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Militants stage attack on US consulate
in Jeddah
Compiled by Greg White
Dec. 8 (AGR) — Five gunmen stormed the US consulate in
the Saudi Arabian port city of Jeddah on Dec. 6 and fought a three-hour
battle with security forces.
At least nine people were killed, including four of the attackers, in
the latest string of attacks on western targets in the Saudi kingdom.
Several US citizens in the compound suffered minor injuries.
Officials in the Saudi capital Riyadh denied reports that four members
of the Saudi National Guard were killed. Conflicting reports have surrounded
the incident.
Adel al-Jubeir, foreign affairs adviser to Saudi Arabia’s Crown
Prince Abdullah, told reporters that the militants approached the gate
in two vehicles and when the first vehicle was stopped at an outside
checkpoint, they got out and fought their way into the compound, firing
guns and lobbing grenades.
Witnesses reported hearing two explosions which breached the heavily-guarded
compound’s walls as the attack began. Other eyewitnesses said that
the attackers’ car exploded outside the consulate, but it was not
immediately clear if a car bomb had been used, or if the attackers had
thrown explosives after driving the car up to the consulate.
The gunmen fought their way into the complex, reportedly taking 18 staff
and visa applicants hostage for a short time before Saudi security forces
stormed the building, killing three of the attackers and arresting two
others. One of the two later died due to injuries sustained during the
attack.
Saudi TV pictures showed a military helicopter hovering over the building,
part of which was ablaze. Plumes of smoke could be seen rising into
the sky.
The building — like all US diplomatic buildings and other Western
compounds in Saudi Arabia — has been heavily fortified and guarded
since last year’s series of bombings against targets housing foreigners.
US officials in Washington said the attack appeared to have been prepared
well ahead of time.
“It’s quite clear that those terrorists who attacked our consulate
in Jeddah had observed our procedures for some time,” Deputy Secretary
of State Richard Armitage told reporters.
Saudi officials blamed a “deviant” group -- the government’s
way of referring to al-Qaida extremists. “Members of the deviant
group this morning threw explosives at the gate of the US consulate
in Jeddah and then entered the compound,” a Saudi interior ministry
official said on state television.
Adel Al-Jubeir told reporters that the gunmen claimed to be members
of an “Al-Fallujah Brigade” in a call to authorities during
the short-lived hostage standoff.
“This is the Al-Fallujah Brigade, we are in the American embassy,”
he quoted the caller as saying.
A State Department spokesman, Adam Ereli, said the authorities were
not yet certain who made the attack.
“We don’t know at this time who was responsible for the attack.
I’ve seen reports of various claims of responsibility, but frankly
I’m just not in a position to speak to their credibility or veracity,”
he said.
The Saudi branch of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network claimed
the attack in a website statement as apparent revenge for the US-led
assault on the Iraqi city of Fallujah last month.
In a swift reaction to the attack President Bush said it confirmed that
“terrorists were still on the move” and linked them to fighters
opposing the US-sponsored interim government in Iraq and elections scheduled
to be held in January.
“They want us to leave Saudi Arabia, they want us to leave Iraq,
they want us to grow timid and weary in the face of their willingness
to kill randomly, kill innocent people. That’s why these elections
in Iraq are very important,” Bush said.
After falling sharply in recent days, oil prices rose on news of the
attacks, reflecting fears about the security of Saudi oil fields, where
thousands of US civilians and other Westerners work, and which contain
a quarter of the world’s proven petroleum reserves.
The brazen nature of the attack has confirmed the worst fears of the
US that despite the closure of its bases in Saudi Arabia, and a fierce
crackdown on militant groups by the Saudi authorities, the country remains
a highly dangerous place.
The attack was the latest in a series of attacks against Westerners
since 2003, when car bombs targeted three compounds housing foreign
workers in Riyadh, killing 35 people, including nine suicide bombers.
Later that year, a suicide car bomb killed 17 people and wounded 122
at a compound for foreign workers in Riyadh.
In May of this year, 22 people, including 19 foreigners, died when insurgents
stormed a residential compound in the eastern city of Khobar, in the
main oil producing region of the country.
About 170 people including foreigners, security forces, and suspected
insurgents have been killed since the first wave of attacks in Riyadh
18 months ago.
Sources: Agence France-Presse, Al Jazeera,
Associated Press, Guardian (UK), Independent (UK)
Bolivian government up against the wall
By Franz Chávez
La Paz, Bolivia, Dec. 1 (IPS) — The Bolivian government
is facing opposition from all sides, with Congress blocking its draft
budget, and workers and community groups staging roadblocks, protests
and strikes.
