Check It Out for Tuesday, June 23rd
Ralph Seliger at In These Times writes about a new book that details Jewish-American lobbying organizations spanning the political spectrum.
"As both a public-relations professional and an activist, Dan Fleshler fights the good fight on behalf of Americans for Peace Now and other organizations in the pro-Israel peace camp.
"In his new book, Transforming America’s Israel Lobby: The Limits of Its Power and the Potential for Change (Potomac Books, April), Fleshler addresses two audiences: progressives who are not familiar with (or are skeptical of) the pro-Israel/pro-peace community and liberal supporters of Israel who fear that criticizing repressive Israeli policies would unduly harm that country.
"Above all, he argues against a “zero-sum” perspective—that what hurts one side necessarily helps the other, or vice-versa. He explicitly argues for “even-handedness” on Mideast issues, a term that is a bugaboo for most of the pro-Israel community in the United States."Fleshler writes in the large shadow of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, which generated intense controversy upon its release two years ago. Fleshler’s book is partially a critique of The Israel Lobby, but its main intention is to suggest ways U.S. policy on the Israeli-Arab conflict can be moved in a more progressive, peace-oriented direction, and provide a more accurate analysis of how “the conventional Israel lobby” operates. (Fleshler labels as “conventional” the mainstream Jewish organizations that concern themselves with Israel, as opposed to the more progressive pro-Israel groups he supports.)
"Transforming America’s Israel Lobby contains an admirable level of detail about the complex landscape and history of national U.S. Jewish organizations. The book’s “Guide for the Perplexed” section classifies more than 70 Jewish groups that weigh in on national issues. Far from monolithic, their history involves surprising twists and turns.
"For example: Tom Dine, a liberal Democrat who built up AIPAC as its director in the 1980s, now works for the dovish Israel Policy Forum, which was formed as a counterweight to AIPAC with the encouragement of Yitzhak Rabin. Speaking of AIPAC last year, Dine declared: “These people have to go. …These people have stayed too long.”
Daphne Eviatar at The Washington Independent writes that the US government aka Obama's Department of Justice still relies on torture evidence in a habeas case.
"The United States is relying on evidence obtained by torture to prove that it can continue to imprison indefinitely a young man arrested as an adolescent in Afghanistan six and a half years ago, according to documents filed with a federal district court.
"Mohammed Jawad may have been as young as 12 years old when he was seized by Afghan police and turned over to U.S. authorities in December 2002, according to a recent letter from the Afghan attorney general, who is requesting his return. Jawad is accused of throwing a hand grenade into a U.S. military vehicle and injuring two servicemen and their translator. But the primary evidence against him — his own confessions — were obtained by torture. Although the U.S. military commission created by President George W. Bush eventually charged him with war crimes for the attack in October 2007 — almost six years after the crime — a judge ruled in October 2008 that because they were tortured, his confessions were unreliable and inadmissible.
"By all accounts, Jawad’s military commission case has been a fiasco. In September 2008, military prosecutor Lt. Col. Darryl Vandeveld resigned from the case and from the military commissions altogether, saying he could not in good conscience prosecute someone for an act allegedly committed as a child and where virtually the only evidence against him is his tortured confessions. (Vandeveld was unable to convince the commission to drop the charges or let Jawad enter a plea agreement with a sentence to time served.) In October, a U.S. military judge at Guantanamo Bay agreed that Jawad had only confessed after armed Afghan police threatened to kill him and his entire family if he didn’t. Statements made to U.S. authorities just hours later, the judge subsequently ruled in November, were still tainted by the Afghan authorities’ torture, because U.S. authorities “used techniques to maintain the shock and fearful state associated with the Accused’s initial apprehension by the Afghan police.” Both confessions therefore were inadmissible.
