Iraqi civilian deaths put at 100,000

Friday, the 29th of October 2004.

Tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed in violence since the US-led invasion last year, according to public health experts who estimate there were 100,000 "excess deaths" in 18 months.
The US-based researchers found that the risk of death from violence in the period after the invasion was 58 times higher than before the war.
The rise in the death rate was mainly due to violence and much of it was caused by US air strikes on towns and cities, they said.
"Making conservative assumptions, we think that about 100,000 excess deaths or more have happened since the 2003 invasion of Iraq," said Les Roberts of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in a report published online by The Lancet medical journal.
"The use of air power in areas with lots of civilians appears to be killing a lot of women and children," Mr Roberts said.
The report comes just days before the US presidential election in which the Iraq war has been a major issue.
Mortality was already high in Iraq before the war because of United Nations sanctions blocking food and medical imports.
But the researchers described their findings after the war as shocking.
Air strikes
The new figures are based on surveys done by the researchers in Iraq in September 2004.
They compared Iraqi deaths during 14.6 months before the invasion in March 2003 and the 17.8 months after it by conducting household surveys in randomly selected neighbourhoods.
Previous estimates based on think-tank and media sources put the Iraqi civilian death toll at up to 16,053 and military fatalities as high as 6,370.
By comparison, about 849 US military personnel were killed in combat or attacks and another 258 died in accidents or incidents not related to fighting, according to the Pentagon.
The researchers blamed air strikes for many of the civilian deaths.
"What we have evidence of is the use of air power in populated urban areas and the bad consequences of it," Roberts said.
Gilbert Burnham, who collaborated on the research, says US military action in Iraq was "very bad for Iraqi civilians".
"We were not expecting the level of deaths from violence that we found in this study and we hope this will lead to some serious discussions of how military and political aims can be achieved in a way that is not so detrimental to civilians populations," he told Reuters.
The researchers did 33 cluster surveys of 30 households each, recording the date, circumstances and cause of deaths.
Before the war the major causes of death were heart attacks, chronic disorders and accidents. That changed after the war.
Two-thirds of violent deaths in the study were reported in Fallujah, the insurgent held city 50 kilometres west of Baghdad which has been repeatedly hit by US air strikes.
"Our results need further verification and should lead to changes to reduce non-combatant deaths from air strikes," Mr Roberts added in the study.
Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, said the research which was submitted to the journal this month had been peer-reviewed, edited and fast-tracked for publication because of its importance in the evolving security situation in Iraq.
"But these findings also raise questions for those far removed from Iraq - in the governments of the countries responsible for launching a pre-emptive war," Mr Horton said in an editorial.
-- Reuters

ABC 29-10-4

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200410/s1230305.htm

Amnesty condemns US 'torture tactics'

Wednesday, the 27th of October 2004.

Amnesty International has accused the United States of being more concerned with getting around international laws which prohibit torture than with safeguarding human rights as it wages its "war on terror".
The 200-page analysis of the practices and decisions that led to torture in Iraq, and alleged abuse in Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay, argues that Washington's "war mentality" led it down a slippery slope toward disregard for the rule of law.
"It is tragic that in the 'war on terror', the USA has itself undermined the rule of law. Its selective disregard for the Geneva Conventions and international human rights law has contributed to torture and ill-treatment," it wrote.
"The torture and ill-treatment of Iraqi detainees by US agents in Abu Ghraib prison was due to a failure of human rights leadership at the highest levels of government, sadly predictable," it continued.
The report comes just a week ahead of the US presidential election on Tuesday between Republican incumbent George W Bush and Democratic Senator John Kerry.
Photos depicting torture at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, which first emerged in late-April, shocked the world and again smeared US assertions that it is a defender of human rights.
US Government documents suggest that "far from ensuring that the 'war on terror' would be conducted without resort to human rights violations, the administration was discussing ways in which its agents might avoid the international prohibition on torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment," the Amnesty report said.
"The war mentality the Government has adopted has not been matched with a commitment to the laws of war," it added.
Instead, the strategy of the US Government has been to deny detainees prisoner of war status under the Geneva Conventions, and to restrict access to detainees citing military necessity - both of which have allowed abuse to go by unnoticed and largely unpunished, the group said.
Mr Bush and his leadership also contribute to the slippery slope by refusing to use "torture" to describe Abu Ghraib, but only call events that took place there as "abuse", it said.
Amnesty, the London-based global human rights campaigner, reiterated its call for an independent commission to investigate alleged abuse in the war on terror which would be mandated to investigate the highest echelons of government.
It also outlined 12 recommendations for Washington, including the need to improve access to detainees, totally condemnation of torture and ratification of international treaties to that effect and the prosecution of wrong-doers.
The group criticised what it termed US Government hypocrisy to denounce torture and yet refuse to address its own instances of mistreatment.
In a bitter ironic passage, it noted that when "it suited the US Government's aims in its build-up to the invasion of Iraq", the Bush administration cited Amnesty International's reports on torture under Saddam Hussein's rule in that country.
The report draws largely on a wide source of information, including the US Government and non-governmental organisations, as well as press reports of abuse cases and Amnesty's own investigations.
--AFP

ABC 27-10-4

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200410/s1229147.htm

US applying Geneva 'exceptions' in Iraq

Tuesday, the 26th of October 2004.

The Bush administration has concluded for the first time that some non-Iraqi prisoners captured by American forces in Iraq are not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Convention, the New York Times has reported.
According to unnamed administration officials who spoke with the newspaper, the opinion reached in recent months holds that there are exceptions to prior assertions that the Geneva Convention applies to all prisoners taken in the Iraq war.
The report follows another story in Sunday's Washington Post, which said US intelligence officials were transferring detainees out of Iraq for interrogation.
In those cases, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) invoked a confidential Justice Department memo to justify its actions, the Post said.
The report in NYT said that the legal opinion would allow the military and the CIA to treat at least a small number of non-Iraqi prisoners captured in Iraq in the same way as members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban captured in Afghanistan, Pakistan or elsewhere.
In such cases, the United States has said, the Geneva Convention does not apply.
According to the NYT, the new opinion represented a consensus reached by lawyers from the Departments of State and Justice, as well as other agencies such as the Pentagon and the National Security Council.
A Government official told the newspaper that the opinion had been sought by the CIA to establish the legality of its secret transfers of non-Iraqi prisoners, beginning in April 2003, for interrogation outside Iraq.
Government officials told the NYT that the new ruling could open the way for additional transfers on a broader scale, because the status of prisoners being held in Iraq is reviewed on a case-by-case basis.
The administration takes the view that exceptions from the Geneva Convention would include suspected Al Qaeda members and other terror suspects, as well as foreigners who travelled to Iraq to join the insurgency or engage in acts of terrorism, the paper said.
--Reuters

ABC 26-10-4

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200410/s1228465.htm

US secretly moved prisoners out of Iraq for questioning: report

Monday, the 25th of October 2004.

The CIA has secretly transferred detainees out of Iraq for interrogation after asking the US Justice Department to write a memo justifying the practice, which violates the Geneva Conventions, The Washington Post has reported.
The CIA used the draft memo as legal support for the transfer up to a dozen detainees in the last six months, concealing the move from the International Committee of the Red Cross and other authorities, the Post said, citing an intelligence official familiar with the operation.
The daily said it had obtained a copy of the confidential memo, written by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, dated March 19, 2004 and stamped "draft".
The memo covers both Iraqi citizens and foreigners in Iraq, according to the Post.
It permits the CIA to take Iraqis out of the country to be interrogated for a "brief but not indefinite period," and allows permanent removal of persons deemed to be "illegal aliens" under "local immigration law," the daily said.
Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention protects civilians during wartime and occupation, prohibiting "individual or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons from occupied territory... regardless of their motive."
In a footnote to the memo its author wrote that a violation of this provision constitutes a "grave breach" of the accord and a "war crime" under US federal law, the Post said.
"For these reasons, we recommend that any contemplated relocations of 'protected persons' from Iraq to facilitate interrogation be carefully evaluated for compliance with Article 49 on a case by case basis," the footnote says.
In a controversial move, the administration transferred many Al Qaeda fighters captured in Afghanistan to a US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, saying these "enemy combatants" were not protected under the Geneva Conventions.
But the US government had said that former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party and military, insurgents and other civilians in Iraq, were to be protected by the Geneva Conventions, the Post pointed out.
The CIA has not disclosed the identities or locations of prisoners captured in Iraq, the Post said.
"The Geneva Conventions are applicable to the conflict in Iraq, and our policy is to comply with the Geneva Conventions," White House spokesman Sean McCormick told the Post when asked about the memo.
On Sunday, US Senator John McCain told ABC television, that the flouting of international rights protocols should be discouraged.
"These conventions and these rules are in place for a reason, because you get on a slippery slope and you don't know where to get off," he said.
"And the thing that separates us from the enemy is our respect for human rights.
"It's a tough decision. It's a very tough decision, but we have to observe these rules."
-- AFP

ABC 25-10-4

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200410/s1226801.htm

CIA withdraws Iraq WMD claim

Saturday, the 23rd of October 2004.

