How the Pentagon Spread Its Message

David Barstow, an investigative reporter for The Times, examines primary source documents detailing the Pentagon’s response to criticism of then-Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld by a group of prominent retired generals

Bush, Harper, Calderon Defend Trade Amid Backlash

April 21 (Bloomberg) — President George W. Bush and the leaders of Canada and Mexico are using a summit meeting today in New Orleans to defend free trade and $930 billion in cross-border commerce against a political backlash. It won’t be easy.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Mexican President Felipe Calderon have each made lowering trade barriers, cutting regulation and supporting the North American Free Trade Agreement a hallmark of their administrations and will make the case with Bush for those policies.

“All three governments want to push back on the perception that Nafta is a disaster,” said Eric Farnsworth, vice president of the Council of the Americas, a business-backed group that will meet with the leaders tomorrow. “The overriding political imperative is the support of Nafta.”

Bush and Calderon reopened the Mexican consulate in New Orleans today, a move they heralded as a sign of both the recovery following Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and of the close economic ties between the two countries.

“Mexico and the United States are working together to build a future of prosperity and opportunity for people on both sides of the border,” Bush said.

`Three Amigos’

Each leader faces opposition related to Nafta, the world’s largest free-trade agreement. Analysts are predicting more symbolism than tangible results from this fourth summit of the “three amigos” dealing with security and commerce.

“They will have some jambalaya, eat some gumbo and send the right signals, but don’t expect much,” said Michael Hart, a political science professor at Carleton University in Ottawa.

One goal of the meeting, which wraps up tomorrow, is to harmonize standards in areas such as fuel efficiency and automobile testing, Dan Fisk, director for Western Hemisphere affairs on Bush’s National Security Council, told reporters on April 18.

Bush, Calderon and Harper will also pledge greater cooperation on seizing fake products, Fisk said.

A business advisory group made up of executives from United Parcel Service Inc., Exxon Mobil Corp. and General Motors Corp., which all have operations in Mexico and Canada, will meet with the leaders tomorrow.

In the U.S., the loss of jobs due to international competition has become an issue in this year’s presidential election campaign as Republican Bush comes to the end of his presidency. The Democratic presidential candidates are squabbling over who dislikes Nafta more, and Congress voted to delay consideration of a similar trade accord with Colombia.

Clinton Versus Clinton

While campaigning in Pittsburgh last week, Senator Hillary Clinton of New York renewed her pledge to renegotiate Nafta to beef up labor standards and environmental protection provisions, and she took a swipe at her husband Bill Clinton for pushing the agreement through Congress.

“As smart as my husband is, he does make mistakes,” Clinton said April 14. “We’ve now had 15 years of experience with Nafta, and the evidence is clear that we have to change the basic provisions.”

Her rival, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, counters that he has always opposed Nafta; he says Clinton only became disenchanted as part of the election campaign.

Protesters

As he arrived in New Orleans, Bush was greeted by a few dozen protesters waving signs against Nafta and complaining that the real aim of the three leaders is to create a North American political union.

The opposition isn’t just in the U.S.

In Mexico, 150,000 farmers shut down Mexico City’s main boulevard during a Jan. 31 march against cheap food imports, saying they are being put out of business by subsidized U.S. crops, especially corn.

They say Nafta will push more Mexican farmers off their land, forcing them to try to enter the U.S. illegally looking for better work.

In Canada, which sells about 75 percent of its exports to the U.S., attention is focused on what the next administration in the U.S. might do to weaken Nafta.

Congress has already been moving to restrict trade and immigration among the nations. They tried to block a requirement that Mexican trucks be allowed on American roads, and scuttled efforts by Bush to allow in more temporary workers from Mexico, which has soured relations between the nations.

`Integral Vision’

“Immigration is a natural economic phenomenon between the neighboring economies,” Calderon said today. “That’s why we should have an integral vision on the issue.”

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has proposed requiring passports to travel to Canada, a move that has drawn similar howls of protest from leaders in Ottawa.

Congress is also moving forward with legislation to require country-of-origin labeling of meat, which might destroy the cross-border coordination of hog producers.

In Manitoba, hog farmers are beginning to euthanize hundreds of thousands of young pigs because U.S. farmers, scared by the proposal, are breaking contracts and refusing to buy them, the National Post reported.

