Gen. David Petraeus Refers to Mineral Resources as a Reason for "Achieving Objectives" in Afghanistan

LIbyan Official: Attack on U.S. Consulate Took Months of Planning

Washington Post

The leader of Libya's national congress said he's convinced the recent attack that killed the American ambassador and three of his aides was a terrorist act, not part of a spontaneous protest. U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice says the protests were not premeditated.

“Based on the best information we have to date ... it began spontaneously in Benghazi as a reaction to what had transpired some hours earlier in Cairo, where, of course, as you know, there was a violent protest outside of our embassy sparked by this hateful video. But soon after that spontaneous protest began outside of our consulate in Benghazi, we believe that it looks like extremist elements, individuals, joined in that effort with heavy weapons of the sort that are, unfortunately, readily now available in Libya post-revolution. And that it spun from there into something much, much more violent.... We do not have information at present that leads us to conclude that this was premeditated or preplanned.”

— Susan E. Rice, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

“The way these perpetrators acted and moved, and their choosing the specific date for this so-called demonstration, this leaves us with no doubt that this was preplanned, predetermined.”

— Mohamed Yusuf al-Magariaf, president of Libya’s General National Congress, on the same program.

This is a strange one.

Just minutes after Libya’s de facto head of state says that the deadly attack on an American Consulate was “preplanned, predetermined,” the top administration spokeswoman on the same show disagrees with him, saying there is no “information at present” that suggests the attack was planned.

Yet in the same breath, Susan E. Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, says that “extremist elements” joined in what she calls a demonstration that began “spontaneously” in response to another demonstration in Cairo. That certainly suggests that someone may have been planning to take advantage of any opportunity.

The investigation is in its earliest stages, but let’s explore what we know and why the administration would be eager to play down any suggestion that this tragedy was planned.

The Facts

The attack that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans took place on the 11th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. That may simply be a coincidence, but if so, it would be a pretty big one.

In his interview, Mohamed Yusuf al-Magariaf, the president of Libya’s National Congress, said Libya had arrested 50 people, many connected to al-Qaeda. That would certainly bolster the notion that the date — Sept. 11 — was not a coincidence. He also said a few of those arrested were from other countries.

It is in Magariaf’s interest to emphasize that this tragedy does not reflect anti-American feelings by the Libyan people, especially because Stevens was a well-liked diplomat in the country. But he was also emphatic that “the way these perpetrators acted and moved” and the “specific date for this so-called demonstration” make it clear that the attack was planned.

“It was planned by foreigners, by people who entered the country a few months ago, and they were planning this criminal act since their arrival,” he said.

To some extent, Rice and Magariaf may be speaking past each other. Magariaf is emphasizing a plan in motion for a period of time; Rice appears to be focused on a plan for that particular day, or even an attack specifically on the ambassador. The two positions do not necessarily contradict each other.

For instance, Stevens was known to travel with a relatively small security detail, so the attackers may have planned to take advantage of that. But that does not mean they had a specific plan for that day — until the opportunity presented itself.

Stevens, who died of smoke inhalation, may not have been the target of the attacks in any case. Onemedia report claims that key documents, including one with the names of Libyans working with Americans, were taken from the consulate.

That same report, in the Independent, quotes a Libyan military official as saying that a separate safe house also came under attack:

The building then came under fire from heavy weapons. “I don’t know how they found the place to carry out the attack. It was planned, the accuracy with which the mortars hit us was too good for any ordinary revolutionaries,” said Captain Obeidi. “It began to rain down on us, about six mortars fell directly on the path to the villa.”

Indeed, news services reported last week that Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy, briefing lawmakers last week, said the attack appeared to be planned because it was so extensive and because of the “proliferation” of small and medium weapons at the scene. That also would seem to contradict Rice’s stance.

Finally, ABC News reported that Glen Doherty, one of the former Navy SEALs who was killed, was not there to provide security but was on a mission to track down shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles and destroy them. “Doherty said that he traveled throughout Libya chasing reports of the weapons, and once they were found, his team would destroy them on the spot by bashing them with hammers or repeatedly running them over with their vehicles,” ABC said.

While Rice pointed to anger at an anti-Muslim film that appeared on YouTube as the spark for the demonstration, Doherty’s mission suggests that there were aspects of U.S. policy that may have directly affected militants in the country — and angered them. That also would strengthen the case that this was a planned attack.

The Pinocchio Test

The administration obviously wants to play down the possibility of a planned attack because that would raise broader questions about whether U.S. intelligence and embassy security in Libya were adequate. But Rice’s comments strain credulity, especially after Libya’s president declared without a doubt that the attack was planned.

We also acknowledge being suspicious when an official begins by citing “the best information we have to date” because that suggests other information, such as that gathered by the Libyans, is not being given the same weight. (Rice said FBI agents were not even in Libya yet.) Elsewhere in the interview, Rice used carefully hedged language — “We do not have information at present that leads us to conclude that this was premeditated” — that suggests the administration is straining to avoid an obvious conclusion.

Given that this is a fast-moving story with confusion about basic facts, we are going to start out relatively light on the Pinocchios. We may adjust depending on the information that emerges in the coming weeks, but at the moment the publicly available evidence stands in stark contrast to Rice’s talking points.

