Final straw for Afghan leader after child death toll in air strike hits 60

· Karzai orders new rules for all foreign military activity
· 90 civilians killed in worst incident since 2001

Julian Borger, diplomatic editor
The Guardian,
Wednesday August 27 2008

Sixty children were killed in air strikes by US-led coalition warplanes in western Afghanistan last week, a UN investigation has found. UN investigators said they discovered "convincing evidence" that a total of 90 Afghan civilians died in the incident.

The toll, potentially the worst since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, could wreck relations between the Afghan government and the Nato-led coalition forces, which were already under severe strain over civilian casualties and strategy in the counter-insurgency against the Taliban.

The government of President Hamid Karzai has ordered that any military operation by foreign forces on its territory will be subject to a new set of rules enforceable under international law.

Kai Eide, the UN special envoy to Afghanistan who ordered the investigation, said the incident could undermine the faith of the Afghan people in international efforts to stabilise the country.

Military sources said the air strikes last Thursday on the Shindand district of Herat province were carried out not by the Nato force attempting to bolster Karzai's government, but as part of a parallel US mission targeting al-Qaida and Taliban militants, called Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF).

US officials initially said that the air strikes were aimed at a Taliban stronghold and had killed 30 jihadis. An OEF spokesman in Kabul said last night that an investigation into the incident had been launched last Saturday and was still under way.

In his report, Eide said investigators from the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (Unama) found that up to eight houses in the village of Nawabad had been destroyed in the raids and many others damaged.

"Investigations by Unama found convincing evidence, based on the testimony of eyewitnesses, and others, that some 90 civilians were killed, including 60 children, 15 women and 15 men. Fifteen other villagers were wounded or otherwise injured," Eide wrote.

"This is matter of grave concern to the United Nations, I have repeatedly made clear that the safety and welfare of civilians must be considered above all else during the planning and conduct of all military operations. The impact of such operations undermines the trust and confidence of the Afghan people in efforts to build a just, peaceful, and law-abiding state."

Humayun Hamidzada, a spokesman for the Afghan president, said Karzai had ordered that all foreign military operations be governed by an internationally enforceable "status of forces agreement".

"The patience of the Afghan people has run out. We no longer can afford to see the killing of our children," Hamidzada said.

The incident comes at a fraught time for western forces in Afghanistan, after a week of high casualties and deep splits within Nato on sharing the burden of the Afghan conflict.

Eide was appointed to bring some coordination to the international community's disparate efforts. But last night he warned that those efforts were in danger of being crippled by public mistrust.

In a harshly worded statement, he said: "I want to remind all parties engaged in the conflict that the protection of civilians must be their primary concern; they must respect their duties under international humanitarian and human rights law to protect the people we are here to serve."
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MI5 criticised for role in case of torture, rendition and secrecy

· MI5 criticised for role in torture case
· UK intelligence agent questioned about alleged war crimes

• Richard Norton-Taylor
• The Guardian,
• Friday August 22 2008
• Article history

Binyam Mohamed, a UK resident held in Guantánamo Bay. Photograph: PA

MI5 participated in the unlawful interrogation of a British resident now held in

Guantánamo Bay, the high court found yesterday in a judgment raising serious questions about the conduct of Britain's security and intelligence agencies.

One MI5 officer was so concerned about incriminating himself that he

initially declined to answer questions from the judges even in private, the judgment reveals. Though the judges say "no adverse conclusions" should be drawn by the MI5 officer's plea against self-incrimination, they disclose that the officer, Witness B, was questioned about alleged war crimes under the international criminal court act, including torture. The full evidence surrounding Witness B's evidence, and the judges' findings, remain secret.

The MI5 officer interrogated the British resident,

Binyam Mohamed, while he was being held in Pakistan in 2002. Mohamed, 30, an Ethiopian national, was later secretly rendered to Morocco, where he says was tortured by having his penis cut with a razor blade. The US subsequently flew him to Afghanistan and he was transferred to Guantánamo Bay in September 2004 where he remains.

In a passage which appears to contradict previous assurances by MI5, Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones concluded: "The conduct of the security service facilitated interviews by or on behalf of the United States when [

Mohamed] was being detained by the United States incommunicado and without access to a lawyer." They added: "Under the law of Pakistan, that detention was unlawful."

Asked last month about unrelated allegations involving

detainees held in Pakistan, the Home Office said on behalf of MI5: "All security service staff have an awareness of the Human Rights Act 1998, and are fully committed to complying with the requirements of the law when working in the UK and overseas."

It added that the security and intelligence agencies "do not participate in, solicit, encourage or condone the use of torture or inhumane or degrading treatment".