The US Central Intelligence Agency has withdrawn its claim that a Danish company sold equipment to Iraq that could be used to make weapons of mass destruction, Denmark's foreign ministry said on Friday.
The CIA has posted a message on its website explaining that the allegation against the Danish company Niro, which belongs to the German group GEA, was based on incorrect information, and it has therefore withdrawn its claim, the ministry added.
The CIA report, entitled "Possible Breaches of UN Sanctions by Danish Companies", said Niro sold equipment to Iraq in 2001 that could be used to make biological weapons, in violation of a United Nations embargo against Iraq.
The Danish Government had investigated the claim and, when its probe turned up nothing, asked the US authorities on Thursday for an explanation.
"I'm pleased that the CIA has now withdrawn its allegation on its website. Niro is no longer accused of having violated the UN sanctions against Iraq," Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller said in the statement.
The statement on the CIA website reads: "The report implies that Iraq procured the spray dryers with precise atomiser nozzles from Danish company Niro Atomiser Inc in 2001. That is incorrect. In fact, the spray dryers and nozzles were procured in the late 1980s, well before UN sanctions were in place on such equipment".
The managing director of Niro had repeatedly rejected the claim.
"We have not delivered one single screw to Iraq since 1989 when we supplied a drier system used in the industrial ceramics industry," Niels Graugaard told the Danish financial daily Boersen earlier this week.
-- AFP

ABC 23-10-4

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200410/s1226358.htm

Iraq war fuelling terrorism, says former weapons inspector

Thursday, the 14th of October 2004

United Nations former chief weapons inspector Hans Blix has again said the invasion of Iraq has failed to make the world a safer place.
Instead, he says it is only succeeded in fuelling terrorism.
Speaking in Stockholm, Dr Blix said the invasion of Iraq has not deterred other states from contemplating weapons of mass destruction programs.
He criticised the United States and Britain for focusing on removing Saddam Hussein who was not developing nuclear weapons, when Iran and North Korea are still widely believed to be considering weapons of mass destruction.
Dr Blix labelled the Iraqi dictator's removal as the only positive to come from the US-led invasion, saying the military action has succeeded in stimulating terrorism instead of stopping it.

ABC 14-10-4

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200410/s1219652.htm

US accused of breaching international law

Tuesday, the 12th of October 2004

The United States is violating international law by holding prisoners in its war on terror incommunicado and in secret hiding places, Human Rights Watch said in a report to be published on Tuesday calling for an end to such practices.
The New York-based rights organisation profiles 11 Al Qaeda suspects being detained without concern for their rights under international law in a 46-page report.
They include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the suspected architect of the September 11 attacks; Abu Zubaydah, reputedly a close aide of Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden; Ramzi bin al-Shaibah, who might have been a September 11 hijacker if he had not failed to get a US visa, and Hambali, an alleged Al Qaeda ally in South East Asia.
"Those guilty of serious crimes must be brought to justice before fair trials," Reed Brody, special counsel with Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.
It added that if the United States ignores international law, "it abandons its ideals and international obligations and becomes a lesser nation".
The rights group said international treaties ratified by the United States prohibit holding prisoners incommunicado and in secret locations.
The Geneva Conventions require that the International Committee of the Red Cross have access to all detainees and that information on them be provided to their relatives.
Under international human rights law, detainees must be held in recognised places of detention and be able to communicate with lawyers and family members, it said.
US officials say the detentions are essential to confronting terrorism and that many of those held have provided valuable intelligence that has foiled planned attacks.
Human Rights Watch called on the United States to grant unrestricted access to the International Committee of the Red Cross to all detainees held in anti-terrorist operations.
-- Reuters

ABC 12-10-4

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200410/s1218361.htm

Detained terror suspects 'missing'

The 12th of October 2004

At least 11 al-Qaeda suspects have "disappeared" in US custody, and some may have been tortured, according to a report by Human Rights Watch.
The prisoners are probably being held outside the United States without access to the Red Cross or any oversight of their treatment, the human rights group said.
In some cases, the United States would not even acknowledge the prisoners were in custody.
The report said the prisoners include the alleged architect of the September 11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, as well as Abu Zubaydah, who is believed to be a close aide to Osama bin Laden.
In refusing to disclose the prisoners' whereabouts or acknowledge the detentions, Human Rights Watch said, the US government had violated international law, international treaties and the Geneva Convention. The group called on the government to bring all the prisoners "under the protection of the law."
"I think the US demeans itself when it adopts the philosophy that the ends justify the means in the fight against terror," said Reed Brody, special counsel with Human Rights Watch.

The White House had no immediate comment.
The report - The United States' 'Disappeared': The CIA's Long-term 'Ghost Detainees' - was released on Monday and said many of the prisoners had provided valuable intelligence to US officials. But it also cited reports that some detainees had lied under pressure to please their interrogators.
Human Rights Watch had no first-hand knowledge of the treatment of the detainees. Much of the report stems from news accounts that have cited unidentified government sources acknowledging the torture or mistreatment of detainees.
The report provided a brief sketch of 11 detainees believed to be incommunicado in undisclosed locations. They originate from countries across the Arab world, including Libya, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. US authorities had confirmed the detention of six of them, the report said.
© 2004 AP

SMH 12-10-4

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/10/12/1097406538508.html

Guantanamo detainee alleges torture, killings

The 2nd of October 2004

A Briton being held at Guantanamo Bay was tortured, held in solitary confinement for almost two years and "partially witnessed" US military interrogators killing two detainees at an American base in Afghanistan, he said in a letter released by his lawyers Friday.
Moazzam Begg made the claim in an uncensored letter that was released to his legal team by American officials - something his lawyers described as an "oddity."
The Pentagon said Friday that America treats all prisoners humanely.
Begg, 36, is one of four Britons being held at the US prison camp for terrorist suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Five other Britons were released earlier this year, and Prime Minister Tony Blair has asked US President George Bush to free the remaining British detainees.
Begg's lawyers said they would file a suit on Monday demanding the US stop what they called the "inhumane treatment" of Begg, and called on the British government to press harder for his release.
In Begg's handwritten letter, written in formal, legalistic language and dated July 12, 2004, he says he was kidnapped from his home in Pakistan in January 2002 and taken to Afghanistan, where he was "degraded and physically abused" during a year at the US military base at Bagram, near Kabul.

"During several interviews, particularly though unexclusively in Afghanistan, I was subjected to pernicious threats of torture, actual vindictive torture and death threats amongst other coercively employed interrogation techniques," Begg wrote.
He said interviews "were conducted in an environment of generated fear resonant with terrifying screams of fellow detainees facing similar methods."
"This culminated, in my opinion, with the deaths of two fellow detainees at the hands of US military personnel, to which I myself was partially witness," Begg wrote.
He did not provide further details, but referred to an earlier letter that his lawyers said they had not seen.
The lawyers said they could not reach Begg to ask him about the letter, and they did not clarify what "partially witness" meant.
Asked about the allegations, the Pentagon did not comment specifically on Begg's case, but said in a statement that "all interrogation techniques used at Guantanamo are within the standards accepted internationally."
US policy prohibits torture, and American personnel are required to follow that policy, the statement said.
"All detainees are treated humanely and to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity in accordance with the principles of the Third Geneva Convention of 1949," it said.
The military takes credible allegations of illegal conduct by soldiers seriously and investigates them, the Pentagon said.
Begg also claimed he had been held in solitary confinement at Guantanamo Bay since February last year and was forced to sign statements under threat of torture and "long-term imprisonment, summary trials and execution."
One of Begg's US-based lawyers, Clive Stafford Smith, said his claims were just the tip of the iceberg, and called for evidence of torture at the US facility to be made public.
He said another lawyer, Gitanjali Gutierrez, had met with Begg at Guantanamo in August, but that she was forbidden from revealing details of their discussions.
In the letter, Begg denied any involvement with al-Qaeda or any "synonymous paramilitary organisation."
"I am a law-abiding citizen of the U.K. and attest vehemently to my innocence before God and the law of any crime, though none has ever been alleged," he said.
The letter was addressed "to whom it may concern," with a note that copies should go to Blair, the US Supreme Court and Amnesty International, among others.
A lawyer acting for Begg in Britain, Gareth Peirce, said it was likely he had written many more letters that had not been declassified.
"The letter was processed out to her through the official military censorship channels and seems to be an oddity," Peirce told BBC radio. "It refers to a previous letter that hasn't arrived."
The Foreign Office said British officials had made several welfare visits to Begg and that he hadn't alleged any systematic abuse while at Guantanamo Bay.
"Mr. Begg has said that he was mistreated at Bagram, and we have raised this with the US authorities who are investigating," a spokesman for the department said.
The US military is already looking into at least three deaths in US custody in Afghanistan, dating back to December 2002. It has yet to release the results of any of the investigations.
Still, a CIA contractor has been charged in the United States with using a flashlight to beat a prisoner who later died in the eastern town of Asadabad in June 2003.
AP

SMH 2-10-4

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/10/02/1096527972845.html

Allies 'planned' Iraq war despite denials

Thursday, the 30th of September 2004

The United States, Australia and Britain started to plan the invasion of Iraq months before the conflict, according to a report Wednesday quoting a leaked Pentagon document.
Senior British and US commanders met at a war-planning session in June 2002 and orders to prepare actual military operations were given on October 7, 2002, more than a month before a UN resolution giving a final warning to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, the London Evening Standard reported.

