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.

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

Help us build for a Just Foreign Policy
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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
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.

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.

NYT: Taliban Offer Afghan Peace Plan
According to yesterday’s New York Times, talks between Taliban leaders and Afghan government representatives have accelerated since Obama’s election, and Afghan officials say they have Washington’s blessing for the talks. Judging from the NYT report, the Taliban demands appear eminently reasonable. The signaled position of the US has been: we’re not in any hurry for talks, because we want to bloody the Taliban first, so they’ll be more flexible in negotiations. But if the Taliban are already being flexible, perhaps we could skip over the bloodying part - given that for every bloodied Taliban, there are going to be fifty bloodied Afghan civilians - and move straight to meaningful negotiations.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/nyt-taliban-offer-afghan_b_206936.html

Will Speaker Pelosi Stand Up to the IMF?
The failure of Senator DeMint’s amendment to strip money for the International Monetary Fund from the supplemental means the question of IMF reform will now go to House-Senate conference. House Speaker Pelosi is in a unique position to require that the IMF implement observable reforms as the price of new U.S. tax dollars.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/will-speaker-pelosi-stand_b_205958.html

Help us build for a Just Foreign Policy
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Summary:
U.S./Top News
1) The Senate passed 86-3 a $91.3 billion military spending bill, allowing Obama to significantly ramp up the war in Afghanistan, AP reports. Feingold, Sanders, and Coburn voted no. Sen. Boxer, who voted yes, said: "I don’t support an open-ended commitment of American troops to Afghanistan." Sen. Corker won approval of an amendment requiring the president to set forth U.S. objectives in Afghanistan and Pakistan and issue quarterly reports detailing whether those goals were being met. By a 64-30 vote, the Senate rejected an amendment by Sen. DeMint to kill a proposed $100 billion line of credit for the International Monetary Fund [IMF]. [Sanders and Feingold voted to cut the IMF money - JFP.] House Appropriations Chair Obey said again he’s "very, very reluctant" to support any additional IMF money.

2) $108 billion in new funds for the IMF approved by the Senate won’t help developing countries counter the world recession, CEPR says. The IMF has been mandating economic conditions for countries receiving new loans, including deficit reduction, monetary tightening, and inflation-targeting measures, that run counter to the worldwide need for an increased economic stimulus. Thirty-three Democratic members of the House sent a letter to Appropriations Chair Obey and Foreign Ops Chair Lowey outlining legislative language that should be included to ensure the IMF uses the funds to facilitate economic stimulus in recipient countries, instead of pro-cyclical conditions.

3) Vice President Biden said future U.S. aid to Lebanon depends on the outcome of upcoming elections on June 7, AP reports. Hezbollah criticized Biden’s visit as a U.S. attempt to influence the vote. [The AP writer appears to regard Hizbollah’s allegation as obviously true - JFP.] Biden’s visit was clearly timed to bolster the faction led by Prime Minister Saniora ahead of the vote, AP writes.

4) The apocalyptic rhetoric about moving Guantanamo detainees to federal prisons rarely addresses the fact that 33 international terrorists, many with ties to al-Qaeda, reside in a single federal prison in Florence, Colo., with little public notice, the Washington Post reports. Detained in the supermax facility in Colorado are Ramzi Yousef, who headed the group that carried out the first bombing of the World Trade Center in February 1993; Zacarias Moussaoui, convicted of conspiring in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001; Ahmed Ressam, of the Dec. 31, 1999, Los Angeles airport millennium attack plots; Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, conspirator in several plots, including one to assassinate President Bush; and Wadih el-Hage, convicted of the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya. "We have a vast amount of experience in how to judge the continued incarceration of highly dangerous prisoners, since we do this with thousands of prisoners every month, all over the United States, including some really quite dangerous people," said Philip Zelikow, who was executive director of the 9/11 Commission.

Israel/Palestine
5) Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu insisted that all of Jerusalem will always remain under Israeli sovereignty, AP reports. After the 1967 war, Israel annexed east Jerusalem, a move that no other country has recognized. Previous Israeli governments have indicated willingness to cede Arab neighborhoods to the Palestinians in the framework of peace. Netanyahu has always rejected giving up control of any part of Jerusalem. an aide to Palestinian President Abbas said the Palestinians have accepted a two-state solution based on east Jerusalem as the capital of their state. Secretary of State Clinton voiced the toughest criticism to date of Israeli settlement construction, AP says: "First, we want to see a stop to settlement construction, additions, natural growth, any kind of settlement activity," she told Al-Jazeera.

Bolivia
6) President Morales called for an about-face in relations with Washington, saying past diplomatic spats can be overcome if the new U.S. government refrains from meddling in Bolivia’s affairs, AP reports. Morales said said U.S. aid should be channeled to his government instead of other groups in the country, which he accuses of conspiring against him. Morales met with Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Shannon, who said their talks were a "good start" toward improving ties. Bolivian Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca, who met Shannon Wednesday, expressed willingness to cooperate on anti-drug efforts.

Panama
7) President Obama is throwing his support behind a trade deal with Panama, courting a potential backlash among his labor supporters and human rights groups, the Los Angeles Times reports. Obama is pushing for approval by July 1.

Contents:
U.S./Top News
1) Senate passes $91.3 billion war funding bill
Andrew Taylor, Associated Press, Friday, May 22, 2009 1:43 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/21/AR2009052100291.html

The Senate on Thursday passed a $91.3 billion military spending bill, shorn of money President Barack Obama wants to close the Guantanamo Bay prison but allowing him to significantly ramp up the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

The Senate voted 86-3 to pass the bill, which provides money for military and diplomatic operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, setting up House-Senate talks on a compromise measure to present to Obama next month.
…
Among the few cautionary voices was Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. "I want to give this administration … the resources it needs to successfully end these wars," Boxer said. "I don’t support an open-ended commitment of American troops to Afghanistan. And if we do not see measurable progress, we must reconsider our engagement and strategy there."
…
Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., won approval Thursday of an amendment requiring the president to set forth U.S. objectives in Afghanistan and Pakistan and issue quarterly reports detailing whether those goals were being met.
…
By a 64-30 vote earlier Thursday, the Senate rejected an amendment by Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., to kill a proposed $100 billion line of credit for the IMF to shore up the ability of countries around the globe cope with financial crises, along with $8 billion for existing commitments. [Democratic caucus members voting to strip the IMF money included Feingold and Sanders - JFP.]
…
House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., said again Thursday that he’s "very, very reluctant" to support any additional IMF since European countries have been slow to take deficit-financed steps to stimulate their economies.

Sens. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., Russ Feingold, D-Wis., and Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., voted against the measure war spending bill.

2) New Funds for IMF Approved by U.S. Senate Would Worsen Global Economic Downturn, Economists Say
Center for Economic and Policy Research, May 22, 2009
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/press-releases/press-releases/new-funds-for-imf-approved-by-u.s.-senate-would-worsen-global-economic-downturn,-economists-say/

$108 billion in new funds for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) approved by the U.S. Senate yesterday is not likely to help developing countries counter the world recession, according to economists at the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR). Contrary to remarks by IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn that rich country contributions to the IMF make "this…the most coordinated stimulus ever," the IMF has been mandating economic conditions for countries receiving new loans, including deficit reduction, monetary tightening, and inflation-targeting measures that run counter to the worldwide need for an increased economic stimulus.
…
In what media reports and observers see as an effort to limit debate and scrutiny, the White House has attempted to obtain the new money for the IMF through back channels by attaching it to the war supplemental bill in the Senate. The House version of the bill does not include the IMF funds, and attaching the IMF funding in conference is likely to face strong opposition from many representatives.

Yesterday, thirty-three Democratic members of the House sent a letter to Appropriations Chair David Obey and Foreign Operations Subcommittee Chair Nita Lowey outlining legislative language that should be included to ensure the IMF uses the funds to facilitate economic stimulus in recipient countries, instead of pro-cyclical conditions. The letter also urges that transparency and governance reforms be required of the IMF, and that a portion of revenue from planned IMF gold sales be used for debt cancellation or grants for the poorest countries.

"There’s little evidence that the IMF has actually helped boost GDP growth in developing countries over the past 30 years, and a lot of evidence to the contrary," Weisbrot said. "Giving the IMF this money without reform conditions is a mistake, and one that will come back to haunt us in the future."

3) Biden links US aid to outcome of Lebanon election
Sam F. Ghattas, Associated Press, Fri May 22, 2:06 pm ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090522/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_lebanon_biden

Beirut - Vice President Joe Biden said Friday that future U.S. aid to Lebanon depends on the outcome of upcoming elections, a warning aimed at Iranian-backed Hezbollah as it tries to oust the pro-Western faction that dominates government.

Confident its alliance will win, Hezbollah criticized Biden’s visit as a U.S. attempt to influence the June 7 vote and held a mass rally to show its popular support.

Biden is the highest-level U.S. official to visit Lebanon in more than 25 years and the attention shows American concern that the vote could shift power firmly into the hands of Hezbollah. U.S. officials have said before they will review aid to Lebanon depending on the composition of the next government, apparently meaning military aid.

"The election of leaders committed to the rule of law and economic reform opens the door to lasting growth and prosperity as it will here in Lebanon," Biden said. The U.S. "will evaluate the shape of our assistance programs based on the composition of the new government and the policies it advocates."

The U.S. considers Hezbollah a terrorist group and Biden’s one-day visit was clearly timed to bolster the Western-leaning faction led by Prime Minister Fuad Saniora ahead of the vote. He expressed strong support for the government.
…
Biden said the U.S. did not want to interfere in the elections and tried to steer clear of the political divisions by meeting the neutral president, Saniora and Hezbollah-allied parliament speaker Nabih Berri.

But he signaled a tilt toward America’s allies when he met behind closed doors with leaders of Saniora’s faction at a private residence. A similar meeting between U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during the monthlong Hezbollah war with Israel in 2006 was broadcast on TV and drew months of sharp condemnation from Hezbollah.
…
Biden’s visit caps a transformation in American policy toward Lebanon. It began four years ago after more than two decades of steering clear of the country long viewed as a quagmire. Pro-Iranian militants targeted Americans with bombings and kidnappings in the 1980s during the civil war and more than 250 Americans were killed. That led to a 12-year U.S. ban on citizens traveling to the country that was lifted in 1997.

But by stepping into Lebanon’s political fray, the United States risks deepening the rift between rival factions. If it does not win, an embittered Hezbollah could take a harder line against its opponents.
…
The coalition dominated by the heavily armed Hezbollah stands a good chance of winning, which could increase the influence of its sponsors Iran and Syria in the region. Israel and U.S. Arab allies such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt are concerned about the growing influence of Iran in the Middle East, especially through the militant groups Tehran backs such as Hezbollah and Hamas in Gaza.
…
U.S. support for Lebanon shot up after the Hariri assassination under the former Bush administration, which had isolated Syria.

But the Obama administration has shifted policy, reaching out for a dialogue with Syria and Iran. Those moves have alarmed America’s allies in Lebanon, prompting recent reassurances from U.S. officials that they will not sell out Lebanon in any dialogue with Syria.

4) Supermax Prisons In U.S. Already Hold Terrorists
Carrie Johnson and Walter Pincus, Washington Post, Friday, May 22, 2009
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/21/AR2009052102009.html

In news conferences, speeches and debates this week, lawmakers from both parties, as well as the director of the FBI, have sounded alarms about moving Guantanamo Bay detainees to federal prisons, where they could launch riots, hatch radical plots or somehow be released among the populace.

"No good purpose is served by allowing known terrorists, who trained at terrorist training camps, to come to the U.S. to live among us," said Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.).

Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (Nev.) said Tuesday, before saying he was open to changing his position, "Part of what we don’t want is them be put in prisons in the United States."

But the apocalyptic rhetoric rarely addresses this: Thirty-three international terrorists, many with ties to al-Qaeda, reside in a single federal prison in Florence, Colo., with little public notice.

Detained in the supermax facility in Colorado are Ramzi Yousef, who headed the group that carried out the first bombing of the World Trade Center in February 1993; Zacarias Moussaoui, convicted of conspiring in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001; Ahmed Ressam, of the Dec. 31, 1999, Los Angeles airport millennium attack plots; Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, conspirator in several plots, including one to assassinate President George W. Bush; and Wadih el-Hage, convicted of the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya.

Inmates in Florence and those at the maximum-security disciplinary barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., rarely see other prisoners. At Leavenworth, the toughest prisoners are allowed outside their cells only one hour a day when they are moved with their legs shackled and accompanied by three guards.

"We have a vast amount of experience in how to judge the continued incarceration of highly dangerous prisoners, since we do this with thousands of prisoners every month, all over the United States, including some really quite dangerous people," Philip D. Zelikow, who was counselor to Bush administration Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and executive director of the 9/11 Commission, told the Senate Judiciary Committee last week.
…
Still, one economically pressed community in Montana is bucking the trend of "not in my back yard." Some residents in Hardin are volunteering to open their unused, 464-bed Two Rivers Regional Detention Facility to the detainees from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The City Council recently passed a resolution in support.

But Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) put his foot down. "We’re not going to bring al-Qaeda to Big Sky Country - no way, not on my watch," he told Time magazine this month.

Israel/Palestine
5) Netanyahu Says All Jerusalem to Remain Israeli
Mark Lavie, Associated Press, Thu May 21, 2:44 pm ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090521/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_israel_palestinians

Jerusalem - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted Thursday that all of Jerusalem will always remain under Israeli sovereignty, taking a hard line on a key Israeli-Palestinian peace issue just hours after his forces removed an unauthorized settlement outpost in the West Bank.

The twin moves came a day after Netanyahu returned from talks in Washington, where President Barack Obama backed creation of a Palestinian state and urged an end to Jewish settlement construction in the West Bank, setting up a potential confrontation between Israel and the U.S.

Netanyahu has refused to endorse Palestinian statehood, and his uncompromising statement about Jerusalem focused attention on another issue that could cause friction between Israel and Obama’s administration.

The U.S. has long held that the future of Jerusalem must be decided in negotiations, but Netanyahu offered no flexibility. "United Jerusalem is Israel’s capital," Netanyahu said. "Jerusalem was always ours and will always be ours. It will never again be partitioned and divided."

Netanyahu was speaking at a ceremony marking 42 years since Israel captured east Jerusalem in the 1967 Mideast war.

Before the war, Jordan controlled east Jerusalem, while Israel had the western section. A barbed wire barrier and wall separated the two sides. Shortly after the war, Israel annexed east Jerusalem, a move that no other country has recognized. Israel did not annex other territories, like the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Previous Israeli governments have indicated willingness to cede Arab neighborhoods to the Palestinians in the framework of peace. Netanyahu, who took office on March 31, has always rejected giving up control of any part of Jerusalem.

Rafik Husseini, an aide to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, rejected Netanyahu’s stand. He said the Palestinians have accepted a two-state solution based on east Jerusalem as the capital of their state. "Israeli occupation of east Jerusalem is illegal," he told The Associated Press, adding that an Israeli attempt to keep control of east Jerusalem would be a "major obstacle to peace."
…
On Thursday morning, Israeli forces moved on a small West Bank settler outpost and tore it down, but critics charged that the gesture was almost meaningless, and settlers quickly began putting the makeshift buildings back up.

Israeli peace groups say there are at least 100 wildcat outposts in the West Bank, in addition to 121 settlements authorized by the government. For years, Israel has pledged to remove outposts, but little has been done.

More than 280,000 Israelis now live in West Bank settlements, including several thousand in outposts, many of them little more than a a few mobile homes.
…
In a television interview, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton voiced the toughest criticism to date of settlement construction. "First, we want to see a stop to settlement construction, additions, natural growth, any kind of settlement activity," she told Al-Jazeera this week.

Bolivia
6) Bolivia’s leader advocates change in US relations
Carlos Valdez, Associated Press, Thu, May. 21, 2009
http://www.philly.com/philly/wires/ap/news/nation_world/20090521_ap_boliviasleaderadvocateschangeinusrelations.html

La Paz, Bolivia - President Evo Morales called for an about-face in relations with Washington on Thursday, saying past diplomatic spats can be overcome if the new U.S. government refrains from meddling in Bolivia’s affairs.

Morales met with U.S. envoy Thomas Shannon, the assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, who said their talks were a "good start" toward improving ties.

Morales expelled the U.S. ambassador last year, claiming he had conspired with the Bolivian opposition to incite violence. U.S. officials denied it, and former President George W. Bush’s administration kicked out Bolivia’s envoy to Washington and suspended trade preferences.

Morales said Thursday the two nations must treat each other with "mutual respect" and Washington should not interfere in Bolivia’s internal matters , which he frequently accuses U.S. officials of doing.

The leftist leader, a close ally of Venezuela and Cuba, also said U.S. aid should be channeled to his government instead of other groups in the country, which he accuses of conspiring against him.

The Bolivian government has expressed hope of improved ties under President Barack Obama. As recently as last month, however, Morales said he believed Washington continued to conspire against him.

Morales also suspended cooperation with U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents last year, accusing them of espionage and funding "criminal groups" trying to undermine his government. The U.S. in turn added Bolivia to its anti-narcotics blacklist.

Bolivian Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca, who met Shannon on Wednesday, expressed willingness to cooperate on anti-drug efforts and said Bolivia hopes Obama reverses course on Bush policies that he called "injustices" against the Andean nation.

Shannon said the talks helped "deepen the goodwill between the two countries."

Panama
7) Panama moves to top of Obama’s list for a trade agreement
The president, in a turnabout that reflects his vow to shun protectionism and his goals of rewarding strategic allies and confronting economic necessity, is pushing for passage of a deal by July 1.
Chris Kraul, Los Angeles Times, May 21, 2009
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-panama-trade21-2009may21,0,6727251.story

A frequent critic of NAFTA and other trade pacts when he was on the campaign trail, President Obama is now throwing his support behind a trade deal with Panama, courting a potential backlash among his labor supporters.

The administration is expected to make its case before a Senate Finance Committee hearing today in Washington, where his team is likely to face sharp questioning about Obama’s change of heart on a deal the president now apparently views as a strategic imperative.

The Panama trade deal, which Obama is pushing for approval of by July 1, is one of three bilateral accords negotiated by the Bush administration that later stalled in Congress. The others are deals with Colombia and South Korea, both of which Obama wants passed this year as well.

The Panama pact bogged down over U.S. lawmakers’ concerns about that country’s poor enforcement of labor rights and its reputation as a haven for offshore tax evasion. Last week a White House negotiating team visited the Central American nation and successfully extracted concessions from the Panamanians on those issues, according to people familiar with the talks.

Panama’s trade deal was behind that of Colombia on the Bush agenda. Obama has moved it to the forefront because the administration sees it as having the best chance at passage, creating momentum for the two others, according to the people familiar with the White House legislative strategy, who were not authorized to speak publicly.
…
But the president has offended some of his strongest election backers, including the AFL-CIO and human rights groups that oppose such trade agreements on general principles. The president risks "alienating core supporters in a way that could cripple the broader agenda," said Farnsworth, adding that "the fight in Washington has only just begun."

On Wednesday, Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) sent a letter to Obama urging him to postpone the deal until Panama cooperates in combating international tax evasion. "In this time of economic distress, we can no longer afford to ignore the billions of dollars of tax revenue lost to the U.S. Treasury due to the bank secrecy practices of Panama and other tax havens," Doggett and Levin wrote.

-
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.

A Failsafe Plan to Reduce AfPak Civilian Deaths from U.S. Operations
If reducing Afghan and Pakistani civilian casualties from U.S. military operations were a priority, it would be a requirement. If the Pentagon were required to reduce civilian deaths, they could surely comply.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/a-failsafe-plan-to-reduce_b_206356.html

Will Speaker Pelosi Stand Up to the IMF?
The failure of Senator DeMint’s amendment to strip money for the International Monetary Fund from the supplemental means the question of IMF reform will now go to House-Senate conference. House Speaker Pelosi is in a unique position to require that the IMF implement observable reforms as the price of new U.S. tax dollars.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/will-speaker-pelosi-stand_b_205958.html

Help us build for a Just Foreign Policy
Your financial contributions to Just Foreign Policy help us create opportunities for Americans to advocate for a just foreign policy.
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Summary:
U.S./Top News
1) Leaders of the Taliban and other armed groups battling the Afghan government are talking to intermediaries about a potential peace agreement, with initial demands focused on a timetable for a withdrawal of U.S. troops, the New York Times reports. The talks are being supported by the Afghan government. The Obama administration says it is not involved in the discussions, but Afghan officials believe they have tacit support from the Americans. The talks are significant because they suggest how a political settlement may be able to end the war, the Times says.

2) International efforts to slow the pace of worldwide climate disruption face against powerful interests who advocate a fundamentalist conception of intellectual property, writes Mark Weisbrot in the Guardian. Developing countries such as Brazil, India and China have indicated that if they are going to have to make sacrifices to reduce carbon emissions, they should be able to license some of the most efficient available technologies for doing so. But the US Chamber of Commerce is planning to fight to limit the access of developing countries to environmentally sound technologies.

3) One possible reason for the resilience of the Taliban insurgency is their access to US weapons, the New York Times reports. Of 30 rifle magazines recently taken from insurgents’ corpses, at least 17 contained cartridges, or rounds, identical to ammunition the US had provided to Afghan government forces. The US has been criticized by the GAO for failing to account for thousands of rifles issued to Afghan security forces.

