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Britain spied on UN allies over war vote
Security Council members ‘illegally targeted’ by GCHQ
after plea from US security agency

By Martin Bright and Peter Beaumont

Feb. 8— Britain helped America conduct a secret and potentially illegal spying operation at the United Nations in the run-up to the Iraq war.

The operation, which targeted at least one permanent member of the UN Security Council, was almost certainly in breach of the Vienna conventions on diplomatic relations, which strictly outlaw espionage at the UN missions in New York.

Translators and analysts at the Government’s top-secret surveillance center, GCHQ, were ordered to co-operate with an American espionage “surge” on Security Council delegations after a request from the US National Security Agency at the end of January 2003. This was designed to help smooth the way for a second UN resolution authorizing war in Iraq.

The information was intended for US Secretary of State Colin Powell before his presentation on weapons of mass destruction to the Security Council on Feb. 5.

Sources close to the intelligence services have now confirmed that the request from the security agency was “acted on” by the British authorities. It is also known that the operation caused significant disquiet in the intelligence community on both sides of the Atlantic.

An operation of this kind would almost certainly have been authorized by the director-general of GCHQ, David Pepper. But the revelation also raises serious questions for Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, who has overall responsibility for GCHQ.

Details of the operation were first revealed in The Observer on the eve of war last year, after the leaking of a top-secret memo from the NSA requesting British help.

But until today it was not known whether British spy chiefs had agreed to participate. The operation was ordered before deliberations over a second UN resolution and targeted the so-called “swing nations” on the Security Council -- Chile, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Angola, Guinea, and Pakistan -- whose votes were needed to proceed to war.

The first evidence has also emerged that China, a permanent member of the Security Council, was a likely target of the operation.

A GCHQ translator, Katherine Gun, 29, who faces trial after leaking details of the US request, was hired by the surveillance center as a Chinese language specialist. Documents of this level of secrecy are circulated on a strict “need-to-know” basis. Security experts have said that it is highly unlikely that someone as junior as Gun would have seen the memo had she not been expected to use her language expertise in the operation.

She is thought to be an expert translator of Mandarin, the language of Chinese officialdom.

The memo, dated Jan. 31, 2003, stated that the security agency wanted to gather “the whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favorable to US goals or to head off surprises.”

It was sent out four days after the UN’s chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, produced his interim response on Iraqi compliance with UN resolutions.

In the wake charges that the Blair administration misled the British public as to the danger posed by Iraq, as well as the establishment of inquiries into intelligence failures on both sides of the Atlantic, the Gun case represents a further risk to government credibility over the Iraq war, showing how far the US and Britain were prepared to go in their ultimately unsuccessful attempts to persuade the world of the case for UN support for war against Iraq.

The Gun trial will reopen embarrassing questions for the government over the conflicting views on the legality of war, which were debated in the run-up to the conflict. At the time when the memo was received at GCHQ, officials at the Foreign Office, Ministry of Defense, and in the intelligence services -- including senior legal advisers -- were expressing serious doubts over the legality of any invasion.

At the time, The Observer was told by Foreign Office officials of serious doubts that the war was legal.

When the GCHQ revelations were first published in The Observer last March, Attorney-General Lord Goldsmith, had still not publicly announced his final advice to Downing Street.

At the time, it was expected that he would agree with most experts in international law that intervention would be unlawful without a second resolution.

The legality of the war was a highly sensitive issue for senior military officers on the eve of war, who were wary of being accused of war crimes in the aftermath of the conflict.

Former assistant chief of defense staff Sir Timothy Garden said that the legal basis of the war is all the more important now that Britain has signed up to the International Criminal Court.

“We did it on the best advice that was available in a democratic country. But following an order is not an excuse in the end.”

Source: Observer (UK

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Growing criticisms of Bush’s preemptive war

Compiled by Josh Ferguson

Feb. 10 (AGR) -- President George Bush has recently been called to defend his decision to invade Iraq, in light of new questions and challenges to his previous justifications for a preemptive war.

On Feb. 8, Bush gave NBC a rare hour-long television interview acknowledging that some pre-war intelligence had been wrong, but denying allegations of leading the country to war under false pretenses.

In the interview, his first on network television since he took office, Bush insisted that even if no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were found, Saddam Hussein had the capacity to produce them and could, in time, have developed a nuclear weapon.

President Bush’s interview was an attempt to address the growing credibility gap over Iraq’s WMD, as polls showed his approval ratings sliding. He told NBC’s Meet the Press: “He [Saddam] had the capacity to have a weapon ... and we thought he had weapons. The international community thought he had weapons. But he had the capacity to make a weapon and then let that weapon fall into the hands of a shadowy terrorist network.”