Some of the roadblocks thrown up at border crossings Nov. 28 by truckers
who are demanding the elimination of the 13 percent Value Added Tax
remain in place, although the government announced the start of talks
to resolve the conflict.
Business groups and other civic organizations in the southeastern department
(province) of Potosí declared a 48-hour shutdown starting Dec.
1, to call for government measures aimed at a resurgence of the local
mining industry. They held a similar stoppage two weeks ago, sharply
criticizing the government of Carlos Mesa.
In the meantime, the Federation of Community Organizations (FEJUVE)
in the sprawling slum city of El Alto, next to La Paz, agreed to put
their protests on hold until Dec. 20, to give the government time to
address their grievances.
FEJUVE also suspended a general strike it was planning this week in
El Alto, a hotbed of labor activism and street demonstrations that was
at the center of the month-long protests that led to the toppling of
the government of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada in October 2003,
after at least 70 people were killed when the security forces were called
out to quash the demonstrations.
“This is a ‘war’ designed to wear the government down,
rather than a coup d’etat,” said Minister of the Presidency
José Antonio Galindo, referring to the protests and political
opposition — which he blamed on unidentified “political factions”
— that have the government up against the wall.
Over the past week, three explosions targeted the Defense Ministry,
a military barracks, and a TV station belonging to President Mesa.
“The government finds itself in a complicated situation, but it
is not temporary or circumstantial, because the administration has been
faced with constant social conflicts,” political analyst María
Teresa Zegada commented to IPS.
The Mesa administration, which took office after Sánchez de Lozada
was forced to resign last year, is also confronting difficulties on
the economic front since Congress voted down its draft budget.
Legislators are opposed to a $250 million cut in social spending, which
would make it impossible to raise the salaries of public employees.
The government said the proposed reduction in social spending is due
to the uncertainty regarding future tax revenues from the oil and gas
industry caused by the delay in approving a new energy law.
The Mesa administration had projected extra revenues of 90 million dollars
from the application of a tax on foreign oil companies that would have
gradually increased.
But a group of leftist lawmakers want to replace the existing contracts
with the foreign firms operating in Bolivia with new ones, under which
the royalties paid by the companies would abruptly increase from the
current 18 percent to 50 percent.
Government officials argue, however, that the contracts cannot be modified
because of commitments undertaken by the Bolivian government to respect
foreign investment, as part of bilateral accords with the countries
where the oil companies are based.
The main foreign investors in Bolivia, which has the second largest
reserves of natural gas in South America after Venezuela — 53 trillion
cubic feet — are from Brazil, the US, Britain, and Spain.
Congress has opposed the government’s version of a new energy law,
which has delayed its passage. The question is scheduled to be debated
again on Dec. 7.
In the meantime, Bolivia’s natural gas wealth has failed to improve
living conditions in what remains South America’s poorest country.
According to the National Institute of Statistics, 61 percent of Bolivia’s
9.2 million people live below the poverty line, with one-third living
in extreme poverty. However, other sources put the poverty rate at 70
percent or higher.
Mesa is also facing difficulties in the legal sphere, where the Constitutional
Court struck down his appointment of a new attorney-general and nine
district attorneys.
The president argued that he was forced to directly designate the judicial
authorities, without seeking legislative approval, due to the delays
in Congress.
Although some analysts and media outlets have expressed concern over
the government’s weakness, sociologist Joaquín Saravia told
IPS that over the past year, the continuing conflicts have found channels
that lead to solutions, which means there is no threat to democracy.
For her part, Zegada said Bolivia’s democratic system is entering
a process of “reconfiguration of the political and party system,”
which started on Dec. 5, when some 4.5 million voters will be eligible
to choose mayors and town councilors for 327 municipal governments,
from a total of 13,000 different candidates.
Parties and candidates are vying for leadership in the local elections,
to position themselves with a view to the 2007 general elections, she
said.
Zegada noted that traditionally strong parties like the Nationalist
Revolutionary Movement and the Movement of the Revolutionary Left have
taken a low profile in the campaign for the municipal elections, by
contrast with increasingly popular newer parties like the Movement Without
Fear, led by lawyer Juan del Granado, a former mayor of La Paz who is
running for that post again.
Another party that is growing in strength is the Movement to Socialism,
led by indigenous lawmaker Evo Morales, the leader of Bolivia’s
coca farmers.