Iran
4) Former AIPAC official Keith Weissman says there is no viable military option for dealing the Iranian nuclear threat, the Jeruslem Post reports. "The only viable solution is dialogue," Weissman says. The Arab states are at least as worried as Israel about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and they should all be working together to deal with it, Weissman said, "but because nothing is moving on the Palestinian problem, there can’t be any overt and probably little if any covert cooperation."

5) New reports by prominent think tanks downplay the potential dangers presented by Iran, concluding that Tehran is at least six years away from building a deliverable nuclear weapon and that its ability to wreak havoc in the Middle East through surrogates is exaggerated, the Los Angeles Times reports. A report by Russian and US scientists at the EastWest Institute says although Iran could build a nuclear device within one to three years of deciding to do so, it would not be able to deliver a long-range weapon for many more years and that a U.S. missile defense system being considered for Central Europe would be useless against an Iranian nuclear weapon. A separate by the Rand Corp. found Iran a less formidable adversary than some believe. Rand paints Iran as a military paper tiger, with poorly maintained and outdated equipment and shortages of personnel. Tehran exercises less control over militant groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas and its allies in Iraq than popularly believed, the report says.

Afghanistan
6) The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction’s first audit of reconstruction work in Afghanistan found the person responsible for a $404 million reconstruction contract in Afghanistan is unable to provide adequate oversight as to where all the money is going, the Christian Science Monitor reports.

Pakistan
7) The US plans to provide as much as $110 million to help Pakistanis who have been displaced by their government’s attacks on militants in northwestern tribal areas, the Los Angeles Times reports. The announcement appeared to reflect the Obama administration’s concern that the Pakistani offensive, which was strongly urged by Washington, not create a humanitarian catastrophe that might turn ordinary Pakistanis against the counterinsurgency effort, the LAT says. The U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that 2 million Pakistanis have fled their homes.

8) Pakistan and India have begun sharing intelligence on Islamic extremists, with the prodding of the U.S., the Wall Street Journal reports. Washington hopes the cooperation will get a lift from last week’s Indian elections, in which the incumbent Congress Party won by a wide margin over a Hindu nationalist party traditionally more hostile to Pakistan. U.S. officials hope a calming of tensions can allow India to resume peace talks with Pakistan over Kashmir.

Iraq
9) To comply with the June 30 deadline for US military withdrawal from Iraqi cities, US and Iraqi military officials have agreed by fiat that some military bases aren’t in cities, the Christian Science Monitor reports. Plans for a promised referendum on the SOFA agreement appear to have quietly disappeared, the CSM says. "We promise a lot of things we don’t deliver," says one Iraqi member of parliament when asked about the poll.

Israel/Palestine
10) Israeli police said they razed a tiny Jewish settlement outpost in the West Bank in what Israeli media called a gesture to President Obama, AFP reports. The international community considers all settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory illegal, while Israel considers as illegal only the outposts built without Israeli government authorisation. Israel reiterated at Annapolis in 2007 it would freeze settlement activity but Peace Now says 1,518 new structures were built in settlements and outposts in 2008, compared to 898 structures in 2007.

Panama
11) Sen. Levin and Rep. Doggett have urged Obama to postpone sending a trade deal with Panama to Congress until concerns about the Central American nation’s banking secrecy laws are addressed, CQ Today reports. Levin and Doggett said Panama should have to sign a tax information exchange agreement with the US and pass legislation changing Panamanian law to "allow for sufficient transparency and access to financial and corporate information."

Colombia
12) Interpol no longer wants Colombia´s intelligence agency DAS to be its contact with Colombian authorities and has asked the National Police to take up this role, according to Colombia Reports. The DAS has come under pressure now that it is suspected of having conducted illegal wiretaps on Supreme Court judges, opposition politicians and journalists. A former director of the agency is being investigated for alleged collaboration with paramilitary death squads. [The DAS was Interpol’s source for the "magic laptop" which allegedly linked FARC guerillas to the governments of Venezuela and Ecuador, as well as to members of the US Congress - JFP.]

Contents:
U.S./Top News
1) U.S. Pullout a Condition in Afghan Peace Talks
Dexter Filkins, New York Times, May 21, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/21/world/asia/21kabul.html

Kabul - Leaders of the Taliban and other armed groups battling the Afghan government are talking to intermediaries about a potential peace agreement, with initial demands focused on a timetable for a withdrawal of American troops, according to Afghan leaders here and in Pakistan.

The talks, if not the withdrawal proposals, are being supported by the Afghan government. The Obama administration, which has publicly declared its desire to coax "moderate" Taliban fighters away from armed struggle, says it is not involved in the discussions and will not be until the Taliban agree to lay down their arms. But nor is it trying to stop the talks, and Afghan officials believe they have tacit support from the Americans.

The discussions have so far produced no agreements, since the insurgents appear to be insisting that any deal include an American promise to pull out - at the very time that the Obama administration is sending more combat troops to help reverse the deteriorating situation on the battlefield. Indeed, with 20,000 additional troops on the way, American commanders seem determined to inflict greater pain on the Taliban first, to push them into negotiations and extract better terms. And most of the initial demands are nonstarters for the Americans in any case.

Even so, the talks are significant because they suggest how a political settlement may be able to end the eight-year-old war, and how such negotiations may proceed. They also raise the prospect of potentially difficult decisions by President Hamid Karzai and President Obama, who may have to consider making deals with groups like the Taliban that are anathema to many Americans, and other leaders with brutal and bloody pasts. Some of the leaders in the current talks have been involved with Al Qaeda.

While the talks have been under way for months, they have accelerated since Obama took office and have produced more specific demands, the Afghan intermediaries said.

The Taliban leaders, through their spokesman, and those of other armed groups publicly deny that they are involved in any negotiations. But several Afghans here and in Pakistan say they have been talking directly to the Taliban leadership group headed by Mullah Muhammad Omar, the movement’s secretive founder. The council is based in the Pakistani city of Quetta.

Discussions have also been held with representatives of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a longtime warlord with a record of extreme brutality, and with Sirajuddin Haqqani, whose guerrilla army is based in the tribal areas of Pakistan. Haqqani’s group is also known for its ruthlessness and for sending suicide bombers into Afghanistan.

"America cannot win this war, and the Taliban cannot win this war," Mullah Abdul Salaam Zaeef, a former Taliban ambassador and one of the intermediaries, said in an interview. "I have delivered this message to the Taliban."

The talks under way now appear to be directed not at individual bands of antigovernment insurgents - the strategy suggested by President Obama - but at the leaders of the large movements.

American officials insist they are not participating in any talks. "The U.S. would support such efforts only if Taliban are willing to abandon violence and lay down their arms, and accept Afghanistan’s democratically elected government," said Ian Kelly, a State Department spokesman. Still, two of the principal intermediaries, Zaeef and Daoud Abedi, said they had held extensive discussions with American officials.

A State Department memo described a single meeting with Abedi, but said it ended abruptly because American officials were not permitted to meet with representatives of Hekmatyar. There is no independent confirmation of Zaeef ’s claim to have met with Americans.
[…]
In an interview, Abedi said he undertook the negotiations - with Hekmatyar and with the Taliban leaders - at the behest of the State Department, a claim that American officials deny. Abedi said he met several times with American officials in Washington before and after his trip to Pakistan and Afghanistan. He declined to say which American diplomats he met, saying, "I am a Pashtun, and I swore on my honor that I would not reveal the names of the people I met with, so I cannot."

Abedi said he hammered out a common set of demands between the Taliban and Hekmatyar’s group. The groups agreed to stop fighting if those conditions were met, Abedi said. The Taliban’s demands seem incompatible with much of Obama’s strategy, which is to substantially weaken the Taliban through a combination of military force and economic development.

Nor did the deal Abedi described mention either Osama bin Laden or Ayman al-Zawahri, the two senior Qaeda leaders believed to be hiding in Pakistan under the protection of the Taliban or some other armed group.

The first demand was an immediate pullback of American and other foreign forces to their bases, followed by a cease-fire and a total withdrawal from the country over the next 18 months. Then the current government would be replaced by a transitional government made up of a range of Afghan leaders, including those of the Taliban and other insurgents. Americans and other foreign soldiers would be replaced with a peacekeeping force drawn from predominantly Muslim nations, with a guarantee from the insurgent groups that they would not attack such a force. Nationwide elections would follow after the Western forces left.
[…]
After the agreement between the Taliban and the Islamic Party was reached, Abedi said, the Taliban leaders added more conditions: an end to the drone attacks in Pakistan’s tribal areas, and the release of some Taliban prisoners.

Abedi said that when he returned to the United States with his proposal, he was greeted with enthusiasm by officials at the State Department. But he said they never called him back.
[…]
Their plan would be for the guerrillas and the government to reconcile slowly, starting with the least contentious issues. One of the main low-level demands of the opposition leaders is that their names be removed from a so-called blacklist, contained in a resolution passed by the United Nations Security Council, which obliges governments to detain them. More difficult issues would follow. "Blood begets blood, but talking begets peace," Rahmani said.

Zaeef said the public declarations of Mullah Omar, who usually vows to fight on, are not necessarily to be taken seriously. "A policy can have many faces," he said.

2) Big Business Gears Up to Fight Green Technology
Big business is gearing up to fight the use of green technology by developing countries seeking to reduce carbon emissions
Mark Weisbrot, Guardian, Wednesday 20 May 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/may/19/wto-climate-change-intellectual-property

The battle over intellectual property rights is likely to be one of the most important of this century. It has enormous economic, social and political implications in a wide range of areas, from medicine to the arts and culture - anything where the public interest in the widespread dissemination of knowledge runs up against those whose income derives from monopolising it.

Now it appears that international efforts to slow the pace of worldwide climate disruption could also run up against powerful interests who advocate a fundamentalist conception of intellectual property.

According to Inside US Trade, the US chamber of commerce is gearing up for a fight to limit the access of developing countries to environmentally sound technologies (ESTs). They fear that international climate change negotiations, taking place under the auspices of the United Nations, will erode the position of corporations holding patents on existing and future technologies.

Developing countries such as Brazil, India and China have indicated that if - as expected in the next few years - they are going to have to make sacrifices to reduce carbon emissions, they should be able to license some of the most efficient available technologies for doing so.

Big business is worried about this, because they prefer that patent rights have absolute supremacy. They want to make sure that climate change talks don’t erode the power that they have gained through the World Trade Organisation.
[…]
Developing countries such as Brazil, India and China want to make sure that such possibilities are open for new environmentally sound technologies, eg in the areas of renewable energy, that might enable them to meet future targets for reducing carbon emissions. A Brazilian official noted that his country had only issued one compulsory license, for the anti-Aids drug Efavirenz, produced by Merck.

But big business doesn’t want to take any chances. Today they are launching a new coalition called the Innovation, Development and Employment Alliance (Idea). (You’ve got to love the Orwellian touch of those marketing consultants). Members include General Electric, Microsoft and Sunrise Solar. They will reportedly also be concerned with intellectual property claims in the areas of healthcare and renewable energy.
[…]
Environmental awareness and a sense of urgency with regard to climate change are much more broadly shared today. The Obama administration should take note of this and place itself squarely on the side of promoting the spread of environmentally sound technologies.

3) Arms From U.S. May Be Falling Into Taliban Hands
C. J. Chivers, New York Times, May 20, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/20/world/asia/20ammo.html

Kabul - Insurgents in Afghanistan, fighting from some of the poorest and most remote regions on earth, have managed for years to maintain an intensive guerrilla war against materially superior American and Afghan forces.

Arms and ordnance collected from dead insurgents hint at one possible reason: Of 30 rifle magazines recently taken from insurgents’ corpses, at least 17 contained cartridges, or rounds, identical to ammunition the United States had provided to Afghan government forces, according to an examination of ammunition markings by The New York Times and interviews with American officers and arms dealers.

The presence of this ammunition among the dead in the Korangal Valley, an area of often fierce fighting near Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan, strongly suggests that munitions procured by the Pentagon have leaked from Afghan forces for use against American troops.

The scope of that diversion remains unknown, and the 30 magazines represented a single sampling of fewer than 1,000 cartridges. But military officials, arms analysts and dealers say it points to a worrisome possibility: With only spotty American and Afghan controls on the vast inventory of weapons and ammunition sent into Afghanistan during an eight-year conflict, poor discipline and outright corruption among Afghan forces may have helped insurgents stay supplied.

The United States has been criticized, as recently as February by the federal Government Accountability Office, for failing to account for thousands of rifles issued to Afghan security forces. Some of these weapons have been documented in insurgents’ hands, including weapons in a battle last year in which nine Americans died.

Iran
4) Washington Watch: Ex-AIPACer: There is no military option in Iran
Douglas Bloomfield, Jerusalem Post, May 19, 2009
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1242212417034&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

There is no viable military option for dealing the Iranian nuclear threat, and efforts by the Israeli government and its supporters to link that threat to progress in peace with the Palestinians and Syria are "nonsense" and an obstacle to the Arab-Israeli and international cooperation essential to changing Iranian behavior.

That’s the conclusion of Keith Weissman, the Iran expert formerly at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), speaking publicly for the first time since the government dropped espionage charges against him and his colleague, Steve Rosen, earlier this month.

There’s no assurance an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities - even if all of them could be located - would be anything more than a temporary setback, Weissman told me. Instead, a military strike would unify Iranians behind an unpopular regime, ignite a wave of retaliation that would leave thousands dead from Teheran to Tel Aviv, block oil exports from the Persian Gulf and probably necessitate a ground war, he said.

"The only viable solution is dialogue. You don’t deal with Iran with threats or preaching regime change," said Weissman, who has lived in Iran, knows Farsi (as well as Arabic, Turkish and French) and wrote his doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago on Iranian history. That’s where the Bush administration went wrong, in his view.

"President Bush’s demand that Iran halt all nuclear enrichment before we would talk with the regime was an excuse not to talk at all," Weissman said. "And the administration’s preaching of regime change only made the Iranians more paranoid and told them there was no real desire to engage them, only demonize them. The thing they fear most is American meddling in their internal politics."

He said President Barack Obama is right to make it clear that regime change is not our goal. "Without that assurance we can’t begin any dialogue or hope to be able to do anything about their nuclear program. Without a doubt, talking with Iran will be very difficult and frustrating, but there are no other viable options."

AIPAC has been the driving force on Capitol Hill for a get-tough policy, pushing through Congress a series of sanction bills, and Weissman was the lobby’s expert on the topic.

"All along the idea was that sanctions were a bargaining chip to be traded for something tangible," he said. "We never opposed America and Iran talking to each other about these issues. However, the US strategy should have been directed at the supreme leader; he’s the guy at the top and the one who makes the important decisions, not politicians like presidents Khatami or Ahmadinejad."

Weissman said Israel’s worries about Iran getting a nuclear weapon are understandable, but despite some of the rhetoric coming out of Teheran, the Iranian leaders "are not fanatics and they’re not suicidal. They know that Israel could make Iran glow for many years." He was referring to reports that Israel may have 200 or more nuclear weapons as well as the missiles and aircraft for devastating retaliation.
[…]
The Arab states, especially in the Gulf, are at least as worried as Israel about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and they should all be working together to deal with it, Weissman said, "but because nothing is moving on the Palestinian problem, there can’t be any overt and probably little if any covert cooperation."

Trying to separate the issues, even refusing to endorse the two-state approach, "is part of the sophistry of people like [Binyamin] Netanyahu who want to avoid confronting the peace process," he said. "Iran’s ability to screw around in the Israel-Arab arena would be severely impaired by pressing ahead on the Palestinian and Syrian tracks instead of looking for excuses not to."

"We’re going to have to end up accepting some kind of peaceful Iranian nuclear energy program - and they actually need it; it’s already too late to stop it entirely. That’s why it is so important to establish a relationship with Iran in which they accept international inspection and obey international law," he said. "For that to happen, there has to be a discussion of some overarching security architecture for the region that includes both Israel and the Arabs, but before that can even be considered there has to be Arab-Israel reconciliation."

5) Iran nuclear danger downplayed in reports, Los Angeles Times, May 20, 2009
Borzou Daragahi, Los Angeles Times, May 20, 2009
The EastWest Institute says Iran could build a nuclear weapon in one to three years, but it would take up to 15 to develop long-range technology that would pose a threat to the West.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iran-threat20-2009may20,0,5589113.story

A pair of reports released Tuesday by prominent think tanks downplay the potential dangers presented by Iran, concluding that Tehran is at least six years away from building a deliverable nuclear weapon and that its ability to wreak havoc in the Middle East through surrogates is exaggerated.

A report by a group of Russian and American scientists and engineers at the EastWest Institute concludes that although Iran could build a nuclear device within one to three years of deciding to do so, it would not be able to deliver a long-range weapon for many more years. The scientists also say that a U.S. missile defense system being considered for Central Europe would be useless against an Iranian nuclear weapon.

A separate 230-page report by the Rand Corp., the result of political and military research for the U.S. Air Force begun in 2007, found Iran a less formidable adversary than some believe.

The report notes "significant barriers and buffers" to Iran’s ambitions because of the reality of regional ethnic and religious politics and "its limited conventional military capacity, diplomatic isolation and past strategic missteps."
[…]
The Rand report argues that Iran "feeds off existing grievances with the status quo, particularly in the Arab world," rather than activating agents to stir up trouble. It suggests that the outside world ignore Iranian officials’ sometimes aggressive, religiously tinged rhetoric and focus on its activities.

"Its revolutionary ideology has certainly featured prominently in the rhetoric of its officials," the report says. "However, the record of Iranian actions suggests that these views should be more accurately regarded as the vocabulary of Iranian foreign policy rather than its determinant."

Iran’s foreign policy is driven more by old-fashioned nationalism and a desire to maintain territorial integrity and ensure the Islamic Republic’s survival than by a desire to expand Iran’s revolutionary ideology, the report says.

Rand also paints Iran as a military paper tiger, with poorly maintained and outdated equipment and shortages of personnel. Tehran exercises less control over militant groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas and its allies in Iraq than popularly believed, the report says.

Afghanistan
6) Shades Of Iraq, Millions Spent In Afghanistan Lack Adequate Oversight
The inspector general finds too few watchdogs keeping an eye on how US reconstruction funds are spent.
Gordon Lubold, Christian Science Monitor, May 19, 2009
http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0520/p02s04-usmi.html

The person responsible for a $404 million reconstruction contract in Afghanistan sits nine time zones away in suburban Maryland and is unable to provide adequate oversight as to where all the money is going, according to a new government report.

The audit suggests that the US is confronting the same kinds of problems in Afghanistan as it did in Iraq, where billions of dollars were unaccounted for during six years of reconstruction there, and has little plan yet to address the problems.

The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) released its first audit of reconstruction work in Afghanistan, focusing on a single, $404 million contract let by the American command responsible for training Afghan security forces.

The auditors discovered the sole person overseeing the massive contract - just one of an untold number of contracts let under the training command - cannot provide the proper oversight because the individual is not in Afghanistan but instead works an Army contracting center in Maryland.

Recognizing the problems inherent in overseeing such a massive contract far away from where the work was actually being done, the contracting officer hired a subordinate to work in-country. But that person has limited contracting experience and is not able to visit many of the actual work sites where the work is performed under the contract.

Pakistan
7) Pakistan will get up to $110 million in U.S. aid for displaced, Clinton says
Paul Richter, Los Angeles Times, May 20, 2009
The announcement appears to reflect concern that Pakistan’s offensive on militants in tribal areas may create a humanitarian catastrophe that could turn civilians against counterinsurgency efforts.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-clinton-pakistan20-2009may20,0,1555718.story

The United States plans to provide as much as $110 million to help Pakistanis who have been displaced by their government’s attacks on militants in northwestern tribal areas, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Tuesday.

Clinton, speaking at the White House, said U.S. relief officials were already on the ground in northwestern Pakistan evaluating the needs of the hundreds of thousands of people who have been driven from their homes since the Pakistani government’s offensive began last month.
[…]
The announcement appeared to reflect, in part, the Obama administration’s concern that the Pakistani offensive, which was strongly urged by Washington, not create a humanitarian catastrophe that might turn ordinary Pakistanis against the counterinsurgency effort.

Pakistani forces have been using heavy artillery and aircraft to batter the militants, but the fighting has sent columns of civilians fleeing the Swat Valley and prompted criticism that the government’s tactics are heavy-handed.

The U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that 2 million Pakistanis have fled their homes.

8) Pakistan, India And U.S. Begin Sharing Intelligence
Jay Solomon and Siobhan Gorman, Wall Street Journal, May 22, 2009
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124287405244442187.html

Washington - Pakistan and India have begun sharing intelligence on Islamic extremists, with the prodding of the U.S., in an arrangement that represents unprecedented cooperation between the two nuclear-armed South Asian nations.

Washington hopes the cooperation will get a lift from last week’s Indian elections, in which the incumbent Congress Party won by a wide margin over a Hindu nationalist party traditionally more hostile to Pakistan.

With the Congress party’s recent win in India’s elections, intelligence reporter Reporter Siobhan Gorman explains why the time may be right for longtime rivals Pakistan and India to forge an alliance that allows for greater intelligence sharing with the U.S.

The Central Intelligence Agency arranged for Pakistan and India to share information on Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group widely blamed for last November’s terrorist attack on Mumbai, as well as on Taliban commanders who are leading the insurgency against Pakistan’s government, said U.S. officials.

