Just Foreign Policy News
May 28, 2009

Jubliee USA Network: Ask Your Rep to Sign the Waters IMF letter
A conference committee will meet soon to resolve differences between the House and Senate versions of the supplemental appropriations bill. Rep. Waters and others are writing to Reps. Obey and Lowey, asking them to attach real reform conditions to the International Monetary Fund money, including a ban on IMF budget cuts during recessions, as the IMF is presently imposing in Latvia. Ask your Rep. to sign.
http://www.jubileeusa.org/get-active/take-action.html

Cuba: US Concedes World "May Have Changed" Since 1962
A recent proposal by the State Department to the Organization of American States regarding Cuba’s re-entry to the OAS rises to the level of ludicrous understatement. The US proposal, along with proposals from Latin America for Cuba’s re-entry, is to be considered at the OAS meeting in Honduras next week. The US proposal concedes that "some of the circumstances since Cuba’s suspension… may have changed," since 1962. The Soviet Union, purported at the time to be a cause for Cuba’s expulsion, hasn’t existed for almost 20 years.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/cuba-us-concedes-world-ma_b_208626.html

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Summary:
U.S./Top News
1) Photographs of prisoner abuse that Obama is trying to suppress include images of rape and sexual abuse, the Telegraph reports. One picture shows a US soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee. Further photographs are said to depict sexual assaults on prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube. The Telegraph bases its claim on an interview with Gen. Taguba, in which he confirms that there were pictures of the abuses alleged in his 2004 report on Abu Ghraib.

2) At least 20 US soldiers have been killed in Iraq this month, the most since September 2008, the New York Times reports.

3) In a letter to the Washington Post, Rep. Donna Edwards rejects a claim by a Post editorial that she voted against the war supplemental because she believes "we should abandon Afghanistan and ignore the threats the region poses to the United States." She says her vote was based on the belief that the bill commits our servicemen and women to a war without end, placing them in harm’s way without a plan for being there or a strategy for leaving. She notes that only a small fraction of the money allocated for war is allocated for aid and development, contrary to experts’ recommendations.

4) International Monetary Fund demands for higher interest rates are "squeezing" businesses in Pakistan, the BBC reports. Many businesses have effectively lost access to credit due to the IMF-imposed measures, thereby further contracting Pakistan’s economy.

5) Under pressure from Latin America over Cuba’s continued exclusion from the OAS, the State Department submitted a proposal that could eventually allow Cuba to rejoin, the Miami Herald reports. [The US proposal concedes that "some of the circumstances since Cuba’s suspension… may have changed," a remarkable statement given that Cuba was suspended from the OAS in 1962, because of its alliance with the Soviet Union, which no longer exists - JFP.] The question of Cuba’s suspension is expected to be on the agenda at the OAS summit in Honduras next week.

6) The Obama administration reiterated "emphatically" that it viewed a complete freeze of construction in settlements on the West Bank as a critical step toward a peace accord between Israel and the Palestinians, the New York Times reports. Secretary of State Clinton said, Obama wants "a stop to settlements - not some settlements, not outposts, not ‘natural growth’ exceptions." Some analysts interpreted Clinton’s comments as a sign the administration was determined to change Israel’s policy on settlements rather than accept a compromise.

Israel/Palestine
7) Supporters of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank are increasing pressure on Netanyahu, the Washington Post reports. One group held a debate on whether Netanyahu’s plan to dismantle about two dozen settlement outposts means that he "has changed his opinions or whether he is just misleading the Americans." One of its leaders said "You have to fight for the outposts in order to distance the battles from the larger settlements." A human rights group said the fight over outposts was a game to distract attention from larger issues, including unenforced demolition orders against settler properties and long delays in clearing unauthorized outposts.

Lebanon
8) Hezbollah says it has talked with the IMF and the EU about continued financial support to Lebanon in the event the group’s political alliance wins the June 7 parliamentary elections, the New York Times reports. The IMF acknowledged meeting with Hizbollah but denied that future agreements were discussed.

Afghanistan
9) The Afghan government dumped more than 1,000 Shiite texts and other books from Iran into a river after a local governor complained that their content insulted the country’s Sunni majority, AP reports. Shiite leaders denounced the news as evidence of discrimination against the country’s Shiite minority.

Pakistan
10) Taliban groups claimed responsibility for an assault in Lahore that killed at least two dozen people and wounded nearly 300, the New York Times reports. One of the statements said the attack was retaliation for the offensive in Swat.

Haiti
11) Haitian-Americans continue to pressure the Obama Administration to halt deportations to Haiti, the New York Times reports. Haitian advocates say they have heard that the government has been detaining and deporting only those with criminal records, rather than those accused solely of immigration violations. A spokeswoman for ICE said the government would continue to detain and deport Haitians who violate immigration laws but that under a recent agreement with the Haitian government, the US was focusing on those with criminal records.

Contents:
U.S./Top News
1) Rape And Sex Abuse Pictured In Abu Ghraib
Duncan Gardham and Paul Cruickshank, Telegraph, 28 May 2009
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/5395830/Abu-Ghraib-abuse-photos-show-rape.html

Photographs of alleged prisoner abuse which Barack Obama is attempting to censor include images of apparent rape and sexual abuse, it has emerged.

At least one picture shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee.

Further photographs are said to depict sexual assaults on prisoners with objects including a truncheon, wire and a phosphorescent tube.

Another apparently shows a female prisoner having her clothing forcibly removed to expose her breasts.

Detail of the content emerged from Major General Antonio Taguba, the former army officer who conducted an inquiry into the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq.

Allegations of rape and abuse were included in his 2004 report but the fact there were photographs was never revealed. He has now confirmed their existence in an interview with the Daily Telegraph.

2) Bomb Kills G.I. in Baghdad as Attacks Keep Rising
Timothy Williams, New York Times, May 28, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/28/world/middleeast/28iraq.html

Baghdad - An American soldier and four Iraqi civilians died Wednesday when a bomb exploded on a Baghdad street as a United States military patrol drove past, officials said.

The death of the soldier, whose name was not released, brings to at least 20 the number of American soldiers who have died this month, the most since September 2008, when 25 service members died.

3) Getting It Right On Afghanistan
Rep. Donna Edwards, Letter, Washington Post, Thursday, May 28, 2009
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/27/AR2009052703239.html

The May 17 editorial "Mr. Obama’s War?" implied incorrectly that my opposition to the supplemental appropriations bill was because I believe we should abandon Afghanistan and ignore the threats the region poses to the United States. To the contrary, having returned recently from Afghanistan, my vote was based on the belief that this bill commits our servicemen and women to a war without end, placing them in harm’s way without a plan for being there or a strategy for leaving. I share Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s assessment that "Afghanistan . . . poses an even more complex and difficult long-term challenge than Iraq - one that, despite a large international effort, will require a significant U.S. military and economic commitment for some time."

Unfortunately, this legislation did not include a comprehensive approach that even Gates acknowledged is necessary. Instead, only $2.05 billion of the $33.6 billion appropriated is dedicated to foreign aid and development funding, despite experts’ recommendations. After eight years of failure, the American people and our servicemen and women deserve a plan that defines what winning means and how we accomplish it. Congress failed its responsibility leading up to the Iraq war, yet here we are once again. President Obama inherited this situation from President George W. Bush, who ignored needs in Afghanistan to go to war in Iraq. Now, I only hope we get it right.

4) Pakistan business fighting on all fronts
James Melik, BBC World Service, 27 May 2009
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8062949.stm

Not so long ago Pakistan was being described as one of the booming Asian Tigers, but now its economy more resembles a whimpering pussycat.

As the government continues its military campaign in the Swat valley in the north, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children have fled the fighting, losing their homes and livelihoods.

The turmoil has had serious effects on business and the wider economy.

Pakistan is suffering from falling foreign investment, a weakened currency, a badly bruised stock market, and economic growth that is predicted to be half what it was last year.

The country was forced to turn to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a $7.6bn (£5.2bn) rescue package towards the end of 2008.

But the money came with strings - unpopular austerity measures including higher interest rates to tackle inflation.
…
Mr Shah also bemoans the fact that interest rates have risen so high, which effectively means businesses cannot avail themselves of the credit facilities on offer.

It is not just military action that is having a destructive effect on Pakistan’s economy however.

The International Monetary Fund gave Pakistan an emergency loan facility, on condition that the government tried to bring down raging inflation which peaked at 25% per cent in the summer of 2008, by raising interest rates and taxes - which has been putting the squeeze on business.

5) U.S. changes stance on Cuba’s inclusion in OAS
Frances Robles, Miami Herald, Wed, May 27, 2009
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/americas/story/1067519.html

Cuba’s decades-old suspension from the Organization of American States appears to be coming to an end.

As more countries clamor to lift the communist country’s 1962 suspension from the hemispheric group, the U.S. State Department threw a curve ball at the debate late Tuesday by submitting a new proposal that would eventually allow Cuba back to the OAS - as long as Havana abides by the organization’s democratic principles.

The OAS meets Wednesday in Washington to review three proposals submitted that ultimately reach the same goal: an end to Cuba’s suspension.

Just how the suspension should be lifted will be taken up at the group’s permanent council meeting in Washington, where they will hammer out a final agenda for thegeneral assembly next week in San Pedro Sula, Honduras.

The council will decide which of the three proposals submitted that lift Cuba’s suspension will be voted on in Honduras.

Nicaragua submitted a resolution calling for Cuba’s suspension to be lifted because it is an "unjust affront to the OAS" that "violates international law." Honduras also submitted a resolution in more straight-forward language asking for sanctions against Cuba to be lifted, according to a draft agenda of the meeting.