"In addition to his torture by the Afghans, military records indicate that at Bagram and later at Guantanamo, Jawad faced more abuse..."The bulk of the government’s claim that Jawad can be held indefinitely (although he was deemed an “enemy combatant” by the Bush administration, the Obama administration no longer uses that term) appears to be that Jawad, an Afghan citizen born in a refugee camp in Pakistan and functionally illiterate, learned how to throw a grenade at a Madrassa in Afghanistan and was at the time of his capture as an adolescent associated with a group called Hezb-i-Islami Gulbuddin, or HIG, “an extremist organization long associated with [Osama bin Laden], with a 30-year history of supporting jihad in Afghanistan.” Its founder has been named a “specially designated global terrorist” by the U.S. government. The evidence supporting this charge is that Jawad was able to provide directions to and describe the appearance of the HIG camp. The government also originally claimed Jawad was a member of HIG based on a document it said indicated sworn loyalty to the group that was “signed” with Jawad’s thumbprint. A later forensic exam by the US Army laboratory concluded that the thumbprint was not Jawad’s.
"After Vandeveled resigned, he was replaced by a new prosecutor, who appealed the military commission ruling that the tortured confession to U.S. authorities should be suppressed. There has never been a ruling on that appeal, however, because when President Obama took office he suspended the military commission proceedings until his administration could review them. Although the government also attempted to stall the habeas corpus proceedings pending the outcome of the military commission review, Judge Ellen Huvelle of the federal district court in Washington, D.C. refused. So on June 1, the government submitted its statement of facts it is relying on in the case.
“ 'They’re relying on everything they relied on in the military commissions, including statements that are the product of torture, including tortured statements they didn’t even appeal that were made to Afghan authorities,' said Jonathan Hafetz, an attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project who represents Jawad in his habeas case.“ 'Setting aside the hearsay statements, our position is that a statement that’s involuntary and coerced is not admissible in a federal court,' said Hafetz. 'It’s against our basic values and principles. And it’s notoriously unreliable.' That Jawad was a child at the time suggests the statements were even more likely coerced and therefore even less reliable."
David Price writes at Counterpunch about Obama's classroom spies.
"As the continuities and disjunctures between the Bush and Obama administrations come into focus it becomes increasingly clear that while Obama’s domestic agenda has some identifiable breaks with Bush’s, at its core, the new administration remains committed to staying the course of American militarization. Now we have an articulate, nuanced president who supports elements of progressive domestic policies, can even comfortably say the phrase LGBT in public speeches, while funding military programs at alarming levels and continuing the Bush administration’s military and intelligence invasion of what used to be civilian life.
"The latest manifestation of this continuity came last week when Dennis C. Blair, Director of National Intelligence, announced plans to transform the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program (PRISP) from a pilot project into a permanent budget item. Blair also announced plans to establish a “Reserve Officers' Training Corps” to train unidentified future intelligence officers in US college classrooms. Like students receiving PRISP funds, the identities of students participating in these programs would not be known to professors, university administrators or fellow students—in effect, these future intelligence analysts and agents would conduct their first covert missions in our university classrooms.
"Four years ago I wrote a series of CounterPunch exposés on the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program (PRISP), then a pilot project funded under section 318 of the 2004 Intelligence Authorization Act. PRISP links undergraduate and graduate students with US security and intelligence agencies like the NSA or CIA, and unannounced to universities, professors or fellow-students, PRISP-students enter American university campuses, classrooms, laboratories and professor’s offices without disclosing links to these agencies. PRISP was originally conceived by anthropologist Felix Moos, long a proponent of using anthropological knowledge in waging of counterinsurgency campaigns—an area of growing interest to the Obama administration as it prepares for prolonged soft power counterinsurgency campaigns in Afghanistan.
"It seems likely that many of the affected disciplines will offer little resistance and some may quickly warm to announcements of any new funding stream. Traditionally, the disciplines of political science, history or area specialists coming from the humanities have seldom resisted such developments; but for disciplines like anthropology, these undisclosed intelligence-linked programs present devastating ethical and practical problems, as the non-discloser of funding and links to intelligence agencies flies in the face of the basic ethical principles of the discipline. But even without the problems for individual disciplinary ethics codes, the presence of these undisclosed secret sharers in our classrooms betrays fundamental trusts that lie at the core of honest academic endeavors."
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