The U.S. is stressing to Indian and Pakistani leaders that they face a common threat in Pakistan-based militant groups. Washington hopes that when India sees the intelligence and evidence that Islamabad is seriously fighting the militants in some areas, it will ease its deployments against Pakistan - which in turn would prompt Islamabad to put even more focus on the battle at home.

"We have to satisfy the Mumbai question, and show India that the threat is abating," said a U.S. official involved in developing Washington’s South Asia strategy.
[…]
A U.S. official said Washington isn’t "under any illusions" about the difficulty of erasing decades-old suspicions between India and Pakistan, but sees some progress. U.S. officials hope that a calming of tensions can allow India’s Congress Party government, strengthened by its election victory, to resume peace talks with Pakistan over the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir. Some U.S. officials believe Lashkar-e-Taiba orchestrated the assault specifically to undermine the peace process.

The Obama administration has been concerned that Lashkar could carry out a second strike on India in a bid to stoke a war. President Barack Obama came into office pledging to craft a regional solution to the instability in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
[…]
The government of Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari is hoping that Congress’s victory can also provide the Indian government with the political cover to move one or two divisions away from the Pakistan border in coming months, according to an official briefed on the diplomacy.

But Indian officials say they aren’t ready to do so. An Indian government official said New Delhi has documented an escalation of cross-border infiltrations by Pakistani militants into Kashmir.

Iraq
9) To Meet June Deadline, US and Iraqis Redraw City Borders
‘What is a city’ is one question the US and Iraq must answer as they try to balance a requirement that US combat forces withdraw from cities next month and the need for US help to maintain security.
Jane Arraf, Christian Science Monitor, May 19, 2009
http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0519/p06s05-wome.html

On a map of Baghdad, the US Army’s Forward Operating Base Falcon is clearly within city limits.

Except that Iraqi and American military officials have decided it’s not. As the June 30 deadline for US soldiers to be out of Iraqi cities approaches, there are no plans to relocate the roughly 3,000 American troops who help maintain security in south Baghdad along what were the fault lines in the sectarian war. "We and the Iraqis decided it wasn’t in the city," says a US military official.
[…]
A major question ahead of the June 30 deadline - whether US troops will be asked to stay in the volatile cities of Mosul and those in Diyala Province - is still unanswered.

Senior Iraqi military officials are expected to recommend to Maliki that US combat forces remain in those areas to help fight an ongoing insurgency. Maliki publicly has said he will not extend the deadline but privately is believed to be willing to consider it. As commander in chief of the Iraqi Security Forces, Maliki has the final decision on whether to ask US forces to stay.

Some US and Iraqi officials suspect that his hard-line rhetoric is almost purely for political purposes in a country where people are widely opposed to the continued presence of US forces. The Iraqi parliament voted to approve the SOFA late last year only after linking it to a referendum this summer which would allow Iraqis to vote on whether US troops should leave sooner than the end of 2011.

With Maliki’s public insistence that there will be no extension for US forces, plans for the promised referendum appear to have quietly disappeared. "We promise a lot of things we don’t deliver," says one Iraqi member of parliament when asked about the poll.

Israel/Palestine
10) Israel Dismantles West Bank Settlement Outpost
AFP, May 21, 2009
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iq2q8UsS6wXxehuTHHpafG59f9Cw

Kokhav Hashahar, West Bank - Israeli police said they razed a tiny Jewish settlement outpost in the West Bank on Thursday in what media called a gesture to US President Barack Obama after his talks with Israel’s prime minister. "We dismantled seven tin huts," said police spokesman Danny Peleg, specifying that the outpost had been built without government authorisation.
[…]
No violence was reported as police, backed by army troops, evacuated settlers from the Maoz Ester outpost, near the Kokhav Hashahar settlement east of Ramallah, the political capital of the West Bank.

The international community considers all settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory illegal, while Israel considers as illegal only the outposts, often just a few hundred meters away from larger settlements, built without Israeli government authorisation.

Obama told right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during White House talks on Monday that Israel should stop all settlement activity, in line with its commitments at peace negotiations.
[…]
Israel reiterated at the 2007 Annapolis, Maryland peace conference it would freeze the activity but Israel’s anti-settlement Peace Now movement says that 1,518 new structures were built in settlements and outposts in 2008, compared to 898 structures in 2007.

Peace Now says more than 280,000 people live in 120 settlements and about 100 outposts in the West Bank.

Panama
11) Senior Democrats Seek Delay of Panama Trade Deal
CQ Today, May 20, 2009
http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?docID=cqmidday-000003121947

Two senior Democrats urged the administration Wednesday to postpone sending a stalled trade deal with Panama to Congress until concerns about the Central American nation’s banking secrecy laws are formally addressed.

In a letter to President Obama, Sen. Carl Levin , D-Mich., and Rep. Lloyd Doggett , D-Texas, said that the Panamanian government should have to sign a tax information exchange agreement with the United States and pass legislation changing Panamanian law to "allow for sufficient transparency and access to financial and corporate information."

Such an agreement would allow for an exchange of tax information between the United States and Panama and help the IRS enforce U.S. tax laws when it comes to American companies operating in Panama.

"Given Panama’s interest in successfully concluding the U.S.-Panama FTA, it is essential that we not waste the opportunity to insist on real cooperation from Panama in the fight against international tax evasion," Doggett and Levin wrote.

Colombia
12) Interpol no longer wants to work with DAS
Colombia Reports, Sunday, 17 May 2009 09:22
http://colombiareports.com/colombia-news/news/4061-interpol-no-longer-wants-to-work-with-das.html

International Police organization Interpol no longer wants Colombia´s intelligence agency DAS to be its contact with Colombian authorities and officially asked the National Police to take up this role, Police Commissioner Oscar Naranjo said Saturday.

The DAS has come under pressure now that it is suspected of having conducted illegal wiretaps on Supreme Court judges, opposition politicians and journalists. Some of the highest officials of the Presidency are being investigated for allegedly ordering these interceptions. A former director of the agency is investigated for alleged collaboration with paramilitary death squads.

Naranjo told Caracol Radio that Interpol had said it no longer wants to work with the intelligence agency and wants the Police to be its partner in the international fight against crime.

However, according to the Police Commissioner, Interpol had requested to strengthen ties with the National Police before the wiretap scandal. The two institutions are already in the process of shifting responsibilities away from the DAS.

-
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.

Obama: Israeli Settlements "Have To Be Stopped"
President Obama, at his press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, said Israeli settlements on the West Bank "have to be stopped." The question is whether the Obama Administration will use its substantial leverage with the Israeli government - including a planned increase in U.S. military aid - to bring this about.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/obama-israeli-settlements_b_204961.html

Help us build for a Just Foreign Policy
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Summary:
U.S./Top News
1) UNHCR says the Pakistani exodus from Swat is turning into the world’s most dramatic displacement crisis since the Rwandan genocide, the Guardian reports. Almost 1.5 million people have registered for assistance, bringing the total number of war displaced in North West Frontier province to more than 2 million, not including 300,000 the provincial government believes have not registered. Aid workers and political analysts warn that if international aid to ease the crisis is not urgently delivered, the strain on the displaced and those helping them could lead to political destablisation.

2) Palestinians slammed Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu for failing to endorse the creation alongside Israel of a Palestinian state, which has been at the basis of all peace initiatives over the past nearly two decades, AFP reports. "Calling for negotiations without a clearly defined end-goal offers only the promise of more process, not progress," said Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat.

3) The Obama administration offered business groups more assurances it intends to move several pending trade agreements as soon as possible, The Hill reports. USTR Kirk expressed optimism to the Chamber of Commerce that the Panama trade deal would be submitted to Congress soon, and that he would try to move the Colombia deal this year.

4) An analysis by top U.S. and Russian scientists says a planned U.S. missile shield to protect Europe from a possible Iranian attack would be ineffective against the kinds of missiles Iran is likely to deploy, the Washington Post reports. The team also judged it would be more than five years before Iran is capable of building both a nuclear warhead and a missile capable of carrying it over long distances. "The missile threat from Iran to Europe is thus not imminent," their report said. The report predicts that the country could probably build a simple nuclear device in one to three years - if it kicked out U.N. inspectors and retooled its uranium-processing plants to make weapons-grade enriched uranium.

Afghanistan
5) Senior officials say former US Ambassador Khalilzad could assume a powerful, unelected position inside the Afghan government, the New York Times reports. The position would allow Khalilzad to serve as "a prime minister, except not prime minister because he wouldn’t be responsible to a parliamentary system," a US official said. US officials insisted that the US was not behind the idea.

Iraq
6) Stories of missing drugs, of desperately ill-equipped doctors and of patients left to suffer the consequences are everywhere in Iraq’s public health care system, McClatchy News reports. With violence down, improvements in health care should be coming far faster than they are, according to doctors, patients, aid organizations and some public officials; they fault widespread corruption.

Israel/Palestine
7) Likud faction MKs who oppose a two-state solution said Prime Minister Netanyahu would not be able to advance the formation of a Palestinian state, due to the wide majority against it in the Likud faction, the Jerusalem Post reports. Likud MKs said they were concerned about reports Netanyahu would not rule out the formation of a Palestinian state in his meeting with Obama. They said they had been worried since they read an article in The Jerusalem Post about AIPAC delegates lobbying Congress for a two-state solution with the blessing of the Prime Minister’s Office. Meretz leader Haim Oron said he would not be surprised if Netanyahu caved in to Obama on the Palestinian state issue: "We cannot expect a man who has zigzagged throughout his entire political career to suddenly act differently now."

Colombia
8) Three of President Uribe’s closest advisers are under investigation in a political spying scandal, the Washington Post reports. Former U.S. ambassador to Colombia Myles Frechette said the scandal could lead the US to curtail aid. "I think that Washington is increasingly nervous about this," Frechette said. "I just don’t think that people in Congress, even the Republicans, are going to feel very comfortable with this kind of thing coming out about Uribe." The spying revelations detail how the DAS, the intelligence service that answers to the president, spied on some of Uribe’s opponents, including politicians and journalists. DAS agents also tailed Supreme Court judges.

9) The Fellowship of Reconcilation says the US is planning to establish a new military facility in Colombia that will give the U.S. increased capacity for military intervention throughout most of Latin America, based on US planning documents. FOR says the plan should be subjected to vigorous debate.

Cuba
10) Up to 20 billion barrels of oil sits off Cuba’s northwest coast, the Washington Post reports. If Cuban estimates are correct, they rival US reserves. The prospect of development could prove a powerful incentive to remove the US embargo, the Post says.

Contents:
U.S./Top News
1) Swat Valley Could Be Worst Refugee Crisis Since Rwanda, UN Warns
Declan Walsh Guardian, Monday 18 May 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/18/swat-valley-pakistan-refugee-crisis

The human exodus from the war-torn Swat valley in northern Pakistan is turning into the world’s most dramatic displacement crisis since the Rwandan genocide of 1994, the UN refugee agency warned.

Almost 1.5 million people have registered for assistance since fighting erupted three weeks ago, the UNHCR said, bringing the total number of war displaced in North West Frontier province to more than 2 million, not including 300,000 the provincial government believes have not registered. "It’s been a long time since there has been a displacement this big," the UNHCR’s spokesman Ron Redmond said in Geneva, trying to recall the last time so many people had been uprooted so quickly. "It could go back to Rwanda."
…
The operation continues to enjoy broad public support. Opposition parties endorsed the action at a conference called by the government, dispelling the notion that the army was fighting "America’s war".

But that fragile unity could be threatened by heavy civilian casualties or a further deterioration in the conditions of the 2 million displaced. Returning from a three-day trip to Pakistan, the UNHCR head António Guterres termed the displacement crisis as "one of the most dramatic of recent times". Relief workers were "struggling to keep up with the size and speed of the displacement," a statement said.

The main difference with African refugee crises such as Rwanda, however, is that a minority of people are being housed in tented camps. According to the UN just 130,000 people are being accommodated in the sprawling, hot camps in Mardan and Swabi districts, while most are squeezed into the homes of friends or relatives, with as many as 85 people in one house.

Nevertheless aid workers and political analysts warn that if international aid to ease the crisis is not urgently delivered, the strain on the displaced and those helping them could lead to political destablisation. Acknowledging the scale of the crisis, the prime minister of Pakistan, Yousaf Raza Gilani, said: "The displaced men, women and children should not feel alone. We won’t leave any stone unturned in providing them help and protection."

The UN is expected to launch an international appeal for aid running into hundreds of millions of dollars in the coming days.

2) Obama, Netanyahu bare Iran, Palestinian divides
Stephen Collinson, AFP, Tue May 19, 2:17 am ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090519/pl_afp/usisraelmideast_20090519074134

During an intense first meeting as heads of state, President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu laid bare differing approaches on Iran and the US goal of a Palestinian state.

In blunt comments after more than three hours of talks Monday, Netanyahu offered discussions "immediately" with the Palestinians but stopped short of endorsing Obama’s call for a two-state solution.
…
Netanyahu, who described the talks as "extraordinarily friendly," did not use the words "Palestinian state" but also warned against obsessing on "terminology."

"I want to make it clear that we don’t want to govern the Palestinians - we want to live in peace with them," Netanyahu said. "We want them to govern themselves (minus) a handful of powers that could endanger the state of Israel," he said, referring, for example, to control of airspace and other areas related to security concerns.

The Palestinians slammed Netanyahu for failing to endorse the creation alongside Israel of a Palestinian state, which has been at the basis of all peace initiatives over the past nearly two decades. "By failing to endorse the two-state solution, Benjamin Netanyahu missed yet another opportunity to show himself to be a genuine partner for peace," top Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erakat said in a statement. "Calling for negotiations without a clearly defined end-goal offers only the promise of more process, not progress."

There were also signs of division between the two men on the issue of the construction and expansion of Jewish in the occupied West Bank. "Settlements have to be stopped," Obama said, hours after Israel issued construction tenders for the West Bank settlement of Maskiot.

3) Obama’s trade representative makes plea for business’s help
Kevin Bogardus, The Hill, 05/18/09
http://thehill.com/business-lobby/obamas-trade-representative-makes-plea-for-businesss-help-2009-05-18.html

The Obama administration on Monday offered business groups more assurances it intends to move several pending trade agreements as soon as possible.

At the same time, U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk, during a speech at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said President Obama wants help from those same business groups on a range of other issues, including healthcare and tax reform.
…
He said he was working to resolve a few final issues that would allow the administration to send a trade deal with Panama to Congress. Kirk added that the administration continues to work on more controversial deals negotiated by the Bush administration with Colombia and South Korea that have drawn strong opposition from Democrats in Congress.
…
The speech is the latest in a series of moves that shift Obama’s tone from the trade criticism displayed on the campaign trail, particularly during the Democratic primary battle, when Obama took a harsher tone toward trade deals. That worried business groups like the Chamber, but they’ve enjoyed the more recent words from the administration on trade. On Monday, Kirk was met with resounding applause at the end of his speech.

Kirk offered optimism that the Panama trade deal would be submitted to Congress soon. "We are doing everything we can to resolve the outstanding issues, from labor to tax, to get it ready so we can send it up to Congress," he said.

Kirk is completing a review of the Colombia deal and has begun a dialogue with the Korean government to work out the kinks of that agreement. He said the administration is also "breathing fresh life" into the stalled Doha round of global trade talks.
…
Prodded to give his assurance that the administration would move on the Colombia deal within the year, Kirk said he wants to finish the trade agreement soon.

"What I would love to do is give you that assurance," Kirk said. "What I can promise you is we will work every day and every hour to make that possible."

4) U.S.-Russian Team Deems Missile Shield In Europe Ineffective
Joby Warrick and R. Jeffrey Smith, Washington Post, Tuesday, May 19, 2009
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/18/AR2009051803055.html

A planned U.S. missile shield to protect Europe from a possible Iranian attack would be ineffective against the kinds of missiles Iran is likely to deploy, according to a joint analysis by top U.S. and Russian scientists.

The U.S.-Russian team also judged that it would be more than five years before Iran is capable of building both a nuclear warhead and a missile capable of carrying it over long distances. And if Iran attempted such an attack, the experts say, it would ensure its own destruction. "The missile threat from Iran to Europe is thus not imminent," the 12-member technical panel concludes in a report produced by the EastWest Institute, an independent think tank based in Moscow, New York and Belgium.

The report, scheduled for release today, could further dampen the Obama administration’s enthusiasm for a Bush administration plan to deploy radars and interceptor missiles in Poland and the Czech Republic. The missile shield has been promoted as a safeguard against future attacks from rogue states, particularly Iran. But the plan has severely strained relations with Moscow, which says it would undermine strategic stability and lead to a new arms race.

The year-long study brought together six senior technical experts from both the United States and Russia to assess the military threat to Europe from Iran’s nuclear and missile programs. The report’s conclusions were reviewed by former defense secretary William J. Perry, among others, before being presented to national security adviser James L. Jones and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

The report acknowledges dramatic technological gains by Iran, and it predicts that the country could probably build a simple nuclear device in one to three years, if it kicked out U.N. inspectors and retooled its uranium-processing plants to make weapons-grade enriched uranium. Another five years would be needed to build a warhead that would fit on one of Iran’s missiles, the panel says. U.S. intelligence agencies have made similar predictions; Israel maintains that Iran could build a bomb in as little as eight months.

The U.S.-Russian experts say Iran faces limits in developing ballistic missiles that could someday carry nuclear warheads. Its current arsenal is derived from relatively unsophisticated North Korean missiles, which in turn are modified versions of a Russian submarine-launched missile that dates from the 1950s. "We believe that these components were likely transferred to North Korea illegally in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Russia was experiencing major political and economic chaos," one of the U.S. team members said in a separate commentary.

As a result, the missiles have inherent weaknesses stemming from such aged technology, despite some improvements in their range, the report states. Moreover, the country lacks "the infrastructure of research institutions, industrial plants, or the scientists and engineers that are needed to make substantial improvements."

They conclude that it would take Iran at least another six to eight years to produce a missile with enough range to reach Southern Europe and that only illicit foreign assistance or a concerted and highly visible, decade-long effort might produce the breakthroughs needed for a nuclear-tipped missile to threaten the United States.

Moreover, if Iran were to build a nuclear-capable missile that could strike Europe, the defense shield proposed by the United States "could not engage that missile," the report says. The missile interceptors could also be easily fooled by decoys and other simple countermeasures, the report concludes.

"The much more urgent problem is to seek a resolution" of the Iranian nuclear crisis, the report says. "That is a project on which the United States and Russia need to cooperate more closely."

Afghanistan
5) Ex-U.S. Envoy Considers Key Role In Afghan Government
Helene Cooper, New York Times, May 19, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/19/world/asia/19diplo.html

Zalmay Khalilzad, who was President George W. Bush’s ambassador to Afghanistan, could assume a powerful, unelected position inside the Afghan government under a plan he is discussing with Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, according to senior American and Afghan officials.

Khalilzad, an American citizen who was born in Afghanistan, had considered challenging Karzai for the presidency in elections scheduled for this summer. But Khalilzad missed the May 8 filing deadline, and the American and Afghan officials say that he has been talking with Karzai for several weeks about taking on a job that the two have described as the chief executive officer of Afghanistan.

Such an alliance would benefit Karzai by co-opting a potential rival. For its part, the White House has made no secret of its growing disenchantment with Karzai, and some Afghanistan experts said that enlisting Khalilzad would have the virtue of bringing a strong, competent leader into an increasingly dysfunctional Afghan government.

The position would allow Khalilzad to serve as "a prime minister, except not prime minister because he wouldn’t be responsible to a parliamentary system," a senior Obama administration official said. Taking the unelected position would also allow Khalilzad to keep his American citizenship.

Administration officials insisted that the United States was not behind the idea of enlisting Khalilzad to serve in the Afghan government, and they gave no further details on what his duties might be.

They said that Karzai had sought out Khalilzad, but that the idea of enlisting a chief executive had also been raised by Gordon Brown, the British prime minister.

American and British officials expressed concern that any belief that the West was behind the plan would harm its chances inside Afghanistan.
…
"This has the makings of a really bad movie," said Teresita C. Schaffer, a South Asia expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "The idea of having an American as a major senior official of Afghanistan is a very risky one both for the Afghan government and the person in question."

Iraq
6) Iraq’s Once-Envied Health Care System Lost to War, Corruption
Corinne Reilly, McClatchy Newspapers, May 18, 2009
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/68193.html

Baghdad - Dr. Zinah Jawad leaned over her patient and peered into his glazed eyes. It doesn’t look good, she said, shaking her head. The man had arrived at Baghdad Teaching Hospital’s emergency department a few hours earlier with a high fever and dizziness. Now he lies shaking, sweat soaking his dirty clothes.

The Teaching Hospital’s emergency room is cleaner than most in Baghdad. In fact, it’s widely considered the best in the Iraqi capital. Still, flies buzz overhead, and on busy days there aren’t enough beds or oxygen tanks. Across the room, a crude sign made with binder paper and tape marks the department’s two-bed cardiac unit, which lacks a reliable defibrillator.

Jawad, a second-year medical resident, turns to the sick man’s wife, who’s perched anxiously on a ripped chair at his bedside. "We suspect meningitis," she says. If Jawad is correct, the man probably will die long before she can confirm her diagnosis. Her chances of getting antibiotics to treat him are even slimmer.

The hospital can’t perform the lab test she needs. Its stock of drugs and basic supplies is so unreliable that doctors routinely dispatch patients’ relatives to fetch medicines, IV fluids and syringes from private merchants or the black market.

