BY TRUDY RUBIN

TRUBIN@PHILLYNEWS.COM

(C)2009 The Philadelphia Inquirer

The Miami Herald -link to original article

How could anyone release the only man convicted in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103? Does anyone really believe that Scottish officials sent Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi back to Libya for “compassionate” reasons? Yes, the former Libyan intelligence agent is purportedly dying of cancer. But as a London Times columnist asked: Would the same Scots release Robert Black, the Scottish serial killer of young girls, if he were on death’s door?

Clearly something is going on here that has little to do with compassion. Americans, who remember the Lockerbie tragedy with horror, deserve to know the real reason Megrahi was freed.

The most likely possibility falls under the heading “business and blackmail.” The Brits have extensive trade interests in Libya, and Megrahi had become an obstacle to them. (No one believes British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s claim that the decision rested solely with Scottish officials.)

As Saif Gadhafi, a son of Libya’s leader, put it last week, “In all commercial contracts for oil and gas with Britain, Megrahi was always on the negotiating table.” His father, the mercurial Moammar, went out of his way to embarrass Brown, along with Queen Elizabeth and her son Prince Andrew (a regular visitor to Libya on trade missions), by thanking them publicly for their alleged role in Megrahi’s release.

The British had been seeking to unload Megrahi for some time since Gadhafi’s renunciation of terrorism and his scrapping of Libya’s weapons of mass destruction in 2003. Gadhafi made clear that lucrative oil deals depended on Megrahi’s repatriation.

Moreover, Gadhafi has been using his oil and gas wealth to blackmail Europeans into accepting his unorthodox behavior. Over the past year, the Libyan leader waged economic war against the Swiss after his son Hannibal, a reputed playboy, was briefly arrested by police in a Geneva hotel based on complaints that he had been beating his servants.

In response, Gadhafi cut off crucial oil supplies to Switzerland and made two Swiss citizens living in Tripoli virtual hostages. After the Swiss president made a groveling apology, Libya promised to restore normal relations and to let the hostages go.

British expats were threatened with similar reprisals if Megrahi died in prison, according to The London Times. So home he went.

There is a second, but less likely, possible explanation for the Megrahi decision. Some argue the Brits knew that Megrahi wasn’t guilty, and Iran was the true culprit. So why not release him? (Never mind that a neutral Scottish court found him guilty.)

To lay that one to rest, I spoke by phone with Vincent Cannistraro, a former head of counterterrorism at the CIA who directed the agency’s Pan Am 103 investigation. Cannistraro told me the evidence at first implicated a Damascus-based Palestinian group, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — General Command (PFLP-GC), which was working on behalf of Iran. Tehran had authorized and funded the bombing, he said, as a reprisal for the accidental U.S. shoot-down of an Iranian civilian airliner over the Persian Gulf in July 1988.

But this operation was foiled in October 1988 by German intelligence, which broke up a PFLP-GC cell in Frankfurt. The Lockerbie bombing happened two months later.

Cannistraro believes the PFLP-GC handed off the operation to the Libyans. The explosive device that destroyed Pan Am 103 was placed in a Toshiba cassette player — just like the bombs found in the Frankfurt bust.

“The methodology of the boom box was very coincidental,” Cannistraro said. “To me, this meant that Libya picked up the technology from the PFLP-GC, which had active members in Tripoli.” He added firmly: “There is no question in my mind that the Libyans carried this operation off.”

Among the other questions is what role, if any, the Obama administration had in it. After all, 180 of 270 passengers on Pan Am 103 were Americans. The British press claims Attorney General Eric Holder was informed in advance.

Once Megrahi was released, it was dumb for the Brits or the Americans to expect Gadhafi to refrain from giving him a big public reception.

Obama’s engagement policy can’t preclude serious consequences for Libya for continuing to glorify Megrahi. “The man who organized the hero’s welcome for Megrahi was the one who ordered the Lockerbie bombing — Moammar Gadhafi,” says Cannistraro. “He stuck his finger in our eye.”

By Dan Balz

Wednesday, August 26, 2009 

Washington Post - link to original article

No matter which way he turns, President Obama can’t seem to shake the legacy of George W. Bush’s presidency. On two issues this week, the Obama administration broke with and embraced the policies of his predecessor, drawing criticism on successive days from both ends of the political spectrum.

The biggest break came with the decision Monday by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to initiate an investigation into allegations of detainee abuse by CIA interrogators and contractors.

