Deep Blade Journal

Attack on principles of freedom


John G. Roberts, Jr.: George W. Bush Supreme Court nominee a corporate hack who will uphold special “Commander-in-Chief” powers

First, a big welcome to Counterpunch readers who have found Deep Blade Journal through Chris Floyd’s fine piece, Judge Dread: John Roberts and Enemy Combatants. The Deep Blade posting Floyd refers to is Domination by detention.

I am on the run just now, but I will say that Floyd strikes exactly the alarm that few Democrats and liberals lining up weak (if any) opposition to Roberts are sounding: Roberts has ruled just last Friday in favor of military trials with secret evidence for “enemy combatant” detainees (a ruling not restricted to non-citizens).

Floyd writes,

George W. Bush has granted himself the power to declare anyone on earth – including any American citizen – an ‘enemy combatant,’ for any reason he sees fit. He can render them up to torture, he can imprison them for life, he can even have them killed, all without charges, with no burden of proof, no standards of evidence, no legislative oversight, no appeal, no judicial process whatsoever except those that he himself deigns to construct, with whatever limitations he cares to impose. Nor can he ever be prosecuted for any order he issues, however criminal; in the new American system laid out by Bush’s legal minions, the Commander is sacrosanct, beyond the reach of any law or constitution.

Wow… more later…

US declares itself arbiter of humanity


The military JAGs secretly had debated some of the allowable torture techniques, but told the Senate Armed Services Personnel Subcommittee on Thursday that “juvenile” pranks involving use of dogs and sexual humiliation constituted “humane” treatment of detainees.

Over the last several months, some former officials of the US military’s Judge Advocate General (JAG) services — the military lawyers — and other retired high-ranking soldiers have expressed concerns about Terror War information-gathering techniques employed on detainees. Deep Blade Journal carried some references to these concerns here and here.

On Thursday, current JAG leaders appeared before the Senate Armed Services Personnel Subcommittee. The Washington Post on Friday had a Page A01 story on this hearing headlined “Military Lawyers Fought Policy on Interrogations”. Okay, they fought some things — often on the clearly valid basis that it is not a good idea to allow tortures be committed against enemies that we would not want used on our own troops. Note however, that the memos containing these discussions remain secret, including from members of Congress.

But I watched a good chunk of this thing on C-SPAN 2. I was very troubled by what I heard. For the most part, the JAGs have accepted the notion that the President of the United States has the “Commander-in-Chief” authority to declare a whole new classification of persons detained in territory under US invasion called “enemy combatant”, to declare on this personal authority that international law does not apply to this class, to then deport these persons to a facility half-way around the world (this act itself a grave breach of the intent of international law), and to declare by unsubstantiated fiat — indeed what a reasonable person easily could find to be precisely the opposite — what constitutes “humane” treatment of such detainees. Terror War or not, it should be easy to see how a reasonable person could interpret such declarations as dictatorial, despotic policies.

The Post story alludes to this last point, but does not convey properly the consensus amongst the JAGs and the Senators that these are accepted as proper classifications of human beings, and in the case of detention at Guantánamo, proper suspension of international law. In fact, most in the room appeared to be quite anxious to get the military tribunals underway. These tribunals of course will be staffed and adjudicated by the US military’s own house puppies — in secret — under conditions where the enemy combatants will not have the normal rights to confront the evidence against them — rights afforded defendants in all decent societies.

I suppose Kennedy and McCain seemed a little grumpy about all this, McCain for obvious reasons. Carl Levin appeared to be offended that the memos discussing the “techniques” have been withheld from even the senators. But Lindsey Graham was mostly a disappointment, being apparently the most eager to get to the tribunals.

Meanwhile, on Friday the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit was busy paving the road to legal approval of the “enemy combatant” process. They overturned a ruling from last November that stopped the military trial of Salim Ahmed Hamdan of Yemen.

This capped an ominous flood of news this week on the Guantánamo torture front. Earlier, according to a posting on antiwar.com,

The U.S. Army general widely considered the architect of abusive prisoner interrogation techniques at Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and detention centers in Afghanistan used “creative” and “aggressive” tactics, but did not practice torture or violate law or Pentagon policy, the head of the U.S. Southern Command has determined.Despite the recommendations of military investigators, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey C. Miller will not be reprimanded, thus bringing to a close what could be the last of 12 separate investigations into detainee abuse.

The Center for Constitutional Rights elucidated these “tactics”:

• Canadian O.K., a juvenile who was approximately 15 years old when he was taken into custody by U.S. forces in 2001, was threatened by interrogators who, on several occasions, told O.K. he would be sent to Egypt, Israel, Jordan, or Syria—to be tortured. Interrogators also told the 15-year old O.K. that Egyptians would send “Soldier No. 9” to rape him. On one occasion, O.K. was short shackled in various painful positions over an extended period of time; he urinated on himself. Military Police (MP) poured pine oil on the floor and dragged O.K.—still shackled—on his stomach through the mixture.

• Before he was taken to Guantánamo, German resident Murat Kurnaz was tortured by U.S. forces in Afghanistan who applied electric shocks to his feet, hung him by his hands for days at a time, and repeatedly subjected him to waterboarding. Mr. Kurnaz witnessed the brutal beating by soldiers of another prisoner who was left bleeding severely from his head wounds. Mr. Kurnaz believes the prisoner died as a result of the beating.

• When Bosnian Lakhdar Boumediene went on a hunger strike to protest his brutal treatment, a nurse administering intravenous (IV) fluid to him threatened to have a soldier administer the IV the next day if Mr. Boumediene did not eat. The following day, she made good on her threat, and a soldier was directed to administer the IV. Mr. Boumediene’s arm was in extreme pain and bleeding as the soldier attempted to administer the IV. On another occasion, interrogators threatened to shave Mr. Boumediene and apply lipstick to him to make him look like a woman.

• Abd Al Malik Al Wahab of Yemen was told by interrogators that he would be taken “underground” and never again allowed to see the sun; that if taken to the U.S. he would be “put . . . in a jail with all blacks” who “will do whatever they please to you” and “nobody will help you”; that he would be taken to “Egypt and Jordan, and they will torture you”; and that he would be raped by a male at Guantánamo. Interrogators also threatened Mr. Al Wahab’s family, telling him the military could “reach them if it wanted.”

