A visiting Iraqi archbishop has appealed to Korean Catholics to have mercy on Christian refugees from Iraq.

During his Oct. 12-16 visit to South Korea, Chalean Archbishop Bashar Warda of Arbil spoke on the need of the Korean church to be aware to the suffering of Christians in the Middle East.

“I’m very much grateful to the Korean church offering support and prayers to the suffering Christians in Iraq. However, they are still suffering much and we need more help,” said Archbishop Warda during Mass at Myeongdong Cathedral which he presided with Cardinal Andrew Yeom Soo-jung.

“If there was no attention and prayer from churches around the world, all the Christians will vanish in Iraq,” he said.

Some 100,000 Christian refugees are now staying in Arbil Archdiocese having fled attacks by the so-called Islamic State (IS).

In March, the United Nations and the U.S. State Department ruled that the persecution of Christians by IS amounted to genocide.

As part of his stay in Korea, Archbishop Warda met students at the Catholic University of Korea and said Mass at Seoul parishes.

He also met Korean bishops including Archbishop Hyginus Kim Hee-joong of Kwangju and made visits to various church institutes including the Reconciliation and Peace Center in Paju and Aid to the Church in Need Korea.

By Kevin J. Jones

A reputed “Catholic Spring” group played a key role in influencing Barack Obama’s controversial 2009 Notre Dame speech, and its campaigns “broadened the agenda” of Catholic voters to see abortion as just one of several election issues.

This is according to a leaked memo attributed to George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.

The group, Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, was founded in 2005. While early backing from billionaire financier George Soros’ philanthropic network was previously reported, a 2009 memo leaked earlier this year seems to provide the foundations’ view of the group’s early activities.

“CACG has helped to transform Catholic values in the mainstream media and in the public discourse on religion and politics, thereby thwarting previously successful attempts by the conservative movement to use religious faith for partisan advantage,” said the memo.

The memo, dated Sept. 22, 2009, is attributed to the Open Society Foundations’ U.S. Programs’ Democracy and Power Fund. The memo, apparently a series of grant proposals, was posted to the website DCLeaks.com.

According to the memo, Catholics in Alliance played “pivotal roles” in 2009 during “critical Catholic moments” like President Barack Obama’s 2009 Notre Dame commencement speech.

President Obama’s controversial speech at the University of Notre Dame included the bestowal of an honorary degree on the new president. The action had drawn criticism from dozens of bishops who said it caused scandal and confusion. The bishops cited U.S. bishops’ 2004 document “Catholics in Political Life,” which said that Catholic institutions should not honor those who “act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles.”

Bishop John D’Arcy, who at the time headed the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, objected that the university in his diocese honored someone “whose activities both as president and previously, have been altogether supportive of laws against the dignity of the human person yet to be born.”

The Open Society Foundations memo praised Catholics in Alliance for “reframing” the abortion debate in terms of reducing abortions.

“Indeed, this reframing is where the group has showed some of its most successful policy influence within the new Obama administration: the President made this reframing the centerpiece of his much anticipated Notre Dame speech,” the memo said.

The memo lists Catholics In Alliance for the Common Good under the section “grassroots organizing and civic engagement.” It indicates the group received at least $450,000 in financial support from the massive George Soros philanthropy network from 2006-2010, when the foundations also operated under the name Open Society Institute (OSI).

The group is currently in the public eye because the site Wikileaks has posted alleged 2012 emails involving Hillary Clinton campaign chief John Podesta, who appears to state that Catholics in Alliance was founded to aid a “Catholic Spring” political revolution within the Church.

Christopher Hale, who became Catholics in Alliance’s executive director in late 2013, distanced himself from accusations he and his colleagues aimed to split the Church.

“We don’t concern ourselves with the internal politics of the Catholic Church,” Hale told CNA Oct. 17.

“I think that it’s important to distinguish the work of organizations from those who funded it or used to fund it,” he added. “No organization funders agree 100 percent with its activity.”

Catholics in Alliance has become more critical of powerful abortion groups in recent years

“I want to state categorically that we are pro-life. If anyone has doubts about that commitment, ask Planned Parenthood,” Hale said.

The group broke with many political progressives by criticizing Planned Parenthood following the release of investigative videos appearing to show the abortion provider breaking laws in selling harvested fetal tissue and body parts from aborted unborn babies.

According to the 2009 Open Society Foundations memo, Catholics in Alliance drew criticisms from pro-abortion rights groups like Catholics for Choice for its efforts to “play down abortion rights and reframe the debate in terms of reducing the number of abortions.”

“We believe that CACG’s reframing may actually be one of its strengths,” said the memo.

The Soros network typically supports abortion rights. The memo added: “We will continue to monitor this issue, but at this time feel that CACG’s position on choice is not at odds with OSI priorities.”

Catholics in Alliance’s politics-related actions also drew praise from the grantmaker.

“Unlike in 2004, CACG and the progressive faith community in 2008 provided a consistent counterpoint to the religious right-wing’s message in key media stories,” the memo said. “Importantly, CACG broadened the agenda of Catholic voters.”

Hale discussed Catholics in Alliance’s current view of the abortion debate.

“Catholics should definitely consider abortion as central component of the social teaching of the Catholic Church. But it is fair to say that it’s not the only issue,” Hale told CNA. “While abortion is very important to Catholic conscience, it can’t be the only issue,” he said.

“We’re proudly pro-life. That means more than pro-birth.”

Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good has spoken up about a wide variety of political issues, criticizing the parties and platforms on both sides of the aisle. However, it has drawn criticism for its general avoidance of criticizing Hillary Clinton by name, while it has criticized Donald Trump on numerous occasions.

The Open Society Foundations’ memo said the group filled an important vacuum by “providing a progressive voice for Catholics.” It claimed that the group’s outreach to Catholic voters in 2006 and 2008 resulted in a situation where the Catholic population believed that “abortion is not the overriding issue at the ballot box” but took into account the moral questions of the economy, health care, fair wages and a just immigration policy.

The memo claimed proof of the group’s success in post-2008 election poll results. It highlighted the large majorities of Evangelical and Catholic voters who told pollsters people of faith “should focus on all issues that are central to their values, rather than focusing on one or two issues.” As evidence the memo also listed poll results showing voters made the economy, Iraq, health care, and terrorism their top issues, while only 14 percent named abortion and 6 percent same-sex “marriage.”

Catholics in Alliance also drew praise for its use of “robust media, grassroots, and collaborative strategies” to educate and mobilize “voters of faith in support of social justice.” The memo said the group had gained attention through circulating local letters, producing radio ads, websites and op-eds, booking commentators on cable television, and in major news coverage

The memo said another critical Catholic moment the group influenced in 2009 was the release of Pope Benedict XVI’s 2009 encyclical “Caritas in Veritate,” but it did not specify any reasons for this claim.

The foundation memo said Catholics in Alliance fits into a broader strategy “to inspire greater public participation from mainstream and social justice oriented faith communities” on Open Society priority issues and also to “counter the outsize influence and impact of right-wing religious constituencies.”

Catholics in Alliance was mentioned in a recently leaked February 2012 e-mail exchange between Hillary Clinton’s present campaign manager, John Podesta, and Sandy Newman, president of the progressive organization Voices for Progress. They discussed the controversy over a federal rule requiring Catholic organizations to cover contraception.

Newman discussed the possibilities of a “Catholic Spring,” similar to Arab protests, to lead Catholics to demand “the end of a middle ages dictatorship and the beginning of a little democracy and respect for gender equality in the Catholic church.” Newman wondered how one would plant “the seeds of revolution.”

Podesta responded by saying, “We created Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good to organize for a moment like this.” At the same time, Podesta suggested it lacked the leadership to do so. He suggested former Maryland Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend be involved.

Newman replied to Podesta: “Great. I suppose it’s conceivable that a few organizers could spark a high-profile demonstration or two (a la Occupy [Wall Street]) that might turn out to be the spark. But it is indeed a puzzle to figure out why some events, usually with very little planning, ignite a movement no one would have predicted, while other, far better planned things fashioned by experienced organizers don’t.”

As of 2009, Catholics in Alliance organized local Catholic activists to promote public policy. It followed a media organizing strategy to promote the voices of religious leaders, and conducted “strategic coordination and support of the Catholic social justice movement,” the memo said.

The memo praised Catholics in Alliance’s role in immigration reform and in states affected by immigration raids. According to the memo, the group planned to offer media training and leadership training for Latino faith leaders, including the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians, with a focus on immigration reform.

The memo named Catholics United as the group’s 501c4 sister organization. It claimed both groups had a combined membership of 60,000 and fundraising totals above $3 million as of 2009.

The memo also included a critical evaluation of Catholics in Alliance as an organization. It faulted the group for its alleged failure to incorporate and employ Latino Catholics, given demographic trends in Catholicism. The memo said the group was working to improve minority representation among Hispanics and people of color in its board of directors, its advisory council and its speakers’ bureau.

It said the departure of the group’s co-founder Alexia Kelley to join the Obama White House in 2009 left the group “without strong leadership.” Another co-founder, Tom Perriello, is mentioned in other documents in the Soros leak.

Another Soros foundations grantee, Faith in Public Life, is discussed in the 2009 memo for its role in media messaging on the University of Notre Dame controversy, stem cell guidelines, conscience protections for medical professionals, as well as issues like health care reform, climate change and immigration. Faith in Public Life is described as a partner organization for Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good.

The same document from the Soros foundations recommends a nearly $1.4 million grant to Podesta’s Center for American Progress and indicates previous Open Society Institute support for the center totaling nearly $5 million. It describes the Center for American Progress as “the most influential think tank in our funding universe.”

According to the memo, there is major foundation support for the center from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Humanity United Fund, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Ford Foundation, among others.

Other more recent documents leaked from the Soros foundations indicate the grantmaker aims to change Ireland’s pro-life laws against abortion as a model for Catholic countries. The grantmaker also took part in a $7-8 million dollar effort to respond to 2015 media reports appearing to show the abortion giant Planned Parenthood was involved in the illegal sale of fetal tissue and organs.

The Open Society Foundations did not respond to a request for comment on the document. It has previously said a number of internal documents were removed from “an online community that served as a resource for our staff, board members, and partners across the world.” It charged that the publication of documents was an apparent symptom of “an aggressive crackdown on civil society and human rights activists that is taking place globally.”

During most of the past two decades Washington has aggressively launched military and economic wars against at least nine countries, either directly or through its military aid to regional allies and proxies. US air and ground troops have bombed or invaded Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and Lebanon.

More recently Washington has escalated its global economic war against major economic rivals as well as against weaker countries. The US no longer confines its aggressive impulses to peripheral economic countries in the Middle East, Latin America and Southern Asia: It has declared trade wars against world powers in Asia, Eastern and Central Europe and the Gulf states.

The targets of the US economic aggression include economic powerhouses like Russia, China, Germany, Iran and Saudi Arabia, as well as Syria, Yemen, Venezuela, Cuba and the Donbas region of Ukraine.

There is an increasingly thinner distinction between military and economic warfare, as the US has frequently moved from one to the other, particularly when economic aggression has not resulted in ‘regime change’ – as in the case of the sanctions campaign against Iraq leading up to the devastating invasion and destruction.

In this essay, we propose to examine the strategies and tactics underlying Washington’s economic warfare, their successes and failures, and the political and economic consequences to target nations and to world stability.

Washington’s Economic Warfare and Global Power

The US has used different tactical weapons as it pursues its economic campaigns against targeted adversaries and even against its long-time allies.

