Politics

An edition of Inspire magazine, produced and published by an arm of al-Qaeda, was discovered at Guantanamo, prompting a strict, new legal mail review policy for detainees and their attorneys. Pentagon officials told Truthout that details of their probe into how the magazine made its way to the detention facility will not be made public. Photo: Wikipedia

This report was originally published on Truthout.

The Pentagon won’t release any details of an investigation initiated by the commander of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility revolving around the discovery of “contraband” at the prison, which included a magazine produced by an offshoot of al-Qaeda based in Yemen.

Late last year, Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale told Truthout the prison facility’s new commander, Rear Adm. David B. Woods, “directed that a security search be undertaken of detainee cells and materials in Camp 7,” which houses high-value prisoners.

Breasseale did not disclose what prompted the “security search” or whether any materials were seized from the camp. But during the military commission hearing last December for high-value detainee Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged mastermind of the USS Cole bombing, Navy Cmdr. Andrea Lockhart testified, “material … was getting [into Guantanamo], like Inspire magazine, that should not have been getting in.” Lockhart suggested lawyers defending Guantanamo detainees were responsible.

Inspire magazine was a slick English-language glossy edited by Samir Khan, a Pakistani US citizen who was killed in a drone strike in Yemen last September along with al-Qaeda propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki, another US citizen who the US government placed on a targeted assassination list.

Lockhart is a member of the Pentagon’s prosecution team. She was testifying about the reasons Woods had implemented a new order that directed a team of former government lawyers, translators and law enforcement officials under contract to the Pentagon to review privileged attorney-client communications. The policy applies to about 30 or so detainees charged with war crimes and other prisoners who will likely be prosecuted before military commissions.

Take back the media by making a tax-deductible donation to Truthout this week. Click here to support news free of corporate influence.

Neither Lockhart nor Woods, who was named commander of the prison last August, disclosed additional details about the discovery of the al-Qaeda magazine, such as whether it was found in a detainee’s cell or who was responsible for bringing it onto the grounds of the prison.

Breasseale, who characterized the magazine as “contraband,” told Truthout Wednesday that Woods investigated the circumstances involving “contraband getting into or around” Guantanamo.

The details of Woods’ probe, however, will remain secret, Breasseale said.

Woods “made clear he has no intention of releasing” the findings of the investigation, Breasseale said. “It gets to the heart of how we do business.”

Breasseale would not say when the investigation was launched or whether it included the discovery of Inspire magazine. Additionally, he did not respond to claims leveled by attorneys representing detainees in habeas corpus proceedings that interrogators were likely responsible for bringing incendiary material onto the prison grounds.

“We won’t get into the contents of the investigation,” Breasseale said.

Last month, Brent Mickum, an attorney who represents high-value detainee Abu Zubaydah in habeas corpus proceedings, told Truthout, “the idea that an attorney would take into Guantanamo a periodical or a document that he or she knew to be proscribed is outrageous,”

“No attorney in the 600 or so I have interacted with over the years would ever do such a thing,” said Mickum, who holds a top-secret security clearance and is bound by a separate protective order involving legal mail. “No attorney would take the chance of jeopardizing the arduous steps they had to go through to obtain security clearance so prisoners could be represented by defense counsel and risk it by bringing in Inspire magazine. The only way such a magazine or document would get to a prisoner is through an interrogator who was trying to reward him for providing intelligence.”

But Maj. Michelle Coghill, a spokeswoman for Joint Task Force Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO,) told Truthout Thursday that while she could not “discuss any details associated with specific contraband items…I can state that Joint Task Force personnel did not attempt to introduce specific contraband items into our detention facilities.”

Coghill also would not disclose further details about the Woods’ investigation involving “contraband,” which she said he has “fully investigated.”

“In keeping with our security practices and the commander’s commitment to provide for the security of the detainees as well as the guard force, JTF-GTMO will not discuss any details associated with specific contraband items,” Coghill said.

That position undercuts a promise the Pentagon made to be more transparent about the military commissions. Indeed, a tagline on the Department of Defense’s new military commission web site unveiled last year boasts, “Fairness, Transparency, Justice.”

In hopes of gaining additional insight into the matter, Truthout filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Pentagon to obtain a wide range of documents pertaining to the events that led up to Woods’ legal mail review policy as well as details about the investigation into the discovery of Inspire magazine and other “contraband.”

Meanwhile, military defense attorneys who have objected to Woods’ order and have since stopped sending mail to their clients are still awaiting Chief Military Commissions Judge James Pohl to issue an opinion as to how the review of legal mail will be handled going forward.

When the New England Patriots and New England Giants meet on the national stage in Super Bowl XLVI this Sunday, it's expected to be an event far removed from politics -- just two tough and proven football squads, squaring off in the biggest sporting event of the year. Off the field, however, is another matter entirely. Evan Mackinder http://www.opensecrets.org/about/staff.php

The latest outbreak of violence in Egypt is a reminder of that country’s halting transition from dictatorship to democracy. The process of democratization in the Arab world that begun with the self-immolation of Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi just over a year ago will likely continue, but the experience of ex-communist countries shows that economic growth and opportunity are at least as important as political freedom. Mr. Bouazizi, after all, was not protesting for a right to vote, but for a right to earn a living unmolested by the government.

The extraordinary events taking place in Arab countries — from the fall of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya to the civil uprisings in Syria and Yemen — make it easy to forget that the Arab Spring started with a suicide of a Tunisian street vendor harassed and humiliated by government officials. Like millions of young Arab men and women, the 26-year-old failed to find formal employment. He started selling produce on the street instead. There he was preyed upon by corrupt policemen and abusive bureaucrats who repeatedly harassed him and confiscated his wares. Without the means to support his family, a frustrated Mr. Bouazizi set himself alight in front of the governor’s office. Reportedly, his last words were “how do you expect me to make a living?”

Egypt’s parliamentary elections were a direct result of the protests that spread through the Arab world following Mr. Bouazizi’s death. But restoring dignity to the Egyptian people requires more than allowing them to vote; history shows that freedom to exploit economic opportunities offered by an open and growing economy is just as important.

After the Berlin Wall fell, for example, ex-communist countries embarked on an uneven path toward economic freedom. Economic liberalization in Central Europe and the Baltics tended to be faster and deeper than that in the rest of the former Soviet bloc. On average, the rapid reformers received more foreign investment, grew more rapidly, and had lower inflation rates as well as lower poverty rates and more equal income distributions.

Crucially, the rapid reformers developed stronger democratic institutions. In fact, all of them became liberal democracies. In contrast, some of the countries that underwent only partial economic liberalization, like Ukraine and Russia, failed to develop into full-fledged democracies. Decision-making in those countries was “captured” by a small number of wealthy oligarchs.

The military junta that has run Egypt since Mr. Mubarak’s downfall has so far delivered neither political stability nor economic reforms. In the World Bank’s Doing Business report, Egypt fell from 94th place in 2010 to 110th place in 2011. Growth has declined from 5.1 percent to 1 percent. The overall unemployment rate rose from 9 percent to almost 12 percent, while youth unemployment remains at 24 percent. With the national debt approaching 80 percent and the budget deficit hitting 11 percent of GDP, the junta is running out of time and space to maneuver.

Unfortunately, there is little indication that the big winners of the recent parliamentary elections — the moderate Islamist Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafist Al Nour party received some two-thirds of the votes and will write Egypt’s new constitution — appreciate the gravity of Egypt’s economic situation or understand the importance of economic liberalization in sustaining high rates of growth. If anything, liberalization seems to be treated with suspicion, because the initial reforms of the Egyptian economy were pushed through by Mr. Mubarak and the corrupt business elite that surrounded him. Rather than wealth-creating, competitive capitalism, Egyptians got crony capitalism.

It would be a mistake to think that economic reform can wait until all of Egypt’s political problems are resolved. If the economy continues to stagnate, Egypt’s best and brightest will leave the country and millions of Egyptians will remain mired in poverty. Only a free and vibrant economy can provide the people of Egypt with meaningful jobs and the dignity that comes from being able to make a living and provide for one’s family. That is the real lesson that Egypt and other Arab countries ought to learn from the death of Mohamed Bouazizi.

Marian Tupy is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity in Washington, D.C.

For some time now, Republican hawks like Sen. John McCain and Rep. Howard P. "Buck" McKeon have been saying that our military budget is inadequate for the threats we face. They like to gripe that President Barack Obama is orchestrating the decline of American power.

Some of this is pure partisanship. Republicans criticize Democrats just as Democrats criticized President George W. Bush. The hawks, though, have a special devotion to the military budget. In their view, some military spending is good; more is even better. But if overspending on the military and promoting the United States as global policeman are benchmarks of approval, they should have little to complain about with our current president.

Contrary to his rhetoric of change, the president sounded like a neoconservative when he declared during his recent State of the Union address that the United States was, and would remain, the world's "indispensable nation." Obama's proposed Pentagon budget, released last week, affirmed his intention to retain most of the U.S. military's current missions, even when they aren't needed to safeguard the United States' vital security interests.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon's latest strategy document was carefully designed to convince allies and adversaries alike that the United States can continue to prosecute multiple armed conflicts in far-flung corners of the globe. Taken together, Obama's strategy document, budget and State of the Union remarks articulate a coherent philosophy on military spending and global engagement that ought to hold a lot of appeal for the neoconservatives in the GOP.