• On approximately April 27 or 28, 2002, Juma Al Dossari was choked and beaten in his cell by MPs and lost consciousness. He was carried from his bloodied cell on a stretcher. The military videotaped the incident. When Mr. Al Dossari later asked the MP who had beaten him why he had done so, the MP replied, “because I’m a Christian.”

• During an interrogation of Abdullah Al Noaimi, Mr. Al Noaimi was injected with an unknown substance that caused him to lose the ability to control his thoughts. Interrogators then asked if he wanted to hurt himself, and if he wanted to be shot.

• Guantánamo prisoners routinely have been subject to beatings, extreme sleep deprivation, humiliation, short shackling, intimidation by dogs, extended periods of solitary confinement, withholding of medical care, and temperature extremes in connection with interrogation.

• As confirmed in findings released yesterday in the Schmidt Report, military officials impersonated FBI agents and State Department officials. Prisoners also have reported that interrogators impersonated lawyers, in an effort to gain information.

And why not throw in that the US military itself confirmed this week that at least one male detainee at Guantánamo was while dressed in women’s underwear “forced to dance with a male interrogator, was subject to strip searches for control measures, not for security, and he was forced to perform dog tricks — all this to lower his personal sense of worth”. All well and good, purposeful, they claimed.

And they better damn well make these claims that international law does not apply in these cases. The puzzle of the “humane” treatment language charged through the administration’s justification for its torture practices was unravelled in an excellent article by former US Representative Elizabeth Holtzman appearing in The Nation for July 18, 2005. Holtzman cites the 1996 War Crimes Act, a Clinton-era domestic statute:

This relatively obscure statute makes it a federal crime to violate certain provisions of the Geneva Conventions. The Act punishes any US national, military or civilian, who commits a “grave breach” of the Geneva Conventions. A grave breach, as defined by the Geneva Conventions, includes the deliberate “killing, torture or inhuman treatment” of detainees. Violations of the War Crimes Act that result in death carry the death penalty.In a memo to President Bush, dated January 25, 2002, Gonzales urged that the United States opt out of the Geneva Conventions for the Afghanistan war–despite Secretary of State Colin Powell’s objections. One of the two reasons he gave the President was that opting out “substantially reduces the likelihood of prosecution under the War Crimes Act”.

It seems likely that numerous high officials, up to and including the President, could be liable under this statute if their outlandish re-definition of the word “humane” and opt-out of international law does not stick. Unfortunately, the power relationships within the US government suggest that the Republican investigative apparatus will never allow such a formulation of charges to occur.

Jingoistic Americans may be impressed with the power the president appears to wield against perceived enemies. The humanity of persons finding themselves in US detention systematically has been attacked in both the personal and public spheres, breaking down 790 years of foundation of criminal law resting on the Magna Carta. This reflects the ultra-radical nature and drunkeness with power of the Bush regime. It is not a criminal regime only because it has usurped the power necessary for it to declare itself legal, but only through outrageous re-definition of the terms that define the crimes of which otherwise they would be guilty.

The baleful signs in this enterprise point to a future nobody would accept until the Bush regime’s noose is tight around our necks, at which point we have no choice. The regime’s purpose? Could it be domination of a sort a thousandfold more powerful than the threat posed by the terrorist enemy, 500 of whose members supposedly are incarcerated at Guantánamo?

I say supposedly because a high percentage of Guantánamo detainees are completely innocent of any wrongdoing, or if they are guilty, the deserve a fair, public trial. The verdict of a US tribunal, where the detainee has been tortured in any reasonable eyes, will hardly hold water or give anyone apart from emotionally immature Americans true satisfaction that justice for terror has been accomplished.

In these conditions, terror will breed like a wildfire. People around the world will begin to see themselves forced into desperate measures to avenge the injustice, settle the score, and protect their homelands from the invaders who deport their countrymen.

On the other hand, once the Bush regime establishes it’s ability to define terms and overturn law by its own fiat, every person on this planet with contrary political views is at risk for detention and mistreatment under any theory the regime will choose to apply. That would be a world gulag by any definition.

Paying the price for defending human rights

GUEST POST by Mike Walls
In light of new findings regarding the extent to which the US has aided and abetted the Karimov regime in Uzbekistan, I feel that a reprisal of the experiences of former British diplomat to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, is timely. Back in 2002 Murray exposed the human rights abuses going on in Uzbekistan and unwittingly revealed the Blair government’s support for such abuses.

Craig Murray’s story tells of a dedicated British diplomat who felt that by bringing to light human rights abuses on the part of the Karimov regime, his government would condemn them, sever diplomatic ties with Uzbekistan and take measures to prevent such abuses from continuing. To Murray’s stunned dismay this was not to be. In a recent documentary here in Sweden entitled “Agenda”, aired following the alleged massacres in Uzbekistan some weeks ago, Murray spoke out about his grisly experiences in Uzbekistan. On the question of torture he reports:

We received photos of a corpse, Mr Abazov, who had been boiled to death. The corpse, in addition to having its fingernails removed, showed complete scolding damage to the skin on the lower arms, legs and lower torso.

Murray made the claim that torture was systemic in Uzbekistan and that the information being procured from victims of this torture was being used by his own British government. Murray tried in vain to bring all of this to light to foreign secretary Jack Straw, as he explains:

When I first went back in November 2002 and said, “look, America’s supporting this really vicious dictatorship here”, and the intelligence material we’re gaining has been gained under torture, maybe I was naïve but I actually thought that if I brought this to Jack Straw’s attention, brought it up to a high enough level, then they’d stop.

Unfortunately for Mr Murray, he was being naïve, but his naïveté was a sign of his own human decency which contrasted greatly, as it transpired, to that of his superiors. On discovering his own government’s complicity, Murray, in the Financial Times in 2004, openly criticised MI6 and the CIA after publishing information in a Foreign Office document. This adherence to democratic principles did not bode him well, however. Murray was called home from Uzbekistan and an investigation was carried out, after which Murray was fired from his position as Ambassador. To this injury, much insult was hurled too:

So then they [the British Government] started contacting the Media, telling people I was an alcoholic, telling people I was offering visas in exchange for sex. They brought up these amazing allegations against me as formal charges which were then dropped.