“Protectionist forces have been gathering steam for some years and they’re showing no signs of abating,” Canadian Trade Minister David Emerson said April 2.

`Gathering Steam’

Yet when the so-called Security and Prosperity Partnership began in Waco, Texas, in March 2005, Bush and his counterparts pledged to improve the flow of people across the borders, cooperate on regulatory standards and promote collaboration on transportation and other issues.

Since then, the three leaders have met with business leaders each year and affirmed their support for the concept. After their last summit in Montebello, Quebec, they announced a joint plan to fight avian flu, and agreed to cooperate on energy and protect copyrights and patents.

Future joint summits might end up being transformed into forums that a new U.S. president could use to seek changes to the trade accord.

Instead of scrapping Nafta, the forum “could be adapted” to deal with the labor and environmental issues raised by Obama and Clinton, said Christopher Sands, a senior fellow at the non- partisan Hudson Institute in Washington.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601110&sid=a2RNeBDbqSu0

Carter Says Hamas May Accept Right of Israel to Exist

April 21 (Bloomberg) — Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who helped broker peace between Egypt and Israel in 1978, said that Israel’s enemy Hamas may accept, under certain circumstances, the Jewish state’s right to exist.

Hamas leaders told Carter that the group would accept a peace agreement negotiated by the leader of the rival Fatah group, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, on condition that the agreement is submitted to the Palestinian people for approval, the former president said in a speech in Jerusalem.

“Hamas leaders said they would accept a Palestinian state on the 1967 border and the right of Israel to live as a neighbor, provided the agreement was submitted to the Palestinian people for overall approval,” Carter said.

Hamas later said it wouldn’t necessarily accept the results of a peace referendum, the Associated Press reported, and Hamas leader Khalid Mashaal said from Damascus the group won’t recognize Israel. Mashaal offered Israel a 10-year truce if it withdraws from lands seized in 1967, AP added.

The Islamic group which seized control of the Gaza Strip in June is sworn to Israel’s destruction, and launches regular rocket attacks against Israeli towns, killing and maiming citizens. Israel has imposed a military and economic blockade on Gaza in a bid to stop the rockets and undermine Hamas rule, and has fired missiles into Gaza aimed at those launching rockets and at terrorist leaders, sometimes inadvertently killing or injuring citizens.

`Actions, Words’

The Bush administration said it didn’t support Carter’s meeting with a terrorist organization and was skeptical about what it accomplished. “You have to look at public comments and actions. Actions speak louder than words,” White House spokeswoman Dana Perino told reporters traveling with President George W. Bush today on Air Force One to New Orleans.

Abbas, who is in control of the West Bank, renewed negotiations with Israel in December about a framework peace agreement that Bush wants by the end of the year. The two Palestinian factions don’t recognize each other’s right to rule.

A cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas is imminent, Ahmed Yousef, a spokesman for the Islamic organization said today. Hamas sent its proposals to Israel and is now awaiting a response.

“We expect a real development in this regard in the coming few days,” Yousef said. Carter said that Hamas had rejected his proposal for a 30-day unilateral cease-fire.

Syria’s Role

Syria believes that nearly all its differences with Israel have been resolved and that talks “just need to be reconvened,” Carter said in Jerusalem after meeting with Syrian officials in Damascus. Syria is eager that the U.S. play a “strong role” in talks with Israel, while in the meantime, the U.S. is opposing talks, Carter said.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad confirmed his country exchanged messages with Israel via third parties about the possibility of resuming peace talks, Syria’s state-run SANA news service reported today. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told the daily Yediot Ahronot last week that the two countries, which failed to sign a peace accord after the Six-Day war in 1967, clarified what they expect from a potential peace accord. Each side now understands what the other wants, Olmert said.

Carter said that, while he is glad that Bush is committed to reaching a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, there is a general feeling that no progress is being made of any significance in the talks.

`Just Isn’t Working’

The Israeli-U.S. strategy of excluding Syria and Hamas from peace negotiations “just isn’t working,” and they would have to be involved in order to make progress, Carter said.

Hamas leaders said that they are making progress in Egyptian-mediated talks about a prisoner exchange that would include Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who was captured by Palestinian gunmen in June 2006. Hamas has agreed to allow Shalit to send a letter to his parents, Carter said.