But partisan politics aside, what our foreign policy leaders have consistently ignored is an argument that should have strong sway at a time of economic uncertainty: This country's tax dollars can be better spent than on defending wealthy allies who are more than capable of protecting themselves.

The administration plans to withdraw some U.S. troops from Europe, but as many as 70,000 are likely to remain. Meanwhile, the number of troops in Asia will be increased. These troops serve to reassure our allies of our commitment to defend them. It is working as designed: Other countries do not spend enough to satisfy their defense needs.

The end result is that Americans pay more. The Obama administration's budget will cost every American nearly $2,000 next year. The figure rises by hundreds of dollars when one accounts for homeland security, payments to veterans, and the few billion dollars tucked away in the Department of Energy for the nation's bloated nuclear arsenal. All told, every American will likely shell out more than $2,700 on spending classified as national defense. That is at least 2½ times what the British spend, five times more than what the Germans spend, and six times what the Japanese spend.

It is hard to see how that is good news for Americans struggling to make ends meet. Obama's magnanimity is especially ironic given his emphasis on "fairness" and "shared sacrifice." His rhetoric apparently does not apply to people living outside the United States. American troops will continue to be tasked with policing the world, and American taxpayers will be on the hook to pay for it.

The administration has proposed to restrain the growth of military spending. But total U.S. military spending will remain well above pre-9/11 levels. The Obama administration is requesting $525 billion for the Pentagon's base budget in 2013, plus another $88.4 billion to pay for the war in Afghanistan. To put this in perspective, that is more than the annual average during Ronald Reagan's time in office (about $526 billion in today's dollars). One seldom hears GOP hawks speak of Reagan as a misguided dove who left the country vulnerable to attack.

Focusing only on budget numbers, however, misses the big picture. Instead, we must focus on what we will spend and why. The answer is clear: Our military budget is large by historical standards because Washington is unwilling to revisit the premise that Americans are responsible for everything that happens in the world, even things that have no connection to American security or prosperity.

Our fiscal crisis has created an opportunity to revisit our commitments abroad. We should focus American power on our core interests, and call on other countries to take responsibility for their own defense.

Intuitively, that exercise should satisfy both liberal demands that "everyone pay their fair share" and conservative demands that our government "live within its means." But given the rhetoric we have heard so far, it is doubtful that this election cycle will produce a leader who will seriously contemplate how we can most prudently provide for our common defense.

Christopher Preble is vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute and the author of The Power Problem: How American Military Dominance Makes Us Less Safe, Less Prosperous, and Less Free.

Republican Mitt Romney relied on the finance, insurance and real estate sector for roughly $2 out of every $11 he raised during the fourth quarter of 2011, according to a new analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics of campaign finance documents submitted Tuesday to the Federal Election Commission. Michael Beckel http://www.opensecrets.org/about/staff.php#beckel

The Current Wisdom is a monthly Cato feature written by Senior Fellow Patrick J. Michaels on global climate change. These articles usually feature new and interesting items in the scientific literature with important implications for climate change regulations.

Prior to April, 2011, issues of this Wisdom, which began in 2010, are available at our blog Cato@Liberty (www.cato-at-liberty.org/).

This edition departs from our usual routine because of the very vitriolic fight that has broken as the result of publication of a January 27 op-ed titled “No Need to Panic about Global Warming” in The Wall Street Journal. Authored by 16 high-profile scientists, it made common-sense climate arguments that readers of this Wisdom and other Cato publications on climate science and policy are certainly familiar with.

The January 27 piece can be summarized as follows:

• There has been no net warming for “well over ten years;”

• Global warming forecasts confidently made by the UN in 1990 were clearly exaggerations;

• Carbon dioxide, the main “greenhouse” emission, stimulates plant growth;

• Climate scientists on the federal dole have a track record of punishing those who do not express alarmist views;

• Climate alarmism, public funding, and the growth of government and taxation create self-feeding mutual incentives; and

• Doing “nothing” about climate change in the next 50 years has little effect on climate mitigation compared to initiating taxation now.

None of the above are earthshaking propositions to any serious student of climate change. Monthly temperature departures from average show no significant trend going back to 1996. If one is concerned about biasing from the warm El Nino year of 1998, beginning post-2000 yields the same result. The UN was forecasting that global temperatures would be rising around twice the mean rate actually observed in surface temperatures. Greenhouse owners jack up the carbon dioxide concentration of their air several fold to stimulate plant growth. Alarmism breeds funding and new agencies that require more tax dollars, and funding begets tenure. The futility of politically feasible emissions reductions policies has been demonstrated for decades.

By January 30, the New York Times, whose editorial stance on global warming is (to put it mildly) different than that of the Journal, brought in their high-profile environmental blogger, Andrew Revkin, to carp principally about the last bullet item.

His post, “Scientists Challenging Climate Science Appear to Flunk Climate Economics,” claimed that the Journal scientists had misrepresented the work of Yale economist William Nordhaus, quoting the latter’s “wise policy” (no bias there) of slowly introducing a carbon tax.

Nordhaus responded that the Journal piece “completely misrepresented my work.”

At that point, Revkin opened up the controversy to commentary. Readers can decide for themselves.

Here is Nordhaus’s complete comment on the Journal op-ed:

The piece completely misrepresented my work. My work has long taken the view that policies to slow global warming would have net economic benefits, in the trillion of dollars of present value. This is true going back to work in the early 1990s (MIT Press, Yale Press, Science, PNAS, among others). I have advocated a carbon tax for many years as the best way to attack the issue. I can only assume they either completely ignorant of the economics on the issue or are willfully misstating my findings.

And here is the response of the Journal article authors:

We have accurately represented Professor Nordhaus’s findings in our Wall Street Journal editorial of 01-27-12, while making and intending no statement regarding his policy beliefs and advocacy. In his 2008 book, A Question of Balance, Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies, Professor Nordhaus provided the computed discounted costs and benefits for a variety of policies, assuming the IPCC central value for warming due to increased atmospheric CO2 (3 degrees C for doubling of CO2).

He finds (Table 5.3 of the book) that a policy of delaying greenhouse gas controls for 50 years gives a benefit-to-cost ratio just slightly less than his “optimum” policy. The optimum policy is a universal harmonized carbon tax, which Professor Nordhaus advocates. It starts small and is increased gradually over decades. In terms of net benefits, the 50-year-delay policy is far better than more aggressive policies that would severely limit atmospheric concentrations of CO2 or model-calculated global temperature rises.

Both the 50-year-delay policy and the optimum policy allow world economies to continue to develop with relatively little disruption. Aggressive policies considered in the book do not have this characteristic and display sharply higher abatement costs and lower benefit-to-cost ratios.

As we note in the Wall Street Journal editorial, several more aggressive policies are negative return propositions.

Furthermore, in Chapters I and VI, Professor Nordhaus takes pains to explain that the requirement of universality of policy application is critical; regional, national, or group participation differences can be expected to lower policy effectiveness, perhaps substantially: “... there are substantial excess costs if the preponderance of sectors and countries are not fully included. We preliminarily estimate that a participation rate of 50 percent, as compared with 100 percent, will impose an abatement-cost penalty of 250 percent.” (Chapter 1, p.19). Therefore the optimum policy should be considered an ideal upper limit that may not be achieved in real world application.

We wish to emphasize once again that the above assumes that the IPCC climate results are correct and that significant environmental damage would result, both of which we strongly dispute. The statements made in the Wall Street Journal editorial report Professor Nordhaus’s findings accurately and do not bear on his policy advocacy.

Here is Table 5.3:

Of course, that wasn’t the end.

It seems that if one ever needs to start a fire in the woods, simply rub two climatologists together. So, in the wee hours of February 1, a response to the Journal article, signed now by 38 scientists, was published.

For clarity, let’s call this one “Trenberth et al.”, for its senior author, Kevin Trenberth of the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Summarizing Trenberth et al.:

• The authors of the original Journal article were largely not climate scientists, and those that were, held “extreme views.”

• Warming has not “abated” in the last decade.

• Scientific societies worldwide concur that “the earth is heating up and humans are primarily responsible”. More than 97% of all actively publishing climate scientists “agree that climate change is real and human caused”.

• ”... The transition to a low-carbon economy will not only allow the world to avoid the worst risks of climate change, but could also drive decades of economic growth.”

Trenberth et al. is surprisingly weak and incomplete. The 16 original authors are all individuals that are highly competent in their fields, most are physicists of one stripe or another, and all can read and summarize a scientific literature. In fact, most would hold that climate science is nothing more than applied physics.

“Extreme views” lie in the eye of the beholder, and science only grudgingly backs away from established paradigms. For example, despite the obvious jigsaw-puzzle fit of the earth’s continents, it took 100 years of bickering before continental drift was accepted over geological stasis. And, in this case, the “extreme view” of the most prominent climate scientist of the 16, MIT’s Richard Lindzen, is hardly an outrage.