According to the UN, there are currently up to 8000 people imprisoned in Uzbekistan for no more reason than their religious and political persuasions. Very few Uzbeks dare to speak out about Karimov’s crimes in Uzbekistan, but those who do have a chilling tale to tell. For example, peace activist, Surat Akrakov, told of beatings, rape and electric shock occurring as part of the torture regime.

Unwaveringly, Craig Murray, despite his ouster, travelled back to Uzbekistan in April 2003 in order to speak with one Professor Jamal Mersajdov, an outspoken critic of the Karimov regime. Unfortunately, Murray’s visit did not go unnoticed:

I left the house that evening, at 3 o’clock the next morning the body of his [Professor Jamal] grandson was dumped on the doorstep. The right hand had been immersed in boiling water or liquid for a long period. His murder was a warning to dissidents for meeting me or perhaps a warning to me for meeting dissidents.

The usual arguments from the Karimov regime were that torture is necessary in order to curb the threat of Islamic terrorism. However, dissidents and critics, alike, claim that this is merely used as a pretext in order to continue the repression and torture that is already emblematic of the Karimov regime; war on terror or no war on terror.

Craig Murray’s tenacity is to be commended in light of the many obstacles he has had to face. The sacrifices he and his compatriots in Uzbekistan have made to bring this story to light is worthy of praise too, since their sacrifices have shone the spotlight on the corrupt and despicable policies of the Bush and Blair governments since 9/11 and prior to 9/11.

Craig Murray, himself, has begun the slow journey back into politics. He has as his goal to displace the current foreign secretary, Jack Straw, for, like many of us, Murray understands the dire and dangerous consequences of a foreign policy which reneges on human rights laws and international law. To illustrate this point, Murray leaves us with a chilling reminder:

Torture breeds hatred, ill-treatment, repression, breeds hatred. That hatred is not just directed at karimov, but at the West who are seen as his close supporters. So really, we’re creating terrorism. In the future this is going to come back and hit us.

The last two sentences are a definitive mantra for our times, unfortunately. And it is one which resonates with layman and activists alike. It is encouraging that more and more people are becoming aware of the true meaning of power in relation to the US and UK. However, it is disconcerting that those, like Murray, who were once placed at power’s political epicentre are shunned and scorned when practising their duties of office, namely, to promote democracy and protect the rights of others at home and abroad. This once again reconfirms the truism that democracy in our beloved Occident is no more than rhetorical window dressing used in order to divert our attention from our leaders’ destructive Realpolitik. –Mike Walls

Vacuous senator from Maine thinks we want it “blurry”

What is happening on one side of this image is abundantly clear.

Obsidian Wings had a piece back on June 15 that rattled me in my chair. The minimizations/trivializations of US torture practices various Republican & Fox News mouth breathers have been spewing forth have kept a pit in my stomach for a long time now. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rep. Duncan Hunter and his Gitmo meal plan, …, ick, I am so sick inside.

So what is it that could stir me up beyond all that? The inane prattle from my US senator, Susan Collins of Maine, concerning what she thinks about her constituents’ reaction to torture conducted in our name, that’s what.

As Hilzoy points out, Collins is quoted in a “somewhat frustrating” June 12 New York Times Sunday Magazine piece by Joseph Lelyveld:

Members of Congress say they receive a negligible number of letters and calls about the revelations that keep coming. “You asked whether they want it clear or want it blurry,” Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, said to me about the reaction of her constituents to the torture allegations that alarm her. ”I think they want it blurry.”

I guess I should expect Collins to take us for foolish sheep following leader into the moral basement of responding to terror with terror, including blatantly illegal designation by American presidential fiat of a sub-human species called “enemy combatant” — often located through paid bounty.

It’s all so disgusting. So, let’s do something to give Senator Collins some clarity! First, please read through and take all the steps recommended in the Obsidian Wings post linked above. Then, if you are in range on Thursday…

June 23 Anti-war demonstration in Bangor
Veterans for Peace and other local Maine groups have decided to protest at the Bangor offices of Senator Collins. The entire ugly ball of death and destruction due to the Iraq war is the target of this protest. The high crime of torture will be included in the list of impeachable high crimes of this administration. Here is the release from Maine Veterans for Peace:

An anti-war demonstration outside the Federal Building in Bangor is being called for June 23.

The demonstration, beginning at 10 a.m., will coincide with a visit by concerned citizens from around the state to Senator Collins’ Bangor office.

Both in front of the Federal Building and inside Collins’ office, people will read the names of the U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq since March, 2003, and an equal number of Iraqi civilians who have been killed. More than 1,700 U.S. soldiers have been killed and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians.

A statement to Senator Collins will request that she support:

* curtailing funding of the war
* a timetable for withdrawal, and
* a Congressional inquiry into impeachable offenses committed by the administration

The statement will also request that Senator Collins participate in a town meeting to listen to the concerns of her constituents. Rep. Tom Allen has already agreed to participating in a town meeting.

Gulf War Veteran and peace activist Kim Hawkins will participate in the demonstration joined by other members of Veterans of Peace and members of Peace Action Maine, Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, Peace and Justice Center of Eastern Maine, Veterans for Peace, Peninsula Peace & Justice, Island Peace & Justice, and Midcoast Peace and Justice.

Bring your signs and puppets. Bring your friends. Help read the names of those killed in Iraq. The demonstration will last from 10 a.m. to 4 or 5 p.m. If you cannot participate the entire day, come for a few hours at any time throughout the day. The greater our numbers, the more impressive the public display of anti-war sentiment.

The Federal Building is located at 202 Harlow Street, Bangor.

Come demand the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan. See you there!

Info: Contact Dud Hendrick [dudhe at verizon dot net] or Judy & Peter Robbins [robbins at downeast dot net].

Note: Those planning to read the names inside Susan Collins’ office are asked to meet at the Peace and Justice Center of Eastern Maine at 9am, June 23.

“In terms of the detainees, we’ve had thousands of people detained. We’ve investigated every single complaint against the detainees. It seemed like to me they based some of their decisions on the word of — and the allegations — by people who were held in detention, people who hate America, people that had been trained in some instances to disassemble [sic] — that means not tell the truth. And so it was an absurd report. It just is.” –President Bush at May 31 press conference

Do the FBI agents who have reported seeing the horrendous conditions to which Gitmo prisoners have been subjected “disassemble” too, Mr. Bush? Or is the rottenest apple at the top of the barrel? Read through these documents [updated link, 2/20/2006] and judge for yourself.