Criticism of Bush’s intelligence on Iraq comes at a bad time for an administration involved in a re-election campaign; according to a Time/CNN survey taken last week, 55 percent of Americans have “doubts and reservations” about Bush, and only 44 percent believe he is a leader to be trusted.

On Jan. 28, as the Iraq war claimed its 512th confirmed American victim, David Kay, the former CIA chief weapons inspector in Iraq, announced to Congress that “we were all wrong” about Iraq’s so-called weapons of mass destruction.

Kay admitted that he had found no concrete evidence of any Iraqi nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons program, forcing the White House to acknowledge that there was no substance to the rationale for the war on Iraq.

Even with Saddam Hussein in jail and Iraq occupied, this testimony is important. Public opinion was only swayed when President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair warned of the imminent threat of Iraq’s WMD. Such WMD, Kay made clear, simply did not exist. Whatever Saddam once had, had been destroyed. “There’s a long record of being wrong,” he told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Blair had claimed Iraqi WMD could be deployed to strike at Britain “within 45 minutes.”

The Bush administration went still further, with Bush claiming that Iraq had “stockpiles” of WMD, continued to “possess and produce” them, and had “dispersed rockets” with them. Vice President Dick Cheney claimed Iraq was “amassing WMD to use against us.” Secretary of State Colin Powell said “we know Iraq has at least 7 mobile facilities to make biological weapons.” Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld said, “we know where the WMD are.”

Kay, a frank, non-political scientist who left his job last week because the weapons search was downgraded, blamed his employer, the CIA, for mistaken information. He has called for an overhaul of the agency. At the same time, Kay made the same charge that was the focus of Britain’s inquiry: that intelligence was exaggerated by the politicians. Warnings from agents about the reliability of information were dropped in order to exaggerate the threat.

This admission by a former high ranking CIA official has led to the CIA engaging in its own process of defending itself, by deferring blame back to the White House and its interpretation of CIA reports.

The director of the agency, George Tenet, in his first public defense of the agency, said that analysts had various opinions about the state of Iraq’s chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs and that these were clearly spelled out in a report handed to the White House in October 2002.

“Analysts differed on several important aspects of these programs and those debates were spelled out in the estimate. They never said there was an imminent threat. Rather, they painted an objective assessment for our policy makers,” he said.

That report, the National Intelligence Estimate, included 40 caveats and dissents from various analysts.

At the time of the report, Bush was seeking congressional approval for the authority to wage war if Iraq refused to comply with United Nations resolutions demanding weapons inspections. But some lawmakers wanted to know how dire the Iraqi threat really was.

In just a few weeks, Tenet’s team of analysts brought together the evidence they had compiled, much of it based, according to intelligence officials, on information gathered by UN weapons inspectors in Iraq. Those inspections had been halted four years earlier, suggesting that some of the CIA’s evidence was outdated.

While various anonymous intelligence officials have already responded to widespread criticisms by saying that the information they provided was as accurate as it could be, Tenet’s speech at Georgetown University in Washington, DC was the first time the CIA’s leadership has defended its analysts. Tenet has a close relationship with George Bush, but his remarks will be seized on by critics of the administration who claim that intelligence was cherry-picked by officials who used various elements to build a case to support their desire to oust Saddam Hussein. Greg Thielmann, a former intelligence official with the State Department, called such a practice “faith-based intelligence gathering.”

In response to these statements, as well as growing challenges in the media and among public opinion, Bush said that he would name an independent bipartisan commission to review intelligence failures in Iraq. It would also look at what is known about efforts by Iran, North Korea, and terrorist groups to obtain nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Two congressional committees, an internal CIA board, and a White House advisory panel are already reviewing the Iraq intelligence.

Bush and GOP leaders in Congress had resisted a demand by Democrats for an independent review of the Iraq intelligence, but calls by Kay and key Republicans last week for such an inquiry forced the president to reconsider.

“I want to know all the facts,” Bush told reporters after a Cabinet meeting.

Bush said that the panel was to “examine intelligence on weapons of mass destruction,” comparing what has and has not been found in Iraq to date to what his administration believed existed before the war.

It could be a challenge for this commission. Only one of its seven members, retired Adm. William Studeman, has been involved directly in intelligence work. Studeman was once deputy director of the CIA.

One of the panel’s co-chairmen, Charles Robb, a former Democratic senator from Virginia, was a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The panel’s other four members include two federal jurists, commission co-chairman Laurence Silberman, of the US Court of Appeals in Washington, and Patricia Wald, a former member of the same court. The others are Lloyd Cutler, a former White House counsel during the Clinton and Carter administrations, and Richard Levin, president of Yale University. Two other members will be named later.