Obama, who in his first days as president ordered an end to the agency’s harshest interrogation techniques, has said repeatedly that he does not wish to re-litigate the past or subject officials to criminal prosecution if they believed they were operating within parameters approved by their superiors. Holder’s decision undercuts Obama’s desire to move forward.

The appointment of career prosecutor John H. Durham to determine whether there is enough evidence to warrant prosecutions does not guarantee that criminal charges will be filed. But the decision keeps the controversy alive indefinitely at a time when Obama has more than enough controversies to occupy him.

The decision pleased neither liberal nor conservative critics. Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, argued that there is more than enough evidence to warrant prosecutions and accused Holder of “appeasing the political interests in Washington.”

Former vice president Richard B. Cheney weighed in late Monday with a statement to the Weekly Standard. He said Holder’s decision to hold CIA officials up for possible prosecution and a separate administration policy removing authority over detainee interrogations from the CIA are proof that the Obama administration cannot be trusted to protect national security.

“He’s clearly carved out a middle course of not wanting the most egregious behaviors to pass uninvestigated while not wanting judgment of the Bush administration as the centerpiece of his administration,” said Robert Borosage of the progressive Campaign for America’s Future. Obama, he added, “bent over backward to be sensitive and probably has paid a political price for it.”

On the same day Holder made his announcement, it became clear that some elements of the Bush administration’s policies for handling suspected terrorists would continue. The current administration will continue the policy of rendition — shipping suspects abroad for interrogation — although, administration officials insist, under stricter guidelines that will prevent them from being tortured.

That was the latest example of an area of continuity between Obama’s and Bush’s national security policies, particularly the policies that were in practice during the last years of Bush’s presidency.

The most obvious area of continuity in foreign policy involves two of the key architects of Bush’s policies in the final two years of his presidency. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Gen. David H. Petraeus, the head of U.S. Central Command, continue to play central roles in military and security policy of the Obama administration.

In Afghanistan, Obama’s departures from Bush’s policies have been aimed at augmenting the size of U.S. forces and stepping up the nation’s commitment to the war there. In Iraq, Obama has ordered a withdrawal of U.S. forces, as he pledged during the campaign, but on a slightly elongated timetable. In reality, given the relative success of Bush’s troop surge policy and the agreements negotiated at the end of his administration, the shift from U.S. to Iraqi dominance in securing the country was already in the works.

In other areas of national security policy, Obama has made alterations but not always full breaks with Bush. In some cases, he has repackaged the rhetoric that describes these policies, but Bush administration officials see clear links.

“None of these are exact replicas of what Bush as doing, of course, and Obama and his team have an interest in not drawing parallels to what Bush & Company did,” Bush White House official Peter Wehner said in an e-mail Tuesday. “But they exist.”

The following day, when the administration’s new forecasts said the country would rack up an additional $9 trillion in debt over the next decade, officials pointed to a series of Bush administration policies that they said had irresponsibly contributed to the deficit. Though they said the steeper-than-expected recession played a major role, the officials also cast blame on Bush’s tax cuts, a prescription drug bill that was not paid for, and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that were never truly accounted for in the budget.

At the same time, Obama interrupted his vacation on Martha’s Vineyard to announce that he had decided to nominate Ben S. Bernanke to a second term as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, keeping the Bush appointee in place for another four years. Obama praised Bernanke for his boldness and creativity in dealing with the financial crisis that began to spiral late in last year’s presidential campaign.

Bernanke was part of a three-person team during the waning days of the Bush administration that took the first steps designed to stabilize the financial markets and prevent the economy from slipping into a depression. The others were then-Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson and Timothy F. Geithner, then the head of the New York Federal Reserve Bank and now Paulson’s successor at Treasury.

Together they helped initiate, with Bush’s blessing, the financial industry bailouts that have continued under Obama — to the dismay of some of the current president’s liberal allies.

Tom Mann of the Brookings Institution said Obama’s moves amount to embracing the Bush legacy while trying to walk away from it. “It was changes made by Bush late in his tenure . . . that are more readily embraced by President Obama.” Those policies, he said, most seem to rankle Cheney.

Where there is continuing conflict with Bush policies, Mann said, it is “with the original Bush and the unchanging Cheney, while the overlap is to be seen in some of the more pragmatic moves made near the end of Bush’s term.”

All this leaves Obama in an uncomfortable position, drawing fire from conservatives while making his liberal friends nervous. It is a clear example of the difference between campaigning for president and actually being president.