Full battle plans were issued on October 31, 2002, eight days before UN Resolution 1441 called for the resumption of arms inspections in Iraq and warned Saddam of "serious consequences" if he were still seeking weapons of mass destruction, the paper said.
The document quoted in the report is a Pentagon chronology used by US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in an August 2003 presentation on the "strategic lessons learned from Operation Iraqi Freedom".
The chronology lists a "UK and Australia planning conference" on June 28, 2002.
Three weeks later, on July 16, the Prime Minister Tony Blair rejected the notion that Britain was gearing up for an invasion.
When asked by a lawmaker whether Britain was "preparing for possible military action in Iraq", Mr Blair responded, according to the paper: "No, there are no decisions which have been taken about military action".
The newspaper report was written by defense and security journalist Andrew Gilligan, the former BBC radio reporter whose claim that Mr Blair had "sexed up" his pre-war dossier with a claim about Iraqi weapons capability led to his ouster and a showdown between the British Government and public broadcaster.
Britain's defense ministry refused to confirm or deny the report, Mr Gilligan wrote.
"The latest disclosures sit uneasily with Mr Blair's denials that the Government was following a course toward war," he said.
Mr Rumsfeld's document, the article charges, "frequently contradicts" public statements by officials in Britain in the run-up to the war.
Mr Blair has been dogged by persistent doubts over the war, and Tuesday admitted that his decision to join the US-led invasion had made the public lose trust in the Government.
He also told the annual conference of his ruling Labour Party that the claim that Saddam possessed stockpiles of banned weapons had "turned out to be wrong".
According to the Evening Standard article, a British defense official was quoted in July 2002 - two weeks after Britain's first war-planning huddle with the United States - as saying: "We don't have current plans for an invasion or attack on Iraq in any form".
Even after Washington began actively preparing its offensive in August 2002, British Home Secretary David Blunkett derided war talk as "hype", Mr Gilligan wrote.
Mr Gilligan's controversial report for the BBC back in May 2003 used a Government weapons expert, David Kelly, as a confidential source who was later outed in public.
Mr Kelly committed suicide in July of that year, triggering a major public inquiry into the causes of his death.
Its conclusions, written by judge Brian Hutton, absolved Mr Blair of wrongdoing but made a scathing attack on the BBC, which in turn led to the resignations of Mr Gilligan as well as the BBC's chief executive Greg Dyke and chairman Gavyn Davies.
-- AFP

ABC 30-9-4

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200409/s1210043.htm

Saddam had no WMD stockpile: US report

The 17th of September 2004

Drafts of a report from the top US inspector in Iraq conclude there were no weapons stockpiles.
But they say there were signs that fallen Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had dormant programs he hoped to revive at a later time, according to people familiar with the findings.
In a 1,500-page report, the head of the Iraq Survey Group, Charles Duelfer, will find Saddam was importing banned materials, working on unmanned aerial vehicles in violation of UN agreements and maintaining a dual-use industrial sector that could produce weapons.
Duelfer also says Iraq only had small research and development programs for chemical and biological weapons.
As Duelfer puts the finishing touches on his report, he concludes Saddam had intentions of restarting weapons programs at some point, after suspicion and inspections from the international community waned.
After a year and a half in Iraq, however, the United States has found no weapons of mass destruction - its chief argument for overthrowing the regime.

An intelligence official said Duelfer could wrap up the report as soon as this month, but noted it may take time to declassify it.
Those who discussed the report inside and outside the government did so on the condition of anonymity because it contains classified material and is not yet completed.
If the report is released publicly before the November 2 election, Democrats are likely to seize on the document as another opportunity to criticise the Bush administration's leading argument for war in Iraq and the deteriorating security situation there.
Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry has criticised the president's handling of the war in Iraq, but has also said he still would have voted to authorise the war even if he had known no weapons of mass destruction would be found there.
Duelfer's report is expected to be similar to findings reported by his predecessor, David Kay, who presented an interim report to Congress in October. Kay left the post in January, saying, "We were almost all wrong" about Saddam's weapons programs.
The new analysis, however, is expected to fall between the position of the Bush administration before the war - portraying Saddam as a grave threat - and the declarative statements Kay made after he resigned.
It will also add more evidence and flesh out Kay's October findings. Then, Kay said the Iraq Survey Group had only uncovered limited evidence of secret chemical and biological weapons programs, but he found substantial evidence of an Iraqi push to boost the range of its ballistic missiles beyond prohibited ranges.
He also said there was almost no sign that a significant nuclear weapons project was under way.
Duelfer's report doesn't reach firm conclusions in all areas. For instance, US officials are still investigating whether Saddam's fallen regime may have sent chemical weapons equipment and several billion dollars over the border to Syria. That has not been confirmed, but remains an area of interest to the US government.
The Duelfer report will come months after the Senate Intelligence Committee released a scathing assessment of the prewar intelligence on Iraq.
After a yearlong inquiry, the Republican-led committee said in July that the CIA kept key information from its own and other agencies' analysts, engaged in "group think" by failing to challenge the assumption that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and allowed President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell to make false statements.
The Iraq Survey Group has been working since the summer of 2003 to find Saddam's weapons and better understand his prohibited programs. More than a thousand civilian and military weapons specialists, translators and other experts have been devoted to the effort.
AP

17-9-4

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/09/17/1095320949195

PM was told war would spur terrorism
By Tom Allard, Foreign Affairs Reporter
The 23th of August 2004
        
The Federal Government was warned repeatedly by intelligence analysts before the Iraq war that the conflict would harm the war on terrorism by fanning Islamic extremism and spurring terrorist recruiting.
An investigation by the Herald, which has included interviews with several serving and retired intelligence figures, has uncovered that John Howard and his senior colleagues were briefed on the dangers, verbally and in written reports.
Yet the Prime Minister told Australians on the eve of the conflict that the war would lessen the terrorist threat, contradicting his intelligence advice.
The revelation raises serious questions about the inquiry into the intelligence services commissioned by the Government and conducted by Philip Flood. The inquiry never mentioned the warnings about an increased terrorist threat.
"They were very, very aware of our views," one former intelligence analyst said. "We believed it would inflame extremism and increase terrorist recruitment."

The source said these views were relayed in written reports and in verbal briefings to Mr Howard and his ministers in the months and weeks leading up to the conflict.
The sources said senior Government members were constantly being briefed on al-Qaeda and terrorism, including the impact of the Iraq war on the jihad being carried out by al-Qaeda.
Another intelligence analyst pointed to additional reporting on how the war would be viewed on the "Arab street" and elsewhere.
"We thought the Arab governments, the Gulf states, would keep a lid on demonstrations in the lead-up to the war. But we were sure, in the longer term, there would be a lot of anger towards the West," the analyst said. "We would see there was a risk here that this is going to provoke more support for terrorism and violent responses."
The assessments proved prescient. The war has led to a surge in anti-Western sentiment and has become a powerful recruitment tool for terrorists, as the Government now acknowledges.
"A lot of our terrorism reporting predicted what is going on at the moment," one of the sources said. "We were thinking about it and writing about it."
The sources also said the Government was told there was no operational link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, and the Iraq war could not be seen as part of the broader global war on terrorism.
Mr Howard, unlike his US counterpart, George Bush, never played up the link between Saddam and Osama bin Laden but he did assure the public that the terrorist threat would be diminished by invading Iraq.
"Far from our action in Iraq increasing the terrorist threat, it will, by stopping the spread of chemical and biological weapons, make it less likely that a terrorist attack will be carried out against Australia," Mr Howard said in a televised address to the nation on the eve of the war.
Australian intelligence agents said their views on terrorism accorded with those of the British intelligence services.
It was revealed last year that Britain's joint intelligence committee said one month before the war that "al-Qaeda and associated groups continued to represent by far the greatest terrorist threat to Western interests, and that threat would he heightened by military action against Iraq".
Mr Howard has confirmed Australia received this advice and it went into the decision-making "mix", but has studiously avoided comment on what the Australian agencies told him on the subject.
Last night his spokeswoman said: "We will not respond to unsourced, non-specific allegations of this kind."
Asked by the Herald on July 15 about what the Government was told by its intelligence services about the war's impact on terrorism, the Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, said he could not answer. "I don't have that information with me here today. I didn't come prepared to answer that question.
"Regardless of what intelligence agencies may or may not say, it isn't the intelligence agencies that make the decisions. It's the governments that make the decisions, and governments make the decisions not just on the basis of information provided by intelligence agencies."
Mr Howard attacked the Federal Police Commissioner, Mick Keelty, when he observed in March that the war had made participants, including Australia, bigger terrorist targets.
The Flood inquiry found the intelligence services did little by way of strategic assessment but never outlined what those assessments were. It also never canvassed what was said in verbal briefings to Mr Howard and senior ministers.
Labor yesterday reaffirmed its commitment to a judicial inquiry into the intelligence services, citing gaps in Mr Flood's report.

SMH 23-8-4

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/08/22/1093113058224.