At the last minute, Costa Rica’s proposal to study the issue before one of the OAS’ legal commissions was replaced by one from the U.S. State Department.

"Any effort to admit Cuba into the OAS is really in Cuba’s hands," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in remarks to Congress last week. "They have to be willing to take the concrete steps necessary to meet those principles. We’ve been very clear about that -move toward democracy, release political prisoners, respect fundamental freedoms. That is what it means to be a member of the OAS."

The U.S. proposal calls for the OAS to "initiate a dialogue" with Cuba about its eventual reintegration to the hemispheric body - "consistent with principles and values of the OAS charter, the InterAmerican Democratic charter and other instruments."

If approved, the OAS Permanent Council would start those talks, and report back in a year.

In the bid submitted Tuesday evening by Washington’s deputy representative to the OAS, W. Lewis Amselem, Washington acknowledged that "some of the circumstances since Cuba’s suspension from full participation in the OAS may have changed."

Cuba was suspended from the OAS in 1962, officially because of its alliance with the Soviet Union. But as more leftists were elected to lead Latin American nations in the past years, pressure increased to lift the suspension.

The OAS makes its decisions by consensus, and after last month’s Summit of the Americas conference in Trinidad, it became increasingly clear that Washington did not have the support to continue to pressure for Cuba’s exclusion.

At the same time, Cuban-American members of Congress were outraged that Cuba could be let back in to a group that in 2001 passed the InterAmerican Democratic Charter - a rule calling for all its members to be democratic.

Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey moved to cut the organization’s funding.

6) Israeli Settlement Growth Must Stop, Clinton Says
Mark Landler and Isabel Kershner, New York Times, May 28, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/28/world/middleeast/28mideast.html

The Obama administration reiterated emphatically on Wednesday that it viewed a complete freeze of construction in settlements on the West Bank as a critical step toward a peace accord between Israel and the Palestinians.

Speaking of President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said, "He wants to see a stop to settlements - not some settlements, not outposts, not ‘natural growth’ exceptions." Talking to reporters after a meeting with the Egyptian foreign minister, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, she said: "That is our position. That is what we have communicated very clearly."

Mrs. Clinton’s remarks, the administration’s strongest to date on the matter, came as an Israeli official said Wednesday that the Israeli government wanted to reach an understanding with the Obama administration that would allow some new construction in West Bank settlements.

The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, is expected to focus on the issue of settlement expansion when he meets with Obama on Thursday in Washington. Abbas and other Palestinian leaders have said repeatedly that they see no point in resuming stalled peace negotiations without an absolute settlement freeze.

Obama and other senior American officials have called on the government of Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of the right-wing Likud Party who became prime minister almost two months ago, to halt all settlement activity.

Some Middle East peace analysts in Washington interpreted Mrs. Clinton’s comments as a sign that the administration was determined to change Israel’s policy on settlements rather than accept a compromise.
…
Mitchell has been negotiating reciprocal measures with Israel’s Arab neighbors, in which they would take steps, like granting visas to Israeli citizens or allowing Israel to open trade offices in their capitals, in return for Israel’s action on settlements. But administration officials say the onus is on Israel to show progress. Almost 300,000 Israelis now live in settlements in the West Bank, excluding East Jerusalem, among a Palestinian population of some 2.5 million. Much of the world considers the 120 or so settlements a violation of international law.

Netanyahu says his government will not build any new settlements and will take down outposts erected in recent years by settlers without proper government authorization. But he insists that his government will allow building within existing settlements to accommodate what he terms "natural growth."

Israel says it reached understandings with the Bush administration - some formal, some informal and some tacit - on building within settlements. For example, construction was limited in small outlying settlements but more tolerated in large ones in areas that Israel intends to keep under any deal with the Palestinians. "We want to work to reach understandings with the new administration" that are "fair" and "workable," said the Israeli official.
…
But the tenor of Mrs. Clinton’s comments Wednesday indicated to some analysts that the Obama administration was unlikely to budge from its position, even at the risk of putting Netanyahu’s government into jeopardy.

"She is stripping away whatever nuance, or whatever fig leaf, that would have allowed a deeply ideological government to make a settlement deal that is politically acceptable at home," said Aaron David Miller, a public policy analyst at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. "They’ve concluded, ‘We’re going to force a change in behavior.’ "
…
In an effort to show good will, Netanyahu and Barak have been underscoring their willingness to take down 22 small outposts that are illegal under Israeli law, and that were supposed to have been removed under the 2003 American-backed peace plan known as the road map. That plan specified that Israel should halt "all settlement activity (including natural growth)."

Israel/Palestine
7) Backers of Jewish Settlements Put Squeeze on Netanyahu
Howard Schneider, Washington Post, Thursday, May 28, 2009
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/27/AR2009052702587.html

Jerusalem - Supporters of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank are increasing the pressure on Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu as he steers between a government coalition that supports continued building in the area and President Obama’s demand that it stop.

A group of rabbis who support expanding settlements gathered Wednesday in an outpost near Ramallah and issued a statement asking the government "not to destroy settlements while maltreating pioneers." The group, calling itself Rabbis of the Torah and the Land, also declared that Jewish law forbade police and troops from obeying orders to remove settlements.

Harel Cohen, the secretary of the organization, said the meeting was called to debate whether Netanyahu’s plan to dismantle about two dozen settlement outposts means that he "has changed his opinions or whether he is just misleading the Americans."

Obama has asked for a complete freeze on construction in more than 100 Jewish settlements housing a total of about 290,000 people on land occupied by Israel in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. In response, the Netanyahu administration has said it would pull down 26 small, unauthorized settlement outposts but would not halt construction in other West Bank communities.

Cohen said the loss of the outposts would be a blow to the settler movement, which maintains that the occupied land belongs to Israel and should not be used to form a Palestinian state. "They want to throw 2,000 Jews into the street," Cohen said, referring to the small clusters of mobile homes marked for evacuation. "You have to fight for the outposts in order to distance the battles from the larger settlements."

In Washington, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton firmly rejected any half steps on settlements. "The president was very clear when Prime Minister Netanyahu was here," she told reporters Wednesday. "He wants to see a stop to settlements - not some settlements, not outposts, not natural growth exceptions."
…
Dror Etkes, coordinator of settlement issues for the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din, said scuffles over the outposts deflect attention from larger issues, including hundreds of unenforced demolition orders against individual settler properties and long delays at the Defense Ministry in clearing unauthorized outposts. "It is a well-directed drama," Etkes said. "It is a game between the Israeli administration and the U.S. administration."

Lebanon
8) Hezbollah Says It Is Talking to European Union and I.M.F.
Robert F. Worth, New York Times, May 28, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/28/world/middleeast/28lebanon.html

Beirut - Hezbollah, the Shiite militant group, has talked with the International Monetary Fund and the European Union about continued financial support to Lebanon in the event the group’s political alliance wins the June 7 parliamentary elections, Hezbollah officials said Wednesday.

The talks this month reflected concerns here about a possible drop in international donor and investor confidence should the political alliance led by Hezbollah - considered a terrorist group by the United States and Israel - gain a majority for the first time. Many analysts believe that outcome is likely, though the race is considered too close to call.

Lebanon’s current governing majority, which has tried unsuccessfully to disarm Hezbollah, has depended on heavy financial support from the West and oil-rich Persian Gulf states, especially Saudi Arabia. In Beirut last week, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said future American support to Lebanon, which includes military aid, would depend on the elections’ outcome.

European governments have not issued any such veiled threats, and Western leaders have recently shown a greater willingness to engage in political dialogue with Hezbollah’s patrons, Iran and Syria. Britain’s Foreign Office said in March that it would re-establish relations with Hezbollah’s political wing.

The European Union provides about $84 million a year to Lebanon, and the International Monetary Fund provides about $114 million, aid that will be coming up for reauthorization soon.

The monetary fund has not negotiated a possible loan with members or sympathizers of Hezbollah, Simonetta Nardin, a spokeswoman for the fund, said in an e-mail message. But the agency routinely meets with the main political parties in Lebanon and with members of Parliament, Ms. Nardin said. Future loans with the monetary fund were not discussed, she said.

The practical effects of an election victory by Hezbollah and its allies would be limited because they already play important roles in the cabinet, and any new government would almost certainly preserve a "blocking minority" for the opposition.
…
Lebanon’s centrality in Arab politics could help to mitigate any losses. Qatar, which has good relations with Iran and Syria, has also provided aid to Lebanon, and could afford to increase it.

Another question for donors is the financial and economic priorities of Hezbollah and its allies, which remain relatively unknown, said Nassib Ghobril, the head of research and analysis for Byblos Bank.

Hezbollah’s election platform is more economically populist than the current majority’s, but the group will have fewer seats in Parliament - and, perhaps, less interest in such matters - than its major Christian political partner, the Free Patriotic Movement, whose economic platform is not so different from its electoral opponents’, emphasizing privatization and accountability.

Lebanon’s public debt may limit the options of any future government, Ghobril said.

Afghanistan
9) Afghan gov’t destroys books it says insult Sunnis
Amir Shah and Heidi Vogt, Associated Press, Wednesday, May 27, 2009 2:32 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/27/AR2009052702152.html

Kabul - The Afghan government quietly dumped more than 1,000 Shiite texts and other books from Iran into a river after a local governor complained that their content insulted the country’s Sunni majority.

The move appeared to be an attempt by President Hamid Karzai’s U.S.-backed government to smooth over a potential thorn in relations between the Muslim sects.

But instead of burying the issue along with the books at the bottom of the Helmand River, the government was facing condemnation Wednesday from Shiite leaders after news leaked a month after the dumping.

"It is a humiliation for all Shiites," said Mohammad Akbari, a prominent Shiite member of parliament. He said a joint commission of Sunni and Shiite leaders should have reviewed any complaints about the books.