UPDATE: Administration officials sharply disputed these conclusions, especially the awarding of any Pinocchios so early in the process. They argued we had really jumped the gun. We had considered a “verdict pending,” but had believed the gap between Rice’s statement and other information publicly available made a Pinocchio rating appropriate.

For instance, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said after receiving a briefing from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said that “it was a planned, premediated attack.”

But officials also pointed to a statement by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chair of the Intelligence Committee. “I can say I’ve seen no evidence or no assessment that indicates” this was a planned attack, she said after receiving a briefing from CIA Director David Petreaus.

Part of the issue surrounds the definition of “planning.” Was this something in the works for months, which intelligence had missed, or was this an opportunistic event, planned just 24 or 48 hours earlier, that could not have been prevented? U.S. officials do not discount the possibility of the later, but insist there is thus far no evidence of the former.

“We have no indication that there was actionable intelligence that would have allowed us to predict there would be an attack on the U.S. post in Benghazi,” said Shawn Turner, director of communications for national intelligence.

It is of course in the Libyan government’s interest to point the finger at foreigners, just as it is in the intelligence community’s interest to suggest this tragedy sprung up suddenly, with little or no prior planning. We still think Rice’s statement is bit too categorical, given the the timing of the attack and the statements of the Libyan government. But we also can see an argument for considering this worthy of a Pinocchio, or a Verdict Pending--options we had considered on Sunday.

As mentioned above, we are prepared to revisit this issue in the future, adjusting the ruling as new information emerges. We would welcome reader input as well, since this is a difficult issue to judge. Were we too hasty or on the mark?

Pentagon, CIA Sued for Lethal Drone Attacks on U.S. Citizens

Wired
David Kravets

Survivors of three Americans killed by targeted drone attacks in Yemen last year sued top-ranking members of the United States government, alleging Wednesday they illegally killed the three, including a 16-year-old boy, in violation of international human rights law and the U.S. Constitution.

“The government has killed three Americans. It should account for its actions. This case gives us an opportunity to do that,” Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director with the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a press call.

The suit, (.pdf) is being litigated by the Center for Constitutional Rights and the ACLU. It seeks unspecified damages and highlights the government’s so-called unmanned “targeted killing” program. The ACLU and the Center maintain the drone attacks have killed thousands, including hundreds of innocent bystanders overseas. (Other estimates of the campaign come to widely different conclusions.)

The suit, the first of its kind, alleges the United States was not engaged in an armed conflict with or within Yemen, prohibiting the use of lethal force unless “at the time it is applied, lethal force is a last resort to protect against a concrete, specific, and imminent threat of death or serious physical injury.” The case directly challenges the government’s decision to kill Americans without judicial scrutiny.

At bottom, Jaffer said, “the question is whether the government is justified in killing without charging them or trying them for anything.”

The suit is brought on behalf of Anwar Al-Awlaki, a radical cleric and a native of New Mexico. He was originally known for his incendiary blog and YouTube videos. But according to the Obama administration, Awlaki’s role morphed from marketer to operational planner and recruiter for al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. U.S. authorities claim he had contacts with the 9/11 hijackers, the underwear bomber and others.

He was killed Sept. 30 last year. Also killed was Samir Khan, the editor of the English magazine Inspire, which allegedly was published by Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula.

Two weeks later, the cleric’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki, was killed in a separate Yemen attack.

The defendants include Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, CIA Director David Petraeus, U.S. Navy Adm. William H. McRaven and U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Joseph Votel.

Citing U.S. officials, the Washington Post has reported that the son and Khan were not intended targets.

The Justice Department did not immediately respond for comment. The administration refuses to release the Justice Department memo that legally justifies targeting Americans, and according to the New York Times, President Obama approves or denies who gets added to the “kill list.”

But Attorney General Eric Holder said in a March speech at Northwestern University Law School that “Our legal authority is not limited to the battlefields in Afghanistan.” He said the legal authority Congress passed following the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks covers Yemen and Somalia, where other unmanned drone attacks have been carried out.

Holder said the administration takes action with “the consent of the nation involved or after a determination that the nation is unable or unwilling to deal effectively with a threat to the United States.”

In another suit, the ACLU is invoking the Freedom of Information Act seeking details of the government’s drone program. In that case, the CIA refuses to confirm or deny the covert military use of drones to kill suspected terrorists overseas.

Gen. David Petraeus: We Can't Leave Afghanistan Now, They Have Trillions of Dollars of Minerals

REPORT: Drones Targeting Funerals/Rescuers in Pakistan

In America, TV watches you: CIA to spy on people through household items

Russia Today

With a growing number of ‘smart gadgets,’ spying on homes may start to become much easier. In fact, CIA Chief David Petraeus admitted that Americans were effectively bugging themselves and making it easy for spy agencies to peek in on their lives.

­Speaking at a summit for In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm, Petraeus noted that new devices that link ‘dumb’ home appliances such as refrigerators, ovens and lighting systems to the Internet could “change our notion of secrecy.”

“‘Transformational’ is an overused word, but I do believe it properly applies to these technologies, particularly to their effect on clandestine tradecraft,” Petraeus noted.

“Items of interest will be located, identified, monitored, and remotely controlled through technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensor networks, tiny embedded servers, and energy harvesters — all connected to the next-generation Internet using abundant, low-cost, and high-power computing,” Petraeus explained. “The latter now going to cloud computing, in many areas greater and greater supercomputing, and, ultimately, heading to quantum computing.”