Administration critics were quick to charge that with the post-election deadline Bush set for a report — it is due in March 2005 — the commission is a thinly disguised attempt to shelve the growing controversy over prewar intelligence and the decision to go to war in Iraq. There are also criticisms that Bush’s calling for the commission to investigate Iran and North Korea, especially considering the panel members’ inexperience in matters of international intelligence, is an attempt to broaden the investigation to the point of inefficiency.

The commission is also noticeably not directed to investigate the role of Vice President Dick Cheney, the Pentagon, and other administration officials who may have had objections that were later ignored.

Asked about the report’s deadline, the president said the commission needed time for its work.

“There is going to be ample time for the American people to assess whether or not I made... good calls — whether I used good judgment, whether or not I made the right decision in removing Saddam Hussein from power,” Bush said.

Sources: Knight-Ridder, IPS, Union-Tribune Publishing Co., Independent Digital (UK), Guardian (UK), Washington Post

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Opaque justice in Mexico

By Diego Cevallos

Mexico City, Mexico, Feb. 5 (IPS)— Half of the inmates of Mexico’s prisons are serving sentences for minor thefts, committed without violence, 80 percent have never even seen the judge who sentenced them, and 70 percent received no legal advice when questioned by prosecutors.

These are just some of the serious irregularities marring a judicial system that is heavily resistant to change.

While a new culture of openness is beginning to appear in other spheres in Mexico, legal proceedings take place far from public scrutiny, under a system of written trials that has already been abandoned by many countries in Latin America, and which keeps some court records closed for 36 years.

But many Mexican judges say the system is functioning smoothly, with few problems. According to the chief justice of Mexico’s Supreme Court, Mariano Azuela, the country’s justice system “is transparent and fair.”

However, a 2002 report by Dato Param Coomaraswamy, UN rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, stated that “impunity and corruption apparently continue to prevail” in Mexico’s justice system, and reported that there is generalized suspicion, mistrust, and a lack of faith in the administration of justice in this Latin American country.

After visiting Mexico, the rapporteur said he had received reliable reports indicating that between 50 and 70 percent of federal judges were corrupt. He did not specify his sources of information.

Feeling the pressure, due to the abundant evidence of corruption and ineffectiveness, and the demands of private investors, who have little faith in the country’s justice system, President Vicente Fox announced in late 2003 that he would push through reforms designed to make legal processes more transparent and to adopt the oral trial system.

Experts and the media took him at his word, and organized forums last month to discuss the issue. The common denominator in the viewpoints expressed in the debates was that the system is in urgent need of an overhaul to adopt oral trials, open up proceedings to public scrutiny, and whittle down to a minimum the restrictions keeping court records closed.

“The judicial system must join in the efforts to bring transparency to public life, and it must stop resisting that trend with absurd, obsolete arguments that merely fuel corruption,” criminal trial lawyer Andrés Pérez told IPS.

Judges have responded to the calls for transparency with the argument that Mexico is not ready for oral trials, and that opening up legal proceedings would only hurt the litigating parties, who would be informally judged and sentenced in the media prior to the actual legal verdict.

“The implementation of oral trials is a proposal that must be carefully analyzed, because this scheme of administration of justice has not produced good results in other countries,” argued Supreme Court magistrate Olga Sánchez.

Germán Froto, spokesman for the Superior Court of Justice in the northern state of Coahuila, said that “throughout the country, there are media outlets that would use the new transparency to commit slander, with no regard for the interests of society.”

A number of Latin American countries, including Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Paraguay, and Venezuela, began in the mid-1990s to reform their legal systems and to adopt oral trial procedures.

But Mexico has not changed its old written criminal prosecution system which entails filling up pages and pages of files with statements and evidence for judges to read, on the basis of which they hand down their sentences.

Under the current system, no one unconnected to the case is allowed access to the files.

But according to Azuela, the Supreme Court justices pride themselves on the openness “that has always characterized” them. He pointed out that since 1870 they have published a “judicial gazette” containing extracts of verdicts from selected cases.

A new freedom of information law went into effect in Mexico in 2002, guaranteeing public access to information from any state body, except the judiciary, which was allowed to adopt its own rules aimed at ushering in transparency.

But instead of making moves towards achieving greater transparency, the 11 Supreme Court justices decided last May that court records, especially those involving cases handled by the criminal and family courts, would be closed for 12 years.

When the pressure for openness continued to mount, they decided in December to increase the number of years from 12 to 36.

“We were wrong in letting the judicial branch create its own transparency rules, because instead of doing so, it closed in on itself even more,” said Juan Escobedo, a lawyer who took part in drafting Mexico’s access law.