Merchants who’d ordered the books for shops in Kabul said there was nothing offensive about their content and that they were destroyed simply because of prejudice against Shiites, who make up about 20 percent of the population.

The dispute highlights the continuing tension between Sunnis and Shiites in Afghanistan despite efforts by the government to preach tolerance across the sectarian divide.

Shiites were persecuted under the largely Sunni Taliban regime that ruled the country until the U.S.-led invasion in 2001. Since then, the two sects have settled into an uneasy coexistence, with the post-Taliban constitution giving Shiites the right to create some laws that apply only to them.
…
About 2,600 history, geography and cultural books were destroyed, along with about 600 Shiite religious books, according to Sharyati and Ahmadi, a bookseller who had ordered the Shiite texts. Ahmadi declined to give his full name out of fear of government reprisal.

Both booksellers say they previously had ordered these books from Iran without any problem. Many of the books in question can be found for sale at shops in Kabul. Sharyati said he orders the books from Iran because paper and printing are cheaper there.

Pakistan
10) Taliban Claim Pakistan Bomb Attack
Salman Masood and Mark Mcdonald, New York Times, May 29, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/world/asia/29pstan.html

Lahore, Pakistan - Hours after the Pakistani government placed bounties on 21 insurgent leaders it blamed for a suicide car bomb attack here, Taliban groups claimed responsibility Thursday for the assault that killed at least two dozen people and wounded nearly 300.

In telephone calls to Reuters and The Associated Press, a Pakistani insurgent commander, Hakimullah Mehsud, said, "We have achieved our target. We were looking for this target for a long time."

He also said the attack in Lahore on Wednesday was "a reaction to the Swat operation," a reference to the Pakistani Army’s campaign against Taliban militants in the northwestern Swat Valley. The government claims it has killed more than 1,000 insurgents in the current offensive.

In the Lahore attack, gunmen and suicide bombers struck a police emergency-response unit in one of the city’s busiest districts, ramming a car laden with explosives into the squad’s building.

The attack may also have been directed at a nearby command center of the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence agency, according to army and intelligence officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief reporters.

Haiti
11) Haitians in U.S. Illegally Look for Signs of a Deporting Reprieve
Kirk Semple, New York Times, May 28, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/28/nyregion/28haitians.html

For Danie, who moved from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, to the United States in 2001 to live with her grandparents, there has never been a good time to go home.

Haiti, which has stumbled from grave political unrest to catastrophic natural disasters, remains one of the world’s poorest nations. So although Danie, 22, is an illegal immigrant, she has decided to stay in New York City. She lives in Cambria Heights, Queens, and is about to graduate from college with a degree in education. She hopes to become an elementary school teacher, but fears that her lack of a Social Security number will leave her few options beyond doing menial labor in an underground economy.
…
But Haitians in New York - the city with the largest population of Haitian descent outside Port-au-Prince - are hopeful about a proposal under consideration by the Obama administration that would provide relief for her and tens of thousands of other illegal Haitian immigrants.

After four hurricanes and tropical storms in 2008 killed hundreds of people, wiped out most of Haiti’s food crops and caused nearly a billion dollars in damage, the country’s government asked the United States to grant undocumented Haitian immigrants what is known as temporary protected status. The designation would shield them from detention and deportation for a set period of time, and allow them to work legally, while Haiti tries to recover.

Such relief has occasionally been granted to immigrants who are unable to return safely to their home countries because of armed conflict or environmental disasters. It is currently in effect for people from El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Somalia and Sudan.

Supporters of temporary protected status for Haitians say that Haiti is in no condition to absorb tens of thousands of deportees, and that its recovery may depend, at least in part, on a continuing flow of remittances sent home by illegal Haitian immigrants in the United States. Those remittances totaled $1.87 billion last year, according to estimates by the Inter-American Development Bank.

The Bush administration denied Haiti’s request in December. In February, the Obama administration, in a letter from the Department of Homeland Security to immigration advocates in Miami, said it would continue to deport Haitians. And anti-immigration lobbying groups have vowed to oppose any change in the policy.

But immigrant advocates and the Haitian diaspora’s civic leadership have continued to apply pressure on the administration and pore over the tea leaves of rumors and leaks for indications of a policy shift.

They say that in recent weeks, they have drawn hope from a number of developments. In April, on the eve of a trip to Haiti, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton announced that the administration was reviewing its deportation policy for Haitians. During the trip, she also spoke about the importance of remittances to Haiti.

Haitian advocates in New York say they have heard that the government has been detaining and deporting only those with criminal records, rather than those accused solely of immigration violations.

Barbara Gonzalez, a spokeswoman for United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the government would continue to detain and deport Haitians who violate immigration laws but that under a recently executed agreement with the Haitian government, the American immigration authorities were focusing on those with criminal records. "Our priority - and we’ve clearly articulated it - is removing those who are criminal aliens and have final orders of removal," she said.
…
In interviews, about two dozen Haitians and Haitian-Americans in Brooklyn and Queens said that if the Obama administration accelerated deportations, it would tear apart their community, splinter families and add a crushing burden on their homeland.

"Haiti cannot take another burden," said Mathieu Eugene, a Haitian-American member of the City Council who represents Flatbush and other Brooklyn neighborhoods with large Haitian populations. Last month, the Council unanimously approved a resolution he sponsored in support of protected status for Haitians.
…
While no one knows exactly how many Haitians would be eligible for protected status, Ms. Gonzalez, the immigration spokeswoman, said about 30,000 in the United States have exhausted their legal options and face final court-issued deportation orders. Many more are still in litigation or have not yet come to the attention of the authorities, officials say.

-
Robert Naiman
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org

Just Foreign Policy is a membership organization devoted to reforming US foreign policy so it reflects the values and interests of the majority of Americans.

Just Foreign Policy News
May 27, 2009

Jubliee USA Network: Ask Your Rep to Sign the Waters IMF letter
A conference committee will meet soon to resolve differences between the House and Senate versions of the supplemental appropriations bill. Rep. Waters and others are writing to Reps. Obey and Lowey, asking them to attach real reform conditions to the IMF money. Ask your Rep. to sign.
http://www.jubileeusa.org/get-active/take-action.html

Labor, House Dems Stall Panama Trade Deal
The Administration has tacked hard to the right on international economic policy since coming in to office. Its efforts to ram $100 billion for the International Monetary Fund through Congress via the war supplemental without reform language that would stop the IMF from making recessions worse through demands for budget cuts - as the IMF is now doing in Latvia - are just the most recent example. But if Wall Street thought they were just going to run the table on international economic policy in this administration, they had another think coming.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/labor-house-dems-stall-pa_b_208212.html

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Summary:
U.S./Top News
1) France’s former Ambassador to Iran says efforts to stop Iran from enriching uranium will fail, Borzou Daragahi reports in the Los Angeles Times. Instead, Francois Nicoullaud says the key to a peaceful resolution is for the West to accept Iranian enrichment in exchange for Iran accepting an intrusive monitoring system. Nicoullaud concedes that Israel might not like such an arrangement, but says the US and Europe should go for it anyway.

2) If Obama allows the Israeli agenda on Iran to become America’s, his outreach is dead, writes Roger Cohen in the New York Times. New thinking is needed, including some acceptance of Iranian enrichment of uranium. Many more young American men and women will die in Iraq and Afghanistan over the next several years if no Iranian breakthrough is achieved, Cohen says.

3) Army chief of staff Casey said the US could have fighting forces in Iraq and Afghanistan for a decade, AP reports, even though a signed agreement requires all U.S. forces to be out of Iraq by 2012. As recently as February, Defense Secretary Gates repeated the U.S. commitment to the agreement.

4) Pakistan’s Supreme Court ruled that former prime minister Nawaz Sharif can participate in elections despite an earlier ban, the Washington Post reports. Sharif is supporting President Zardari on the military’s operation in the Swat Valley, the Post notes. A military spokesman rebuffed a call from Human Rights Watch for relaxing a curfew so that food, water and medicine could reach civilians trapped by the government offensive.

Lebanon
5) Hezbollah and its allies have a good chance to win a slim edge in the parliamentary election June 7, Reuters reports. But the Hizbollah bloc would likely ask their opponents to join another national unity government in order to avoid international isolation.

Iran
6) Iran’s presidential hopeful Mir-Hossein Mousavi has a slight lead in 10 major Iranian cities, Xinhua reports, citing PressTV. Iran’s state TV IRIB last week said Mousavi was slightly ahead in Tehran.

Israel/Palestine
7) Palestinian President Abbas is to meet Obama at the White House tomorrow, the Washington Post reports. Analysts say if progress in negotiations is not imminent, Abbas’ shaky hold on power could collapse. Polls show that he lags in popularity behind the leader of the Islamist Hamas movement, Ismail Haniyeh. The creation of a U.S.-trained Palestinian security force has been credited by Israel with helping reduce militant attacks. But Palestinians say that has not led to an easing of Israeli restrictions in the West Bank, or a curb on Jewish settlements.

Iraq
8) The newly elected speaker of Iraq’s parliament is moving to strengthen parliament’s role in acting as a check on the government, the Washington Post reports. Under Ayad al-Samarraie’s leadership, parliament has become more aggressive in trying to hold the government accountable for ministerial corruption thought to involve billions of dollars.

9) The last of Britain’s combat troops finished military operations in Iraq, Bloomberg reports. About 400 British personnel will stay on, mainly to help train the Iraqi navy.

Bolivia
10) Bolivia denied supplying uranium to Iran, while Venezuela dismissed an Israeli report that the two countries have been aiding Iran’s nuclear program, AP reports. Bolivian Mining Minister Echazu said his country doesn’t even produce the radioactive metallic element. Bolivian Presidential Minister Quintana described Israel’s intelligence agency as a bunch of incompetent "clowns," and Echazu said the Bolivian Foreign Ministry plans to issue a formal response to the report’s assertion.

