Antiwar.com Blog

Australian voters kicked Prime Minister John Howard out of office yesterday.  Howard was even more of a groveler to Bush than Tony Blair. 

One step Bush took to try to help Howard win reelection was to release Australian David Hicks from Guantanamo earlier this year.  As part of the deal for his release, Hicks had to promise to keep his mouth shut about how he was tortured until after the Australian election – and to sign a statement swearing he was not abused while at Gitmo.  The  release deal stunk to high heaven, but it was typical of the candor & ethics of the Global War on Terror.

Here’s the segment on Hicks’s case from a story I wrote in July for the American Conservative:

The torture of David Hicks, an Australian seized in Afghanistan and sent to Gitmo in early 2002, became an international cause célèbre. Hicks, who joined the Kosovo Liberation Army, a terrorist organization supported by the U.S. government, before fighting alongside the Taliban, was sexually assaulted, beaten with a rifle butt, kept in isolation in the dark for 244 days, prohibited from sleeping for long periods, threatened with firearms during interrogations, and psychologically tormented.

He was one of the first people tried by the Gitmo military tribunals. Though former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once called him one of the most dangerous terrorists in the world, after Hicks agreed to plead guilty to material support of terrorism, he was sentenced to nine months confinement—a typical sentence for a misdemeanor in most states. As part of his plea agreement, Hicks was obliged to declare that he “had never been illegally treated by any person or persons while in the custody and control of the United States” and to swear that his guilty plea was made voluntarily, despite all the beatings he had received.

[audio:http://wiredispatch.com/scott/07_11_21_levy.mp3]

Former Israeli diplomat Daniel Levy, now at the New America Foundation, discusses the upcoming Annapolis peace conference, the letter from the American establishment to Bush and Rice urging them to make real progress toward a two-state solution, the negative consequences of current American policy, the failure of the “roadmap to peace,” the lack of a real strategic purpose behind the occupation of the West Bank and Golan Heights, U.S. intervention to the detriment of an Israeli/Syrian peace deal, the blown opportunity to work with Hamas and the consequences, the effect of the neocons’ “Clean Break” doctrine on current policy, the contemptible myth that the origin of America and Israel’s problems in the Middle East are rooted in radical Islam rather than real grievances about circumstances here on earth and his belief that the U.S. should remain involved, but should start getting it right.

MP3 here. (33:30)

Daniel Levy is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Middle East Policy Initiative of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. He was the lead Israeli drafter of the Geneva Initiative and directed policy planning and international efforts at the Geneva Campaign Headquarters in Tel Aviv. Previously, Mr. Levy served as senior policy adviser to former Israeli Minister of Justice, Yossi Beilin, and under the Barak government he worked in the prime minister’s office as a special adviser and head of the Jerusalem Affairs unit. He was a member of the Israeli delegation to the Taba negotiations with the Palestinians in January 2001, and of the negotiating team for the “Oslo B” Agreement from May to September 1995, under Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

As a Senior Fellow and Director of the Middle East Policy Initiative at the New America Foundation, Mr. Levy seeks to encourage thought-provoking debate and offer strategic solutions for resolving the long-running conflicts in the Middle East, core among them the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He has published extensively in a broad range of publications including Ha’aretz, The Jerusalem Post, The Boston Globe, United Press International, The American Prospect, the International Herald Tribune, The Evening Standard (London), and the blog TPMCafe.

[audio:http://wiredispatch.com/charles/aw111607ericmargolis.mp3]

Eric Margolis, foreign correspondent for Sun National Media in Canada, discusses the turmoil in Pakistan, the Pakistani population’s growing hatred for the United States for propping up their dictatorship and growing belief that the U.S. is waging a war on Islam itself, Musharraf’s relationship with the Pakistani Army, Benazir Bhutto’s People’s Party, the possibility of a power-sharing arrangement, their conflict with India over Kashmir, American backing of various terrorists against Iran and the catastrophe that is Iraq.

MP3 here. (20:56)

Award winning author, columnist, and broadcaster Eric S. Margolis has covered 14 wars and is a leading authority on military affairs, the Middle East, South Asia, and Islamic movements. He is the author of War at the Top of the World. See his website.

[audio:http://wiredispatch.com/scott/07_11_20_porter.mp3]

Gareth Porter discusses the Israeli attack on Syria and how its purpose was to intimidate Iran and frame North Korea, John Bolton’s blustering, the failure of the U.S.’s abduction of Iranians in Iraq policy to provide any evidence of their involvement in the killing of Americans there, and Iran’s recent offer to move their uranium enrichment to Switzerland.

MP3 here. (13:38)

Dr. Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist on U.S. national security policy who has been independent since a brief period of university teaching in the 1980s. Dr. Porter is the author of four books, the latest of which is Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (University of California Press, 2005). He has written regularly for Inter Press Service on U.S. policy toward Iraq and Iran since 2005.

Dr. Porter was both a Vietnam specialist and an anti-war activist during the Vietnam War and was Co-Director of Indochina Resource Center in Washington. Dr. Porter taught international studies at City College of New York and American University. He was the first Academic Director for Peace and Conflict Resolution in the Washington Semester program at American University.

Peter Hitchens files a fascinating report from North Korea, where the regime’s pursuit of security at all costs keeps the public in constant darkness, literally and figuratively:

The main feeling the visitor has in Pyongyang is one of pity at the pathos of the place—its hopeless, helpless overestimate of its own power and importance, the deluded ignorance of millions of people carefully protected from any inrush of truth about themselves, their country, and their rulers. Every radio and TV set has been carefully neutered, its tuning dial soldered so that it can receive only the transmissions of the North Korean state. There is no access to the Internet except for a tiny, select few. Cell phones are confiscated from visitors upon arrival, though the very senior elite are believed to possess and use them. The newspapers are comically constipated accounts of speeches by the Dear Leader, long-ago angling contests, and uninteresting visits by junior dignitaries from countries ruled by dubious governments, which you would struggle to find on a map.

Read the rest.

[audio:http://wiredispatch.com/scott/07_11_19_glantz.mp3]

Aaron Glantz, host of KPFA’s “The War Comes Home” series and author of How America Lost Iraq, discusses the recent ruling in favor of Lt. Ehren Watada, the and the homelessness, suicides, PTSD and other problems faced by soldiers and marines returning from the war and the government’s total negligence in their care.

MP3 here. (34:16)

Aaron Glantz has visited Iraq three times during the U.S. occupation: for a month immediately after the fall of Saddam Hussein; from February to May 2004; and during the elections in January of 2005. His work from Iraq has also been syndicated to newspapers around the world by Inter Press News Service.

He is author of the San Francisco Chronicle best-selling book How America Lost Iraq (Penguin/2005), which describes how the war turned to disaster from the perspective of the Iraqi people.

Aaron is a founding producer of Pacifica Radio’s national newscast, Free Speech Radio News In the course of his work he has also reported from Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, South Korea, Indonesia, India, Vietnam, France, and Denmark and their new project WarComesHome.org.

Before becoming an international reporter, Aaron served as California State Capitol reporter for Pacifica’s flag-ship station, KPFA, in Berkeley CA, where he won the California Journalism Award for radio in 2000.

He maintains his own website at AaronGlantz.com.