By GLENN GARVIN

Miami Herald - link

ggarvin@MiamiHerald.com

There’s been no formal announcement yet, but I think Woody Allen must be remaking Bananas, his old comedy about Latin American politics. Really: When Argentine president Cristina Fernandez tells the Organization of American States that the miliary coup in Honduras amounted to ”kidnapping the democratic restoration in Latin America,” how could it be anything but a punch line? And the joke — a very sad and expensive one — is the OAS.

An organization that can, with a straight face, expel Honduras as a threat to democracy barely a month after inviting Cuba (50 years without elections and still counting) to join, has lost any claim to serious consideration, much less the funding of American taxpayers.

Founded in 1948, the OAS is an artifact of the Cold War, originally intended to resist Soviet mischief in Latin America. How much it really accomplished in that regard, and at what cost, are open to debate. But what isn’t arguable is that for the past 30 years, the OAS has devolved into a pack of circus clowns who perform political somersaults for the amusement of the region’s leftists — all on the nickel of U.S. taxpayers, who put up more than 60 percent of the OAS budget.

The OAS double standard on democracy dates at least to the late 1970s, when it worked to oust Nicaragua’s anti-communist Somoza dynasty while breathing not a word about Omar Torrijos, the vicious left-wing military dictator just over the hill in Panama.

But in the past decade, the organization has outdone itself. If the OAS were a sports team, its official mascot would be a pipe cleaner, its motto Capable of bending around any corner.

The rule of law? That’s very important for a centrist government in Honduras — so much so that the OAS has appointed itself the ultimate arbiter of the country’s constitution, overruling the Honduran supreme court. Not so much in Venezuela, where leftist strongman Hugo Chávez sent mobs to Caracas city hall to keep a victorious opposition candidate from taking office after he won election last year.

The sanctity of elections? Absolutely crucial in Honduras, where the OAS insists that Chávez’s sock-puppet Manuel Zelaya be returned to power to serve out the final six months of his term even though practically every political force in the country opposes him. But much less so for Nicaragua, where President Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista party was so obvious in its theft of 40 mayoral elections last fall that even the ordinarily sympathetic European Union cut off aid.

Toppling elected governments? That’s an authoritarian affront to the hemisphere if it’s done by the army in Honduras and participatory democracy when it happens at the hands of leftist mobs in Ecuador, where Jamil Mahuad was forced out in 2000. (Pssst! Don’t tell the OAS, but the Ecuadoran army helped, too!) Or in Bolivia, where two presidents in two years were driven from office by machete-wielding gangs loyal to cocaine socialist Evo Morales — who, in an amazing coincidence, was elected president right afterward.

Literally nothing — not even captured documents showing that he was supplying money, oil and weapons (including anti-aircraft missiles) to Marxist guerrillas in neighboring Colombia — can prod the OAS into breathing a word against Chávez and his left-wing cronies.

The organization’s left-eye-blindness reached terminal levels in the wake of last month’s coup, when the OAS ignored Chávez’s ranting threats to invade, then blandly cited ”the principle of nonintervention in the internal affairs of other states” as its justification for expelling Honduras and threatening the broke little country with economic sanctions. As Woody Allen said in Bananas, “It’s a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham.”

The decision follows weeks of furious internal debate and will likely please Israel and Jewish groups that lobbied against U.S. participation but upset human rights advocates and some in the African-American community.

AP - link

Saturday, April 18, 2009

The Obama administration has decided “with regret” to boycott a U.N. conference on racism next week over objectionable language in the meeting’s final document that could single out Israel for criticism and restrict free speech, the State Department said Saturday.

The decision follows weeks of furious internal debate and will likely please Israel and Jewish groups that lobbied against U.S. participation but upset human rights advocates and some in the African-American community who hoped President Obama, as the nation’s first black president, would decide to send an official delegation.

The administration had wanted to attend the April 20-25 meeting in Geneva, although it warned in late February that it would not go unless significant changes were made to the draft text.

Some revisions — including the removal of specific critical references to Israel and problematic passages about the defamation of religion — were negotiated.

But the State Department said the text retains troubling elements that suggest support for restrictions on free speech and an affirmation of the findings of the first World Conference Against Racism, held in Durban, South Africa, in 2001 that the U.S cannot endorse.

“Unfortunately, it now seems certain these remaining concerns will not be addressed in the document to be adopted by the conference next week,” State Department spokesman Robert Wood said in a statement. “Therefore, with regret, the United States will not join the review conference.”

Concern is high that the meeting may descend into heated debate over Israel that marred the last such gathering eight years ago, especially since Iran’s hardline president — who has called for Israel’s destruction — will attend.