Howard denies Blix's WMD claim

Wednesday,  the 18th of August 2004

Prime Minister John Howard has rejected suggestions that former United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix warned him of serious doubts that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) just weeks before the Iraq war began.
Mr Howard met Dr Blix in his New York office in February 2003.
In an email sent to a Melbourne researcher, Dr Blix says he told Mr Howard in the meeting that the "evidence" supporting claims about Iraq's WMD was unimpressive.
Mr Howard says he has now checked his record of that meeting.
Mr Howard says Dr Blix was not that direct in his remarks.
"He admitted that he had not kept notes of the meeting, well I did keep notes of the meeting," he said.
"Whilst he certainly didn't agree with everything, I'm not asserting that, it's fair only to say that he was cautious and guarded about what he said about Iraq's possession of WMD's.
"That's the correct interpretation of our discussion."

ABC 18-8-4

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200408/s1179587.htm

Iraq deployment makes Australia a terrorist target: Iran

Thursday, the 12th of August 2004.

Iran says Australia is a terrorist target because it is part of the occupying force in Iraq.
The secretary of Iran's National Security Council, Hassan Rowhani, says Australia is less popular in the Middle East because of its involvement in the United States-led coalition.
"All the groups that now are involved in terrorist acts in Iraq seem to take all the groups that are participating in helping with the occupying forces as the targets of their attacks," he said.
Dr Rowhani had talks in Canberra today with Prime Minister John Howard and the Foreign Minister Alexander Downer.
He says Iran sees Australia as a friend, but public opinion in the Middle East has turned against any country involved in the occupation of Iraq.
He says Australia should note that Spain increased its standing by withdrawing its troops from Iraq.

ABC 12-8-4

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200408/s1174993.htm

Pentagon plan for global anti-terror army

The 11th of August 2004

The Pentagon has urged Congress to authorise a $700 million package designed to build a global anti-terrorist network of friendly militias.
Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, a key architect of the Iraq war, told the House Armed Services Committee the money would be used "for training and equipping local security forces - not just armies - to counter terrorism and insurgencies".
If approved as part of a larger defence bill, the package would "provide greater internal security in areas that are or could become sanctuaries for terrorists," he said.
No specific beneficiaries of the program were named, but US officials have repeatedly expressed concern about vast tracts of land along the Afghan-Pakistani border, in Iraq, the Caucasus, the Horn of Africa and various islands in the Philippines, where radical Islamic fighters could set up shop.
The strategy has already been used in Afghanistan, where US special forces managed to forge alliances with local warlords, who became instrumental in bringing down the Taliban government in 2001 and keeping its remnants at bay.

"Indeed, our most important allies in the war on terrorism will be Muslims who seek freedom and oppose extremism," Wolfowitz stated.
The request comes amid a concerted push by top Defence Department and other administration officials to develop new forms of "asymmetrical" warfare that would be more effective against small terrorist cells.
The "new" warfare would also spare the United States the need to deploy large contingents of its own forces around the world.
Addressing the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations last week, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld spoke of the need for the Pentagon to adjust to the new reality in which it does not have to confront big foreign armies, navies and air forces it was originally trained to fight.
"There are not a lot of them around at the moment," the secretary pointed out. "And we've got manhunts going on."
To help establish contact with local chieftains, the Pentagon is considering hiring immigrants to serve as "bicultural advisers" in unfamiliar areas of the world and implementing a number of economic aid projects there, according to defence officials.
AFP

SMH 11-8-4

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/08/11/1092102504650.html

Habib compares detention to horror film
The 11th of August 2004

Australian terror suspect Mamdouh Habib has told his wife in an emotion-charged telephone call from Cuba that life in detention is like a Hollywood horror movie.
The Sydney father of four broke down in tears as he spoke to his wife Maha and children on Wednesday for the first time in almost three years.
According to his lawyer, Mr Habib seemed "morbidly depressed", and at first he did not even believe it was his wife on the other end of the line.
Mr Habib is one of two Australians detained by the United States at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
US authorities allowed Mr Habib a 30-minute telephone conversation at 9.30am (AEST) with his family in the Sydney office of the Department of Foreign and Affairs and Trade (DFAT).
The call was monitored, with strict rules enforced - no speaking in Arabic or talking about his case and treatment in Cuba.
The call was suspended at one stage when he compared his experience to the Sylvester Stallone movie Lock Up, which features mental and physical torture inside a brutal prison.

Mr Habib's Australian-based lawyer Stephen Hopper said Maha Habib had mixed feelings after the call.
"She's very happy that's she's spoken to her husband finally after nearly three years," he told AAP.
"She's very upset about how she believes he's being treated and certainly he's not the same Mamdouh that she last spoke to.
"He's morbidly depressed and at some stages during the conversation he was breaking down in tears."
Mr Habib had to be convinced he was actually talking to his wife at the start of the conversation.
He told his wife he could trust no Australians, saying consular officials had not been supportive.
He also asked his family not to send him photographs, claiming US authorities were using them to psychologically torture him.
Mr Hopper said he was not surprised by his client's revelations.
Previous detainees from Camp Delta have said Mr Habib had been told his family was dead and that he had been tortured.
"He couldn't go into specifics, but he did say he was being treated poorly by consular officials and law enforcement officials," Mr Hopper said.
"We had clues about it beforehand, but basically it's confirmed our suspicions.
"The government's reported to us he hasn't been talking to the diplomatic staff who have gone there in recent times and we can see why."
Mr Habib has yet to be charged, but has been told his case will among the next round to go before a US military tribunal.
Mr Hopper praised DFAT's handling of Wednesday's phone link, but was angry it had taken so long for Mr Habib to be allowed to contact his family.
"It's something that should have happened years ago," he said.
"It's something that's afforded to every prisoner in our jails, every prisoner in all western jails, but not the people in Guantanamo Bay."
© 2004 AAP

smh 11-8-4

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/08/11/1092102520624.html

PM stung by roaring 40 band of top brass and diplomats
By Matt Wade and Tony Stephens
The 9th of August 2004

John Howard was not impressed. In Samoa for the Pacific Islands forum, he was confronted with an extraordinary repudiation of his foreign policy, especially the Iraq war, by 43 of Australia's former military chiefs, department heads and senior diplomats.
A tight-jawed Prime Minister adopted a well-worn defence yesterday: "The argument that we took the country to war based on a lie is itself a misrepresentation and I continue to reject it."
The statement from the "concerned group" of distinguished citizens demands truth in government, from whichever party wins power in the coming election. But it also accuses the Howard Government of deceiving the people over the war in Iraq. "It is wrong and dangerous for our elected representatives to mislead the Australian people," it says. "If we cannot trust the word of our government, Australia cannot expect it to be trusted by others. Without that trust, the democratic structure of our society will be undermined and with it our standing and influence in the world."

The military brass signing up to the statement include the former defence chiefs General Peter Gration and Admiral Alan Beaumont, along with the former navy heads Admiral Mike Hudson and Vice-Admiral Sir Richard Peek.
Top diplomats included Richard Woolcott, a former ambassador to the United Nations; Alan Renouf, the former head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and ambassador to the US and France; Peter Lloyd, former ambassador to Iraq; and Cavan Hogue, the former representative on the UN Security Council.
The instigator was John Menadue, former head of the Prime Minister's Department - for the Whitlam and Fraser governments. It is believed to be the first time such a group has come together to stage an attack on a government. Many have avoided public attention until now.
General Gration said the concern went back beyond Iraq - to Tampa and the children overboard affair. He said serving defence force officers shared the concerns expressed in the statement.
"I can tell you that a number of serving offices do share these concerns and serving diplomats too, I guess. But quite properly in their present positions, they can't speak out," he said. "Demonstrably, over the last year or two, truth in government has been less than it should be.
The statement says the international prestige of the US and its presidency has fallen precipitously over the past two years and Australia should seek a true partnership with it, rather than rubber-stamp Washington's policies.
It also claims terrorist activity has increased since the Iraq war and Australia now has a higher profile as a target.
The Opposition Leader, Mark Latham, seized on the statement, calling it a damning judgement on the Howard Government. "Truth in government is long overdue in this country," he said. "Mr Howard has an appalling record. He can barely lie straight in bed."
General Gration said the statement was not meant to be partisan political - "that's why we released it well before the election". And Mr Hogue said: "Many of these people are very conservative. It was not easy for them to sign. Others said they shared the sentiments but were not signers and some sympathisers have government consultancies or are looking for them."
Mr Woolcott, also a former secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, said: "In a healthy democracy, experienced former senior representatives are entitled to speak out if they feel the integrity of the decision-making processes are under threat."
And Mr Menadue also said: "The immediate inspiration for this was Iraq and terrorism, where the Government has kicked an own goal - the invasion and occupation of Iraq has greatly added to terrorist attacks. But the statement is really about the need for truth in public life."
Mr Menadue initiated the statement with Mr Woolcott and Mr Hogue. They joined Alison Broinowski, former charge d'affaires in Jordan, who was working on a similar concept.
Some signatories, including General Gration and a former Defence Department head, Paul Barratt, have criticised the Iraq policy in the past. But several have not gone public with their concerns before.
A former diplomat, Ron Walker, says in a letter to the Herald: "Most of us have no ties to either side in politics, just a strong commitment to Australia."