In the meantime, the biggest microchip company in the world, ARM, presented new processors that can be implanted into nearly any household appliance and connect it to the Internet so that the appliance could be remotely controlled in tandem with other applications. The company described the concept as the “Internet of things.”

And the National Security Agency is already building a gigantic supercomputer to process this gigantic amount of information. It’s a $2 billion Utah-based facility that can process yottabytes (a quadrillion gigabytes) of data, according to the Gizmondo technology blog. It will be the centerpiece for the Global Information Grid and is set to go live in September 2013. 

These latest announcements paint a somewhat Orwellian picture of the future, with TV’s spying on their viewers and beds recording the dreams of those sleeping in them. Perhaps this data would then be sent to the Utah supercomputer, which would assess the person’s pros and cons. And what if the computer uses statistics to decipher the likelihood that that person will commit a crime? A score could land you in jail – for a crime that had not yet happened.

But even now we see how people are being arrested for posting online or clicking the wrong button in the privacy of their own home. A British teenager is set to appear in court on charges of racially aggravated assault after posting comments about six British soldiers killed in Afghanistan.

Why Is President Obama Keeping a Journalist in Prison in Yemen?

The Nation
Jeremy Scahill

On February 2, 2011, President Obama called Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh. The two discussed counterterrorism cooperation and the battle against Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. At the end of the call, according to a White House read-out, Obama “expressed concern” over the release of a man named Abdulelah Haider Shaye, whom Obama said “had been sentenced to five years in prison for his association with AQAP.” It turned out that Shaye had not yet been released at the time of the call, but Saleh did have a pardon for him prepared and was ready to sign it. It would not have been unusual for the White House to express concern about Yemen’s allowing AQAP suspects to go free.

Suspicious prison breaks of Islamist militants in Yemen had been a regular occurrence over the past decade, and Saleh has been known to exploit the threat of terrorism to leverage counterterrorism dollars from the United States. But this case was different. Abdulelah Haider Shaye is not an Islamist militant or an Al Qaeda operative. He is a journalist.

Unlike most journalists covering Al Qaeda, Shaye risked his life to travel to areas controlled by Al Qaeda and to interview its leaders. He also conducted several interviews with the radical cleric Anwar al Awlaki. Shaye did the last known interview with Awlaki just before it was revealed that Awlaki, a US citizen, was on a CIA/JSOC hit list. “We were only exposed to Western media and Arab media funded by the West, which depicts only one image of Al Qaeda,” recalls his best friend Kamal Sharaf, a well-known dissident Yemeni political cartoonist. “But Abdulelah brought a different viewpoint.”

Shaye had no reverence for Al Qaeda, but viewed the group as an important story, according to Sharaf. Shaye was able to get access to Al Qaeda figures in part due to his relationship, through marriage, to the radical Islamic cleric Abdul Majid al Zindani, the founder of Iman University and a US Treasury Department–designated terrorist. While Sharaf acknowledged that Shaye used his connections to gain access to Al Qaeda, he adds that Shaye also “boldly” criticized Zindani and his supporters: “He said the truth with no fear.”

While Shaye, 35, had long been known as a brave, independent-minded journalist in Yemen, his collision course with the US government appears to have been set in December 2009. On December 17, the Yemeni government announced that it had conducted a series of strikes against an Al Qaeda training camp in the village of al Majala in Yemen’s southern Abyan province, killing a number of Al Qaeda militants. As the story spread across the world, Shaye traveled to al Majala. What he discovered were the remnants of Tomahawk cruise missiles and cluster bombs, neither of which are in the Yemeni military’s arsenal. He photographed the missile parts, some of them bearing the label “Made in the USA,” and distributed the photos to international media outlets. He revealed that among the victims of the strike were women, children and the elderly. To be exact, fourteen women and twenty-one children were killed. Whether anyone actually active in Al Qaeda was killed remains hotly contested. After conducting his own investigation, Shaye determined that it was a US strike. The Pentagon would not comment on the strike and the Yemeni government repeatedly denied US involvement. But Shaye was later vindicated when Wikileaks released a US diplomatic cable that featured Yemeni officials joking about how they lied to their own parliament about the US role, while President Saleh assured Gen. David Petraeus that his government would continue to lie and say “the bombs are ours, not yours.”

Seven months after the Majala bombing, in July 2010, Sharaf and Shaye were out running errands. Sharaf popped into a supermarket, while Shaye waited outside. When Sharaf came out of the store, he recalls, “I saw armed men grabbing him and taking him to a car.” The men, it turned out, were Yemeni intelligence agents. They snatched Shaye, hooded him and took him to an undisclosed location. The agents, according to Sharaf, threatened Shaye and warned him against making further statements on TV. Shaye’s reports on the Majala bombing and his criticism of the US and Yemeni governments,

Sharaf said, “pushed the regime to kidnap him. One of the interrogators told him, ‘We will destroy your life if you keep on talking about this issue.’” Eventually, in the middle of the night, Shaye was dumped back onto a street and released. “Abdulelah was threatened many times over the phone by the Political Security and then he was kidnapped for the first time, beaten and investigated over his statements and analysis on the Majala bombing and the US war against terrorism in Yemen,” says Shaye’s lawyer, Abdulrahman Barman. “I believe he was arrested upon a request from the US.”
Shaye responded to his abduction by going back on al Jazeera and describing his own arrest.