Administration lies denying the intentional nature of the atrocities are flowing like water following the 2005 Annual Report of Amnesty International that called US torture center at Guantanamo Bay “the gulag of our times.”

Let’s get one thing straight right off. Ripping people out of their home countries into a permanent imprisonment half-way around the world without trial — at a site specifically chosen by American jailers so that international and domestic law could be sidestepped — is on the face of it torture. President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary Rumsfeld, and the rest of their minions have in the design and operation of their torture centers, dispensed with 790 years of enlightened concepts of how criminals and other enemies should be treated. Bush has indeed created exactly what Amnesty International says — a gulag every bit as ugly in its own way as a Soviet-era gulag.

The whole damn thing is rotten. In my opinion, President Bush is culpable for High Crimes and Misdemeanors. But so far no one is holding anyone accountable. Who is it that hates thinking America should be a beacon of international law?

US runs the gulags of our times

The Henry M. Jackson Foundation, named for the late ultra-anti-communist Democratic senator (and mentor to Richard Perle and other current neocons), reconstructed Perm 36, one of Russia’s most notorious gulags. Will human rights foundations of the future have the unhappy duty to reconstruct Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and other gulags in the Pentagon Archipelago?

First I want to give author Chris Floyd credit for coining the phrase “Pentagon Archipelago, which appeared in a Counterpunch posting last year, before the Abu Ghraib photos broke. His pieces on US prison torture are shockingly eloquent, even to me, a person who has studied and opposed US-sponsored torture and torture schools for 25 years.

Today Amnesty International from the platform of its annual report weighs in on the distinct lack of interest by the Republican administration and its Congress in coming clean, seeking the truth, and ending the atrocities — which continue to this day, despite the transparent lies perpetuated by mealy administration spokesman Scott McClellan.

Here is what Irene Khan, Secretary General of Amnesty, writes in the forward to the 2005 Annual Report:

Despite the near-universal outrage generated by the photographs coming out of Abu Ghraib, and the evidence suggesting that such practices are being applied to other prisoners held by the USA in Afghanistan, Guantánamo and elsewhere, neither the US administration nor the US Congress has called for a full and independent investigation.Instead, the US government has gone to great lengths to restrict the application of the Geneva Conventions and to “re-define” torture. It has sought to justify the use of coercive interrogation techniques, the practice of holding “ghost detainees” (people in unacknowledged incommunicado detention) and the “rendering” or handing over of prisoners to third countries known to practise torture. The detention facility at Guantánamo Bay has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the practice of arbitrary and indefinite detention in violation of international law. Trials by military commissions have made a mockery of justice and due process.

Scotty M. says, “We hold people accountable when there’s abuse. We take steps to prevent it from happening again. And we do so in a very public way for the world to see that we lead by example and that we do have values that we hold very dearly and believe in.”

But this is exactly the problem, as Amnesty correctly points out. That public response shows exactly the “values” that America’s Terror War “hold very dearly.” It is obvious to anyone who looks at the official public information with any scrutiny at all that no one higher than a few low-ranking soldiers seems to have any responsibility for these crimes.

Example: Afghanistan
A few months ago, The Guardian ran a story on Afghanistan, linked to in Deep Blade Journal, that the country is “one big US jail.”

Last week, an appropriately-placed story on the front page of the New York Times revealed how that jail has operated over the last three years: “Even as the young Afghan man was dying before them, his American jailers continued to torment him.”

Zeynap at Under the Same Sun has a good piece on “How Dilawar [from the Times story] died.” Go there for the description of how this poor man fell into the clutches of bigoted interrogators who were part of the US forces occupying his country, and who then beat him to death — for the apparent crime of driving his taxi too close to an American base.

Here is part of the story that is distressingly revealing about the culture of official disinformation concerning the real nature of US detention:

But documents and interviews reveal a striking disparity between the findings of Army investigators and what military officials said in the aftermath of the deaths.Military spokesmen maintained that both men had died of natural causes, even after military coroners had ruled the deaths homicides. Two months after those autopsies, the American commander in Afghanistan, then-Lt. Gen. Daniel K. McNeill, said he had no indication that abuse by soldiers had contributed to the two deaths. The methods used at Bagram, he said, were “in accordance with what is generally accepted as interrogation techniques.”

They lied. So why should anything on this issue that comes out of Scotty McClellan’s mouth be believed? The Amnesty report is properly damning of US officials’ lack of accountability for these war crimes.

Questions: Why so much violence? Why do US sweeps round up mostly innocents?
It has been known for over a year now that 70% to 90% of prisoners detained by the US in Iraq “had been arrested by mistake,” according to a confidential May 2004 Red Cross report.

This fact seems not to be of any concern to US commanders, who this week continued the round-up with Operation Squeeze Play where, “Almost 300 suspected insurgents have been detained in the largest joint US-Iraqi military offensive in Baghdad.”

The numbers in the round-up are getting so bad that the US has already announced a new crash program of prison construction in Iraq. The linked May 10 Washington Post story says detainees numbered

11,350 last week, a nearly 20 percent jump since Iraq’s Jan. 30 elections. U.S. prisons now contain more than twice the number of people they did in early October, when aggressive raids began in a stepped-up effort to crush the insurgency before January’s vote.

Again, referring to a another recent posting in Under the Same Sun, the policy of indiscriminant round-up is accompanied by concentration camp marking and dehumanization of the detainees.

In “How a man becomes K2,” Zeynep writes with anguish,

that unnamed man’s furrowed forehead is marked “K2″ by the marine captures the fundamental process of dehumanization that you will find if you scratch the surface of all major 20th century atrocities. That man is no longer a man for those soldiers: he is a detainee, a number, a representation of the enemy, of the people who shoot at them, the people who they hate, people who they are scared of, people that aren’t people. He can be blindfolded, marked, humiliated before his heartbroken family, taken away at will….The question facing us is whether we will stop before magic markers turn into tattoos.

Absolutely do click through and read Zeynep’s entire post. If you are American, be careful looking in the mirror after you understand what is going on in Iraq. We must deal with that ugliness, before it permanently deals with us. It may be too late….

