Former US president George W. Bush convoluted some definitions. ‘The ambiguity began shortly after 9/11, when then-U.S. President George W. Bush defined two missions: waging a war on terror, and bringing Osama bin Laden and his followers to justice. Both made for good rhetoric. But they also were fundamentally contradictory. A war is not a judicial inquiry, and a criminal investigation is not part of war.’

However, there is no ambiguity in international law regarding the status of al-Qaeda members. ‘The Geneva Conventions do not apply to them because they have not adhered to a fundamental requirement of the Geneva Conventions, namely, identifying themselves as soldiers of an army.’

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision ‘to transfer Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to federal court makes it clear that Mohammed was not a soldier acting in time of war, but a criminal.’ If the process goes by the stipulations of the Geneva Conventions, Mohammed’s actions in organizing the September 11 attacks, which were carried out without uniforms or other badges of a combatant, denies him status and protection as a Prisoner of War (POW). Logically, he is therefore a criminal.’

But spies, saboteurs and terrorists do not belong in the realm of international law. ‘This class of actors falls under the category of national law, leaving open the question of their liability if they conduct acts inimical to a third country. Who has jurisdiction? The United States is claiming that Mohammed is to be tried under the criminal code of the United States for actions planned in Afghanistan but carried out by others in the United States.’

9/11 revises some accepted legal norms. ‘The fact is that international law has not evolved to deal with persons like Mohammed.’

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Via STRATFOR

It is said that there are ‘two poles in Washington: the counterinsurgency experts, or COIN-istas, who believe Afghanistan’s deteriorating security can only be reversed by adding tens of thousands of troops – perhaps as many as 80,000; and those who believe US interests in Afghanistan are few, and the best way to keep it on a low simmer is to employ a counterterrorism-like model – using drones, bombs, and special forces teams to keep Al Qaeda at bay.’ To say that the debate in Washington is protracted is an understatement. In all this, the decision of US Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates is said to be the most crucial.

Robert Gates holds the vital yet precarious advantage of swinging the vote in Obama’s decision on the Afghanistan war. As Pentagon chief, his advice on whether or not to grant the request of US generals for an escalation of troops in Afghanistan will determine the fate and future of said war. ‘The Defense secretary’s role in shaping Mr. Obama’s policy in Afghanistan is seen as a swing vote among the president’s counselors on the question at hand: Whether to send a surge of tens of thousands more troops to support the current counterinsurgency against the Taliban or to overhaul the mission entirely.’

However, Gates has in the past expressed concern about the size of the American “footprint” in Afghanistan. He is worried that ‘too many forces could look a lot like an occupation.’ Yet, he admits that ‘long-term needs of Afghanistan – good governance, economic opportunity, and a strong indigenous force – won’t magically appear without the help of the US military stabilizing the country.’

What is clear with Gates is his ‘genuine feeling for the troops. He personally handwrites letters to each family of those killed overseas.’ Bush made him Iraq’s “Mr. Fix-it.” Now, Obama expects him to do the same tinkering in Afghanistan.

Via The Christian Science Monitor

Cuba responded positively to the U.S. proposal to reopen negotiations on Cuban immigration to the United States, halted in 2004 by President George Bush. The U.S. offer was a new gesture of openness of the Obama administration which attempts a cautious and gradual approach with the Castro regime. Cuba also accepts the U.S. proposal to establish direct mail services between the two countries. 

Initiated under the Reagan administration, the talks on migration became regular in the 1990s when both countries had sealed agreements to prevent a mass exodus of Cuban refugees to the United States. U.S. President Barack Obama has already expressed his desire to reconnect with the Cuban communist regime and decided in April to curb restrictions on travel and remittances to the Cuban-American community. 

Excluded from the talks, in the meantime, is the issue on the lifting of the embargo imposed on Cuba since 1962. Obama has said that he might consider the lifting if it aids the progress of democracy in Cuba. One of these democratic indicators would be democratic elections. Earlier this month, a senior Democrat estimated that the embargo would probably be lifted by the current Congress whose mandate expires at the end of 2010.

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Via BBC

For starters, Bush insisted that torture was legal. He bought into the official legal reviews on it, hook, line, and sinker. If his administration’s legal counsels said that no international or domestic law can bind him to legal culpability in times of war, then the advice must have been sound. Everybody dealing with the top terror-suspect Abu Zubaydah believed that he ‘wouldn’t talk except by using torture.’

For Bush (upon the advice of the people in his presidential circle), the use of torture was ‘designed to be safe,’ as well as compliant with US laws, US Constitution, and US treaty obligations. After all, even the US Department of Justice had reviewed ‘the authorized methods extensively, and determined them to be lawful.’ On Feb. 7, 2002, he even declared that the Geneva Conventions will not be applicable to the move.