Cuba
11) President Obama is asking Cuba to resume talks on legal immigration of Cubans to the US, AP reports. Obama’s proposal would reopen discussions that had been closed off by Bush since they were last held in 2003. The Cuban American National Foundation welcomed the news, saying resumed migration talks could be "an opportunity to resolve issues of United States national interest," but three Cuban-American members of Congress from Florida denounced the move as "another unilateral concession by the Obama administration to the dictatorship." Cuba’s possible re-entry into the OAS will will be discussed at an OAS meeting June 2 in Honduras; Secretary of State Clinton said the U.S. would not support Cuba’s membership unless President Raul Castro’s government makes democratic reforms and releases political prisoners. [Several Latin American countries, including Brazil, are pushing hard for Cuba to be re-admitted to the OAS. OAS Secretary General Insulza has criticized Cuba’s continued exclusion, noting that the 1962 expulsion was linked to Cuba’s relationship with the Soviet Union, which no longer exists - JFP.]

Contents:
U.S./Top News
1) Former diplomat: Iran won’t stop nuclear work
Former French envoy to Tehran offers solution to nuclear crisis
Borzou Daragahi, Los Angeles Times, May 27, 2009
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iran-qa27-2009may27,0,7118239.story

Beirut - Short of the tremendous cost and risk of war, what would it take to get Iran to stop producing the nuclear material that one day could be used to build weapons? The short answer, according to an emerging consensus among arms inspectors, diplomats and Iranian officials struggling with the issue of Iran’s nuclear program, is nothing.

But that doesn’t mean there’s no peaceful solution to conflict over Iran’s nuclear program, says Francois Nicoullaud, who served from 2001 to 2005 as Paris’ envoy to Iran and has written a book about the Islamic Republic.

Nicoullaud, now retired from the foreign service and able to speak freely, says the key to a solution is for the international community to accept Iran’s production of enriched uranium and for the Iranians to accept an intrusive monitoring system that would set off alarm bells if they made any move toward weaponizing their avowedly peaceful program.

The key, he said in a recent interview from Paris, is for the West to grant Iran the respect it craves and for the Islamic Republic to begin acting like a responsible member of the international community.

Q. What do you think of the idea of imposing a deadline on talks with Iran?

The basics of the solution could be put together quite fast. In fact, in a few weeks. Two or three months is perfectly possible - if on both sides, especially on the Western side, people dedicated themselves to the task. If the negotiation starts in September, very substantial progress by the end of the year can very well be a realistic goal.

Q. Do you think that Iran will stop its enrichment of uranium?

No, I do not think so. Frankly, nobody in Iran, even under another president, will dare to suspend the production of enriched uranium. But what would be perhaps attainable is that, in some unspoken, unofficial way, the production could slow down and go at a leisurely pace.

Q. Would that be acceptable to Europe?

Europe, which up to now has been quite adamant on suspension, will most probably follow the American administration if it decides to try a short negotiation with no prerequisites like suspension of enrichment.

Q. If there is no suspension, and Iran continues to enrich uranium at low levels to maintain nuclear ambiguity indefinitely, is that tolerable?

No, but I believe that with reinforced control and some basic rules, some clear-cut commitments from Iran, it is very possible for this country to continue producing low-enriched uranium without any ambiguity. It would be clear that low-enriched uranium could not be diverted to be further enriched for military use, at least without the international community being aware of it in ample time.
…
For instance, the Iranians have said that they were ready not to enrich uranium beyond 5%. That’s not enough, but it is a start. The goal would be to build around the enrichment activity a safety fence of checks and controls. If one comes close to the fence and touches it, one of its many little alarm bells is bound to ring.

Another guarantee would be not to keep the low-enriched uranium produced in [the nuclear facility near] Natanz in its gaseous or liquid state but to transform it as soon as possible into … fuel rods used in nuclear power plants.

And, of course, there should be some relation between the amount of low-enriched uranium produced by Iran and the actual needs of its nuclear power plants. As long as Iran does not possess at least two or three active nuclear power plants, there is no use having an enrichment unit of 50,000 centrifuges, as announced by the Iranian president.

We have to explain to them that this is the unavoidable entrance fee to the club of legitimate, respectable nuclear nations. Iran is interested in belonging to such a club. So they are not asking Iran to do something that they have not accepted themselves.

Q. Do you think such a deal would be acceptable to Israel?

Perhaps the Israelis won’t be very happy if the negotiation builds up along such a track. But it would be difficult for them to launch a [military] strike [against Iranian nuclear facilities] if the international community - the U.S., Europe, etc. - is on the way toward a compromise with the Iranians. Israel would take an enormous political risk, on top of the practical risks, in such a complex intervention.

2) Obama in Netanyahu’s Web
Roger Cohen, New York Times, May 28, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/28/opinion/28iht-edcohen.html

Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, won the first round over President Barack Obama. That’s not good for American interests or for Israel’s long-term security. All the overblown reciprocal compliments could not hide evident tensions - over Iran and Israel-Palestine and how the two are linked. In the end, Obama blinked.

The president ceded to Israeli pressure for a timetable on any Iran talks, saying a "reassessment" should be possible by year’s end (Israel had pressed for an October deadline). Obama talked of the possibility of "much stronger international sanctions" against Iran, undermining his groundbreaking earlier overture that included a core truth: "This process will not be advanced by threats."

Obama also allowed Netanyahu to compliment him for "leaving all options on the table" - the standard formula for a possible U.S. military strike against Iran - when he said nothing of the sort. The president did, however, use that tired phrase in a Newsweek interview this month - another mistake given the unthinkable consequences of a third U.S. war front in the Muslim world.

In return, what did Obama get? Not even acknowledgment from Netanyahu that Palestinian statehood, rather than some form of eternal limbo, is the notional goal of negotiations.
…
Three things are clear. The first is that if Obama allows the Israeli agenda on Iran to become America’s, his outreach is dead. I don’t know if Israel is bluffing about bombing Iran - nobody does - but one thing is clear: Netanyahu’s bellicosity is as unrelenting as his desire to distract attention from stillborn Palestine.

Netanyahu, declaring "It is us or no one," said this week that his job was to "eliminate" Iran’s threat. Israel’s shifting "red line" on Iran, now avowedly months away, is at odds with U.S. intelligence, which holds that no Iranian decision on bomb production has been made and capacity is likely two to five years distant.

It’s essential that Obama cleave to an American framework that affords the time to overcome a 30-year impasse. He might remind Netanyahu that if anyone had asked five years ago if an Iran with 6,000 centrifuges, more than a ton of low-enriched uranium and a genie-out-the-bottle level of technical nuclear know-how was over Israel’s "red line," the answer would have been, "Damn right."

But the world has not come to an end, for all Netanyahu’s dangerous, mythologizing attempts to liken Iran to Amalek, the Biblical enemy of the Jews that the Israelites were told to destroy, every "man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass."

The second imperative is that the sanctions game be revealed for an empty farce. There will be no "crippling sanctions" - Hillary Clinton’s phrase - because China and Russia have their own interests in Iran.

Beijing has paid lip service to mild sanctions while becoming Iran’s largest trading partner in recent years: Tehran is awash in Chinese products. Moscow has trained Iranian engineers while calculating how Iran can serve its aim of a less U.S.-dominated world.

A race is on for Iran, with its vast oil and gas reserves. China and Russia will be front and center.

Only a U.S. blockade would have impact - but that’s an act of war. Tightened sanctions equal a return to the sterile policies of the Bush years. They would prove no more effective than in North Korea.

The third imperative is for Obama to shift from what Nader Mousavizadeh of the International Institute for Strategic Studies recently called a "mix of rhetorical innovation and policy continuation" to new thinking on Iran freed of carrot-and-stick redundancy.

This must begin with Iran’s pride and insecurities - a medium-sized power facing the world’s superpower - and almost certainly envision as an endgame a "non-zero option" where Iran retains an intrusively monitored, limited pilot uranium enrichment program while jettisoning its unacceptable rhetoric and troublemaking to become part of a new regional security arrangement.

Netanyahu talks a lot about the "existential threat" from Iran. The United States faces a prosaic daily threat: Many more young American men and women will die in Iraq and Afghanistan over the next several years if no Iranian breakthrough is achieved.

Obama must remind Israel of that. He should also tell Bibi that the real existential threat to Israel is not Amalek but hubris: An attack on Iran that would put the Jewish state at war with Persians as well as Arabs, undermine its core U.S. alliance, and set Tehran on a full-throttle course to a nuclear bomb with the support of some 1.2 billion Muslims.

3) Army chief: Troops could be in Iraq after 2012
Tom Curley, Associated Press, Wednesday, May 27, 2009
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/05/26/national/w141859D58.DTL

The United States could have fighting forces in Iraq and Afghanistan for a decade, the top Army officer said, even though a signed agreement requires all U.S. forces to be out of Iraq by 2012.

Gen. George Casey, Army chief of staff, said Tuesday his planning envisions combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan for a decade as part of a sustained U.S. commitment to fighting extremism and terrorism in the Middle East.
…
He spoke at an invitation-only briefing to a dozen journalists and policy analysts from Washington-based think-tanks.
…
Casey would not specify how combat units would be divided between Iraq and Afghanistan. He said U.S. ground commander Gen. Ray Odierno is leading a study to determine how far U.S. forces could be cut back in Iraq and still be effective. Casey said his comments about the long war in Iraq were not meant to conflict with administration policies.