In 2003, under the new law, 2,700 requests for information were filed by the public at different levels of the state, 85 percent of which were successful in soliciting information, according to local authorities.

In Pérez’s view, “sooner or later, Mexico will have to open up its justice system, to make it more expeditious and fair, and to adopt oral trial procedures.”

A study published in 2002 by the Center for Economic Research and Teaching (CIDE) concluded that it is not the most dangerous criminals who are found in Mexico’s prisons, but those who are unable to gain a favorable legal outcome due to lack of money or knowledge about how the system works.

Half of the inmates in Mexico’s penitentiaries are serving sentences for minor non-violent theft and burglary.

“In general, the country’s penitentiaries do not house the criminals who have committed the most dangerous crimes, but the poorest criminals. The great majority of the prison population is made up of inmates responsible for relatively minor crimes,” states the study, The Mexican Penitentiary System.

The authors, who surveyed a representative sample of the 175,000 prisoners in Mexico’s jails, say there is widespread mistrust and dissatisfaction with the performance of the judiciary, which is made up of 183 district courts, 74 appeals courts, and the Supreme Court.

Of the 1,615 sentenced prisoners interviewed in the study, 65 percent said they had pled guilty directly before the prosecutor.

Half said they did so because they had committed the crime with which they were charged, 23 percent said they had been tortured, 12 percent said they had been threatened, three percent said their lawyers had convinced them to plead guilty, and two percent said they did so on the prosecutor’s recommendation.

A full 80 percent were not informed of their right not to testify the first time they were brought before the court. In addition, 70 percent received no legal advice or support when they were first interrogated in the presence of the prosecutors, and 80 percent never had a chance to talk to, or even meet, the judge who sentenced them.

When asked about corruption, just over half of the prisoners said they would likely have gone free if they would have bribed the police who arrested them, one-third said that could have happened if they had paid off the prosecutors, and 27 percent said they could have gotten off the hook by bribing the judge.

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Activists demand action on crimes against
former untouchables

By Rahul Verma

New Delhi, India, Feb. 4— Human rights activists are concerned about continuing violence against Dalits -- formerly known as the untouchables of India -- more than half a century after a discriminatory caste system was abolished by the Indian Constitution.

Two recent instances of harassment of Dalits in the western Indian state of Gujarat have prompted the Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC), a Hong Kong-based body, to urge the Indian government to take urgent action against anti-Dalit practices still being followed in the south Asian country.

“Fifty-six years after India’s independence, the country is still suffering from caste discrimination and inequality,” says AHRC. “AHRC urges the Government of India to take strong action to eliminate these socially sanctioned practices.”

AHRC’s call was prompted by two recent incidents of Dalit harassment in the western Indian state of Gujarat. In December, three Dalit teachers were shunted out of their school for protesting separate lunch-time seating arrangements for students of the so-called lower and upper-castes.

This was followed by the suspected suicide of a Dalit, whose wife, Gangaben Maru, an elected village head, was being threatened by her political rivals belonging to upper caste communities.

“This is a very discouraging situation for Dalits,” says S.K. Thorat, a professor of economics at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University. “Atrocities against Dalits are rampant in society,” he says.

Thorat, who is associated with the National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights, an umbrella body of Dalit groups in India, points out that 13,000 to 15,000 cases of atrocities against Dalits and 3,000 to 3,500 cases of untouchability are registered in India every year. “And this is just a fraction of the actual number of incidents of violence that take place throughout the country,” he stresses.

In December 2003 in Saharanpur, a western district of the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, two Dalit boys were killed, allegedly by members of an upper caste community. The People’s Union for Civil Liberties, a New Delhi-based Indian rights group, says in a report published last month that young men from adjoining villages played cricket that often turned ugly when the Dalit boys won a match.

The two Dalit boys were picked up by members of the upper caste when they were playing cricket. The boys were told they wanted to discuss the matter of a stolen pump with them.

“According to the villagers, the victims were killed by placing their neck on the center of a tractor hydraulic (the rear part of tractor under which ploughing iron rods are fitted), by placing a lathi (stick) on the upper part of the neck and putting pressure on either side of it, thereby damaging the wind pipe,” the report says.

A soon to be published report by the global non-governmental organization, Action Aid, states that Dalits are often harassed if they assert their rights. “As long as they keep silent and don’t speak up for their rights, there is peace,” says Thorat.

The violence against Dalits ranges from rape and murder to economic or social boycotts. In the case of the Dalit school teachers, for instance, villagers refused to send their children to the school where the Dalits taught untill they were transferred out to another school in another area.