Carter’s speech came after meeting with exiled Hamas leader Mashaal in Damascus and other Hamas officials in Cairo over the past week.

By meeting with Hamas officials, Carter went against the policy of the Bush administration, which says Hamas must be sidelined until it recognizes Israel and ends violence, and ignored Israeli objections. The U.S. considers the group a terrorist organization.

Hamas won 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections and ousted forces loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas from the Gaza Strip in June last year. Abbas heads the Fatah faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization and controls the West Bank.

`Obstacle to Peace’

During a visit to Israel on April 11, U.S. Secretary of StateCondoleezza Rice told reporters that she found it “hard to understand what is to be gained by having discussions with Hamas when Hamas is, in fact, an obstacle to peace.”

Fifty members of the U.S. Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, wrote an appeal to Carter on April 14 not to meet with Hamas.

In Carter’s visit to Israel, President Shimon Peres told him it was a “mistake” to meet with Hamas. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert declined to receive the former U.S. leader. Israel barred Carter from crossing into the Gaza Strip.

Since his 1977-1981 presidency, Carter has occasionally embarked on private diplomacy. In 1994, he visited Pyongyang and persuaded North Korea to freeze its nuclear program. The agreement collapsed when the CIA discovered, in 2002, that North Korea ran a covert uranium-enrichment program. Carter also visited U.S. adversaries Iraq, when it was ruled by Saddam Hussein, and Cuba.

Egypt navigates a delicate path with Hamas: it has called for Israel to lift a trade and travel blockade of the Gaza Strip, while declining to open its own border to Gazans, which has been forcibly breached in the past. Instead, Egypt has tried to mediate in the Abbas-Hamas dispute.

Carter won the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize for promoting peaceful solutions to conflicts and social and economic justice.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aaYzQyps6Bwo&refer=home

Secret deal to persuade Ireland on EU treaty

Leaked memos and French threat to Celtic Tiger economy could scupper Brussels-Dublin manoeuvring over EU treaty

Bertie Ahern was fiddling self-consciously with the buttons on his jacket when the gates of Dublin’s Government Buildings swung open and the motorcade swept into the Edwardian quadrangle.

Out leapt José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, smiling broadly, striding confidently up the steps to clasp the hand of the Irish Taoiseach.

	Brothers in arms: Bertie Ahern and José Barroso

It was an important moment, a show of unity designed to convince Irish voters that they have nothing to fear from the controversial Lisbon Treaty when it is put to a referendum on June 12.

Yet even as the two men emerged from their private talks to insist that Europe loved Ireland and Ireland loved what Europe had done for it, a murky deal to keep voters sweet was threatening to scupper their hopes.

Two leaked memos suggest that the Irish government and Brussels are going to great lengths to suppress bad news that might encourage a No vote – a result that would delight Eurosceptics everywhere, since if Ireland does not ratify the treaty it cannot come into force anywhere in Europe.

An internal email from a British diplomat in Dublin let slip that the commission’s vice-president, Margot Wallström, had promised the Irish government to “tone down or delay messages that might be unhelpful”.

The diplomat, Elizabeth Green, also said Ireland had decided to get the vote out of the way before France took over the EU leadership in July, to avoid “the risk of unhelpful developments during the French presidency” – noting that President Nicolas Sarkozy was “completely unpredictable”.

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The second memo, from Jo Leinen, the German chairman of the European Parliament’s committee on constitutional affairs, warned that “politically sensitive” aspects of the treaty should not be discussed until it was in force.

Just how sensitive some issues can be became clear earlier this month when Christine Lagarde, Mr Sarkozy’s finance minister, said Paris was “determined” to push for harmonised corporation taxes across Europe.

Her words sent a shiver through Ireland, where a low corporation tax – 12.5 per cent compared with 28 per cent in Britain – is one of the main factors credited with attracting the international companies that have helped create its “Celtic Tiger” economy.

Nowhere would the loss of that commercial advantage be felt more keenly than in the small town of Leixlip, Co Kildare, 11 miles west of Dublin.

Two technology giants, Hewlett-Packard and Intel, employ 6,000 in a town of few more than 14,000, attracted in part by the favourable tax regime. The No camp claims such companies would move away if the tax breaks went.