Two supposed allies, Germany and Saudi Arabia, have been attacked by the Obama Administration and US Congress via ‘legal’ manipulations aimed at their financial systems and overseas holdings. This level of aggression against sovereign powers is remarkable and reckless. In 2016 the US Justice Department slapped a $14 billion dollar penalty on Germany’s leading international bank, Deutsche Bank, throwing the German stock market into chaos, driving the bank’s shares down 40% and destabilizing Germany’s financial system. This unprecedented attack on an ally’s major bank was in direct retaliation for Germany’s support of the European Commission’s $13 billion tax levy against the US-tax evading Apple Corporation for its notorious financial shenanigans in Ireland. German political and business leaders immediately dismissed Washington’s legalistic rhetoric for what it was: the Obama Administration’s retaliation in order to protect America’s tax evading and money laundering multinationals.

The chairman of the German parliament’s economic committee stated that the gross US attempt to extort Deutsche Bank had all the elements of an economic war. He noted that Washington had a “long tradition of using every available opportunity to wage what amounted to a trade war if it benefits their own economy” and the “extortionate damages claim” against Deutsche Bank were a punitive example. US economic sanctions against some of Germany’s major trade partners, like Russia, China and Iran, constitute another tactic to undermine Germany’s huge export economy. Ironically, Germany is still considered “a valued ally” when it comes to the US wars against Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, which have driven millions of refugees to Europe creating havoc with Germany’s political, economic and social system and threatening to overthrow the government of ‘ally’ Angela Merkel.

The US Congress launched an economic-judicial war against its closest ally in the Gulf region when it approved legislation granting US victims of Islamist terrorism, especially related to the attacks on September 11, 2001,the right to sue the government of Saudi Arabia and seize its overseas assets. This included the Kingdom’s immense ’sovereign funds’ and constitutes an arbitrary and blatant violation of Saudi sovereignty. This opens the Pandora’s Box of economic warfare by allowing victims to sue any government for sponsoring terrorism, including the United States! Saudi leaders immediately reacted by threatening to withdraw billions of dollars of assets in US Treasuries and investments.

The US economic sanctions against Russia are designed to strengthen its stranglehold on the economies of Europe which rely on trade with Russia. These have especially weakened German and Polish trade relations with Russia, a major market for German industrial exports and Polish agriculture products. Originally, the US-imposed economic sanctions against Moscow were supposed to harm Russian consumers, provoke political unrest and lead to ‘regime change’. In reality, the unrest it provoked has been mainly among European exporters, whose contracts with Russia were shredded and billions of Euros were lost. Furthermore, the political and diplomatic climate between Europe and Russia has deteriorated while Washington has ‘pivoted’ toward a more militaristic approach.

Results in Asia have been even more questionable: Washington’s economic campaign against China has moved awkwardly in two directions: Prejudicial trade deals with Asian-Pacific countries and a growing US military encirclement of China’s maritime trade routes.

The Obama regime dispatched Treasury Secretary Jack Lew to promote the Trans- Pacific Partnership (TPP) among a dozen regional governments, which would blatantly exclude China, Asia’s largest economic power. In a slap to the outgoing Obama Administration, the US Congress rejected his showpiece economic weapon against China, the TPP.

Meanwhile, Obama ‘encouraged’ his erstwhile ‘allies’ in the Philippines and Vietnam to sue China for maritime violations over the disputed ‘Spratly Islands’ before the Permanent Court of Arbitration. Japan and Australia signed military pacts and base agreements with the Pentagon aimed at disrupting China’s trade routes. Obama’s so-called ‘Pivot to Asia’ is a transparent campaign to block China from its markets and trading partners in Southeast Asia and Pacific countries of Latin American. Washington’s flagrant economic warfare resulted in slapping harsh import tariffs on Chinese industrial exports, especially steel and tires. The US also sent a ‘beefed up’ air and sea armada for ‘joint exercises’ along China’s regional trade routes and its access to critical Persian Gulf oil, setting off a ‘war of tension’.

In response to Washington’s ham-fisted aggression, the Chinese government deftly rolled out the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) with over fifty countries eagerly signing on for lucrative trade and investment deals with Beijing. The AIIB’s startling success does not bode well for Obama’s ‘Pivot to Pacific Hegemony’.

The so-called US-EU-Iran accord did not end Washington’s trade war against Teheran. Despite Iran’s agreement to dismantle its peaceful uranium enrichment and nuclear research programs, Washington has blocked investors and tried to undermine trade relations, while still holding billions of dollars of Iranian state assets, frozen since the overthrow of the Shah in 1979. Nevertheless, a German trade mission signed on a three billion trade agreement with Iran in early October 2016 and called on the US to fulfill its side of the agreement with Teheran – so far to no avail.

The US stands alone in sending its nuclear naval armada to the Persian Gulf and threatens commercial relations. Even the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the longstanding enemy of the Iranian Islamic Republic, has agreed to a cooperative oil production arrangement at a recent OPEC meeting.

Washington’s declaration of economic warfare against two of its most strategic powerful allies, Germany and Saudi Arabia and three rising competitor world powers, has eroded US economic competitiveness, undermined its access to lucrative markets and increased its reliance on aggressive military strategies over diplomacy.

What is striking and perplexing about Washington’s style of economic warfare is how costly this has been for the US economy and for US allies, with so little concrete benefit.

US oil companies have lost billions in joint exploitation deals with Russia because of Obama’s sanctions. US bankers, agro-exporters, high-tech companies are missing out on lucrative sales just to ‘punish’ Russia over the incredibly corrupt and bankrupt US coup regime in Ukraine.

US multi-national corporations, especially those involved in Pacific Coast transport and shipyards, Silicon Valley high tech industry and Washington State’s agro-export producers are threatened by the US trade agreements that exclude China.

Iran’s billion dollar market is looking for everything from commercial airplanes to mining machinery. Huge trade deals have has been lost to US companies because Obama continues to impose de facto sanctions. Meanwhile, European and Asian competitors are signing contracts.

Despite Washington’s dependence on German technical knowhow and Saudi petro-dollar investments as key to its global ambitions, Obama’s irrational policies continue to undermine US trade.

Washington has engaged in economic warfare against ‘lesser economic powers’ that nevertheless play significant political roles in their regions. The US retains the economic boycott of Cuba; it wages economic aggression against Venezuela and imposes economic sanctions against Syria, Yemen and the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine. While these countries are not costly in terms of economic loss to US business interests, they exercise significant political and ideological influence in their regions, which undermine US ambitions.

Conclusion

Washington’s resort to economic warfare complements its military fueled empire building.

But economic and military warfare are losing propositions. While the US may extract a few billion dollars from Deutsch Bank, it will have lost much more in long-term, large-scale relations with German industrialists, politicians and financiers. This is critical because Germany plays the key role in shaping economic policy in the European Union. The practice of US multi-national corporations seeking off-shore tax havens in the EU may come to a grinding halt when the European Commission finishes its current investigations. The Germans may not be too sympathetic to their American competitors.

Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has not only collapse, it has compelled China to open new avenues for trade and cooperation with Asian-Pacific nations – exactly the opposite of its original goal of isolating Beijing. China’s Asia Infrastructure and Investment Bank (AIIB) has attracted 4 time more participants than Washington’s TPP and massive infrastructure projects are being financed to further bind ASEAN countries to China. China’s economic growth at 6.7% more than three times that of the US at 2%. Worse, for the Obama Administration, Washington has alienated its historically most reliable allies, as China, deepens economic ties and cooperation agreements with Thailand, Philippines, Pakistan, Cambodia and Laos.

Iran, despite US sanctions, is gaining markets and trade with Germany, Russia, China and the EU.

The Saudi-US conflict has yet to play-out but any escalation of law suits against the kingdom will result in the flight of hundreds of billions of investment dollars from the US.

In effect, Obama’s campaign of economic warfare may lead to the infinitely more costly military warfare and the massive loss of jobs and profits for the US economy. Washington is increasingly isolated. The only allies supporting its campaign of economic sanctions are second and third rate powers, like Poland and current corrupt parasites in Ukraine. As long as the Poles and Ukrainians can ‘mooch’ off of the IMF and grab EU and US ‘loans’, they will cheerlead Obama’s charge against Russia. Israel, as long as it can gobble up an additional $38 billion dollars in ‘aid’ from Washington, remains the biggest advocate for war against Iran.

Washington spends billions of US tax-payer dollars on its military bases in Japan, Philippines and Australia to maintain its hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region. Its allies, though, are salivating at the prospect for greater trade and infrastructure investment deals with China.

Economic warfare doesn’t work for the Washington because the US economy cannot compete, especially when it attacks its own allies and traditional partners. Its regional allies are keen to join the ‘forbidden’ markets and share in major investment projects funded by China. Asian leaders increasingly view Washington, with its ‘pivot to militarism’ as politically unreliable, unstable and dangerous. After the Philippine government economic mission to China, expect more to ‘jump ship’.

Economic warfare against declared adversaries can only succeed if the US is committed to free trade with its allies, ends punitive sanctions and stops pushing for exclusive trade treaties that undermine its allies’ economies. Furthermore, Washington should stop catering to the whims of special domestic interests. Absent these changes, its losing campaign of economic warfare can only turn into military warfare – a prospect devastating to the US economy and to world peace.

By Fedja Buric*

Last Thursday, the Serbian weekly Nedeljnik published a bombshell statement by Donald Trump in which the Republican nominee reportedly apologized to Serbia for the 1999 bombing campaign of the country conducted by the then President Bill Clinton, the husband of Trump’s nemesis.

Like everything else in this strange election season, the story quickly took on a carnivalesque character: the Trump campaign issued an immediate denial that its candidate had ever given such an interview and shortly thereafter, Nedeljnik issued an embarrassing retraction suggesting it had been duped by a Serbian expat with links to Mike Pence, Trump’s Vice Presidential pick and the current governor of Indiana.

The extent to which Trump’s candidacy has completely turned the tradition of American foreign policy on its head was made clear by the fact that initially, no one in the Republican or the Democratic establishment questioned the veracity of the statement.

After all, this is a candidate who had said things that were much more jarring: that the US should target families of suspected terrorists, that it should engage in medieval acts of torture, that it should impose a blanket ban on Muslims entering the US, and that it should look up to the authoritarianism of the Russian President Vladimir Putin as a role model of effective leadership.

Given that the Nedeljnik flap came in the midst of an avalanche of accusations of sexual assault levied against the Republican nominee by several women, and in the aftermath of the leak of the 2005 tape on which Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women, no wonder that the story petered out even before it had been proven false.

Trump’s erratic style, his vitriolic demagoguery, and his disrespect for the basic norms of human decency have already caused considerable damage to American democracy, but, as the flap over his non-apology to Serbia shows, he has also distracted the American public from having serious discussions on important foreign policy issues, including the US role in NATO.

Had the issue of the Clinton-led bombing campaign of Serbia been raised by a “normal” candidate, the public may have had the opportunity to reflect on NATO’s history of involvement in the Balkans. It is up to academics to try and make themselves heard amidst all the sensationalist chatter at a time when NATO’s role in the world, and especially vis-a-vis Putin, is at a critical juncture.

With this in mind, I think it is important to look back to NATO’s first two major post-Cold War interventions, in Bosnia in 1995 and in Kosovo in 1999, in reflecting on the role of the alliance in stopping, or exacerbating, regional ethnic conflicts.

NATO vs. Radovan Karadzic

There are of course many reasons why the Bosnian war escalated into a full-blown genocide in Srebrenica in 1995.

There had been many missed opportunities at stopping the outbreak of the war in the first place: the premature recognitions of Croatia and Slovenia, the failure of the EC and its member states to speak with one voice, the indifference of the George W. Bush administration to the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the distraction of major European powers with the reunification of Germany, etc.