President Barack Obama plans to bring U.S. combat forces home from Iraq in 2010, and the United States and Iraq have agreed that all U.S. forces would leave by 2012. Although several senior U.S. officials have suggested Iraq could request an extension, the legal agreement the two countries signed last year would have to be amended for any significant U.S. presence to remain.

As recently as February, Defense Secretary Robert Gates repeated U.S. commitment to the agreement worked out with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. "Under the Status of Forces Agreement with the Iraqi government, I intend to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2011," Gates said during an address at Camp Lejeune.

4) Popular Former Prime Minister Is Back In Pakistani Politics
Griff Witte, Washington Post, Wednesday, May 27, 2009
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/26/AR2009052600554.html

Islamabad - Pakistan’s Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, the nation’s most popular politician, can participate in elections despite an earlier ban.

The ruling is likely to ease political tensions in the short term but could ultimately pose a challenge for President Asif Ali Zardari, who is Sharif’s main rival and whose popularity has plummeted. Although elections are not due until 2013, Sharif is now in position to reclaim the office he held twice in the 1990s.
…
Sharif and his brother Shahbaz had been banned from electoral politics because of previous criminal convictions that they say were politically motivated. The brothers’ reinstatement had been widely expected. This year, Nawaz Sharif led a successful movement to restore the chief justice of the Supreme Court, whom then-President Pervez Musharraf fired in late 2007.

In a statement Tuesday, Zardari congratulated Sharif and welcomed him back to electoral politics. But Sharif’s branch of the Pakistan Muslim League represents the main opposition to Zardari’s Pakistan People’s Party, and the enmity between the men is well known. For now, though, Sharif is supporting Zardari on several issues, most crucially the military’s operation in the Swat Valley, which continued Tuesday.

Since early May, the army has been battling to oust Taliban militants who had taken control of the northwestern region. About 2.3 million people have fled since fighting began, according to provincial government statistics, but about 200,000 civilians remain trapped.

Human Rights Watch warned Tuesday that unless the government relaxes a curfew and allows food, water and medicine into the valley, there will be a "humanitarian catastrophe."

But Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, a military spokesman, said it would not be possible to pause the offensive. "Lifting the curfew would mean letting the operational situation slip out of hand," he said. Instead, the government said it was planning to air-drop supplies to trapped residents.

Lebanon
5) Close Lebanon election could favour Hezbollah
Alistair Lyon, Reuters, Thu May 21, 2009
http://in.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idINIndia-39780220090521

Beirut - Lebanon’s parliamentary election looks tight, but Hezbollah and its allies have a good chance to win a slim edge over their Saudi- and Western-backed rivals. Many local analysts predict a small swing in that direction in the June 7 vote, but there is no reliable opinion polling.

Iran and Syria would certainly applaud such a result, which would be seen as a setback for the United States, four years after the anti-Syrian "March 14" coalition took power in Beirut.

Yet the Shi’ite Hezbollah and Amal factions, which, along with Christian leader Michel Aoun, form the core of the "March 8" alliance, would likely ask their opponents to join another unwieldy national unity government, limiting the chances of any radical shift in Lebanon’s political or economic orientation.

"It has been clear for some time that Hezbollah has a very strong interest in ensuring a national unity framework," said Karim Makdissi, who teaches international relations at the American University of Beirut.

"It has absolutely no intention of a hostile takeover of the state, so it is in its strategic interest to ensure it has a measure of legitimacy and credibility within official channels."
…
"The election swing will be very narrow," said Shafiq Masri, law professor at the Lebanese University. "So it’s not a choice, it’s a necessity to come back to a national unity government."
…
Nasrallah is unlikely to favour an overtly partisan cabinet that Western and some Arab countries might cold-shoulder, as they have the Palestinian government led by Hamas, which lies with Hezbollah on the U.S. terrorist list. "The (Hezbollah-led) opposition cannot deal with the outside world if it insists on ruling alone," Masri said.

A detente in Syrian-Saudi ties has already defused tensions in Lebanon in recent months. Continued regional calm as U.S. President Barack Obama explores dialogue with Iran and Syria could allow expediency to triumph over confrontation in Lebanon.

Iran
6) Poll: Iran’s Mousavi takes lead in presidential campaign
Xinhua, May 27, 2009
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-05/27/content_11446054.htm

Tehran - Iran’s presidential hopeful Mir-Hossein Mousavi takes the lead in 10 major Iranian cities, the local Press TV reported Wednesday, citing a recent poll. The poll conducted in Iran’s 10 big cities showed that Mousavi is surpassing the incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad by 4 percent, the report said.

Some 38 percent of the people expressed their support for Mousavi while 34 percent others supported Ahmadinejad. Similarly, in an opinion poll conducted by Iran’s state TV IRIB last week, Mousavi also enjoyed the lead in the capital city of Tehran with 47 percent of the votes, while 43 percent of the votes went to Ahmadinejad.

Israel/Palestine
7) Abbas’s Credibility Problem
U.S. Sees Bolstering Palestinian Leader as Key to Mideast Peace
Howard Schneider, Washington Post, Wednesday, May 27, 2009
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/26/AR2009052602993.html

Ramallah - Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas heads a fractured government and a fractured political party. His term expired four months ago. His handpicked prime minister, trusted to manage billions of dollars in foreign aid, is reviled by some Palestinians as a U.S. proxy.

Whatever peace initiative President Obama envisions for the region, it involves a gamble that Abbas can overcome a long list of liabilities, put Palestinian politics back into one piece and hold up his side of any bargain. Abbas is to meet Obama at the White House tomorrow in a session that may be as much about ways to bolster the Palestinian leader as about Obama’s broader strategy.

"When he is talking to the American administration, and the areas under his rule are divided, it does not bode well," said Rafiq Husseini, Abbas’s chief of staff. "Despite the difficulties and despite the disunity within the Palestinian debate, he is still the president and he is still ready to reach a deal" with the Israelis, Husseini added.

Obama has made progress on Middle East peace a priority, and has met with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and top Arab leaders. The president travels to Cairo next week for a speech outlining what is expected to be a new U.S. approach toward the region.

Abbas, 74, a longtime aide to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, took over after Arafat’s death in 2004 and won election on his own the following year. Trained as a lawyer and historian, Abbas came to power from a career spent burrowing into the fine points of peace talks.

Abbas’s credibility, supporters and critics say, is wholly tied to those negotiations. If progress is not imminent - whether in the shape of a final agreement or at least something tangibly felt among Palestinians - his shaky hold on power could collapse, a setback for those who favor a moderate course.

"He is not a man of resistance. He is not a man of fighting. He is a man of negotiation," said Ghassan Khatib, a Palestinian analyst and founder of the Jerusalem Media and Communications Center. And at this point, "he is not in good shape," Khatib said, with polls showing that he lags in popularity behind the leader of the Islamist Hamas movement, Ismail Haniyeh.
…
The creation of a U.S.-trained Palestinian security force has curbed crime in West Bank cities and has been credited by Israel with helping reduce militant attacks. But Palestinians say that has not led to an easing of Israeli restrictions in the West Bank, a curb on Jewish settlements in the area or other steps. "Abbas wants to make sure he does everything so nobody can create pretexts or excuses" for not advancing the peace talks, Husseini said. "We are waiting to reap the benefits."

Iraq
8) In Iraq, Assertive Parliament Emerges Under New Speaker
Nada Bakri, Washington Post, Wednesday, May 27, 2009
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/26/AR2009052603226.html

Baghdad - In a test of wills that could shape Iraq’s turbulent politics for years to come, the country’s parliament has moved decisively against a minister accused of corruption and has threatened to summon Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to answer lawmakers’ questions.

The struggle over Trade Minister Abdul Falah al-Sudani in recent days is more than just the typical debate between legislative and executive powers. The newly elected speaker of parliament, Ayad al-Samarraie, a Sunni Arab, is attempting to reshape the institution ahead of crucial elections scheduled for January, eight months before the Obama administration has pledged to withdraw most combat troops from Iraq.

"The government kept parliament weak for the past three years," Wael Abdel Latif, an independent lawmaker, said Monday. "But now, with Samarraie in power, it’s becoming stronger, and it’s assuming its rightful place."

The conflict involves two of the dominant forces in today’s Iraq. An increasingly powerful Maliki is attempting to centralize authority in the hands of a coterie of advisers his opponents have nicknamed "the impenetrable circle." Opposing Maliki, a Shiite, are politicians who say they are trying to build institutions in a state still susceptible to the appeal of a strongman.

Politicians on both sides have made the stakes clear. Under Samarraie’s leadership, parliament has become more aggressive in trying to hold the government accountable for ministerial corruption thought to involve billions of dollars. Maliki, in turn, has threatened to quell opponents by compiling evidence against them that could lead to criminal charges, his foes say.
…
In asserting parliament’s new role, Samarraie has transformed the institution from an arena for seemingly endless debate and hour-long speeches into an organized forum that starts with the ring of a bell at 10:00 a.m. Under the former speaker, Mahmoud al-Mashhadani, discussions often drifted into minutiae, prompting many lawmakers to start side chats, talk on cellphones or read newspapers.

9) U.K. Finishes Withdrawal of Its Last Combat Troops in Iraq
Gonzalo Vina, Bloomberg, May 27
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601085&sid=aslB2LAf_hWs

The last of Britain’s combat troops finished military operations in Iraq today, ending a six-year deployment at their base near Basra in the south of the country.
…
Prime Minister Gordon Brown started winding down Britain’s occupation in Iraq shortly after he took over from Tony Blair in 2007. Voters objected to the war when it started in 2003 and increasingly associated Blair’s efforts with exacerbating tensions in the region. The war cost 179 British lives.
…
The U.K. deployed up to 46,000 soldiers to help the U.S. oust Saddam Hussein and has scaled back its force steadily since then. About 400 British personnel will stay on after today, mainly to help train the Iraqi navy.