Lindzen holds that the “sensitivity” of surface temperature to changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide has been overestimated because of an inaccuracy in the way that computer models magnify warming. In and of itself, it is mainstream, not extreme, to entertain the hypothesis that doubling carbon dioxide on its own would only cause a bit more than 1 degree (C) of global surface warming. Computer models arrive at much higher values, around 3.5°C, by amplifying the carbon dioxide effect because a slightly warmer atmosphere contains more water vapor, which itself is a potent greenhouse gas. Clouds are also changed in a way that enhances warming. There is evidence from the outgoing radiation signal of the earth that the effects of water vapor and clouds have been overestimated.

The 38 must somehow disagree with Susan Solomon, whose 2010 article in Science attributing the lack of recent warming—that the 39 deny—to unanticipated changes in stratospheric water vapor with no known cause.

The 38 must somehow disagree with the global temperature sensing from satellites, which also shows no net warming for the last 14 years. Now, one could argue that the satellites are measuring temperatures above the surface in the lower atmosphere, but the computer models that the 38 find so accurate, predict that the lower atmosphere should be warming faster than the surface over most of the planet.

Finally "more than 97% of all actively publishing* climate scientists agree that climate change is real and human caused" is probably an underestimate, as virtually everyone acknowledges that the surface temperature is warmer than it was, and that multifarious human activities have some influence on climate. Rather, he misses the point well-made by the original Journal article, which is that the rise in surface temperature is clearly below the values first forecast by the UN in 1990. The core—unsettled—issue in climate science is the "sensitivity" of temperature to carbon dioxide, and there are several independent lines of evidence, including the surface temperature history and the water vapor problems, that argue that it has been substantially overestimated.

In global warming, it's not the heat, it's the sensitivity. But don’t expect much sensitivity and expect a lot of heat when climatologists voice their opinions.

* The part about “actively publishing” is saved for another day. The climategate emails—and there are plenty by, to, or about these 39 scientists, detail how difficult it is to publish anything they disagree with, thanks to intimidation and manipulation of editors, blackballing of those who disagree with them, and other blood sports.

Patrick J. Michaels is a Senior Fellow in Environmental Studies at the Cato Institute.

The Federal Reserve’s decision to release forecasts for short-term interest rates is supposed to clarify monetary policy and reassure the public. By keeping the federal funds rate close to zero for three more years, and switching from shorter to longer-term securities, the Fed hopes to spur investment and growth. The problem is that manipulating interest rates and allocating credit to favored parties fosters crony capitalism, not market liberalism.

Clarity in capital markets is not improved by distorting interest rates, which are relative prices. Nor is monetary policy improved by engaging in fiscal policy and the allocation of credit. Targeting inflation at 2 percent is 2 percent too much. Nominal interest rates should reflect real interest rates in a world of zero inflation, if they are to perform their function of allocating capital efficiently.

By pegging nominal interest rates at artificially low levels, the Fed is penalizing millions of people who have their assets in saving accounts or money market funds and are getting near zero nominal returns. With CPI inflation of 3 percent in 2011, the real rate on those assets is negative. The Fed’s low interest rate policy, designed to help fund big government and stimulate housing, is decapitalizing many households who do not want to take on more risky assets. Private virtue is being penalized by public vice.

Retirees, or those near retirement, typically prefer less risky assets. But with the average rate on a savings account at 0.24 percent, on a money market account at 0.22 percent, and on a 1-year CD at 0.53 percent, nominal returns are close to zero, and real returns are negative—even at relatively low rates of inflation.

The longer rates are held artificially low, the more savers will suffer, and the more tempted they will be to take on risks they never would have considered. Risk mismatches will complicate Fed policy when rates must rise to prevent serious inflation. Bond prices will collapse, and those investors who trusted the Fed to support longer-term asset prices will be especially harmed. There will be significant political pressure to keep all rates lower for longer, even if inflation is above the Fed’s 2 percent target. So how can that target be credible?

Fed chairman Ben Bernanke has said that he will put equal weight on price stability and full employment, as dictated by the Fed’s dual mandate. But “price stability” means zero inflation, not 2 percent. The Fed has no fixed anchor: there is no rule to guide it, only discretion. And that discretion is still influenced by Keynesian thinking and a Phillips Curve mentality.

Bernanke is willing to tolerate a little more inflation to try to engineer less unemployment. Yet, he must know this is a Faustian bargain that cannot work. Indeed, the Fed’s press release following the FOMC meeting on January 25 admits, “The maximum level of employment is largely determined by nonmonetary factors.”

The Fed has largely lost its independence. Congress has asked too much of the Fed, and Bernanke has vastly expanded the Fed’s powers and balance sheet to comply. Some asset prices have been inflated (especially gold and bonds), but overall inflation has remained relatively low because people and businesses have been holding large cash balances, and banks have parked their excess reserves at the Fed for a risk-free return. The Fed has helped create its own “liquidity trap” by paying interest on excess reserves, which has reduced the so-called money multiplier.

However, as the economy regains steam and loan demand increases, those excess reserves will enter the marketplace and increase nominal spending and prices. The Fed will need to reduce the size of its balance sheet and nip inflation in the bud; but policymakers may act too late. The result will be stagflation.

Bernanke has placed the Fed in a precarious position. There is no way the FOMC can accurately forecast interest rates or determine what the efficient allocation of capital should be. Interfering with market interest rates is an exercise in market socialism, not capitalism.

In his press conference following the historic January 25 policy meeting, Bernanke was asked whether the Fed’s inflation target of 2 percent was intended to depreciate the purchasing power of the dollar. Bernanke replied that the real purpose is to “avoid deflation.” He then tried to downplay the idea that mild inflation would erode the value of money, because most people would protect their money by investing it, and not put it under the mattress. He admitted that interest rates are low now, but in the long run they tend to “compensate” for inflation.

This was an artful dodge. In fact, inflation always erodes the domestic purchasing power of the dollar. At the current 3 percent CPI inflation rate, the average level of money prices would increase by 34 percent in a decade, and by 81 percent in 20 years. Even at 2 percent, the price level would double every 35 years—no matter what the interest rate is. By suppressing nominal interest rates, the Fed is denying savers the means to safeguard their property; yet Bernanke barely gives that failure a mention.

Transparency is a noble goal, but it is best achieved under a rule of law and freely determined prices. The Fed’s transparency crusade has not imposed any rule on the Fed or moved us closer to sound money. Forecasting short-term rates near zero for the foreseeable future sends the wrong signal—namely, that financial repression and crony capitalism will continue.

James A. Dorn is the vice president for academic affairs for the Cato Institute and editor of the Cato Journal.

Abdul Aziz Naji

This story was originally published on Truthout.

The UK action charity Reprieve, whose attorneys represent over a dozen prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, reports that former Guantánamo prisoner, Algerian citizen Abdul Aziz Naji, has been sentenced to three years in prison in Algeria. Reprieve says the charges were “of past membership in an extremist group overseas – a charge derived from the unsubstantiated accusations the US administration made against him in 2002.”

News reports state that prosecutors initially had asked for a ten-year prison sentence, and a 5,000 euro fine (over $6,000 US dollars).

The Reprieve press release states, “During his trial held in Algiers on Monday 16 January, the prosecutor presented no evidence of Mr Naji’s guilt – rather, the judge simply questioned him and produced a guilty verdict. His lawyer, Hassiba Boumerdassi, filed an appeal of his sentence and will request that he be released on bail pending retrial.”

When Naji was first forcibly returned to Algeria in 2010 – the first Guantánamo detainee removed to a country where he refused to go, for fear of returning there – he was, according to the Jurist, held initially “under a [Algerian] statute that allows for the detention of terror suspects for up to 12 days.” The charges under which he was held were never clarified at the time, but presumably were similar or the same for which he was recently sentenced.

Naji was subsequently released in July 2010 under judicial supervision, with the proviso he report to police authorities weekly. At the time, a statement by Algiers prosecutors, reported by Reuters Africa, bragged that Naji’s case had been “dealt with in the most complete transparency and in respect for the law, whether in terms of procedure or the length of his detention.”

Naji had been forcibly deported from Guantánamo to Algeria with the full knowledge and approval of Congress, which, at that time, had demanded 15 days advance notice of any Guantánamo transfer. Naji had previously stated he feared any return to Algeria, where he anticipated either repression by the government or by Islamic extremists. His forcible return, the first such non-voluntary expulsion of any Guantánamo prisoner, violated the principle of non-refoulement or non-return of prisoners to states where they have reason to expect torture or other mistreatment. The principle is part of the United Nations Convention Against Torture treaty, to which the US is a signatory.

The Obama administration, like the Bush administration before it, relies on diplomatic “assurances” by host countries that they will not maltreat returning prisoners. But a 2007 report by Human Rights Watch described the problems with such “assurances”: “Governments that engage in torture routinely deny it and refuse to investigate allegations of torture. A government that is already violating its international obligation not to torture cannot be trusted to abide by a further ‘assurance’ that it will not torture.”