Even once the war in Bosnia started, there were many factors that had to collide, tragically, in order for the genocide to occur: the war had to have reached a point when one of the sides (the Bosnian Serbs) believed that they had one last chance to forcibly create a demographic map to their liking ahead of a peace deal; the leadership of all sides had to have become radicalized to such an extent as to view the war not as a political conflict, but an existential Darwinian struggle; and the paralysis of the international community in stopping the war had to have convinced the leadership of the strongest side that radical measures would go unpunished and that these measures were strategically worth it, and morally justified.

But no matter where one stands on these issues, one thing remains indisputable: in those scorching July days of 1995 there was only one force capable of stopping Ratko Mladic’s revenge-bent army from murdering the Srebrenica Muslims -NATO.

The story behind the genocide, and the failure to stop it, is of course well-known by now.

After years of half-hearted threats against Bosnian Serbs that were never followed up by action, the international community had by 1995 settled into a perverse wait and see approach.

Six towns in Bosnia that were surrounded by the heavily armed Serbs, including Srebrenica, were declared “safe areas” but everyone agreed that no one really knew what this meant and what kind of consequences the Bosnian Serb leadership would face if they overran them.

The UN had sent its lightly armed, poorly trained, morally disoriented, and mandate-less troops as keepers of the peace that did not exist; Bosnians responded to the fumbling response of the blue helmets in their characteristically humorous way – they nicknamed them the Smurfs.

For its part, the US threatened to use NATO as a hammer against the Serb artillery, but the Clinton administration, shell shocked by its disastrous intervention in Somalia, always found an excuse not to follow up.

Emboldened by their military superiority, the support from Belgrade, but also eager to make ethnically pure some 70 per cent of Bosnia they had occupied, the Bosnian Serb forces had by the spring of 1995 decided to embark on a major offensive to retake Muslim enclaves in eastern Bosnia.

Radovan Karadzic’s infamous Directive No. 7 ordered his forces to “create an unbearable situation of total insecurity, with no hope of further survival or life for the inhabitants of Srebrenica or Zepa”.

On the eve of Mladic’s offensive against the enclave, the commander of the Dutch UN battalion in Srebrenica, Dutchbat, promised its lightly-armed Muslim defenders that NATO would light up the skies if the Serbs dared attack. Repeatedly, the commander called his superior in Zagreb to request air support.

Reportedly, at some point NATO-American planes were on their way to Srebrenica and were circling the Adriatic as they waited for the dual key to be turned. The latter was the institutional arrangement between the UN and NATO whereby the commanders of both organizations had to approve any military action.

Citing a wrongly filled-out form, the UN commander in Zagreb refused to sign off on it. The NATO planes above the Adriatic ran out of fuel and returned to Italy.

Ratko Mladic’s troops entered Srebrenica and in the next few days murdered most of its male inhabitants.

The failure of the dual key arrangement in Bosnia illustrates that NATO can be an effective force in stopping humanitarian catastrophes only when it is unencumbered by complicated institutional arrangements.

Once the Clinton administration finally decided to use NATO in August 1995, the three-week long bombing campaign of Bosnian Serb positions proved extremely effective in ending the war and bringing the parties to Dayton, Ohio.

However, the fact that the intervention came too late, and in the aftermath of a genocide the alliance could have stopped, caused NATO to overact the next time it was faced with a crisis – in Kosovo in 1999.

NATO vs. Slobodan Milosevic

It is my contention that precisely because it had failed to stop the Srebrenica genocide, NATO, and the Clinton administration in particular, overreacted the next time they had to deal with the man they blamed for denigrating the reputation of the alliance – the Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

There is no doubt that Milosevic’s actions in this province were atrocious. From the very moment he came to power, he stripped the local Albanian population of the autonomy they had long enjoyed under Tito, his policemen harassed Albanians, and Albanian language was effectively banned in public life.

Infamously, Milosevic stirred up ethnic tensions in the late 1980s in launching his metamorphosis from a Communist functionary into a nationalist populist.

But there is equally no doubt that the leadership of the shadowy organization, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), formed in 1998, cleverly exploited the pent-up aggression NATO, and Clinton personally, had against the Serbian president for thumbing his nose at the West.

Starting in 1998, the KLA abandoned the peaceful resistance campaign of the Kosovo Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova and began to strike at Serbian police patrolling the province.

The killings of police officers predictably triggered a disproportionate response from the Milosevic government, which sent the army and its mercenary veterans from the Bosnian campaigns, to Kosovo to teach the Albanians a lesson.

By early 1999, the violence had escalated into an all-out war between the KLA and the Milosevic forces, with civilians, both Serbs and Albanians, caught in the middle.

Unencumbered by the prospect of another election during his second term, Bill Clinton acted decisively and pushed NATO to act aggressively against Milosevic.

The reasoning was muddy at best: to stop the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo Albanians by Serbs, to prove that NATO mattered, to recover the legitimacy of the alliance, to oust the Serbian President, or all of these motivations combined.

The administration went through the motion of offering Milosevic a deal which no President would accept – besides agreeing to withdraw Serbian forces from the province, NATO demanded Milosevic allow unfettered movement of NATO troops on Serbian territory.

That the offer was meant to be rejected became clear after the campaign was over and NATO acquiesced to Milosevic taking the same deal absent the provision allowing NATO access to Serbian territory.

But as Samantha Power, the current US ambassador to the UN, has pointed out, the bombing campaign had the opposite effect: unable to retaliate against NATO, Milosevic did so against the Albanian population.

While NATO bombs rained down, Milosevic cleansed up to one million Kosovo Albanians creating a refugee crisis in the neighboring Macedonia. From their high altitude, NATO airplanes struck with deadly inaccuracy: they hit a column of Albanian refugees, killing many, the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing three Chinese journalists, a Serbian passenger train, and a hospital.

Milosevic refused to back down and NATO ran out of obvious military targets. As a result, its commanders began to strike at Serbia’s infrastructure – including its water supply systems, the electricity grid, and bridges – killing hundreds of civilians in the process.

Human Rights Watch estimates that up to 528 civilians, Albanians and Serbians, died in the bombings, but Serbian authorities put this number much higher. The number remains in dispute.

Almost three months later, Milosevic finally backed down. Serbian forces withdrew from the province, NATO moved in, and the Kosovo Albanians returned to their homes.

With NATO patrolling the province, the KLA and their auxiliaries exacted revenge on Serbian civilians: thousands were ethnically cleansed, some were murdered, and others pushed into the northernmost part of Kosovo where they have remained in what Samantha Power has called “a militant ethnic ghetto”.

Kosovo is independent today, but not recognized as such by Serbia, Russia and many of its allies. Violence still sporadically erupts between the majority Albanians and the minority Serbs particularly in the divided town of Mitrovica.

Conclusion

The point of this detour into recent history is that NATO is indeed an alliance with powerful implications for the US position in the world.

Since the Kosovo operation, it has grown to include 28 countries and has drawn the wrath of Putin who blames the enlargement for the recent tensions in the Ukraine and the Baltic states. NATO’s recent flexing of its muscle in Eastern Europe has stirred up further fears of Western encroachment on the Russian sphere of influence, but to many Eastern Europeans these moves were like Xanax at a time when they are increasingly frightened by Putin’s foreign policy.

The point is that Europeans generally tend to view the alliance through the prism of their view of America: if they think the US is essentially a force of the good in the world they tend to view NATO as an extension of that well-intentioned impulse; if, on the other hand, they see the US as an unredeemable force of imperialism they see NATO as a destructive force.

The American public deserves a discussion on this and many other foreign policy issues. However, Donald Trump’s candidacy has made any rational, informed, discussion of foreign policy (or of anything else not related to “Hillary’s emails”) impossible.

His ‘Sopranos ‘approach to foreign policy, his bull-in-a-china shop floundering on major issues – including on the use of nuclear weapons – and his uncanny ability to drive the media coverage of the campaign in whichever direction he decides on the spur of the moment, have caused considerable damage to civil discourse in the country with huge implications for the future course of American foreign policy.

Trump himself was surprisingly frank when he said, about his description of NATO as “obsolete”: “Big statement to make when you don’t know that much about it.” Finally, something we can all agree on!

NATO’s role in the region remains highly contentious and unsettled. Its legacy is as disputed as ever.

Bosnians remain divided over whether or not to join. The alliance’s recent invitation to Montenegro to join has, predictably, prompted the ire of Putin’s Russia.

One could even say that we are living in the age of a new Eastern Question but instead of the Ottoman Empire, it is the declining influence of the EU that is prompting the Great Power competition in the region.

Whichever turn this competition takes, it is highly likely that the next US administration will have to make some serious decisions about NATO’s continuing involvement in the region. But because of Donald Trump, it is also highly likely that when this moment comes, the American public will be caught unawares and without having had even a semblance of a debate on the subject. Such is the legacy of Trumpism.

*Fedja Buric is an Assistant Professor of History at Bellarmine University in Louisville, KY. He specialises in modern European history with a focus on the former Yugoslavia. His writing has also appeared in Salon.

(Civil.Ge) — Georgian PM’s special representative for relations with Russia, Zurab Abashidze, met Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister, Grigory Karasin, in Prague on October 19 as part of informal direct bilateral dialogue launched between the two countries in late 2012.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said in a press release after the meeting that the Georgian and Russian diplomats “reaffirmed readiness to continue pragmatic course towards further gradual normalization of bilateral relations.”

“It was noted that after the recent parliamentary elections in Russia and Georgia, the both countries are interested in continuation of a dialogue on specific issues to intensify Russian-Georgian relations in those areas, where progress is possible in the condition of absence of diplomatic ties – trade, transport, culture and humanitarian areas,” it said.

“Results achieved over the past four years in normalization of bilateral [relations] inspire optimism,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said and noted increase in bilateral trade turnover, increase in number of Russian tourists visiting Georgia, and “successful development of practical interaction between the transport authorities” of the two countries.

It also said that a meeting of Russian and Georgian businesspeople would be held in Tbilisi in November, organized by chambers of trade and commerce of the two countries.

“Working on liberalisation of visa requirements for the Georgian citizens will continue,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said and added that the Russian government was considering “easing” visa rules for Georgian airline crew members.

Georgian PM’s office said in a press release on October 20 that the Georgian diplomat “made emphasis on gross violation of human rights in occupied Abkhazia and Tskhinvali region [South Ossetia] and on difficult situation along the occupation line.”

“Special importance of the Geneva talks [launched after the August, 2008 war] was stressed in this context as the major format for discussion of security and humanitarian issues existing between Georgia and Russia,” the Georgian PM’s office said.

It said that main issues on the agenda of the Prague format were discussed, related to “prospects for deepening” trade, economic, transport and humanitarian ties.

The Georgian PM’s office also said that during the meeting Abashidze reiterated once again to his Russian interlocutor that Tbilisi finalized work on all the documents envisaged by 2011 WTO deal between the two countries on customs monitoring.

Georgia agreed to give its go-ahead to Russia’s WTO membership only after Tbilisi and Moscow signed a Swiss-mediated agreement in November, 2011, envisaging putting in place sophisticated systems for tracking and auditing of cargo passing through breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. The deal has not yet been implemented and the issue was not mentioned in the Russian Foreign Ministry’s press release on the meeting in Prague.

Issue of Georgian citizens serving prison terms in Russia for spying was also discussed, according to the Georgian PM’s office. Seven Georgians, serving prison terms in Russia on spying charges, were handed over by Russia to Tbilisi since 2014.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said that the next meeting between Abashidze and Karasin is expected in the beginning of 2017.