SMH 9-8-4

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/08/08/1091903447166.html

Iraq war a 'gift' to Osama: CIA analyst
The 8th of August 2004

The US invasion of Iraq was a "tremendous gift" to Osama bin Laden and a major setback in the struggle against al-Qaeda, according to a CIA terrorism expert who has written a scathing account of the conduct of the US "war on terror".
In an interview with AFP, the author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror blasted the efforts of successive US governments and the US intelligence community in fighting what he describes as a global Islamic insurgency.
"Anonymous," as he is known, painted a dismal picture of the situation in Iraq, a "very bleak" outlook for Afghanistan and advocated debate about US policies which he claimed are providing a fertile recruiting ground for al-Qaeda in the Muslim world.
A senior CIA analyst, "Anonymous" has been widely identified as the head of the bin Laden unit at the Central Intelligence Agency's Counter-terrorist Centre from 1996 to 1999. He was allowed to write the book on condition he not reveal his identity.

Published last month with an initial print run of 10,000 copies, the provocative work, which was vetted by his employer for classified material, has climbed to number five on the New York Times list of non-fiction best-sellers.
It has gone back to the printers for another 200,000 copies and translations into nearly a dozen languages are planned. They include Arabic, French, Greek, Japanese and Turkish.
"Anonymous," a bearded, professorial man in his 50s, is blistering in his criticism of the US decision to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein.
"It's a disaster," he said. "I'm not an expert at all on Saddam or WMD (weapons of mass destruction) or Iraq but as it factors into the war against al-Qaeda or al-Qaedaism it was a tremendous gift to bin Laden.
"It validated so many of the arguments he's made over the past decade," "Anonymous" said, particularly the claim by the Saudi-born al-Qaeda leader that the West seeks to occupy the Islamic holy places.
"We have the first one, the most important in the Arabian peninsula, we occupy that in their eyes," he said in a reference to Saudi Arabia.
"We now occupy Iraq, the second holiest place, and the Israelis have Jerusalem, the third.
"The idea that we would smash any government that posed a threat to Israel - that's validated by our actions," he continued.
"And his claim that we lust after control of Arab oil; Iraq has the second greatest reserves in the Arab world.
"So it's been an astounding victory for Osama bin Laden in terms of perceptions and perceptions are reality so often," "Anonymous" said.
He said the situation in Iraq, where more than 900 US soldiers have died, "looks like Afghanistan in the '80s with the Soviets, kind of a mujahideen magnet".
"I think you can see already the fighters that are flowing in from Algeria and from Saudi Arabia and from Malaysia and from all other places," he said.
As for Afghanistan, "Anonymous" said: "It's very bleak".
"The insurgency is increasing day by day in small measures," he said. "Eventually we'll be faced with a lose-lose situation of either increasing our forces dramatically or leaving."
"Anonymous" said capturing or killing bin Laden would be important "symbolically" but "he's also very valuable in death as a martyr".
"If he dies he'll be replaced and the movement goes on, so the worth of taking him out is still there but it's drastically reduced from what it was four or five years ago in terms of its impact on improving American security," he said.
"Al-Qaeda is transforming really into al-Qaedaism, if you will, more of a movement than just an organisation," he said.
"Not all of it agrees with bin Laden's theological arguments or his military actions but they're all united, at least in the sense of detesting our policies."
To counter al-Qaeda, "Anonymous" advocates a coordinated strategy of tough military action, diplomacy, intelligence, energy independence, propaganda and debate over longstanding US policies.
"Rhetoric is not going to work," he said. "There's no one listening out there. I think the best we can do, in the near term, is to undercut the room bin Ladenism has to grow.
"And because we don't have any diplomacy that's working, because our policies basically are hated in the Muslim world, we only have a military option.
"It seems to me that the one national security effort we haven't made is to debate whether policies that have been on autopilot for 30 years are still serving us well," he said.
Asked what the reaction to his book has been at his workplace, "Anonymous" said "I think it represents a good deal of the views of the people who actually work this issue on a day to day basis".
"I can't claim that I speak for anyone but me, but the reaction among my colleagues has certainly been positive," he said.
"On the other hand, from my superiors there's been kind of a thundering silence."
© 2004 AFP

SMH 8-8-4

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/08/08/1091903425666.html

Deceptions over Iraq strongly condemned
By Michelle Grattan
The 8th of August 2004
The Sun-Herald

A who's who of Australia's former military chiefs, departmental heads and top diplomats is set to launch a scathing attack on John Howard's foreign policy and call for "truth in government" from whomever wins the election.
It is understood that a statement from more than 40 ex-military and diplomatic officers will condemn Australia's commitment to the Iraq invasion as based on deception, and call for Australia to stop rubber-stamping American policies.
Gathering names has been under way for weeks. Signatories are believed to include two former chiefs of the Australian Defence Force, Admiral Alan Beaumont and General Peter Gration, two former Navy Chiefs, Vice Admiral Sir Richard Peek and Admiral Mike Hudson and a former Air Force Chief, Air Marshal Raymond Funnell.
On the list are also expected to be six former department heads: Paul Barratt (Defence); John Burton (External Affairs), Stuart Harris (Foreign Affairs), John Menadue (Prime Minister's), Alan Renouf (Foreign Affairs), and Richard Woolcott (Foreign Affairs).

The ex-heads of mission have represented Australia in all the major posts, including the United States, China, Japan and Indonesia, as well as in Middle Eastern countries. Three former heads of mission to Iraq are understood to be on the list.
Prominent names from the intelligence community are expected to be Robert Furlonger, former director-general of the Office of National Assessments and head of the Joint Intelligence Organisation (also ambassador to Indonesia); Gordon Jockel, former chairman of the National Intelligence Committee (also ambassador to Thailand and Indonesia); and Roger Holdich, former director-general of intelligence (and ambassador to Korea).
The statement will be a blow for the Prime Minister, especially as it comes at the start of what could be the last week of Parliament before the election, but a source in the group said it was not designed to be partisan - rather a call for whoever won the election to learn from the lessons of Iraq.
The sheer number of signatories and their prominence in diplomatic and military life over several decades give the declaration great weight.
The statement, although short, is certain to be both blunt and comprehensive. It is expected to strongly condemn the misleading of the Australian people over the reasons for invading Iraq, and carry the message that if what the Australian Government says cannot be trusted by its own citizens, Australia cannot expect its word to be trusted internationally.
The signatories argue that the alliance relationship between Australia and the United States, and the ANZUS treaty, are important but do not require Australia to consistently echo policies decided in Washington by the US administration.
They believe the invasion and occupation of Iraq have led to an obvious increase in terrorism rather than the predicted decrease.
The outcome has been to raise Australia's profile as a terrorist target considerably.
The group is also expected to call for the post-election government to review the balances in foreign and security policy, to get a better weighting between the relationship with the US, regional engagement and role with the United Nations.
The declaration follows similar ones issued in the US and Britain criticising their governments.
This initiative is quite separate from the campaign "Not Happy John" launched recently by former federal Liberal president John Valder.
Mr Valder's movement is protesting against Mr Howard's Iraq and other policies and is trying to unseat him in Bennelong.

SMH 8-8-4

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/08/07/1091732140028.html

Hicks and Habib abused, allege ex-inmates
By Fergus Shiel
The 5th of August 2004
        
Australian terrorist suspects Mamdouh Habib and David Hicks have suffered terribly at the hands of their American captors, three former detainees of the Guantanamo Bay military base have said.
Detailing their own time in US captivity in Afghanistan and Cuba, a joint 115-page statement by the Englishmen - who claim they were routinely assaulted, threatened with death and weakened by lack of food, water, sleep and medical care - recounts conversations they had with Habib and Hicks.
It gives the first witness details about the Australians' mental and physical condition.
They claim Habib was denied medical attention despite being in "catastrophic" mental and physical shape after being tortured in Egypt.
"[Habib] used to bleed from his nose, mouth and ears when asleep ... He got no medical attention for this. We used to hear him ask but his interrogator said he shouldn't have any," they say.
The Englishmen claim Hicks, "a tiny, white guy no more than five feet three inches tall with a lot of tattoos", was hooded and beaten on a ship and later denied medical attention for a hernia unless he co-operated with interrogators. Hicks, they say, was told that he would get prostitutes if he worked with his interrogators but that he would never go home if he didn't.
According to the men, Hicks was treated more aggressively than other detainees, was moved all the time and kept in isolation.
They believed that he was forced to make admissions.
"We were interrogated a lot but he [Hicks] used to get interrogated every two or three days, sometimes every day."
The statement by Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Rhuhel Ahmed, due to be officially released overnight by civil rights lawyer Gareth Pierce in London and by the Centre for Constitutional Rights in New York, alleges continuous physical and mental abuse at the hands of both US and British military and intelligence personnel.
The men say they wrote the statement solely to let the world know the truth about what is happening in Guantanamo Bay. Their intention is that human rights groups and lawyers may use the information to ensure fairness for the prisoners being detained there, including Hicks and Habib.
The Englishmen, who were detained in northern Afghanistan in November 2001 and freed without charge this year, say they were held for 18 hours with scores of dead and dying detainees by Northern Alliance troops - under the supervision of US forces - in shipping containers riddled with machine-gun fire to ventilate them.
They claim that they had pistols put to their heads during interrogations by US and British intelligence officers and were told they'd be shot if they moved. They say they were regularly threatened with snarling dogs, kicked, punched and hit with rifle butts and that they were left naked, hungry, dehydrated and wounded in freezing conditions, denied toilet facilities and banned from praying.