Bolivia
10) Bolivia denies supplying Iran with uranium
Carlos Valdez, Associated Press, Tuesday, May 26, 2009 8:19 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/26/AR2009052601453.html

La Paz - Bolivia on Tuesday denied supplying uranium to Iran, while Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez dismissed Israeli allegations that the two countries have been aiding Tehran’s nuclear program.

Bolivian Mining Minister Luis Alberto Echazu said his country doesn’t even produce the radioactive metallic element, though he acknowledged that officials believe the country has some untapped uranium deposits. "There isn’t even a precise geological study of uranium deposits, and much less can there be talk of export" to another country, he said.

A secret Israeli Foreign Ministry report, obtained by The Associated Press on Monday, cites previous Israeli intelligence assessments saying "there are reports that Venezuela supplies Iran with uranium for its nuclear program" and that "Bolivia also supplies uranium to Iran."
…
Bolivian Presidential Minister Juan Ramon Quintana described Israel’s intelligence agency as a bunch of incompetent "clowns," and Echazu said the Bolivian Foreign Ministry plans to issue a formal response to the report’s assertion.

Chavez and Bolivian President Evo Morales have built close ties with Iran and have fiercely opposed Israeli and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Both Venezuela and Bolivia broke off ties with Israel in January to protest its offensive in the Gaza Strip.
…
Some analysts doubt that Iran currently is receiving uranium from other countries. "Iran does not need to import uranium from abroad" at this time, said Farideh Farhi, a researcher at the University of Hawaii who is an expert on Iran’s foreign policy. "Iran has uranium deposits itself. There is a real issue about Iran’s deposits being large enough to sustain the ambitious enrichment program Iran is envisioning in the future, but at this point this is not an issue."

Cuba
11) Obama in fresh overture to Cuba on immigration
Matthew Lee, AP, May 23, 2009
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5isn-A6X47PLC4dRexapk4yFMmbyQD98C289G0

In a fresh overture to Cuba, President Barack Obama is asking the communist government to resume talks on legal immigration of Cubans to the United States.

Obama’s proposal would reopen discussions that had been closed off by former President George W. Bush since they were last held in mid-2003. His move comes ahead of the United States’ attendance at a high-level meeting early next month of the Organization of American States, where Cuba’s possible re-entry into the regional bloc will be discussed.

The State Department said Friday it had proposed restarting the talks to "reaffirm both sides’ commitment to safe, legal and orderly migration, to review trends in illegal Cuban migration to the United States and to improve operational relations with Cuba on migration issues."
…
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who will attend the June 2 meeting in Honduras, told lawmakers this past week that the U.S. would not support Cuba’s membership in the organization until and unless President Raul Castro’s government makes democratic reforms and releases political prisoners.

She and Obama have also said that broader engagement with Cuba, including the possible lifting of the U.S. embargo on the island, is dependent on such steps.
…
In Miami on Friday, the influential Cuban American National Foundation welcomed the news, saying resumed migration talks could be "an opportunity to resolve issues of United States national interest."

However, three Cuban-American members of Congress from Florida denounced the move as "another unilateral concession by the Obama administration to the dictatorship."

-
Robert Naiman
Just Foreign Policy
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May 26, 2009

IraqTortureGate: Powell Denies Knowing He Used Tortured Evidence for UN Case
The Senate Intelligence Committee knows that al-Libi’s false, tortured testimony was part of Colin Powell’s speech to the UN. Human Rights Watch knows it. Powell’s former deputy Lawrence Wilkerson knows it. And you know it. But supposedly Colin Powell doesn’t know it. Is this credible?
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/05/26-12

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Summary:
U.S./Top News
1) Human Rights Watch said hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis trapped by an offensive against the Taliban in Swat face catastrophe and authorities should lift a curfew to enable them to get out and for help to get in, Reuters reports. The offensive in Swat has sparked an exodus of 2.3 million people, but about 200,000 people are believed to be still in the valley. Severe shortages of food, water and medicine were creating a major humanitarian crisis for the trapped civilians, HRW said.

2) On its present course, Obama’s Iran policy will not provide an alternative to continued antagonism between the US and Iran, argue Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett in the New York Times. Iran will not be persuaded of US seriousness if Washington acquiesces to Israeli insistence on a deadline for successful US engagement with Iran. President Obama said, after his meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu, that he wants to see "progress" in nuclear negotiations before the end of the year. Secretary Clinton has been pushing the other permanent members of the Security Council to intensify multilateral sanctions against Iran if Tehran has not agreed to limit the expansion of its nuclear-fuel cycle program by the time the General Assembly convenes at the end of September. This diplomatic approach is guaranteed to fail. Getting America’s Iran policy "right" would require a president to take positions that some allies and domestic constituencies won’t like. The president would have to accept that Iran will continue enriching uranium, and that the only realistic potential resolution to the nuclear issue would leave Iran in effect like Japan - a nation with an increasingly sophisticated nuclear fuel-cycle program that is carefully safeguarded to manage proliferation risks. Additionally, the president would have to accept that Iran’s relationships with Hamas and Hezbollah will continue, and be willing to work with Tehran to integrate these groups into lasting settlements of the Middle East’s core political conflicts.

3) Forced into the arms of the International Monetary Fund, the Latvian government is now slashing its budget and the wages of state employees, the New York Times reports. Latvia is racing to halve a government budget deficit, estimated at 12 percent of gross domestic product, even as its economy is expected to contract by 16.5 percent this year. That is a condition of the $10 billion bailout by the I.M.F.

4) Defense Secretary Gates said US public support for the Afghan war will dissipate in less than a year unless the Obama administration achieves "a perceptible shift in momentum," the Wall Street Journal reports. Gates said the momentum in Afghanistan is now with the Taliban, who are inflicting heavy U.S. casualties and hold de facto control of swaths of the country.

Afghhanistan
5) US intelligence agencies have launched an intensive effort to examine the various tribes linked to the Taliban to determine whether some can be broken off through diplomatic and economic initiatives, the Boston Globe reports. "You have a whole spectrum of bad guys that sort of get lumped into this catch-all term of Taliban . . . because they’re launching bullets at us," said a senior defense official. "There are many of the groups that can probably be peeled off." But one analyst cautioned that sending more troops might make it more difficult to reach accommodations.

Iraq
6) U.S. forces in Iraq have been holding Reuters cameraman Ibrahim Jassam without charge, evidence or trial since Sept. 2, despite an Iraqi court order that he be released, Liz Sly reports in the Los Angeles Times. She notes that the US has harshly criticized other countries for detaining journalists, while "routinely" holding journalists without charge in Iraq. The decision to release him or transfer him to the Iraqi legal system will be made by the Iraqi government "by the end of the year."

Iran
7) Polls show that Mir Hussein Moussavi is the most serious threat to President Ahmadinejad in Iran’s presidential election, the New York Times reports. Ahmadinejad still has considerable support among many poor Iranians.

Israel/Palestine
8) The party led by Israel’s Foreign Minister plans to introduce a bill making Israeli citizenship contingent on an oath of allegiance, a move targeting the country’s Arab minority, AP reports. The bill follows a separate proposal by the same party that would make it illegal for Arabs to mourn the "catastrophe" - the term Palestinians use to describe the exile caused by Israel’s founding.

Panama
9) A trade accord with Panama won’t be submitted to Congress for approval until President Obama offers a new "framework" for trade, Bloomberg reports. The AFL-CIO’s John Sweeney had said unions would oppose a rush to ratify the deal, and 55 House Democrats told Speaker Pelosi to reject the Panama accord unless it is renegotiated.

Colombia
10) UNHCR said it is concerned about a wave of death threats in Colombia against human rights workers and social activists, AP reports. UNHCR said it couldn’t name the source of the threats for fear of putting its workers at risk.

Contents:
U.S./Top News
1) Pakistanis trapped in Swat face catastrophe: group
Reuters, Tuesday, May 26, 2009 3:59 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/26/AR2009052600285.html

Islamabad - Hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis trapped by an offensive against the Taliban in Swat face catastrophe and authorities should lift a curfew to enable them to get out and for help to get in, a rights group said.

The offensive in the Taliban bastion of Swat, about 120 km (80 miles) northwest of Islamabad, has sparked an exodus of 2.3 million people, according to government figures, but about 200,000 people are believed to be still in the valley.

Severe shortages of food, water and medicine were creating a major humanitarian crisis for the trapped civilians, the U.S.-based group Human Rights Watch said.

"People trapped in the Swat conflict zone face a humanitarian catastrophe unless the Pakistani military immediately lifts a curfew that has been in place continuously for the last week," said Brad Adams, the group’s Asia director. "The government cannot allow the local population to remain trapped without food, clean water, and medicine as a tactic to defeat the Taliban," Adams said in a statement on Tuesday.

[…]

Human Rights Watch said it was getting persistent reports of civilian casualties from army shelling and aerial bombardments as well as reports of summary executions of civilians by the Taliban.

"The Pakistani government should take all possible measures including air drops of food, water, and medicine to quickly alleviate large-scale human suffering in Swat," Adams said. "Both sides should allow a humanitarian corridor that would let civilians escape the fighting and for impartial humanitarian agencies to evacuate and aid civilians at risk," he said.

[…]

A top U.N. official said on Monday the United Nations was considering asking the military to temporarily halt its offensive to enable aid to get to trapped civilians. "A humanitarian pause is a subject of discussion … it is obviously something that we would not shy away from asking for," Manuel Bessler, head of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Pakistan, told AlertNet.