A new study published in The Cryosphere, an European Geosciences Union journal, has found that Bolivian glaciers shrunk by 43% between 1986 and 2014, and will continue to diminish if temperatures in the region continue to increase.

“On top of that, glacier recession is leaving lakes that could burst and wash away villages or infrastructure downstream,” said lead-author Simon Cook, a lecturer at the Manchester Metropolitan University in the UK.

Receding glaciers also put water supply in the region at risk. Glacial meltwater is important for irrigation, drinking water and hydropower, both for mountain villages and large cities such as La Paz and El Alto. Throughout the year, the 2.3 million inhabitants of these two cities receive about 15% of their water supply from glaciers, with this percentage almost doubling during the dry season. Glacier retreat also means less water is available to supply rivers and lakes, such as southern Bolivia’s Lake Poopó, which recently dried up.

The new study is one of the first to monitor recent large-scale glacier change in Bolivia, to better understand how receding glaciers could affect communities in the country. “The novelty of our study lies in the bigger picture — measuring glacier change over all main glaciated ranges in Bolivia — and in the identification of potentially dangerous lakes for the first time,” Cook said.

The team measured glacier area change from 1986 to 2014 using satellite images from Landsat, the U.S. Geological Survey’s and NASA’s Earth observation programme. They found that the area of the Bolivian Andes covered by glaciers decreased from about 530 square kilometres in 1986 to only around 300 square kilometres in 2014, a reduction of 43%.

As glaciers recede, they leave behind lakes typically dammed by bedrock or glacial debris. Avalanches, rockfalls or earthquakes can breach these dams, or cause water to overflow them, resulting in catastrophic floods known as glacial lake outburst floods. The team reports that both the number and size of glacier lakes in the study region increased significantly from 1986 to 2014.

After studying glacier change, the researchers used their 2014 glacial-lake observations to identify the lakes where outburst floods could occur and present a hazard to populations. “We mapped hundreds of lakes,” Cook explained.

“Some lakes are very small and pose little risk. Others are very large, but there’s little or no possibility that they would drain catastrophically. Others are both large enough to create a big flood, and sit beneath steep slopes or steep glaciers, and could be dangerous.”

They identified 25 glacial lakes across the Bolivian Andes as potentially dangerous to communities and infrastructure, as they could result in very damaging floods. If the smallest of these 25 lakes was to drain completely, it would yield a flood with a peak discharge of 600 cubic metres per second. The largest could result in a discharge of over 125,000 cubic metres of water, about 50 times the volume of an Olympic swimming pool, in a second.

While measuring glacier area change was a relatively simple task, Cook said “identifying which lakes are dangerous is the million dollar question” as there are various factors to tidake into account.

“We considered that a lake was dangerous if there were settlements or infrastructure down-valley from the lake, and if the slopes and glaciers around the lake were very steep, meaning that they could shed ice or snow or rock into the lake, which would cause it to overtop and generate a flood – a bit like jumping into a swimming pool, but on a much bigger scale!”

Cook said these events could be under-reported, suggesting the risk of such floods in the Bolivian Andes has been overlooked. “We heard of other [glacier lake outburst flood] events from villagers when we visited the Apolobamba region in 2015, but there is no mention of these in publications or papers, possibly because many of these communities are relatively remote.” Hoffmann added: “A nation-wide risk assessment of potentially dangerous glacial lakes would be of great interest to local communities in glacier watersheds.”

In the study, the team also estimated that glacier area will be severely reduced by the end of the century, to about a tenth of the 1986 values. This would put communities even more at risk from water scarcity, Cook says. “We predicted in our study that most glaciers will be gone or much diminished by the end of the century – so where will the water come from in the dry season? Big cities like La Paz are partially dependent on meltwater from glaciers. But little is known about potential water resource stress in more remote areas. More work needs to be done on this issue.”

The team hope the study raises awareness about the rapid glacier loss in Bolivia, how it could change in the future, and how it could affect water supply and cause glacial lake outburst floods. “Ultimately, I hope that our results will be useful to people in Bolivia – governments, agencies, people living in rural areas and cities,” Cook concluded.

The processing power of standard computers is likely to reach its maximum in the next 10 to 25 years. Even at this maximum power, traditional computers won’t be able to handle a particular class of problem that involves combining variables to come up with many possible answers, and looking for the best solution.

Now, an entirely new type of computer that blends optical and electrical processing, reported Oct. 20 in the journal Science, could get around this impending processing constraint and solve those problems. If it can be scaled up, this non-traditional computer could save costs by finding more optimal solutions to problems that have an incredibly high number of possible solutions.

“This is a machine that’s in a sense the first in its class, and the idea is that it opens up a sub-field of research in the area of non-traditional computing machines,” said Peter McMahon, postdoctoral scholar in applied physics and co-author of the paper. “There are many, many questions that this development raises and we expect that over the next few years, several groups are going to be investigating this class of machine and looking into how this approach will pan out.”

The traveling salesman problem

There is a special type of problem – called a combinatorial optimization problem – that traditional computers find difficult to solve, even approximately. An example is what’s known as the “traveling salesman” problem, wherein a salesman has to visit a specific set of cities, each only once, and return to the first city, and the salesman wants to take the most efficient route possible. This problem may seem simple but the number of possible routes increases extremely rapidly as cities are added, and this underlies why the problem is difficult to solve.

“Those problems are challenging for standard computers, even supercomputers, because as the size grows, at some point, it takes the age of the universe to search through all the possible solutions,” said Alireza Marandi, a former postdoctoral scholar at Stanford and co-author of the study. “This is true even with a supercomputer because the growth in possibilities is so fast.”

It may be tempting to simply give up on the traveling salesman, but solving such hard optimization problems could have enormous impact in a wide range of areas. Examples include finding the optimal path for delivery trucks, minimizing interference in wireless networks, and determining how proteins fold. Even small improvements in some of these areas could result in massive monetary savings, which is why some scientists have spent their careers creating algorithms that produce very good approximate solutions to this type of problem.

An Ising machine

The Stanford team has built what’s called an Ising machine, named for a mathematical model of magnetism. The machine acts like a reprogrammable network of artificial magnets where each magnet only points up or down and, like a real magnetic system, it is expected to tend toward operating at low energy.

The theory is that, if the connections among a network of magnets can be programmed to represent the problem at hand, once they settle on the optimal, low-energy directions they should face, the solution can be derived from their final state. In the case of the traveling salesman, each artificial magnet in the Ising machine represents the position of a city in a particular path.

Rather than using magnets on a grid, the Stanford team used a special kind of laser system, known as a degenerate optical parametric oscillator, that, when turned on, will represent an upward- or downward-pointing “spin.” Pulses of the laser represent a city’s position in a path the salesman could take. In an earlier version of this machine (published two years ago), the team members extracted a small portion of each pulse, delayed it and added a controlled amount of that portion to the subsequent pulses. In traveling salesman terms, this is how they program the machine with the connections and distances between the cities. The pulse-to-pulse couplings constitute the programming of the problem. Then the machine is turned on to try to find a solution, which can be obtained by measuring the final output phases of the pulses.

The problem in this previous approach was connecting large numbers of pulses in arbitrarily complex ways. It was doable but required an added controllable optical delay for each pulse, which was costly and difficult to implement.

Scaling up

The latest Stanford Ising machine shows that a drastically more affordable and practical version could be made by replacing the controllable optical delays with a digital electronic circuit. The circuit emulates the optical connections among the pulses in order to program the problem and the laser system still solves it.

Nearly all of the materials used to make this machine are off-the-shelf elements that are already used for telecommunications. That, in combination with the simplicity of the programming, makes it easy to scale up. Stanford’s machine is currently able to solve 100-variable problems with any arbitrary set of connections between variables, and it has been tested on thousands of scenarios.

A group at NTT in Japan that consulted with Stanford’s team has also created an independent version of the machine; its study has been published alongside Stanford’s by Science. For now, the Ising machine still falls short of beating the processing power of traditional digital computers when it comes to combinatorial optimization. But it is gaining ground fast and the researchers are looking forward to seeing what other work will be possible based on this breakthrough.

“I think it’s an exciting avenue of exploration for finding alternative computers. It can get us closer to more efficient ways of tackling some of the most daunting computational problems we have,” said Marandi. “So far, we’ve made a laser-based computer that can target some of these problems, and we have already shown some promising results.”

India’s submarine construction programme has been jeopardised by a major data leak of its French-designed Scorpene submarines. The future of its new generation submarines under the Project 75 (India) contract has also been thrown into doubt.

By Sarosh Bana*

India’s submarine construction programme has been given unwelcome exposure by the wide-ranging data leak of its French-origin Scorpene submarines by The Australian newspaper. It has also raised questions about the Indian Navy’s Project 75 (India) for the construction of six new generation stealth diesel-electric submarines.

The 22,400 leaked pages, hosted on the New South Wales paper’s website on 24 and 25 August 2016, detailed the combat capabilities of the Scorpene 2000 SSK diesel-electric hunter/killer submarines. Six of these vessels are being built under the Indian Navy’s Project 75’S 2005 Transfer of Technology agreement between DCNS, the French contractor in naval defence, and the Mumbai-based state-owned shipyard Mazagon Dock Limited (MDL). The first of this series, construction on which began at the MDL Yard in December 2006, was to have been launched in September 2016 but is now delayed, its commissioning scheduled a year after its launch, with subsequent boats to be delivered at intervals of nine months.

Scorpene Programme Behind Schedule

The programme is running four years behind schedule, its original contract cost of US$2.63 billion in 2010 having spiralled to $3.8 billion. The cost includes a $1 billion Technical Data Package for MDL to gain competence in submarine construction, especially in the field of hull fabrication, outfitting and system integration.

Besides the question whether India’s security is under threat as a result of the data leak, another question concerns the motive of The Australian in exposing a friendly nation’s defence agenda, Indian commentators opined. Coincidentally, Canberra in April awarded the same French defence contractor DCNS a $38 billion (AU$50 billion) contract to design and build 12 new -generation submarines. That was after the Type 216 diesel-electric submarine of the German defence contractor, Thyssen Krupp Marine Systems (TKMS), lost out to DCNS’ Shortfin Barracuda in the bidding for the Australia contract.

Indian naval authorities downplayed the leak of the Scorpene submarines affirming it did not compromise national security. They viewed the issue as a temporary setback, noting that it involved largely generic data and information removed in 2011. However, such comprehensive disclosure as by The Australian would divulge confidential information and provide convenient levers to a rival company as well as to a rival navy.

Turnbull’s Concern

Though he termed the leak as one of “concern”, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull did not refer to the damage it might cause India’s defences or even The Australian’s culpability in this regard; he instead specified that the Indian Scorpene was a model different from the one Australia was buying. According to DCNS, the 97-metre 4000-tonne Shortfin Barracuda designed for the Australian Navy was the world’s most advanced conventionally powered submarine with state of the art technology, propulsion and hydroplanes and most powerful sonar.

India has taken up the matter with the French Government, requesting it to investigate it with urgency. It was not a leak, said a naval official, but a theft that took place overseas. They had not found any DCNS negligence, but identified some dishonesty by an individual. The Australian reported the secret data were stealthily drawn from DCNS by a former sub-contractor in 2011 and taken to a private company in Southeast Asia before being passed on to a branch of that company in a second Southeast Asian nation. A compact disk containing the data was then posted in regular mail to a company in Australia.

DCNS took the issue to the highest court of New South Wales that directed The Australian to withdraw the documents published on its website and desist from publishing any additional documents. DCNS also filed a complaint against unknown persons for breach of trust before the Paris Public Prosecutor. The French contractor is perturbed.