In the 2002 elections, Morales was the presidential candidate who took
the second-largest number of votes.
Civic associations and indigenous organizations that have won recognition
from the electoral court will also participate in the local elections
with their own candidates, for the first time ever.
US kept quiet on Chávez plot
Compiled by Eamon Martin
Dec. 8 (AGR)— The US government knew of an imminent plot
to oust Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez, in the weeks
prior to a 2002 military coup that briefly unseated him, newly released
CIA documents show, despite White House claims to the contrary a week
after the putsch.
Yet the United States, which depends on Venezuela for nearly one-sixth
of its oil, never warned the Chávez government, Venezuelan
officials said this week.
The US was the only country in the Americas to recognize the coup-installed
illegal military junta led by multimillionaire chamber of commerce
head Pedro Carmona, which lasted just two days before a popular uprising
forced the triumphant return of Chávez. The New York Times
opined in an editorial on Apr. 13 before the coup unraveled, “Venezuelan
democracy is no longer threatened by a would-be dictator.”
With the rapid overthrow of the military junta, the US was forced
to retreat from its support. However, the US Congress-controlled National
Endowment for Democracy (NED), whose stated role is to help “further
democracy in the region,” actually increased its funding to groups
that helped organize the coup in its immediate aftermath.
Now, documentary proof has emerged that the CIA was not only fully
aware of the plans for a coup in advance, but also knew how it would
unfold. Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and
made public last week prove that the US lied when it pretended not
to know of coup plans. An Apr. 6, 2002, top-secret intelligence brief
headlined “Venezuela: Conditions Ripening for Coup Attempt”
states, “Dissident military factions… are stepping up efforts
to organize a coup against President Chavez, possible as early as
this month, [CENSORED]…To provoke military action, the plotters
may try to exploit unrest stemming from opposition demonstrations
slated for later this month…”
This is exactly what happened.
“This is substantive evidence that the CIA knew in advance about
the coup, and it is clear that this intelligence was distributed to
dozens of members of the Bush administration, giving them knowledge
of coup plotting,” said Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the
National Security Archive in Washington.
The documents — called Senior Executive Security Briefs —
are one level below the highest-level Presidential Daily Briefs and
are circulated among about 200 top-level US officials, Kornbluh said.
All the CIA documents were heavily censored before being released.
Chavez lashed out at US officials on Dec. 2, saying, “The CIA
knew that a coup was coming...the government of George Bush knew.”
“Having a government of this type in the United States is a threat
to the world,” added Chavez, who accused the Bush administration
of actively supporting the short-lived coup.
The funding of the NED has provided more than three million dollars
since late 2001 to opposition groups, many of which were key participants
in the coup.
In June 2002, the US Agency for International Development, set up
an Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) in the US Embassy in Caracas,
allegedly for the purposing of helping Venezuela to resolve its political
crisis. The OTI in Caracas has counted on more than $15 million in
funding from Congress since June 2002 and has recently requested five
million more for 2005, despite the fact that it was only supposed
to be a two-year endeavor. All evidence obtained to date shows that
the OTI has primarily funded opposition groups and projects in Venezuela,
particularly those that were focused on the Aug. 15, 2004 recall referendum
against President Chávez.
In addition, Miami, Florida is now home to a growing number of strongly
anti-Chavez wealthy Venezuelans, including a number of those wanted
in Venezuela for their role in the coup. The US has so far ignored
calls from Venezuela to have those facing charges extradited.
Sources: Associated Press, Green Left
Weekly, Newsday Venezuelafoia.info
More robot grunts ready for duty
By Noah Schachtman
Orlando, Florida, Dec. 1— Hunting for guerillas, handling
roadside bombs, crawling across the caves and crumbling towns of Afghanistan
and Iraq — all of that was just a start. Now, the Army is prepping
its squad of robotic vehicles for a new set of assignments. And this
time, they’ll be carrying guns.
As early as March or April, 18 units of the Talon — a model armed
with automatic weapons — are scheduled to report for duty in
Iraq. Around the same time, the first prototypes of a new, unmanned
ambulance should be ready for the Army to start testing. In a warren
of hangar-sized hotel ballrooms in Orlando, military engineers this
week showed off their next generation of robots, as they got the machines
ready for the war zone.
“Putting something like this into the field, we’re about
to start something that’s never been done before,” said
Staff Sgt. Santiago Tordillos, waving to the black, 2-foot-six-inch
robot rolling around the carpeted floor on twin treads, an M249 machine
gun cradled in its mechanical grip.