Jawad can’t explain the shortages. Her department is always careful in placing its orders with the national health ministry, which supplies all of Iraq’s public hospitals. Often, though, the medicines never show up. "No one can tell us why," Jawad said. "It is as if they just disappear somewhere."

Stories of missing drugs, of desperately ill-equipped doctors and of patients left to suffer the consequences are everywhere in Iraq’s public health care system. Some hospitals are filthy and infested with bugs. Others are practically falling down. More and more, the blame is being placed on Iraq’s U.S.-backed government, which by many accounts is infested with corruption and incompetence.

There’s no doubt that years of economic sanctions, followed by years of war, have taken a heavy toll on all public services in Iraq. However, with violence down and some tentative sense of normalcy returning, improvements in health care should be coming far faster than they are, according to doctors, patients, aid organizations and some public officials.

They fault widespread problems at all levels of Iraq’s government, and the examples they cite are troubling. Health ministry workers routinely siphon drugs from hospital orders to make extra cash on the black market. Bribery is rampant. Millions of dollars meant for clinics and equipment have gone missing. Millions more have been wasted on government contracts to buy expired medicines.

Israel/Palestine
7) Likud ministers ready to resist PA state
Gil Hoffman, Jerusalem Post, May. 18, 2009
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1242212399287&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu would not be able to advance the formation of a Palestinian state, due to the wide majority against it in the Likud faction, MKs who oppose a two-state solution said Sunday.

They said that unlike the fight against the disengagement from the Gaza Strip, when only 15 MKs out of 40 dared challenge then-prime minister Ariel Sharon, this time around, two-thirds of the Likud faction would defy a potential effort by Netanyahu to withdraw from parts of Judea and Samaria.

The rebellion against Sharon also suffered from a lack of leadership, because the only Likud minister who actively opposed him was then-minister-without-portfolio Uzi Landau.

This time around, no fewer than seven Likud ministers vocally oppose a Palestinian state: Gideon Sa’ar, Bennie Begin, Moshe Ya’alon, Yuli Edelstein, Gilad Erdan, Yisrael Katz and Moshe Kahlon.

"MKs might be afraid now to say that Bibi doesn’t have a majority for two states in the faction or other Likud bodies, but later on they will make their voice heard," said Likud MK Danny Danon, who wrote Netanyahu on Friday warning him against concessions to US President Barack Obama in their Monday meeting.
…
Likud MKs said they were concerned about reports from Netanyahu’s flight to Washington that he would not rule out the formation of a Palestinian state in his meeting with Obama. They said they had been worried since they read an article in The Jerusalem Post on May 4 about AIPAC delegates lobbying Congress for a two-state solution with the blessing of the Prime Minister’s Office.

"We must also continue to insist on the absolute Palestinian commitment to ending terrorist violence and to building the institutions necessary for a viable Palestinian state living side-by-side, in peace with the Jewish state of Israel," read a letter that AIPAC delegates lobbied their congressmen to sign.

The lobbying took place after a meeting between AIPAC heads and Netanyahu in Jerusalem. When asked about the letter, Netanyahu’s adviser Ron Dermer said he did not think there was a difference between the positions of Netanyahu and AIPAC.

"This article was the first sign," Danon said. "When Sharon endorsed a Palestinian state in a speech at Latrun [in 2003] we were taken by surprise. This time, we have to be ready. The first step is telling Netanyahu that if he will be too flexible, he will have problems at home."

Meretz leader Haim Oron said he would not be surprised or disappointed if Netanyahu caved in to Obama on the Palestinian state issue. "Accepting two states for two peoples is not a concession to the Palestinians but the supreme interest of Israel," Oron said. "We cannot expect a man who has zigzagged throughout his entire political career to suddenly act differently now. The test of the Bibi-Obama meeting is not whether Netanyahu will leave it in peace, but whether it will create a basis to advance to peace."

Colombia
8) Scandals Surround Colombian Leader
Top Aides Suspected in Secret Police Case
Juan Forero, Washington Post, Sunday, May 17, 2009
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/16/AR2009051602301.html

Bogota - For weeks after the news broke, Colombians knew only that the secret police had spied on Supreme Court judges, opposition politicians, activists and journalists. Suspicions swirled that the orders for the wiretapping, as well as general surveillance, had come from the presidential palace.

Then on Friday, the inspector general’s office announced an investigation against three of President Álvaro Uribe’s closest advisers and three former officials of the Department of Administrative Security, or DAS, the intelligence service that answers to the president. Inspector General Alejandro Ordoñez investigates malfeasance in government agencies, and his findings can be used in criminal prosecutions.

The latest revelations have come on top of an influence-peddling scandal involving the president’s two sons, Tomás and Geronimo, and a widening probe of the links between Uribe’s allies in Congress and right-wing paramilitary death squads. Though Uribe remains popular for having brought security and economic prosperity to a once-chaotic country, the scandals are hitting hard just as he weighs a run for a third term.

Latin America policymakers in Washington are also watching the controversy closely. The United States has funneled nearly $6 billion in mostly military and anti-drug aid to the Uribe administration for its fight against Marxist rebels and drug cartels. Myles Frechette, a former U.S. ambassador in Bogota who closely tracks Colombia policy, said one possible ramification of the scandal is that the Obama administration could curtail aid.

"I think that Washington is increasingly nervous about this," Frechette said. "I just don’t think that people in Congress, even the Republicans, are going to feel very comfortable with this kind of thing coming out about Uribe."
…
The Colombian government has characterized the surveillance as the work of rogue DAS agents. José Obdulio Gaviria, a former presidential aide now spearheading Uribe’s reelection effort, told the Bogota daily El Tiempo on Friday that criminal elements had infiltrated the department to hurt the government’s image. "We are in a political war," he explained.

But the news media reported this past week that Jorge Alberto Lagos, former DAS director of counterintelligence, told prosecutors during 14 hours of interrogations how information about judges was turned over to two top Uribe aides, Bernardo Moreno and Gaviria. The attorney general’s office, meanwhile, is offering to make deals - leniency in exchange for information - with other DAS employees, 33 of whom have been fired since the scandal broke in February.

El Tiempo, in an editorial Friday, questioned how the agency could have acted against Uribe’s wishes when he controls it. "In everything that has happened, what has stood out are the poor arguments of the Casa Nariño," the editorial said, referring to the presidential palace.

The spying revelations, first made by Semana magazine, detail how the DAS zeroed in on some of Uribe’s most vocal opponents, including Carlos Gaviria, who ran against Uribe in the 2006 election, and journalists who oversee tough coverage of government, among them Daniel Coronell, who runs a small Bogota television station and is a columnist.

DAS agents also intercepted phone conversations, studied financial records and tailed Supreme Court judges, authorities say.

9) Pentagon Plans Latin America-Wide Intervention Ability for New Military Base in Colombia
Press Release, Fellowship of Reconciliation, May 18, 2009
http://www.forpeace.net/blog/pentagon-plans-latin-america-wide-intervention-ability-new-military-base-colombia

Oakland, CA - The United States is planning to establish a new military facility in Colombia that will give the U.S. increased capacity for military intervention throughout most of Latin America. Given the tense relations of Washington with Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador, as well as the Colombian military’s atrocious human rights record, the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) believes the plan should be subjected to vigorous debate.

"This base would feed a failed drug policy, support an abusive army, and reinforce a tragic history of U.S. military intervention in the region," said John Lindsay-Poland, Latin America Program Co-director for FOR. "It’s wrong and wasteful, and Congress should scrap it."

The new facility in Palanquero, Colombia would not be limited to counter-narcotics operations, nor even to operations in the Andean region, according to an Airlift Military Command (AMC) planning document. The U.S. Southern Command aims to establish a base with "air mobility reach on the South American continent" in addition to a capacity for counter-narcotics operations, through the year 2025.
…
President Obama’s Pentagon budget, submitted May 7, includes $46 million for development of the Palanquero base, and says the Defense Department seeks "an array of access arrangements for contingency operations, logistics, and training in Central/South America." A U.S. Embassy spokesperson in Bogota told FOR that negotiations were not yet concluded for the base.
…
The "mission creep" in the proposal for continent-wide operations from Colombia is also evident in President Obama’s foreign aid request for Colombia. While the budget request for $508 million tacitly recognizes the failure of Plan Colombia drug policy by cutting funds for fumigation of coca crops, the White House is asking for an increase in counterinsurgency equipment and training to the Colombian Army.

Cuba
10) Cuba’s Undersea Oil Could Help Thaw Trade With U.S.
Nick Miroff, Washington Post, Saturday, May 16, 2009
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/15/AR2009051503416.html

Deep in the Gulf of Mexico, an end to the 1962 U.S. trade embargo against Cuba may be lying untapped, buried under layers of rock, seawater and bitter relations.

Oil, up to 20 billion barrels of it, sits off Cuba’s northwest coast in territorial waters, according to the Cuban government - enough to turn the island into the Qatar of the Caribbean. At a minimum, estimates by the U.S. Geological Survey place Cuba’s potential deep-water reserves at 4.6 billion barrels of oil and 9.8 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, stores that would rank the island among the region’s top producers.

Drilling operations by foreign companies in Cuban waters are still in the exploratory stage, and significant obstacles - technological and political - stand between a U.S.-Cuba rapprochement eased by oil. But as the Obama administration gestures toward improved relations with the Castro government, the national security, energy and economic benefits of Cuban crude may make it a powerful incentive for change.

Limited commercial ties between U.S. businesses and the island’s communist government have been quietly expanding this decade as Cuban purchases of U.S. goods - mostly food - have increased from $7 million in 2001 to $718 million in 2008, according to census data.

Thawing relations could eventually open up U.S. investment in mining, agriculture, tourism and other sectors of Cuba’s tattered economy. But the prospect of major offshore reserves that would be off-limits to U.S. companies and consumers has some Cuba experts arguing that 21st-century energy needs should prevail over 20th-century Cold War politics.

"The implications of this have the potential to be a sea change, literally and figuratively, for the Cubans," said Jonathan Benjamin-Alvarado, a political scientist at the University of Nebraska-Omaha who studies Cuba’s energy sector.

At a House subcommittee hearing last month on U.S.-Cuba policy, former oil executive Jorge Piñón told lawmakers that the United States has a strategic interest in helping Cuba tap its potentially vast hydrocarbon stores and that U.S. companies should receive special permission to do so.

"American oil and oil equipment and service companies have the capital, technology and operational know-how to explore, produce and refine in a safe and responsible manner Cuba’s potential oil and natural gas reserves. Yet they remain on the sidelines because of our almost five-decade-old unilateral political and economic embargo," said Piñón, a member of a Brookings Institution advisory group on Cuba policy reform.
…
The larger deposit is thought to be in a section of the gulf known as the Eastern Gap, to which Mexico and the United States also have a claim. Cuban officials believe there are 10 billion to 15 billion barrels of crude stored there under more than 5,000 feet of seawater and 20,000 feet of rock- costly to extract but accessible with existing technology. By comparison, U.S. proven reserves total 21 billion barrels.

-
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.

Can Treasury Sneak IMF Money Through the Supplemental?
Lost in the drama over the war supplemental is a sneaky play by Treasury Department to get $108 billion in U.S. tax dollars for the IMF. If Treasury can get the money through the supplemental, it can avoid any Congressional debate over the policies of the IMF and whether this is a wise and just use of U.S. tax dollars; and whether Congress should insist on meaningful, observable reforms of IMF policy as the price of new U.S. funding.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/can-treasury-sneak-imf-mo_b_204058.html

Help us build for a Just Foreign Policy
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Summary:
U.S./Top News
1) After meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, President Obama said that Israel "is going to have to take some difficult steps," the Washington Post reports. "Settlements have to be stopped," Obama said.

2) It would be in our best interests to declare a moratorium on drone strikes into Pakistan, argue David Kilcullen and Andrew Mcdonald Exum in the New York Times. A similar drone war in Somalia solidified the power of extremists. Press reports suggest drone strikes in Pakistan have killed about 14 terrorist leaders. According to Pakistani sources, they have also killed 700 civilians. This is 50 civilians for every militant killed, a hit rate of 2 percent - hardly "precision." The strikes are exciting visceral opposition across a broad spectrum of Pakistani opinion. The drone campaign is part of a larger strategic error - insistence on personalizing conflict with Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Devoting time and resources toward killing or capturing "high-value" targets distracts us from larger problems, while turning figures like Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Pakistani Taliban umbrella group, into Robin Hoods. Our experience in Iraq suggests that the capture or killing of high-value targets has only a slight and fleeting effect on levels of violence.

3) Villagers consistently said U.S. bombardment came at least 90 minutes after the Taliban had melted away from Garani, the Los Angeles Times reports.

4) Soldiers have described beatings, psychological torture and other physical mistreatment at a camp where Gen. McChrystal, then commander of US Joint Special Operations forces in Iraq, was frequently seen, the Telegraph reports. Gen McChrystal is likely to be questioned over the findings of a Human Rights Watch report during Senate hearings on his appointment as US commander in Afghanistan, the Telegraph says. Critics warn that Gen McChrystal’s robust methods may generate more hostility among Afghan civilians. "Expect to see secret, dead of night raids in Afghanistan, with more civilians getting hurt and no one being held accountable," said a senior official a ‘respected international organization.’ "Because of his history in Iraq we were very alarmed when we heard he was going to be in charge in Afghanistan."

5) The Pakistani army offensive in Buner District has left devastation in its wake, the Wall Street Journal reports. According to official estimates, more than half of Buner’s 700,000 population have fled their homes.

6) The Administration’s request for more money for the IMF will likely cause other priorities in international affairs budget to be cut, reports the Stimson Center.

Iran
7) Even if there is a community of interest between Israel and some Arab states regarding Iran, that doesn’t mean they are right, argues Roger Cohen in the New York Times. What’s really at issue here is that neither Israel nor the Arabs want a change in a status quo that locks in Israeli regional military dominance and the cozy relationships - arms deals, aid and all - that U.S. allies from the Gulf to Cairo enjoy, Cohen says.

8) Iran’s oil minister says Iran has plans in place to deal quickly with the consequences of a proposed U.S. law that would penalise companies supplying the country with gasoline, Reuters reports.

Afghanistan
9) A single American Special Forces group was behind at least three of Afghanistan’s worst civilian casualty incidents, The Independent reports. Troops from the US Marines Corps’ Special Operations Command, or MarSOC, were responsible for calling in air strikes in Bala Boluk last week - believed to have killed more than 140 men, women and children - as well as two other incidents in 2007 and 2008. MarSOC was created by Rumsfeld despite opposition from within the Marine Corps and the Special Forces community. An article in the Marine Corps Times described the MarSOC troops as "cowboys" who brought shame on the corps.

Colombia
10) Union leaders say the number of union activists assassinated rose to 17 in Colombia this year, Inside Costa Rica reports. During the last decade 2,711 union activists were killed in Colombia. Behind these crimes are illegal armed groups with strong ties to the government.

Contents:
U.S./Top News
1) Obama Vows End to Impasse on Palestinian State
Scott Wilson, Washington Post, Monday, May 18, 2009 3:02 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/18/AR2009051800825.html

President Obama began a weeks-long focus on Middle East diplomacy today as he met for the first time with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who must show that he is able to get along with the new U.S. administration despite the significant policy differences.
…
Speaking to reporters after the meetings, Obama said there is now an "extraordinary opportunity" to break the long-standing impasse between Israelis and Palestinians. He said Palestinians "are going to have to do a better job of providing the kinds of security assurances that the Israelis would need to achieve a two-state solution" and that other Arab states must be "bolder" and "more supportive" in seeking normalization with Israel.

But Israel "is going to have to take some difficult steps as well," Obama said with Netanyahu seated by his side in the Oval Office. He said Netanyahu’s administration should respect agreements reached by previous Israeli governments and curtail settlements on the West Bank. "We have to make progress on settlements," Obama said. "Settlements have to be stopped."
…
A proposal endorsed by the Arab League in 2002 would grant Israel recognition from all Arab nations in exchange for its withdrawal from all lands it occupied in the 1967 Middle East War, including Syria’s Golan Heights. Past Israeli governments have called the proposal a foundation for negotiation but have ruled out its provision granting Palestinian refugees the right to return to homes inside the Jewish state.
…
The administration is counting on Mubarak, an autocratic ruler unpopular in his own country but an important regional player, to lobby Arab nations in favor of recognizing Israel, perhaps through a modified Arab peace proposal that softens the so-called right of return.

2) Death From Above, Outrage Down Below
David Kilcullen and Andrew Mcdonald Exum, New York Times, May 17, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/opinion/17exum.html
…
While we agree with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates that "fresh eyes were needed" to review our military strategy in the region, we feel that expanding or even just continuing the drone war is a mistake. In fact, it would be in our best interests, and those of the Pakistani people, to declare a moratorium on drone strikes into Pakistan.
…
First, the drone war has created a siege mentality among Pakistani civilians. This is similar to what happened in Somalia in 2005 and 2006, when similar strikes were employed against the forces of the Union of Islamic Courts. While the strikes did kill individual militants who were the targets, public anger over the American show of force solidified the power of extremists. The Islamists’ popularity rose and the group became more extreme, leading eventually to a messy Ethiopian military intervention, the rise of a new regional insurgency and an increase in offshore piracy.

While violent extremists may be unpopular, for a frightened population they seem less ominous than a faceless enemy that wages war from afar and often kills more civilians than militants.

Press reports suggest that over the last three years drone strikes have killed about 14 terrorist leaders. But, according to Pakistani sources, they have also killed some 700 civilians. This is 50 civilians for every militant killed, a hit rate of 2 percent - hardly "precision." American officials vehemently dispute these figures, and it is likely that more militants and fewer civilians have been killed than is reported by the press in Pakistan. Nevertheless, every one of these dead noncombatants represents an alienated family, a new desire for revenge, and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially even as drone strikes have increased.

Second, public outrage at the strikes is hardly limited to the region in which they take place - areas of northwestern Pakistan where ethnic Pashtuns predominate. Rather, the strikes are now exciting visceral opposition across a broad spectrum of Pakistani opinion in Punjab and Sindh, the nation’s two most populous provinces. Covered extensively by the news media, drone attacks are popularly believed to have caused even more civilian casualties than is actually the case. The persistence of these attacks on Pakistani territory offends people’s deepest sensibilities, alienates them from their government, and contributes to Pakistan’s instability.

Third, the use of drones displays every characteristic of a tactic - or, more accurately, a piece of technology - substituting for a strategy. These attacks are now being carried out without a concerted information campaign directed at the Pakistani public or a real effort to understand the tribal dynamics of the local population, efforts that might make such attacks more effective.
…
Governments typically make several mistakes when attempting to separate violent extremists from populations in which they hide. First, they often overestimate the degree to which a population harboring an armed actor can influence that actor’s behavior. People don’t tolerate extremists in their midst because they like them, but rather because the extremists intimidate them. Breaking the power of extremists means removing their power to intimidate - something that strikes cannot do.

Imagine, for example, that burglars move into a neighborhood. If the police were to start blowing up people’s houses from the air, would this convince homeowners to rise up against the burglars? Wouldn’t it be more likely to turn the whole population against the police? And if their neighbors wanted to turn the burglars in, how would they do that, exactly? Yet this is the same basic logic underlying the drone war.

The drone strategy is similar to French aerial bombardment in rural Algeria in the 1950s, and to the "air control" methods employed by the British in what are now the Pakistani tribal areas in the 1920s. The historical resonance of the British effort encourages people in the tribal areas to see the drone attacks as a continuation of colonial-era policies.

The drone campaign is in fact part of a larger strategic error - our insistence on personalizing this conflict with Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Devoting time and resources toward killing or capturing "high-value" targets - not to mention the bounties placed on their heads - distracts us from larger problems, while turning figures like Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Pakistani Taliban umbrella group, into Robin Hoods. Our experience in Iraq suggests that the capture or killing of high-value targets - Saddam Hussein or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi - has only a slight and fleeting effect on levels of violence. Killing Mr. Zarqawi bought only 18 days of quiet before Al Qaeda returned to operations under new leadership.

This is not to suggest that killing terrorists is a bad thing - on the contrary. But it’s not the only thing that matters, and over-emphasizing it wastes resources. The operation that killed Zarqawi, for example, was not a one-day event. Thousands of hours of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance were devoted to the elimination of one man, when units on the ground could have used this time to protect the people from the insurgency that was tearing Iraq apart.

Having Osama bin Laden in one’s sights is one thing. Devoting precious resources to his capture or death, rather than focusing on protecting the Afghan and Pakistani populations, is another. The goal should be to isolate extremists from the communities in which they live. The best way to do this is to adopt policies that build local partnerships. Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies must be defeated by indigenous forces - not from the United States, and not even from Punjab, but from the parts of Pakistan in which they now hide. Drone strikes make this harder, not easier.

3) Afghan Civilian Deaths: Who Is to Blame?
Commanders and villagers give conflicting accounts of the attack that Afghan officials say killed 140 civilians, a toll disputed by the U.S. But injured girls make clear the costs for two families.
Laura King, Los Angeles Times, May 17, 2009
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-afghan-deaths17-2009may17,0,4108227.story

Qale Zaman, Afghanistan - The road to Bala Baluk district stretches arrow-straight ahead, with heat-shimmered cucumber fields on either side. But determining exactly what transpired nearly two weeks ago in a hamlet called Garani takes a far more twisted path.