Apart from having set up its subsidiary DCNS India in Mumbai for building the Scorpene, it is now establishing another fully-owned subsidiary to produce Air Independent Propulsion (AIP) technology for submarines. The AIP allows a non-nuclear submarine to remain under water three times longer than one without it. An AIP is under indigenous development by the Indian Naval Material Research Laboratory. The AIP might be subsequently retrofitted during the scheduled major overhaul on the Scorpene.

DCNS Bidding For Project 75(I)

DCNS seeks to produce an AIP in India that would be deployed in all future submarines in the country. DCNS is also keen on bidding for the $11.1 billion Project 75 (I) contract for the construction of six new generation stealth diesel-electric submarines. Defence-oriented enterprises with warship-building facilities are priming themselves for the bidding for the tender to build the submarines in India at recognised shipyards. The Indian Navy has scotched speculation of a follow-on order to DCNS for the construction of three more Scorpenes.

Meanwhile, Germany’s TKMS is negotiating with India for a possible government to government deal for six of its 1,800 tonne Type 214 diesel-electric submarines that are equipped with AIP systems developed by Siemens and based on polymet electrolyte membrane hydrogen fuel cells. Germany has been keen on supplying its submarines to India. TKMS is expected to bid for the P-75(I) tender for which competition will be fierce from Spain, Sweden, Russia and Japan. TKMS will no doubt redouble its effort in India after failing to back the Australian deal that went to DCNS.

In rejecting the TKMS bid, Canberra informed Berlin that its 3,810-tonne Type 216 submarine that it had offered had an “unacceptable level of radiated noise”. It was reported that DCNS, the successful French bidder, had managed to influence Australian officials about the noise levels of the TKMS submarine.

*Sarosh Bana is Executive Editor of Business India. He contributed this to RSIS Commentary.

By Gulnur Kazimova*

A spate of high-profile allegations of medical malpractice, which has led to several fatalities, has served to increase many Azerbaijani’s already jaundiced view of their country’s public health system.

Most citizens have little faith in Azerbaijan’s healthcare, even though life expectancy has markedly improved over the past quarter of a century.

The average lifespan rose from 60 years for men and 66 years for women in 1990 to 69 years for men and 76 years for women in 2015, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).

Maternal mortality dropped from 64 per 100,000 live births over the same period, while the mortality rate of children under five fell from 20 per 1,000 children to seven.

Yet in spite of these positive developments, the perception is quite different. Many ordinary people distrust doctors and medical institutions, reporting experiences of corruption and malpractice in the medical sector.

Media reports of recent incidents have spurred public debate over substandard care.

In June alone, seven deaths in hospitals across the country were widely presumed to be the result of medical negligence, although a subsequent official enquiry found evidence of misconduct in only two cases.

On June 21, two babies of a set of triplets born prematurely in the Salyan district in the southeast died. A week later, the third baby died as well. The relatives say the babies died because they were not put into an incubator for preterm children in a timely manner. The incubator did not work because there was no electricity in the hospital.

“What century do we live in? Why does the hospital not have a generator in case of a power outage,” the grandmother said.

On June 25, six-month old Salim Lachinov, who was suffering from an intestinal obstruction, died after surgery at the Central Hospital in Zagatala. His parents said their baby was a victim of negligence, although the hospital said the child had been gravely ill and they had done all they could to save him.

That same day, 82-year-old Tarlan Aliyeva, a diabetic, was to have her gangrenous left leg amputated at the Angiology and Microsurgical Centre in Baku. Instead, her right, healthy leg was amputated by mistake. The left leg was amputated a few days later. A month later, she died.

On June 26, 35-year-old Lumu Veyisova underwent a gallbladder operation in an emergency hospital in Sumgayit and died on the operating table. The 81-year-old surgeon, Jafar Guliyev, whose hand was seen to be shaking during the operation, nicked an artery causing her to bleed to death.

Then on June 30, three-year-old Arzu Gurbanli died in a private clinic in the city of Sumgayit after an adenoma operation.

In response to this series of deaths, the ministry of health created a special commission. Guliyev was dismissed and the chief doctor of the hospital were he had been working was reprimanded, a ministerial spokesperson told the Azerbaijan Press Agency (APA).

The ministry´s press secretary, Liya Bayramova, defended the fact that Guliyev was still operating at his advanced age.

“The doctors have to go through certification every five years, and during this time their level of performance is established. If a doctor has a scientific degree, a name held in high regard and ability to work, then the contract with him can continue regardless of age. Jafar Guliyev, despite his advanced age, was certified. How this came about should be for the commission to find out,” Bayramova told IWPR.

A criminal case was also opened against the surgeon who amputated Aliyeva’s leg on charges of causing grievous bodily harm through negligence. He faces a fine of 500 manats (300 dollars) or six months in jail.

In the other cases, the commission concluded that no negligence was involved.

WIDESPREAD MISTRUST

Khadija Hajili, a doctor and a member of the opposition Republican Alternative movement (ReAl), said that medical staff were often able to act with impunity.

“Doctor’s negligence often goes unpunished,” she said. “The second reason is the lack of independent experts and mandatory health insurance. Citizens faced with doctors’ negligence simply cannot prove it.

“On the other hand, the ostensibly free medical services make patients dependent on public hospitals. In private clinics, the service is expensive. In the state [clinics], one has to [bribe] doctors informally but less than private ones [cost]. And if people had insurance, they would have the opportunity to be treated where they want,” Hajili continued.

The main reason for the sorry state of public health in Azerbaijan was endemic corruption, she concluded.

“At [Azerbaijan’s] Medical University, as in all other state universities, students pay bribes for good grades. At health facilities, [medical] personnel pay bribes to get a job, and then they take bribes from the patients to again pay a bribe to stay in this job. All this causes mistrust in the healthcare system of the country,” Hajili said.

However Galib Aliyev, chairman of the Association of Physicians of Azerbaijan, argued that the central problem was a lack of effective management within the Azerbaijani health system.

He said that 70 per cent of the budget was spent on equipment, clinics and the construction of new hospitals, while only per cent went towards paying the salaries of medical personnel.

“Doctors’ salaries in Azerbaijan are three times less than unemployment benefits in Europe,” he said.

The average salary of a public hospital doctor ranges between 130 – 450 manats (80 to 277 US dollars), depending on qualifications.

Aliyev said that low salaries were the main reason why doctors and nurses often violated medical ethics.

“As a result, people lose confidence in the whole system. Clear legislation is needed, according to which the work of doctors will be closely evaluated, and they will carry responsibility for their negligence. In 2008, our organisation developed a draft law entitled ´doctor´s code´ and proposed it to parliament. But parliament has still not considered it,” he told IWPR.

In 2012 – the only year for which figures are available – the ministry of health recorded 235 cases where people were prosecuted for public health violations. Of these criminal cases, 52 were connected to maternity hospitals and pre-natal clinics.

Meanwhile, the government is planning to introduce compulsory health insurance in two districts of the country next year as a pilot project. The aim is for citizens to receive high-quality medical care while creating a competitive environment among public hospitals and eliminating unofficial payments.

“We are going to implement this process in stages,” Zaur Aliyev, director of Azerbaijan’s state agency for compulsory medical insurance under the cabinet of ministers, told the Azerbaijan Press Agency (APA).

“This process will cover all the country after the hospitals in Mingachevir and Yevlakh districts make use of compulsory health insurance. It will be introduced in most parts of the country in 2018.”

However, there are some doubts whether the government´s efforts will go very far.

“Since the late 1990s, this question has been discussed. But its introduction has been dragging on,” said Azer Ismayil, an advisor to the chairman of the opposition Musavat party.

“I think during the time of the oil boom the resolution of this problem should have been a priority for the government. How far it will be possible to implement mandatory health insurance now, when the country is going through an economic crisis, I do not even know,” he said.

*Gulnur Kazimova is an Azerbaijani journalist who lives abroad. This article was published at IWPR’s CRS 828

On all nations and at all times it is easier to portray gods (neither friends nor enemies would criticize the images) than, for example, people… Fewer people had seen gods, which is quite opposite to the commonality of observing the men who are so close, though sometimes far away in space and even time.

That is why it is so easy and at the same time so difficult to create the adequate portrait of humans in paintings, clay, or words without elevating them as gods and also without downplaying them as demons.

In such a situation I find myself, facing the challenge [binding myself by commitment] to convey to the Ukrainian readers, at least in a schematic way, the creative world of Albanian poet Jeton Kelmendi who is already a well-known writer in the world and with whom I am acquainted through his texts, without seeing him, as well as I have only seen him through a myriad of cultural images familiar to his homeland, which sounds very poetic to me – Albania…

Since I take close to heart and mind the formula of Goethe the genius “Who wants to know the world of a poet – let them go to his country”, I understand and apologize in advance for all the creative approximation in my portrait of a fellow writer who has a romantic biography, stack of printed books, multi-level awards, ranks and titles, and with whom, I feel, we have much in common regarding the ways we embrace life… Although I never shook his hand in his ancestral aristocratic nest on his country that gives roots and wings to his poetry.

Therefore, learning more about Jeton’s creative manhood, I was able to better understand the attractive feminine charm of Albania and – vice versa. By “learning” I mean knowledge and reasoning, as well as intuitive feelings, a conscience in the highest spiritual coordinates. For literature, especially poetry; is the history of human emotion.

As for the poet’s homeland, the Republic of Albania is a country in the western Balkans on the Adriatic and Ionian seas. Its closest neighbours are (“tell me who is your neighbour and I’ll tell you something about yourself…”) Italy (through the Strait of Otranto); in northeast it is Serbia, Kosovo; Montenegro is to north-west; Republic of Macedonia is to the east; and Greece to south and south-east. Only the list of names awakens in souls of our consecrated contemporaries a whole bunch of lyrical, dramatic, and sometimes tragic associations.

Jeton Kelmendi writes in Albanian, English, French, and Romanian languages and he is not a stranger, as often happens with real poets, also to other literary modes and genres, such as prose, drama, journalism, the translation… As for the iconic facts that make up and mark the context of Jeton Kelmendi’s creative life, it is worth noting that he was born in Peja (Kosovo) in 1978, graduated from the department of mass communications at Prishtina University, and then studied at the Free University in Brussels. He participated in the Kosovo Liberation Army during the War of Kosovo of 1998-1999… This latter biographical feature especially touched me and became a psycho-philosophical reference point-magnet in the perception of myth and poetic world of Jeton Kelmendi, whose book of poems “On the Top of Time” was published recently in Ukraine, translated by remarkable poet Anna Bahryana and published in the publishing house “Tverdynya” (“Stronghold”) in Lutsk.

War puts everything in its place within the highest hierarchy. And what war gives to human soul is stress, trauma, simultaneously joy and suffering (according to Lorca), which are under the aegis of love, hate as love, and love as hate. The situation of war often calls for treatment with prayer or poetry, and with prayer that is poetry and poetry that is prayer …After all, if poetic argumentation of the world is a great hypocrisy for someone, for others it becomes life and death.

This is why it is so important how our neighbours on the planet are praying or write poetry – because with this knowledge we can examine ourselves in deeper and subtler way, which also means learning about the One who will call us again, for a meeting with the eternity, after calling each of us out of mother’s womb … out of distant above-Earth dimensions.
It is difficult, of course, to deal adequately with poetry in translation, but knowing well the work of a translator Anna Bahriana and taking into account the impact of social, political, natural, ethical, ethnic, and aesthetic context – we will be able to see, feel, and understand what is crucial and serves as vector, “vertical”, and the core senses. In order to take these central points for ourselves and carry on …not as medals of gold or steel, but as something soulful and spiritual, experiential, painful, transformed into a quiet warm light of worldwide sorrow and innate joy derived from the fact that we are here, that we are sometimes pulsing in unison …in spite of everything.

