Gareth Porter
Inter Press Service

The revelation by Wikileaks of a U.S. military order directing U.S. forces not to investigate cases of torture of detainees by Iraqis has been treated in news reports as yet another case of lack of concern by the U.S. military about detainee abuse.

But the deeper significance of the order, which has been missed by the news media, is that it was part of a larger U.S. strategy of exploiting Shi'a sectarian hatred against Sunnis to help suppress the Sunni insurgency when Sunnis had rejected the U.S. war.

And Gen. David Petraeus was a key figure in developing the strategy of using Shi'a and Kurdish forces to suppress Sunnis in 2004-2005.

The strategy involved the deliberate deployment of Shi'a and Kurdish police commandoes in areas of Sunni insurgency in the full knowledge that they were torturing Sunni detainees, as the reports released by Wikileaks show.

That strategy inflamed Sunni fears of Shi'a rule and was a major contributing factor to the rise of al Qaeda's influence in the Sunni areas. The escalating Sunni-Shi'a violence it produced led to the massive sectarian warfare of 2006 in Baghdad in which tens of thousands of civilians - mainly Sunnis - were killed.

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Gilad Atzmon
Gilad Atzmon's Blog

In her desperate attempt to smear Lauren Booth, Independent writer Julie Burchill, a devout Zionist, proves how deceiving British multiculturalism is.

Indeed the Zionification of this Kingdom has left this country in a disastrous ethical limbo.

“Last year I took the first steps towards converting to Judaism; also last year, I abandoned my attempt”, says Burchill.

But I guess that Burchill didn’t really have to convert -- She is obviously far more Jewish than anyone I can think of. Burchill can teach Rabbi Ovadia Yosef what self-love is all about. She can teach Paul Wolfowitz, David Aaronovitch and David Miliband what moral-interventionism stands for. She can give Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman a crash course in Hasbara. Burchill can lecture Zionist slander operators on how to spread venom.

But most significantly, she displays an astonishing command of Jewish humour. Burchill is indeed very funny.

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Erich Follath & Christian Neef
Der Spiegel

[Craig Murray's comment to this Spiegel article HERE]

Uzbekistan is both a nation of terror led by brutal dictator Islam Karimov and a partner of the West that is an important staging ground for NATO's war in Afghanistan. Its story is best told through the eyes of two men -- the flamboyant former British ambassador and the current top German diplomat in the country.

Some cities are tedium set in stone, joyless places where people don't live but merely survive.

And then there are the cities whose names alone are the stuff of legend. They are places of stunning geography, impressive history and breathtaking architecture. Three of these cities are Samarkand, Bukhara and Khiva, located on the legendary Silk Road in Uzbekistan in Central Asia, lined up like a string of pearls, each rising up from the shimmering heat of the surrounding deserts like mirages. These are magical places.

Their turquoise domes, madrassas decorated with mosaics and ornate caravanserai roadside inns are not only evidence of the skill of those who built them, but also of the ambitions of the ethnic groups that proudly left their mark on the region in past centuries: Persians, Greeks, Mongols and Turks. In the 19th century, the British and the Russians competed over strategic bases and mineral resources in the region, in what was known as the "Great Game." After 1920, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin drew the arbitrary borders that would later outline the Central Asian nations. Today, the region's conflicts are crystallizing once again.

Uzbekistan is the most populous and probably most important of the new Central Asian countries that emerged from the former Soviet Union. Islam Karimov, the Communist Party's first secretary in Uzbekistan prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, easily transitioned into his new role as president, brutally eliminating all opposition and placing members of his family into positions of power. Today Karimov has his eye on billions in future business. Uzbekistan is the world's sixth-largest cotton producer and has massive reserves of natural gas as well as gold and uranium deposits. It is potentially a wealthy country.

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Lawrence Davidson
Redress

Lawrence Davidson considers why so many US officials, some ostensibly intelligent, end up blatantly lying or blindly following murderous orders without question, and why the general public seems to accept this.

Dr Susan Elizabeth Rice (DPhil, Oxford, 1990) is United States ambassador at the United Nations. She is a professional diplomat and foreign policy consultant as well as a protégée of former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Rice, who is unrelated to Condolezza Rice, had a reputation of being a free thinker and a stubborn defender of what she thought to be proper and right.