In the case of Algeria, the 2010 State Department report on human rights in that country notes that, while torture is formally illegal in Algeria, there have been numerous charges of torture by state police. Furthermore, the Algerian government obstructs oversight on such matters by non-governmental and UN agencies. The report describes abuse of prisoners in order to obtain confessions. While some government agents have been tried and convicted for such abuse, the State Department reports notes, dryly, that in regards to abuse by state officials, “impunity remains a problem.” Even more, local Algerian human rights attorneys have said that prisoner abuse occurs “most often against those arrested on ‘security grounds.’”

In regards to prison and detention conditions, the report states, “Prison conditions generally did not meet international standards, and the government did not permit visits to military, high-security, or standard prison facilities or to detention centers by independent human rights observers.”

Revelations About Drugging of Detainees, Torture for False Confessions

Since his release, Naji has been vocal about the treatment he endured in US custody. in a July 28, 2010, interview with the Algerian paper El Khabar, only days after his forcible transfer, Naji told the world about maltreatment at the hands of the Americans. He charged Guantánamo authorities with using torture to make detainees confess to terror charges.

“They force detainees to take some medicines for three months to drive them crazy, loosing memory and committing suicide,” he said, adding, “I still remember how a Yemeni prisoner killed himself for he couldn’t resist to torture and sexual abuse practiced by the prison caretakers.” Two of the six purported Guantánamo suicides were Yemeni, Ali Abdullah Ahmed (also known as Salah al-Aslami) and Mohammed Salih al-Hanashi, but it is not clear to which prisoner Naji is referring.

Charges of drugging prisoners have been widespread, but have been difficult to verify. (See this April 2008 report by Joby Warrick at The Washington Post.) A Pentgon inspector general investigation on such drugging was completed in 2009, Titled “Investigation of Allegations of the Use of Mind Altering Drugs to Facilitate Interrogations of Detainees,” the report remains classified. A Freedom of Information Act request by this author for the report is now 16 months old. Last September, a Senate Armed Forces Committee spokesperson told Truthout the Office of Inspector General’s investigation did not substantiate allegations of drugging of prisoners for the “purposes of interrogation.”

The involuntary use of drugs on prisoners would violate a number of domestic and international laws, as well as basic ethical codes of the medical professions. Yet, under the guidelines of the current “Army Field Manual” (AFM), whose protocols govern all interrogations past and present at Guantánamo, only drugs that cause permanent, lasting harm are not allowable for interrogation use. The provision from an earlier version of the AFM that forbid use of drugs that could create a “chemically induced psychosis” was dropped from the manual in September 2006, or even earlier.

Naji also told El Khabar “about how some detainees had been promised to be granted political asylum opportunity in exchange of a ‘spying role’ within the detention camp. He added that once released, they are maintained as spies serving for the US, under the cover of political refugees.”

The use of spies recruited by the Americans from among Muslim detainees and suspects has been reported in numerous instances. Abdurahman Khadr, the brother of Guantánamo prisoner, Omar Khadr, was an admitted “asset” for the CIA, who once described how he was sent to Guantánamo as a fake prisoner to spy.

More recently, the Tarek Mehanna case raised a good deal of controversy with charges from Mehanna and supporters that he was targeted by the FBI because the 29-year-old Sudbury, Massachusetts, man repeatedly refused to become an informant.

The “Case” Against Abdul Aziz Naji

No public report has indicated to what “extremist group” Naji is accused of belonging. In the May 2008 Joint Task Force-Guantánamo Detainee Assessment leaked by WikiLeaks last year, US intelligence maintained that Naji had belonged to the Pakistani-based group Lashkar-e-Tayyiba. It also accused him of being “an identified al-Qaida courier.” The bulk of the accusations against him were levied by torture victim Abu Zubaydah, who supposedly said he had recruited Naji to be part of his “Martyrs Brigade.” Another torture victim, and one who the US relied upon to place Naji in Afghanistan, was Abd al-Rahim Abdul Razzak Janko, who was arrested by the Americans even though he had been tortured by the Taliban.

Abu Zubaydah was infamously tortured by the CIA, including being waterboarded 83 times, held in stress positions, had his head banged against a wall, suffered sleep deprivation and isolation. Mr. Zubaydah was flown from one CIA black site prison to another in the four or so years he was held in CIA captivity. Under later Department of Defense detention, it is not known exactly what ill treatment he may have endured, though it is known he is held in solitary confinement, and like the other Guantánamo detainees, is subject to interrogations under the current AFM. The manual has a special appendix known by the letter M that describes special interrogation techniques that cannot be used on regular prisoners of war. All told, AFM techniques used on Mr. Zubaydah could include, besides solitary confinement, modified forms of sleep deprivation, modified sensory deprivation or overload, stress positions, use of drugs and interrogation approaches meant to generate fear and humiliation.

Mr. Janko, who was released from Guantánamo in 2009, had provided supposedly incriminating information about approximately 20 other detainees, coerced from him via torture. After arrest and torture by the Taliban in 2000 for alleged sexual and espionage crimes, Mr. Janko was arrested by the US after 9/11 and was tortured from his first days while incarcerated at Kandahar Air Base. While the Taliban had used electric shock, stress positions, beatings on the soles of his feet (falaka) and water torture, to get Mr. Janko to falsely confess to sexual crimes and being an American and Israeli spy, the US relied upon sleep deprivation, stress positions, physical assault, attack by dogs and forced exercise to make him admit he was a terrorist. The US even used a Taliban videotape of Mr. Janko’s “confession” and tried (unsuccessfully, ultimately) to pass it off as the martyrdom video of an al-Qaeda suicide bomber.

Mr. Janko’s mental state deteriorated seriously, and he spent years in Guantánamo’s psychiatric ward, given antidepressant, antiseizure and antipsychotic medications. He subsequently filed suit against the US government for the torture, and is said to live under an assumed name in Belgium.

Both Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim Abdul Razzak Janko were two of the primary sources used to build the case against Naji. The other Algerian arrested with Naji, Musafa Hamilil, was released from Guantánamo without charges in July 2008 and returned to Algeria at that time. Once in Algeria, Mr.Hamlili was charged with “counterfeiting and affiliation to a militant group that is active abroad.” He was acquitted of those charges in February 2010.

But Naji was not so lucky. According to the Reprieve story, Naji is suffering “serious health complications” in regards to his leg, which was amputated after he stepped on a landmine in 2001, while doing charity work in Kashmir. The US accused him of being a landmine expert, but Naji told his Combatant Status Review Hearing that he had nothing to do with mines or the planting of mines, and admitted to some details because of serious beatings. “I had a difficult time when I was first transferred to Cuba … I was tortured and made to tell things against myself,” Naji told the Guantánamo military hearing. “The interrogators forced me to say these things, because I was scared to be punished.”

His family is reportedly concerned about the deterioration of Naji’s health while imprisoned at El Harache prison in Algiers. His attorney, Hassiba Boumerdassi, reports his condition is “worsening by the day.” Reprieve charges that Naji has been denied adequate health care.

Katie Taylor, a “Life After Guantánamo” caseworker for Reprieve stated, “It is outrageous that Mr Naji is being punished again for the same discredited accusations that the US used to hold him in Guantánamo for eight years without charge or trial – this time in his own country. Algerian authorities must restore his right to a fair trial and overturn his conviction on faulty charges for which the prosecutor did not even bother to introduce evidence.”

Jeffrey Kaye, a psychologist living in Northern California and a regular contributor to Truthout and The Public Record, blogs about civil liberties and issues revolving around the US government’s torture program at The Dissenter. He can be reached at sfpsych at gmail dot com. Follow Jeff on Twitter: @Jeff_Kaye

Facebook continued to show off its growing political muscle Tuesday night, as its nascent political action committee disclosed an impressive six-figure haul during its inaugural fundraising quarter. Evan Mackinder http://www.opensecrets.org/about/staff.php

President Barack Obama has raised more money for his re-election bid from small-dollar donors than Republican Mitt Romney has collected from all his contributors, according to a new Center for Responsive Politics analysis. Michael Beckel http://www.opensecrets.org/about/staff.php#beckel

Coming off a big win in the Florida primary race Tuesday night, Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney continues to gain steam at an impressive clip that threatens to leave his GOP rivals in the dust. Evan Mackinder http://www.opensecrets.org/about/staff.php

Harold Simmons, long one of the GOP's most prolific donors, cemented his place on the speed-dial of fundraisers for conservative causes on Tuesday as several super PACs reported huge hauls from the Texas billionaire in their 2011 year-end campaign finance reports. Simmons and his holding company, Contran, gave $8.5 million to three super PACs, two of which support candidates for the GOP presidential nomination, in the last quarter of the year. Viveca Novak http://www.opensecrets.org

In this Internet Age, 81 senators have Twitter accounts for lightning-fast communication. Yet only a handful of them typically file their campaign finance reports electronically. Dan Hartranft http://www.opensecrets.org

Usually low-tier, last week President Obama signaled in both the State of the Union and a University of Michigan speech that higher education will loom large in Campaign 2012.