And just a poet the mythmaker as no one else becomes a poet the peacemaker, when politicians confidently and stubbornly push our common world into the abyss of the apocalypse, with its features of disillusionment and estrangement not surprisingly presented in this book:

I do not believe anything,
Even the words
That you speak from the heart
(“The Walled Dream”)

While reading these texts of free verses in the book, I was trying to understand precisely to whom they are addressed cordially – …a sweetheart? Albania? The Almighty God? … Obviously – to all and everything at the same time, with some prevailing senses and prerogatives in each particular poem of ragged rhythm, hints, and the rhyme-webs.

Although most often, it seems to me, they are letters of a man with music in the soul to his beloved Muse and they extrapolate on imaginary conversations of Adam and Eve who had just lost the paradise…

The endings in his poems are expressive and conceptual, for example: “And this whole long journey // was it necessary just for // To come to myself”, and epigraphs refer to existential wisdom (“Now I came to myself and I can live with the angels” (Mother Teresa)).

Mother Teresa (Agnese Ґondzha Boyadjiev (1910 -1997)), whose “Prayers and Commandments” are always with me (like this one – “If you succeed, you make imaginary and real enemies. Yet still, look forward to success!”), by the way, was also Albanian … which let me better feel and understand the Albanian poet.

Jeton dates and geographically determines his poems: “District Auderghem, Brussels, and February, 2007”. They have a lot of footnotes, explanations, indicating the historiography specificity of his lyrics.

Finally, whatever he writes about, everything in his texts, like in writings of every true poet, can be globally reduced to three main themes and ideological spectrums: love, space, homeland:

My Godly Motherland that called me
Albanian…

In some poems and lines, these themes are symphonically combined together in one single liturgy of feelings, and they sound as sacred saga of gratitude to the Almighty for our being here, pulsing, aching, and shining:

My beloved,
Beauty and poetry merge into one stream
For you and for the country
(Paris, March 28).

Sometimes his poems appear to be concise but meaningful everyday dramas, created, in fact, by the laws of the scene with all its actions, introductions, payoffs, and culminations:

DRAMA

Action first
Maybe
Yesterday there was just too much
And you do not even remember
Where lies the boundary between
Sadness and joy
We had to walk
This way,
From somewhere — and to somewhere
……..
Action third
Today, we do not blame each other.
Buy a ticket for a long journey…
At each station
Of the written
You will find commas
For yourself
And question marks – for me.

Jeton Kelmendi is dancing his white dance with the words in his spiritual quest around apocryphal religious truths, once paying more attention to society, then poetry and politics, even macro-politics with their sacraments and revelations go together, creating the effect of hologram depth, making the poet a mirror of national space which exists by rules established by man, the other time, on the contrary, he regards nature that exists under the laws of God.

So mature as a poet, a man, a human being Jeton Kelmendi in his poetry and life creation becomes a philosopher, not a poet-lover, but a poet-guru, gourmet, who, for sensing the taste of wine and life does not need to drink the whole bottle, but quite a few delicate sips, because he is not afraid of the boundary manifestation of all things – aging … death, as evidenced by his poems such as “About my thirst, about her thirst,” “Life over oneself”, “Path to the own self”, “Memory in verse.” The latter one is probably one of the most penetrating pieces approaching matters of Eros and Thanatos

There, under a large stone
You will not find me anymore
I became its shadow
There, over the yellowed grass,
Only the content remained
How strong have you been, dear
When you said you would not move a step
Whilst you see me
Months were passing,
Seasons, years
Honey, how strong you were
Soft poems and wild poems
Words no longer have blood
Do not speak any more
About all that we had in common
Only one poem
Take off the top of time…

One verse that might become a song translated into different languages, including Ukrainian, one Albanian woman who is Mother Teresa, one poet-warrior, and one Albania on our common planet Earth, one Word which is Logos, and another Word that is God…

All of these are enough in order to feel the continuity of life and be eager to live with dignity and a feeling of flight, praying with poems and feeling prayers as poetry, as do all the true poets of the world, among which undoubtedly Jeton Kelmendi, whose writings give a chance and hope to the close souls for meeting soon on top of time – space…

Jeton Kelmendi. On the Top of Time: poetry / Jeton Kelmendi; compiled and translated from Albanian by Anna Bahriana. – Lutsk: Publishing House “Tverdynia”, 2012. – 40 p. – Series “Modern Balkan Poetry”

*Ihor Pavlyuk, Kiev Ukraine.

On the third day of his official visit to Rwanda, King Mohammed VI today visited Kigali Genocide memorial and observed a minute moment of silence behind a solitary bouquet of white roses in a tribute to 250, 000 genocide victims buried on this site. The world still remembers sadly the 1994 genocide against Tutsi where over a million lives were lost.

Inaugurated in April 2004, on the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, the Gisozi memorial includes three permanent exhibitions explaining the tragedy’s circumstances, reasons behind the growing tension between the country’s ethnic groups, what triggered the genocide and how it happened.

King Mohammed VI visited the exhibitions that trace Rwanda’s history from colonialism and the introduction of the Hutu and Tutsi classifications. They end with the devastating result of the divisions that were created, illustrated in hundreds of photos of the massacred, and rows of skulls and bones assembled in a silent, black room.

Undoubtedly this place matters. The victims and survivors matter. And they deserve our time, prayers and respect. The memorial is the final resting place for up to 259,000 victims of the genocide and serves as a place where people can grieve for their lost loved ones and remember them. It also serves as a museum where both local and international visitors can learn about the history, implementation and consequences of the genocide that wiped out a significant percentage of Rwanda’s population, caused millions to flee and traumatized survivors.

Rwandans are keen to educate us as to what happened and all the massacres that were perpetrated in the 100 days in 1994, to help us all learn from the past to ensure to promote the message clear NEVER AGAIN. They seem to be forgiving, but not forgetting.

At the end of the visit, King Mohammed VI scribbled in the guestbook. Then, the Memorial director Honoré Gatera handed the sovereign a brochure on the exhibition and a book entitled “28 years of survivors’ testimonies”. That was a royal tribute to the victims of that universally condemned horrendous tragedy.

I’ve written often about our Iraqi refugee friend and his oldest son from Baghdad. I will call them Mohammed and Ahmed. They made the torturous flight last year from Baghdad to Kurdistan and then across Turkey. They were on three Greek islands before permission was granted them to continue their trip. They passed through several countries at the time the borders were being closed. They arrived finally at their destination in late September 2015. Finland.

Having lived with this family in Baghdad, I have the faces of the wife and each of the children before me. Above is a photo of two of Mohammed’s children.

Generally, I use Mohammed’s words, quoting him in a first person narrative. He told the story of their desperate life-threatening journey over a year ago. They went to Finland with the hope that fewer refugees would travel so far, that they would get asylum quicker and be reunited with their family, Mohammed’s wife and the other six children in Iraq. Together with a small group of friends, Kathy Kelly and I were able to visit them in Finland in the deep winter cold this past January. We were able to bring them for a few days from the camp to Helsinki where they were warmly received by many Finnish people involved in the peace movement, journalists among them.

In late June, Mohammed wrote us about the depression and frustration among refugees in their camp as many of them were getting rejected for asylum. He wrote that even Iraqi refugees from Fallujah, Ramadi and Mosel were getting rejections. “I don’t know what I will do if I get a bad answer. For the last three weeks only bad answers are coming.” Then in late July came the crushing news that his own case had been denied.

“Today I got the immigration decision that my case was rejected. Me and Ahmed are not welcomed to Finland. Thanks for everything you did.” The next day he wrote again. “Today is one of the heaviest days of my life. Everybody, my son, my cousin and myself….we just kept silent. We are shocked from the decision. Losing my brother, jailed for 2 years, kidnapped, tortured, losing my house, parents, father-in-law, death threat letter and assassination attempt. Over 50 relatives killed. What more must I give them for them to believe me? Only one thing I forgot, to submit my death certificate. I feel I am being slaughtered. I don’t know what to tell my wife and children [in Baghdad].”

We have since learned that Finland is granting residency to only 10% of asylum seekers. An appeal is in progress, and several people have written letters on Mohammed’s behalf. It is by no means clear however that his request will be accepted.

In the meantime, the situation in Iraq and in Baghdad continues to worsen in terms of daily explosions, suicide bombings, assassinations, kidnappings, ISIS, police, army and militia activity. His wife lives in a particularly open and vulnerable rural area. His brother, who used to live a stone’s throw away, had to flee with his family several months ago due to death threats. This left Mohammed’s wife and children without protection. During Ramadan Mohammed wrote: “The situation is really terrible during these days. My wife was planning to take the kids to her mother’s village during EID but she cancelled this idea.” On another occasion he wrote “My wife is very worried about our second oldest son, afraid he will be kidnapped. She is thinking of moving from the village. Today we argued very hard as she blames me, telling me that I said we would be reunited within 6 months.”

On two recent occasions armed uniformed men came to Mohammed’s house seeking information about Mohammed and Ahmed. Mohammed wrote: “Yesterday at 5am the house was raided by armed official military guys in uniforms. Maybe the police? Maybe the militia or ISIS?” It is hard to imagine the fright of Mohammed’s defenceless wife and the children, the youngest of whom is only 3 years old. It is hard to imagine Mohammed and Ahmed’s fright being so far away. At times Mohammed’s wife has hidden the oldest boy in the reeds by their house, afraid he will be recruited by force by ISIS or the militia! She has also been afraid to send the children to school because the security situation is so dangerous. She is angry at Mohammed, scared and not understanding why they have not been reunited after a year’s time.

Recently Mohammed emailed: “Honestly, Cathy, every night I am thinking of returning home and ending these arguments. Living away from your beloved kids is really hard. If I get killed alongside of my family, then everyone will understand why we had to leave and the arguments will finish. Even the Finnish immigration will understand that what I told them was true. But the next morning I changed my mind and decided to await the court’s final decision.”

“Every night I am afraid from the next morning’s news from my family. My daughter asked me by phone last week ‘Dad, when can we live together again. I am now 14 years and you have been away so long.’ She broke my heart.”

Just a few days ago he wrote: “I’m so happy because the ice has melted between my wife and I.” His little boy, 6 years, and his youngest daughter 8 years went to school today. My wife is so brave….She decided to pay for a school bus for all of the kids. She said ‘I believe in God and I am sending the children and taking the risk.'”

I often ask myself how Mohammed gets up in the morning. How are he and his wife able to face the day? Their courage, their faith and their resilience inspires me, challenges me and pushes me to get out of my own bed in the morning.

*Cathy Breen (newsfromcathy@gmail.com), lives and works at Maryhouse Catholic Worker in New York City. She is also co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence.
Photo credit: Cathy Breen

The ongoing debate on divorce (triple talaq) and Uniform Civil Code, in India has been slammed as an “unnecessary polemic”. One wonders as to how the Uniform Civil Code or the abolishment of the triple talaq would help in the country’s development. If the government intends to provide equal rights to Muslims, it should not refrain from removing the religious stipulation from the Section 341 in the Constitution.

Talking today to the media reporters, Maulana said that Muslims’ condition is worse than that of the Dalits and other backward sections of the Indian society, as the Sachchar Committee has also revealed. Therefore, the apex body of Sunni Sufi Muslims in India, All India Ulama and Mashaikh Board recommends the government to ameliorate the social, educational, economic and political condition of Muslims rather than indulge in the unnecessary issues and debates.

