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U.S. combat operations in Iraq were supposed to end by August 31, 2010,, signaling the beginning of the military’s accelerated withdrawal from the country after more than seven years of war Since taking office President Obama has promised, repeatedly, that America’s bloody occupation would finally, truly end by the close of 2011. But, maybe it

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Gitmo jurors believe US hasn’t used torture to extract confessions: report President Barack Obama has said repeatedly that he wants to see the Guantanamo prison camp shut down. But holding that opinion is apparently enough to disqualify you from jury duty at the Gitmo military tribunals. A US Army lieutenant colonel who told the military

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US President Barack Obama’s revamped military commissions start work Monday at the US naval base in Guantanamo, Cuba, focusing on the cases of two men facing terrorism charges. One has pleaded guilty and the other was 15 at the time of his arrest. Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al-Qosi, 50, pleaded guilty last month to conspiring to provide material support to terrorism. The former bodyguard of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden will appear before a commission on Monday to hear his sentence. A spokesman for the prosecution, David Iglesias, refused to tell reporters if Qosi’s sentence will be made public or remain confidential. Asked if convicted Guantanamo prisoners would be kept at the prison even after their sentences had run out, as happened under former US president George W. Bush, Iglesias said he was “not aware of any controlling direction from Washington, DC, on that.” Story continues below… Also Monday, in a second courtroom at the naval base, Omar Khadr, a Canadian captured at age 15 by US troops in Afghanistan and the last Westerner at the naval base, will appear at the last preliminary hearing before his trial, due to start on Tuesday. The trial will begin with the selection of a 15-member jury, at least five of whom will be military officers. Khadr, now 23, is accused of throwing a grenade in 2002 that killed a US soldier. He also is alleged to have been trained by Al-Qaeda and joined a network organized by Osama bin Laden to make bombs. “It’s very clear that the government of the US and the government of Canada have decided not to intervene in this case and therefore we are going to see the first case of a child soldier in modern history,” said his military lawyer Jon Jackson. “When President Obama was elected, I believed that we were going to close the book on Guantanamo and the military commissions. And instead President Obama has decided to write the next sad, pathetic chapter in the book of the military commissions,” he added. “Forever, Obama’s military commission will be remembered as the trial of a child soldier,” Jackson said. Iglesias had a different view on Khadr’s case. “There is no legal prohibition in the US to try underage” people, he said, adding that the prosecution would have no trouble asking that he be put away for life if he is found guilty of the charges. In Canada, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government has not requested the return of Khadr, preferring to allow the US trial to run its course. Khadr has so far refused a plea deal. In a letter to his Canadian lawyer, Dennis Edney, published in newspapers in Canada and the United States, Khadr said the trial may show the world how unfair the process is. “The world doesn’t get it, so it might work if the world sees the US sentencing a child to life in prison, it might show the world how unfair and sham this process is,” he said. Since 2001, four men have been convicted of terrorism-related charges in Guantanamo military trials, two of whom pleaded guilty, while US federal courts have sentenced some 200 extremists over the same period. The first, so-called “Australian Taliban” David Hicks, pleaded guilty in May 2007 to material support for terrorism in exchange for a reduced sentence of nine months in prison to be served in his native Australia. On Friday, the US Supreme Court declined to block Khadr’s prosecution at Guantanamo. Jackson had sought the injunction in order to force a lower court to examine the constitutionality of the military tribunal set to try the Canadian.