With Americans outraged over skyrocketing prices and student debt, it makes sense. Unfortunately, Obama's proposed solutions aren't similarly sensible.

In his speeches, the president talked tough about reining in colleges that raise prices at breakneck speeds, casting much needed attention to a decades-old problem.

But decrying symptoms doesn't cure a disease. That requires attacking root causes, which is where Obama fails: Rather than assault ever-expanding student aid, which practically begs colleges to inflate prices, the president wants to increase aid while imposing weak price controls on schools and states.

Obama isn't totally off, of course, in reasoning that colleges largely set their own tuition, so one way to control prices is to pressure schools. And he's right that states tend to slow funding for public colleges during bad economic times.

But how is it colleges can raise their prices at incredible rates and still get people to pay?

Because students use lots of money belonging to other people, and Washington ensures that the funding meets ever-ballooning bills.

Indeed, in 2010 the federal government disbursed roughly $140 billion in financial aid to students, a staggering amount that has exploded from roughly $30 billion, adjusted for inflation, in 1985.

And those tightfisted states?

According to data from the State Higher Education Executive Officers, inflation-adjusted state and local allocations to public institutions actually rose from $69.2 billion in 2000 to $74.9 billion in 2010.

Gov't Spending Up

In that same time, however, inflation-adjusted tuition and fees at public four-year colleges increased from $4,586 to $7,889.

Schools hiked their prices despite state and local appropriations rising.

Corroborating that cheap states aren't the primary drivers of college costs are private institutions. They haven't lost big state and local subsidies because they've never gotten them, yet they increased real prices from $21,013 in 2000 to $28,254 in 2010.

Still, on a per-student basis state and local funding has been decreasing, because enrollment has significantly grown.

Such losses might be regrettable were students graduating and moving on to high-paying jobs. But they aren't.

According to the federal Digest of Education Statistics, the latest six-year graduation rate for public four-year programs is a dismal 55 percent. In addition, about one-third of bachelor's holders are in jobs that don't require degrees. Finally, real earnings for people whose top attainment is a bachelor's have dropped over the decade.

Simply put, there are too many people in college. Unfortunately, to deal with these realities the president is proposing to increase aid, to which he'd couple a few soft price controls.

Too Many Students?

He proposes, for instance, increasing spending on Perkins Loans, Work Study, and Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants to $10 billion, but giving less money through those programs to colleges that, according to the White House, "show poor value, or... don't act responsibly in setting tuition."

The president would also create a $1 billion "Race to the Top" that would "incentivize" states to, among other things, "maintain adequate levels of funding for higher education."

The White House doesn't define "adequate," but the implication is clear: Spend more taxpayer money, get more taxpayer money.

Ultimately the plan is a stinker, with the disaster-exacerbating aid increase the most likely part to pass. Few in Washington can resist doling out "free" money.

And the price controls?

Such controls are almost always bad, distorting supply and demand. But given the government-fueled Ivory Tower excess, perhaps weak controls would be helpful, at least in the short term.

But the ones proposed would have little power. Even plussed-up to $10 billion, the programs the president would employ for leverage would be dwarfed by Pell Grants, Stafford Loans, and tax incentives, which tally in the hundreds of billions. Most colleges could more than make up for slight Perkins or Work Study losses with other aid.

And Race to the Top? If it's at all like its K-12 cousin, it'll be a dud. Lots of states made huge fusses to get the money, but since it's been awarded the winners have shown little urgency to implement their promised reforms.

It's good that the president is focusing on higher education. But his remedies would do nothing to cure the disease.

Neal McCluskey is associate director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom and author of Feds in the Classroom: How Big Government Corrupts, Cripples, and Compromises American Education.

I was thrilled to see this headline on the American Civil Liberties Union's website after the Supreme Court's unanimous Jan. 23 ruling on United States v. Jones: "Supreme Court GPS Ruling: Bringing the 4th Amendment Into the 21st Century" (aclu.org, Jan. 26). Wow!

And this dramatic praise from Marcia Hofmann, the senior staff attorney for leading digital civil liberties protector, the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

"The Supreme Court has unanimously confirmed that the Constitution prevents unbridled police use of new technologies to monitor our movements" ("Unanimous Supreme Court Ensures Americans Have Protections From GPS Surveillance," eff.org, Jan. 23).

Do you hear that, President Obama?

But as soon as I read Justice Antonin Scalia's decision, I knew the Supreme Court had committed no such all-encompassing attack on how George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Barack Obama have turned us into a society constantly under surveillance by the government.

First, let's look at the actual case: In 2005, a joint FBI and Washington, D.C., police task force covertly placed a Global Positioning System (GPS) device on Antoine Jones' Jeep, which was parked in a public lot in Maryland. For four weeks, the GPS, using satellites, allowed the authorities to continuously monitor Jones' actions and movements as he drove his Jeep.

From what the authorities learned from the GPS's tracking, Jones was arrested and charged with conspiracy to distribute cocaine. Justice Scalia, joined by colleagues John Roberts, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Sonia Sotomayor, declared in the court's decision: "The government physically occupied private property for the purpose of obtaining information. We have no doubt that such a physical intrusion would have been considered a 'search' within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment when it was adopted."

Scalia is notably proud of being an "originalist" — relying on the language of the Constitution when our founders were here. Accordingly, he adds that he is applying in this case "an 18th-century guarantee against unreasonable searches."

However, Justice Samuel Alito, in a concurring opinion with the three other justices, argues that "it is almost impossible to think of late-18th-century situations that are analogous to what took place in this case... the use of longer-term GPS monitoring in investigations of most offenses impinges on expectations of privacy."

All four justices maintain that the familiar "expectation of privacy" involves much more than government infringement of our private property rights.

Strongly agreeing with Alito, the Rutherford Institute's president, John W. Whitehead, an incisively alert constitutionalist, reminds us:

"The government's arsenal of surveillance technologies now includes a multitude of devices which enable it to comprehensively monitor an individual's private life without necessarily introducing the type of physical intrusion into his person or property covered by the (Jones) ruling" ("U.S. v. Jones: The Battle for the Fourth Amendment Continues," rutherford.org, Jan. 23).

Scalia did not ignore Alito's reminder of the century we live in, but he tried to have the high court postpone doing anything about it, saying: "It may be that achieving the same result through electronic means without an accompanying trespass (on private property) is (also) an unconstitutional invasion of privacy, but the present case does not require us to answer that question."

What about those of us who still care about our privacy, sir, which is increasingly limited by so many other means?

Justice Sotomayor, one of the justices to concur with the court's ruling, gently chides Scalia, writing:

"People disclose the phone numbers that they dial or text to their cellular providers; the URLs that they visit and the email addresses with which they correspond to their Internet service providers; and the books, groceries and medications they purchase to online retailers.

"I, for one," she continues, "doubt that people would accept without complaint the warrantless disclosure to the government of a list of every website they had visited in the last week, or month, or year" — without the government having physically occupied their property.

A growing number of Americans and I would like to ask Justice Scalia and his four "let's stop here" colleagues why they're waiting to rule on our expectations of privacy in this century and others to come.

To those who are greatly overstating the significance of this decidedly limited U.S. v. Jones decision, I bring back John W. Whitehead, who does not mince his words:

"We have entered a new and frightening age when advancing technology is erasing the Fourth Amendment. Thankfully, in recognizing that the placement of a GPS device on Antoine Jones' Jeep violated the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable search and seizure, the U.S. Supreme Court has sent a resounding message to government officials — especially law enforcement officials — that there are limits to their powers" ("Victory: In 9-0 Ruling in U.S. v. Jones, U.S. Supreme Court Declares Warrantless GPS Use by Police Unconstitutional," rutherford.org, Jan. 23).

But it's not "a resounding message." In reporters' parlance, U.S. v. Jones is now a dead story. I'm not aware of any urgency on either side in Congress to address our Fourth Amendment expectations of privacy in such a way that will exceed the private property essence of U.S. v. Jones.

We know that President Obama, if re-elected, is tone-deaf on reviving the Fourth Amendment and certain other parts of the Bill of Rights, not to mention the separation of powers. (Obama, after all, was the government in this case.) And, watching the endless Republican presidential candidates' debates, I've not sensed any deep concern among them, with the exception of Ron Paul, about the flickering remnants of our personal privacy.

Next week, John W. Whitehead (despite calling this particular ruling "a resounding message") and others detail the frightening ways that swiftly advancing technology is tracking us far beyond the personal property limits on government surveillance in U.S. v. Jones.

Have you asked your children what their expectations of privacy are? How many of them can tell the compelling, tumultuous history of the Fourth Amendment since the 18th century? Shouldn't they know?

Nat Hentoff is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.

One of the few lines in President Obama’s State of the Union address that actually received bipartisan applause was his vow of “no bailouts, no handouts, and no cop outs.” Of course the president then went on to claim credit for his bailout of the auto industry and promise additional handouts to the “green energy” industry.

Both liberals and conservatives often succumb to a narrative that pits big government against big business. No doubt many of big government’s tax and regulatory policies do make it more difficult for businesses to expand and hire people. But just as often, big business and big government are all too happy to work hand in hand to thwart the free market.Confusing support for free markets with support for the corporate agenda is a bipartisan failing. In a free market, for example, corporations compete against one another on their merits. Government doesn’t pick winners and losers or prefer one type of industry over another.