Thorat maintains that the violence against Dalits continues because political parties in India refuse to acknowledge caste as an issue. “The agenda of social reform is completely ignored by most political parties,” he says.

He points out that the Indian government resisted efforts by Dalit groups and other human rights bodies to place the issue of discrimination against Dalits at an international conference against racism in the South African city of Durban in 2001.

“Unless political leaderships acknowledge caste as a problem, the future for Dalits is black,” Thorat stresses.

AHRC has launched a campaign to press for the rights of Dalits by sending letters to heads of leading Indian institutions, such as the National Human Rights Commission, the National Commission for Scheduled Castes and Tribes, and the United Nations urgung them to take action against those violating the rights of Dalits.

“I am gravely concerned by the ongoing caste discrimination against Dalits in India,” says Kim Soo A of AHRC’s Urgent Appeals Program. “These cases illustrate the failure of justice in India.”

AHRC has urged the Indian government to set up an independent body to investigate and try “the offenders of such gross violations of human rights.” It calls for action against the offenders and compensation to the displaced teachers and Gangaben Maru.

Source: OneWorld.net

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Ugandan rebels slaughter refugees

By Jim Lobe

Washington, DC, Feb. 6 — Less than a week after the International Criminal Court announced an investigation of atrocities committed by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). The Ugandan rebel group Thursday attacked a refugee camp, killing as many as 52 people and wounding more than 70 others, according to published reports.

It was the worst massacre by the LRA in several months and was carried out at a camp near the town of Lira, about 75 miles south of the Sudan border, according to the UN’s Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN).

“Some of the people were killed by bullet wounds, some were burned alive in their homes, and others were beaten and hacked to death with pangas,” Father Sebhat Ayele, a Roman Catholic priest, told IRIN. “This is terrible.”

The attack, which was reportedly led by a senior LRA commander, came less than a week after Luis Moreno Ocampo, the chief prosecutor of the newly established International Criminal Court (ICC), announced in London that he would begin an investigation into crimes committed in Uganda during the LRA’s 18-year insurgency.

Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, who met with Moreno Ocampo before the announcement, formally asked the ICC — mandated by an international treaty to investigate and prosecute war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity — to investigate the LRA. Uganda is the first government to refer a case to the ICC since it began work at The Hague on July 1.

Human rights groups that have long documented atrocities committed by the LRA have called on the ICC to investigate abuses committed by Ugandan People’s Defense Forces (UPDF), as well.

“Human Rights Watch has documented many shocking abuses by the LRA in Uganda,” said Richard Dicker, director of the organization’s International Justice program. “But the ICC prosecutor cannot ignore the crimes that Ugandan government troops allegedly have committed.”

“Any Court investigation of war crimes and crimes against humanity in northern Uganda must be part of a comprehensive plan to end impunity for all such crimes, regardless of which side committed them and of the level of the perpetrator,” London-based Amnesty International said, noting that the text of Museveni’s referral to the ICC apparently sought to limit the investigation to the LRA.

Amnesty pointed out that under the ICC rules, which are established in the 1998 Rome Statute, the prosecutor has the right to investigate all relevant crimes, regardless of who committed them.

Both Amnesty and HRW said the amnesty law noted UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s assertion that “amnesty cannot be granted in respect of international crimes such as genocide, crimes against humanity, or other serious violations of international humanitarian law” as appropriate guidance for the scope of the ICC prosecutor’s investigation.

Moreno-Ocampo has already appointed a US attorney, Christine Chung, to lead the investigation. A Harvard-trained lawyer, Chung has no prior experience with international tribunals but has earned a strong reputation as a formidable prosecutor for her work in the US Attorney’s office in New York City, where she targeted street gangs and organized crime.

Aid agencies and human rights group estimate that the war between the LRA and the UPDF has taken some 23,000 lives since 1988 and forced more than one million people to flee their homes.

The LRA says it is fighting to overthrow the government of President Yoweri Museveni and replace it with one based on the Biblical Ten Commandments. But the group’s attacks have mainly targeted civilians from the Acholi tribe.

The LRA has gained a reputation for extraordinary cruelty, most of all in its treatment of children, tens of thousands of whom have been abducted from their homes and forced to work as porters, soldiers or sex-slaves. More than 10,000 children were reportedly abducted by the LRA since 2002. According to HRW, children who fail to comply with orders are murdered, often by other children, who are forced to kill them.

The UPDF has also been accused of forcibly recruiting children under the age of 15 into government militias.

New York-based HRW said the presence and security of children in LRA ranks required special caution on the part of the prosecutor. While UNICEF and the UN’s office for humanitarian assistance have recently expanded their presence in northern Uganda, additional measures, including the deployment of human rights monitors, should be considered.