Now I want to ask why. Why is the US using its huge-sized net and overflowing its cages with so little concern about who is “guilty” of taking up arms against the occupation and who is not? Is this indiscriminant attack tantamount to war against the entire civilian population of Iraq?

Perhaps one clue to the answer may be found in a story Newsweek broke back in January. This important story is on Pentagon use of “The Salvador Option” in Iraq. Later stories gave more details about how the US is employing ex-Baathist militias to undermine Iraqi resistance to occupation with Sadaam-era methods. These policies have been insisted upon by the US, leading to severe questions about the operative sovereignty of the elected Iraqi government. See additional Deep Blade postings here, here, and here.

Then a couple of weeks ago this same question of actual lack of sovereignty of the Jaaffari government came to the surface when it expressed its desire to remove Maj. Gen. Muhammad Abdallah al-Shahwani, director of Iraq’s National Intelligence Service. According to the Knight-Ridder story,

The CIA has so far refused to hand over control of Iraq’s intelligence service to the newly elected Iraqi government in a turf war that exposes serious doubts the Bush administration has over the ability of Iraqi leaders to fight the insurgency and worries about the new government’s close ties to Iran.The director of Iraq’s secret police, a general who took part in a failed coup attempt against Saddam Hussein, was handpicked and funded by the U.S. government, and he still reports directly to the CIA, Iraqi politicians and intelligence officials in Baghdad said last week. Immediately after the elections in January, several Iraqi officials said, U.S. forces stashed the sensitive national intelligence archives of the past year inside American headquarters in Baghdad in order to keep them off-limits to the new government….

When the U.S.-led occupation authority ceded power to the semi-sovereign interim government last June, the official said, CMAD was split, with roughly half the agents going to the new interior ministry and the rest to work on military intelligence in the defense ministry. Both ministries’ intelligence departments are led by Kurds, the most consistently U.S.-friendly group in Iraq, and report to the Iraqi prime minister.

But an elite corps of CMAD operatives was recruited into the third and most important Iraqi intelligence agency, the secret police force known by its Arabic name: the Mukhabarat. Its Iraqi director is Mohammed Abdullah Shahwani, a Sunni general whose three sons were executed by Saddam in retaliation for his involvement in a botched, CIA-backed coup attempt in the mid-1990s. Shahwani’s top deputy in charge of daily operations is said to be a Kurd; Shiites are believed to comprise just 12 percent of the force.

Unlike the defense and interior ministries, there is no provision in the Iraqi government’s budget for the secret police. The Mukhabarat’s money comes straight from the CIA.

Several Shiite politicians in the new government want Shahwani out, saying the Mukhabarat’s ranks are filled with Saddam’s former officers seeking revenge against the Shiite militias they fought in the 1980s. The Iraqi intelligence official said agents have complained the ex-Baathists use the word “resistance” instead of “terrorists” when describing Sunni insurgents in internal memos, raising serious doubts about the agents’ loyalties.

Whew…Iraq has a CIA-funded Mukhabarat operating without the authority of the elected government?? What kind of sick joke is the US playing here? Who is really responsible for the increasingly sectarian attacks? In this light, US policy could be seen to be directly fomenting the endless bombings and horrendous death and destruction experienced in Iraq over the last many weeks.

Let’s get back to the Newsweek story from January, and that clue to US policy, still shrouded in secrecy. Here is how Newsweek quoted Shahwani and unnamed Pentagon officials on the “insurgency problem”:

the U.S. occupation has failed to crack the problem of broad support for the insurgency. The insurgents, [Shahwani] said, “are mostly in the Sunni areas where the population there, almost 200,000, is sympathetic to them.” He said most Iraqi people do not actively support the insurgents or provide them with material or logistical help, but at the same time they won’t turn them in. One military source involved in the Pentagon debate agrees that this is the crux of the problem, and he suggests that new offensive operations are needed that would create a fear of aiding the insurgency. “The Sunni population is paying no price for the support it is giving to the terrorists,” he said. “From their point of view, it is cost-free. We have to change that equation.” [emphasis added]

I’ll end for now with this speculation about US broad-sweep detention policy — it is being used for intentional collective punishment and dehumanization of the entire Iraqi population.

These realities of US policy are sickening — home invasions, indiscriminant round-ups, numbering of prisoners, stress interrogations, torture. It all reflects the brutal nature of the US taking of Iraq.

Work of US allies:

Photo of tortured man, killed in KIN-64/29 colony, Navoi, Uzbekistan during detention by “colony administration” on January 3, 2005. Source: The Central Asian and Southern Caucasian Freedom of Expression Network (CASCFEN), “a voluntary association of the public organizations, called to protect freedom of expression and press in the region agreed to Article 19 of the Universal Human Rights Declaration.”

Uzbekistan

Two days ago I posted a very disturbing description of the recent massacre of at least 500 people in the City of Andijan by the Uzbek regime. Dictator Islam Karimov has had a cozy relationship with the Bush administration since shortly after 9/11.

Today, Uzbek officials are claiming that they massacred no one, and that only 169 people died during rioting. Opposition spokespersons say the toll was 700 killed brutally by security forces. I continue to believe the that the narrative found here is accurate, and the official Uzbek version is horseshit.

Meanwhile, The Washington Post has added this account of what did happen:

It was a sunny, warm day, and the crowd was suffused with a sense of optimism as speakers said that they had been in touch with President Karimov and that he would be coming soon to listen to their concerns.But late in the afternoon, dark clouds began to gather and a helicopter began circling, Mavlanov recalled.

Sensing concern in the crowd, speakers urged the demonstrators to stay in the square, promising that no harm would come to them. But soon afterward, several minivans and trucks packed with security officers arrived, and the men began firing on people from the vehicles’ doors and windows.

The reaction of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other US spokespersons has been to pussyfoot around Uzbekistan, citing a few nice speeches the president has given in the past and declaring that, “We have good relations with some that we believe need to do more on the democratic front.”

British foreign secretary Jack Straw was marginally better, asking for an “international and independent inquiry” to “get to the bottom” of what happened in Andijan late last week.

Why the kid gloves crock from high US officials on Uzbekistan, and not even a word from the president himself after a horrendous massacre? After all, this same president inspired an incredible response against another dictator in Iraq who “murdered his own people.” The reasons for this, I believe, concern the strategic position of Uzbekistan and its secret role in the Terror war.