CIA Drone Assassinations Violate the Law of War

The New American
Michael Tennant

The constitutional arguments against the Central Intelligence Agency’s assassinations of Anwar al-Awlaki and, two weeks later, his 16-year-old son have been widely discussed. Less well known, however, is the case against CIA assassinations to be made on the basis of the law of war.

Into the breach has stepped Howard University law professor Morris Davis, who in a recent column presented a well-researched case that the CIA’s drone assassination program is illegal under the law of war and that, as a result, CIA personnel participating in drone strikes could be prosecuted for murder.

Davis knows his subject well. He was a U.S. Air Force judge advocate for 25 years and served as chief prosecutor of the Guantanamo Bay military commissions from 2005 to 2007, resigning from that post in disgust at the use of torture to extract evidence from prisoners and the interference in the proceedings from the Pentagon. He is now executive director and counsel of the Crimes of War Education Project. In other words, Davis’ opinion on the matter of war crimes should not be taken lightly.

Central to Davis’ argument is the indisputable fact that the CIA is not an arm of the military but “a civilian agency made up of civilian employees and civilian contractors.” For those still not convinced, columnist Nat Hentoff reminds us that “when Gen. David Petraeus (who had led U.S. forces in Afghanistan) became the present head of the CIA, he removed his military uniform.”

Before tackling the law-of-war issues, Davis makes short work of the claim that the assassinations were legal under the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF). That resolution only authorized the President to undertake military action against those responsible for the 9/11 attacks; it said nothing about the use of civilian agencies such as the CIA. Furthermore, Congress pointedly deleted from the final resolution language proposed by President George W. Bush that would have allowed him to act “to deter and pre-empt any future acts of terrorism or aggression against the United States.” Awlaki, at the time living in the United States and only later aligning himself, however tenuously, with al-Qaeda, hardly falls under the scope of the AUMF.

Now comes the real meat of Davis’ brief. Simply put, because CIA personnel are not members of the military, they are not entitled to immunity for killing civilians, as indeed Awlaki, his son, and others killed in these strikes were. Says Davis:

Generally, the deliberate killing of another human being is considered murder unless some legal justification provides immunity. The law of war does just that by extending combatant immunity to lawful combatants who kill in the course of armed conflict, provided they comply with the law of war…. The CIA’s civilian employees and civilian contractors are not lawful combatants and are not entitled to combatant immunity.…

The law of war provides lawful combatants with immunity from responsibility for collateral damage that occurs when they conduct legitimate attacks on legitimate military objectives. That includes immunity from responsibility for civilians killed in the course of a proper attack on a legitimate military target.

The problem, of course, is that CIA employees and contractors, as civilians, are not considered lawful combatants. Since their drone strikes, even if directed at military targets (Awlaki being a dubious one), are being carried out by civilians, the deaths of civilians in those strikes cannot be chalked up to collateral damage but must be regarded as outright murders — murders for which those involved can be held responsible under the laws of the United States (though the U.S. government is unlikely to prosecute them) and of those countries in which the drone strikes are carried out.

Lest one think that Davis is splitting hairs, he elaborates:

The concern over using civilian CIA personnel to conduct combat operations is not inconsequential. A primary objective of the law of war is to limit the effects of war, particularly the effects on civilians and civilian objects. A fundamental law of war principle is distinction, which mandates uniforms or other distinctive markings to clearly denote combatants. The failure to comply with the principle of distinction, a fundamental requirement for lawful combatancy, is one of the reasons the US cites for classifying enemy detainees as unlawful combatants rather than prisoners of war.

The government also recognizes the significance of this distinction and is trying to send all evidence of this law of war down the memory hole, according to Davis:

The importance of the combatant-civilian distinction was apparent when the Pentagon prepared the latest version of the Manual for Military Commissions, the rulebook for the trials of some of the alleged unlawful enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay. The 2007 version of the Manual for Military Commissions, which made rules implementing the Military Commissions Act of 2006, said that “for the accused to have been acting in violation of the law of war, the accused must have taken acts as a combatant without having met the requirements for lawful combatancy.” It went on to add that such persons “do not enjoy combatant immunity because they have failed to meet the requirements of lawful combatancy under the law of war.” That language was removed when the current manual was drafted because of concerns among senior US government officials that the language on lawful combatancy and combatant immunity could be viewed as an acknowledgment that CIA civilian drone operators are committing war crimes.

Thus, in using a civilian agency to conduct combat operations, “the US undermines the law of war by blurring the intended bright line separating combatants from civilians,” Davis avers. Should a foreign country’s intelligence service begin assassinating civilians within the borders of the United States, our government would be in no position to demand a halt to the practice. As Davis put it, “The ability to bend the law to what we want it to be at any given moment diminishes us and our commitment to abide by the proper rule of law.”

“Many terrorists around the world, and some right here among us, want to kill us instantly,” observes Hentoff. “For us to survive, does that mandate our government, including the civilian CIA, to act sometimes as our enemies do — no matter ‘the collateral damage’ to innocent civilians, our rule of law and the law of war?”

For far too many Americans, the answer appears to be yes. It is an answer many will come to regret — but not, one hopes, too late to reverse this dangerous slide toward lawlessness.