A battle raged. Bombs fell. Afghan officials say at least 140 civilians died, two-thirds of them children and teenagers, in what may prove the most lethal episode of civilian casualties since the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

Days of interviews with U.S. and Afghan commanders, mourning villagers and jittery provincial authorities, doctors and human rights activists about the fighting of May 4 yielded accounts that could be likened to a series of linked circles; some elements overlap while others appear irreconcilable.

Villagers consistently told of a bombardment that came at least 90 minutes after the Taliban had melted away from Garani, a village just 22 miles from the provincial capital, Farah City. The military insists that the airstrikes were based on real-time information and driven by precise battlefield imperatives. Local people are adamant that bombardment caused the civilian deaths; the U.S. military asserts that at least some were inflicted by the Taliban, and it sharply disputes the toll of 140.
…
Piercing wails rose into the antiseptic-scented air where four blistered and bandaged little girls lay in side-by-side hospital beds. One of them, 5-year-old Ferishteh, writhed and cried almost continuously, unable to find a position that did not cause her pain from the burns that covered her arms, legs and torso.

On the night of May 4, the girls’ families, frightened by hours of fierce fighting between insurgents and Afghan and Western troops in and around Garani, had sought shelter, together with dozens of neighbors, in a pair of sprawling compounds belonging to the village’s most powerful tribal clans.

After the clashes subsided in the early evening, residents said, many were bedding down by about 8:30, still huddled together in hope of safety. That, they say, is when the bombs fell.

Nine-year-old Nazbibi, whose large brown eyes were half hidden by swollen eyelids with eyelashes burned away, remembered falling asleep with her mother and 10-year-old sister by her side. "I heard a big boom, and I was buried except for my head," she said. "Everything collapsed - the roof was on me, and there were flames. I was so frightened."

Her sister, Gulbuddin, was killed. Her mother, Sanam, suffered burns but survived, although the night’s events so unhinged her that she apparently suffered a mental collapse.

4) Gen McChrystal, America’s New Army Chief in Afghanistan, Under Fire Over Rough Tactics and ‘Prisoner Abuse’
The general chosen by Barack Obama to run the war in Afghanistan permitted abusive treatment and interrogation of detainees in Iraq, according to human rights investigators.
Leonard Doyle, Telegraph, 17 May 2009
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/barackobama/5335846/Gen-Stanley-MacChrystal-Americas-new-army-chief-in-Afghanistan-under-fire-over-rough-tactics-and-prisoner-abuse.html

Soldiers have described beatings, psychological torture and other physical mistreatment at a camp near Baghdad where General Stanley McChrystal, then commander of US Joint Special Operations forces in Iraq, was frequently seen.
…
The investigation into human rights abuses was led by Marc Garlasco, himself a former Pentagon intelligence officer who helped lead the hunt for former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Now a weapons expert at Human Rights Watch, his report, No Blood No Foul, covered the period 2003-2004 when Gen McChrystal operated in the shadows and hunted insurgents across Iraq.

Gen McChrystal is likely to be questioned over the findings of the report, compiled in 2006, during Senate hearings which are needed to confirm his appointment to his new post.

His special operations unit used Camp Nama, an acronym for "Nasty Ass Military Area", which had a fearsome reputation.

According to Mr Garlasco’s report, which was based on soldiers’ evidence, inmates at the camp were regularly stripped naked, subjected to sleep deprivation and extreme cold, placed in painful stress positions, and beaten. Gen McChrystal is lionised in the US as a warrior-scholar. Last week the media has carried admiring reports on how he eats just one meal a day and operates on a few hours’ sleep. He led Task Force 121, the Special Operations units in Iraq which caught Saddam Hussein and killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq.

His appointment signals a dramatic shift in US tactics, from reaching out to the Taliban in favour of a more aggressive military approach. But critics warn that Gen McChrystal’s robust methods may generate more hostility among Afghan civilians to US and other Nato forces. Roger Carstens of the Center for a New American Security, himself a former special forces officer, said: "Has he ever worked in the counterinsurgency environment? Not really."

One senior official who asked for the identity of the respected international organisation for which he works to be withheld said: "Expect to see secret, dead of night raids in Afghanistan, with more civilians getting hurt and no one being held accountable. Its a big tactical shift. Because of his history in Iraq we were very alarmed when we heard he was going to be in charge in Afghanistan."

Mr Garlasco said that, as the top commander, Gen McChrystal "can allow the special forces to operate with impunity, or he can rein them in and use counterinsurgency tactics like (General David) Petraeus."

Mr Garlasco interviewed a special forces soldier named Jeff who accused Gen McChrystal of banning the Red Cross and other investigators from entering Camp Nama, a decision which was viewed as a violation of the Geneva Conventions.

"Once, somebody brought it up with the colonel," reported the soldier. "’Will [the Red Cross] ever be allowed in here?’ And he said, ‘Absolutely not.’ He had this directly from General McChrystal and the Pentagon that there’s no way that the Red Cross could get in. ‘They won’t have access and they never will.’"

"This facility was completely closed off to anybody investigating, even to Army investigators."

5) Battle In Pakistan Scars Region
Zahid Hussain, Wall Street Journal, May 18, 2009
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124260295744628487.html

Buner District, Pakistan - The Pakistani army says it is making progress against the Taliban in this district 70 miles from Islamabad, but the fighting has left devastation in its wake.

Burned vehicles, spent artillery shells and broken electric poles lay strewn along the dusty main road in Ambela, the small mountain town that became the main battleground when Pakistani troops moved in to Buner to oust the Taliban.

Pakistan’s troops have pushed the militants from the town after fighting that began when the Taliban occupied the district in what the government said was a violation of a peace agreement in neighboring Swat Valley.

Rehman Malik, Pakistan’s Interior Ministry chief, said Sunday that more than 1,000 militants had been killed in the latest military offensive against the Taliban in northwestern Pakistan. There hasn’t been any independent verification of the claim. "The operation is going in the right direction as we had planned," he said in a televised news conference from Mardan, a district hosting several relief camps for some of the 1.5 million refugees from fighting in the region.
…
Most of Ambela’s population of 10,000 people have fled. A few families returned after the security forces relaxed curfew restrictions to allow farmers to harvest their wheat crop. But most didn’t come back, leaving most of the crop to go to waste.

Arsalan Khan, who fled the fighting along with thousands of other villagers several weeks ago, returned to Ambela Sunday to see if his house was still standing. It was damaged, and the factory where he worked has closed. He said there was nothing in the village for his family to come back to from Mardan, where they’ve settled in a refugee camp. "I don’t have any work and can’t move because of the curfew," he said.

According to official estimates, more than half of Buner’s 700,000 population have taken refuge in the lowland.

They have joined another one million refugees fleeing from Swat and other battle zones in northern Pakistan, triggering one of the worst humanitarian crises in the country’s 62-year history.

6) Hidden Problem for 150?: IMF Budget Scoring
Budget Insight, Stimson Center, May 15, 2009
http://budgetinsight.wordpress.com/2009/05/15/hidden-problem-for-150-imf-budget-scoring/

The Senate Appropriations Committee’ markup of the FY 2009 supplemental funding bill provides an increase in the IMF Quota and the New Arrangements to Borrow (NAB). This item was squeezed in after the original supplemental was sent to Congress The President asked for changes to the level of borrowing authority for the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
…
The Senate bill would provide an increase in the U.S. quota in the IMF, as requested, of approximately 5 billion in Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) (valued at about $8 billion), in order to maintain the U.S. current voting share and veto power within the organization.

The bill also provides for additional US loans to the IMF, as requested, up to 75 billion SDRs (which is about $113 b. in US dollars). This increase would enable the U.S. to increase its share of the New Arrangements to Borrow, (a set of credit lines extended to the IMF) from approximately $10 billion (6.6 billion in SDRs) to up to $123 billion.

In the past, US transfers to the IMF were treated as something that had no impact of the budget or on spending, as they were treated as a funding transfer. We loaned the funds to the IMF, but we could always call on IMF funds to the same degree, making it, basically, a wash, in budgetary terms.

[This practice is misleading: the funds made available to the IMF will almost certainly never come back, so they have the same effect on the U.S. as a direct appropriation - JFP.]

This time, as Congress and the White House grappled with the IMF budget issue, they decided to agree that the costs of these new requests would be estimated according to the Federal Credit Reform Act of 1990. Doing this meant that there would be real budget impact - the authority and the outlays would have to be the cost of the lending, or, in technical terms, the estimated present value of all future cash flows out of and into the Treasury, which would lead to some estimated loss of funds.

The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the expansion of the quota and the new lending will cost of $5 billion over the next four years. While considerably less than the $108 billion in the administration’s proposal, it means for the first time in the 65 year history of U.S. participation in the IMF, the Congress will have to include actual spending, some $5 billion, as well. CBO thinks this spending will be $1 billion in 2009, $2 billion in 2010, and $1 billion in each of years 2011 and 2012.

The problem with this agreement on IMF scoring is that the Foreign Operations appropriations subcommittee may now have to find room for an unexpected $2 billion in outlays in 2010. This could create real complications for the rest of the Obama administration’s international affairs budget request, as the new costs may have to be squeezed into a budget ceiling already filled up by the international affairs budget request the administration sent up in February (with details that went to Congress last week). Unless there is some relief, this could mean pressure on the President’s other priorities, which will already be squeezed by the Budget Resolution agreement that Congress will provide $2.5 billion less than the President asked for.

Iran
7) Iran and Israel
Roger Cohen, New York Times, May 18, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/18/opinion/18iht-edcohen.html

Riyadh - A story is doing the rounds in Washington about an Arab ambassador whose view of Barack Obama’s overtures to Iran is: "We don’t mind you seeking engagement, but please, no marriage!" It’s sometimes hard to know if the Arabs or Israelis are more alarmed - or alarmist - about Iran’s nuclear program and regional ambitions.
…
But recent developments have envenomed things to the point that Arab diplomats troop daily into the State Department to warn that the U.S. quest for détente with Tehran is dangerous. That point will be made with vigor by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he meets with President Obama Monday. After all, when Israelis and Arabs make common cause, surely the danger is real.

Obama should be skeptical, for reasons I will explain. But first those Arab fears.

The Saudis have been incensed by how U.S. policy has favored "the Persians" - as they refer to them - by removing Iran’s Sunni Taliban enemy in Afghanistan and ending Sunni dominance of Iraq. Despite U.S. prodding, the Saudis have not named an ambassador to Iraq and view the prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, as an Iranian pawn. Their strategic goal remains an "Iraq that comes back to be a solid Arab country," as one Saudi official put it to me.

They also express frustration at the U.S. failure to rein in Israel, whose wars against Hezbollah in 2006 and Hamas in Gaza have stirred growing support for these Iran-backed movements. Anger on the Arab street is easily exploited by Iranian leaders using insurgent rhetoric.

With a significant Shia minority, Saudi Arabia - like Kuwait and Bahrain - believes Iran is inciting these communities to rebellion. It’s not uncommon to see posters of Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Iran-backed Hezbollah, in Shia homes. Shiites, in turn, say Iran’s rising influence is used to justify oppression.

When popular rage rises, the region’s Arab autocrats look in the mirror and see the Shah. They don’t want a rerun of Tehran 1979.
…
What’s really at issue here is that neither Israel nor the Arabs want a change in a status quo that locks in Israeli regional military dominance and the cozy relationships - arms deals, aid and all - that U.S. allies from the Gulf to Cairo enjoy.

American interests are, however, another story. They are not served by having no communication with Iran, the rising Mideast power; nor by the uncritical support of Israel that has allowed West Bank settlements to grow and peace to fade; nor by relationships with Arab states that comfort stasis.

The Arab arguments over Iran are weak. It is precisely U.S. non-engagement that has led to Tehran’s rising power. So it makes sense to change policy. Only within an American "grand bargain" with Iran will a solution to the nuclear issue be possible.

Given that a Mideast peace is inconceivable without Iran because of its influence over Hamas and Hezbollah, it is in the Arab interest that the United States attempt to bring Iran "inside the tent." Outside it will make trouble. Moreover, the Arabs themselves have engaged. The Saudis have normal if strained diplomatic relations with Iran.

So here’s what Obama should say to Netanyahu when he says Arab states have identical fears over Iran: "We’re aware of this, Mr. Prime Minister, which is why we sent Defense Secretary Robert Gates and others to reassure Arab allies. But the U.S. interest is not served by the Mideast status quo. Our interest lies in new region-wide security arrangements that promote a two-state peace, end 30 years of non-communication with Iran, and ultimately afford Israel a brighter future. You can’t build settlements and expect Iran’s influence to diminish."

8) Iran says ready to face any U.S. gasoline sanctions
Hashem Kalantari, Reuters, Monday May 18 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/feedarticle/8512988

Tehran - Iran has plans in place to deal quickly with the consequences of a proposed U.S. law that would penalise companies supplying the country with gasoline, its oil minister was quoted as saying on Monday.

The U.S. Congress is considering legislation to impose sanctions on companies that sell, ship, finance or insure gasoline exports to Iran. Under the bill, which aims to pressure Iran over its nuclear plans, foreign companies doing so would be barred from conducting business in the United States.

"They are (threatening) us with sanctions on gasoline imports while…we presently have the capability to meet the country’s gasoline needs within 48 hours," the semi-official ISNA news agency quoted Gholamhossein Nozari as telling an oil conference in Tehran.

Without rationing, gasoline consumption would have risen to some 90 million litres a day, compared with an average of 64 million litres since its introduction, Nozari said.

Afghanistan
9) Rumsfeld’s Renegade Unit Blamed For Afghan Deaths
Special Forces group implicated in three incidents that claimed the lives of hundreds of innocent civilians / MarSOC was set up by former defence secretary despite opposition from within the Marine Corps
Jerome Starkey, The Independent, Saturday, 16 May 2009
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/rumsfelds-renegade-unit-blamed-for-afghan-deaths-1685704.html

A single American Special Forces group was behind at least three of Afghanistan’s worst civilian casualty incidents, The Independent has learnt, raising fundamental questions about their ongoing role in the conflict.

Troops from the US Marines Corps’ Special Operations Command, or MarSOC, were responsible for calling in air strikes in Bala Boluk, in Farah, last week - believed to have killed more than 140 men, women and children - as well as two other incidents in 2007 and 2008. News of MarSOC’s involvement in the three incidents comes just days after a Special Forces expert, Lieutenant-General Stanley McChrystal, was named to take over as the top commander of US and Nato troops in Afghanistan. His surprise appointment has prompted speculation that commando counterinsurgency missions will increase in the battle to beat the Taliban.

MarSOC was created three years ago on the express orders of Donald Rumsfeld, US defence secretary at the time, despite opposition from within the Marine Corps and the wider Special Forces community. An article in the Marine Corps Times described the MarSOC troops as "cowboys" who brought shame on the corps.

The first controversial incident involving the unit happened just three weeks into its first deployment to Afghanistan on 4 March 2007. Speeding away from a suicide bomb attack close to the Pakistan border, around 120 men from Fox Company opened fire on civilians near Jalalabad, in Nangahar province. The Marines said they were shot at after the explosion; eyewitnesses said the Americans fired indiscriminately at pedestrians and civilian cars, killing at least 19 people.

The US Army commander in Nangahar at the time, Colonel John Nicholson, said he was "deeply ashamed" and described the incident as "a stain on our honour". The Marines’ tour was cut short after a second incident on 9 March in which they allegedly rolled a car and fired on traffic again, and they were flown out of Afghanistan a few weeks later.

The top Special Operations officer at US Central Command, Army Major General Frank Kearney, refuted MarSOC’s claims that they had been shot at. "We found no brass that we can confirm that small-arms fire came at them," he said, referring to ammunition casings. "We have testimony from Marines that is in conflict with unanimous testimony from civilians."

At the military hearings on the incident, which were held back in the US, soldiers said the MarSOC troops, who called themselves Taskforce Violence, were gung-ho and hungry to prove themselves in battle.
…
Meanwhile, Afghan MPs have called for new laws to regulate the presence of foreign forces in Afghanistan, and limit use of air strikes, house searches and Special Forces operations. Sayed Hussein Alemi Balkhi, one of the chief proponents of the planned legislation, said: "Special Forces, all forces, should be regulated by the law. If they won’t accept that we have to ask bigger questions about what they are doing here."

Colombia
10) Assassinated 17 Colombian Unionists in 2009
Inside Costa Rica, Sunday 17 May 2009
http://insidecostarica.com/dailynews/2009/may/17/lam02.htm

Bogota - The number of union activists assassinated rose to 17 in Colombia this year, confirmed Favio Arias, member of the executive committee of the United Workers Central (CUT).

Arias said that persecution of the Colombian union movement has not stopped, quite the contrary, crimes against the working class increases in the country.

He pointed out that during the last decade 2,711 union activists were killed in Colombia for the simple fact of struggling for the fundamental rights of workers, pointing out that repression of the movement is permanent and relentless.

Arias explained that behind these crimes are illegal armed groups with strong ties to the government that, he said "take care to appear as if they are the only intellectual author of these outrages and violations."

These assassinations put in doubt the claims of the current administration of President Alvaro Uribe that the situation of violence, crimes and blame on the union movement is under control.

-
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.

McGovern Bill Introduced, 75 Sponsors
H.R.2404: To require the Secretary of Defense to submit a report to Congress outlining the United States exit strategy for US military forces in Afghanistan.
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/D?d111:20:./temp/~bdQ2iW:@@@P|/bss/|

Can Treasury Sneak IMF Money Through the Supplemental?
Lost in the drama over the war supplemental is a sneaky play by Treasury Department to get $108 billion in U.S. tax dollars for the IMF. If Treasury can get the money through the supplemental, it can avoid any Congressional debate over the policies of the IMF and whether this is a wise and just use of U.S. tax dollars; and whether Congress should insist on meaningful, observable reforms of IMF policy as the price of new U.S. funding.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/can-treasury-sneak-imf-mo_b_204058.html

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Summary:
U.S./Top News
1) The House passed more than $96 billion in funding for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq through Sept. 30, but a bloc of 51 Democrats opposed it, the Washington Post reports. Democratic opponents are accusing Obama of the same charge they leveled against his predecessor: escalating a war without a clear exit strategy. The bill passed 368 to 60, with 200 Democrats and all but nine Republicans supporting it.

2) Former State Department official Lawrence Wilkerson says finding a "smoking gun" linking Iraq and al Qaeda became the main purpose of the torture program the Bush administration authorized in 2002, CNN reports. An adviser to Human Rights Watch called the torture-induced claim by Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi that Iraq had trained al Qaeda operatives in producing chemical and biological weapons "pivotal" to the Bush administration’s case for war.

3) Human Rights Watch said U.S. forces in Afghanistan should have known there were large numbers of civilians in a village they bombed this month, and need to change their procedures to prevent civilian casualties, Reuters reports. The Afghan government says 140 civilians were killed in the U.S. bombing of Bala Boluk district in Farah province on May 3.

4) Survivors of U.S. airstrikes in the Afghan village of Granai say Taliban fighters had left their village before the U.S. bombing began, the New York Times reports.

5) The White House said some Guantánamo detainees would be prosecuted in a military commission system Obama sharply criticized as a candidate, the New York Times reports. Officials said they were making changes in the system to grant detainees expanded legal rights, but some human rights groups said they were stunned by what they called a betrayal. They said the prospect of the new administration presiding over military trials would hurt Obama’s efforts to improve relationships around the world.

Pakistan
6) Hospitals have been overwhelmed by the flood of injured refugees from the U.S.-backed Pakistani government offensive in Swat, the Los Angeles Times reports. The offensive has driven at least 800,000 civilians from the valley.

Iraq
7) Iraq has lost more than half the Christians who once called it home, mostly since the US invasion, AP reports. The last official Iraqi census in 1987 found 1.4 million Christians. Now, according to the State Department, that number has dropped to between 550,000 and 800,000. Some estimate the number is even lower: only 400,000, according to the German Catholic relief organization Kirche in Not.

Contents:
U.S./Top News
1) House Passes War Funds As 51 Democrats Dissent
Perry Bacon Jr., Washington Post, Friday, May 15, 2009
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/14/AR2009051403480.html

The House passed a bill yesterday that would provide more than $96 billion in funding for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq through Sept. 30, as President Obama had requested, but a bloc of 51 Democrats opposed it.

Democratic opponents are accusing Obama of the same charge they leveled against his predecessor: escalating a war without a clear exit strategy.

The bill passed 368 to 60, with 200 Democrats and all but nine Republicans supporting it.

Democratic opponents did not attack Obama by name, but some likened his increase of 21,000 troops and billions of dollars to win the war in Afghanistan to President George W. Bush’s efforts in Iraq.

"When George Bush was president, I was on this floor saying we need an exit strategy," said Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.). "The same applies with Afghanistan. I’m tired of wars with no deadlines, no exits and no ends."

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), who also voted against the bill, said that "this bill simply amplifies and extends failed policies."
…
House Democratic leaders refused to back an effort by McGovern and other antiwar legislators that would require Obama to provide Congress a detailed exit strategy for Afghanistan by the end of the year.

2) Powell aide says torture helped build Iraq war case
Lawrence Wilkerson criticizes Dick Cheney for defending interrogation methods
Interrogations aimed at finding "smoking gun" linking Iraq and al Qaeda, he says
By 2002, U.S. officials decided "we had al Qaeda pretty much on the run," he says
Matt Smith, CNN, May 14, 2009
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/05/14/iraq.torture/

Finding a "smoking gun" linking Iraq and al Qaeda became the main purpose of the abusive interrogation program the Bush administration authorized in 2002, a former State Department official told CNN on Thursday.