It is not easy to illustrate how the US uses Uzbekistan, as cooperation with the regime and US military basing in the country developed since 9/11 has been highly secretive. But according to a recent piece on EurasiaNet, “strategic importance of the Karshi-Khanabad base, the cornerstone of the US-Uzbek alliance, was dramatically declining. Today, many of the functions performed by the base could be easily shifted to Afghanistan.”

However, another US use of the Uzbek regime has been as torturer of choice for certain Terror War prisoners. This passage from Jane Mayer’s important February 14, 2005 New Yorker piece on rendition of Terror War suspects contains quotes from Craig Murray, the former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan,

[Murry] told me that “the U.S. accepts quite a lot of intelligence from the Uzbeks” that has been extracted from suspects who have been tortured. This information was, he said, “largely rubbish.” He said he knew of “at least three” instances where the U.S. had rendered suspected militants from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan. Although Murray does not know the fate of the three men, he said, “They almost certainly would have been tortured.” In Uzbekistan, he said, “partial boiling of a hand or an arm is quite common.” He also knew of two cases in which prisoners had been boiled to death.In 2002, Murray, concerned that America was complicit with such a regime, asked his deputy to discuss the problem with the C.I.A.’s station chief in Tashkent. He said that the station chief did not dispute that intelligence was being obtained under torture. But the C.I.A. did not consider this a problem. “There was no reason to think they were perturbed,” Murray told me.

Sweden and the Terror War
A perhaps surprising stop on the Terror War circuit is Sweden. Here I want to lead into today’s exclusive guest post by a British citizen, resident of Sweden, and friend of Deep Blade Journal, Mike Walls. You’ll see in a disturbing personal story Mike tells what all this has to do with Uzbekistan.

First, I want to quote another related story from the Jane Mayer article, illustrating how Sweden has cooperated with US rendition methods:

On December 18, 2001, at Stockholm’s Bromma Airport, a half-dozen hooded security officials ushered two Egyptian asylum seekers, Muhammad Zery and Ahmed Agiza, into an empty office. They cut off the Egyptians’ clothes with scissors, forcibly administered sedatives by suppository, swaddled them in diapers, and dressed them in orange jumpsuits. As was reported by “Kalla Fakta,” a Swedish television news program, the suspects were blindfolded, placed in handcuffs and leg irons; according to a declassified Swedish government report, the men were then flown to Cairo on a U.S.-registered Gulfstream V jet.

So it is in the context of the recent Uzbek slaughter, and stories of the crimes against humanity in the form of renditions carried out by the Bush regime and its Terror War collaborators, that Deep Blade Journal today offers this exclusive guest post….

————————————————–

GUEST POST

Questions about Uzbek, Egyptian, and Swedish complicity in the US Terror War
Recently I saw a news item on the BBC World satellite channel describing the warm relationship between Karimov and the Bush Administration. Regrettably the item did not go into any more detail than that.

For example, they could have outlined the grievances of the protesters in the recent upheavals there instead of echoing Karimov’s construction of Islamist terrorism being on the rise which, according to him, was the reason behind the protests. To put the record straight it needs to be aired that Islam Karimov’s record on human rights abuses extend not only to Muslims in Uzbekistan but to a plethora of other minorities.

I have a personal story to tell on this account. A former Uzbek colleague of mine told me how he was persecuted for being homosexual. The first time we met he mentioned the US’s cosy relationship with Karimov — that was back in 2003. My colleague was utterly disgusted and distressed. He would laugh out loud at the claim that the US wanted democracy in the region (central Asia) and sometimes in the face of other colleagues who believed such fantasies.

A couple of months ago he was sent back to Uzbekistan to an uncertain fate; nobody, not even his Swedish partner, has heard anything from him since. The fact that the Swedish authorities would do such a thing is disturbing and only lends suspicion to their general foreign policy agenda. Case in point, in late 2004 it was reported in a Swedish independent (The Local) that the now deceased Anna Lindh, back in 2001, in collaboration with the CIA extradited two Egyptian nationals back to Egypt who were summarily tortured shortly thereafter.

The Local quotes its source thus: “She [Anna Lindh] stepped aside to consult her nearest bosses and discuss the issue. It took maybe half a minute until she confirmed that they would accept the [CIA] offer.”

Could it be that the Bush Administration has a list of countries that, irrespective of their human rights record, have been approved by them because of their agreement to join in the “War on Terror”? I think we know the answer to that question but my suspicions have been aroused even more in light of the Uzbekistan and Egyptian matter here in Sweden. Could it be furthermore, then, that Göran Persson’s government agreed to extradite people back to Uzbekistan on the proviso of the US? Could it be that Sweden and a host of other countries are collaborating in this way in order to expedite the so-called “War on Terror”? The pot thickens and the boundaries between dictatorships and democracies blur ever more.

Mike Walls
May 18, 2005

Though it was doomed, the Democrats for once mounted a dissent

Rhode Island Democrat Jack Reed gave an impressive speech in opposition to the torture theorist Wednesday on the floor of the US Senate.

Utah Republican Orrin Hatch, until recently Chair of the Committee on the Judiciary, provided squirrelly mendacity against the dissenters and in support of Gonzales.

Yet another assertion of Republican impunity has confirmed Alberto Gonzales as America’s highest law enforcer, who took over the US Department of Justice today. Heaven help the sundry persons detained without evidence in the president’s Terror War. Accountability for illegal rendition, torture, humiliation, perpetual confinement without charge or evidence, and other atrocities committed by US military and contract personnel will reach only as far as a few low-ranking soldiers – and then only when there are pictures. No torture policy architect will pay any price. Instead, being the chief legal theorist for torture results in promotion.

It is good that there was principled Democratic dissent, which forced squirrelly Republican mendacity in response. I thank Ted Kennedy, Dick Durbin, Jack Reed, Robert Byrd, and other Senate Democrats for making sure there were 36 dissenting lawmakers, thereby showing that not all of the American people believe Bush’s lies, approve of his torture practices, and think his high officials that are responsible should be given a free pass.

Without these Democrats, the whole record and story would have ended with the outrageous ear candy in service of cover-up that the Republicans dished up. The public record may have ended with fawnings about how Judge Gonzales “grew up in Humble, TX…one of seven siblings living in a two-bedroom house” that was built by his migrant-laborer family, who lacked education beyond elementary school.