Military to Have a Greater Influence in CIA Intelligence Reports

Washington Post
Kimberly Dozier

David Petraeus

WASHINGTON — David Petraeus, the former general who led the Afghanistan war and now heads the CIA, has ordered his intelligence analysts to give greater weight to the opinions of troops in the fight, U.S. officials said.

CIA analysts now will consult with battlefield commanders earlier in the process as they help create elements of a National Intelligence Estimate on the course of the war, to more fully include the military’s take on the conflict, U.S. officials say.

Their input could improve the upcoming report card for the war.

The most recent U.S. intelligence assessment offered a dim view of progress in Afghanistan despite the counterinsurgency campaign Petraeus oversaw there and painted a stark contrast to the generally upbeat predictions of progress from Petraeus and other military leaders. Petraeus has made no secret of his frustration with recent negative assessments coming primarily from the CIA, and said during his confirmation hearing that he planned to change the way the civilian analysts grade wars.

The CIA’s analysis makes up the bulk of national intelligence estimates, which help guide the White House and Congress in drafting future policy.

The CIA says Petraeus’ tweaks to the agency’s part of the assessment will add to its accuracy, not tilt the results, and that military commanders’ views were always part of the equation.

“Analytic debate and discussion haven’t been chilled; they’ve been promoted,” CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood said.

The change has been backed by National Intelligence Director James Clapper, another senior U.S. official said.

U.S.-backed Afghan police force accused of human rights abuses

GlobalPost

A disturbing report into human rights abuses by the U.S. backed Afghan police force - including rape and murder - has raised serious questions about the exit plan of the West.

Human Rights Watch published a report on Monday which found that in three of seven provinces it visited and conducted interviews there was evidence of arbitrary detentions also, AFP reports.

The 102-page report found that armed groups supported by NATO and the Afghan government are terrorizing and robbing communities, Reuters reports.

Murder, torture, illegal taxes, theft and the gang rape of a teenage boy are among the abuses by government-backed militias, and the NATO-funded Afghan local police, documented in the 102-page report, "Just Don't Call It a Militia", Reuters reports.

The 7,000-member Afghan Local Police was set up last year and put up by the U.S. as central to a successful handover by the deadline of the end of 2014.

But the report by HRW has raised concerns about handing full control over to the Afghan forces by then.

AFP reports:

The force arms residents protecting their communities in areas where the Afghan army and regular police have only limited reach.

They do not have law enforcement powers.

HRW found evidence of ALP abuses including killings, rapes and arbitrary detentions in three provinces -- Baghlan, Herat and Uruzgan -- out of seven where it conducted interviews.

It said such cases raised "serious concerns" about ALP vetting, recruitment and oversight and urged improvements including the establishment of a complaints body to deal with problems.

"Pressure to reduce international troop levels should not be at the expense of the rights of Afghans," said HRW's Asia director Brad Adams."Poor governance, corruption, human rights abuses and impunity for government-affiliated forces all are drivers of the insurgency and these issues need to be addressed if true stability is to come to Afghanistan."

General David Petraeus, former commander of foreign forces in Afghanistan, in March called the ALP "arguably the most critical element in our effort to help Afghanistan develop the capability to secure itself", AFP reports.
A spokesman for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, Lieutenant-Colonel Jimmie Cummings, said that it would work with the Afghan government to probe the report's claims.

"The ALP program is a critical component to bringing governance and security to the Afghan people at the local level," he said.

"Where relevant, we will endeavor to improve this program and work diligently to correct these observations."

A previous report, released in May by Oxfam, also highlighted grave human rights abuses including child sex abuse.

Afghanistan's security forces number over 300,000 and the United States has spent billions of dollars ahead of the planned withdrawal of all foreign troops by the end of 2014.

The report comes as two Afghan civilians were killed and nearly 80 NATO soldiers were wounded after a truck of explosives drove into a military base in eastern Afghanistan, military officials said Sunday, the Washington Post reports.

The Taliban took responsibility for the attack, which occurred on the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States.

Afghanistan civilian death toll has risen sharply, says United Nations

The Guardian
Peter Beaumont

In his last few weeks in charge of the Afghan war before taking the helm of the CIA, General David Petraeus and senior US officials have been talking up their progress.

The metrics of that success, perhaps unsurprisingly, have concentrated on the lethality of US and Nato operations.

From April to July this year – according to a briefing given to the Associated Press – 2,832 special forces raids have led to the deaths of 834 insurgents, while another 2,941 have been captured.
Because of this, according to Petraeus himself, violent attacks have fallen by 14% in 12 months.
"The [Taliban] have less capacity, they have been degraded somewhat," he told the New York Times. "This is the first real indicator – for the first time since 2006 – compared with the previous year, insurgent attack numbers are lower."

These would be impressive figures and claims except for one problem: the US military's figures are starkly contradicted by other sources.

For even as Petraeus was busy talking up his success earlier this month, the UN mission in Afghanistan was describing the course of the conflict in far more bleak and bloody terms.

Speaking on 14 July, Stefan de Mistura, special representative of the UN secretary general for Afghanistan, and his colleague Georgette Gagnon – director of human rights for the mission – described a 15% increase in civilian casualties in the preceding six months, with May 2011 the deadliest month of the war for civilians since 2007.

According to Gagnon (pdf): "The human cost of the Afghan conflict for Afghan civilians rose in the first six months of 2011.