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AP Exclusive: To keep program secret, CIA whisked 9/11 figures from Gitmo before court ruling. Four of the nation’s most highly valued terrorist prisoners were secretly moved to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in 2003, years earlier than has been disclosed, then whisked back into overseas prisons before the Supreme Court could give them access to lawyers, The Associated Press has learned. The transfer allowed the U.S. to interrogate the detainees in CIA “black sites” for two more years without allowing them to speak with attorneys or human rights observers or challenge their detention in U.S. courts. Had they remained at the Guantanamo Bay prison for just three more months, they would have been afforded those rights. “This was all just a shell game to hide detainees from the courts,” said Jonathan Hafetz, a Seton Hall University law professor who has represented several detainees. Removing them from Guantanamo Bay underscores how worried President George W. Bush’s administration was that the Supreme Court might lift the veil of secrecy on the detention program. It also shows how insistent the Bush administration was that terrorists must be held outside the U.S. court system. Story continues below… Years later, the program’s legacy continues to complicate President Barack Obama’s efforts to prosecute the terrorists behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The arrival and speedy departure from Guantanamo were pieced together by the AP using flight records and interviews with current and former U.S. officials and others familiar with the CIA’s detention program. All spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the program. Top officials at the White House, Justice Department, Pentagon and CIA consulted on the prisoner transfer, which was so secretive that even many people close to the CIA detention program were kept in the dark. CIA spokesman George Little said: “The so-called black sites and enhanced interrogation methods, which were administered on the basis of guidance from the Department of Justice, are a thing of the past.” Before dawn on Sept. 24, 2003, a white, unmarked Boeing 737 landed at Guantanamo Bay. At least four al-Qaida operatives, some of the CIA’s biggest captures to date, were aboard: Abu Zubaydah, Abd al-Nashiri, Ramzi Binalshibh and Mustafa al-Hawsawi. Binalshibh and al-Hawsawi helped plan the 9/11 attacks. Al-Nashiri was the mastermind of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole. Zubaydah was an al-Qaida travel facilitator. The admitted terrorists had spent months overseas enduring some of the harshest interrogation tactics in U.S. history. By late summer 2003, the CIA believed the men had revealed their best secrets. The agency needed somewhere to hold them, but no longer needed to conduct prolonged interrogations. The U.S. naval facility at Guantanamo Bay seemed a good fit. Bush had selected the first six people to face military tribunals there, and a federal appeals court unanimously ruled that detainees could not use U.S. courts to challenge their imprisonment. And the CIA had just constructed a new facility, which would become known as Strawberry Fields, separate from the main prison at Guantanamo Bay. The agency’s overseas prison network, meanwhile, was in flux. A jail in Thailand known as Cat’s Eye closed in December 2002, and in the fall of 2003 the CIA was preparing to shutter its facility in Poland and open a new one in Romania. Human rights investigators and journalists were asking questions. The CIA needed to reshuffle its prisoners. The prisoner transfer flight, outlined in documents and interviews, visited five CIA prisons in Afghanistan, Poland, Romania, Morocco and Guantanamo Bay. The flight plan was so poorly thought out, some in the CIA derisively compared it to a five-card straight revealing the program to outsiders: Five stops, five secret facilities, all documented. The flight logs were compiled by European authorities investigating the CIA program. The flight started in Kabul, where the CIA picked up al-Hawsawi at the secret prison known as the Salt Pit. The Boeing 737 then flew to Szymany, Poland, where a CIA team picked up 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and took him to Bucharest, Romania, to the new prison, code-named Britelite. Next it was on to Rabat, Morocco, where the Moroccans ran an interrogation facility used by the CIA. At 8:10 p.m. on Sept. 23, 2003, the Boeing 737 took off from a runway in Rabat. On board were al-Hawsawi, al-Nashiri, Zubaydah and Binalshibh. At 1 a.m. the following day, the plane touched down at Guantanamo. Unlike the overseas black sites, there was no waterboarding or other harsh interrogation tactics at Strawberry Fields, officials said. It was a holding facility, a place for some of the key figures in the 9/11 attacks to await trial. Not long after they arrived, things began unraveling. In November, over the administration’s objections, the Supreme Court agreed to consider whether Guantanamo Bay detainees