Gina Haspel should be in the dock at The Hague

by John Kiriakou — Reader Supported News

Gina Haspel’s appointment as CIA director sends a message that is clear to the CIA workforce, to our allies around the world, and to our enemies. That message is that any CIA officer can break the law with impunity and still get promoted; indeed, one can even be promoted to director. The message is that, when push comes to shove, the United States doesn’t care about human rights. We pretend to. We insist that other countries do. But that’s all for show. If you are a strategic ally of the United States (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Ukraine immediately come to mind) you can do whatever you want and we’ll look the other way. The message is that we don’t care about international law, even though we know that our torture program and the illegal prison at Guantanamo are the leading recruitment tools for terrorist groups around the world.

But we should care. And we should start by rejecting the nomination of Gina Haspel as CIA director. Here’s why.

As has been reported widely in the press, Gina Haspel was the chief of a secret prison overseas where alleged al-Qaeda prisoners were tortured in violation of US law and the United Nations Convention Against Torture. Her supporters will tell you that reasonable people can agree to disagree on “enhanced interrogation techniques.” I say that that’s impossible. First, the US government executed Japanese soldiers after the Second World War because they had waterboarded American prisoners of war. Let me repeat that. Waterboarding was an executable offense in 1945.

Second, in January 1968, The Washington Post published a photo of an American soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner. On the day that photo was published, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered an investigation. The soldier was arrested, charged with torture, convicted, and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Between then and now, the law never changed. We changed. Why were waterboarding and other torture techniques illegal in 1945 and in 1968, but somehow magically legal in 2002? When we say that passage of the McCain-Feinstein Amendment in 2015 finally outlawed torture, that’s wrong. Torture has been outlawed for many decades. We just pretended that it wasn’t.

But that’s what the CIA does. It pushes the envelope as much as it can. That’s its nature. Only strong oversight committees on Capitol Hill can rein it in. And that hasn’t happened in many years.

Another reason Haspel must be rejected is her clear and well-documented disdain for the law. In 2005, her boss, the notorious former CIA Counterterrorism Center director and later deputy director for operations Jose Rodriguez, ordered her to destroy 92 tapes showing the CIA torture of alleged al-Qaeda prisoners Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. The White House counsel and the CIA’s general counsel had both told Rodriguez not to destroy the tapes. They could have been evidence of a crime. At the least, they were a federal record that, by law, was supposed to be retained until it was properly declassified. But Haspel personally wrote the cable to the secret site ordering their destruction. Her defense, that she was “just following orders,” is reminiscent of Nuremberg and, in fact, is not a defense at all.

Constitutional scholar and former assistant attorney general Bruce Fein said it best: “An ethos honoring the rule of law is imperative in an agency shrouded in secrecy and thus undeterred by sunlight, the best of disinfectants. When a government official becomes a lawbreaker with impunity, it invites every man and woman to become a law unto themselves. If there are better ways to encourage lawbreaking at the CIA and popular disrespect for the law than by Ms. Haspel’s promotion, they do not readily come to mind.”

That brings us back to the oversight committees. Readers will know that I routinely criticize members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence as lemmings and cheerleaders. I can’t begin to tell you how much I hope I’m wrong. Let’s assume that the Republicans are (nearly) unified in their support of Haspel. Then the Democrats also have to be unified. Republican Rand Paul already has voiced his opposition to Haspel and has said that he will filibuster the nomination. Republican John McCain has hinted at his opposition. But Democrats Dianne Feinstein and Mark Warner are wobbly. Feinstein, who blocked Haspel’s nomination as deputy director for operations in 2013, just because of Haspel’s torture history, commented recently that she had gotten to know Haspel in the interim: “We’ve had dinner together,” she said, as if that has anything to do with anything. Warner made an even worse statement: “My mind is very open on this nomination.” That doesn’t instill confidence.

In past opinion pieces, I’ve urged readers to “ride our elected officials.” I’ve never meant it as much as I mean it now. Please call your senators at 202-224-3121 and tell them to vote against Gina Haspel’s nomination. The ACLU, Expose Facts, Psychologists for Social Responsibility, and myriad other groups are doing the same. We only have a little bit of time. We have to organize quickly and not back down. We have to tell the CIA that it cannot violate US and international law and not have a price to pay. Gina Haspel should be in the dock at The Hague. She shouldn’t be in the CIA director’s office.