On this occasion, the Sufi Muslim clerics and scholars also endorsed the demand of the All India Ulama and Mashaikh Board. Two more key officials of the board, who are currently on a visit to an international conference on the unity of Ummah in Moscow, Russia, were also in the AIUMB press meet. Before they left for the conference in Moscow, Maulana Syed Tanveer Hashmi and Syed Salman Chishti endorsed the statements of the founder-president of the AIUMB. They appealed to the Indian government to ensure the constitutional freedom of religious practice to the followers of all religions in India.

Maulana Syed Mohammad Ashraf Kichchawchchvi further said that the debate is pointless because the Uniform Civil Code is already enacted in the country. All the criminal and civil laws are equal and uniform for all the religious communities. Only the laws of marriage, divorce and inherence are practices as per the personal laws, though the Special Marriage Act is also there. Hence, he wondered whether how government’s unsolicited interference in the laws of nikah and talaq would help in the development of the nation on the constructive lines. “Similar personal laws are practiced by people of other faith traditions in India. Apparently, the government’s intent behind raising the issue of triple talaq is dubious”, he said.

Islamic Scholar and writer, Ghulam Rasool Dehlvi, a key member of the World Sufi Forum, said that the we should did not reject the law commission’s questionnaire, but rather, answer each and every question. He further said that “we should not see a sinister design behind the questionnaire which elicits opinions about reforms in other communities, not only in the Muslim community”. The AIUMB has got it translated into Urdu and Hindi for its wider dissemination among the Sufi Sunni Muslims attached to various wings of the board across the country. It has also run a campaign to bring awareness to stop the abuse of triple talaq and other Islamic practices.

The AIUMB also questioned the Salafis lashing out at the law commission’s questionnaire on triple talaq, as the Salafi or Ahle-Hadisi sect has nothing to do with any of the four Islamic schools of law pertaining to the issue. “The Law Commission has done nothing wrong by asking the mainstream Indian Muslims’ opinion on this question. Common Muslims have to be educated and trained to democratically protect and practice their personal laws”, said the founder-president of the AIUMB.

The AIUMB is also planning an Islamic seminar on triple talaq which will gather the leading muftis and experts on Hanafi Islamic school of law. “We will come to the final result after considering all aspects of the matter and will uphold the Ulama and Mashaikh’s position on the issue”, said Syed Muhammad Ashraf Kichchawchchvi.

*Ghulam Rasool Dehlvi, Independent writer and columnist, well-versed in Islamic Studies and Comparative Religion, Researcher in Culture & Communication Studies, Arabic-Urdu-Hindi Author & Translator, a Frequent Commentator on Muslim Affairs in national and international Media.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued the “Sexually Transmitted Disease Surveillance 2015” report.

Never before have more young people been subjected to “progressive” sex education than today; never before have more Americans been given free condoms than today; never before have more colleges and universities incorporated “safe sex” classes into their freshmen orientation programs than today; never before have there been more public service advertisements imploring gays to take preventive measures than today; never before have more celebrities been hired to promote “sexual awareness” than today; and never before has the rate of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) been higher.

In the 1950s, abortion was illegal, sex education hardly existed, and the pill was not on the market. The rates of abortion, illegitimacy, and STDs were so small that these subjects were rarely discussed. So why is it that today, with all the advances in education and technology, we are going backwards?

Never before have the rates of chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis been worse. Chlamydia mostly affects females, and it is young women, disproportionately black, who score the worst. Homosexual men, who are roughly one percent of the population, account for the majority of cases of gonorrhea and syphilis.

So who is suffering the least from STDs? We know from a study published in the Journal of Pediatric and Adolescent Gynecology that girls who are religious are far less likely to be burdened with STDs than those who are not. Religious beliefs and practices, the researchers found, functioned as “an independent predictor of multiple sexual behaviors directly linked to important clinical outcomes such as pregnancy and STD risk.”

Religious beliefs and practices have proven to be a better deterrent to STDs than education and technology. Yet we are doing nothing to husband the resources of faith communities to combat STDs. Instead, we distribute condoms and lecture on the wonders of “safe sex.” And then we scratch our heads every year when the STD rates get worse. We never learn.

Religion is not the enemy—it’s the answer. But religion scares the free spirits: they don’t want to be told to practice restraint, so they throw it to the wind, living a libertine lifestyle. Then they get sick.

We don’t need to spend a dime more on research. In fact, funding research on STD prevention only increases the likelihood that we will keep our heads in the sand. Money won’t cure a problem rooted in reckless behavior—only virtue will.

Law is not meant to be mishandled and mutilated by lawyers the way they want because they want to mint money in courts by all means.

The Judiciary is not cricket and justice cannot be delivered in a match fixing mode practiced in cricket matches. In cricket, bowlers and fielders jointly offer 50, 100, and 200 etc score to the “needy: batboys on prior agreement between the cricket boards and corporate mafias and obviously on huge payment basis. But Judiciary cannot function like hired fixing agents in as in cricket.

For the people, Judges are honest people.

Judges cannot but be honest people to raise the trust of the society in laws. By misbehaving, judges bring down the prestige and status of judiciary as vanguard of truthful justice system.

Introduction

The judiciary of a nation is the ultimate hope of people and therefore has a big responsibility as it should guide the nation honestly and with distinction. It judgments should strengthen and make the system function much better than that exists.

Unfortunately, global judicial system is corrupt and causes faulty judgments and suspicions in the public mind. One gets the impression- rightly so- that money can buy favorable judgments from honorable judges. That is devastatingly horrible thing to happen to judiciary. The result is judiciary and judgments, like any other domains, are controlled by mafia and frauds in and around courts.

Unfortunately, India is a top corrupt nation with faulty, corrupt system, developed by government after government, catering for the welfare of the rich and corporate lords, spoiling the image of the nation. This image has badly affected even judiciary wherefrom people expect full, guaranteed and genuine justice.

Like elsewhere, Indian courts, from down local to the Apex Court, cases in abundance have been pending mainly because most of them are fake and false and advocates and at times judges keep postponing the cases just like that. Lawyers and judges waste their time as well as the courts.

First of all fake cases should not be entertained by the courts and at the document writing level, veracity of the facts should be ascertained before documents are allowed b document writers to produce documents and the document registration offices should also verify if the facts presented as facts are really true. Verification process might take some time but that is worth the trouble because by that precious time of courts can be saved to argue real cases. Today any rogue can produce fake documents and register them at the offices by paying bribes everywhere, thereby causing problems for the judiciary. Lawyers aid the rogues to produce fake documents and judges allow the cases to proceed on fake documents seeking just “some” proof that could easily be presented y by the advocates and the judges who were lawyers before just oblige the lawyers to go ahead.

A big show of lies and mischief and totally farce!

Courts should verify the facts of a case even of complicated ones before delivering judgments because judgment needs to be truthful and entirely valid. Lower courts quickly deliver judgments deliberately wrong expecting the higher courts to study the cases and of the needful.

Courts should use the services of honest intelligence that cannot be bribed or influenced by the “concerned” persons to ascertain the facts before judgments are passed.

The Chief Justice should not ignore the truth about why and how cases are delayed and why there are thousands of unresolved cases in all courts.

Judiciary

Judiciary is lifeline of legal societies and hence it has pivotal role to play in every country. Hence courts are places meant for worship by those who handle law. Courts aren’t just the money making spots. Spot fixing in courts against the constitution is immoral and illegal.

The importance of judiciary in any system of government cannot be disputed or questioned chiefly because without it system can collapse. It is well known that flaws in judicial system or delivery of justice, including negative phenomena, can harm the proper functioning of jurisprudence and badly hamper genuine judgment delivery without favor and nepotism and without getting involved in corrupt practices.

The need for honest and truly secular judges without involvement in any corruption issues needs not over stressed. Quality of judges determine quality of proceedings and speedy judgments.

Judiciary suffers from all sorts of drawbacks in developed as well as developing nations. Any negative phenomena in judiciary can negatively affect the life of a given society by encouraging even the creation of fake governments. Courts are essentially meant for the rich people to pursue their greedy projects, targeting the poor and common people. People have to think about the cost factor as well as lengthy processes. This fact should change in any modern democracy, including developing and developed nations.

There is a general understanding in the public domain that money can make law salute the criminals and frauds and without money none can get justice from courts. This public impression is devastating for any system of government as it harms the legal system.

The Judiciary interprets the Constitution as its final arbiter. It is its duty as mandated by the Constitution, to be its watchdog, by calling for scrutiny any act of the legislature or the executive, who otherwise, are free to enact or implement these, from overstepping bounds set for them by the Constitution. It acts like a guardian in protecting the fundamental rights of the people, as enshrined in the Constitution, from infringement by any organ of the state. It also balances the conflicting exercise of power between the centre and a state or among states, as assigned to them by the Constitution.

The term “judiciary” is also used to refer collectively to the personnel, such as judges, magistrates and other adjudicators, who form the core of a judiciary (sometimes referred to as a “bench”), as well as the staffs that keep the system running smoothly.

The judiciary – also known as the judicial system or court system – is the system of courts that interprets and applies the law in the name of the state. The judiciary generally makes laws for the nation and provides a mechanism for the resolution of disputes. In some nations, the judiciary can make law, known as Common Law, by setting precedent for other judges to follow, as opposed to Statutory Law made by the legislature. The Judiciary is often tasked with ensuring equal justice under law. In some nations, under doctrines of separation of powers, the judiciary generally does not make law as law making is the responsibility of the legislature or enforce law which is the responsibility of the executive. Judiciary rather interprets law and applies it to the facts of each case.

Judges

Judges occupy a very special status in any political system. Unlike other professionals, including teachers, medical doctors and persons engaged in examination works, etc, where there is a possibility of favoritism, nepotism and corruption, judges cannot be biased nor afford to be insincere in their duty in any manner.
A judge presides over court proceedings, either alone or as a part of a panel of judges. The powers, functions, method of appointment, discipline, and training of judges vary widely across different jurisdictions. The judge is supposed to conduct the trial impartially and in an open court. The judge hears all the ‘witnesses’ and any other ‘evidence’ presented by the lawyers or barristers of the case, assesses the ‘credibility’ and arguments of the parties, and then issues a ruling on the matter at hand based on his or her interpretation of the law and his or her own personal judgment.

In some jurisdictions, the judge’s powers may be shared with a jury. In inquisitorial systems of criminal investigation, a judge might also be an examining magistrate. In India at district levels, district collectors or equivalent officiate as district magistrate as well.

Concerns and hypocrisy

Recently, the Chief Justice of India (CJI) TS Thakur India has asked the government to speed up process of appointment of more judges to deliver judgments without delay. He sought to link huge backlog of cases and vacancies in the judiciary, saying due do the delay in filing up vacancies the cases keep piling up in various courts. He has flagged the issue several times publicly on many occasions.

Once again highlighting the issue of vacancies in the judiciary and huge backlog of cases, Chief Justice of India T S Thakur said the process of appointment of judges must be accelerated. TS Thakur was addressing the first state conference of judicial officers, organised by the Chhattisgarh High Court and the State Judicial Academy in Bilaspur.

The CJI has flagged the issue in his public speeches on many occasions in the recent past. “There are 12 judges per 10 lakh people in the country and at least three crore cases are pending in the courts. There is a need to speed up the process of appointment to vacant posts of judges,” Justice Thakur said.

As per the Law Commission’s report in 1987, 40,000 judges were needed then, but even today the strength of judiciary was only 18,000, he said. If the situation did not change, the figure of pending cases would cross five crore in the next 15-20 years, and crores of people would be deprived of justice, the CJI said.