For years, the Pentagon and defense contractors have been toying with
the idea of sending armed, unmanned ground vehicles, or UGVs, into
battle. Actually putting together the robots was a remarkably straightforward
job, said Tordillos, who works in the Army’s Armaments Engineering
and Technology Center.
Ordinarily, the Talon bomb-disposal UGV comes equipped with a mechanical
arm, to pick up and inspect suspicious objects. More than a hundred
of the robots are being used in Iraq and Afghanistan, with an equal
amount on order from the UGV’s maker, Waltham, Massachusetts-based
firm Foster-Miller.
For this new, lethal Talon model, Foster-Miller swapped the metal
limb for a remote-controlled, camera-equipped, shock-resistant tripod,
which the Marines use to fire their guns from hundreds of feet away.
The only difference: the Marines’ version relies on cables to
connect weapons and controllers, while the Talon gets its orders to
fire from radio signals instead.
“We were ready to send it a month ago,” Tordillos said.
Navigating the Pentagon bureaucracy and putting together the proper
training manuals are what’s keeping the Talon stateside, for
now.
Back in December 2003, the Army’s 1st Brigade, 25th Infantry
Division tested an armed Talon in Kuwait. Now, the brigade wants 18
of the UGVs to watch the backs of its Stryker armored vehicles.
Four cameras and a pair of night-vision binoculars allow the robot
to operate at all times of the day. It has a range of about a half-mile
in urban areas, more in the open desert. And with the ability to carry
four 66-mm rockets or six 40-mm grenades, as well as an M240 or M249
machine gun, the robots can take on additional duties fast, said GlobalSecurity.org
director John Pike.
“It’s a premonition of things to come,” Pike said.
“It makes sense. These things have no family to write home to.
They’re fearless. You can put them places you’d have a hard
time putting a soldier in.”
It’s the same goal Army-funded researchers are keeping in mind
as they develop an unmanned ambulance. The Robotic Extraction Vehicle,
or REV, is a 10-foot-long, 3,500-pound robot that can tuck a pair
of stretchers — and life-support systems — beneath its armored
skin. The idea is for battlefield medics to stabilize injured soldiers,
and then send them back to a field hospital in the REV. But the REV
also carries an electrically powered, 600-pound, six-wheeled robot
with a mechanical arm that can drag a wounded fighter to safety if
there isn’t a flesh-and-blood soldier around.
Ordinarily, it takes two to four men to get the wounded out of harm’s
way. Patrick Rowe, with Applied Perception of Pittsburgh, said he
hopes the REV will cut that number, maybe by half. The firm is scheduled
to show off prototypes of the robots to the Army’s Telemedicine
& Advanced Technology Research Center in March.
But this early version will be limited, Howe said. Ideally, the REV
would drive around on its own, with no help from human operators.
In practice, the robot would either be driven by a person with a joystick,
or it would get around by itself by sticking to carefully preplanned
routes. As the limited performances in the Pentagon’s robot off-road
rally in March showed, unmanned drivers are still pretty lousy at
handling open, unknown terrain.
That’s one of the reasons why iRobot’s new UGV will still
have a steering wheel inside, so it can be driven by a human, too.
The company — best known for its Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner
and the PackBot UGVs that the Army has been using to clear bombs and
explore suspected terrorist hideouts in the Middle East — is
now working with agricultural equipment manufacturer John Deere to
build a cargo-hauling robot.
The M-Gator is a six-wheeled, diesel mini-Jeep that soldiers use to
schlep about 1,400 pounds of gear. IRobot wants to have a robotic
version ready by next year, so it can show it off to the Army and
try to get funding for a full line of the vehicles, which would work
as mechanical pack mules. The company hopes to be in production by
2006.
By then, the armed Talon will have been in operation for about a year,
if all goes according to plan. And for those of you who might be worried
about the robot getting loose with a “runaway gun,” Tordillos
orders you to relax.
“The thing is not shooting on its own. You’ve got to have
these,” he said, waving a set of small, silvery keys, which fit
into a lock on the Talon’s briefcase-sized controller. A single
switch causes the robot to reboot and return to safe mode.
GlobalSecurity.org’s Pike isn’t worried about the Talon
going haywire. He’s concerned about what the armed UGV represents
for the future.