John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the Obama administration under the Espionage Act – a law designed to punish spies. He served 23 months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration’s torture program.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

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The fake enemy

by Uri Avnery

Towards the end of 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and declared war on the United States. Their Nazi ally followed with its own declaration of war, and so did all its satellites.

The joke tells about the Hungarian ambassador in Washington who delivered his declaration of war to the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, who decided to have some fun:

“Hungary, Hungary,” Hull queried, “Are you a republic?”

“No,” the ambassador corrected him, “We are a monarchy.”

“Indeed? So who is your king?”

“We don’t have a king, but a regent, Admiral Horthy.”

“An admiral? So you have a large navy?”

“We have no navy at all, because we have no outlet to the ocean.”

“Strange, a monarchy without a king, an admiral without a navy. So tell me, why are you declaring war on us? Do you have claims against the USA?”

“No, we have claims against Romania.”

“So why don’t you declare war on Romania?”

“We can’t! Romania is our ally!”

I remember this joke every time Binyamin Netanyahu utters his blood-curdling threats against Iran. The struggle with Iran heads his agenda. He warns of the danger of an Iranian effort to produce nuclear weapons and implicitly threatens her with our “secret” nuclear arsenal.

Why?

God knows. I search desperately for a reason for the Israeli-Iranian conflict, a struggle of life and death, and do not find any. Nothing. Niente.

Wars between nations are based on conflicts of interest. Are there any conflicting interests between Israel and Iran?

None whatsoever.

Israel has a conflict with the Arab world, which refuses to recognize and have normal relations with it as long as there is no peace between Israel and the Palestinian people. Israel is now practically at war with Syria and Hezbollah.

Iran wants to be the dominant Muslim power in the region. Therefore it is practically at war with Saudi Arabia (which wants the same) and its satellites. That looks like a community of interests between Israel and Iran.

And indeed, not so long ago there was a strong — though unofficial — alliance between Iran and Israel. That was when the Shah ruled in Teheran. Israelis acted in Iran at will. Iran was the basis for Israel’s extensive military and political activities in Iraqi Kurdistan. Shabak, the Israeli secret service, trained the feared Iranian secret service, Savak. Except for the USA, Iran was Israel’s closest ally.

So what happened? Regime change in Iran, of course. The Shah was thrown out, the Ayatollahs came in. The Ayatollahs are religious leaders. In the name of Shi’ite Islam they curse the “Jewish State.”

But religious ideology does not replace the basic interests of a state. These are based on objective facts, primarily geographical ones. Even the religious wars of the 17th century arose mainly from national interest. Mostly, religion was just a pretext.

National interests do not change when a regime change occurs.

The most obvious example is Russia. When the Bolshevik revolution replaced the Czars, foreign policy did not change. When the Communist regime broke down and power eventually came to Vladimir Putin, the foreign policy continues more or less as if nothing has happened.

And indeed, when the vital interests of Iran were concerned, the Ayatollahs did not despise Israeli aid. During the Iraqi-Iranian war, Israel provided the ayatollahs with arms. That happened almost openly during the so-called “hostage crisis.” The US sent arms to Israel, Israel sent them to Iran, in return Iran released the American hostages. My friend Amiram Nir, then a government security official, went to Teheran to deliver them.

The thought that Iran could possibly attack a nuclear power like Israel and risk its own annihilation is ludicrous.

Iran is the heiress to one of the world’s most ancient civilizations, almost as ancient as Egypt. Compared to it, Jewish civilization is a younger sister. Indeed, many experts believe that the Jewish religion is heavily indebted to the Iranian civilization.

Cyrus “the Great” founded the largest empire in the world (until then). He created a system of tolerance and progress. As part of the effort he sent the banished Jews from Babylon back to Jerusalem. The “Return to Zion” was, as many experts believe, the real beginning of Judaism.

True, that was long, long ago. But, as mentioned above, objective interests have a very long life.

So why do the Iranians curse us now? Why do they rain fire and brimstone on us?

Quite simple. The hatred for Israel is for the Iranians an instrument for the achievement of their real goals.