SMH 5-8-4

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/08/04/1091557923155.html

Guantanamo inmates allege abuse, humiliation

Wednesday,  the 4th of August 2004

Three British men who were held in the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay for more than two years have compiled a report alleging abuse and humiliation at the hands of their captors.
The men returned to Britain in March and their claims are due to be be released in New York later today.
They claim they were repeatedly beaten, bullied into making false statements and subjected to sexual and religious humiliations.
It is understood that in the report, Ruel Ahmed says that shortly after his capture in northern Afghanistan in 2001 he was questioned by a British interrogator while an American soldier held a gun to his head, threatening to shoot him.
The men's lawyers intend to pass the report on to the US Senate's Armed Services Committee for investigation.
The British Ministry of Defence has acknowledged that such behaviour is contrary to the Geneva Conventions and has promised to investigate any such allegations.
The Pentagon has dismissed the claims of abuse as a fabrication.
--BBC

ABC 4-8-4

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200408/s1168993.htm

UK report warns of Iraq, Afghanistan deterioration
By Europe correspondent Philip Williams

Friday, the 30th of July 2004

A British parliamentary committee has warned the situation in Afghanistan and Iraq is getting worse.
The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee says Afghanistan is "in danger of implosion" and Iraq is "a battleground for Al Qaeda".
The highly critical report outlines a series of failures that have cost coalition opportunities in Iraq.
It says the United Kingdom's credibility has been damaged by the inability to provide basic services, such as electricity and water.
The British MPs also say they are concerned there is a cover up of key intelligence and prisoner abuse.
The report says militant groups are flourishing in Iraq, which risks becoming a failed state because there are not enough troops there.
It urges the British Government to encourage other nations to send troops to Iraq to shore up both the firepower and the legitimacy of US and UK forces.
"Iraq has become a 'battleground' for Al Qaeda ... The coalition's failure to bring law and order to parts of Iraq [has] created a vacuum into which criminal elements and militias have stepped," the cross-party Foreign Affairs Committee said.
On Afghanistan, the terrorism report says opium production has increased and the Government's power is limited to the capital.
Without urgent military and economic assistance, it says the country is in danger of imploding.
The committee says British forces, diplomats and aid workers in Afghanistan are overstretched.
It backs a call by Afghan President Hamid Karzai for more troops.
"There is a real danger that if these resources are not provided soon that Afghanistan - a fragile state in one of the most sensitive and volatile regions of the world - could implode, with terrible consequences," the committee said.
--ABC/Reuters

ABC 30-7-4

www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200407/s1165143

Howard 'should be tried for war crimes'

Monday, the 19th of July 2004

Former Liberal Party federal president John Valder says Prime Minister John Howard should be tried and punished for war crimes over Australia's involvement in the Iraq conflict.
Mr Valder was speaking at a forum on the impact of the war in Iraq, held on Sunday at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS).
Mr Valder says there is no justification for invading Iraq simply to get rid of its leader.
"By any standard that is a massive crime and the people who perpetrated it - being President [George W] Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard - as such are guilty of extreme crime and they should be dealt with," he said.
Mr Valder admits he is not sure how it should be dealt with and is doubtful it will ever happen, but he says he has no doubt that their actions were criminal.
"It has certainly divided me far away from John Howard's policy of taking Australia into a war that was an act of absolute aggression," he said.
"There's no getting away from it, that's what it was.
"If people do that sort of thing on a grand international scale, they've got to expect to be punished."

ABC 19-7-4

www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200407/s1156535

WMDs never Bush's main focus: Clinton

Sunday, the 18th of July 2004

Former president of the United States Bill Clinton says the Bush administration may have used claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for going to war against the country.
In an interview with the ABC's Enough Rope program, Mr Clinton says he believes the main concern for the administration was to remove Saddam Hussein from power.
"To shake up the authoritarian Arab regimes in the Middle East, to make Israel feel more secure and to give America more leverage in making peace between Palestinians and Israelis," he said.
"I think that in the beginning this whole weapons of mass destruction thing for them was maybe a good way for them to get their foot in the door, but not the major issue for them."
The full interview with Mr Clinton can be seen on ABC television on Monday night.

ABC 18-7-4

www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200407/s1156480.

Swede reignites Guantanamo Bay torture fears

Wednesday, The 14th of July 2004.

A 25-year-old Swede released last week from the US detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba says he was tortured both physically and psychologically during his detention.
Australians Mamdouh Habib and David Hicks are also being held at the detention centre.
In his first interviews to the Swedish media, Mehdi Ghezali said US interrogators subjected him to a string of abuses, including being shackled for hours, sleep deprivation, no contact with the outside world, being forced to endure cold temperatures for up to 14 hours at a time and attempts to humiliate him sexually.
"There was always psychological torture, but the last month they used more physical torture," Mr Ghezali told Swedish Radio.
His claims are in line with accounts from other Guantanamo detainees who have been released.
Since his return to Sweden on July 8, Ghezali has been hiding out at an undisclosed location after receiving threats from neo-Nazis.
Media reports have indicated that he is being guarded by Swedish secret police Saepo, but Saepo has not confirmed those reports.
Swedish Radio's correspondent described Mr Ghezali as withdrawn, solemn and tired.
A devout Muslim, Mr Ghezali insisted he was not involved in terrorist activities.
"I don't think they would have released me if I were," he told the radio.
He said he was arrested in December 2001 in Pakistan and turned over to US authorities who shipped him to Guantanamo in January 2002.
He claimed he was visiting a friend in Pakistan when local villagers captured him and sold him to Pakistani police, who then handed him over to the US.
Mr Ghezali denied media reports which at the time of his arrest said he was part of a prison revolt in Pakistan.
Guards and prisoners travelling on a bus were reported to have been killed in the uprising.
"I've never been involved in anything like that, or any other battle," he told Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter, adding: "The stuff that supposedly happened on a bus was never even brought up in a single interrogation."
Mr Ghezali said he was interrogated daily by US guards, but stopped answering their questions after the first six months. He said he remained silent for the next two years.
One time, the guards brought an American woman into his cell to try to get him to have sex with her.
"They tried to make me lose my faith. Maybe they wanted to use it against me so I would cooperate," he said.
The only physical traces Mr Ghezali has from his detention are teeth in poor condition and the loss of feeling in part of his left foot after an ankle chain was clamped too tight.
-- AFP

ABC 14-7-4

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200407/s1154121/

US tortured Habib in Egypt: report
Wednesday, the 7th of July 2004.
Australian terror suspect Mamdoub Habib was allegedly tortured in Egypt before being sent to Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, according to the Pakistani Government.
SBS's Dateline program tonight will report the admission by Pakistan's Interior Minister Makhdoom Syed Faisal Saleh Hayat.
The program explores allegations about the treatment of Mr Habib, beginning with his capture and interrogation in Pakistan in 2001.
It claims to have unearthed the mystery of what happened to Mr Habib before he became one of the two Australian citizens being detained at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba by the United States.
He has been held there for over two years without trial.
A former Qatari justice minister, who is interviewed in the program, says Mr Habib was tortured and interrogated in Egypt "in a way in which a human cannot stand up".
The use of torture as an interrogation technique is allegedly commonplace in countries such as Egypt.
Although the Australian Government has confirmed he was interviewed three times by ASIO and the Federal Police in Pakistan, a spokesman for Attorney-General Philip Ruddock says that Australia "had no role in his transfer if he did go to Egypt," the Sydney Morning Herald has reported.

ABC 7-7-4
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200407/s1148398.htm

US, Israel deflect nuclear watchdog
Wednesday, the 7th of July 2004.
The United States and Israel have highlighted Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program as the UN's atomic energy agency moved to probe Tel Aviv's nuclear strength.
"Iran is the country that have announced that one missile toward Israel will destroy the Jewish state. So we should be concerned about the Iranians' efforts to develop nuclear weapons," Israel Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom told reporters after holding talks with US Secretary of State Colin Powell.
He said that Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) who arrived in Tel Aviv to persuade the Government to reveal its nuclear secrets, should instead step up his probe on Iran's nuclear weapons program.
Mr Shalom charged that Iran, regarded as the Jewish state's number one enemy, was trying to develop "a new missile that will include Berlin, London and Paris, and the southern part of Russia in its range".
"So if we would have to do something with ElBaradei, is to ask him to continue with his efforts to push the Iranians to put an end to its effort to develop a nuclear weapon," Mr Shalom said.
ElBaradei is expected to hold talks with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, but Mr Sharon had earlier indicated that Israel's policy of refusing to confirm or deny that it has nuclear weapons would continue.
Most foreign experts believe that Israel possesses a nuclear arsenal, comprising around 200 warheads, although it has stuck to a policy of "ambiguity" for the last 40 years.
Mr Powell, speaking alongside Mr Shalom, said the Bush administration had been pointing out Iran's nuclear weapon capability to the international community for the last three-and-a-half years.
He noted that European foreign ministers had made trips to Iran to convince it to give up its nuclear arms program but without much success "even though they have received some commitments which have been unfulfilled".
"So the United States will continue to press in every way that we can, use all of the diplomatic and other resources at our disposal, to make sure the international community stands unified behind the effort to stop Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons development, or worse, acquiring a nuclear weapon," Mr Powell said.
Under an understanding with the United States dating back to 1969, Israel has committed itself to abstain from any comment on its nuclear potential and not carry out nuclear tests.
In return, Washington does not pressure Israel to adhere to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which would oblige its nuclear facilities to submit to international supervision by the IAEA.
Experts have said that Mr ElBaradei's mission was more of a political gesture to convince Arab states the IAEA is as concerned about Israel as it is about Iran, being investigated on suspicions of harbouring a secret atomic weapons program.
--AFP

ABC 7-7-4

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200407/s1148173.htm

Hill won't release abuse dossier for risk of offending US

By Tom Allard, Defence Reporter

The 22^nd of June 2004

The Federal Government has refused to make public a detailed 61-page dossier outlining what Australians knew about prisoner abuse in Iraq, with the Minister for Defence, Robert Hill, claiming some details would offend the US.