"Afghan civilians experienced a 15% increase in conflict-related civilian deaths over the past six months compared with the same period in 2010."

She added: "This dramatic growth was mainly due to the use of landmine-like pressure plate improvised explosive devices or IEDs by anti-government elements.

"We at Unama [United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan] documented 1,462 civilian deaths for this period, with 80% attributed to anti-government elements, an increase of 28% in civilian deaths from the same period in 2010.

"A further 14% of civilian deaths over the last six months were attributed to the pro-government forces – this is the Afghan national security forces and international military forces."
These UN figures – and their contradiction of the official US military accounting – are important for three reasons.

US not in talks with 'real Taliban'

PressTV

So called US talks with the Taliban are only with groups friendly toward Karzai in the north. The stronghold of the Taliban lies in southern Afghanistan.

Press TV talks with Zafar Nawaz Jaspal, Professor at Quaid-I-Azam university, Islamabad who dissects the numerous factors influencing talks and negotiation with the Taliban and the US. Following is a transcript of the interview.

Press TV: Our other guest Gareth Porter has said that talks with the Taliban are in part an effort by the US to sew some kind of a division between the Taliban and Pakistan. The British representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan said that the talks are held with the sole aim of finding a solution to Afghanistan without any involvement of foreign players. Is that a reference to Pakistan?

Zafar Jaspal: Indeed there is an effort in Afghanistan for political settlement because Obama wants his 2012 elections to win. Public opinion in the US is very much against this war. They are not willing to pay 120 billion dollars for this war. In that context Robert Gates made the statement that if we can handle Afghanistan without Pakistan that germinates a new option for them (US) that they can deal with - And that confirms that they are confident that they can divide and deal with the Taliban without Pakistan.

However, at the same time we cannot forget what the reality on the ground is. The Taliban who are dealing with the US, their number is only 1,700 and the majority of them are from the northern side and they are not from the Taliban of other areas of Afghanistan. These people who they are engaged with are already on the payroll of Karzai.

The real cold heart of this insurgency, they are Taliban under the leadership of Mullah Omar and under the leadership of what we call Khakani - I think that will be dubious when they start feeling as if they can deal with the Taliban bypassing Pakistan. They can; but the question is - How can they secure the border?

Press TV: We have been getting contradictory statements from the White House. On the one hand we are hearing General Petraeus speaking of a need to have more troops on the ground; Gates saying there needs to be more troops on the ground, but on the other hand we hear of official confirmation that talks are underway and this has been confirmed by Britain. So do you think this show that the counter insurgency strategy has not been working and that the US is not willing to admit that?

Zafar Jaspal: I submit that we can see in what is happening within the US there is a big divide. There's a divide between the strategists; between the Pentagon; and the White House and that divide is very much visible.

When Obama was going to announce the withdrawal of 10,000 troops this year and a further 23,000 next year, General Petraeus was clearly saying that whatever we achieved they (those numbers) are not confirmed. We can see in the testimony of Admiral Mullen in the Senate he also said the same thing - it still needs two seasons that is next year 2012 and 2013 to fight with the Taliban with the same number of troops. Whereas, Obama is concerned about his next term.

If we look at the interlinked developments recently in one week, one development was the UN resolution on 17th June dividing the Taliban and al-Qaeda into two separate organizations; treating them differently. Second, on June 19th when Robert Gates admitted on CNN that yes we are in touch with the Taliban. Third, four parliamentarians of Germany have said we want the Taliban represented and according to reports they have invited the Taliban to participate in the December 2011 World conference. And fourth, on the one side they say we can without Pakistan, but we see that Karzai was in Islamabad last week and he was requesting Pakistan to support the peace reconstruction process.

All these things give us the idea that at the rhetorical level is one thing, but at the practical level is another thing. So, Americans at the rhetorical level try to save what we call their grandeur. But practically, they are unable.

US dithers on Afghanistan troop withdrawal

Brisbane Times

No "rush to the exits" for US troops ... an
Afghan National Police graduation ceremony
at an International Security Assistance Force operating base
in Tarin Kowt, Afghanistan.

WASHINGTON: The incoming US Defence Secretary, Leon Panetta, has declined to put a figure on imminent US troop withdrawals from Afghanistan, while increasing the prospect of American forces staying in Iraq longer than originally planned.

Mr Panetta, the present head of the CIA, told a congressional committee that it would be up to the President, Barack Obama, the Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, and the commander of forces in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus, to call the shots on the drawdown, due to start next month.
But in somewhat contradictory testimony, the 72-year-old long-time Washington insider appeared to back both Mr Obama's pledge of a ''significant'' cut in troop numbers as well as endorse Mr Gates's call for a ''modest'' pull-back.

 

Questioned by the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee, which is expected to rubber-stamp his Pentagon appointment, Mr Panetta said it was impossible to be specific on numbers before he assumed his new role.

He agreed with recent assessments that there had been progress on security in Afghanistan, ''albeit fragile and reversible''.

But asked by a Republican senator, John McCain, whether he agreed with Mr Gates's more cautious position on withdrawals, Mr Panetta said: ''I agree that they should be conditions-based. And I'm going to leave it up to Secretary Gates and [the others] to decide what that number should be.''
Pressed further, he said: ''I'll have to obviously arrive at a decision myself. I'm not in that position now.''