The real aim of the Iranians is to gain power over the entire Muslim Middle East. They are doing this systematically, with quite a lot of success. The logic goes like this: the Muslim world hates Israel. The Arab Middle East hates Israel. Therefore, the hatred of Israel can be an effective political instrument.

Curiously enough, Binyamin Netanyahu has adopted the same logic — only the other way round. Donald trump hates the ayatollahs. Many people in the Western world fear them. So Netanyahu has adopted hatred of Iran as his main political instrument. He goes around the world and peddles it everywhere. It is the main theme of his rousing speeches to the UN, the American Congress and AIPAC.

It is also a good remedy for his personal troubles. Netanyahu is now up to his neck in various corruption affairs, including large bribes. His admirers are ready to ignore them, because he is Israel’s only bulwark against the terrible danger of annihilation by the ayatollahs riding on nuclear missiles.

Since President Trump also has a thing about Iran and wants to withdraw from the international agreement in which Iran undertook to suspend much of its nuclear program, in return for adequate concessions, Netanyahu’s anti-Iranian ranting cements the companionship between the two.

Lately the Iranians have been establishing bases in Syria and Lebanon, near the borders of Israel. The Israeli air force is bombing them from time to time, proudly showing aerial photos proving their success. These attacks raise, of course, Iran’s credibility in Arab eyes. Everybody is satisfied.

Still, it’s a dangerous situation. It is based on the Israeli-Arab conflict that could explode any minute in various ways. Israeli “military experts” prophesy another Israeli-Arab war soon, probably against Syria and Hezbollah. This week, air-raid sirens were tested all over this country.

The best way to avoid it is to make peace with the Arab world. That means to make peace first with the Palestinians.

Netanyahu proudly tells us that he has achieved a remarkable victory — cooperation with Saudi Arabia and the Arab Emirates, who are now involved in a shooting war with Yemeni insurgents who enjoy Iranian backing. The Saudis are nowhere near to winning that war.

This Israeli-Saudi cooperation is strictly secret. The Saudi crown prince, a very young and inexperienced dictator, cannot admit it, because the masses of Arabs everywhere, including his own kingdom, see Israel as the arch-enemy.

No Arab country can establish real peace with Israel, as long as Israel occupies all of Palestine and subjects the Palestinians to a cruel occupation regime. The old Saudi peace plan is still lying around somewhere, but it is totally ignored by the Israeli government.

True, Israel has signed peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan, but nothing even remotely resembling a thoroughgoing peace exists between us and these nations. The initial enthusiasm evaporated long ago, and both the Egyptian and the Jordanian governments keep relations to a minimum, aware that the masses of their peoples detest Israel.

There is just no way around the Palestinians.

Real friends of Israel should advise Netanyahu to make peace as long as Mahmoud Abbas (Abu-Mazen) is still around. In two weeks he will be 83 years old, and he is ailing. He is deeply committed to peace. He has no obvious successor, and his replacement may be far, far less moderate.

But Netanyahu doesn’t care. Peace is the last thing he has on his troubled mind. He is far more committed to the eternal conflict with both the Arabs and the Iranians.

After all, what would life be like without enemies?

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Father Héctor Gallego

And Father Gallego?

by Miguel Antonio Bernal

Some weeks back there ran a great rumor about Father Héctor Gallego, who, as we should know, was forcibly disappeared by the military dictatorship in 1971.

It is known that something happened to the remains numbered 724, but due to the head of the Instituto de Medicina Legal having rendered no statements about them, the families of the victims of the dictatorship suffered in addition to the pain of their loved ones’ disappearances, the pain of governmental indolence in addressing that. Thus we saw in the case of Marlene Mendizábal, the disappeared teenager whose remains have now been conclusively identified, that the test results went undisclosed for months, prolonging the pain of the family that suffered the uncertainty since the 1970s, with the dictatorship having protected the murderer because he was a soldier’s nephew.

With the Father Gallego case something similar and ever more serious is happening. Since 1999, when human remains were found in a clandestine tomb a the Pumas Barracks in Tocumen nearly nobody has doubted the identity of Father Gallego due to mundane indicators – like a coin and some articles of clothing found in the grave – were identified as belonging to the priest. But the new authorities took it upon themselves to disappear the priest a second time, this time with the help of a laboratory that contaminated the evidence.