In their ruling yesterday, the judges found that MI5 "continued to facilitate" the interviewing of

Mohamed at the behest of the US even after he was secretly flown out of Pakistan. It did so, they said, by providing information to America although its officers "must also have appreciated" he was being detained and questioned in a facility which was "that of a foreign government". That government is believed to be Morocco.

The judgment contains two particularly stinging passages. The judges said Witness B worked with the US "to the extent of making it clear to [

Mohamed] that the United Kingdom government would not help [him] unless he cooperated fully with the United States authorities". They added: "The relationship of the United Kingdom government to the United States authorities in connection with [Mohamed] was far beyond that of a bystander or witness to the alleged wrongdoing." Mohamed is due to be tried for terrorist offences before a US military commission in Guantánamo Bay as a result of confessions he says were extracted by torture. He faces the death penalty if found guilty. Without information held by the British government, he could not have a fair trial "as he will not be able to try to establish the only answer he has to the confessions - namely that they were involuntary and abstracted from him by wrongful treatment", the judges said.

Richard Stein, of Leigh Day,

Mohamed's lawyer, said outside the court that the government was clearly committed to a fair trial and opposed to the practices of torture and extraordinary rendition. He added: "However, unfortunately when faced with the choice between the rule of law and upsetting its allies the Americans, it waivers in this commitment".

David

Miliband, the foreign secretary, has provided the US with documents about the case, though the US has so far refused to release them. Miliband has declined to release further evidence about the case on grounds of national security, arguing that disclosure would harm Britain's intelligence relationship with the US.

The judges will decide which documents about the case must be released after a private court hearing next week.

A Foreign Office spokesman said the implications of the judgment were being considered very carefully. He added: "For strong reasons of national security, to which the court accepted we were entitled to give the highest weight, we could not agree to disclose this information voluntarily."

Clive Stafford Smith, director of Reprieve, the legal rights group also defending

Mohamed, said: "The British government may have been accused of being Bush's poodle, but the British courts remain bulldogs when it comes to human rights."

Senior security sources said last night that the judgment was being carefully looked at to see whether changes should be made in MI5's procedures.

They added that the court recognised that

Mohamed in 2002 was regarded as someone potentially significant. "Talking to people who could provide life-saving intelligence is MI5's bread and butter," they said.

Conservative ideology is why Britain is failing

George Osborne blames the state for the country's woes, but they are the result of Labour's enthusiastic embrace of Tory ideology

All comments (54)

• 
• • Prem Sikka
  • guardian.co.uk,
  • Thursday August 21 2008 18:00 BST
  • Article history

It has become fashionable for Conservative politicians and others to blame the state for almost everything. The state is blamed for rising income and wealth inequalities, the banking crisis, pensioner poverty, failed regulation, housing shortages, rising utility prices, complex tax laws and almost everything else under the sun. They rarely acknowledge the role of their ideologies in creating the very failures that they complain of.

Over the last 35 years, the UK state has been thoroughly restructured to advance the interests of the rich and major corporations. Through financial contributions, lobbying, funding of

thinktanks, friendly journalists, consultancies for legislators and jobs for potential and former ministers, they have colonised public policy making. The consensus about advancing social rights, equitable distribution of wealth and developing a just society has been eschewed in favour of markets, laissez-faire, light-touch regulation, corporate profits and tax cuts for the rich.

The state, we continue to be told, is the problem and gets in the way of market efficiency, but

neoconservatives are very adept at using the state to serve their interests. The private finance initiative (PFI) developed by the Conservatives and championed by Labour, ensures that the profits of many companies are relatively risk-free and guaranteed by the taxpayer.

Corporate

thinktanks, accountancy firms and the mega-rich are closely involved with the shaping of tax laws. The state obliges by giving tax concessions to non-dom millionaires. Tax breaks are created for specialist sectors (eg farming, movies) and soon exploited by others. Tax cuts for companies and the rich have been financed by wealth transfers from the most vulnerable. The last Conservative government reduced the state pension by breaking its link with average earnings and condemned many pensioners to poverty. Labour has not yet restored the link. The recent "10p in the £" fiasco is a continuation of the ideology that transfers wealth to the well-off.

The state has been used to smash trade unions and dilute worker's rights and their ability to secure an equitable share of wealth. The result is that the share of the

GDP going to workers in the form of wages and salaries has been reduced from 65.1% in 1975 to 52.6% in 1996. In 2006, it stood at 55.6%, a decline of 10% on 30 years. The Conservatives opposed the national minimum wage (pdf) and Labour appeased the elites by setting it at a low level. This has produced record corporate profits and fat-cat salaries for few, but hardship for many.