This tendency to be independent of mind meant she had trouble with other, older career diplomats when, in the second Clinton administration, she served as assistant secretary of state for African affairs. No doubt she soon learned that, in the world of diplomacy as in most well established bureaucracies, too much independent thinking makes you a square peg surrounded by round holes. In the long term one either conforms or leaves for a more accommodating career (usually in academia). It appears that Dr Rice has done the former.

Evidence of this choice came on 28 October 2010 when Ambassador Rice stepped out of the UN Security Council chamber in New York and began scolding the Syrian government for a "flagrant disregard" of Lebanese sovereignty. Syria is supposedly doing this by "continuing to provide increasingly sophisticated weapons to Lebanese militias, including Hezbollah…"

Murderous hypocrisy

Dr Rice’s charge is only superficially true and that is where she left it. For instance, she omitted the context of the situation and the whole recent history of Lebanon. She made no mention of Lebanon’s right-wing factions and the role of the United States and France in supporting their continuing divisive independence. She did not deem to mention that Lebanon’s horrible history of civil wars was finally brought to an end only with Syrian intervention. And, she did not tell of Hizbollah’s role as protector of the country’s majority Shi’i population as well as defender of the entire nation from the rapacity of the United States’ main ally, Israel. No, she did not put things in perspective, but rather got her orders from Washington to play the sovereignty card and thereby distort things for the sake of a highly partisan American position. And so, like a good soldier, she carried out those orders. She is now an official team player.

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Bill Van Auken
WSWS

The Obama administration is preparing to escalate its intervention in Yemen, placing US military units under CIA control to facilitate intensified drone attacks and death squad killings.

Citing unnamed government officials, the Wall Street Journal reported Monday that the administration has responded to the alleged airplane mail bomb plot by stepping up its consideration of “military options” inside Yemen.

According to the report, these plans would include placing “elite US hunter-killer teams that operate secretly in the country under Central Intelligence Agency authority.” The Journal added,

“The White House is already considering adding armed CIA drones to the arsenal against militants in Yemen, mirroring the agency’s Pakistan campaign.”

The purpose of placing the US intervention in Yemen (now largely conducted by US military special operations forces) under CIA command, the report states, would be to “streamline US decision-making, giving the White House more direct control over day-to-day operations.”

What this means in practice is that making the growing intervention in Yemen a CIA operation would allow the Obama administration to cloak in even greater secrecy its escalation in yet another front in the “global war on terrorism.” It would be able to operate with less congressional oversight, while concealing its actions from the American people.

Equally important, placing the operation under the command of the US spy agency would circumvent the need for explicit approval by Yemen’s government. While such approval is required for the deployment of the US military, outside of an outright war, the covert character of CIA’s activities would provide both Washington and the corrupt and autocratic regime of President Ali Abdullah Saleh with “deniability.”

Popular hostility in Yemen to US operations is overwhelming, forcing Saleh to publicly declare his opposition to foreign military intervention and to refuse permission for some US missile strikes.

Washington’s aim is to create a similar arrangement as the one it forged with the government in Pakistan, which has tacitly accepted drone missile attacks—allowing US forces to operate from Pakistani territory—while publicly condemning them.

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JuJuBe (Joanna)
IMR

Last week, a victory for the government in a federal court case sent a signal out to the rest of the world as to how loosely we hold the ideals of "liberty and justice for all" In a decision that is not surprising AT ALL, Federal District Judge Barbara Jones determined that the Pentagon DOES NOT need to make public vital information pertaining to the prisoners held at the Parwan Prison on the Bagram Air Force Base outside of Kabul.

The ACLU filed suit demanding that such pertinent information as circumstances and location of "capture", the national origin and citizenship, and the length of imprisonment of detainees at Bagram be released. They were denied, under the guise of "national security". And, the judge also decided that there is no need to reveal whether or not the CIA is keeping captives there. It seems like after the debacles at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, the government is reluctant to share any details of the hundreds of people detained at Bagram. The ACLU believes that it is for fear that the public will find out that many people being held are, in fact, innocent of any wrongdoing, simply victims of circumstance. Prisoners at Bragram DO NOT have the right to challenge their captivity in US Courts.

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