Leixlip, a tidy town with no shortage of EU flags fluttering from the buildings, is a testament to the benefits of EU membership. The council notice board describes it as the “fastest-growing town in Ireland”.

But in her shop off the main street, Kathleen King, 65, a florist, was fretting about the impact if the big companies left. “This town would die,” she said. “When I came here 35 years ago there was a chip shop and a few offices. Now we have dentists, boutiques, flower shops and better roads.”

Intel, where her husband worked until he retired, had even paid for the Christmas lights and had the canal cleared out. So she was planning to vote no in the referendum: “We are praying that they stay. We don’t want the French dictating to us.”

Mr Ahern and Mr Barroso are both adamant that Ireland would see off the French proposal, but while neither Intel nor Hewlett-Packard would be drawn into the debate, Wyeth, an American pharmaceutical company employing 3,300 people in four Irish counties, said it would have to consider its position if corporation tax rates changed.

Ireland is the only country holding a referendum on the treaty. Britain has been denied a vote, although this faces a High Court challenge on Tuesday by the businessman Stuart Wheeler.

With polls showing that most Irish are undecided, the No camp have their tails up. Donal O’Sullivan-Latchford, of the EUReform group, said voters were alarmed at the prospect of further interference from Brussels.

The Irish government is determined to avoid having to call a second vote, as it was forced to over the Nice Treaty in 2001, after losing the first referendum.

Dick Roche, the minister for European Affairs, told The Sunday Telegraph that the critics’ fears would be proved groundless. And he warned that this time there would be no second chance: “If this goes wrong, the treaty is gone, because there is no plan B. The time is not there to get it renegotiated.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/04/20/wirish120.xml

Torture victim’s records lost at Guantánamo, admits camp general

A shackled detainee is transported to an interview with US officials at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Photograph: Brennan Linsley/AP

The former head of interrogations at Guantánamo Bay found that records of an al-Qaida suspect tortured at the prison camp were mysteriously lost by the US military, according to a new book by one of Britain’s top human rights lawyers.

Retired general Michael Dunlavey, who supervised Guantánamo for eight months in 2002, tried to locate records on Mohammed al-Qahtani, accused by the US of plotting the 9/11 attacks, but found they had disappeared.

The records on al-Qahtani, who was interrogated for 48 days – “were backed up … after I left, there was a snafu and all was lost”, Dunlavey told Philippe Sands QC, who reports the conversation in his book Torture Team, previewed last week by the Guardian. Snafu stands for Situation Normal: All Fucked Up.

Saudi-born al-Qahtani was sexually taunted, forced to perform dog tricks and given enemas at Guantánamo.

The CIA admitted last year that it destroyed videotapes of al-Qaida suspects being interrogated at a secret “black site” in Thailand. No proof has so far emerged that tapes of interrogations at Guantánamo were destroyed, but Sands’ report suggests the US may have also buried politically sensitive proof relating to abuse by interrogators at the prison camp.

Other new evidence has also emerged in the last month that raises questions about destroyed tapes at Guantánamo.

Cameras that run 24 hours a day at the prison were set to automatically record over their contents, the US military admitted in court papers. It is unclear how much, if any, prisoner mistreatment was on the taped-over video, but the military admitted that the automatic erasure “likely destroyed” potential evidence in at least one prisoner’s case.

The erased tapes may have violated a 2005 court order to preserve “all evidence [of] the torture, mistreatment and abuse of detainees” at Guantánamo. The order was retroactive, so it also applies to the 2003 loss of al-Qahtani’s records.

Lawyers representing other Guantánamo detainees are asking whether tapes of their clients’ treatment may also be erased. “You can’t just destroy relevant evidence,” said Jonathan Hafetz, of the Brennan Centre for Justice in New York.

David H Remes, a lawyer for 16 Guantánamo prisoners, said the CIA’s destruction of interrogation videos shows the US government is capable of getting rid of potentially incriminating evidence.

“[In Guantánamo] the government had a system that automatically overwrote records,” Remes told the Guardian. “That is a passive form of evidence destruction. If a party has destroyed evidence in one place, there’s no reason to assume it has preserved evidence in another place.”

More than 24,000 interrogations were videotaped at Guantánamo, according to a US army report unearthed by researchers at Seton Hall University in New Jersey.