The Durban meeting was dominated by quarrels over the Middle East and the legacy of slavery.

The United States, under the Bush administration, and Israel walked out over attempts to liken Zionism — the movement to establish a Jewish state in the Holy Land — to racism. The reference was later dropped, but concerns about anti-Semitism remained in the final text.

Plans to reaffirm the 2001 document were of particular concern to the Obama administration.

“(It) singles out one particular conflict and prejudges key issues that can only be resolved in negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians,” Wood said.

Planning for the upcoming meeting, which is to review progress made in fighting racism since Durban, has been underway for months and was shunned by the Bush administration.

But once Obama took office, his team decided to engage in the process as part of its broader aim of reaching out to the international community.

After sending delegates to a preparatory meeting, the administration announced on Feb. 27 that it would not participate in further planning talks or the conference itself unless the changes were made.

In the weeks that followed, the U.S. pressed its European allies to lobby for an acceptable text and officials had held out hope until earlier this week that the negotiations would produce an acceptable document.

Possible participation by Washington remained on the table, pending the changes, even after it was learned that Iran’s hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — who has called for the destruction of Israel — would go.

Pro-Israel groups in the United States vehemently opposed U.S. participation while human rights advocates and organizations like TransAfrica and members of the Congressional Black Caucus thought it was important to attend.

Just hours before Saturday’s announcement, Human Rights Watch appealed for the U.S. to go, saying it “should stand with the victims of racism.”

AP - link

Saturday, April 18, 2009

The United Nations’ top torture investigator criticizes Obama’s decision not to prosecute CIA agents for detainee treatment that has deemed torture

VIENNA — President Barack Obama’s decision not to prosecute CIA operatives who used questionable interrogation practices violates international law, the U.N.’s top torture investigator said Saturday.

On Thursday, Obama absolved CIA officers from prosecution for harsh, painful interrogation of terror suspects under the former Bush administration. The announcement was met with disappointment from human rights groups and former detainees who condemned such methods as torture.

In a brief telephone interview with The Associated Press, Manfred Nowak, an Austrian who serves as a U.N. special rapporteur in Geneva, said the United States had committed itself under the U.N. Convention against Torture to make torture a crime and to prosecute those suspected of engaging in it.

“They are party to the convention and the convention is very, very clear,” Nowak said when asked to confirm comments contained in an interview he gave Austria’s Der Standard newspaper. “The fact that you carried out an order doesn’t relieve you of your responsibility,” he said, adding it could be a mitigating factor.

Nowak, who said he would soon travel to Washington for meetings with officials, also called for a comprehensive independent investigation into the matter and added it was important to compensate the victims.

“Now we need to know all the facts — not just bits and pieces,” Nowak said. “First you need the truth and then you need justice.”

The Obama administration on Thursday also released secret CIA memos detailing interrogation tactics sanctioned under Bush.

The memos authorized keeping detainees naked, in painful standing positions and in cold cells for long periods of time. Other techniques included depriving them of solid food and slapping them. Sleep deprivation, prolonged shackling and threats to a detainee’s family also were used.

As ever, countries have interests, not friends.

By JOSEF JOFF

Wall Street Journal - link

Nearly 100 days into Barack Obama’s presidency and he is still a rock star in Europe, as evidenced by the large crowds that turned out to cheer him at the recent G-20 summit in London and NATO summit in Strasbourg, France.

George W. Bush was heartily disliked in Europe west of Warsaw, and Mr. Obama is universally loved. But how well does that popularity translate into power? How far could President Obama push his agenda with, say, German Chancellor Angela Merkel or French President Nicolas Sarkozy? About as far as you can throw a piano.

At the G-20 summit in London, Frau Merkel politely said nein to Mr. Obama’s entreaties about adding billions to the German economic stimulus pot. (Actually, it was a sheer pleasure to watch the Europeans, who have never seen a government expenditure they didn’t like, celebrate fiscal discipline in the face of U.S. profligacy).

Afghanistan? Mr. Obama asked his European allies to contribute more troops and put them where the fighting is — mainly in the embattled south. This is where the Anglo powers bear the brunt of warfare while the French, Germans and Italians remain happily ensconced in the quieter north. Though Mr. Obama says he received “strong and unanimous support” on Afghanistan from his NATO partners in Strasbourg, he got no additional troop commitments. The Europeans are happy to see the U.S. president add another 19,000 American troops to the 38,000 already there. Why worry, if Mr. Big is willing to carry the load?