“But Judge Gonzales learned through his parents’ example that, with dreams and commitment and hard work, you can be rewarded in this country.”

Yes, and in Bush’s America, you are also rewarded — with the highest office available — for destroying the law of the land.

So it is very good to have the Republican responses to being called on official support for torture — how they ran away from the memos, how they repeatedly were forced to feign abhorrence about bad apples and pictures, how they repeatedly said it was proper to carve out a class of presidentially-declared Terror War suspects who then without evidence could be treated outside the bounds of international law, how good faith ruled the roost, and how dissenters undermine the president and “give comfort” to the enemy — in the permanent record.

But even the slightest perusal of the publicly-available documentation reveals that none of these Republican canards can hold a drop of water. The notion of Republican good faith is put to rest rather thoroughly in a piece by Joshua Dratel posted on Counterpunch a few days ago.

Dratel writes,

The policies that resulted in rampant abuse of detainees first in Afghanistan, then at Guantanamo Bay, and later in Iraq, were product of three pernicious purposes designed to facilitate the unilateral and unfettered detention, interrogation, abuse, judgment, and punishment of prisoners:(1) the desire to place the detainees beyond the reach of any court or law;

(2) the desire to abrogate the Geneva Convention with respect to the treatment of persons seized in the context of armed hostilities; and

(3) the desire to absolve those implementing the policies of any liability for war crimes under US and international law.

Indeed, any claim of good faith–that those who formulated the policies were merely misguided in their pursuit of security in the face of what is certainly a genuine terrorist threat–is belied by the policy makers, more than tacit acknowledgment of their unlawful purpose. Otherwise, why the need to find a location–Guantanamo Bay–purportedly outside the jurisdiction of the US (or any other) courts? Why the need to ensure those participating that they could proceed free of concern that they could face prosecution for war crimes as a result of their adherence to the policy? Rarely, if ever, has such a guilty governmental conscience been so starkly illuminated in advance.

Meanwhile, Senator Reed provided a summary of how the Bush/Gonzales theories of “Commander-in-Chief override” of US and international law were developed in order to provide that absolution for the ensuing crimes.

JACK REED: Despite the Constitution’s clear prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, despite law after law, treaty after treaty prohibiting torture, the President’s chief counsel, Judge Gonzales, requested a series of legal memos regarding the applicability of treaty provisions and permissible interrogation techniques in the war on terrorism.

One of these memos, the August 1, 2002, Bybee Memorandum, was apparently written to explore what coercive tactics U.S. officials could use without being held criminally liable.

This memo created a new and radically narrow definition of torture. It stated that torture would require interrogators to have specific intent to cause physical pain that “must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death.” Mental torture is defined in the statute but the Justice Department memo states that mental torture must result in “significant psychological harm lasting for months or even years.”

According to Harold Koh, Dean of the Yale Law School, former Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, and an international law expert, this memo is “the most clearly erroneous legal opinion” he has ever read. In testimony before the Judiciary Committee he stated:

“In sum, the August 1, 2002 OLC memorandum is a stain upon our law and our national reputation. A legal opinion that is so lacking in historical context, that offers a definition of torture so narrow that it would have exculpated Saddam Hussein, that reads the Commander-in-Chief power so as to remove Congress as a check against torture, that turns Nuremberg on its head, and that gives government officials a license for cruelty can only be described–as my predecessor Eugene Rostow described the Japanese internment cases–as a “disaster.”

One would have expected the Counsel to the President to have immediately repudiated such an opinion. Judge Gonzales did not.

Instead, this memo was endorsed by Judge Gonzales as the legal opinion of the Justice Department on the standard for torture.

Into the face of this voluminous evidence of official malfeasance on the part of Gonzales — and the calm and eloquent presentation thereof by the Democrats — the race-baiting ramblings, emphatic gestures, lies, and full-gallop retreat from the content and foreseeable results of the torture memos by Utah Republican Orrin Hatch would have been comical if the issue wasn’t so serious. I’ll reproduce quite a bit of the recorded transcript here. Try not to be entertained.

HATCH: Some Senators on the other side of the aisle are desperately searching, fishing, and hunting to find something, anything, with which to attack Judge Alberto Gonzales. I reviewed some of the issues yesterday, including their attempt to hold Judge Gonzales responsible for a memo that he did not write, prepared by an office he did not run, in a Department in which he did not work, that provided legal advice that President Bush did not follow. That argument is a very thin brew. But some of my friends across the aisle are still throwing political spaghetti at the wall hoping something will stick.

…

What is it about Judge Gonzales that makes some people believe that he is somehow incapable of making the simple distinctions, distinctions made by lawyers every day? Is it prejudice? Is it a belief that a Hispanic American should never be in a position like this—because he will be the first one ever in a position like this? Is it a belief that only liberal Hispanics should be confirmed? Or is it because he has been an effective Counsel to the President of the United States, who many on the other side do not like? Or is it because he is constantly mentioned for the Supreme Court of the United States of America? Or is it that they just don’t like Judge Gonzales? I find that that is not possible because you can’t help but like him. He is a fine, enjoyable, friendly man.

…

It is ridiculous. What is the reason for this opposition? I don’t know what it is. But I have listed a few things it could be…Senator KENNEDY raised all of these torture memoranda as though Judge Gonzales wrote them. He wasn’t in the Justice Department. He wasn’t in the office of legal counsel. He wasn’t the person who wrote them. He didn’t represent the Justice Department. But he did have a relationship to the February 7, 2002, memorandum where the President said that all prisoners, whether or not they were subject to the Geneva Conventions, had been treated “humanely.” People can have different views on the Bybee memoranda, and other memoranda that have been quoted here as though Judge Gonzales had anything to do at all with them, but Judge Gonzales’s opinion, which he gave the President, was that they should be treated humanely. Why do they insist on these points? Why has torture become the big point of debate on the floor of the Senate? There is only one reason: to undermine the President of the United States. Just think about it. Why would we do that publicly as Senators? Why would we do that, especially since we all know that these were rogue elements who have done these awful things? We all condemn them. But why would we do this? Some people think that these statements are so bad, that they give comfort to the enemy. I do not go that far. But why have they used distortions to try to stop Judge Gonzales? Why would they do that? He is a moderate man. He is an accomplished man. He is a decent man. We have had 4 years of experience with him. He has done a great job down there as White House Counsel. He has been up here before every Senator on the Judiciary Committee, eight of whom voted against him, and he accommodated them in every way he possibly could. Sometimes he couldn’t do what they wanted him to do, but the fact is he was always accommodating.

