How to deal with those non-Americans messing with threads on American National Intere

Discussion in 'Politics' started by fairplay, Jan 19, 2003.

  1. Indifference to all, and to all a good night.

    I would suggest searching for a greater sense of balance, for either course of action: engaging or ingnoring if taken to an extreme will yield less than optimal results. On the one side, engaging every word of any would be detractor is a fruitless waste of time. On the other, ignoring every word of any would be detractor would yield a homogeneous dialogue of agreement.

    I embrace the comments of those with whom I disagree. So long as their intentions are sincere, I find the excercise of rhetoric beneficial - often moreso than when engaging those with whom I agree.

    Just a thought,
    RLB
     
    #281     May 3, 2003
  2. msfe

    msfe

    U.S. Confronts EU On War Crimes Court

    Immunity Pact Issue Threatens Relations


    By Colum Lynch
    Washington Post Staff Writer
    Tuesday, June 10, 2003; Page A17


    UNITED NATIONS, June 9 -- The Bush administration charged the European Union with actively undermining U.S. efforts to shield Americans from prosecution by the International Criminal Court and warned that the impact on transatlantic relations will be "very damaging" if the EU does not stop.

    The unusually tough warning, which was issued in a confidential note to EU governments last week, threatens to complicate the United States' relations with its European allies as a June 25 summit in Washington approaches. It also comes as the United States formally tabled a Security Council resolution today that would extend immunity for at least one year to Americans serving in U.N.-authorized military operations from prosecution by the world's first permanent war crimes court.

    The United States has been struggling for a year to negotiate accords barring individual governments around the globe from surrendering Americans to the war crimes court, which went into force on July 1, 2002. So far, the United States has signed 37 immunity pacts, primarily with poor, small countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe.

    The U.S. effort has encountered stiff resistance from European allies, who believe that the terms set by the United States would undermine the power of the court before it has tried its first case.

    U.S. officials and one European diplomat said Germany, a stalwart supporter of the court, has led European opposition to the U.S. campaign. But the U.S. memorandum noted that there have been reports that a number of EU member ambassadors have "lobbied against U.S. bilateral efforts" outside of the extended European community. "The tone is equally aggressive on both sides," the European diplomat said.

    The United States accused the 15-member European Union of actively lobbying countries, including the 10 future members of the union, not to sign the U.S.-drafted agreements. The United States warned that recent improvement in relations with France, Germany and other countries that opposed the war in Iraq could be undone.

    "This will undercut all our efforts to repair and rebuild the transatlantic relationship just as we are taking a turn for the better after a number of difficult months," according to the note, known as a démarche, which was obtained by The Washington Post. "We are dismayed that the European Union would actively seek to undermine U.S. efforts."

    The dispute centers on a provision of the 1998 Rome Statute, which established the war crimes court. The provision allows states that have ratified the treaty to seek immunity for their troops -- through bilateral accords known as Article 98 agreements -- in countries where the troops are serving.

    Britain, France and other European governments have signed such agreements with Afghanistan, shielding thousands of European peacekeepers from surrender by Afghan authorities to the Hague-based court, which has been ratified by 90 nations. But the EU published guidelines last year that set limits on the scope of immunity that can be granted to individuals serving in a foreign military operation without undermining the international court. For instance, the exemption "should cover only persons present on the territory" of a nation that signed the agreement.

    European officials maintain that the U.S. immunity pacts go too far, granting broad immunity to all U.S. citizens -- including stationed troops, government officials in Washington and international contract workers -- for crimes committed anywhere in the world.

    U.S. officials grew alarmed when the European Union issued a letter in April to the new EU members urging them to honor the Sept. 30, 2002, guidelines, according to Richard Dicker, an expert on the court at the New York-based advocacy group Human Rights Watch. "The European Union is asserting the principles they have adopted and urging those states that want to join the EU to keep those principles in mind," he said. "It's the U.S. putting those governments that have ratified the treaty between a rock and a hard place."

    The United States argued in the démarche that its efforts to shield Americans from prosecution are consistent with the ICC treaty: "The EU guidelines for Article 98 agreements are inconsistent with the Rome Statute. We disagree. We continue to believe that our language does not contradict or undermine the ICC."
     
    #282     Jun 10, 2003
  3. msfe

    msfe

    An axis of junkies

    Classified pages in the Congress report on September 11 have stirred curiosity about the relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia, says Julian Borger

    Wednesday August 6, 2003

    Washington abhors a vacuum, and loves a mystery. Plenty of aficionados here are still obsessed with the 18 and a half minutes missing from the 6,000 hours of tapes of Richard Nixon's White House. Likewise, many are devoted to guessing exactly who Deep Throat was.

    Now a new gap has opened up in the capital's collective consciousness, becoming just as great a source of fascination. It is the 28 pages blanked out in the Congress report on September 11.

    Whoever had the bright idea of classifying it should have known that, just like Nixon's missing minutes, those pages would attract more attention than the other 800-plus put together.

    Consequently, attention has been focused on a subject that the Bush administration would prefer to be ignored: the strange, dysfunctional and incestuous relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia. The bond is far more relevant to the events of September 11 2001 than the absurdly-hyped connection between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida.

    According to the inevitable leaks, some of the 28 pages concern the career of a mysterious Saudi called Omar al-Bayoumi, who was living on the US west coast at the start of the new millennium.