Opinions differ wildly on how many troops should leave. Senator McCain nominates just 3000 of the nearly 100,000-strong force; his fellow committee member Carl Levin, a Democrat, says ''at least 15,000 troops'' should be sent home this year.

Mr Gates, meanwhile, continued to portray the drawdown as minimalist, telling NATO defence ministers in Brussels on Thursday that a reduction in American troops should not signal a mass exodus of allied forces.

The long-serving Mr Gates, who leaves his post on June 30, has cautioned against withdrawing combat troops, saying the US was looking for a way to reduce its ''surge'' numbers without compromising the safety of those remaining on the ground.

''Even as the United States begins to draw down next month, I assured my fellow ministers that there will be no rush to the exits on our part - and we expect the same from our allies,'' he told reporters.
More Americans now say it is time for the US to get out of Afghanistan, with almost half of those surveyed in opinion polls since the May 2 killing of Osama bin Laden claiming the allies are at last winning.

And Mr Obama claimed last week that a ''big chunk'' of objectives in Afghanistan had now been achieved.

In a CNN poll out yesterday, 74 per cent of respondents endorsed the drawdown; 39 per cent said it was time to leave altogether.

Mr Obama increased US troop numbers in Afghanistan by more than 30,000, copying the Iraqi troop surge ordered by George Bush in 2007 that provided enough stability for Mr Obama to scale back forces there last year.

However, Mr Panetta said it was likely that Iraq would ask the US to keep some of its remaining 47,000 troops in that country beyond 2011, making a complete withdrawal problematic. Such a request should be ''seriously considered'', he said, warning that there were more al-Qaeda operatives in Iraq than there were in Afghanistan.

"[Iraq], too, continues to be a fragile situation … we should take whatever steps are necessary to make sure that we protect whatever progress we've made there."
IN addition, Mr Panetta also:

Warned that America's ''next Pearl Harbour'' could be a cyber-attack on the US that crippled its electrical grid and security and financial systems.

Described US relations with Pakistan as complicated and frustrating, but also critical.
Promised to complete this year Mr Gates's review of the $US400 billion in proposed defence budget cuts.

Petraeus to CIA Completes Cheney’s Dream, Consolidates Intelligence Within Pentagon

Firedoglake
Jim White

Today is the day that my worst fears will be realized, and the propaganda machine that has been mercilessly promoting the career of David Petraeus will achieve his nomination to be Director of Central Intelligence.

Aside from the horrible nature of this move in putting a blatantly political operator into a highly visible position from which he can consolidate his credentials for an eventual presidential campaign (see Spencer Ackerman for a very different take on this aspect), this move can be seen as finally completing Dick Cheney’s dream of moving virtually all intelligence functions into the Pentagon. Back when Michael Hayden was nominated to head CIA, the ongoing Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)-CIA turf war was noted:

What worries some experts, however, is a shift in the balance of power within the US intelligence infrastructure as the CIA is weakened and the Pentagon expands its role. For one thing, the Pentagon’s intelligence activities largely escape congressional scrutiny. ”Rumsfeld and Cambone claim that everything they do is a military operation,” says Richard Clarke, the former head of counterterrorism at the National Security Council, ”[and] that therefore nothing that they do should have oversight by the House and Senate intelligence committees. But they are doing things that are clearly intelligence.”

It is precisely this ability to “escape congressional scrutiny” that has driven the move to consolidate intelligence functions within the Pentagon. Here is more from Jeremy Scahill on how this was brought about:

While JSOC has long played a central role in US counterterrorism and covert operations, military and civilian officials who worked at the Defense and State Departments during the Bush administration described in interviews with The Nation an extremely cozy relationship that developed between the executive branch (primarily through Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld) and JSOC. During the Bush era, Special Forces turned into a virtual stand-alone operation that acted outside the military chain of command and in direct coordination with the White House. Throughout the Bush years, it was largely General McChrystal who ran JSOC. “What I was seeing was the development of what I would later see in Iraq and Afghanistan, where Special Operations forces would operate in both theaters without the conventional commander even knowing what they were doing,” said Colonel Wilkerson. “That’s dangerous, that’s very dangerous. You have all kinds of mess when you don’t tell the theater commander what you’re doing.”

Wilkerson said that almost immediately after assuming his role at the State Department under Colin Powell, he saw JSOC being politicized and developing a close relationship with the executive branch. He saw this begin, he said, after his first Delta Force briefing at Fort Bragg. “I think Cheney and Rumsfeld went directly into JSOC. I think they went into JSOC at times, perhaps most frequently, without the SOCOM [Special Operations] commander at the time even knowing it. The receptivity in JSOC was quite good,” says Wilkerson. “I think Cheney was actually giving McChrystal instructions, and McChrystal was asking him for instructions.” He said the relationship between JSOC and Cheney and Rumsfeld “built up initially because Rumsfeld didn’t get the responsiveness. He didn’t get the can-do kind of attitude out of the SOCOM commander, and so as Rumsfeld was wont to do, he cut him out and went straight to the horse’s mouth. At that point you had JSOC operating as an extension of the [administration] doing things the executive branch–read: Cheney and Rumsfeld–wanted it to do. This would be more or less carte blanche. You need to do it, do it. It was very alarming for me as a conventional soldier.”