Yet, Rick Santorum shares President Obama’s desire for special tax breaks for “manufacturing.” Both Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney join President Obama in backing government subsidies for ethanol and other alternative energy.

And obviously, in a free market, when businesses fail because they made stupid investment decisions, they go bankrupt. But both Romney and Gingrich joined President Obama (and President Bush) in supporting TARP and the bailout of some of America’s biggest banks and investment firms. This was not a one-time situation brought about by a unique crisis: Dodd-Frank enshrines the principle of “too big to fail,” all but guaranteeing future bailouts.

The Cato Institute estimates that corporate welfare now tops $125 billion per year. Among the biggest beneficiaries are companies such as Boeing, Xerox, IBM, Motorola, Dow Chemical, and General Electric. At a time when we are facing a $15.3 trillion national debt and borrowing 34 cents out of every dollar we spend, should we really be spending money to subsidize McDonald’s advertisements for Chicken McNuggets overseas?

And, when they don’t get direct subsidies, businesses are forcing taxpayers to subsidize consumer purchases of their products.

For example, Big Pharma poured more than $150 million into advertising in favor of Obamacare. Why? Among other things, every insurance plan in America will now be required to cover pharmaceutical products. And, closing the Medicare Part D “donut hole” will encourage seniors to buy brand-name drugs rather than cheaper generics. Speaking of the Medicare prescription-drug program, guess who was the biggest lobby in favor of the entitlement expansion? The drug companies even funneled millions of dollars to Newt Gingrich’s Center for Health Transformation. No surprise, then, that Gingrich supported the Medicare expansion, calling it a cost-saving idea, even though it added $17 trillion to the Medicare’s unfunded obligations. Among the biggest supporters of Obamacare’s individual insurance mandate are the big insurance companies. After all, isn’t it great for the government to force people to buy your product? It certainly beats having to provide cheaper and higher-quality insurance.

Big businesses also use regulations to prevent competition or impose costs on their competitors. For example, General Electric is among the biggest supporters of President Obama’s “cap and trade” proposals. GE is not doing this out of some sense of altruistic global citizenship, but because it operates a unit that would trade cap-and-trade credits. The company stands to reap billions in profits were Obama’s plan to pass.

Similarly, Walmart stunned many by coming out in support of an employer health mandate. But it’s really not that surprising. Walmart actually spends more on employee health care than its competitor Target. Mandating that all companies provide health insurance will drive up Target’s costs, benefiting Walmart.

President Obama is planning to mount a reelection campaign that attempts to paint Republicans as the captives of special interests, ignoring his own addiction to corporate bailouts, handouts, and cop outs.

Polls show that despite the president’s drumbeat about inequality, Americans are not particularly concerned about income disparities. But there does seem to be a growing concern that the system seems to be rigged to benefit the powerful and well connected. Simply put, Americans don’t care about unequal outcomes as long as the system is fair.

If Republicans want to counter this, they will need to take a firm stand in favor of free markets, rather than special-interest corporatism. They should stop talking about how “pro-business” they are, and talk about the virtues of free-market capitalism — emphasis on the “free market.”

Will they do so?

Last week, both Romney and Gingrich came out in favor of sugar subsidies. That isn’t encouraging.

Michael Tanner is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of Leviathan on the Right: How Big-Government Conservatism Brought Down the Republican Revolution.

Sixteen lobbyists raised nearly $2.2 million to aid the presidential campaign of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in 2011, according to a Center for Responsive Politics review of documents filed with the Federal Election Commission. Michael Beckel http://www.opensecrets.org/about/staff.php#beckel

Last year, 445 bundlers collectively raised at least $74.4 million for Barack Obama and the Democratic National Committee. That represents $35 out of every $100 the two organizations have raised since April, when Obama launched his re-election bid. Michael Beckel http://www.opensecrets.org/about/staff.php#beckel

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki. Photo/Wikimedia.

Human Rights Watch is charging that, despite U.S. government assurances that it helped create a stable democracy, the reality is that it left behind a “budding police state” —  cracking down harshly during 2011 on freedom of expression and assembly by intimidating, beating, and detaining activists, demonstrators, and journalists.

The organization’s Middle East and North Africa director, Sarah Leah Whitson, warns that “Iraq is quickly slipping back into authoritarianism as its security forces abuse protesters, harass journalists, and torture detainees.”

Its World Report 2012 attributes the downward trajectory to the security services of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki” and armed gangs.

The report notes that in February, HRW “uncovered a secret detention facility controlled by elite security forces who report to the military office of the Prime Minister. The report added, “The same elite divisions controlled Camp Honor, a separate facility in Baghdad where detainees were tortured with impunity.”

The 676-page report report says, “Given the violent forces resisting the “Arab Spring,” the international community has an important role to play in assisting the birth of rights-respecting democracies in the region.”

The report documents a wide range of human rights abuses. For example, it says, “In the weeks before the last convoy of US troops left Iraq on December 18, Iraqi security forces rounded up hundreds of Iraqis accused of being former Baath Party members, most of whom remain in detention without charge.”

The pullout of U.S. troops has been marked by an “apolitical crisis and a series of terrorist attacks targeting civilians that have rocked the country.” But Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence is not new and is unconnected to the US exit. A number of US Embassy cables released by Wikileaks refer to the torture of prisoners in Iraqi custody and of knowledge of some of it by US troops.

The annual report, which covers the state of human rights in some 90 countries, says that, during nationwide demonstrations in Iraq to “protest widespread corruption and demand greater civil and political rights,” security forces “violently dispersed protesters, killing at least 12 on February 25, and injuring more than 100. Baghdad security forces beat unarmed journalists and protesters that day, smashing cameras and confiscating memory cards.”

Earlier in the year, “in one of the worst incidents, government-backed thugs armed with wooden planks, knives, and iron pipes, beat and stabbed peaceful protesters and sexually molested female demonstrators as security forces stood by and watched, sometimes laughing at the victims,” the report charges.

In May, the report says, the Council of Ministers approved a Law on the Freedom of Expression of Opinion, Assembly, and Peaceful Demonstration, which “authorizes officials to restrict freedom of assembly to protect ‘the public interest’ and in the interest of ‘general order or public morals.’ This law still awaits parliamentary approval.

HRW comments that freedom of expression fared little better as “security forces routinely abused journalists covering demonstrations, using threats, arbitrary arrests, beatings, and harassment, and confiscating or destroying their equipment.”

On September 8, the report says, “An unknown assailant shot to death Hadi al-Mahdi, a popular radio journalist often critical of government corruption and social inequality, at his home in Baghdad. Immediately before his death, HRW says al-Mahdi had received several phone and text message threats not to return to Baghdad’s Tahrir Square, which was the focal point for the weekly demonstrations.”

Earlier, after attending the February 25 “Day of Anger” mass demonstration, security forces arrested, blindfolded, and severely beat him and three other journalists during a subsequent interrogation,” HRW says.

In January 2012, HRW says it “observed that Iraqi authorities had successfully curtailed the Tahrir Square anti-government demonstrations by
flooding the weekly protests with pro-government supporters and undercover security agents. Dissenting activists and independent journalists for the most part said that they no longer felt safe attending the demonstrations.”

The report continues, “Prison brutality, including torture in detention facilities, was a major problem throughout the year. In February, Human Rights Watch uncovered, within the Camp Justice military base in Baghdad, a secret detention facility controlled by elite security forces who report to al-Maliki’s military office.”

Beginning in late 2010, the report charges, Iraqi authorities transferred more than 280 detainees to the facility, which was controlled by the Army’s 56th Brigade and the Counter-Terrorism Service.

HRW added that “the same elite divisions controlled Camp Honor, a separate facility in Baghdad where detainees were tortured with impunity. More than a dozen former Camp Honor detainees told Human Rights Watch that detainees were held incommunicado and in inhumane conditions, many for months at a time. Detainees said interrogators beat them; hung them upside down for hours at a time; administered electric shocks to various body parts, including the genitals; and repeatedly put plastic bags over their heads until they passed out from asphyxiation.”

HRW also weighed in on the human rights situation in Iraqi Kurdistan. In what it called the “Silenced Spring,” HRW’s Samer Muscati recounts that  the Kurdistan Regional Government “promised a new era of freedom for Iraqi Kurds, but it seems no more respectful of Kurdish rights to free speech than the government that preceded it.”

He added, “In a time when the Middle East is erupting in demands to end repression, the Kurdish authorities are trying to stifle and intimidate critical journalism.”

In March, Human Rights Watch interviewed more than 20 journalists in Kurdistan covering the protests and found that security forces and their proxies routinely repress journalists through threats, arbitrary arrests, beatings, and harassment, and by confiscating and destroying their equipment.