could sue in U.S. courts. The administration had worried for several years that this might happen. In 2001, Justice Department lawyers Patrick Philbin and John Yoo wrote a memo saying courts were unlikely to grant detainees such rights. But if it happened, they warned, prisoners could argue that the U.S. had mistreated them and that the military tribunal system was unlawful. “There was obviously a fear that everything that had been done to them might come out,” said al-Nashiri’s lawyer, Nancy Hollander. Worse for the CIA, if the Supreme Court granted detainees rights, the entire covert program was at risk. Zubaydah and al-Nashiri could tell their lawyers about being waterboarded in Thailand. Al-Nashiri might discuss having a drill and an unloaded gun put to his head at a CIA prison in Poland. “Anything that could expose these detainees to individuals outside the government was a nonstarter,” one U.S. official familiar with the program said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the government’s legal analysis. In early March 2004, as the legal documents piled up at the Supreme Court, the high court announced that oral arguments would be held in June. After that, a ruling could come at any time, and everyone at the island prison — secretly or not — would be covered. On March 27, just as the sun was setting on Guantanamo, a Gulfstream IV jet left Cuba. The plane landed in Rabat the next morning. By the time the Supreme Court ruled June 28 that detainees should have access to U.S. courts, the CIA had once again scattered Zubaydah, al-Nashiri and the others throughout the black sites. Two years later, after The Washington Post revealed the existence of the program, Bush emptied the prison network. Fourteen men, including the four who had been at Guantanamo Bay years earlier, were moved to the island prison. They have remained there ever since. The four men who were making their second journey to Guantanamo Bay received what they nearly obtained years earlier, before they were spirited away. “The International Committee of the Red Cross is being advised of their detention and will have the opportunity to meet with them,” Bush said in a White House speech Sept. 6, 2006. “Those charged with crimes will be given access to attorneys who will help them prepare their defense, and they will be presumed innocent.” Source: AP News Powered by Mochila

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Nothing projects U.S. global air and sea power more vividly than supercarriers. Bristling with fighter jets that can reach deep into even landlocked trouble zones, America’s virtually invincible carrier fleet has long enforced its dominance of the high seas. China may soon put an end to that. U.S. naval planners are scrambling to deal with what analysts say is a game-changing weapon being developed by China — an unprecedented carrier-killing missile called the Dong Feng 21D that could be launched from land with enough accuracy to penetrate the defenses of even the most advanced moving aircraft carrier at a distance of more than 1,500 kilometers (900 miles). ___ EDITOR’S NOTE — The USS George Washington supercarrier recently deployed off North Korea in a high-profile show of U.S. sea power. AP Tokyo News Editor Eric Talmadge was aboard the carrier, and filed this report. Story continues below… ___ Analysts say final testing of the missile could come as soon as the end of this year, though questions remain about how fast China will be able to perfect its accuracy to the level needed to threaten a moving carrier at sea. The weapon, a version of which was displayed last year in a Chinese military parade, could revolutionize China’s role in the Pacific balance of power, seriously weakening Washington’s ability to intervene in any potential conflict over Taiwan or North Korea. It could also deny U.S. ships safe access to international waters near China’s 11,200-mile (18,000-kilometer) -long coastline. While a nuclear bomb could theoretically sink a carrier, assuming its user was willing to raise the stakes to atomic levels, the conventionally-armed Dong Feng 21D’s uniqueness is in its ability to hit a powerfully defended moving target with pin-point precision. The Chinese Defense Ministry did not immediately respond to the AP’s request for a comment. Funded by annual double-digit increases in the defense budget for almost every year of the past two decades, the Chinese navy has become Asia’s largest and has expanded beyond its traditional mission of retaking Taiwan to push its sphere of influence deeper into the Pacific and protect vital maritime trade routes. “The Navy has long had to fear carrier-killing capabilities,” said Patrick Cronin, senior director of the Asia-Pacific Security Program at the nonpartisan, Washington-based Center for a New American Security. “The emerging Chinese antiship missile capability, and in particular the DF 21D, represents the first post-Cold War capability that is both potentially capable of stopping our naval power projection and deliberately designed for that purpose.” Setting the stage for a possible conflict, Beijing has grown increasingly vocal in its demands for the U.S. to stay away from the wide swaths of ocean — covering much of the Yellow, East and South China seas — where it claims exclusivity. It strongly opposed plans to hold U.S.