2) Have We Already Lost Iran?
Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett, New York Times, May 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/opinion/24leverett.html

President Obama’s Iran policy has, in all likelihood, already failed. On its present course, the White House’s approach will not stop Tehran’s development of a nuclear fuel program - or, as Iran’s successful test of a medium-range, solid-fuel missile last week underscored, military capacities of other sorts. It will also not provide an alternative to continued antagonism between the United States and Iran - a posture that for 30 years has proved increasingly damaging to the interests of the United States and its allies in the Middle East.

This judgment may seem both premature and overly severe. We do not make it happily. We voted for Barack Obama in 2008, and we still want him to succeed in reversing the deterioration in America’s strategic position. But we also believe that successful diplomacy with Iran is essential to that end. Unless President Obama and his national security team take a fundamentally different approach to Tehran, they will not achieve a breakthrough.

[…]

In conversations with [Dennis] Ross before Obama’s election, we asked him if he really believed that engage-with-pressure would bring concessions from Iran. He forthrightly acknowledged that this was unlikely. Why, then, was he advocating a diplomatic course that, in his judgment, would probably fail? Because, he told us, if Iran continued to expand its nuclear fuel program, at some point in the next couple of years President Bush’s successor would need to order military strikes against Iranian nuclear targets. Citing past "diplomacy" would be necessary for that president to claim any military action was legitimate.

Iranian officials are fully aware of Ross’s views - and are increasingly suspicious that he is determined that the Obama administration make, as one senior Iranian diplomat said to us, "an offer we can’t accept," simply to gain international support for coercive action.

[…]

Tehran will certainly not be persuaded of American seriousness if Washington acquiesces to Israeli insistence on a deadline for successful American engagement with Iran. Although the White House spokesman, Robert Gibbs, had told reporters that no such deadline would be imposed, President Obama himself said, after his meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, that he wants to see "progress" in nuclear negotiations before the end of the year. He also endorsed the creation of a high-level Israeli-American working group to identify more coercive options if Iran does not meet American conditions for limiting its nuclear activities.

More specifically, Secretary Clinton and Ross have been pushing the other permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and Germany to intensify multilateral sanctions against Iran if Tehran has not agreed to limit the expansion of its nuclear-fuel cycle program by the time the United Nations General Assembly convenes in New York at the end of September.

This diplomatic approach is guaranteed to fail. Having a deadline for successful negotiations will undercut the perceived credibility of American diplomacy in Tehran and serve only to prepare the way for more coercive measures. Obama’s justification for a deadline - that previous American-Iranian negotiations produced "a lot of talk but not always action and follow-through" - is incorrect as far as Iranian behavior was concerned. For example, during talks over Afghanistan after 9/11 in which one of us (Hillary) took part, Tehran deported hundreds of Qaeda and Taliban operatives who had sought sanctuary in Iran, and also helped establish the new Afghan government. It was Washington, not Tehran, that arbitrarily ended these productive talks.

Beyond the nuclear issue, the administration’s approach to Iran degenerates into an only slightly prettified version of George W. Bush’s approach - that is, an effort to contain a perceived Iranian threat without actually trying to resolve underlying political conflicts. Obama administration officials are buying into a Bush-era delusion: that concern about a rising Iranian threat could unite Israel and moderate Arab states in a grand alliance under Washington’s leadership.

President Obama and his team should not be excused for their failure to learn the lessons of recent history in the Middle East - that the prospect of strategic cooperation with Israel is profoundly unpopular with Arab publics and that even moderate Arab regimes cannot sustain such cooperation. The notion of an Israeli-moderate Arab coalition united to contain Iran is not only delusional, it would leave the Palestinian and Syrian-Lebanese tracks of the Arab-Israeli conflict unresolved and prospects for their resolution in free fall. These tracks cannot be resolved without meaningful American interaction with Iran and its regional allies, Hamas and Hezbollah.

[…]

What is really hard is that getting America’s Iran policy "right" would require a president to take positions that some allies and domestic constituencies won’t like.

To fix our Iran policy, the president would have to commit not to use force to change the borders or the form of government of the Islamic Republic. He would also have to accept that Iran will continue enriching uranium, and that the only realistic potential resolution to the nuclear issue would leave Iran in effect like Japan - a nation with an increasingly sophisticated nuclear fuel-cycle program that is carefully safeguarded to manage proliferation risks. Additionally, the president would have to accept that Iran’s relationships with Hamas and Hezbollah will continue, and be willing to work with Tehran to integrate these groups into lasting settlements of the Middle East’s core political conflicts.

It was not easy for President Richard Nixon to discard a quarter-century of failed policy toward the People’s Republic of China and to reorient America’s posture toward Beijing in ways that have served America’s interests extremely well for more than 30 years. That took strategic vision, political ruthlessness and personal determination. We hope that President Obama - contrary to his record so far - will soon begin to demonstrate those same qualities in forging a new approach toward Iran.

3) Latvia Races to Cut Deficit to Keep to Its Bailout Deal
Carter Dougherty, New York Times, May 24, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/world/europe/24latvia.html

Riga - Many countries in the world have felt the sting of the economic crisis, but few can match Latvia for sheer pain. A harrowing contraction in the economy is reordering expectations for the future as the country’s leaders grapple with a credit-fueled boom turned to bust.

Two brothers, Matiss and Oskars Barkoviskis, see it every day as they make their rounds here in their borrowed Mazda pickup truck. In the three months since they founded a charity for feeding the poor, they have discovered a strong and growing demand for their services.

In just that time, the number of families they visit each week has nearly doubled, with new ones answering ads in Riga’s free newspaper every day. They started by delivering groceries down the dirt roads outside Riga and into decrepit, Soviet-era high-rise apartment buildings. But now they find themselves helping out families who live in apparently comfortable surroundings, but who can no longer afford to feed themselves.

[…]

It is not hard to grasp what stands behind the sour mood in Latvia. Forced into the arms of the International Monetary Fund, the Latvian government is now slashing its budget and the wages of state employees in a bid to rebalance a society that had run badly out of whack.

Austerity is rippling down the social hierarchy, as the affluent cancel vacations, middle-class people fret about social descent, and Dickensian scenes of destitution multiply.

In Riga, the capital, abandoned construction sites, vast lots of repossessed cars and a new, utterly empty shopping mall testify to the misery. But the government’s tough medicine for the crisis, stiffer than Black Balsam, the syrupy herbal liqueur that is the country’s national drink, has defined the times.

Latvia is racing to halve an enormous government budget deficit, now estimated at 12 percent of gross domestic product, even as its economy is expected to contract by 16.5 percent this year. That is a condition of the $10 billion bailout by the I.M.F. that the European Union, of which Latvia is a member, also supported.

4) Gates Says Taliban Have Momentum In Afghanistan
Yochi J. Dreazen and August Cole, Wall Street Journal, May 26, 2009
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124329472631452687.html

American public support for the Afghan war will dissipate in less than a year unless the Obama administration achieves "a perceptible shift in momentum," Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in an interview.

Gates said the momentum in Afghanistan is with the Taliban, who are inflicting heavy U.S. casualties and hold de facto control of swaths of the country.

The defense chief has been moving aggressively to salvage the war in Afghanistan, signing off on the deployments of 21,000 American military personnel and recently taking the unprecedented step of firing the four-star general who commanded all U.S. forces there. Gates, speaking in his cabin on an Air Force plane, said the administration is rapidly running out of time to turn around the war.

"People are willing to stay in the fight, I believe, if they think we’re making headway," he said. "If they think we’re stalemated and having our young men and women get killed, then patience is going to run out pretty fast."

Afghhanistan
5) US Probes Divisions Within Taliban
Wants to detach tribes willing to share power
Bryan Bender, Boston Globe, May 24, 2009
http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2009/05/24/us_probes_divisions_within_taliban

US intelligence agencies have launched an intensive effort to examine the various tribes linked to the Taliban to determine whether some can be broken off through diplomatic and economic initiatives, mirroring the successful strategy employed by General David H. Petraeus in Iraq, according to Defense Department officials.

Top military and intelligence officials say they know far too little about the disparate groups they are fighting in Afghanistan and Pakistan and believe many fighters have been incorrectly labeled as the Taliban, lumping those who pose the greatest threat with others who may be willing to share power with the Afghan and Pakistani governments.

"You have a whole spectrum of bad guys that sort of get lumped into this catch-all term of Taliban . . . because they’re launching bullets at us," said a senior defense official involved in the effort who like others was not authorized to speak publicly about intelligence matters. "There are many of the groups that can probably be peeled off."

The initiative, which involves hundreds of intelligence operatives and analysts in the United States and overseas, is expected to culminate later this year in a detailed, highly classified analysis of the different factions of the Taliban and other groups. The overall effort is considered crucial to the long-term success of President Obama’s goal of crushing the remnants of the Al Qaeda terrorist network and bringing stability to large swaths of the two countries that have become incubators for anti-US violence.

"This is the key to moving forward," said Peter Bergen, a specialist on radical Islamic terrorism at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C. "The easiest way to end an insurgency is to get people to stop being insurgents."

[…]

The first step, officials said, will be identifying the remnants of the Afghan Taliban who ruled Afghanistan until it was overthrown by US-led forces in late 2001 for harboring the planners of the 9/11 attacks.

They include leaders possibly open to dialogue, such as Mawlawi Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Afghans who are believed to be potential rivals for power with the more radical Taliban leader Mullah Muhammed Omar, who escaped the US onslaught in 2001. Some Taliban leaders are reportedly talking through intermediaries about a potential peace deal with the Afghan government.

[…]

But Bergen, who has spent considerable time in the region, warned that reaching durable agreements with more moderate elements will prove more difficult than it was in Iraq - especially when they see the 21,000 additional American military forces that Obama is sending this year to Afghanistan.