The key thing to note here is how Cheney bypassed McChrystal’s direct commander in SOCOM to dictate McChrystal’s actions. At least in regard to when those actions were in Iraq, it should be noted that McChrystal’s field commander there was none other than David Petraeus. I think Wilkerson is wrong here when he claims that McChrystal was acting without the knowledge of the field commander.

  For McChrystal to be carrying out “rogue” operations at the direct command of the Vice President and bypassing his SOCOM commander, it seems inconceivable that Petraeus could not have been aware of what was happening. It seems most likely that Petraeus was both aware of what was going on and approved of it, since he is often seen as crediting McChrystal and his night raids for their effects in Iraq and then in Afghanistan. This means that Petraeus had to be aware of, and approved, Cheney’s actions that were designed to bypass congressional scrutiny of actions that would have been subject to oversight had they taken place through the CIA.

In today’s New York Times article about Petraeus’ nomination, we see that the blurring of the lines between intelligence and military functions already is almost complete:

The result is that American military and intelligence operatives are at times virtually indistinguishable from each other as they carry out classified operations in the Middle East and Central Asia. Some members of Congress have complained that this new way of war allows for scant debate about the scope and scale of military operations. In fact, the American spy and military agencies operate in such secrecy now that it is often hard to come by specific information about the American role in major missions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and now Libya and Yemen.

The operations have also created tension with important allies like Pakistan, while raising fresh questions about whether spies and soldiers deserve the same legal protections.
Officials acknowledge that the lines between soldiering and spying have blurred. “It’s really irrelevant whether you call it a covert action or a military special operation,” said Dennis C. Blair, a retired four-star admiral and a former director of national intelligence. “I don’t really think there is any distinction.”

I’m sure Dick Cheney approves of Obama’s move to put Petraeus in charge of the CIA, because it is clear that Petraeus fully subscribes to Cheney’s vision of a Pentagon in control of the most important intelligence functions, fully protected from congressional oversight.

Obama Administration Breaks Promise of Drawdown in Afghanistan

Press TV

The US says it will not pull out large numbers of its troops from Afghanistan in July 2011, contradicting a promise made earlier by President Barack Obama.

In an interview with Fox News on Sunday, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates brushed aside suggestions that Washington would, in accordance with a deadline set by Obama, begin a significant draw-down of its troops in July of 2011.

"That absolutely has not been decided," Gates said.

He also emphasized that any decision would be made based upon the situation on the ground in Afghanistan.

Similar remarks were made earlier by White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who said in an interview with ABC that the size of the reduction would depend on conditions on the ground.

The comments come at a time when US-led forces are wrestling with growing militancy in Afghanistan as outbursts of violence claim more lives from US-led troops.

General David Petraeus, the commander of US forces in the Middle East, said last week that in setting the deadline for the surge last year, Obama's message was "one of urgency -- not that July 2011 is when we race for the exits, reach for the light switch and flip it off."

Earlier in June, after a meeting in Brussels, Gates said that Washington had underestimated the volatility of the situation in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban in 2001 and had not deployed sufficient troops.

U.S. Is Said to Expand Secret Actions in Mideast

Al Jazeera

The commander of the US forces in the Middle East has signed an order that allows clandestine military activity to disrupt "terror" groups or counter threats in friendly and hostile nations, The New York Times says.

General David Petraeus, head of the US Central Command, signed the secret directive on on September 30, the paper said quoting defence officials and military documents.

It said the directive - which allows for covert strikes outside of designated war zones - authorises the sending of US special operations troops to the Middle East, Central Asia and the Horn of Africa to gather intelligence and build ties with local forces.

The seven-page directive, the paper said, appears to authorise specific operations in Iran, most likely to gather intelligence about the country’s nuclear programme or identify dissident groups that might be useful for a future military offensive.

Reconnaissance missions

According to the New York Times, the order also permits reconnaissance that could pave the way for possible military strikes in Iran if tensions over its nuclear ambitions escalate.

It said that officials said that though the administration of George Bush, the former US president, had approved some clandestine military activities far from designated war zones, the new order was intended to make such efforts more systematic and long term.

The paper said the order seeks to build networks that could "penetrate, disrupt, defeat or destroy" al-Qaeda and other "terror" groups.

It also seeks to "prepare the environment" for future attacks by US or local military forces.

But the order does not appear to authorise offensive strikes in any specific countries, the paper said.

In recent years the US has sought to break its dependence on the Central Intelligence Agency and other spy agencies for information in countries without a significant US troop presence, according to the New York Times.

It said Petraeus’s order is meant for small teams of US troops to fill intelligence gaps about terror organisations plotting attacks against Washington.

Risky venture

But some defence department officials, the paper said, worry that the expanded role carries risks.

"The authorised activities could strain relationships with friendly governments like Saudi Arabia or Yemen - which might allow the operations but be loath to acknowledge their co-operation - or incite the anger of hostile nations like Iran and Syria," the New York Times reported.

"Many in the military are also concerned that as US troops assume roles far from traditional combat, they would be at risk of being treated as spies if captured and denied the Geneva Convention protections afforded military detainees."

The paper said the precise operations that the directive authorises are unclear and that what the military has done to follow through on the order is not certain.

The paper did not name several government officials who described the impetus for the order saying the document is classified.

It said spokesmen for the White House and the Pentagon declined to comment on the signing of the order.