-South Korean war games in the Yellow Sea off the northeastern Chinese coast, saying the participation of the USS George Washington supercarrier, with its 1,092-foot (333-meter) flight deck and 6,250 personnel, would be a provocation because it put Beijing within striking range of U.S. F-18 warplanes. The carrier instead took part in maneuvers held farther away in the Sea of Japan. U.S. officials deny Chinese pressure kept it away, and say they will not be told by Beijing where they can operate. “We reserve the right to exercise in international waters anywhere in the world,” Rear Adm. Daniel Cloyd, who headed the U.S. side of the exercises, said aboard the carrier during the maneuvers, which ended last week. But the new missile, if able to evade the defenses of a carrier and of the vessels sailing with it, could undermine that policy. “China can reach out and hit the U.S. well before the U.S. can get close enough to the mainland to hit back,” said Toshi Yoshihara, an associate professor at the U.S. Naval War College. He said U.S. ships have only twice been that vulnerable — against Japan in World War II and against Soviet bombers in the Cold War. Carrier-killing missiles “could have an enduring psychological effect on U.S. policymakers,” he e-mailed to The AP. “It underscores more broadly that the U.S. Navy no longer rules the waves as it has since the end of World War II. The stark reality is that sea control cannot be taken for granted anymore.” Yoshihara said the weapon is causing considerable consternation in Washington, though — with attention focused on land wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — its implications haven’t been widely discussed in public. Analysts note that while much has been made of China’s efforts to ready a carrier fleet of its own, it would likely take decades to catch U.S. carrier crews’ level of expertise, training and experience. But Beijing does not need to match the U.S. carrier for carrier. The Dong Feng 21D, smarter, and vastly cheaper, could successfully attack a U.S. carrier, or at least deter it from getting too close. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned of the threat in a speech last September at the Air Force Association Convention. “When considering the military-modernization programs of countries like China, we should be concerned less with their potential ability to challenge the U.S. symmetrically — fighter to fighter or ship to ship — and more with their ability to disrupt our freedom of movement and narrow our strategic options,” he said. Gates said China’s investments in cyber and anti-satellite warfare, anti-air and anti-ship weaponry, along with ballistic missiles, “could threaten America’s primary way to project power” through its forward air bases and carrier strike groups. The Pentagon has been worried for years about China getting an anti-ship ballistic missile. The Pentagon considers such a missile an “anti-access,” weapon, meaning that it could deny others access to certain areas. The Air Force’s top surveillance and intelligence officer, Lt. Gen. David Deptula, told reporters this week that China’s effort to increase anti-access capability is part of a worrisome trend. He did not single out the DF 21D, but said: “While we might not fight the Chinese, we may end up in situations where we’ll certainly be opposing the equipment that they build and sell around the world.” Questions remain over when — and if — China will perfect the technology; hitting a moving carrier is no mean feat, requiring state-of-the-art guidance systems, and some experts believe it will take China a decade or so to field a reliable threat. Others, however, say final tests of the missile could come in the next year or two. Former Navy commander James Kraska, a professor of international law and sea power at the U.S. Naval War College, recently wrote a controversial article in the magazine Orbis outlining a hypothetical scenario set just five years from now in which a Deng Feng 21D missile with a penetrator warhead sinks the USS George Washington. That would usher in a “new epoch of international order in which Beijing emerges to displace the United States.” While China’s Defense Ministry never comments on new weapons before they become operational, the DF 21D — which would travel at 10 times the speed of sound and carry conventional payloads — has been much discussed by military buffs online. A pseudonymous article posted on Xinhuanet, website of China’s official news agency, imagines the U.S. dispatching the George Washington to aid Taiwan against a Chinese attack. The Chinese would respond with three salvos of DF 21D, the first of which would pierce the hull, start fires and shut down flight operations, the article says. The second would knock out its engines and be accompanied by air attacks. The third wave, the article says, would “send the George Washington to the bottom of the ocean.” Comments on the article were mostly positive. ___ AP writer Christopher Bodeen in Beijing and National Security Writer Anne Gearan in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report. Mochila insert follows … Powered by Mochila