"It’s going to be more complex to do deals with the Taliban than people think," Bergen said. In their view, "more brigades are not coming to make peace deals. They are going to kill a lot of people."

Iraq
6) U.S. Holds Journalist Without Charges In Iraq
Reuters cameraman Ibrahim Jassam has been held since September. The U.S. military rejected a court order to release him, saying he is a ‘high security threat.’ No evidence has been presented.
Liz Sly, Los Angeles Times, May 24, 2009
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iraq-journalist24-2009may24,3,7048082.story

Baghdad - The soldiers came at 1:30 a.m, rousing family members who were sleeping on the roof to escape the late-summer heat. They broke down the front door. Accompanied by dogs, American and Iraqi troops burst into the Jassam family home in the town of Mahmoudiya south of Baghdad. "Where is the journalist Ibrahim?" one of the Iraqi soldiers barked at the grandparents, children and grandchildren as they staggered blearily down the stairs.

Ibrahim Jassam, a cameraman and photographer for the Reuters news agency, stepped forward, one of this brothers recalled. "Take me if you want me, but please leave my brothers." The soldiers rifled through the house, confiscating his computer hard drive and cameras. And then they led him away, handcuffed and blindfolded. That was Sept. 2.

Jassam, 31, has been in U.S. custody ever since. His case is the latest of a dozen detentions the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists has documented since 2001.

No formal accusations have been made against Jassam, and an Iraqi court ordered in November that he be released for lack of evidence. But the U.S. military continues to hold him, saying it has intelligence that he is "a high security threat," said Maj. Neal Fisher, spokesman for detainee affairs.

The Obama administration harshly criticized Iran for its imprisonment of Roxana Saberi, the U.S.-Iranian journalist who was convicted of espionage and sentenced to eight years in prison before being freed two weeks ago. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton criticized Iran’s treatment of Saberi as "non-transparent, unpredictable and arbitrary."

Washington also has called upon North Korea to expedite the trial of two U.S. journalists being held on spying charges.

Yet the U.S. has routinely used the arbitrary powers it assumed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorism attacks to hold journalists without charge in Iraq, as well as Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Committee to Protect Journalists said.

None of the detained journalists has been convicted of any charge, undermining the United States’ reputation when it comes to criticizing other countries on issues of press freedom, committee executive director Joel Simon said. "The U.S. has a record of holding journalists for long periods of time without due process and without explanation," he said. "Its standing would be improved if it addressed this issue."

Reuters has expressed disappointment over Jassam’s detention and has said there is no evidence against him.

[…]

Jassam is the only Iraqi journalist still in U.S. custody, the last to be detained under wartime rules that predated a U.S.-Iraqi security agreement signed in December. Under the new accord, U.S. forces must obtain a warrant before they can arrest an Iraqi citizen.

[…]

The CPJ’s Simon said it was possible for someone to use the cover of journalism to conduct other activities. "No one is suggesting that journalists should have a get- out-of-jail-free card," he said. "But if you accuse someone of something there needs to be a fair legal process. That’s what we said in the Roxana Saberi case, and that’s what we say in the Ibrahim Jassam case."

Jassam will have to wait for the requirements of the security pact to play out before he gets another day in court or his freedom. The agreement states that the U.S. is to release low-threat detainees in a "safe and orderly" way and refer "high threat" cases to the Iraqi Justice Ministry for review.

The decision to release him or transfer him to the Iraqi legal system will be made by the Iraqi government. The only timetable for that step is "by the end of the year," Fisher said. By that time, Jassam will have been in custody for more than a year.

Jassam’s brother, Walid, visited him recently in Camp Bucca, the desolate, tented U.S. prison camp in the desert in southern Iraq, and found him close to the breaking point. "He used to be handsome, but now he’s pale and he’s tired," said Walid, who says his brother had no ties to insurgents. "Every now and then while we were talking, he would start crying. He was begging me: ‘Please do something to get me out of here. I don’t know what is the charge against me.’

Iran
7) Support for Moderate a Challenge to Iran’s Leader
Nazila Fathi, New York Times, May 26, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/26/world/middleeast/26iran.html

Tabriz, Iran - The strongest challenger to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad attracted an unusually large and exuberant crowd of supporters on Monday during a campaign speech in this northwest city near the candidate’s birthplace, with only a few weeks before national elections that the incumbent stands a serious chance of losing.

The crowd for the challenger, Mir Hussein Moussavi, was extraordinary not only for its size - an estimated 30,000 - but also because the supporters were not paid, given free food, bused in or ordered by their workplaces to attend, a tactic sometimes used by Ahmadinejad’s campaign.

[…]

Moussavi, a former prime minister whose moderate views have won him support from other reformers in Iran including former President Mohammad Khatami, has positioned himself as the strongest challenger to Ahmadinejad, a religious conservative whose backing by the Islamic authorities here has weakened and who is now widely criticized for Iran’s economic malaise.

If elected, Moussavi told supporters here, he would enforce the constitutional law that allows the ethnic languages of different regions to be taught at schools, something Ahmadinejad has not done. Moussavi told the voters, "Your vote is crucial in the elections."

His wife, Zahra Rahnavard, who has been at the forefront of his campaign, said in a meeting with women that she favored monogamy - although polygamy is allowed under the law - and more rights for women. She is the first candidate’s wife to campaign since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

[…]

Moussavi is considered the most serious threat to Ahmadinejad’s re-election among the three challengers. The other two, Mehdi Karroubi, a reformist candidate, and Mohsen Rezai, a former leader of the Revolutionary Guards, have lagged in voter opinion polls.

Ahmadinejad still has considerable support among Turkish speakers, especially in poor rural villages. Many low-income Iranians voted for Ahmadinejad four years ago because of his pledges to raise their standards of living.

Hassan Nazari, 75, a supporter of Ahmadinejad in Tabriz, said Monday that he would vote for Ahmadinejad’s re-election because Nazari’s salary had increased nearly five times and the lives of people in rural areas had improved.

Israel/Palestine
8) Israeli Bill Would Impose Loyalty Oath on Arab Citizens
Matti Friedman, Associated Press, May 25, 2009 07:55 AM
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/639832

Jerusalem - An ultranationalist Israeli party headed by the country’s foreign minister said today it plans to introduce a bill making Israeli citizenship contingent on an oath of allegiance, a move targeting the country’s Arab minority.

The bill follows a separate proposal Sunday by the same party that would make it illegal for Arabs to mourn the "catastrophe" - the term Palestinians use to describe the exile caused by Israel’s founding.

Both proposals by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beitenu party focus on the perceived disloyalty of the country’s Arab citizens, who form roughly one-fifth of the population. The legislation, which must still pass several hurdles to win final approval, drew harsh criticism from opposition legislators and civil rights groups.

Yisrael Beitenu swept to third place in recent parliamentary elections with a message that suggested Israel’s Arabs were an internal threat to the country. It is a senior partner in the coalition government. The loyalty oath was one of its main campaign pledges.

The new legislation would make citizenship contingent on an oath of loyalty to Israel as a "Jewish, Zionist and democratic state," party spokesman Tal Nahum said. The bill would also allow the government to revoke the citizenship of anyone who does not comply or perform some form of military or national service.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has yet to express a position on the matter.

[…]

The bills appear not have the support necessary to win parliamentary approval. Nonetheless, they drew furious reactions from Arab parties and civil rights groups. Arab lawmaker Hana Swaid called Miller’s bill "racist," saying it "eliminates the right of Palestinian Arab citizens to pronounce their identity and national feelings."

Panama
9) Obama Delays Panama Trade Pact After Unions Object
Mark Drajem and Eric Sabo, Bloomberg, May 21
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=aHclwpTOYGmU

A U.S. trade accord with Panama, which is opposed by labor unions, won’t be submitted to Congress for approval until President Barack Obama offers a new "framework" for trade, an administration official said.

The decision, announced by Assistant U.S. Trade Representative Everett Eissenstat at a Senate Finance Committee hearing today, is a reversal from statements in March that the U.S. wanted to pass the accord soon. Eissenstat said today the administration wants to outline how trade fits with other priorities such as assistance for unemployed workers and health care.

"It’s clear that trade agreements in the last few years have been much too divisive," Eissenstat told the panel. "We want to make sure that Panama doesn’t contribute to that divisiveness."

Trade accords with Panama, Columbia and South Korea were reached by President George W. Bush and are awaiting congressional approval. Unlike the other two deals, Panama is "relatively non-controversial," House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said April 22.

Both chambers of Congress must approve legislation implementing the tariff cuts and investment rules before the accords can take effect. A delay for Panama may also postpone accords with Colombia and South Korea.

Eissenstat’s comments follow remarks by John Sweeney, the head of the AFL-CIO labor federation, that unions would oppose a rush to ratify the deal. Also today, 55 House Democrats told House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to reject the Panama accord unless it is renegotiated.

Colombia
10) U.N. refugee agency concerned about Colombia threats
Associated Press, Fri, May. 22, 2009
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/americas/AP/story/1060623.html

The U.N. refugee agency said Friday it is concerned about a wave of death threats in Colombia against human rights workers and social activists.

One armed group distributed pamphlets around the country this week threatening to kill government officials and activists, the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said.

UNHCR spokesman Andrej Mahecic declined to name the group for security reasons. "We can’t use the name of the group because we would put our own staff at risk," he said.

Targets of the threats include Colombia’s national office charged with overseeing human rights abuses in the country, UNHCR said. Colombia has 3 million internal refugees from years of conflict between government forces and armed groups, the Geneva-based agency said.

-
Robert Naiman
Just Foreign Policy
www.justforeignpolicy.org

Just Foreign Policy is a membership organization devoted to reforming US foreign policy so it reflects the values and interests of the majority of Americans.