The US military office at Guantánamo did not return a request for comment from the Guardian about its taping policies.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/apr/21/guantanamo.humanrights

New anti-terrorism rules ‘allow US to spy on British motorists’

Routine journeys carried out by millions of British motorists can be monitored by authorities in the United States and other enforcement agencies across the world under anti-terrorism rules introduced discreetly by Jacqui Smith.
# Government to quiz households on sex lives and salaries

The discovery that images of cars captured on road-side cameras, and “personal data” derived from them, including number plates, can be sent overseas, has angered MPs and civil liberties groups concerned by the increasing use of “Big Brother” surveillance tactics.
Images captured by road-side cameras will be made available to foreign authorities
Images of private cars, as well as registration numbers, could be sent outside to countries such as the USA

Yesterday, politicians and civil liberties groups accused the Home Secretary of keeping the plans to export pictures secret from Parliament when she announced last year that British anti-terrorism police could access “real time” images from cameras used in the running of London’s congestion charge.

A statement by Miss Smith to Parliament on July 17, 2007, detailing the exemptions for police from the 1998 Data Protection Act, did not mention other changes that would permit material to be sent outside the European Economic Area (EEA) to the authorities in the US and elsewhere.

Her permission to do so was hidden away in an earlier “special certificate” signed by the Home Secretary on July 4.

The certificate specifically sets out the level of data that can be sent to enforcement authorities outside the European Economic Area (the EU plus Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway) by anti-terrorist officers from the Metropolitan Police. It says:

“The certificate relates to the processing of the images taken by the camera, personal data derived from the images, including vehicle registration mark, date, time and camera location.”
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A spokesman for Richard Thomas, the information commissioner, confirmed that the certificate had been worded so that the images of private cars, as well as registration numbers, could be sent outside to countries such as the USA.

Officers from the Metropolitan Police have been given the right to view in “real time” any CCTV images from cameras that are meant to be enforcing the congestion charge.

Sources said that officers would access the cameras on behalf of overseas authorities if they were informed about a terrorism threat in the UK or elsewhere. They would then share the images, which can be held for five years before being destroyed, if necessary.

Last night, Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, said: “This confirms that this Government is happy to hand over potentially huge amounts of information on British citizens under the catch-all pretext of ‘national security’.”

Civil liberties campaigners said they were appalled that images of innocent people’s journeys could end up in the hands of the British police, let alone foreign investigators.

They feared that it was a move towards the US-style system of “data mining” – in which powerful computers sifted millions of pieces of information as they tried to build patterns of behaviour and match them to material about suspects.

Gus Hosein, who runs Privacy International, said he was making a complaint to the information commissioner having obtained a copy of the certificate.

However, the Home Office defended the powers in the certificate, which was signed specifically for the purposes of counter terrorism and national security.

A spokesman declined to say how many times images had been sent from London to other countries.

However, he added: “We would like to reassure the public that robust controls have been put in place to control and safeguard access to, and use of, the information.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/04/21/nspy121.xml

Behind Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand

A PENTAGON CAMPAIGN Retired officers have been used to shape terrorism coverage from inside the TV and radio networks.

In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.

The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.

Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.

Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Mr. Cheney, Alberto R. Gonzales and Stephen J. Hadley.

In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military analysis.

“It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,’ ” Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, said.

Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst who has taught information warfare at the National Defense University, said the campaign amounted to a sophisticated information operation. “This was a coherent, active policy,” he said.

As conditions in Iraq deteriorated, Mr. Allard recalled, he saw a yawning gap between what analysts were told in private briefings and what subsequent inquiries and books later revealed.

“Night and day,” Mr. Allard said, “I felt we’d been hosed.”

The Pentagon defended its relationship with military analysts, saying they had been given only factual information about the war. “The intent and purpose of this is nothing other than an earnest attempt to inform the American people,” Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said.

It was, Mr. Whitman added, “a bit incredible” to think retired military officers could be “wound up” and turned into “puppets of the Defense Department.”

Many analysts strongly denied that they had either been co-opted or had allowed outside business interests to affect their on-air comments, and some have used their platforms to criticize the conduct of the war. Several, like Jeffrey D. McCausland, a CBS military analyst and defense industry lobbyist, said they kept their networks informed of their outside work and recused themselves from coverage that touched on business interests.

“I’m not here representing the administration,” Dr. McCausland said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/washington/20generals.html?_r=2&………