Senator Hill was yesterday censured in the Senate for his role in misleading Parliament and his failure to take responsibility for the false statements made by him, the Prime Minister and senior Defence officials.

Senator Hill had been asked why he chose to make a 5 page correcting statement when Defence had given him the comprehensive report plus nine large folders of supporting documents.

"The so-called [61-page] report ... was a brief to me," he said. "It is not the practice of this Government or previous governments to table its briefs," he said, adding that Parliament had been "fully informed".

Among the material was a scathing assessment of US detention practices, in the form of a situation report, written by Australian military lawyer Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Muggleton, who was stationed with the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad.

Senator Hill said Colonel Muggleton's situation report was not released "because I did not think it was in the best interests of our relationship with the US".

"I would hope in the same circumstances, before a US congressional committee, any comments that the US officials might make about Australia would not be put on the public record as well," he said.

Labor, the Democrats and the Greens have been calling for Senator Hill to resign after last week's correcting statement.

Three weeks ago the Herald revealed Australian military lawyers knew about abuses in Iraq from October, liaised with the Red Cross over the issue and drafted a reply to their concerns which said that some prisoners were outside the Geneva conventions.

Senator Hill and the Prime Minister, John Howard, denied the report for almost a week but then confirmed it, admitting they had misled the public.

They blamed the Defence department for giving them the wrong information.

Despite knowing on Sunday, May 30 that they had made many wrong statements, Senator Hill, the Defence Force chief, General Peter Cosgrove, and the Defence Department secretary, Ric Smith, waited until 12.30pm on Tuesday before confessing.

The three had been questioned for 15 hours.

 

SMH 22-6-4

 

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/06/21/1087669919356.html

 

 

Guantanamo prisoners not 'worst of the worst': report

 

Monday, the 21^st of June 2004

 

US officials have vastly overstated the value of the nearly 600 detainees being held at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, according to a New York Times report.

The report cited interviews with high-level US and foreign military, intelligence and law-enforcement officials.

The assertions clash with statements from the US Government, which has maintained that the Guantanamo detainees are "the worst of a very bad lot" of foreign terrorists.

US officials have said that information obtained in Guantanamo have halted Al Qaeda attacks and produced vital information about the network.

But officials told the Times that Guantanamo detainees have provided only a tiny amount of intelligence of current value.

None of the Guantanamo detainees are leaders or senior members of Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda terrorist network and only about two dozen are sworn Al Qaeda operatives or militants able to give valuable insight into the network, the Times reported.

"When you have the overall mosaic of all the intelligence picked up all over the world, Guantanamo provided a very small piece of that mosaic," a senior US official who has reviewed the intelligence told the Times, on condition of anonymity.

Brigadier General Jay Hood, who heads the task force that runs the Guantanamo prison, told the Times that the expectations "may have been too high at the outset".

"There are those who expected a flow of intelligence that would help us break the most sophisticated terror organisation in a matter of months but that hasn't happened," he said.

According to the Times, a September 2002 top secret CIA study even suggested that many of the detainees appeared to be low-level Taliban supporters or innocent bystanders.

Some officials told the Times they worried that some low-value Guantanamo detainees have since been radicalised by the prison conditions and contact with hardened militants.

Charges have been laid against only a handful of the detainees from 42 countries being held at the base.

-- AFP

 

ABC 21-6-4

 

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200406/s1137044.htm

 

 

 

The big lie

 

The 19^th of June 2004

 

Andrew Wilkie's job was to find links between Iraq and terrorism. What he found was that the truth counted for little.

I can't recall precisely the origin of my decision to betray my Government. Probably it was during November and December 2002, when I prepared the detailed intelligence assessment for the Australian Government of the possible humanitarian consequences of the looming invasion of Iraq. It was a sobering experience, one that left me with a clear sense of how bad the fallout from the war could easily be.

The assessment of the British Government seemed particularly weak, not least because of the way in which serious gaps had been backfilled with reams of allegations that I knew couldn't possibly be supported by hard intelligence.

By early 2003, as part of my work at the Office of National Assessments (ONA), I was spending considerable time trawling through the vast intelligence database on Iraq so as to be ready to help cover the war once it started.

What jumped out at me was that the war had little to do with weapons of mass destruction and almost nothing to do with al-Qaeda. We were on the cusp of waging an unjustified war on the basis of a preposterous lie. Importantly, my work with ONA on transnational issues, such as people smuggling, had exposed me to some raw intelligence of very poor quality, which gave me a more critical eye in general when it came to analysing intelligence information. BY LATE 2002 nothing could stop the countdown to war.

 

Tony Blair and John Howard understood this clearly because their intelligence agencies were telling them so - I know this was the case in Australia and I'm certain the situation was identical in the UK. ONA knew Australia would participate in a war by late 2002; the Australian Defence Force had begun to prepare even earlier. As far back as mid-2002, for example, the Special Air Service Regiment in Perth was focused on the need to be ready for the formal order to deploy troops to Iraq.

Blair and Howard knowingly recycled the US's case for invading Iraq so as to stay in step with Bush. They understood the broader US agenda and were sympathetic to much of it.

Although Howard had clearly decided by late 2002 to support Bush's war, this decision was not a formal decision of Government. Rather it was an understanding of the US's intentions and a determination to support them, at any cost. In this sense, Howard is correct in saying, as he has repeatedly, that no decision was made by the Government to support the war until just before the invasion began.

Nevertheless, Howard knew what was brewing long before the National Security Committee of Cabinet formally deliberated on the decision to commit Australian troops. ONA's reporting on the US - in accordance with the Government's direction - was prolific during the lead-up to hostilities. Moreover, the occasional telephone conversations with George Bush, about which Howard boasted publicly, also ensured that the Australian Government was well informed enough to be able to read the situation in Washington.

Washington was not always frank with its allies during the build-up to the war, so little so that UK and Australian intelligence agencies sometimes needed to treat the US more as a focus of intelligence interest than as a close ally. A reluctance to share information with allies is fine some of the time. US and UK officials presumably aren't fussed about not receiving the Australian intelligence assessments on issues such as border security that shed light on the effectiveness or otherwise of specific Australian government policies. But it is a different matter when vitally important information, such as the latest thinking in the White House, isn't shared about an issue as grave and all-encompassing as the impending invasion of Iraq.

To overcome problems of this kind, the agreement between the US, UK and Australia (as well as Canada) not to spy on each other is interpreted somewhat loosely. Although Australia is not inclined to spy on the US, it has always been my assumption, one shared by at least some of my former colleagues, that the US spies on Australia.

Australia's corresponding capacity to collect information concerning the US and the UK is far more limited; we must rely instead on the work of diplomats, military staff and intelligence liaison officers who prowl like bottom-feeders for scraps and titbits in the corridors of power in Washington and London.

Thanks to such efforts, Howard (and by his own means, Blair) knew before the war began that the US was intent on invading Iraq for many reasons, not only those involving WMD and terrorism. I recall numerous ONA assessments that explored the machinations in Washington and the thinking of George Bush and his circle.

If this knowledge is juxtaposed with the public case for war that was made in London and Canberra, something very interesting is revealed: Blair and Howard's oft-repeated justifications for going to war were quite hollow. Their statements about WMD and terrorism were made in the full knowledge that such justifications were not the central reasons for the US's actions.

The invasion of Iraq was sold on the basis of that country possessing a massive arsenal of WMD and co-operating actively with terrorists. These claims were made in many different ways and have since been radically re-engineered, but the heart of the official case against Iraq made in Washington, London and Canberra was always as follows: Iraq possessed significant quantities of chemical and biological weapons, it was determined to acquire nuclear weapons, and it was consorting with al-Qaeda.

For his part, John Howard made it quite clear in his February 4, 2003, address to the Australian Parliament that his Government endorsed the views being expressed in Washington and London, including those contained in the American and British reports released on Iraq. He also sought to make clear Iraq's association with the war on terror: "The Australian Government knows that Iraq still has chemical and biological weapons and that Iraq wants to develop nuclear weapons." THERE is no single issue, or shocking secret report, or classified intelligence assessment that I can refer to in order to explain how the Iraq threat was blatantly exaggerated for political purposes. The process was not that dramatic. Most often the deceit lay in the way Washington, London and Canberra deliberately skewed the truth by taking the ambiguity out of the issue. Key intelligence assessment qualifications were frequently dropped and much more definite words put in their place, even though such embellishments had not been offered to the governments by their intelligence agencies. Before we knew it, our political leaders had created a mythical Iraq, one where every factory was up to no good.