    An elusive character, he had a tangle of financial relationships with Saudi officials and, at the same time, was well acquainted with two of the September 11 hijackers.

    The authors of the report suggest that he might represent the missing link between Washington's closest ally in the Arab world and the arch-nemesis of the US. Certainly, there is a lot there that is worth investigating.

    Even according to the report's declassified section on al-Bayoumi, he is a troubling figure. After a visit to the Saudi consulate in Los Angeles in January 2000, he went to a restaurant where he met the two future hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar.

    When they moved to San Diego a couple of weeks later, al-Bayoumi put them up and then found them an apartment.

    Officially, al-Bayoumi was an employee for the Saudi Civil Aviation Authority, but he seemed to do no work for them. However, that did not prevent him from receiving large amounts of money from Saudi official sources, in payments which grew significantly after he made the acquaintance of al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi.

    Some intelligence people in Washington argue that the link has been overstated in the congressional report. Although al-Bayoumi forked out for the first month's rent and deposit for the al-Qaida pair, there is evidence that he was paid back.

    Days after September 11, he was picked up in Birmingham, where he had moved from the US two months earlier, and questioned by both British and US officials before being released and returning to Saudi Arabia.

    In the wake of the new report, there is pressure for him to be questioned again. A team of investigators left for Riyadh at the beginning of this week to discuss, among a host of outstanding issues, the possibility of a new interrogation.

    From its previous session with him, the FBI is, apparently, more or less convinced that al-Bayoumi knew no advance details of the September 11 attack. On the other hand, they are pretty sure that he was an intelligence agent of some sort, possibly given the job of spying on Saudis in California and reporting back to Riyadh.

    But even if he was just a clueless spy - and there is evidence to suggest he did not just bump into the hijackers - the tantalising link is fairly extraordinary. After all, under the president's new doctrine of pre-emption, a country can get itself invaded for more tenuous links than that.

    The reason pages about the Saudi link to the hijackers (15 out of 19 of whom were Saudi nationals) are blanked out, while al-Qaida's questionable ties to Iraq and Iran are taken to the UN, is an old but crucial story. You could argue that the violent modern world revolves around the Washington-Riyadh axis.

    It is sometimes described as an uneasy marriage, but a more fitting analogy is the mutual dependency of two wealthy junkies dragging each other ever deeper into squalor.

    The US is addicted to cheap oil, and shows no inclination to wean itself off it. Meanwhile, Washington officialdom is hooked on the easy money Riyadh offers in the world of consultancies and thinktanks when they retire.

    If they play their cards right, senior US officials need never worry about a pension plan. George Bush senior, his secretary of state, James Baker, and the former CIA director, defence secretary and national security advisor, Frank Carlucci, have all picked up big consultancy fees and commissions for visiting Riyadh after leaving office. So has the former British prime minister John Major.

    In fact, on September 11 2001, Carlucci's Carlyle Group of investment managers and defence contractors was holding a meeting at Washington's Ritz-Carlton Hotel when the planes struck. Carlucci was there, as was Baker, and so was Shafiq bin Laden, Osama's brother and the head of the Bin Laden Group construction company.

    The Saudi royal family, meanwhile, has its own addictions. It depends on the US arms industry, of which it is the biggest foreign customer. Officially, it spends 16% of the country's GDP on arms, more than any country on earth, even though its security is essentially guaranteed by US forces. Even after those forces leave by the end of the year, they will not be far away, in Qatar and Kuwait.

    The Saudi monarchy is fixated on buying US weapons for two main reasons - to defend itself from its own people, and because it is a quick and easy form of kickbacks for a constantly growing clan finding it increasingly hard to live in the style to which it has become accustomed.

    Some of that money ends up in the fleshpots of Europe and the US, where it supports the dissolute lifestyle of the princes, and some of it goes in the form of insurance payments to the ultra-conservative Wahhabist clerics and their theological schools, which teach that the princes' lifestyle is the road to hell.

    Whether or not the cash is deliberately channelled to al-Qaida through middle-men, it is inevitable that millions will end up in the hands of people like Osama bin Laden, who are taking the Wahhabist cause to its enemies.

    Robert Baer, a former CIA official who saw the US-Saudi relationship up close, describes this axis of junkies in detail in his new book, Sleeping with the Devil.

    "We can't get around the fact that the House of Saud underwrites the mosque schools that turn out the jihadists, just as it administers the charities that fund the jihadists. It channels the anger of the jihadists against the west to distract it from the rot in the House of Saud," Baer writes.

    Soon, he believes, this "infernal merry-go-round" is going to come crashing down, triggering a recession in the west and a political earthquake in the Gulf.

    The only escape from that fate is for both sides to kick their habits. Baer thinks that Saudi Arabia has a better chance, particularly if the reformist Crown Prince Abdallah can outlive his stroke-crippled brother, King Fahd, being kept alive by a coterie of princes and hangers-on who know how much they have to lose.

    In Washington, there is no prospect that any administration in the near future would seriously tackle the country's love affair with oversize cars, and its consequent dependency on imported oil.

    Nor is there any sign that administration officials will stop looking to Riyadh to fund their retirements. Of the two junkies, it is the US that is probably beyond help.
     
    #283     Aug 7, 2003