How about being nice to former rogue-staters like Kim Jong Il? North Korea has just kicked out the inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency and vowed to fire up its Yongbyon reactor and resume its nuclear weapons program, which may already have produced several (no one really knows how many) bombs. That, of course, was preceded by the spectacular April 5 launch of an intercontinental missile, which, though it fizzled, was intended to demonstrate North Korea’s growing capacity to deliver a warhead as far away as California.

Mr. Obama has gone out of his way to schmooze with the Iranian mullahs of “Axis of Evil” infamy. In his speeches, he has flattered and fawned over Tehran. He has followed the Europeans in throwing a huge carrot to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: It’s okay to go on enriching uranium while we talk. (George W. Bush always insisted on stopping enrichment as the price of bilateral talks.)

The result was predictable. Earlier this week, a journalist with dual American-Iranian citizenship was put on trial for espionage. This is what totalitarians love to do when facing a suddenly seductive enemy. They respond with deliberate provocation to signal “no deal” or “we want a much higher price.”

How about climate policy? The Bush administration was Beelzebub incarnate. And so, at the beginning of the U.N. climate talks in Bonn, Todd Stern, Mr. Obama’s chief climate negotiator, received a “round of rowdy applause,” as the New York Times put it. By the time the Bonn gathering ended last week, however, it was all gripes and groans. During his campaign, Mr. Obama had wowed greens with his pledge to take CO2 emissions to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050 — an impossible goal. Now, American officials are telling their friends abroad that they can’t come up with concrete steps because they need more time to prepare public opinion at home.

The Bushies could have said that, and they certainly said what Mr. Obama’s emissaries are telling the world now: that rapid-growth countries like China and India ought to curb CO2 emissions as well. Those who remember the mano-a-mano over the Kyoto Protocol will recall that Mr. Bush’s “China, too” policy was one casus belli between Europe and the U.S.

What Jonathan Pershing, Mr. Obama’s No. 2 special envoy for climate change, said in Bonn sounded like pure Bush-speak: “U.S. policy is something we are developing at home, according to what we see as the science and political capacity.” In translation: The U.S. will follow national interest as well as the electoral mood, and it won’t be bullied by the apocalypse mongers of this world.

This litany will lengthen in months to come, but it’s not too early to render a preliminary judgment on Team Obama’s foreign policy. The basic lesson, alas, is that nice guys don’t do better than meanies like Mr. Bush.

That is not how politics among nations works. The last president who excited so much enthusiasm was John F. Kennedy. Jackie did wow the French with her bow to Continental tastes, but Jack found an implacable rival in President Charles de Gaulle. Reaching out to Nikita Khrushchev in his first year, JFK went to the brink of nuclear war in his second with the Cuban missile crisis.

The point here is an old one, variously ascribed to Talleyrand, Palmerston or De Gaulle, about nations having everlasting interests rather than eternal friends or enemies. In today’s language: interest beats affection any time. Mrs. Merkel surely knows how enthralled her country is with Mr. Obama. But that’s not enough to place German soldiers in harm’s way in Afghanistan, or to run up the national debt in a country that is traumatized by inflation.

Why should Kim Jong Il part with his nuclear weapons program when it’s the only sure-fire way for an unhinged but smart dictator to get great powers to give him all sorts of goodies? Let go of the nukes, and Pyongyang will be nothing but the capital of Asia’s most cruelly backward country.

Why should Iran roll over just because the U.S. seeks to flatter and cajole? The jihadis in Tehran don’t want a nuclear bomb or use surrogates like Hamas and Hezbollah because they dislike the United States. They want hegemony over the Greater Middle East, and guess who stands in their way? Uncle Sam and Israel.

Can Mr. Obama sweet talk the European Union into more modest climate goals? No, because the Europeans believe that the U.S. is taking too much from the global commons (energy) and putting too much bad stuff into it (greenhouse gases).

“We will listen carefully,” Mr. Obama said with a view to Tehran, “we will bridge misunderstandings, and we will seek common ground.” Some 500 years ago, Francis I of France was asked what misunderstandings had fueled his constant wars with the Habsburg Empire’s Charles V. He replied: “None, we are in complete agreement. We both want control over Italy.”

Conflict between states is made from sterner stuff than bad manners or bad vibes, past grievances or imaginary fears. International politics is neither psychiatry nor a set of “see me, feel me” encounter sessions. It is about power and position, about preventing injury and protecting interests. Love and friendship move people, not nations.

Mr. Joffe is the editor of Die Zeit, the German weekly, and a fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Hoover Institution.