The allegation was included in an online broadside aimed at former Vice President Dick Cheney by Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff for then-Secretary of State Colin Powell. In it, Wilkerson wrote that the interrogation program began in April and May of 2002, and then-Vice President Cheney’s office kept close tabs on the questioning.

"Its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at preempting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al Qaeda," Wilkerson wrote in The Washington Note, an online political journal.

Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel, said his accusation is based on information from current and former officials. He said he has been "relentlessly digging" since 2004, when Powell asked him to look into the scandal surrounding the treatment of prisoners at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.

"I couldn’t walk into a courtroom and prove this to anybody, but I’m pretty sure it’s fairly accurate," he told CNN.
…
Wilkerson told CNN that by early 2002, U.S. officials had decided that "we had al Qaeda pretty much on the run."

"The priority had turned to other purposes, and one of those purposes was to find substantial contacts between al Qaeda and Baghdad," he said.

The argument that Iraq could have provided weapons of mass destruction to terrorists such as al Qaeda was a key element of the Bush administration’s case for the March 2003 invasion. But after the invasion, Iraq was found to have dismantled its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs, and the independent commission that investigated the 2001 attacks found no evidence of a collaborative relationship between the two entities.

Wilkerson wrote that in one case, the CIA told Cheney’s office that a prisoner under its interrogation program was now "compliant," meaning agents recommended the use of "alternative" techniques should stop.

At that point, "The VP’s office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods," Wilkerson wrote. "The detainee had not revealed any al Qaeda-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, ‘revealed’ such contacts."

Al-Libi’s claim that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s government had trained al Qaeda operatives in producing chemical and biological weapons appeared in the October 2002 speech then-President Bush gave when pushing Congress to authorize military action against Iraq. It also was part of Powell’s February 2003 presentation to the United Nations on the case for war, a speech Powell has called a "blot" on his record.

Al-Libi later recanted the claim, saying it was made under torture by Egyptian intelligence agents, a claim Egypt denies. He died last week in a Libyan prison, reportedly a suicide, Human Rights Watch reported.

Stacy Sullivan, a counterterrorism adviser for the U.S.-based group, called al-Libi’s allegation "pivotal" to the Bush administration’s case for war, as it connected Baghdad to the terrorist organization behind the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.

And an Army psychiatrist assigned to support questioning of suspected terrorists at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp in Cuba told the service’s inspector-general that interrogators there were trying to connect al Qaeda and Iraq.

"This is my opinion," Maj. Paul Burney told the inspector-general’s office. "Even though they were giving information and some of it was useful, while we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between aI Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful in establishing a link between aI Qaeda and Iraq. The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish this link … there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."

3) Rights group: U.S. must change air strike drill
Peter Graff, Reuters, Friday, May 15, 2009 7:10 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/15/AR2009051500962.html

Kabul - U.S. forces in Afghanistan should have known there were large numbers of civilians in a village they bombed this month, and need to change their procedures to prevent civilian casualties, Human Rights Watch said on Friday.

The Afghan government says 140 civilians were killed in the U.S. bombing of Bala Boluk district in Farah province on May 3, an incident that has stoked anti-American anger across Afghanistan.

According to a type-written list of 140 victims’ names, ages and father’s names endorsed by Afghan government investigators and obtained this week by Reuters, 93 of the dead were children and only 22 were adult males.

If confirmed, the death toll would make it the deadliest incident for civilians of the seven-year war.

U.S. officials acknowledge civilians died but dispute the death toll. They say some of the names on the list may be fake and blame Taliban fighters for putting the villagers in harm’s way.

The dispute has stoked outrage against Western forces in Afghanistan and prompted President Hamid Karzai to demand an end to all air strikes, a call that Washington has rebuffed.

New York-based Human Rights Watch said a review promised by General David Petraeus into the use of air strikes in Afghanistan needed to produce "fundamental changes" to prevent similar incidents from occurring again.

"The U.S., working with its Afghan counterparts, should have known that there was a large civilian population in the village at the time of the air strikes," the group’s Asia director, Brad Adams, said in a statement. "The U.S. needs to answer some basic questions about the sources and quality of information it requires before authorizing these kinds of devastating bombing runs."
…
The commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, General David McKiernan, issued a directive in September calling for his forces to attempt to disengage rather than fire if they come into contact with insurgents in an area where there may be civilians.

The United Nations says McKiernan’s directive does seem to have helped reduce civilian deaths in recent months. But Human Rights Watch said: "the tragedy of Bala Boluk shows that further reform is required."

"Even if some Taliban remained in the village, dropping a dozen bombs into a residential area doesn’t seem to make much sense," said Adams. "The U.S. should do everything possible to ensure that disasters like Bala Boluk are not repeated.

4) Villagers in Afghanistan Describe Chaos of U.S. Strikes
Carlotta Gall and Taimoor Shah, New York Times, May 15, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/15/world/asia/15farah.html

Farah, Afghanistan - The number of civilians killed by the American airstrikes in Farah Province last week may never be fully known. But villagers, including two girls recovering from burn wounds, described devastation that officials and human rights workers are calling the worst episode of civilian casualties in eight years of war in Afghanistan. "We were very nervous and afraid and my mother said, ‘Come quickly, we will go somewhere and we will be safe,’ " said Tillah, 12, recounting from a hospital bed how women and children fled the bombing by taking refuge in a large compound, which was then hit.

The bombs were so powerful that people were ripped to shreds. Survivors said they collected only pieces of bodies. Several villagers said that they could not distinguish all of the dead and that they never found some of their relatives.

Government officials have accepted handwritten lists compiled by the villagers of 147 dead civilians. An independent Afghan human rights group said it had accounts from interviews of 117 dead. American officials say that even 100 is an exaggeration but have yet to issue their own count.

The calamity in the village of Granai, some 18 miles from here, illustrates in the grimmest terms the test for the Obama administration as it deploys more than 20,000 additional troops here and appoints a new commander, Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, in search of a fresh approach to combat the tenacious Taliban insurgency.

It is bombings like this one that have turned many Afghans against the American-backed government and the foreign military presence. The events in Granai have raised sharp questions once again about the appropriateness and effectiveness of aerial bombardment in a guerrilla war in which the insurgents deliberately blend into the civilian population to fight and flee.

Taliban insurgents are well aware of the weakness and are making the most of it, American and Afghan officials say. Farah, a vast province in the west, contains only a smattering of foreign special forces and trainers who work among Afghan police and army units. Exploiting the thin spread of forces, the insurgents sought to seize control of Granai and provoke a fierce battle over the heads of the civilian population, Afghan and American officials say.

After hours of fighting and taking a number of casualties, the American forces called in their heaviest weapon, airstrikes, on at least three targets in the village.
…
Much of the villagers’ descriptions matched accounts given by the United States military spokesman, Col. Greg Julian, and the provincial police chief, Col. Abdul Ghafar Watandar. But they differed on one important point: whether the Taliban had already left Granai before the bombing began.

There was particular anger among the villagers that the bombing came after, they say, the Taliban had already left at dusk, and the fighting had subsided, so much so that men had gone to evening prayers at 7 p.m. and returned and were sitting down with their families for dinner.

The police chief said that sporadic fighting continued into the night and that the Taliban were probably in the village until 1 a.m.

Whatever the case, American planes bombed after 8 p.m. in several waves when most of the villagers thought the fighting was over; and whatever the actual number of casualties, it is clear from the villagers’ accounts that dozens of women and children were killed after taking cover.
…
An independent Afghan organization, Afghanistan Rights Monitor, said Wednesday that at least 117 civilians were killed - including 26 women and 61 children - drawing on interviews with 21 villagers and relatives of the dead. The group criticized both the Taliban for fighting among civilians, and the United States military for using excessive force.

5) Obama to Keep Tribunals; Stance Angers Some Backers
William Glaberson, New York Times, May 16, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/16/us/politics/16gitmo.html

The White House said on Friday that some Guantánamo detainees would be prosecuted in a military commission system that was a much-criticized centerpiece of the Bush administration’s strategy for fighting terror.

Administration officials said they were making changes in the system to grant detainees expanded legal rights, but critics said the move was a sharp departure from the direction suggested by Mr. Obama during the campaign, when he characterized the commissions as an unnecessary compromise of American values.
…
But some liberals and human rights groups said they were stunned by what some of them called a betrayal. They said the prospect of the new administration presiding over military trials at Guantánamo would hurt Mr. Obama’s efforts to improve relationships around the world and would embroil the administration in years of legal battles.

The executive director of Human Rights First, Elisa Massimino, called the commission system of trying war crimes cases irredeemable. "Tinkering with the machinery of military commissions will not remove the taint of Guantánamo from future prosecutions," Ms. Massimino said.

The executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, Anthony D. Romero, said he was preparing an advertising campaign that would call the use of an inferior legal system to try detainees "the Bush Obama doctrine."

The new system would limit the use of hearsay evidence against detainees, ban evidence gained from cruel treatment, and give defendants more latitude to pick their own lawyers.

But the new rights still fall far short of the protections provided in federal court, lawyers said, predicting that the administration would encounter energetic new legal challenges that could take years to resolve.

The Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch, Tom Malinowski, said the decision was mystifying. He said he feared it would leave the administration with "the symbolic baggage of the system they inherited from the Bush administration without the procedural advantages" intended to assure easy convictions.

Pakistan
6) Pakistan Hospitals, Camps Are Overwhelmed
After a long trek out of the Swat Valley’s conflict zone, wounded Pakistanis find there are not enough beds or medicine for them.
Mark Magnier, Los Angeles Times, May 15, 2009
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-pakistan-medical15-2009may15,0,6428355.story

Mardan, Pakistan - Shaista Behran lay on a hospital bed with a battered leg and a burdened psyche after watching several members of her family diebefore her eyes.

The 8-year-old and her family fled the village of Wodkhi in Pakistan’s war-torn Swat Valley last week, making it as far as the area’s biggest town, Mingora, when a mortar shell exploded nearby. "I saw my brother, two sisters and my mother die in front of me," she said, her words halting and barely audible, as a fly settled on her matted black hair. "Then everything went dark and I woke up here in the hospital."

The pus and blood had soaked through the dirty bandage on her left leg as she lay on her side in the overloaded women’s ward of District Headquarters Hospital No. 1 in Mardan. The staff wasn’t sure how she got here and hoped one of her relatives would show up soon to help her.

The injured come by taxi, on foot, in cars and by truck, collateral damage from a conflict many of them don’t understand, as the Pakistani army and Taliban militants battle it out in the picturesque Swat Valley, destroying property and lives.

On Thursday, the fighting continued unabated. The current conflict started last month when the army attacked Taliban militants in the neighboring Buner and Dir districts and then in the valley, causing people to flee in panic.

The army said Thursday that 54 Taliban fighters and nine soldiers had been killed in Swat in the preceding 24 hours. The offensive has driven at least 800,000 civilians from the valley, with about 80,000 now living in camps south of the conflict area.

Dr. Shahid Durrani, head of orthopedic surgery at the hospital, said most of the cases the staff has handled were caused by bomb blasts or traffic accidents related to the conflict.

Many injuries are 2 or 3 days old by the time patients reach the main hospital in Mardan, the first city on the road out of Swat. By that point many wounds are dirty, infected and healing all wrong.

Dr. Rahman Khalil, another orthopedist, said the hospital was handling three times its normal load of patients, forcing the staff to release many early to make room for newcomers. Several days this week, far more patients arrived than there were beds in the wards.
…
Imtiaz Ali, 21, a student volunteer from the town of Takht Bhai, north of Mardan, said people who couldn’t make it to hospitals desperately needed medicine and medical care. "Look, these people here have nothing," he said. "And not a single government official has come by, nobody. Please tell them to come. These people badly need help."

The flood of displaced humanity living in close and often unsanitary quarters has increased the risk of epidemics, experts warned this week. Those staying in government-run camps say the demand for medicine far outstrips the supply.

"If you need tablets, the doctors say they’re not available," said Naik Amul, 30, a teacher from Kanju in Swat now living in the Jalala camp. "At best, they give you one or two tablets, which aren’t what you really need and aren’t enough to help."

Often forgotten in the rush to provide food and shelter are the mental costs of the crisis. "People are in bad shape psychologically," said Ali. "People try and comfort each other, but many have seen their entire lives destroyed."

Iraq
7) In Iraq, an exodus of Christians
Paul Schemm, Associated Press, Thursday, May 14, 2009 2:29 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/14/AR2009051400861.html

Baghdad - Iraq has lost more than half the Christians who once called it home, mostly since the war began, and few who fled have plans to return, The Associated Press has learned.

Pope Benedict XVI called attention to their plight during a Mideast visit this week, urging the international community to ensure the survival of "the ancient Christian community of that noble land."

The number of Arab Christians has plummeted across the Mideast in recent years as increasing numbers seek to move to the West, saying they feel increasingly unwelcome in the Middle East and want a better life abroad.

But the exodus has been particularly stark in Iraq - where sectarian violence since the U.S.-led 2003 invasion has often targeted Christians.

The AP found that hundreds of thousands of Christians have fled.

The situation holds practical implications for Iraq’s future. Christians historically made up a large portion of the country’s middle class, including key jobs as doctors, engineers, intellectuals and civil servants.

The last official Iraqi census in 1987 found 1.4 million Christians in the country. Now, according to the 2008 U.S. State Department report on International Religious Freedom, that number has dropped to between 550,000 and 800,000.

Some estimate the number is even lower: only 400,000, according to the German Catholic relief organization Kirche in Not. The number is echoed privately by many Iraqi Christians.

The vast majority of the exodus has happened since the 2003 invasion, the State Department and other statistics suggest. The State Department says as many as 1.2 million Christians remained into 2003.

Christians first began leaving Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War, during the economic sanctions and repression under Saddam Hussein, who pushed more Islamist policies. But the trickle turned to a flood after Saddam was toppled in 2003 and the violence escalated, said a prominent Iraqi Christian lawmaker, Younadem Kana.

-
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.

CEPR: Estimating the Cost of Contributions to the IMF
As Treasury tries to sneak money for the IMF through the supplemental, the Center for Economic and Policy Research estimates costs to the U.S. Treasury from the proposed $108 billion increase in the U.S. contribution to the IMF. OMB originally proposed the $108 billion be scored at zero in the budget, and there are indications that it may be scored at as little as $5 billion. CEPR estimates the cost to the U.S. Treasury would be in the range of $16.6 to $26.3 billion, based on the difference between the U.S. Treasury’s borrowing costs and interest received from the IMF. These estimates are conservative and understate the true cost.
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/estimating-the-cost-of-contributions-to-the-imf/

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Summary:
U.S./Top News
1) In almost all of its standby arrangements negotiated over the last year, the IMF has included conditions that will reduce output and employment in situations where economies are already shrinking, writes Mark Weisbrot in the Guardian. But in Washington there is a rush to get the IMF more money without any congressional hearings or debate. The Obama administration is trying to attach $108bn for the IMF to the supplemental in order to circumvent the normal legislative process.

2) Thanks in part to a lobbying boost from veterans of the Afghanistan war, Rep. McGovern’s bill demanding an exit strategy by December now has more than 60 sponsors, the Boston Globe reports. [The bill had 73 sponsors this morning - JFP.]

3) Secret operations threaten to completely compromise what remains of the public war in Afghanistan and Pakistan with the ascension of Gen. McChrystal to top commander from his classified role in running Special Ops in Iraq for five years, writes Tom Hayden in the Nation. Special Ops units in Iraq served as judge, jury and executioner in hundreds of extrajudicial killings. The public, the media and the Congress are entitled to know whether and how Gen. McChrystal will become transparent, accessible and accountable as he steps out of the shadows, or whether he will be committing America’s future to the night.

4) The Obama administration’s drug czar wants to banish the idea that the U.S. is fighting "a war on drugs," a move that would underscore a shift favoring treatment over incarceration in trying to reduce illicit drug use, the Wall Street Journal reports.

5) The Illinois Senate passed a resolution that criticizes President Obama’s plan to step up military efforts in Afghanistan, AP reports. "The people of the United States have indicated that this war has gone on long enough," says the resolution, which passed last week. "The Senate believes that it is not in the national interest of the United States to deepen its military involvement in Afghanistan."

Iran
6) The Obama administration and its European allies are setting a target of early October to determine whether engagement with Iran is making progress or should lead to sanctions, the Wall Street Journal reports. They also are developing specific benchmarks to gauge Iranian behavior. Those include whether Iran will agree to a "freeze for freeze" - halting uranium enrichment in return for holding off on new economic sanctions. All Iran’s presidential candidates have said they will not abandon enriching uranium, but some Iranian analysts say Iran might agree to a short-term "freeze for freeze" formula. Iran would then offer that Western powers can freely monitor Iran’s program to ensure it is not turning military - in return for sharing technology and expertise.

Pakistan
7) The US-urged Pakistani offensive against Taliban insurgents in the Swat Valley area has driven about 800,000 people from their homes, AP reports. Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani said it was the largest internal displacement of Pakistanis since the country’s creation in 1947. Members of a charity banned for its alleged links to the Mumbai terror attack have resurfaced in northwestern Pakistan under a new name, distributing food and medicine among thousands of refugees.

Israel/Palestine
8) Pope Benedict XVI criticized Israel’s construction of a security barrier through the West Bank and urged a loosening of restrictions on Gaza, the Washington Post reports. The Pope expressed "solidarity with all the homeless Palestinians who long to be able to return to their birthplace."

Haiti
9) A growing chorus is urging the US to stop deporting Haitian immigrants, at least until their nation can recover from four devastating hurricanes last year and years of political and economic turmoil, the Boston Globe reports. Rep. Barney Frank said US policy is discriminatory. The government now provides temporary protection to refugees from five countries - El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Somalia, and Sudan - but it has never offered it to Haiti. "I think it’s outrageous that they don’t have it," Frank said.

Contents:
U.S./Top News
1) Stealth Move in Washington Aims to Get $100 Billion for IMF Without Congressional Debate
Mark Weisbrot, Guardian, Wednesday 13 May 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/may/13/imf-us-congress-aid

"You don’t have to do this." Those are the near- last words of several victims in the Coen brothers’ classic film No Country for Old Men, as they try to convince the movie’s unrelenting assassin that he should spare them. The assassin, played by Javier Bardem, finds this annoying, because in his mind these murders are pre-determined.

So it is with the IMF’s continuing confrontations with its borrowers, with one government after another pleading: "You don’t have to do this." Turkey and Latvia were in the news last week, having joined the roster of governments whose IMF disbursements are being withheld because they find it politically impossible to impose the required punishments on their citizens.

The IMF sees these measures as necessary and pre-determined - in most cases by the borrowing countries’ having run-up unsustainable external or budget imbalances. But in fact the IMF has a long track record - dating back decades - of imposing unnecessary and often harmful conditions on borrowing countries.

Latvia missed a 200 million euro disbursement from the IMF in March for not cutting its budget enough. According to press reports, the government wants to run a budget deficit of 7% of GDP for this year, and the IMF wants 5%. Latvia is already cutting its budget by 40%, and is planning to close some public hospitals and schools in order to make the IMF’s targets, prompting street protests.

Latvia’s GDP crashed by 18% in the first quarter of this year, after a 10.3% drop in the preceding quarter. These are among the worst declines in the world. This indicates that the IMF’s prescription is serious overkill. The purpose of IMF aid is supposedly to make any necessary adjustment easier, not worse.

In Pakistan, it would be surprising if the US Treasury, which is the principal overseer of the IMF, did not see a need to ease up on the contractionary IMF conditions there. The government of nuclear-armed Pakistan is facing serious political problems right now, having recently launched a major offensive against a growing Taliban insurgency. Slowing Pakistan’s economy at a time when the global economic crisis is already doing that may not be the best policy from the point of view of political stability. The IMF has negotiated an increase in Pakistan’s fiscal deficit from 3.4% to 4.6% of GDP, but is holding the line against lowering interest rates.

In almost all of its standby arrangements negotiated over the last year, the IMF has included conditions that will reduce output and employment in situations where economies are already shrinking.

Yet here in Washington there is a rush to get the IMF more money without any congressional hearings or debate. We are told that poor countries will suffer if the IMF does not get a $108bn appropriation from Congress immediately. But this is nonsense.

If we add up all of the IMF’s commitments under the 16 standby arrangements negotiated since the crisis intensified last year, the total is less than $46bn. The poorest countries will not be allowed to borrow anywhere near that amount.

The IMF already has $215bn on hand, plus more than $100bn in gold reserves. It plans to create another $250bn in SDR’s, ie the IMF’s currency. Even if we include the $67.5bn that Mexico ($47bn) and Poland ($20.5bn) together can tap under the IMF’s flexible credit line, it is clear the IMF is trying to get hundreds of billions of dollars more than it is likely to need. And it has at least ten times the money that the poor countries - whose needs are pocket change compared to IMF resources - will ever be allowed to borrow.

Yet the Obama administration, in a surprise move out of nowhere on Tuesday, decided to try and attach the $108bn for the IMF to another spending bill in order to circumvent the normal legislative process. The reason for this stealth maneuver is that they might run into trouble in the House, where legislators are wary of voting for multi-billion blank cheques after the backlash against the Tarp financial bailout. They will try to convince Congress to approve this money without hearings or debate with the idea that it must be done in order to save poor people in poor countries.