…

Here we have a chance to confirm a man who is a decent man, who is of Hispanic origin, the first Hispanic ever to be nominated to one of the big four Cabinet positions. Why can’t my friends who oppose him recognize that and recognize the historic nature of this nomination, recognize his great ability, recognize his decency, recognize his fairness in working with them, and recognize that this man will make a difference for all Americans, as he has as White House Counsel? Is the hatred for the President so bad they transfer it to somebody as decent as Judge Gonzales after years of complaints about John Ashcroft? He has been a wonderful Attorney General, in my eyes. After years of complaining about him because he is too conservative, all of a sudden you have a moderate Hispanic man who has a distinguished public service record, who has a distinguished career as a lawyer, who came from poverty to the heights of strength and success in this greatest of all nations, and he too gets treated like dirt. And I personally resent it. (emphasis added)

Hatch conveniently forgets the ample evidence that the prisoners have NOT been treated humanely. And what treatment does Gonzales consider “humane”? He would not say in written responses to questions from Democrats on the Judiciary Committee.

I shudder to think of what is going on right now in America’s Terror War dungeons.

Through its torture practices, the George W. Bush Administration in 2004 has redefined America in the eyes of the world

No doubt, 2004 has been a terrible year. How can I even presume to name the worst news event of the year? After all, the Tsunami of the Indian Ocean has devastated an incredible swath of the world.

And what about the US invasion and conquest of Iraq that has evolved into a costly colonial war? America has responded to anti-colonial resistance in Iraq by smashing cites. There is no end in sight. Tens of thousands of Iraqis have died as have over 1000 Americans. But to me this is not by itself the worst story of the year. In my mind a story connected to the attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan is the top story and the worst story — the development of the United States as a torture state the likes of which the world has never known.

Members of the Associated Press named their top 2004 stories last week (prior to the tsunami). The Abu Ghraib photographs made the list. But here is how they phrase the story: “U.S. military guards at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad forcing naked Iraqi detainees to pose in humiliating positions. Prosecutions ensued….”

Clearly, this represents the cleaning-up-the-bad-apples media posture the Pentagon has used to deflect deeper examination of what is going on here. And use of this posture is bringing the public along the road to dictatorship with hardly a whisper of dissent.

Steps towards dictatorship

The Center for Constitutional Rights describes in a recent release the facilities and practices now employed worldwide on the mere authority of the president alone:

the CIA has been secretly operating a holding and interrogation center within the larger American military-run prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba…the CIA Center at Guantanamo is “related to a network of holding centers operated by the CIA at undisclosed locations around the world”…”The use of secret detentions centers not only violates international and U.S. law”, said CCR deputy legal director, Barbara Olshansky, “it undermines the critical pillars of our Democracy — justice and liberty — and tosses aside the Framers concerns about the dangers of an overreaching executive. How can we hold ourselves up as an example as the world’s preeminent democracy when we are violating the founding principles of our own?”

We must act in 2005 to stop these Bush practices, as the soul and spirit of America will soon become unredeemable.

Washington Post indicts Bush Administration for war crimes

From today’s lead editorial in the Washington Post:

…Since the publication of photographs of abuse at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison in the spring the administration’s whitewashers — led by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld — have contended that the crimes were carried out by a few low-ranking reservists, that they were limited to the night shift during a few chaotic months at Abu Ghraib in 2003, that they were unrelated to the interrogation of prisoners and that no torture occurred at the Guantanamo Bay prison where hundreds of terrorism suspects are held. The new documents establish beyond any doubt that every part of this cover story is false…

The Post editorial page has now used its considerable conservative microphone to emphasize what Deep Blade has been saying for months: a dozen or so low-level operatives are not the biggest problem — it is the Pentagon leadership, the White House, and the Republican Congress that are the real Rotten Apples where torture is concerned. US atrocities against prisoners are far more than “isolated aberrations” — indeed torture underpins US policy.

Documents released this week through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union revealed that the torturers had “their marching orders from the Sec Def”, according to one of the items released. This memo was discussed by salon.com writer Joe Conason Tuesday on Democracy Now!:

What it says is that the F.B.I. argued strongly against abusive techniques in Guantanamo, and argued with two ranking generals, General Dunlavey and General Geoffrey Miller who figured largely in the Abu Ghraib scandal because he went to Iraq after setting up the system at Guantanamo, and that the response of the military was, of these generals was, you can try your methods, but we have our marching orders from the SecDef, which is what the memo says and the SecDef is military jargon for the Secretary of Defense. In other words, this is an acknowledgement by the F.B.I. in the internal memo that the military was behaving towards these prisoners in a manner that had been ordered by Donald Rumsfeld’s office. That the allegations of abuse and in some cases torture had grown out of an attitude that ordinary conventions and international law did not have to be observed in the treatment of these prisoners.

And “treatment” these prisoners did receive, to wit:

* Mock executions

* Simulated drowning on “waterboards”

* Cuffing and pouring cold water on a subject in an act called the scorpion

* Beatings, chokings, prolonged sleep deprivation and humiliations such as being wrapped in an Israeli flag with loud music blaring

* Dragging feet over barbed wire

* Burning with flammable liquids and cigarettes, including inside the ear

After searching for the slightest bit of administration accountability and failing to find it, the Post to concludes with this lament:

The record of the past few months suggests that the administration will neither hold any senior official accountable nor change the policies that have produced this shameful record…For now the appalling truth is that there has been no remedy for the documented torture and killing of foreign prisoners by this American government.

The absence of significant public demand upon the courts and our elected representatives to put an end to this treatment and give those who are criminally culpable the severest punishment is shameful. I feel great revulsion towards this behavior and the failure of our system to do a damn thing about it. We better be careful. These are exactly the sorts of acts President George W. Bush has continually stated were the crimes of Saddam that justified American conquest of Iraq. Is it such a stretch to think new-formed enemies of America could use the same justification for reciprocal attacks?