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The author of the Rolling Stone article that ended the military career of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the former top commander in Afghanistan, has been denied permission to join U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan, the Pentagon said Tuesday. Defense Department spokesman Col. David Lapan told reporters that freelance writer Michael Hastings was rebuffed when he asked to accompany, or “embed,” with American forces next month. The rejection came as the Pentagon ramped up an internal investigation into the circumstances behind some of the most salacious material Hastings used in his article in Rolling Stone. The Army inspector general is interviewing current and former McChrystal aides, The Associated Press has learned. The inspector general’s review began shortly after Rolling Stone published the article that torpedoed McChrystal’s three-decade Army career. The inspector general, an independent investigator, is considering whether officers were insubordinate and how far up the chain of command responsibility for decisions involving the Hastings interviews extended, officials said. Defense officials outlined the investigation on condition of anonymity because it is ongoing and has reached no conclusions. Story continues below… Hastings quoted McChrystal and his aides criticizing and mocking Obama administration officials, including Vice President Joe Biden. McChrystal was recalled to Washington and fired. Lapan acknowledged that it’s “fairly rare” for the military to turn way a reporter who wants to embed with front-line troops. “There is no right to embed,” Lapan said. “It is a choice made between units and individual reporters, and a key element of an embed is having trust that the individuals are going to abide by the ground rules. So in that instance the command in Afghanistan decided there wasn’t the trust requisite and denied this request.” Lapan did not say what unit Hastings had asked to accompany or whether he had spelled out his assignment. He is a freelance reporter currently working on a story about helicopters in Afghanistan, but also has signed a book contract that grew out of the McChrystal story. Hastings did not immediately reply to requests for comment Tuesday. He has said he did nothing wrong in chronicling the banter, profanity and jocular insults among McChrystal’s inner circle. The four-star general retired in a Pentagon ceremony July 23. In his 18-minute farewell to arms, delivered to a crowd of VIPs, McChrystal made light of the episode. He warned his comrades in arms: “I have stories on all of you, photos of many, and I know a Rolling Stone reporter.” Mochila insert follows … Powered by Mochila

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WASHINGTON, Aug 3, 2010 (IPS) – Seventeen months after President Barack Obama pledged to withdraw all combat brigades from Iraq by Sep. 1, 2010, he quietly abandoned that pledge Monday, admitting implicitly that such combat brigades would remain until the end of 2011. Obama declared in a speech to disabled U.S. veterans in Atlanta that “America’s combat mission in Iraq” would end by the end of August, to be replaced by a mission of “supporting and training Iraqi security forces”. That statement was in line with the pledge he had made on Feb. 27, 2009, when he said, “Let me say this as plainly as I can: by Aug. 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end.” In the sentence preceding that pledge, however, he had said, “I have chosen a timeline that will remove our combat brigades over the next 18 months.” Obama said nothing in his speech Monday about withdrawing “combat brigades” or “combat troops” from Iraq until the end of 2011. Even the concept of “ending the U.S. combat mission” may be highly misleading, much like the concept of “withdrawing U.S. combat brigades” was in 2009. Story continues below… Under the administration’s definition of the concept, combat operations will continue after August 2010, but will be defined as the secondary role of U.S. forces in Iraq. The primary role will be to “advise and assist” Iraqi forces. An official who spoke with IPS on condition that his statements would be attributed to a “senior administration official” acknowledged that the 50,000 U.S. troops remaining in Iraq beyond the deadline will have the same combat capabilities as the combat brigades that have been withdrawn. The official also acknowledged that the troops will engage in some combat but suggested that the combat would be “mostly” for defensive purposes. That language implied that there might be circumstances in which U.S. forces would carry out offensive operations as well. IPS has learned, in fact, that the question