“This opens up great vistas, some quite pleasant, others quite
nightmarish. On the one hand, this could make our flesh-and-blood
soldiers so hard to get to that traditional war — a match of
relatively evenly matched peers — could become a thing of the
past,” he said. “But this might also rob us of our humanity.
We could be the ones that wind up looking like Terminators, in the
world’s eyes.”
Source: Wired News
Land battles a forerunner of crisis
in Paraguay
By Jorge Jorquera
Dec. 1 — A national civic strike demanding land redistribution
has come to an end in Paraguay, with hundreds of campesinos (rural
workers) still imprisoned and none of the demands of the strike met,
not withstanding continuing promises by President Nicanor Duarte to
purchase new land allotments for the landless.
The national strike was preceded by a campaign of progressive land
occupations targeting more than 50 latifundios (large landowners’
properties) that each exceeded 7,400 acres. These occupations, organized
by the Frente Nacional de Campesinos (FNC), culminated on Nov. 16,
the beginning of the civic strike. The strike was led by the Frente
Nacional de Lucha por la Soberania y la Vida (National Front of Struggle
for Sovereignty and Life — FNLSV) and the Coordinadora Obrera,
Campesina y Popular (Popular Coalition of Workers and Peasants —
COCP).
On the morning of Nov. 16, the popular assemblies of the COCP led
road blockades, including three major routes into the capital city
of Asuncion. The strike quickly mobilized more than 20,000 people
in road blockades, land occupations and street protests. While the
strike was organized to last for only one day in Asuncion, it was
indefinite in 10 of the 17 Paraguayan departments (provicences). The
government responded with the immediate mobilization of 12,000 troops,
threatening to chase the campesinos “back into the mountains,”
at the same time as organizations within the FNLSV lodged their third
application to the Supreme Court attempting to have the government’s
increasing use of the military against social protests declared unconstitutional.
Paraguay is a late comer to neoliberalism; serious privatization began
in 1999. The popular response to these reforms started with the 1999
“Paraguayan March” protests, which culminated in a massive
general strike in 2000.
Since then, the Duarte government has tried to appease the growing
social unrest with promises of land and other concessions. For example,
on Oct. 28, the Senate broadened the energy subsidy, marginally extending
the eligibility for discounts on energy bills.
However, in the cut-throat economy of Latin American neoliberalism,
the Paraguayan ruling class has no choice but to push ahead with unpopular
“reform.” While Duarte has tried to contain the social movement
in a “negotiation table” and a “Crisis Cabinet,”
the Rural Association of Paraguay (which groups together the main
big property owners) has been threatening a military coup.
The government has decreasing room to maneuver. The privatizations
and cuts to public spending have thrown tens of thousands of urban
workers into the 38.8 percent of the population that is un- or-underemployed.
At the same time, more than 300,000 families have been thrown off
their land. This is due to the so-called soy-ization of the Paraguayan
economy. The soya industry is growing at 10 percent per annum, with
over five million acres of land, half Paraguay’s cultivatable
land, taken up by genetically modified soya production. Campesinos
are selling their land to soya multinationals at $500 per aproximately
2.5 acres. The resulting influx into the streets of Asuncion, however,
means they are not finding the life of luxury they expect. Instead,
they fill the slums, like El Banado where 15,000 families just manage
to hang on to life. This is but one example in a country with a population
just over five million, where there is a deficit of 700,000 homes
and one percent of the population control 80 percent of the land.
The government has repressed this last wave of protest but the demands
of the movement — negotiations over 900,000 acres of land, a
24.3 percent wage increase, a price freeze on basic consumer goods,
increased social spending, no university fees, lowered energy prices,
and a revocation of the government decree deregulating the use of
genetically modified soy — will only gain further currency in
the months to come.
As in the rest of Latin America, we can expect a growing political
crisis in Paraguay. With the youngest population on the continent,
the Paraguayans will certainly make a fight of it.
Source: Green Left Weekly
Healing the invisible wounds of violence
By María Vega
Rome, Italy, Dec. 5 (IPS) — One billion people in the
world today are psychologically scarred by violence and armed conflicts,
a problem that brought together health ministers from around the
planet in the search for ways to help heal these invisible wounds.
Richard Mollica, director of the Harvard University Program in Refugee
Trauma, told IPS that one-sixth of the world’s population suffers
the psychological consequences of such traumatic phenomena as war,
ethnic conflicts, natural disasters, social upheavals, torture,
terrorism and landmines, which kill over 15,000 people every year
and mutilate many thousands more.