And Iraqi authorities appear to be pulling no punches. Zana Ali Ghazi, 32, a reporter for the Kurdistan News Network (KNN), a satellite television channel affiliated with the Kurdish opposition party, Goran, said that while he was trying to report on a protest in the city of Saeed Sadiq on March 15, “eight armed men, some in uniform, cracked three of his ribs and beat him with wooden clubs and Kalashnikovs until he lost consciousness. ‘They told me that if I continued to cover this type of news, they would kill me’,” Ghazi told HRW.

Kurdistan authorities have repeatedly tried to silence Livin Magazine, one of Iraqi Kurdistan’s leading independent publications, and other media. The international community should end its silence and condemn these widening
attacks, Human Rights Watch said.

A Livin reporter told Human Rights Watch that when he called the Minister of Peshmerga (Kurdistan security forces), on April 24, the minister threatened Livin’s editor, Mira, with death. The reporter says the conversation is on tape but that no one from the Iraqi authorities had made any move to investigate.

In Sulaimaniya on the night of May 11, security forces detained and beat a Kurdistan News Network reporter, Bryar Namiq, breaking his hand.

In Arbil, two journalists, who HRW says are afraid to be named for fear of reprisal, charged that on May 18 eight men in civilian clothes chased after them in late April. The men appeared in two vehicles on the street just before the journalists were supposed to meet with a regional official who had asked for a meeting with some members of the media.

HRW says the journalists believe that the men were plainclothes security forces who were aware of the meeting and were trying to kidnap them.

The HRW Report says that Soran Umar, a protest organizer and freelance journalist, has been in hiding since April 19. “I have not slept at home since then,” he told Human Rights Watch on May 17. “My sin is that I am criticizing the undemocratic acts of KRG and the two ruling parties, that is all. The security forces have tried to kidnap me, and they have ordered my arrest. They even tried to kidnap my son.”

These examples appear to be a small fraction of abuses carried out by Iraqi government authorities against journalists — Reporters Without Borders has tallied 44 physical attacks against media workers and outlets and 23 arrests.

Which prompted this thought from HRW’s Sarah Leah Whitson: “Eight years after the United States removed Saddam Hussein in the name of protecting the rights of Kurds, it is standing by silently as the government it helped to install in Kurdistan abuses and represses the population. US President Obama noted in his speech on May 20 the flourishing democracy in Iraq, but the reality is that government-sponsored fear and repression continue to fester there.”

William Fisher has managed economic development programs for the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Middle East, North Africa, Latin America, Asia and elsewhere for the past 25 years. He has supervised major multi-year projects for AID in Egypt, where he lived and worked for three years. He returned later with his team to design Egypt’s agricultural strategy. Fisher served in the international affairs area in the administration of President John F. Kennedy. He began his working life as a reporter and bureau chief for the Daytona Beach News-Journal and the Associated Press in Florida. He now reports on a wide-range of issues for a number of online journals.

Drums are beating for a pre-emptive war to take out such nuclear facilities as Iran might have. But considerable caution is in order, because this is basically the same story Americans heard not so long ago, in 2003, to promote the pre-emptive war against Iraq. Although the United States “won” that war, intelligence about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction turned out to be wrong, the killing has gone on for nearly a decade, Sunni and Shiite factions appear to be going at each other again, and with Saddam Hussein gone, there’s a political/military vacuum that Iraq’s larger neighbor Iran is undoubtedly eager to exploit.

The calls for another pre-emptive war are particularly ironic considering that Iran used to be a friend of the United States. Our CIA helped the Shah secure his power in 1953, because he helped prevent Soviet penetration of the Mideast. But the Shah went on to establish a secular, authoritarian regime that made plenty of enemies. Ayatollah Khomeini became one of the Shah’s most formidable enemies as early as the 1960s. Because the U.S. backed the Shah, his enemies became our enemies, and they unexpectedly seized power in 1979. The U.S. affirmed its status as an enemy by backing Saddam Hussein after he attacked Iran the following year, in what became an eight-year blood bath.

Iranian leaders have done just about everything to convince the world that they are a bunch of dangerous fanatics, so the prospect of a nuclear Iran is scary. But by now we ought to have learned that a pre-emptive war can multiply the complications.

This is because war is the most costly, violent and unpredictable thing governments do. Again and again, even decisive victories can turn out to be serious mistakes, if not catastrophes, because of unintended consequences. While we might be able to control what we do, we cannot control how other people react to what we do.

Here are 6 reasons why wars go wrong:

1. Nations at war often try to avenge their suffering, which means they are likely to inflame hatreds that persist for a long time and provoke more wars.

In April 1917, President Woodrow Wilson led the United States into World War I. He claimed it was “the war to end wars.” He vowed that it would “make the world safe for democracy.” At that time, the war had been stalemated for three years — neither side able to impose its will on the other. By intervening on the side of the British and the French, Wilson made it possible to break the stalemate, win a decisive victory and dictate terms to the losers.

Wilson imagined he could negotiate peace on noble principles expressed in his January 1918 ”Fourteen Points” speech before a joint session of Congress. But almost a million British soldiers and civilians died in the war. Almost 1.7 million French soldiers and civilians died. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers succumbed to the influenza pandemic. In addition to battle-related destruction of property, retreating soldiers destroyed just about everything that might be useful for their adversaries. They cratered roads, burned homes, demolished factories, poisoned wells, flooded mines, ruined crops and slaughtered livestock.

Wilson, who had more formal education than any previous U.S. president, failed to understand how determined British Prime Minister David Lloyd-George and French Premier Georges Clemenceau were to avenge their grievances against Germany. Clemenceau, for instance, acknowledged that “My life hatred has been for Germany because of what she has done to France.” Wilson was hopelessly outmaneuvered during the postwar negotiations, and the result was the vindictive Versailles Treaty that had nothing to do with the Fourteen Points.

The treaty, forced on the Germans, triggered a nationalist firestorm that enabled a lunatic like Adolf Hitler to attract thousands of followers by promoting hatred and violence. If the United States had stayed out of the war, quite likely it would have ended with some kind of negotiated settlement and better long-term prospects for peace.

2. The overwhelming stresses of war can trigger economic chaos, political crises and totalitarian regimes.

As long as Woodrow Wilson was neutral during World War I, he didn’t have any reason to care what the Russians did. But when he entered the war, he had an incentive to keep Russia fighting on the Eastern Front. This tied up German soldiers there. If the Russians quit the war, as they were anxious to do, Germany would have been able to move some of their soldiers to the Western Front, causing more trouble for the British, French and Americans. So Wilson put pressure on the Russian government. His policy was “No fight, no loans.” He bribed the financially-strapped Russians.

But Russia had begun disintegrating from the day it entered the war in August 1914. Harvard historian Richard Pipes reported that “the army required each month a minimum of 100,000 to 150,000 new rifles, but Russian industry at best could provide only 27,000.” Large numbers of Russian soldiers were sent to the Eastern Front unarmed, and Russian mothers were outraged. The government conscripted some 11 million peasants into the army, which depopulated farms and caused chronic food shortages. In any case, there wasn’t enough railroad capacity both to ship soldiers to the front and ship food for the people — three-quarters of Russian railroad lines had just one track. Massive corruption undermined political support for the government. “There is no indication that the dark and violent history of Russia ever occupied Wilson’s attention,” American diplomat and historian George F. Kennan observed in Russia Leaves The War (1956), which won a Pulitzer Prize.

By keeping Russia in the war, Wilson unintentionally accelerated the disintegration of the Russian army. Kennan reported, “not only had Russia become involved in a great internal political crisis, but she had lost in the process her real ability to make war. The internal crisis was of such gravity that there was no chance for a healthy and constructive solution to it unless the war effort could be terminated at once.” Staying in the war, Kennan added, “provided grist to the mill of the agitator and the fanatic: the last people one would have wished to encourage at such a dangerous moment.” Lenin tried to seize power three times during the summer of 1917, but he failed even though hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers were deserting. Lenin didn’t succeed until his fourth attempted coup in October 1917, when the Russian army had virtually collapsed.

On August 23, 1939, Lenin’s successor Josef Stalin approved a pact with Hitler, pledging (1) that Germany and the Soviet Union wouldn’t attack each other and (2) that they would carve up Poland. “By freeing Germany from the risk of waging war on two fronts,” noted the French historian Stéphane Courtois, “the pact led directly to the outbreak of World War II.” A week after the pack was approved, Hitler invaded Poland, and the war was underway. We might have been spared all that if Woodrow Wilson hadn’t been so anxious to have Russia continue fighting in World War I.

3. If allies have conflicting aims, a war is likely to have conflicting outcomes.

U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill embraced Stalin as an ally after Hitler ordered the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, even though Hitler and Stalin had been odious allies up to that point. FDR and Churchill figured they needed all the help they could get.

But this marriage of convenience changed the nature of World War II. It was no longer a struggle for freedom, because Stalin ranked among history’s worst mass murderers — approximately 42 million deaths. Moreover, the Nazis developed concentration camps based on what they had learned about earlier Soviet concentration camps. Rudolf Hess, who organized Auschwitz, cited Nazi reports that “described in great detail the conditions in, and organization of, the Soviet camps, as supplied by former prisoners who had managed to escape. Great emphasis was placed on the fact that the Soviets, by their massive employment of forced labor, had destroyed whole peoples.”