“The situation in northern Uganda is exactly the kind that the ICC was established to address,” said Fiona McKay, director of the International Justice program at the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (LCHR), recently rechristened as Human Rights First. “The atrocities committed there are extremely serious and well documented, and merit investigation to identify those responsible.”

A key issue will be locating and arresting the LRA leadership. While the rebels have lost a number of commanders in recent fighting, several senior leaders, including overall commander Joseph Kony, remain at large.

As a result of its own recent military successes, the government in Kampala claimed last month that it had “nearly defeated” the LRA, and military officials on Feb. 5 depicted the most recent attack as a “desperate attempt at getting publicity.”

But the Refugee Law Project in Kampala issued a statement on Feb. 4 noting that the LRA retains a formidable arsenal and warned that by scrapping the amnesty for the LRA’s top commanders, it risked prolonging the insurgency.

Source: OneWorld.net

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For Guarani Indians, land is life itself

By Mario Osava

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Feb. 3 (IPS)— Land represents the work of a lifetime for some; for others, it is life itself. For that reason, death is always a possibility in the property disputes between landowners and indigenous people that frequently occur in many parts of Brazil.

The latest outbreak of tension and warnings of bloodshed have occurred in the southwestern state of Mato Grosso do Sul, near the Paraguayan border, where just before Christmas, some 3,000 Guarani Indians invaded 14 ranches that they claim as part of their ancestral land.

In negotiations brokered by the National Indigenous Foundation (FUNAI), the state agency in charge of indigenous affairs, the Guaranis agreed to pull out of 11 of the farms on Feb. 2.

But they will maintain a presence on the three largest ranches in order to press FUNAI to expand their reserve by incorporating the land on which the farms are located.

Anthropologists say the indigenous community has a legitimate ancestral claim to the property in question, under the Brazilian constitution.

But the ranchers have rejected the agreement, and want the Indians to withdraw from all of the farms. “The size of a property does not define rights, and an invasion of land cannot be accepted just because a particular ranch is bigger than the others,” said the president of the Mato Grosso do Sul Federation of Agriculture and Stockbreeding, Leoncio de Brito.

But the press has reported rumors that the ranchers will hire gunmen to forcibly evict the Indians from the farms. Sebastiao de Souza, the mayor of Japorán, one of the two municipalities where the land occupations have taken place, warned of the possibility of a massacre.

The ranchers accuse the Indians of stealing and butchering cattle, and of destroying installations and infrastructure on the occupied farms.

The Guaranis, who belong to the Ñandeva sub-group, want to expand their legally demarcated property by adding 7,800 hectares from the occupied ranches to the 1,600 hectares already comprising their Aldea Puerto Lindo reserve.

The Dec. 22 land invasions were planned as a means of pressuring FUNAI to expand the reserve, as the Indians have long demanded.

Rubem Almeida, one of the two anthropologists who wrote the report that will serve as the basis for the demarcation of the territory by FUNAI, said the Guaranis are legally entitled to the land.

He pointed out that there is testimony and material evidence that the Guaranis traditionally lived on the property in question, as well as “specific documents from 1927” that confirm their legal claim to the land.

The “usurpation” of the property began in 1928, Almeida told IPS, when the government illegally sold the area to a farmer who grew “maté” — a South American herb used to produce a beverage with properties similar to those of tea — on a large-scale.

Under the Brazilian constitution, the local indigenous community has a right to that land, which cancels out the land titles reportedly held by the ranchers, who should be paid compensation by the state, said the anthropologist.

Of the estimated 34,000 Guarani Indians in Brazil, between 8,000 and 10,000 belong to the Ñandeva sub-group, according to the Socioambiental Institute, a non-governmental organization dedicated to the research and support of indigenous rights. The Guarani are also present in neighboring Argentina and Paraguay.

In Brazil, a country of 177 million, the Guaranis are concentrated in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul.

There is a high suicide rate among the Guaranis, especially the young, in Brazil. Last year, 51 suicides were reported, similar to the annual average registered over the past 10 years, Jorge Vieira, local coordinator of the Indigenist Missionary Council, a Catholic Church group, said in a conversation with IPS.

Vieira and Almeida concurred that, although scarcity of land is not the only factor underlying the high suicide rate, the expansion of the reserves is a basic condition for resolving the problem.

In the case of Aldea Puerto Lindo, there is “a clear imbalance” between the size of the local population and the 1,600 hectares comprising the reserve, said Almeida.

While only 600 Guaranis lived on the reserve 30 years ago, that total has risen fivefold since then.