Congress should be met with a chorus of opposition: "You don’t have to do this."

2) Veterans Boost McGovern Bill Calling For Afghanistan Exit Strategy
Farah Stockman, Boston Globe, May 14, 2009
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2009/05/14/veterans_boost_mcgovern_bill_calling_for_afghanistan_exit_strategy/

Representative James McGovern of Massachusetts, who has launched the only effort in the US House to oppose President Obama’s plans for the Afghan war, received an unexpected boost of support yesterday from a group of Afghan and Iraqi war veterans, who raced around Capitol Hill lobbying for his bill.

Congress is expected today to approve swiftly the $94.2 billion war-funding bill, which would support the 21,000 additional combat troops and military trainers Obama plans to deploy. But McGovern’s bill, which the Democrat will file today, would require the Pentagon to come up with an exit strategy by the end of the year.

The veterans, who are part of a small but growing group of Americans who oppose the Afghan war, traveled to Washington this week, shadowed by the Brave New Foundation, a nonprofit film company based in California that produces social justice documentaries and has launched a campaign called Rethink Afghanistan.

Realizing that it could not stop the supplemental measure, the group focused instead on getting more support for McGovern’s bill. "Without an exit strategy, then the mission is doomed to fail," said Jake Diliberto, who fought in Afghanistan in 2001 as a Marine.

Rick Reyes, a former Marine corporal who also served in Afghanistan shortly after the US invasion, said he never thought he would lobby Congress. But by midafternoon, he had met with representatives from 20 offices. The group planned to meet with 100 more. "So far the response has been positive, but you never know how they will vote," said Reyes, who believes the operations in Afghanistan have made the United States less safe.
…
Sixty members of Congress have signed on as cosponsors of McGovern’s bill.

3) McChrystal’s Rise: More Secrets, Less Daylight
Tom Hayden, The Nation, May 13, 2009
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090525/hayden2

All along there were two US wars in Iraq. There was the public war, in which the Pentagon tried to manipulate the mainstream media into being a "message amplifier," while some intrepid reporters and bloggers fought back. Then there was the secret war carried out by the Special Operations forces, whose existence was denied even by the Pentagon.

Now the secret operations threaten to completely compromise what remains of the public war in Afghanistan and Pakistan with the ascension of Gen. Stanley McChrystal to top commander from his classified role in running Special Ops in Iraq for five years.

When questioned by the media or senators presiding at his confirmation hearing in a few weeks, Gen. McChrystal may have a simple answer to anything troubling: sorry, that is classified.

The mystique of secrecy may come to shroud all public inquiry about Afghanistan and Pakistan. There are questions to be answered, however.

One is framed on page 380 of Bob Woodward’s book The War Within, in which the author describes a top-secret operation in 2006 that targeted and killed insurgents with such effectiveness that it gave "orgasms" to Derek Harvey, a top aide to Gen. David Petraeus and longtime tracker of Iraqi dissidents. The secret program was led by McChrystal, then a lieutenant commander, using signals intercepts, informants and other tools of what McChrystal calls "collaborative warfare" through Special Access Programs (SAPS) and Special Compartmented Information (SCI.) McChrystal, according to the New York Times, conducted and commanded most of his secret missions at night. These missions were consistent with the proposals of Petraeus’s top counterinsurgency adviser at the time, David Kilcullen, to revive the discredited Phoenix Program used in South Vietnam.

This expanding secret war is crucial to understand for three reasons. First, according to Woodward’s claim, it was "more important than the surge" in reducing insurgent violence in Iraq. Second, the Special Ops units served as judge, jury and executioner in hundreds of extrajudicial killings. The targeted victims were from broad categories such as "the Sunni insurgency" and "renegade Shiite militias" or other "extremists." Third, and most important, the operation was kept secret from the American public, media and perhaps even the US Congress.

Woodward himself agreed to self-censorship, choosing to accept the Pentagon’s argument that to disclose any details "might lead to unraveling of state secrets that have been so beneficial in Iraq."

And there the matter has been left, without a single follow-up story, investigation or Congressional inquiry.

Three years later, Iraq is far from being a pacified US ally, raising the question of whether the secret killing campaign was partly a desperate effort to get through the 2007-2008 political cycle in the United States.

The prospect of contending with secret counterinsurgency programs is not a secret but a well-known challenge to those on the receiving end in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The real point is that Special Operations allows the Pentagon to pull the wool over the eyes of the American public, media and Congress. Nothing requires an explanation, including the actual causes of American deaths.

If that seems a harsh conclusion, consider the one public "blot" we already know about concerning Gen. McChrystal’s war record. An investigation by the Pentagon itself found him guilty of fabricating false information in the drama surrounding 2004 death of Army Ranger Pat Tillman, an Arizona Cardinals football player who was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan. In 2007, McChrystal was held accountable for a Pentagon cover story that Tillman died from "devastating enemy fire," when in fact he was killed by accidental rounds from his own unit.

What kind of military leader would falsify the details of a soldier’s death in order to create a patriotic legend for public consumption?

His rise can only mean an intensified campaign of secret-and dirty-warfare in the remote villages of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The public, the media and the Congress are entitled to know whether and how Gen. McChrystal will become transparent, accessible and accountable as he steps out of the shadows, or whether he will be committing America’s future to the night.

4) White House Czar Calls for End to ‘War on Drugs’
Kerlikowske Says Analogy Is Counterproductive; Shift Aligns With Administration Preference for Treatment Over Incarceration
Gary Fields, Wall Street Journal, May 14, 2009
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124225891527617397.html

The Obama administration’s new drug czar says he wants to banish the idea that the U.S. is fighting "a war on drugs," a move that would underscore a shift favoring treatment over incarceration in trying to reduce illicit drug use.

In his first interview since being confirmed to head the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, Gil Kerlikowske said Wednesday the bellicose analogy was a barrier to dealing with the nation’s drug issues. "Regardless of how you try to explain to people it’s a ‘war on drugs’ or a ‘war on a product,’ people see a war as a war on them," he said. "We’re not at war with people in this country."

Kerlikowske’s comments are a signal that the Obama administration is set to follow a more moderate - and likely more controversial - stance on the nation’s drug problems. Prior administrations talked about pushing treatment and reducing demand while continuing to focus primarily on a tough criminal-justice approach.

The Obama administration is likely to deal with drugs as a matter of public health rather than criminal justice alone, with treatment’s role growing relative to incarceration, Kerlikowske said.

5) Illinois Senate takes stand against Afghanistan war
Christopher Wills, Associated Press, May 12, 2009
http://www.sj-r.com/news/x362994697/State-Senate-takes-stand-against-Afghanistan-war

The Illinois Senate has jumped into the deep water of foreign policy by passing a resolution that criticizes President Barack Obama’s plan to step up military efforts in Afghanistan.

The resolution calls for the United States to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan rather than send more, as Obama plans to do. "The people of the United States have indicated that this war has gone on long enough," says the resolution, which passed last week. "The Senate believes that it is not in the national interest of the United States to deepen its military involvement in Afghanistan."

Iran
6) U.S., Allies Set October Target for Iran Progress
If Benchmarks on Nuclear Negotiations Aren’t Met, Sanctions Would Follow; Move Is Meant to Reassure Israel, Arab States
Jay Solomon, Wall Street Journal, May 14, 2009
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124225939853917439.html

The Obama administration and its European allies are setting a target of early October to determine whether engagement with Iran is making progress or should lead to sanctions, said senior officials briefed on the policy.

They also are developing specific benchmarks to gauge Iranian behavior. Those include whether Tehran is willing to let United Nations monitors make snap inspections of Iranian nuclear facilities that are now off-limits, and whether it will agree to a "freeze for freeze" - halting uranium enrichment in return for holding off on new economic sanctions - as a precursor to formal negotiations.

The moves are partly driven by concerns in Israel and among Washington’s Arab allies that Tehran could drag out negotiations indefinitely while advancing its nuclear program, the officials said.

President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have stressed that U.S. overtures toward Tehran won’t be open-ended. The administration is committed to testing Tehran’s willingness to cooperate on the nuclear issue and on related efforts to stabilize Afghanistan and Iraq.

Should diplomacy fail, the Obama administration has pledged to increase economic pressure. Mrs. Clinton recently testified that the U.S. will impose "crippling sanctions" on Iran if it doesn’t negotiate.

The U.S. Congress is debating legislation that would require the White House to sanction companies exporting refined petroleum products to Iran. Tehran imports roughly 40% of its gasoline despite having some of the largest energy supplies in the world.

The U.S. target date is aimed at the annual meeting of the U.N. General Assembly at the end of September, when international powers negotiating the nuclear issue with Iran are scheduled to meet on the sidelines.

U.S. officials say gaining Russian and Chinese support for sanctioning Iran through the United Nations is a key plank of their diplomacy. Moscow and Beijing criticized the Bush administration for not talking directly to Tehran. Now the U.S. wants a commitment on sanctions from these states if negotiations founder.
…
All Iran’s presidential candidates have said they will not abandon enriching uranium, but Tehran political insiders with knowledge of the talks say Iran could agree to a short-term "freeze for freeze" formula. Iran would then offer that Western powers can freely monitor Iran’s program to ensure it is not turning military - in return for sharing technology and expertise.

"The Americans will have to accept this offer, they have no choice," said Sadegh Kharazi, a former deputy foreign minister who remains involved in Iran’s foreign policy. "Iran will not back down. From now on, let’s all talk about how to form partnerships so it benefits both parties."

The benchmarks the U.S. and its allies are establishing also include signs Tehran will be willing to rein in its support for militant groups in the region. "The timeline and these benchmarks are flexible, but we have to see some receptiveness from Iran," said a U.S. official working on Iran policy.

The Obama administration has hesitated to lay out firm deadlines or outline proposed punishments should Iran fail to respond to the U.S. overtures.

Pakistan
7) Members of banned group help Pakistan war refugees
Riaz Khan, Associated Press, Thursday, May 14, 2009 12:41 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/14/AR2009051400349.html

Mardan, Pakistan - Members of a charity banned for its alleged links to the Mumbai terror attack have resurfaced in northwestern Pakistan under a new name, distributing food and medicine Thursday among thousands of refugees from the government’s bloody fight against the Taliban.

The makeover of Jamaat-ud-Dawa raises awkward questions for the embattled government, which has been trying hard to convince its skeptical Western sponsors that it is serious about taming Islamist extremism.

The offensive against Taliban insurgents in the Swat Valley area, the largest in months, has driven about 800,000 people from their homes, with 80,000 sweltering in camps south of the battle zone.

Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani told Parliament on Thursday that it was the largest internal displacement of Pakistanis since the country’s creation in 1947. "They are sacrificing for the future, and every Pakistani is ready to help them," he said of the refugees.

But he probably wasn’t reckoning on aid coming from radicals whom the government had supposedly taken out of action.

On Thursday, about 10 volunteers were manning a distribution point for relief goods and services in Mardan, the city serving as the hub of the international relief effort. Ostensibly, they belonged to Falah-i-Insaniat, a previously unheralded charitable foundation.

But the large white flag fluttering nearby featured a black sword along with the Islamic confession of faith - the distinctive logo of the banned Jamaat-ud-Dawa. The same logo was on the back of jackets worn by some of the volunteers.

"We have sent 2,000 of our members to help our brothers and sisters," Mian Adil, deputy chairman of Falah and a former member of Jamaat, told The Associated Press. "We are silently helping the homeless, hungry and needy people, and let us do our work without maligning us."

The U.S. and the U.N. say Jamaat-ud-Dawa is a front for Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant group accused of planning and carrying out last year’s attacks in India’s financial hub, Mumbai, which left 166 people dead and hundreds more wounded.

The government launched a crackdown on Jamaat soon after, arresting several of its leaders, seizing its assets and closing its branches. Jamaat denied it had links to Lashkar, which in turn denied involvement in the attacks.

The clampdown was welcomed by India and the United States, but analysts at the time said it was likely the group would reemerge under another name.
…
Government spokesman Ashfaq Gondal insisted neither Jamaat-ud-Dawa nor any reincarnation of the group was working in the refugee camps set up by the government and the U.N.. He said he didn’t know if they were active elsewhere. Gondal said authorities could not immediately move to shut down Falah-i-Insaniat, because it has not ben banned.

Lashkar was believed to have enjoyed close links with Pakistan’s intelligence agencies, which cultivated it as an ally in Kashmir, a disputed territory claimed by both India and Pakistan. New Delhi accuses it of scores of attacks in Kashmir and India proper.

But any move by the government to stop Falah would likely be unpopular, legally difficult and risk a backlash among Pakistanis. Jamaat helped tens of thousands of people following the deadly Kashmir earthquake in 2005 and a smaller quake in Baluchistan last year. It also ran networks of schools and clinics that have since been taken over by the government.

Israel/Palestine
8) Pope Criticizes Israel On Palestinian Policy
Pontiff Speaks Out in Occupied West Bank
Howard Schneider, Washington Post, Thursday, May 14, 2009
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/13/AR2009051300659.html

Bethlehem, West Bank - Pope Benedict XVI criticized Israel’s construction of a security barrier through the West Bank and urged a loosening of restrictions on the Gaza Strip on Wednesday, a day of speeches and symbolic appearances that amounted to a running critique of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians.

From a morning address alongside Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to a late-afternoon visit to a refugee camp, the pontiff used a full day in the occupied West Bank to highlight some of the main issues on the Palestinian agenda.

His comments were pointed. And although he referred to Israeli security concerns, the focus was on how Palestinians are affected by Israeli measures such as the tall concrete fence that, Benedict said, "intrudes into your territories, separating neighbors and dividing families."

"In a world where more and more borders are being opened up - to trade, to travel, to movement of peoples, to cultural exchanges - it is tragic to see walls still being erected," Benedict said at Bethlehem’s Aida refugee camp, where he spoke in a U.N. schoolyard with the wall and an Israeli military watchtower in the background.
…
The quest for peace "takes on a particular poignancy as you recall the events of May 1948 and the years of conflict, as yet unresolved, that followed from those events," Benedict said at the refugee camp, where he expressed "solidarity with all the homeless Palestinians who long to be able to return to their birthplace."

Whether Palestinian refugees have a right to return to land inside Israel is one of the core issues that separate the two sides. The return of refugees from Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere would, Israelis contend, overwhelm the Jewish state.

Benedict "did not say ‘naqba,’ but he mentioned 1948, and this was good enough," Bethlehem Mayor Victor Batarseh said. "These were all really very impressive texts. We were not expecting to hear from him what we heard."
…
Soha Daqmaq Musleh, a teacher at a Catholic school in nearby Beit Sahour, said she considered the papal Mass a special event in her life, but one that underlined her inability to travel to churches and Christian sites just minutes away in Jerusalem without Israeli permission. "My son asked me, ‘Is the pope going to make it so we can go to Jerusalem or Tel Aviv?’ " Musleh said. "I said we hope so."

Haiti
9) US implored to stop deporting Haitians
Protected status urged for battered country
Maria Sacchetti, Boston Globe, May 13, 2009
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2009/05/13/us_implored_to_stop_deporting_haitians/

Almost a year after Hurricane Hanna slammed into Haiti, the memory stops her cold. Gracieuse Marius, a nurse, had huddled inside until the floodwaters subsided in the city of Gonaives, then she raced into the streets to find someone to save. Instead, she was confronted with silence: Cars, trees, and dead animals floated in the water. She still cannot bring herself to talk about the children.

Overwhelmed, she left Haiti for the United States. Now she is adding her voice to a growing nationwide chorus urging the United States to stop deporting Haitian immigrants, at least until their nation can recover from four devastating hurricanes last year and years of political and economic turmoil.

Haiti is one of the least-developed countries in the hemisphere, and one of the poorest in the world, according to the US State Department. Six of Marius’s relatives are here illegally and facing deportation, among more than 32,000 illegal Haitian immigrants nationwide and 2,000 to 3,000 in Massachusetts.

"If they are sent back, some of them will die," the 46-year-old mother of two said in French Creole through a translator, after English class at the Association of Haitian Women in Boston. "When someone goes back and they don’t have any family and don’t have any money, what are they going to do?"

From Boston to Miami, Haitians and several prominent advocates are intensifying pressure on the US government.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy and Representatives Barney Frank and Stephen Lynch are urging the Department of Homeland Security to grant Haitians temporary protected status, and Lynch cosponsored a bill that would force Secretary Janet Napolitano to take the step if she does not act on her own. The status would allow Haitian immigrants, legal and illegal, to remain here and work for a fixed amount of time.

State Representative Marie St. Fleur, who was born in Haiti, visited that country this spring and then met with White House aides on the issue last month. In January, Haitian Ambassador Raymond Joseph took it even further, by stalling deportations to Haiti. He refused to provide deportees’ travel documents until the Obama administration reviews its policy on Haiti. "Anyone who requests a paper from us is not getting it," he said Friday.

Last month Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton visited Haiti and said the US government was reviewing its policy on granting Haitian immigrants temporary protected status.

But Napolitano, who has the granting authority, has stayed silent. Deportations halted last year after the hurricanes, but have resumed, including a plane filled with 48 convicted criminals who were deported to Haiti last month, said her spokesman Sean Smith.

Frank said Friday that the US policy is discriminatory. The government now provides temporary protection to five countries - El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Somalia, and Sudan - but it has never offered it to Haiti. "I think it’s outrageous that they don’t have it," Frank said.
…
But Haitians say their nation should qualify for temporary protection. It is beset by widespread unemployment and crime, and is still recovering from last year’s hurricanes, which left 800 dead, thousands homeless, and led to riots over food. Haitian officials are also worried that deportations will slash the $1.87 billion that Haitians in the United States sent home last year, more than a quarter of that nation’s income, according to the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington. And hurricane season starts June 1.

-
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.

[The Just Foreign Policy News is on break. It will resume May 13.]

Stopping Pakistan Drone Strikes Suddenly Plausible
Until this week, it seemed like the conventional wisdom in Washington was that stopping U.S drone strikes in Pakistan was outside the bounds of respectable discussion. That just changed. Or it should have. Counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen has told Congress that U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan are backfiring and should be stopped.
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/05/05

On Israeli Settlement Freeze, Public Has Obama’s Back
There have been hints in the press that the Obama Administration has been considering conditioning U.S. aid to Israel on a real freeze of Israeli settlement expansion in the West Bank. There’s been a conventional wisdom that this would touch a "third rail of politics." But a new poll from WorldPublicOpinion.org says three-quarters of Americans - including 64% of those who say they sympathize with Israel more than they do with the Palestinians - think Israel should stop building settlements in the West Bank. And the Obama Administration’s move to loosen restrictions on U.S. aid to facilitate the formation of a Palestinian national unity government is further evidence that the Obama Administration can indeed change U.S. policy toward Israel and the Palestinians.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/on-israeli-settlement-fre_b_194751.html

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Summary:
U.S./Top News
1) Counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen told Congress U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan are backfiring and should be stopped, reports Doyle McManus in the Los Angeles Times. Citing hundreds of Pakistani civilian deaths, Kilcullen said, "The current path that we are on is leading us to loss of Pakistani government control over its own population."

2) As Pakistani President Zardari’s domestic problems have grown, the Obama administration last month cut the frequency of the drone attacks, the Washington Post reports. Some senior U.S. officials think they have reached the point of diminishing returns and the administration is debating the rate at which they should continue.

3) The U.S. should return Guantanamo Bay to Cuba, argues Julia Sweig in the Washington Post. Whatever Guantanamo’s minor strategic value to the U.S., the costs of staying permanently - with the stain of the prisons, the base’s imperial legacy and the animosity of the host government - outweigh the benefits.

4) The Obama administration is reaching out more directly than before to Pakistani opposition leader Nawaz Sharif, the New York Times reports. Some Obama administration officials say his close ties to Islamists could be useful in helping Pakistan’s government confront the challenge of Taliban insurgents.

5) April was the deadliest month since September for U.S. forces in Iraq, AP reports.

6) The Obama administration is moving toward reviving the military commission system for prosecuting Guantánamo detainees, the New York Times reports. Anthony Romero of the ACLU said Obama had pledged to return the country to the rule of law and that "continuing with the military commission system would be a retreat from that promise."

Pakistan
7) The Pakistani elite’s lack of interest in educating poor children has left a void being filled by radical Islamists, the New York Times reports. In an analysis of the profiles of suicide bombers who have struck in Punjab, the Punjab police said more than two-thirds had attended Islamist schools. Only half of Pakistanis can read and write, far below the proportion in countries with similar per-capita income, like Vietnam. One in three school-age Pakistani children does not attend school, and of those who do, a third drop out by fifth grade, according to Unesco. Girls’ enrollment is among the lowest in the world, lagging behind Ethiopia and Yemen.

Afghanistan
8) With Afghan opposition forces divided, Hamid Karzai’s re-election as President looks increasingly likely, the Washington Post reports.

Israel/Palestine
9) Motorola is facing increasing pressure over its links to the Israeli occupation, writes Nadia Hijab for Agence Global. Facing a divestment threat, Motorola sold its department making bomb fuses shortly after Human Rights Watch found shrapnel with Motorola serial numbers at civilian sites bombed by Israel in Gaza.

Panama
10) Conservative supermarket magnate Ricardo Martinelli coasted to victory in Panama’s presidential election Sunday, the Los Angeles Times reports. Martinelli promised to make radical improvements in education.