Stalin exploited more opportunities to expand his Soviet empire after he allied with FDR and Churchill than before. Hundreds of millions of people were liberated from the Nazis, but most were re-enslaved by Stalin. He seized Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, generous portions of Poland, Finland and Rumania. Moreover, Poland, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary and Rumania became Soviet satellites.

On August 8, 1945, two days after the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the Soviet Union declared war against Japan and grabbed more territory. The Soviet Union conquered Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, Sakhalin Island, the Kuriles and Korea. In addition, Stalin helped Mao Zedong who was fighting to establish a communist regime in China. Altogether, within five years after World War II the number of people subject to communist oppression in Europe and Asia soared from 170 million to about 800 million.

4. A vulnerable adversary can become unbeatable if it unexpectedly gains a big ally.

At the National Press Club, January 12, 1950, Secretary of State Dean Acheson gave a speech identifying nations that the United States pledged to defend from an attack. Acheson’s “defense perimeter” notably didn’t include South Korea. That nation, after all, had long been embroiled in conflicts involving its neighbors China, Russia and Japan.

Then on June 25, 1950, North Korean communist dictator Kim Il Sung attacked South Korea. North Korean soldiers crossed the 38th Parallel and entered South Korea. President Harry Truman decided to try stopping this communist aggression, even though South Korea was much less of an issue than China that had already fallen to the communists the previous year. On July 19, Truman asked Congress for $10 billion of emergency appropriations to fund a “police action” in Korea — he didn’t want to ask Congress for a declaration of war and risk having that defeated.

U.S. forces, led by General Douglas MacArthur, landed behind North Korean lines at Inchon — a very bold move — and within a few weeks he was advancing into North Korea. He did so well that Truman let him have a substantially free hand. In late 1950, MacArthur told reporters that the war was almost over.

He might have been wise to settle for occupying North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang, but he pushed his luck as he continued heading north toward the Yalu River on the Chinese border. Then came reports that indicated South Korean soldiers were “heavily engaged with a fiercely resisting [unidentified] enemy.” U.S. forces captured some prisoners who turned out to be Chinese. MacArthur began to hear that Chinese “volunteers,” as Chairman Mao called them, had crossed the border. MacArthur commented that the situation was “not alarming.” But the increasing number of shootouts suggested that a large number of Chinese soldiers might be in North Korea. Then the New York Times reported that “Chinese Communist hordes, attacking on horse and foot to the sound of bugle calls, cut up Americans and South Koreans in an Indian-style massacre.”

In fact, some 300,000 Chinese soldiers had swarmed across the border and forced MacArthur to retreat. The Chinese captured Seoul, South Korea’s capital. Eventually MacArthur battled his way back to the 38th Parallel, and the war became stalemated.. An armistice was signed on June 7, 1953. U.S. armed forces had doubled to 3 million, military spending had quadrupled, the war had cost an estimated $75 billion (real money back then), and 54,246 American lives had been lost. Six decades later, U.S. forces are still in South Korea.

5. Major powers can be thwarted by people who are fighting for their homeland, know their territory well and have nowhere else to go.

After running as a peace candidate during the 1964 election, President Lyndon Johnson authorized the escalation of the Vietnam War. He embraced the “domino theory” that a communist takeover in one country like Vietnam could result in other Asian countries falling to communists. But as noted, the biggest domino — China — had already fallen.

President Johnson seemed to view Vietnam as if it were a social welfare program. He declared, “Our foreign policy must always be an extension of our domestic policy” — namely, his Great Society entitlements. “I want to leave the footprints of America [in Vietnam]. I want them to say, ‘This is what Americans left — schools and hospitals and dams.’” Johnson’s Vice President Hubert Humphrey was even more carried away by the dream of doing good in Vietnamese jungles: “We ought to be excited about this challenge, because here’s where we can put to work some of the ideas about... nation-building... new concepts of education, development of local government, the improvement of health standards... and really the achievement and fulfillment of full social justice.”

Johnson made many mistakes besides having unrealistic expectations. He micro-managed the war and severely restricted what military commanders could do. His policy of gradual escalation seemed to convince the communist North Vietnamese that the United States was a reluctant warrior who could be defeated if they persisted long enough. Johnson and his top brass over-estimated the American advantages of superior weapons, especially air power.

Such policies led many observers to believe that if only the military had been unleashed, they could have won the Vietnam War, but there are reasons to doubt that. Vietnamese were fighting on their homeland. They knew the jungles well, they had nowhere else to go, and their survival was at stake. Americans didn’t know the jungles, everyone figured that eventually we would go home, and American survival wasn’t at stake, because the United States was more than 8,000 miles away. Moreover, since North Vietnamese insurgents wore ordinary civilian clothing, and they mingled among the South Vietnamese, American soldiers could never be sure which were the people they were trying to help and which were the enemies plotting for murder and mayhem. These are crucial advantages that native people always have when dealing with a foreign military presence. Such advantages go far to explain why major powers have become bogged down in guerrilla wars.

6. People don’t want somebody else building their nation, even when they’re making a mess of it — especially during a civil war.

In 1957, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency fixed parliamentary elections in Lebanon. Former CIA officer Victor Marchetti recalled, “the CIA had helped elect so many pro-American candidates that the established Arab nationalist politicians were furious, realizing that the cheating was eroding their power base. The feud that had been brewing between Arab nationalists and the pro-Western Christians erupted into civil war. President Eisenhower sent in the marines. They were withdrawn after a few months, but what had been perhaps the most stable state in the Middle East was on the road to total polarization and eventual disintegration.”

A quarter-century later, U.S. and French forces were in Lebanon again. They attempted to serve as peacekeepers amidst the civil war that raged on. In October 1983, two truck bombs struck the barracks — an inviting stationary target. Among the dead were 58 French personnel and 241 Americans. The American death toll included three Army soldiers, 18 Navy seamen and 220 Marines. Apparently recognizing the futility of trying to referee a civil war, President Ronald Reagan ordered that U.S. forces be withdrawn from Lebanon.

In 1993, Bill Clinton imagined that the U.S. could build a nation in Somalia — or as Clinton’s then-UN ambassador Madeleine Albright put it: “nothing less than the restoration of an entire country.” The first step was to be the disarming of warlords. Of course, they wouldn’t be warlords without their guns, so the U.S. found itself embroiled in another civil war. Tragically, American soldiers were killed for nothing that involved a vital U.S. interest, certainly nothing that well-intended intervention was capable of resolving. Clinton recognized the futility of the intervention and withdrew U.S. forces.

The following year, however, Clinton was at it again. He ordered 20,000 U.S. soldiers to Haiti, so they could help alleviate hunger and establish a democracy. Eight years later, Haitian poverty rates were higher, literacy rates were lower than when the mission had begun, and political turmoil persisted. Why was anybody surprised at the futility of this intervention?. Since Haiti gained independence in 1804, Historians Robert Debs Heinl, Jr. and Nancy Gordon Heinl described it as “a country with nearly 200 revolutions, coups, insurrections and civil wars.”

After 9/11, President George W. Bush ordered U.S. forces into Afghanistan to destroy the camps where al-Qaeda terrorists were trained. This mission became a decade-long (and counting) nation-building project. Now, although almost 2,000 U.S. soldiers have died there and hundreds of billions of dollars have been spent fighting, Afghans continue to grow opium, stone women and engage in bloody power struggles. One might have thought that our sacrifices would have at least bought a loyal ally. But Afghan President Hamid Karzai declared his country would side with Pakistan in the event of a conflict with the United States. The British weren’t able to reform Afghanistan, nor could the Russians, and it’s doubtful whether we’ll be able to do any better.

Clearly, if government intervention cannot save relatively small nations like Lebanon, Somalia, Haiti or Afghanistan, there’s no reason to believe the world can be saved by having our government spend more money and order more American soldiers into harm’s way. Washington would do well if it could save itself from bankruptcy as a result of runaway spending and debt.

What people everywhere need is more freedom and free markets. We can’t force these things on others, but we can reverse anti-business policies that have throttled the American economy. When America becomes a dynamo again, more people overseas will find it in their self-interest to adopt the kinds of policies that work for us, much as millions of people embraced English as a principal language of business, science, technology and popular culture.

We need less foreign intervention, not more, to avoid gratuitously making enemies and contributing to difficult situations like we face with Iran now. This means restraining the government sector — the sector of bellicose rhetoric, seizures, embargoes, blockades, sanctions and wars. We need to encourage more voluntary, people-to-people international relations by businesses and nonprofits as well as individuals. Government can help do this by reducing restrictions on the movement of people, goods and capital.

Meanwhile, we need to be vigilant about maintaining a strong national defense that can protect us against aggression and perhaps more important, a strong national defense that can convincingly deter aggression. Deterrence is probably our best bet with Iran as it proved to be with the Soviet Union and China. Britain’s Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher paid Ronald Reagan a supreme compliment when she declared that “He won the cold war without firing a shot.”

Jim Powell, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, is the author of FDR's Folly, Wilson's War, Bully Boy, The Triumph of Liberty and other books.