The growth of the population of the reserve is one of the factors that prompted the Indians to take a more radical approach to their struggle to recover the land to which they have an ancestral claim, the anthropologist explained.

But on the other side of the dispute are the farmers and ranchers who claim to have documents proving that they are the legal owners of the land. In many cases, the people living on the farms today are the children or grandchildren of those who were originally sold the land by the government between 50 and 80 years ago.

During that period, the Brazilian government sold farmers land that, according to the current constitution enacted in 1988, belongs to indigenous communities if anthropological studies demonstrate that it formed part of their traditional homeland.

But enforcing that constitutional right involves a lengthy, complicated process which requires the formal demarcation of indigenous reserves, indemnification of farmers for the improvements, construction, and work carried out on their property, and the relocation of farmers to other areas.

There are many properties in dispute in Mato Grosso do Sul, a state that is home to several indigenous communities whose reserves shrank as the agricultural frontier expanded.

Pío Queiroz Silva, a rancher who lives in the Mato Grosso do Sul municipality of Antonio Joao, is all too familiar with the problem. Part of his property has been occupied by a group of Indians since 1998.

Red tape and FUNAI’s shortcomings have delayed a final solution, he told IPS in a telephone interview. “If the land should belong to the Indians, okay, then they should just pay me the indemnification and I’ll go elsewhere.”

Silva, 48, has spent his entire life on the farm that his father acquired from the government 54 years ago. The 4,500 hectares have now been divvied up between himself, his father and his brother.

Silva estimates that over the past five years, he has lost more than 300 head of cattle to the Indians living on his property.

He clarified, however, that “I’m not against the Indians,” and pointed out that he has set up a non-governmental organization to help them, called Recové, which means “living well” in Guarani.

But he demands respect for his own rights as an individual and a farmer who also has a legal claim to the land.

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Nixon on Chile intervention
Declassified Kissinger transcripts reveal strong
support for Pinochet following coup

Washington, DC, Feb. 3— President Richard Nixon acknowledged that he had given instructions to “do anything short of a Dominican-type action” to keep the democratically elected president of Chile from assuming office, according to a White House audio tape posted by the National Security Archive today. A phone conversation captured by his secret Oval Office taping system reveals Nixon telling his press secretary, Ron Zeigler, that he had given such instructions to then US Ambassador Edward Korry, “but he just failed, the son of a bitch ... he should have kept Allende from getting in.”

A transcript of the president’s comments on March 23, 1972, made after the leak of corporate papers revealing collaboration between ITT and the CIA to rollback the election of socialist leader Salvador Allende, was recently published in the National Security Archive book, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability by Peter Kornbluh. The tape marks the first time Nixon can be heard discussing his orders to undermine Chilean democracy. The conversation took place as Zeigler briefed the President on a State Department press conference to contain the growing ITT/CIA scandal which included one ITT document stating that Korry had been “given the green light to move in the name of President Nixon ...to do all possible short of a Dominican Republic-type action to keep Allende from taking power.”

Other declassified records show that Nixon secretly ordered maximum CIA covert operations to “prevent Allende from coming to power or unseat him” in the fall of 1970, but that Ambassador Korry was deliberately not informed of covert efforts to instigate a military coup.

When the White House-ordered covert operations failed to prevent Allende’s November 3, 1970 inauguration, Nixon’s national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, lobbied vigorously for a hard-line US policy “to prevent [Allende] from consolidating himself when we know he is weaker than he will ever be and when he obviously fears our pressure and hostility,” according to a previously unknown eight-page briefing paper prepared for the President on November 5, 1970.

In the secret/sensitive “memorandum for the president,” Kissinger claimed that Allende’s election posed “one of the most serious challenges ever faced in the hemisphere” and that Nixon’s “decision as to what to do about it may be the most historic and difficult foreign affairs decision you will have to make this year.”

The memorandum reveals that Kissinger forcefully pressed the President to overrule the State Department’s position that there was little Washington could do to oppose the legitimately elected president of Chile and that the risks for U.S. interests of intervening to oppose him were greater than coexisting with him. “If all concerned do not understand that you want Allende opposed as strongly as we can, the result will be a steady drift toward the modus vivendi approach,” Kissinger informed Nixon.

Kissinger personally requested an hour to brief Nixon on November 5 in preparation for a National Security Council meeting to discuss Chile strategy the next day. The briefing paper records his threat perception of an Allende government as a model for other countries. As Kissinger informed the president: “The example of a successful elected Marxist government in Chile would surely have an impact on — an even precedent value for — other parts of the world, especially in Italy; the imitative spread of similar phenomena elsewhere would in turn significantly affect the world balance and our own position in it.” According to a transcript of the NSC meeting published in The Pinochet File, Nixon told his aides the next day that “our main concern is the prospect that [Allende] can consolidate himself and the picture projected to the world will be his success.”