The problem, he noted, is that victims of post-conflict trauma,
especially in developing countries, rarely have access to the help
they need, and are thus doomed to lives of depression, anxiety,
nightmares and relentless fear, which seriously handicap their social
and family relations.
Nevertheless, Mollica added, it has been scientifically proven that
there is hope for recovery for these victims if a mental health
action plan were put into effect in the societies where they live.
This was the objective behind the International Congress of Ministers
of Health for Mental Health and Post-Conflict Recovery, held in
Rome Dec. 3 and 4.
The health ministers of 49 countries joined together here to establish
a plan of action based on the One Billion Project, an initiative
developed by the Harvard University program in conjunction with
the Fulbright New Century Scholars Program, the humanitarian organization
Caritas-Rome, and the Rome Higher Institute of Health.
The One Billion Project, used as a guideline for the health ministers
at the congress, has scientifically demonstrated that a mental health
action plan can be effective in helping the victims of violent situations
if it is adapted to the specific realities and cultures of each
country.
For Mollica, the health ministers play a key role in this endeavor,
and are in the best position to coordinate these kinds of activities.
The project, initiated three years ago, has explored the effects
of violence on mental health and shown that there is a direct correlation
between mental health, economic development and human rights.
It has also succeeded in disproving two long-held myths: that survivors
cannot overcome post-conflict trauma, and that there is no connection
between individual and collective recovery.
According to Mollica, however, health care initiatives alone will
not suffice. A much more comprehensive approach is needed, integrating
such elements as government policies, legislation, financing, international
cooperation, economic development, human rights, and scientific
research on mental health.
The task ahead is not an easy one. “Those of us from countries
that have lived through conflict know that it will be impossible
to solve all of the mental health-related problems, because our
resources are limited,” said José Maza, the minister
of public health and social assistance in El Salvador.
“But we can at least work towards alleviating these problems,
instead of sitting back and doing nothing,” he added.
Between 1980 and 1992, El Salvador was engulfed in a violent civil
war as government security forces and paramilitary death squads
sought to crush the leftist guerrilla insurgents and their civilian
support base. The war left roughly 75,000 dead and 7,000 “disappeared,”
and according to Maza, most of the survivors continue to suffer
the psychological effects.
The situation is especially serious in countries that face extreme
poverty and constant upheaval, such as Haiti, where it is estimated
that 70 percent of women suffer the consequences of some form of
violence, six out of ten are physically or psychologically abused,
more than 10,000 children are living on the streets, and 600,000
people have no access to health care and medicines.
To make matters worse, natural disasters left over 100,000 Haitians
homeless in 2004 alone. Nevertheless, the Haitian government representatives
attending the congress in Rome stressed that there is a marked political
will to solve these problems.
They pledged that every effort would be made to implement the action
plan and adapt it to their own realities by involving all relevant
social factors and making use of all available resources.
In Peru, the population continues to suffer such psychological effects
as depression, fear and anxiety as a consequence of the wave of
guerrilla and counterinsurgent violence that swept the country between
1980 and 2000, leaving 69,000 dead, 6,000 “disappeared,”
40,000 orphans and 20,000 widows, according to the 2003 report from
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
“In most developing countries that have suffered conflicts
and violence, existing mental health policies are insufficient,
because they have traditionally been ignored in national health
care plans,” Peruvian Health Ministry official Ricardo Bustamante
told IPS.
“In Lima, the capital, there is one psychiatrist for every
55,000 inhabitants, and in the rest of the country, the ratio is
estimated at one for every 200,000, which is clearly not nearly
enough to satisfy the country’s needs,” he noted.
In an attempt to remedy this situation, the ministry has established
mental health as one of the 10 national priorities for health-care
policy making, said Bustamante, and budgetary resources are already
being specifically earmarked for related activities.
The health ministers gathered in Rome committed themselves to promoting
the implementation of the mental health action plan in their own
countries as an official state policy.
The congress participants concurred that mental health encompasses
such factors as access to employment, education and health care,
as well as respect for human rights. Consequently, any mental health
care initiatives should be linked to fighting poverty.
For his part, Mollica stressed that the best treatment for children
suffering post-conflict trauma is school, and for adults, it is
work. Some victims need psychiatric treatment, and others require
medication, but all of them need to work and get back to a normal
life, or at least attempt to rebuild their lives, he said.