Seduced by the myth that private sector is somehow super-efficient, successive governments have privatised almost everything. Gas, electricity, water, telecommunications and many other industries have been sold at knockdown prices to enable a select few to become millionaires. The Conservatives bribed the electorate with few cheap shares, but none of this offered people any control over fat-cat executives, prices or quality of services. Labour has continued with the same policies. Regulators of gas, electricity, water, mobile phone and other sectors have either come from within the industry or are eyeing lucrative jobs there. All too often they see the issues through corporate lenses and have failed to protect consumers.

Light regulation and trusting the corporate elites has been a key factor in the recurring financial crisis. Normal people have been sold dud pensions, endowment mortgages and financial products. The regulators often do too little, too late. Even though people's savings, pensions and investments were tied up in the financial system, regulators did not monitor the financial dealings of banks. They were left free to speculate and gamble on stock markets. The regulators took no action even though billions of dollars of liabilities and toxic debts were not reported in the accounts of banks. The same opponents of effective regulation are only too pleased to accept state sponsored bailouts.

We are witnessing the results of the failed ideologies of conservatism, eagerly embraced by all the major political parties. We have bigger financial scandals, pensioner poverty, increasing income inequality and prospects of greater social strife. The dominant ideology of prioritising markets and appeasing corporate elites need to be replaced by policies that prioritise the concerns of normal people. Without this fundamental shift there is no prospect of building a fair and just society.

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Prem Sikka: Conservative ideology is why Britain is failing

This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Thursday August 21 2008. It was last updated at 18:00 on August 21 2008.

The Other Side of the “al-Mahdi deal”

It has been recently reported in a number of news sources that the British army struck a deal with the

al-Mahdi militia in Basra in an attempt to secure greater security there, which involved the release of al-Mahdi prisoners and a withdrawal from the centre of the city by British troops. Whilst regrets are now being expressed about such a deal, what cannot be forgotten is the treatment of Ahmed Al-Fartoosi, reportedly involved in this deal, and other Iraqi detainees in British army custody in Basra.

In The Times article “Secret deal kept British Army out of battle for Basra” on 5 August 2008 it was stated that the deal was intended “to encourage the Shia movement back into the political process and marginalise extremist factions”. In the Independent on Sunday on 3 August 2008, Colonel Richard Iron states “Last autumn we made a mistake which was understandable but not excusable. A Shia prisoner, Ahmed al-Fartusi, said he could put a stop to the killings. We released 120 of their prisoners and withdrew out of town, but when we moved out, lawlessness took over.” Questions must be asked whether the lawlessness extended to the British Army’s own treatment of detainees, including Ahmed Al-Fartoosi.

The use of coercive interrogation techniques which lead to the death of Baha Mousa and the abuse of those detained with him is by now well-known and is the subject of a Public Inquiry chaired by the Right Honourable Sir William Gage. The Secretary of State for Defence called for an inquiry on 14 May 2008 following pressure exerted by Public Interest Lawyers after the House of Lords judgment in Al-Skeini (2007). But the case of Baha Mousa is not an isolated one. Amongst a number of other cases, Ahmed Al-Fartoosi alleges that he was subjected to systematic deprivation of sleep whilst being kept in solitary confinement for five months and was repeatedly beaten, subjected to stress positions and deprived of food and water during the initial period of his detainment. Sexual humiliation, already seen in a large number of cases, was employed by forcing him to listen to pornographic videos throughout the night, every night, for a month during his prolonged period in solitary confinement.

Ahmed Al-Fartoosi, instructing Public Interest Lawyers, seeks the Ministry of Defence’s acknowledgment that his rights under the European Convention on Human Rights were breached and that compensation is therefore due to him for the mistreatment he suffered whilst in custody. Mistreatment highlighted again this week by the News of the World on 3 August 2008 in its article “Squaddies ordered to torture prisoners”, which raises further serious questions regarding the instruction and authorisation of hooding and other techniques in Iraq, and contains further allegations of deaths in custody.

Phil Shiner said today: “The decision to withdraw from central Basra is now being characterised as a ‘mistake’ by many. However, it appears that far more fundamental mistakes were made, at all levels of the armed forces and government, regarding treatment of detainees and the authorisation of coercive interrogation techniques. The use of sensory bombardment and, in particular, the pornographic films to attempt to break down Ahmed Al-Fartoosi demonstrates yet again that the UK were employing techniques with a strong historical precedent in British army operations, refined in the 1960s and 1970s in Northern Ireland, and then tailored to the 'war on terror' by British and American forces in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay."

Public Interest Lawyers was established in 1999. Since its formation the practice has taken on some of the most significant public law cases of recent times. The practice focuses on the following domestic areas: Public, Human Rights, Environmental, Planning and Urban Regeneration Law. Internationally, we practise Public, Human Rights, Humanitarian and Environmental Law.

For more information, see the website at www.publicinterestlawyers.co.uk or contact Brian Brazier on 0121 515 5069.