“This document is the Rosetta stone for deciphering the motivations of Kissinger and Nixon in undermining Chilean democracy,” said Peter Kornbluh, who directs the Archive’s Chile Documentation Project. “It reinforces the judgement of history on Kissinger’s role as the primary advocate of overthrowing the Allende government.”

The Archive also posted today a series of declassified transcripts of Kissinger’s staff meetings after he became Secretary of State. The transcripts, dated from the days following the coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power through the first several years of his regime’s repression in Chile, record Kissinger’s attitude toward human rights atrocities and mounting Congressional pressure to curtail US economic and military assistance to the military regime. They are quoted at length in Kornbluh’s book, The Pinochet File, and recently cited in the New York Times Week in Review section (Dec. 28, 2003).

Source: National Security Archive

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Strong opposition to secret trials in UK

By Sanjay Suri

London, England, Feb. 3 (IPS)— A proposal for secret trials for suspected terrorists has run into a wall of opposition in Britain.

Civil rights groups, lawyers, the opposition Conservative Party and even Labor leaders have strongly opposed new proposals outlined by Home Secretary David Blunkett, towards the end of a six-day visit to India last week.

Under these proposals British terror suspects could be tried at least partly in secret. The burden of proof would be lowered from the requirement of “beyond all reasonable doubt” at present. A suspect could be convicted “on the balance of probabilities.”

A pool of security-vetted judges would hear evidence, and terror suspects would be defended by security-vetted lawyers. The lawyers would not be given sensitive evidence.

The judges would be able to rely on confidential information from security and intelligence sources, rather than the usual police charges presented in open court by the Crown Prosecution Service.

The proposals are aimed particularly at stopping suicide bombers. They seek to give the police the right to take “pre-emptive action” which would amount to detention based on intelligence information.

Britain introduced the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 (ACTSA) following 9/11 to hold secret trials and detain foreign citizens indefinitely. Fourteen men have been in detention without trial for close to two years under this Act.

Some elements of the legislation also applies to British subjects if Blunkett has his way.

“This is the law of the jungle,” chief executive of the independent Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI), Habib Rahman told IPS. “This kind of thing is simply not on in any democratic society. Draconian measures were introduced earlier, and now there are more. We do not know where this is going to end.”

The new powers are hardly likely to stop suicide bombers, he said. “There is no shortage of strong laws in Israel, but these bombings are only on the rise.”

“Britain’s reputation as a country with civilized laws is bound to be tarnished by such measures,” Rahman said. “There is no shortage of despotic regimes, and if Britain has such laws, with what face can it talk to the others?”

Labor member of the House of Lords and leading barrister Helena Kennedy told the BBC Radio 4’s Today program: “It is as if David Blunkett takes his lessons on jurisprudence from Robert Mugabe (president of Zimbabwe). He really is a shameless authoritarian.”

The Conservative Party, which has traditionally been seen as the party of the right in Britain, joined civil liberty groups in challenging the proposal by a Labor minister. Shadow home secretary, David Davis, said that the move to lower the burden of evidence behind closed doors was hardly “an advance in our justice system.”

Davis said terrorists wanted to target the west because they “hate our civilization.” He added in an interview on BBC: “What are we fighting for if we throw away the very freedoms we are fighting for?”

Amnesty International said that if implemented, these measures would “dispense with justice, the rule of law, and human rights in the UK.”

Amnesty said: “Instead of further undermining the rule of law and human rights, the UK authorities should start to pay attention to the concerns currently being expressed by people and organizations from many different walks of life.”

The detention of 14 foreign nationals has “already created a small Guantanamo Bay in the UK,” Amnesty said. “Any measures to extend these measures to UK citizens must be resisted.”

While outlining his proposals, Blunkett spoke in India on the need to “deal with these delicate issues of proportionality and human rights on the one hand and evidential base and the threshold of evidence on the other.”

He said: “That is quite a challenge because we are having to say that the nature of what people obtain through the security and intelligence route is different to the evidence gained through the policing route.”

The timing of Blunkett’s proposal is being seen by many commentators as particularly unfortunate because it came only days before Prime Minister Tony Blair was forced to order an inquiry into intelligence reports that seem to have gone badly wrong.

These reports suggested that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that could be deployed within 45 minutes. This intelligence was cited as the justification for invading Iraq.

Now Blunkett wants laws to make allegations from discredited intelligence agencies admissible as evidence in secret court proceedings.