Bolivia
11) Former President Carter and Bolivia’s President Morales said they hope their countries are on the road to repairing badly strained relations, AP reports. Carter confirmed that the Carter Center will monitor Dec. 6 elections in which Morales is seeking re-election.

Contents:
U.S./Top News
1) U.S. Drone Attacks In Pakistan ‘Backfiring,’ Congress Told
Predator missile strikes aimed at Al Qaeda often go astray, enraging the people and threatening the Islamabad government, top military advisor testifies.
Doyle McManus, Los Angeles Times, May 3, 2009
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-mcmanus3-2009may03,0,7133284.column

David Kilcullen is no soft-headed peacenik. He’s a beefy, 41-year-old former Australian army officer who served in Iraq as a top advisor to U.S. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus. He’s one of the counter-insurgency warrior/theorists who designed Petraeus’ successful "surge" of troops into the streets of Baghdad.

But a few days ago, when a congressman asked Kilcullen what the U.S. government should do in Pakistan, the Australian guerrilla fighter sounded like an antiwar protester. "We need to call off the drones," Kilcullen said.

In the arid valleys of western Pakistan, the United States is fighting a strange, long-distance war against Al Qaeda, the Taliban and their Pakistani allies. Unmanned "drone" airplanes take off from secret runways, seek out suspected terrorists and, with CIA employees at the remote controls, fire missiles to blow them up.

Officially, this is a covert program, and the CIA won’t acknowledge that it’s going on at all. Unofficially, intelligence officials say the Predator strikes are the most effective weapon they have against Al Qaeda.

President Obama has embraced an escalation in the raids that was approved by his predecessor, George W. Bush, last summer. The CIA has carried out at least 16 Predator strikes in Pakistan in the first four months of this year, compared with 36 strikes in all of 2008. The missile strikes have killed about 161 people since Obama’s inauguration, according to news reports from Pakistan; there’s no way of knowing how many of those were civilians.

Only one problem: Kilcullen says the missile strikes are backfiring.

Kilcullen’s objection to the U.S. strategy isn’t moral (he doesn’t mind killing "bad guys") or legal (most legal scholars consider "targeted killing" acceptable under the law of war because Al Qaeda and the Taliban are at war with the United States). Kilcullen’s objection is practical. He says the strikes are creating more enemies than they eliminate.

"I realize that they do damage to the Al Qaeda leadership," he told the House Armed Services Committee. But that, he said, was not enough to justify the program. "Since 2006, we’ve killed 14 senior Al Qaeda leaders using drone strikes; in the same time period, we’ve killed 700 Pakistani civilians in the same area. The drone strikes are highly unpopular. They are deeply aggravating to the population. And they’ve given rise to a feeling of anger that coalesces the population around the extremists and leads to spikes of extremism. … The current path that we are on is leading us to loss of Pakistani government control over its own population."

Another problem, Kilcullen says, is that "using robots from the air … looks both cowardly and weak."

In the Pashtun tribal culture of honor and revenge, face-to-face combat is seen as brave; shooting people with missiles from 20,000 feet is not.
…
One legal scholar, Kenneth Anderson of American University, says there’s another connection between the two issues: The controversy over how to detain, interrogate and try suspected terrorists has made it simpler just to shoot them. "The most powerful institutional incentive today is to kill rather than capture them," he wrote recently. From a legal perspective, he suggested, warfare is easier than "lawfare."

The problem in western Pakistan is that two U.S. interests are in conflict. We want to kill the leaders of Al Qaeda, but we also want to strengthen the government of Pakistan, which is under serious pressure from Islamist insurgents. At the moment, as Kilcullen points out, we are doing the first at the expense of the second.

The drone strikes play into the hands of insurgents, who cite them to stir up anti-Western and anti-government sentiment. And, according to some reports, the missile strikes have driven Al Qaeda and Taliban forces deeper into Pakistan.

2) U.S. Options in Pakistan Limited
Nation Rife With Security Issues, Infighting, Anti-American Sentiment
Karen DeYoung, Washington Post, Monday, May 4, 2009
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/03/AR2009050302212.html
…
But despite the threat the intelligence conveyed, Obama has only limited options for dealing with it. Anti-American feeling in Pakistan is high, and a U.S. combat presence is prohibited. The United States is fighting Pakistan-based extremists by proxy, through an army over which it has little control, in alliance with a government in which it has little confidence.

The tools most readily at hand are money, weapons, and a mentoring relationship with Pakistan’s government and military that alternates between earnest advice and anxious criticism. As criticism has dominated in recent weeks - along with reports that the administration is wooing Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari’s principal political opponent, former prime minister Nawaz Sharif - the partnership has grown strained. "What are the Americans trying to do, micromanage our politics?" a senior Pakistani official said testily. "This is not South Vietnam."
…
In deference to Pakistani objections, the administration has not initiated covert ground attacks, approved by the Bush administration last year, in mountain villages farther to the north, in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, where it believes high-value al-Qaeda figures are located. But Obama authorized stepped-up attacks on the area by missiles launched from unmanned drone aircraft.

Although the missile attacks are privately approved by the Pakistani government, despite its public denunciations, they are highly unpopular among the public. As Zardari’s domestic problems have grown, the Obama administration last month cut the frequency of the attacks. Some senior U.S. officials think they have reached the point of diminishing returns and the administration is debating the rate at which they should continue.

3) Don’t Just Close Gitmo. Give It Back.
Julia E. Sweig, Washington Post, Sunday, May 3, 2009
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/29/AR2009042903940.html

President Obama has promised to shut down the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, seeking to erase a blot on America’s global image. He has also reached out to Cuba, easing some travel and financial restrictions in an effort to recast Washington’s approach to the island. These two initiatives have proceeded on separate tracks so far, but now is the time to bring them together. Hiding in plain sight, the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay is the ideal place for Obama to launch a far-reaching transformation of Washington’s relationship with its communist neighbor.

How? By preparing to give Guantanamo back to Cuba.

It’s not as impossible as it sounds. The United States has scaled back, modified or even withdrawn its military presence elsewhere; think Okinawa, South Korea, Subic Bay in the Philippines or Vieques in Puerto Rico. Whatever Guantanamo’s minor strategic value to the United States for processing refugees or as a counter-narcotics outpost, the costs of staying permanently - with the stain of the prisons, the base’s imperial legacy and the animosity of the host government - outweigh the benefits.

The time to begin this transition is now. By transforming Guantanamo as part of a broader remaking of Washington’s relationship with Cuba, the Obama administration can begin fixing what the president himself has decried as a "failed" policy. It can upend a U.S.-Cuba stalemate that has barely budged for 50 years and can put to the test Raul Castro’s stated willingness to entertain meaningful changes.
…
After the United States intervened in the Spanish-American War in 1898, Washington forced Cuba to accept the creation of a naval coaling station at Guantanamo Bay in 1903 as a condition of independence. During several peak years of activity and construction in the 1940s, at least 9,000 Cuban civilians worked on the base, and small cities such as Caimanera and Boqueron catered to foreign soldiers with bars, brothels and the like. During the revolution, Cubans smuggled all sorts of supplies off the base to aid the rebel cause. Even after 1959, as the new Castro regime sharpened its attacks on symbols of American power, working on the base did not necessarily preclude being a good revolutionary. To this day, the United States provides pension benefits and health care to a handful of retired Cuban workers, some of whom still live on the base.

Since the Bay of Pigs invasion more than four decades ago, Havana has demanded the return of the base territory, but Washington has found little incentive to leave. The base is a financial freebie; the annual rent is only $4,000, although on grounds of pride and principle, Cuba has not cashed the check since 1959.
…
The two nations could expand their monthly gate talks beyond the issue of perimeter security to include drug trafficking, human smuggling, refugee processing and disaster preparedness and relief. Such confidence-building talks could lead to deeper cooperation, even on human rights and political prisoners.
…
Finally, the Navy could invite public-health professionals from Cuba, the United States and other countries in the region to the base to develop strategies for cooperation. Proposals to convert the base to a public health research and treatment center date back to the Kennedy White House and have been viewed favorably by Havana ever since, especially in light of Cuba’s world-class expertise in infectious and tropical diseases.

These initiatives defy the argument that the United States should cling to the base - and the embargo, for that matter - as leverage to push Cuba toward democracy. The past 50 years have proven the fallacy of that logic. Returning Guantanamo Bay to full Cuban sovereignty and control is a win for the United States: Aside from the boon to America’s credibility with the Cuban people and throughout Latin America, these first steps would probe the Cuban government’s apparent disposition to use the base as a point of contact with the United States - and gauge the regime’s willingness to move the ball forward even more.

4) In Pakistan, U.S. Courts Leader Of Opposition
Helene Cooper and Mark Mazzetti, New York Times, May 2, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/02/world/asia/02policy.html

As American confidence in the Pakistani government wanes, the Obama administration is reaching out more directly than before to Nawaz Sharif, the chief rival of Asif Ali Zardari, the Pakistani president, administration officials said Friday.

American officials have long held Sharif at arm’s length because of his close ties to Islamists in Pakistan, but some Obama administration officials now say those ties could be useful in helping Zardari’s government to confront the stiffening challenge by Taliban insurgents.

The move reflects the heightened concern in the Obama administration about the survivability of the Zardari government. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the head of the United States Central Command, has said in private meetings in Washington that Pakistan’s government is increasingly vulnerable, according to administration officials.

General Petraeus is among those expected to attend an all-day meeting on Saturday with senior administration officials to discuss the next steps in Afghanistan and Pakistan, in advance of high-level sessions next week in Washington, when Zardari and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan will meet with President Obama at the White House.

Washington has a bad history of trying to engineer domestic Pakistani politics, and no one in the administration is trying to broker an actual power-sharing agreement between Zardari and Sharif, administration officials say. But they say that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Richard C. Holbrooke, the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, have both urged Zardari and Sharif to look for ways to work together, seeking to capitalize on Sharif’s appeal among the country’s Islamist groups.

5) U.S. April Deaths Most In 7 Months
Kim Gamel, Associated Press, Friday, May 1, 2009 9:43 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/01/AR2009050101082.html

The U.S. death toll for April rose to 18, the military said Friday, making it the deadliest in seven months for American forces in Iraq. The sharp increase from the previous month came as a series of bombings also pushed Iraqi deaths to their highest level this year.
…
Two U.S. Marines and one sailor were killed Thursday while conducting combat operations in Anbar province, according to a statement. Anbar is a former insurgent stronghold west of Baghdad that has been relatively calm since Sunni tribal leaders turned against al-Qaida in Iraq.
…
The attack raised to at least 18 the number of American troops deaths in April, double the nine killed in March, which was the lowest since the war began in March 2003. That made April the deadliest month for U.S. forces since September, when 25 American troops died.

April also saw the most troops killed in combat so far this year, as opposed to other causes. Thirteen of last month’s 18 deaths were in combat compared with four among the nine in March. In all, at least 4,281 members of the U.S. military have died in the Iraq war since it began, according to an Associated Press count.

6) U.S. May Revive Guantanamo Military Courts
William Glaberson, New York Times, May 2, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/02/us/politics/02gitmo.html

The Obama administration is moving toward reviving the military commission system for prosecuting Guantánamo detainees, which was a target of critics during the Bush administration, including Obama himself.

Officials said the first public moves could come as soon as next week, perhaps in filings to military judges at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, outlining an administration plan to amend the Bush administration’s system to provide more legal protections for terrorism suspects.
…
Human rights groups said Friday that using any form of military commission would be seen as permitting shortcuts that would not be available in existing American courts.

Anthony D. Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said that Obama had pledged to return the country to the rule of law and that "continuing with the military commission system would be a retreat from that promise."

Gabor Rona, the international legal director of Human Rights First, said military commissions would only be necessary if the administration wanted to assure convictions that might not otherwise be certain. "The administration is making a huge mistake," Rona said, "if they believe getting convictions through suspect methods is more valuable than letting justice take its course."

Pakistan
7) Pakistan’s Islamic Schools Fill Void, But Fuel Militancy
Sabrina Tavernise, New York Times, May 4, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/04/world/asia/04schools.html

Mohri Pur, Pakistan - The elementary school in this poor village is easy to mistake for a barn. It has a dirt floor and no lights, and crows swoop through its glassless windows. Class size recently hit 140, spilling students into the courtyard.

But if the state has forgotten the children here, the mullahs have not. With public education in a shambles, Pakistan’s poorest families have turned to madrasas, or Islamic schools, that feed and house the children while pushing a more militant brand of Islam than was traditional here.

The concentration of madrasas here in southern Punjab has become an urgent concern in the face of Pakistan’s expanding insurgency. The schools offer almost no instruction beyond the memorizing of the Koran, creating a widening pool of young minds that are sympathetic to militancy.

In an analysis of the profiles of suicide bombers who have struck in Punjab, the Punjab police said more than two-thirds had attended madrasas. "We are at the beginning of a great storm that is about to sweep the country," said Ibn Abduh Rehman, who directs the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, an independent organization. "It’s red alert for Pakistan."

President Obama said in a news conference last week that he was "gravely concerned" about the situation in Pakistan, not least because the government did not "seem to have the capacity to deliver basic services: schools, health care, rule of law, a judicial system that works for the majority of the people."

He has asked Congress to more than triple assistance to Pakistan for nonmilitary purposes, including education. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the United States has given Pakistan a total of $680 million in nonmilitary aid, according to the State Department, far lower than the $1 billion a year for the military.

But education has never been a priority here, and even Pakistan’s current plan to double education spending next year might collapse as have past efforts, which were thwarted by sluggish bureaucracies, unstable governments and a lack of commitment by Pakistan’s governing elite to the poor.
…
But even today, only about half of Pakistanis can read and write, far below the proportion in countries with similar per-capita income, like Vietnam. One in three school-age Pakistani children does not attend school, and of those who do, a third drop out by fifth grade, according to Unesco. Girls’ enrollment is among the lowest in the world, lagging behind Ethiopia and Yemen.
…
Though madrasas make up only about 7 percent of primary schools in Pakistan, their influence is amplified by the inadequacy of public education and the innate religiosity of the countryside, where two-thirds of people live.

The public elementary school for boys in this village is the very picture of the generations of neglect that have left many poor Pakistanis feeling abandoned by their government.

Shaukat Ali, 40, a tall man with an earnest manner who teaches fifth grade, said he had asked everyone for help with financing, including government officials and army officers. A television channel even did a report. "The result," he said, "was zero."

A government official responsible for monitoring schools in the area, Muhamed Aijaz Anjum, said he was familiar with the school’s plight. But he has no car or office, and his annual travel allowance is less than $200; he said he was helpless to do anything about it.
…
The Islamic schools are also seen as employment opportunities. "When someone doesn’t see a way ahead for himself, he builds a mosque and sits in it," said Jan Sher, whose village in southwestern Punjab, Shadan Lund, has become a militant stronghold, with madrasas now outnumbering public schools. Poverty has also helped expand enrollment in madrasas, which serve as a safety net by housing and feeding poor children.

"How can someone who earns 200 rupees a day afford expenses for five children?" asked Hafeezur Rehman, a caretaker in the Jamia Sadiqqia Taleemul Koran madrasa in Multan, the main city in south Punjab. The school houses and feeds 73 boys from poor villages.
…
Shahbaz Sharif, the chief minister of Punjab, says he is acutely aware of the problem and is trying a different approach, recently setting aside $75 million to build free model schools in 80 locations close to large madrasas, a tactic General Qazi had also proposed.

Afghanistan
8) Karzai’s Would-Be Competition In Disarray
As Afghan President Heads to Washington, No Challengers Emerge for Election
Pamela Constable, Washington Post, Sunday, May 3, 2009
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/02/AR2009050201698.html

Kabul - With less than a week left before candidates must register for Afghanistan’s presidential election, opposition forces remain so divided and appear so confused that the incumbent, Hamid Karzai, is looking more and more like a winner as he heads to Washington for a summit with President Obama and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari on Wednesday and Thursday.

Although more than 60 people have formally expressed interest in the August presidential race, not a single candidate has registered with the Independent Election Commission.

Instead, an array of political strongmen and presidential hopefuls has spent the past week in backroom negotiations with onetime adversaries, either making last-minute attempts to form winning opposition tickets or bartering their presumed vote-getting influence for posts in a future Karzai administration.

"We tried to put together a team with a national agenda, but so far we have failed. As a result, Karzai is growing stronger by the hour," said Ali Jalali, a former interior minister and one of the still-undecided candidates. "The problem is ego. Everyone thinks he has the best chance of winning, so no one is willing to compromise."

Karzai is the unpopular president of a weak government besieged by a brutal Islamist insurgency, but the political disarray appears to leave him in a position to easily win reelection.

Yet if he wins essentially by default, analysts said, Karzai would need to rebuild the confidence of many Afghans who have become increasingly disappointed with his performance over the past seven years.
…
Despite dwindling public support, Karzai’s chances for reelection were bolstered in March when the polling date was postponed and the elections commission ruled that he could remain in office after his term expires later this month, thus allowing him to run as a sitting president. In recent days, he has been further strengthened by the collapse of a major opposition alliance and the erratic or opaque behavior of several of his rivals.

Gul Agha Sherzai, a popular governor from Karzai’s home province and ethnic group, had been widely expected to announce his candidacy this week and had been meeting with other politicians about forming a ticket. But on Saturday, Sherzai announced at a news conference that he was dropping out of the race. He said he made the decision after visiting with Karzai and his family.

Israel/Palestine
9) The Israel Boycott is Biting
Nadia Hijab, Agence Global, 30 Apr 2009
http://www.agenceglobal.com/Article.asp?Id=1986

On May 4, protesters will greet Motorola shareholders, already disgruntled by the company’s losses, as they arrive for their annual meeting at the Rosemont Theater in Chicago, Illinois.

The protest, organized by the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation, is part of a drive to "Hang Up On Motorola" until it ends sales of communications and other products that support Israel’s military occupation of Palestinian land.

Inside the meeting, the Presbyterian, United Methodist and other churches will urge shareholders to support their resolution, which calls for corporate standards grounded in international law. Doing the right thing could also reduce the risk of "consumer boycotts, divestment campaigns and lawsuits."

Although Motorola executives deny it, such risks must have played a part in their decision to sell the department making bomb fuses shortly after Human Rights Watch teams found shrapnel with Motorola serial numbers at some of the civilian sites bombed by Israel in its December-January assault on Gaza.

Panama
10) Ricardo Martinelli wins Panama presidential election
The conservative supermarket magnate has an insurmountable lead in the race for the presidency, officials say.
Chris Kraul, Los Angeles Times, May 4, 2009
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-panama-election4-2009may04,0,4623371.story

Bogota - Conservative supermarket magnate Ricardo Martinelli coasted to victory in Panama’s presidential election Sunday, bucking the Latin American trend of recent years that has seen leftists take power.

Panama’s electoral tribunal declared Martinelli the victor after counting 43% of the vote Sunday evening, saying he had an insurmountable lead: 61% to 36% over Balbina Herrera, a former housing minister and ruling party candidate. Herrera’s campaign suffered from a worsening economy, rising crime and disenchantment with President Martin Torrijos. "Starting on July 1, a change is coming to Panama," Martinelli told supporters at his campaign headquarters in Panama City.

Promising to make radical improvements in education, transportation and public security, he appealed for unity. "We will govern with the best in Panama," he said.

Although Democratic Change party candidate Martinelli is a conservative who attended the U.S. Republican National Convention in Minnesota last summer as an observer, his campaign borrowed a page from Barack Obama’s playbook. He promised to redirect Panama’s government and used slogans saying he was the agent of "real change."
…
Both Martinelli, 57, and Herrera, 54, supported Panama’s proposed free trade agreement with the United States, which was negotiated during the Bush administration but is stalled in the U.S. Congress.

Bolivia
11) Morales, Carter eye improved Bolivia-US ties
Juan Karita, AP, Sunday, May 3, 2009
President Carter met with Bolivian leader Evo Morales on Saturday.
Paola Flores, Associated Press, May 3, 2009
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/politics/2009164389_carter03.html

La Paz, Bolivia - Former President Carter and Bolivia’s Evo Morales said Saturday they hope their countries are on the road to repairing badly strained relations.

After meeting for more than two hours in the Bolivian capital, Carter told Morales he does not doubt President Obama’s stated intention that he wants to improve ties.

The Bolivian leader responded that he has "great interest in bettering relations with the new U.S. government."

Washington and La Paz have been without top-level representation in each other’s capitals since September, when Morales accused the U.S. ambassador of inciting the political opposition and kicked him out of the country.

The government of President Bush responded in kind, and Morales later expelled the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration from Bolivia.

Morales and others in his government have spoken of their desire to improve relations under an Obama administration, but in March Morales threw out the U.S. Embassy’s second secretary - accusing him, too, of conspiring with the opposition.

Carter expressed interest Saturday in having the Peace Corps return to the poor South American nation soon, saying he would submit a report to the White House and the State Department. Corps volunteers were pulled from Bolivia last September.

Morales invited Carter to visit the coca-growing region of Chapare to pick the leaf - which is the key ingredient in cocaine but also has many legal, traditional uses in Andean nations.

Noting that Morales has been to his own property to harvest peanuts, Carter said he hoped to make such a trip on his next visit to Bolivia.

The former president also confirmed that his nonprofit group the Carter Center will monitor Dec. 6 elections in which Morales is seeking re-election.

-
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.