A test had to be carried out with private effort and funding so that at least the first identification of a disappeared person of the dictatorship, which was Heliodoro Portugal, could be achieved. There is no doubt about his identity, but there is doubt about what the authorities did to prevent the identity of Father Gallego from being discovered. Thus very few people continue to claim this until a complete review has been done.

Over the years people like the late Father Fernando Guardia insisted on a review of everything that happened in the Tocumen excavations, in order to find the priest, but the medical examiners have only evaded the question.

[Editor’s note: Father Héctor Gallego, the Colombian-born parish priest in Santa Fe de Veraguas, was last seen alive by persons other than military or government personnel in the military custody when he was arrested by soldiers in 1971. Manuel Antonio Noriega was in charge of the G2 unit that took Gallego away, and according to his dying declarations – which tended to be dubious and self-serving – Gallego died from injuries inflicted in a beating by a civilian informer who helped the soldiers arrest the priest.

Identification of the remains would assist in an investigation as to the cause of death, which might after all these decades lead to new charges, as there is no statute of limitations for murder in Panama. Of more social and religious importance, there are a lot of Catholics, in particular the mostly aging, poor and rural members of the congregation he served, who would like to see Gallego declared a saint. But the Catholic Church will only start that process if the body of the person to be sanctified is found.

The identification of the killer or killers might also help to ascertain the motive. It is generally believed that Gallego was disappeared because he started the Esperanza de los Campesinos cooperative, which provided competition for well-connected people who held local monopolies. As it turned out, the cooperative grew and prospered after its founder’s disappearance, with many businesses including the local coffee mill that produces Tute brand coffee, mostly for export to cooperatives in Europe. They killed Father Gallego, but the co-op he founded is now the biggest business in town.]

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Este video debe ser compartido, hay madres que hacen de todo por sus hijos y este es el vivo ejemplo de que en Colón hay gente que a pesar de que no son ricos desean educar a sus hijos, está señora vio a su hijo en el saqueo y tomó su decisión @AlvaroAlvaradoC @JCTapiaLMB pic.twitter.com/JJcLBjCLyx

— MC RAFA (@LicMcrafapanama) March 14, 2018

A Colon mother when she catches her son in a crowd of looters.

Colon and its two-day strike

The general strike, march from Sabanitas into the city center and acts vandalism and looting lend themselves to be spun in different ways. The actions and reactions of the police, many of the politicians and many of the media are perhaps even more noteworthy.

The strike leaders and the marchers were exemplary good citizens. The called on people to be peaceful and law-abiding and those who took part in their march and walked off of their jobs conducted themselves as requested.

The maleantes were — well, maleantes. One of the demands of the protesters was to take back control of parts of the city from people who live there or pass through there, and to emphasize the point maleantes set fire to the historic Casa Wilcox, burned a police mobile clinic and looted several businesses.

The politicians were also on the whole abominable. All of the main political factions have taken their turns at policies with respect to Colon and its people, which have ranged from malign neglect to brutal oppression.

Now we have an administration that’s spending $1.2 billion there — on a no-bid renovation contract with the hoodlum Odebrecht company, which notoriously pays out large kickbacks to politicians. That project aims to create a gleaming city center that’s a pleasant place to do business — and where almost none of the people who presently live there can afford to live. Have the made an even worse mess of the streets, sewers, water mains and storm drains in the course of that renovation project? Of course they have, and only time will tell whether those things will be fixed. In any case the city center, barely above sea level, has been flooding with increasing frequency of late. It’s the rising Caribbean Sea that has also led to the abandonment of several inhabited islands in Guna Yala. What we are seeing is a $1.2 billion investment premised on climate change denial, that might perhaps be rescued by further large investments dikes and pumping stations like those found in The Netherlands and a number of other places around the world. Which, of course, would keep the gravy train running for even more political cycles. On the margins, then as now, there would be some construction jobs as part of the bargain. And perhaps with an influx of Chinese businesses some of the 9,000 people who have lost jobs in the Colon Free Zone might find other employment. This administration’s efforts in Colon may be expensive and ambitious, but benefits to the ordinary Colonense are at best incidental. It’s an old-fashioned gentrification project, urban renewal of the sort that has been done for many decades in many US cities, leaving the lot of those displaced as miserable as ever. Done in the face of climate change without taking that into account it’s ludicrous even for the intended beneficiaries.