of what kind of combat U.S. troops might become involved in depends in part on the Iraqi government, which will still be able to request offensive military actions by U.S. troops if it feels it necessary. Obama’s jettisoning of one of his key campaign promises and of a high-profile pledge early in his administration without explicit acknowledgement highlights the way in which language on national security policy can be manipulated for political benefit with the acquiescence of the news media. Obama’s apparent pledge of withdrawal of combat troops by the Sep. 1 deadline in his Feb. 27, 2009 speech generated headlines across the commercial news media. That allowed the administration to satisfy its anti-war Democratic Party base on a pivotal national security policy issue. At the same time, however, it allowed Obama to back away from his campaign promise on Iraq withdrawal, and to signal to those political and bureaucratic forces backing a long- term military presence in Iraq that he had no intention of pulling out all combat troops at least until the end of 2011. He could do so because the news media were inclined to let the apparent Obama withdrawal pledge stand as the dominant narrative line, even though the evidence indicated it was a falsehood. Only a few days after the Obama speech, Secretary of Defence Robert Gates was more forthright about the policy. In an appearance on Meet the Press Mar. 1, 2009, Gates said the “transition force” remaining after Aug. 31, 2010 would have “a very different kind of mission”, and that the units remaining in Iraq “will be characterised differently”. “They will be called advisory and assistance brigades,” said Gates. “They won’t be called combat brigades.” But “advisory and assistance brigades” were configured with the same combat capabilities as the “combat brigade teams” which had been the basic U.S. military unit of combat organisation for six years, as IPS reported in March 20009. Gates was thus signaling that the military solution to the problem of Obama’s combat troop withdrawal pledge had been accepted by the White House. That plan had been developed in late 2008 by Gen. David Petraeus, the CENTCOM chief, and Gen. Ray Odierno, the top commander in Iraq, who were determined to get Obama to abandon his pledge to withdraw all U.S. combat brigades from Iraq within 16 months of taking office. They came up with the idea of “remissioning” – sticking a non-combat label on the combat brigade teams — as a way for Obama to appear to be delivering on his campaign pledge while actually abandoning it. The “remissioning” scheme was then presented to Obama by Gates and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, in Chicago on Dec. 15, 2008, according a report in the New York Times three days later. It was hardly a secret that the Obama administration was using the “remissioning” ploy to get around the political problem created by his acceding to military demands to maintain combat troops in Iraq for nearly three more years. Despite the fact that the disparity between Obama’s public declaration and the reality of the policy was an obvious and major political story, however, the news media – including the New York Times, which had carried multiple stories about the military’s “remissioning” scheme – failed to report on it. The “senior administration official” told IPS that Obama is still “committed to withdrawal of all U.S. forces by the end of 2011″. That is the withdrawal deadline in the U.S.-Iraq withdrawal agreement of November 2008. But the same military and Pentagon officials who prevailed on Obama to back down on his withdrawal pledge also have pressed in the past for continued U.S. military presence in Iraq beyond 2011, regardless of the U.S. withdrawal agreement with the Iraqi government. In November 2008, after Obama’s election, Gen. Odierno was asked by Washington Post correspondent Tom Ricks “what the U.S. military presence would look like around 2014 or 2015″. Odierno said he “would like to see a …force probably around 30,000 or so, 35,000″, which would still be carrying out combat operations. Last February, Odierno requested that a combat brigade be stationed in Kirkuk to avoid an outbreak of war involving Kurdish and Iraqi forces vying for the region’s oil resources – and that it be openly labeled as such – according to Ricks. In light of the fact that Obama had already agreed to Odierno’s “remissioning” dodge, the only reason for such a request would be to lay the groundwork for keeping a brigade there beyond the 2011 withdrawal deadline. Obama brushed off the proposal, according to Ricks, but it was unclear whether the reason was that Iraqi political negotiations over a new government were still ongoing. In July, Odierno suggested that a U.N. peacekeeping force might be needed in Kirkuk after 2011, along with a hint that a continued U.S. presence there might be requested by the Iraqi government. *Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in 2006. This article was originally published at IPS News .

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