US downplays report on Guantanamo
prisoner abuse
By Jim Lobe
Washington, DC, Nov. 30 (IPS) — US officials Nov. 30
insisted that detainees held at the US naval base at Guantanamo
Bay, Cuba have been treated “humanely,” despite a Red
Cross report that concluded interrogators were using psychological
and physical techniques that were “tantamount to torture.”
“We strongly disagree with any characterization that suggests
the way detainees are being treated is inconsistent with the policies
the president has outlined,” said White House spokesman Scott
McClellan, who insisted that the Bush administration takes the Red
Cross’s concerns seriously.
“We certainly don’t think it’s torture,” Gen
Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told an audience
in Indianapolis a short time later. “Let’s not forget
the kind of people we have down there,” he added. “These
are the people that don’t know any moral values.”
But human rights groups said the latest disclosure, which was featured
in a front-page New York Times story Nov. 30, should cause renewed
alarms over US detention and interrogation practices, bolstering
their long-standing calls for a comprehensive independent investigation.
The allegation was made in a confidential report sent to US officials
last July by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
Noting that the ICRC report covered practices that continued after
the disclosure of prisoner abuse by US soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison
in Iraq in April, Deborah Pearlstein of Human Rights First (HRF)
said the information was particularly worrisome.
“It tells us two things,” she said, “that the abuse
at Abu Ghraib was only a small piece of a much larger, systematic
failure to uphold US and international laws against torture, and
that even after that abuse was revealed and condemned as unlawful
and immoral by leaders of both political parties, the government
failed to act on its moral certainty.”
According to a memo based on the ICRC report that was obtained by
the Times, US detention and interrogation operations at Guantanamo
Bay “cannot be considered other than an intentional system
of cruel, unusual and degrading treatment and a form of torture.”
Among the report’s findings, the Red Cross, which is able to
carry out the visits in exchange for maintaining confidentiality,
described the participation of physicians and other medical staff
in providing information about detainees’ mental health and
their weaknesses to interrogators, as well as the use of “humiliating
acts, solitary confinement, temperature extremes, use of forced
positions,” exposure to loud and continuous noise and beatings.
The report, according to the Times, was received in July and distributed
to lawyers at the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department,
as well as the commander of the detention facility at Guantanamo,
Gen Jay Hood. The newspaper said it had recently obtained the memo
that quotes the report’s major findings at length.
According to the Times, ICRC investigators who visited Guantanamo
in June found a system carefully designed to break the will of prisoners
held there. They also reported the techniques were “more refined
and repressive” than those they had learned about during previous
visits.
The ICRC team reportedly found a far greater incidence of mental
illness produced by stress, much of it caused by prolonged solitary
confinement, and that the fact that medical staff was cooperating
fully with interrogators had resulted in a breakdown in trust between
inmates and their doctors.
The ICRC report was found by the Times to be consistent with recent
interviews it had conducted with military guards and intelligence
agents knowledgeable about Guantanamo’s operations.
It cited one common practice at Camp Delta, the main prison facility,
which was applied to uncooperative detainees. They were forced to
strip to their underwear, sit in a chair while shackled hand and
foot to the floor, and then subjected to strobe lights and loud
rock and rap music while the air-conditioning was turned to maximum
levels.
Reed Brody, counsel for Human Rights Watch (HRW), which has also
called for an independent probe of US detention and interrogation
practices, said the accounts were also consistent with the findings
of his group.
The report also corroborated the complaints of Salim Ahmed Hamdan,
whose military commission trial was stopped Nov. 8 by a federal
court and is now pending before the Supreme Court. He had reported
months-long solitary confinement that, according to a psychiatrist,
“placed him at significant risk for future psychiatric deterioration”
and may significantly impair “his ability to assess his legal
situation and assist defense counsel.”
In an interview with IPS, Scott Horton, a prominent New York attorney
and expert on the Geneva Conventions who has been in frequent contact
with career attorneys at the Pentagon, said the practices apparently
detailed by the ICRC are consistent with a lengthy report on detention
and interrogation policies by a working group appointed by Pentagon
chief Donald Rumsfeld in 2003.
That report, which was drafted without the input of senior career
military attorneys or the State Department, drew heavily on controversial
memoranda prepared by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal
Counsel and approved by White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, who
President George W. Bush has just nominated to be attorney general.
One of those memos concluded that Bush, as commander-in-chief during
wartime, was not bound either by the United Nations Convention Against
Torture or by a federal anti-torture statute. Another memo found
that an interrogation tactic would not provide sufficiently “severe
harm” to constitute torture unless it produced pain associated
with organ failure or death.