That President Varela had his ministers and elected officials of his party make the allegation that the vandalism and looting were the work of unspecified political opponents is beneath contempt. By their very nature — unless they are paid agent provocateurs — people who burn and loot are neither aligned with nor respectful of those who hold power in a government. But are Varela and his people, who no longer have the votes to get anything controversial passed by the National Assembly and are stuck with a short-handed rogue Supreme Court to which they can no longer successfully appoint people to fill the vacancies, really saying that it’s the PRD, Cambio Democratico, one of the small parties, a faction of the left, a particular labor union or perhaps some politicized religious denomination or ethnic tribe behind the violence? Why not just identify and arrest those personally responsible, and uncover any organization in the course of further investigation?

And perhaps surprisingly, that latter course seems to be what the National Police is taking. As the strike days approached, some 5,000 cops and some ostentatiously scary riot control equipment were moved into Colon. Strike organizers, knowing local history, protested and expressed their fears. But the police acted with exemplary restraint and professionalism. We didn’t see children or anyone else shot dead, nor people tortured in the streets like when Ricardo Martinelli used force to suppress protests that he blatantly provoked in 2012. When media aligned with real estate speculators who indent to make a killing off of the Colon renovation project and construction interests that are already profiting from it blamed the strike organizers for the looting and vandalism, the police put out a statement drawing the distinction between the protesters and the maleantes. And not only did the police not idly stand by for the sacking of those relatively few businesses left functioning during the renovation work, after moving in to rout the looters they proceeded to operations in which much of the stolen property was recovered. While the politicians and press were making lazy and malicious guesses about who was responsible for the looting, the police went out to find out specifically who they were.

The police as the only functional branch of the state? That’s scary, and not through any particular fault of the police.

The events in Colon were a warning shot across the bow of the ship of state. The country just can’t allow its public institutions to continue in the direction they have been heading.

Guns in the USA and here

Bitter old people who have been thrown away by a slightly younger “Me Generation” that has looted the world’s economy — especially those who watch reality TV or read clickbait and believe that it’s real — gave the extra impetus that brought a great nation to the great catastrophe that’s the Trump administration. But until now the gun sellers have made a fabulously lucrative profit off of the situation. As chaos real but mostly imagined has descended, their success at convincing people that having a firearm or several of them makes a home safer has resulted in booming sales. But like reality TV, what the NRA preaches is fake. A gun in the house makes that household more, not less, dangerous. For every shot fired in self-defense, well over 100 more are fired by accident or with criminal or suicidal intent.

Leave it to a younger generation to disrupt the false discourse that results in the disruption of their lives. And those older folks who know the truth of the matter — in many cases those whose own lives have been disrupted by firearms violence — need to lend the kids all possible support. It’s a necessary part of the process whereby the republic recovers from a bout of insanity.

In Panama we also have a problem with gun violence, but with different dynamics. We have no arms manufacturing to speak of and arms merchants are a weak economic force here, so we have nothing like the NRA, which is the advertising shill for such interests in the United States. But we have criminals with guns, and people who are afraid of criminals keeping guns in their homes, which in turn escalates domestic violence to deadly dimensions.

A deadly shootout at a shopping center? Gangs invading a hospital emergency room, with some trying to finish off a hit that left a rival gang member, whose organization is resisting the invaders? It tends to happen with pistols here because assault rifles are prohibited weapons of war that are hard for the average gangster to obtain.

But what about the armed invasions of Panama’s emergency rooms? Or for that matter, armed invasions of US schools?

More armed guards may be legitimate parts of the response, but mainly it’s a construction problem. The heavily fortified entrance to a place where wounded victims of violence are taken for treatment is by no means an unknown technology. The hospital lock ward and the special emergency room that is no easier to enter or leave than is any prison — guarded by people in bulletproof booths, with multiple remote controlled doors, metal detectors and video surveillance — is more expensive than hiring and arming an extra guard. The school with metal detectors that must be passed and a system automated locks and an always staffed control room that can by video monitor see and hear what’s going on everywhere in the building and lock everything in an instant to isolate a gunman — that’s expensive and perhaps oppressive, but nowhere near as problematic as armed teachers.

Yes, the gun merchants will tell you that the solution to the problem — any problem — is more guns. In many cases the better response is actually more stringent building codes.

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