The biggest glitch, of course, was that Bush failed to tell Congress that he had already allowed the use of torture. That was one legal requirement he missed. Congress got wind of it only after Abu Zubaydah had already been waterboarded.

But the biggest tragedy of Bush in this torture ruckus was that he was the President of the United States of America. Besides being ultimately accountable, he was also fundamentally superior. Everyone else in the administration was simply a subordinate to him. The Bush circle insists that ‘if he authorized it, it couldn’t be torture.’ As Condoleezza Rice said: “By definition, if it was authorized by the president, it did not violate our obligations in the Convention Against Torture.”

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Via salon.com

There is now such a thing as the Bush administration’s Torture 13. They belong to the nefarious circle by virtue of authorizing torture to be systematically employed in the name of information gathering post-9/11 for the sake of intelligence. They carried out the strategy, as well as legally justified it. All these point to the creation of a torture regime during the Bush administration.

Bush VP, Dick Cheney, reportedly ordered the implementation of torture. Counsel to the VP, David Addington, actually fought for the commander-in-chief’s impunity from any law that prohibits torture. White House counsel and attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, ‘wrote and reviewed a number of the legal opinions that attempted to immunize torture.’

Military psychologist and consultant, James Mitchell, gave official approval to torture, monitored Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation, observed the use of ‘borderline torture,’ and allowed waterboarding under his supervision (reportedly, ‘a total of 183 times in a month for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and 83 times in a month for Abu Zubaydah’). Former US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, approved the use of torture in the military scope, taking after the CIA methods.

The rest of the members of the dubiously vaunted and infamous circle are CIA people and top-notch government lawyers. As to national security advisor (2001-2005) and Secretary of State (2005-2008), Condoleezza Rice, as well as George W. Bush, himself, it is sufficient to think that the concept of democracy is tantamount to bureaucracy, making the accountability for torture reach all the way to the top.

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Via salon.com

For the past few months, former US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has been reeling under an unpopular reputation. Some regard him as a bad guy. Now come more punches from a magazine feature that includes a slideshow of ‘cover sheets that accompanied intelligence updates produced by Rumsfeld’s DOD for Bush.’

These show pictures of soldiers in the field with matching biblical quotations. These might seem innocuous to those who hold the Bible dearly, but for any outsider who may not be too hot on religion, these materials if leaked to the general public (and they have been) may be construed as the US fighting a religious war with Islam. After all, these religious wars have a lot to do with perception, interpretation, and opinion.

The article also mentioned Rumsfeld not allowing active-duty troops to help in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. This reportedly angered Bush, especially that he probably already had an inkling that the disaster and crisis mismanagement of Katrina by the US government was one disaster that would do his presidential career in. Rumsfeld insisted that the National Guard was sufficient enough, and that sending active-duty troops would ‘create “unity of command” issues.’

Bush’s tragedy, of course, was trusting Rumsfeld too much during the time he did.

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Via salon.com

As publicly promised in March by US President Barack Obama, the embryonic stem cell research in the United States will be enhanced extensively with the aim of finding  treatments for incurable diseases. The new protocols will enable scientists to generate cell lines from embryo waste of fertility clinics.

According to the old Bush policy, US researchers could only receive public funding if their work was limited to material from 21 cell lines. This measure, implemented since 2001 up until the policy change, did not see the utility of used human embryos for research.

Now, things are changing. The US National Institute of Health (NIH) has announced that it is working on new guidelines for the expansion of scientific work. The new regulation which will be completely finished by July will lead to public funds intended for the creation of possibly hundreds of cell lines from embryos.

“There is broad support in the use of federal funds to derive cells from embryos that otherwise would be discarded by fertility clinics. However, there is not the same support for the use of stem cells from other sources,” says Raynard Kington, director of the NIH.

The new protocol restricts and prohibits studies that use cells in connection to experimental methods such as parthenogenesis (chemical and electrical segmentation of the ovum), therapeutic cloning, and the creation of hybrid embryos that are half human and half animal.

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Via The Daily Galaxy

A few days back, Obama was pondering on an ‘exit plan’ for Afghanistan. The strategy for Afghanistan presented on Friday by the U.S. president represents a radical change in relation to his predecessor George W. Bush’s strategy. Obama presented in a ceremony in the White House the long-awaited new strategy that will be presented next week at the NATO summit and includes, among other things, sending more troops and civilian staff to Afghanistan.