The opinions expressed in the memos have been widely condemned as
immoral, unconstitutional and unprofessional by many of the country’s
most prominent jurists, including the past seven presidents of the
American Bar Association, as well as by the 400,000-member group
itself.
Horton said most of the career attorneys with whom he has been in
contact agreed with the administration that the techniques described
in the ICRC report did not constitute “torture,” but that
they do amount at least to “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment,”
which is also banned under the Geneva Conventions.
“Remember that the Red Cross is saying this is ‘tantamount
to torture,’ which means it may not meet the strictest definition
of the word, but it certainly amounts to cruel, inhuman and degrading
treatment,” he said.
“To say it’s torture, we’d have to know more detail
about this. But the Red Cross is THE authority on this issue, and
if they say it’s tantamount to torture, it’s going to
take a long time to convince me otherwise,” added Horton.
“When DOD (the Department of Defense) puts out these blanket
denials, they have a serious credibility problem because of those
(justice department) memos,” he added, noting that military
lawyers who have complained about the Pentagon’s attitude are
now increasingly concerned about the future of the US’s relationship
to the ICRC.
“They think that the relationship of trust that has been built
up over many years has been badly damaged,” said Horton. “The
Pentagon’s political leadership, on the other hand, just thinks
this is a public relations problem”
HRF pointed out that, despite more than 300 reported instances of
torture committed by US personnel in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo,
less than two dozen individuals—all of them low-ranking—have
been charged with a crime.
Moreover, despite a finding by one Pentagon investigation commission
last summer that there was “both institutional and personal
responsibility at higher levels” for the abuses at Abu Ghraib
and elsewhere, no institutions or senior commanders have been held
responsible.
Chemical war over Afghanistan
By Nick Meo
Dec. 1 -- British officials in Kabul have been questioned
by President Hamid Karzai after fields were reportedly sprayed with
chemicals from the air two weeks ago, leaving farmers sick. The
Kabul government is keen to find out who could have carried out
the alleged spraying, which it considers illegal, despite a stated
desire by the US and United Nations to wipe out the opium crop.
The Afghans set up an inquiry into claims by villagers near the
eastern city of Jalalabad that mystery aircraft had sprayed crops.
The British ambassador was called in for questioning and a protest
was lodged with the US after Afghan officials concluded that fields
had been crop-dusted despite Karzai being opposed to spraying.
Britain, which takes a lead role in drug eradication, is opposed
to aerial spraying, which is credited with massive reductions in
cocaine output in Colombia but at a heavy cost in damage to human
health and the environment. Many in Washington have been pressing
for aerial eradication to begin in Afghanistan, however.
Advocates have lined up private US contractors who have already
scoured the region looking for planes and pilots to hire for large-scale
operations as early as next spring, before the poppy harvest begins.
Pressure for dramatic action against Afghan opium production has
been racked up by a UN report released two weeks ago which found
that the area under poppy cultivation has increased by 64 percent
in the past year. The report said Afghanistan is turning into a
narco-state.
Last month, the US announced it was making an extra $780 million
available to fight the drugs trade, including funds for alternative
crops, important dealers being arrested, and poppy fields being
eradicated. Most eradication is expected to be done by teams of
men working in the fields.
Afghans and most aid workers fear that aerial eradication would
destroy legitimate crops and could spark rural rebellions if farmers’
livelihoods are wiped out from the air. Farmers make 10 times as
much money growing poppy as wheat, and most complain that producing
opium is the only way to survive.
President Karzai’s spokesperson Jawed Ludin said that a government
investigation confirmed that chemicals had been already sprayed,
probably from the air. “It is not just serious for us because
of some health problems, it is not just serious for us because it
harms the other crops,” he said. “It is being taken very
seriously because it affects the national integrity of our country.”
Ludin said an investigation of soil samples taken in the Shinwar
and Khogyani districts of Nangarhar province was continuing and
that the government had yet to discover who was responsible. The
province’s governor, Din Mohammed, was one of those who pointed
out that the US effectively controls Afghan airspace.
Dozens of farmers in the area complained to doctors of being sick
after planes sprayed a “snow-like” substance. Ludin said,
however: “The governments of the USA and Britain have assured
us that they also strongly subscribe to the policy that the government
has on aerial spraying.”
He said President Karzai had received assurances that they “have
never in the past and will never in the future support any aerial
spraying.”
Source: Independent (UK)
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