Crucially, there were significant intelligence gaps on Iraq.

These were consistently filled with sequences of doubtful information based on worst-case assumptions, all of this finely tuned to reinforce the need to invade.

Two of these gaps are especially important: the unaccounted-for pre-1991 Gulf War WMD, and the uncertainty surrounding Iraq's actions between the withdrawal of the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) in 1998 and the arrival of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) in late 2002.

The US, the UK and Australia all went to a great deal of trouble to highlight that, based on UN assessments, unaccounted for WMD material included up to 360 tonnes of bulk chemical agent, up to 3000 tonnes of precursor chemicals, enough growth media to produce tens of thousands of litres of biological agent, and over 30,000 special munitions suitable for delivery of chemical and biological agents.

However, the continued reference to these figures in the case for war appeared to me to be simply ridiculous, not least because no one, not even the Iraqis themselves, knew exactly how much chemical and biological agent they'd produced, exactly how much was used during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war or exactly how much was destroyed later outside of UNSCOM control.

On balance the strong, unambiguous language contained in the case for war seemed more the work of salespeople than professional intelligence officers. The claims that the repeated assertions reflected accurately the views of national intelligence agencies are plainly wrong. They were simply too much at odds with the piles of intelligence material I was privy to. In all the material I saw on Iraq, never did I see such a string of unqualified and strong judgements as was contained in the official case for war presented by Bush, Blair and Howard.

By late 2003, however, there was no possibility that Bush, Blair and Howard were unaware of the true situation in Iraq or that they were in some form of understandable denial. No, they were well aware of the fix they were in, but decided to deal with it with more prevarications, fabrications, distortions and exaggerations. Lies beget lies, as they say.

IN Australia, the intelligence chain, from the Iraq WMD analyst through to the director-general, was a ludicrously short one: only a single full-time strategic analyst on Iraq, one middle manager and the director-general, Kim Jones. All three are decent people - two remain friendly to me - who most of the time adopted a commendably measured view on Iraq.

Except in one case: the marked shift made clear in the unexpectedly hardline ONA assessment produced in mid-September 2002. This was an unclassified report put together at the request of the Department of Foreign Affairs. Specifically, the September 13 ONA assessment on Iraq stated that a range of intelligence and public information suggests that "Iraq is highly likely to have chemical and biological weapons". It also commented that, "there is no reason to believe that Saddam Hussein has abandoned his ambition to acquire nuclear weapons". Yet only the previous day, the 2004 inquiry revealed, ONA had reported that there was no firm evidence of new chemical and biological weapon production.

ONA's sudden shift to a more gung-ho position on Iraq is striking. For years it had treated the CIA's claims about Iraq with great caution and, along with Australia's military intelligence agency, the Defence Intelligence Organisation (DIO), it had continued to take a much more measured view than the US and the UK. What happened to change this stance? I believe the explanation is at its core rather simple. The Australian Government's extraordinary request in mid-September for an unclassified report for use in the preparation of the Prime Minister's and Foreign Minister's speeches sent a clear signal to ONA to deliver something much stronger. Crucially, ONA is not a policy organisation and does not normally prepare unclassified notes for anyone's public speeches.

All [ONA reports to the Government] are rigidly capped in length and written in simple terms for the benefit of the non-experts who will read them; often only the most basic explanation of the issue at hand is provided. Adding to the pressure to condense was Howard's personal direction that ONA's reports be produced in a larger 13-point script so that they would be easier for him to read.

This is an edited extract from Axis of Deceit by Andrew Wilkie, published by Black Inc. Agenda, $29.95.

 

SMH 19-6-4

 

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/06/18/1087245110240.html

 

Prisoner's identity concealed to prevent Red Cross access

 

Friday, the 18^th of June 2004

 

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, acting at the request of the CIA, ordered that a suspected Iraqi insurgent leader be detained off the books to conceal his identity from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), the Pentagon has confirmed.

CIA director George Tenet requested in late October that the prisoner, a suspected military planner for the Kurdish militant group Ansar al Islam, be held by the military in a way that he "not be assigned for the purpose of access to the ICRC," Larry DiRita, the Pentagon's chief spokesman, told AFP.

Mr Rumsfeld approved the request and issued the order the same day, he said.

"He was asked to do that. He did," Mr DiRita said.

The prisoner then languished in secret military custody until late May, when Stephen Cambone, the Undersecretary of Defence for Intelligence, decided to return him to the general prison population, he said.

An investigation by Major General Antonio Taguba had noted in March the practice of keeping certain "ghost detainees" off the rolls at Abu Ghraib prison and denounced them as "deceptive, contrary to Army doctrine and in violation of international law".

Mr DiRita said the Geneva Conventions allow prisoners to be held secretly for reasons of "military necessity" for a period of time.

He acknowledged, however, that "nobody believes those provisions allow you to do this for seven months".

A US intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the CIA had been holding the prisoner, who was captured in northern Iraq in June, at an undisclosed location outside Iraq since July.

But after receiving legal guidance that as an Iraqi he should be returned to Iraq, Mr Tenet asked the military to take custody of him without registering him, he said.

"He was believed to be a combatant engaged in hostilities or supporting a force hostile to the United States. He was actively planning operations specifically targeting US forces both inside and outside of Iraq," the official said.

Yet neither the CIA nor the US military followed up by questioning the prisoner after he was back in custody in Iraq.

"Now, in January, officials inquired about him to the military. They were unable to locate him. Frankly, it's a case where people lost track of him," the intelligence official said.

"The normal review procedures that would kick into play didn't in this instance and it fell between the cracks," he said.

Mr DiRita disputed that the military lost track of the prisoner after taking custody of him but admitted that neither the CIA nor the Defence Department took further action, despite periodic questions about his status from those holding him.

"The question is, did the CIA then come back to us and say, 'We want this guy back'? The answer is no," said Mr DiRita.

"Did the CIA then determine further disposition and tell us, 'Keep him, or we'll take him'? The answer is no," he said.

"Did people lose track of him? The answer is also no. Because the people who had custody of him, by all indications, two or three times came back up the chain of command and said, 'We still have this guy. Will somebody tell us [what to do with him]?'"

The prisoner, who has not been identified, was held at Camp Cropper, a detention facility for high-value prisoners near the Baghdad International Airport.

"The people who were holding him basically did all they should have done," Mr DiRita said.

"What didn't happen was that, at a higher level between this department and the CIA, further disposition of his case was never made, until finally it got to the attention of intelligence professionals in both departments," he said.

Meanwhile, the Army announced that General Paul Kern has been appointed to oversee an investigation into prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib replacing Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez.

-- AFP

 

ABC 18-6-4

 

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200406/s1134550.htm

 

 

 

US has secret prisons: rights group

 

Friday, the 18^th of June 2004

 

The United States is holding terrorism suspects in more than two dozen detention centres worldwide, about half of which operate in total secrecy, according to a new human rights report.

Human Rights First said in a report that secrecy surrounding the facilities made "inappropriate detention and abuse not only likely but inevitable".

The director of the group's US law and security program, Deborah Pearlstein, potential abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad and the Guantanamo Bay military prison in Cuba "cannot be addressed in isolation".

"This is all about secrecy, accountability and the law," Ms Pearlstein told a news conference.

The report coincided with news that Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered military officials to hold a suspect in a prison near Baghdad without telling the Red Cross.

Mr Pearlstein says that would be a violation of the Geneva Conventions and Defence Department directives.

She says the United States is holding thousands of security detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as locations elsewhere which the military refused to disclose.

"The US Government is holding prisoners in a secret system of off-shore prisons beyond the reach of adequate supervision, accountability of law," the report said.

Pakistan, Diego Garcia, Jordan

Ms Pearlstein says multiple sources report US detention centres in, among other places, Kohat in Pakistan near the border with Afghanistan, on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia and at Al Jafr prison in Jordan, where the group said the CIA had an interrogation facility.

Prisoners are also being held at the Naval Consolidated Brig in Charleston, South Carolina, and others were suspected of being held on US warships.

A Defence Department spokesman told Reuters he would comment when he had more information about the report.

Ms Pearlstein called for US authorities to end "secret detentions", provide a list of prisoners, investigate abuses and allow the International Committee of the Red Cross unfettered access to detainees.

US treatment of detainees came under the spotlight after disturbing photos were leaked to the media showing US soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners.

The United States is conducting several investigations into the abuses but Ms Pearlstein says they are not enough and a full court of inquiry should be ordered.

Families of suspects detained by US authorities have complained strongly about the lack of information about detainees.

Pakistani Farhat Paracha said via a telephone link-up at the news conference that she tried for weeks to find her husband, Saifullah Paracha, who disappeared last June when he took a business trip from Pakistan to Thailand.

Ms Paracha said she asked the US and Pakistani governments to track him down and only learned about his whereabouts when the Red Cross contacted her six weeks later to say her husband was being held at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan.

"I feel disgusted. It makes my heart sink. I feel so powerless and so helpless," Ms Paracha said.

Human Rights First was formerly known as the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights.

-- Reuters

 

ABC 18-6-4

 

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200406/s1134549.htm

 

 

More at worlddomination.htm