The plan abandons the policy of Bush who Obama believes squandered early gains in Afghanistan to put the emphasis on the war in Iraq. It also adopts a more realistic attitude towards the Asian country. Where his predecessor narrowed on the establishment of a modern democracy, Obama chooses to put emphasis on the fight against Al Qaeda, the provision of basic government services to the population, and strengthening of the Afghan forces – in a word, security. The components of this sociopolitical package seem more concrete than Bush’s democratization, an abstract concept.

The president has decided that the deteriorating security situation in Afghanistan requires a greater involvement despite the palpable fatigue among the American people and US allies as regards to the material and human costs of the international presence in the central Asian country. In his view, the situation is ‘increasingly dangerous’ because the Al Qaeda has been able to achieve full capacity of movement.

One of the key factors of the new plan is the emphasis on international cooperation. According to Obama, “The security of people around the world is at stake in Afghanistan.”

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Via TIME

Once again, the American people are living in a time of utter concern for their economy. While the American government speaks in terms of its military victories over agents of terror, the ordinary American taxpayer might not be aware that he or she shall continue to shell out for his or her government’s military spending.

Through the decades, however, the American people continue to learn the lessons that have to be learned, that of being democratically empowered to be stronger than their government.

Eisenhower’s politics, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, and Reaganomics have all been huge phenomena that have had great impact on the lives of the American people. At the very least, these five social, political, and economic events have helped the American people determine their wisdom and resolve.

The United States of America aims to be a global hegemony where many nations would be subordinate to. The trend for such has shown. This bid for hegemony has always taken the form of wars. Military and foreign aid that was rising in demand was the main reason for Eisenhower’s failure to reduce federal spending. The anti-Communism war that the US waged in Vietnam, the biggest proof of how US reacted to the Communist threat, debilitated the US economy at more than $167 billion dollars a year in war costs. Reaganomics’ tax reform policies glowingly included large-scale deficit spending on the military, thereby significantly increasing public debt.

George W. Bush’s War on Terror has been a massively-funded military expedition against terrorists, thereby giving birth to such a global sociopolitical phenomenon called Islamophobia. This US-backed colossal global war against terrorism continues to hurt the pockets of each and every American taxpayer.

The American people have always been wary of their government. Eisenhower ended up with the image of a ‘do-nothing’ president. Reagan fell out of grace because his economic reforms consequently hurt the American public. Public skepticism and cynicism eventually befell the government proponents of the war in Vietnam. Total distrust in the powers of the White House was all that was earned by Nixon and the Watergate scandal.

The Watergate scandal started the eventual weakening of the power of the US presidency, so much so that big business had taken the reins of power in the United States. With the current US financial crisis and global economic meltdown that springs from it, the global public is now wary of the power and influence of big business. Greed is now a four-letter word.

The American people have shown their discerning intelligence and wisdom through the decades. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s is proof that there is such a thing as Americans’ collective decision to harness collective action towards a just society that is not subservient to the excesses of power. No matter what government and whoever president is put in place at the White House, it is the American people that sway the American fate. The will of the people was ultimately more powerful than the power of their government. Conversely, no American government was ever more powerful than the collective will of the American people. Truly, the United States of America has been a solid proof of the power and influence of the citizenry. In a word, democracy.

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According to a secret report prepared in 2007 by the International Committee of the Red Cross, the treatment received by Al Qaeda suspects subjected to interrogation in CIA secret prisons was torture. According to the document, the practices used by the United States were cruel, inhuman, or degrading and expressly forbidden by the Geneva Conventions.

These findings from the International Committee of the Red Cross came after the agency’s inspectors had access to Guantanamo prisoners. A total of 14 ‘high value’ prisoners or ‘platinum prisoners’ passed by the so-called ‘black holes.’ These are secret CIA prisons outside the United States authorized by the Bush administration after 9/11 where the Al Qaeda suspects were put before they were transferred to Guantanamo in 2006.

The testimonies collected by the inspectors of the Red Cross uniformly agree on the use of coercive tactics such as multiple beatings, sleep and food deprivation, extreme temperatures, and in some cases, a simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding.

The document in question was obtained by Mark Danner, journalist and professor at the University of Berkeley. Its disclosure is contrary to the strict rules of confidentiality which the International Committee of the Red Cross maintains in relation to its policy of neutrality in armed conflicts. The ICRC deplored the leakage of this report but does not dispute its contents.

Within hours of his inauguration, President Obama formally forbade any questioning beyond what the field manual of the US Army mandates. But the new government has proved very reluctant to investigate abuses associated with terrorism strategy adopted by the Bush administration. It is, however, significant that the International Committee of the Red Cross as guardian of adherence to the Geneva Conventions has now made accusations of torture on a topic that had remained previously hazy for a long time.

The United Nations has opened investigations on the alleged secret prisons that the CIA keeps where torture techniques have been applied on prisoners.

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Via The Washington Post