As per the Law Commission’s report in 1987, 40,000 judges were needed then, but even today the strength of judiciary was only 18,000, he said. If the situation did not change, the figure of pending cases would cross five crore in the next 15-20 years, and crores of people would be deprived of justice, the CJI said.
Appointments can be made gradually by setting a target for the next five years, Thakur said, adding that he had expressed his concerns on the issue with the Prime Minister too.

Appointments can be made gradually by setting a target for the next five years, Thakur said, adding that he had expressed his concerns on the issue with the Prime Minister too. — The foremost attribute of judiciary is honesty, he said. “If any person, belonging to any sector, is not honest, then he must be a trader (“dukandar”). An arbitrator should not be a trader and is not supposed to sell judgment. Therefore, honesty is the foremost quality needed in the judiciary,” the CJI said.

A good judge is the one who gives a patient hearing to both the sides before dispensing justice, Justice Thakur said. As per the Law Commission’s report in 1987, 40,000 judges were needed then, but even today the strength of judiciary was only 18,000, he said. Appointments can be made gradually by setting a target for the next 5 years, he said.

However, Justice Thakur refuses to recognize the critical truth about huge fake an d false cases in the courts wasting the valuable time of courts and judges. In many cases genuine cases are not taken up. CJI also declines to admit the corruption in the courts, especially judges. As lawyers are mediating to influence the judges by sharing money the culprits offer to them.

Financial dependence

Apart from appointments of judges, government also controls the budget of the judiciary. Naturally government indirectly controls judiciary and even judgments of major cases.

Budget of the judiciary in many transitional and developing countries is almost completely controlled by the executive. The latter undermines the separation of powers, as it creates a critical financial dependence of the judiciary. The proper national wealth distribution including the government spending on the judiciary is subject of the constitutional economics. It is important to distinguish between the two methods of corruption of the judiciary: the state (through budget planning and various privileges), and the private.

In some countries and jurisdictions, judiciary branch is expanded to include additional public legal professionals and institutions such as prosecutors, state lawyers, ombudsmen, public notaries, judicial police service and legal aid officers. These institutions are sometimes governed by the same judicial administration that governs courts, and in some cases the administration of the judicial branch is also the administering authority for private legal professions such as lawyers and private notary offices. Such interdependence makes judiciary vulnerable to the state control mechanism.

Indian Judiciary

The Indian Judiciary administers a common law system of legal jurisdiction, in which customs, precedents and legislation, all codify the law of the land. It has in part, inherited the legacy of the legal system established by the then colonial powers and the princely states since the mid-19th century, and has partly retained characteristics of practices from the ancient and medieval times.

The system has judiciously promoted a corrupt national judiciary.
There are various levels of judiciary in India – different types of courts, each with varying powers depending on the tier and jurisdiction bestowed upon them. They form a strict hierarchy of importance, in line with the order of the courts in which they sit, with the Supreme Court of India at the top, followed by High Courts of respective states with district judges sitting in District Courts and Magistrates of Second Class and Civil Judge at the bottom. Courts hear criminal and civil cases, including disputes between individuals and the government. The judiciary is independent of the executive and legislative branches of government according to the Constitution of India.

While pronouncing decisions under its constitutional mandate, it is expected to remain unaffected by pulls and pressures exerted by other branches of the state, citizens or interest groups. And crucially, independence of the judiciary has been held to be a basic feature of the Constitution, and which being inalienable, has come to mean – that which cannot be taken away from it by any act or amendment by the legislature or the executive.

This independence shows up in the following manner: No minister, or even the executive collectively, can suggest any names for appointment as judges, to the President, who ultimately decides on appointing them from a list of names recommended only by the collegium of the judiciary. Nor can judges of the Supreme Court or a High Court be removed from office once appointed, unless an overwhelming two-thirds of members of any of the Houses of the Parliament back the move, and only on grounds of proven misconduct or incapacity. A person who has been a judge of a court is debarred from practicing in the jurisdiction of that court.
In many jurisdictions the judicial branch has the power to change laws through the process of judicial review. Courts with judicial review power may annul the laws and rules of the state when it finds them incompatible with a higher norm, such as primary legislation, the provisions of the constitution or international law.

Slow judgments

Lack of state responsibility in establishing an effective honest judicial system is a major reason why the system has acquired planet of lacuna.

Indian courts have millions of pending cases owing to lack of judges and lengthy procedures. On an average about 20% of the sanctioned positions for judges are vacant, whereas the annual increase in pendency is less than 2%. In 2015, it was reported that there were close to 400 vacancies for judge’s post in country’s 24 high courts. Arrears in the Supreme Court have mounted to around 65,000. There are some 30 million cases in various courts. Budget allocation for judiciary is a miserly 0.2 per cent of the gross domestic product. The judge-population ratio is 10.5 to one million, which should be 50 to one million.

If the vacancies were filled, pendencies would go down and make the justice system deliver efficiently. Traffic challans, police challans and cheque bounce cases make up nearly half of all pending cases.
The government has been the largest, single party litigating before the courts, and has kept adding cases to the over-burdened courts despite losing most, and then on losing, has relentlessly taken them to the next court, much of this being avoidable, according to the Law Commission.

The vast number of cases pending in the Supreme Court as well as the other lower courts has defeated the very purpose of the judicial system.

For justice delayed, is in effect justice denied.

Lawyers and judges

India follows the British system of justice. Some aspects have been borrowed from USA. But we have not made efforts to make our judicial system genuine as we make the same blunders as the western systems commit in order to protect the big criminals as lawyers and judges joint play mischief.

Judges should be differentiated from lawyers. A law student can become a law teacher in nay institution but that cannot be extended to a law becoming a judge in the field of court law.

That is cause of all problems Indians suffer for too long – created partly by politicians, partly by the governments and elected representatives of people, partly by the parliament and state assemblies, partly by the media lords, partly by mafias, partly by illogical police, partly by the judiciary and partly by the helpless people of India.

Judiciary can do a lot for the benefits of people and nation of India.

Understandably, there are many people, including lawyers who are interested in meeting select judges and senior lawyers possibly trying to fix cases on huge down payments.

Judges are not like administrators or teachers or any category of people who manage things. They are highly responsible and hence highly respectable people who are the s conscience keepers of the nation and society.

Judges cannot be compared with officals politicians, MPs or MLAs, or ministers or cricketers – primarily because generally they tell lies, cheat people, play mischief and don’t deliver and incapable of deliver justice to people. Judges have the power to ruin or upgrade the fate of humans. Hence judges are serious people.

Pendency

Delay in judgments by prolonging the hearing for too long in repeated adjournments, is just one issue that readily make judgments corrupt. Lawyers make huge money by helping their clients with lies, fake documents and false evidences is another important issue. Courts’ disability to comprehend the truth on the basis of real facts rather than going by concocted proofs and evidences is another issue.

To reduce pendency, ‘Fast-track courts’, ‘Evening courts/Morning courts’ were set up and have met with mixed success so far. ‘Mobile courts’ are being set up to bring ‘justice at the doorsteps of litigants of far-flung remote and backward rural areas.

However, Lok Adalats an informal, alternative mechanism has been a phenomenal success in tackling pendency, especially in pre-litigation matters, settling fresh cases before they become full-blown disputes and enter the courts.

But the most significant fault or lacuna lies in the very selection process of judges for higher courts, where honesty and truthfulness of judges should be the top priority.

This article argues for a special stream of direct judges to handle serious cases. .

A healthy judiciary in all respects is a positive sign any nation can be proud of as its major achievement. It is a crucial issue and making judiciary work honestly should be the priority of every government in the world so that a society behaves well and works in the best traditions.

Now- a-days, officials punish the subordinates or workers, teachers, etc at times arbitrarily and the affected persons have to approach the courts for justice. Courts generally cancel the said official orders or refuse to do that, but they never take any punitive measures against the officials for wrong actions or with vengeance. If the officals are found wrong in their punitive actions, suspension or dismissal, etc, they should also be punished for causing agony to the affected persons. Such counter measures by the courts will a long way in reducing wrong actions against ‘small” people.

Some of the issues that are raised here were discussed earlier in another article. Another article would be necessary to elaborate the judgmental lacuna in some details.

A positive note: since there are good and honest judges the system functions continuously, notwithstanding pressures from the lawyers and money lords. However, all efforts need to be made to make the judicial system work as perfectly as possible with truly independent, honest and committed judges so that every judge is trustworthy.

Why intelligent persons ignore law as profession

The judicial system should make judges a class apart- trust worthy and adorable. There could be honest and hardwiring people in every walk of life, every field and that is how the system functions even with drawbacks. But in judiciary every judge must be genuine and responsible for the society and hence they have to be accountable for their actions.

Lack of talent

Judiciary is no longer attracting the best legal talent because of disparity in the income of bright young lawyers and the emoluments of judicial officers. In order to attract persons of the right caliber to the judicial cadre, System must keep enhancing salaries, improve their service conditions, particularly of the trial court judges.

Judiciary’s blind eye on genocides of Kashmiris

That judiciary is entirely controlled by the government could be gauged by the way it ignores genocides of Muslims in Kashmir by Indian (occupation) forces. At least the apex court should have questioned the logic of killing Muslims of Kashmir who seek sovereignty back from aggressors and occupiers on false claims and pretexts.

There are two important issues affecting normalcy of Indian system and judicial neutrality: Babri Mosque and Kashmir. In both issues, judiciary is either weak or subservient to the government.
When we talk about problems of judiciary and judges, we must also talk about the pathetic plight of Muslims in Jammu Kashmir, now under Indian control. Jammu Kashmir had been a soverign nation and India’s neighbor before India, after its independence from Great Britain, invaded and occupied it.

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Judicial inaction against state crimes in occupied Kashmir is a case of serious concern. Indian forces have killed over 100,000 innocent Kashmir Muslims in its efforts to silence them and end their legitimate struggle for freedom from Indian yoke.

Courts do not take up the plight of Kashmiri Muslims Kashmir which is under heavy military occupational control. While Hindus are treated as state guests, Muslims, including the children are ill treated even on streets by the police and military forces controlling the capital and elsewhere. NO one questions the Indian logic.

Kashmiri Muslims can be treated the way the military likes in Kashmir. The governor has given the permission to ‘squeeze’ the Kashmir Muslims as much as they can be and make Hindus happy. The Kashmiris reeling under state torture mechanisms in various jails in Jammu Kashmir and India main have been reported in these columns. It is no more secret that Kashmiris and other Muslims are ill-treated by authorities in Indian jails and crudest interrogative methods are being administered on Kashmiris in Tihar jail.

If police suspects any Muslims they are arrested and tortured in jails and force them to ’admit’ that they are terrorists and they are trained in Pakistan. Khursheed Ahmed Lone, arrested in 2005 on fictitious charges of now famous “suspected terrorist” in Srinagar underwent punishment in jail without proper trial but was letter “picked-up” by Maharashtra police from Srinagar jail, but nothing is known about his fate. The accused has been implicated in a number of other prefabricated cases. His incarceration in Mumbai is affecting the trial of Shabir Ahmed Bukhari of Kreeri Patan, (a law graduate), Shakeel Ahmed Sofi Abdul Rashid Kahan, his wife Roshni, Rouf Ahmed, Waheed Ahmed Dar, Abdul waheed Dar and Muhammad Maqbool Beig.

Khursheed who was lodged in central jail Srinagar was taken to Mumbai by the sleuths of Anti Terrorism Squad Maharashtra. Since then the local courts have been asking the Maharashtra government to produce him for trial in Srinagar but the orders have been thrown to winds.

The Judge requested the officials to look into the matter personally and direct the concerned officers to produce the accused before this court on August 13. Seven more accused persons are facing trial along with the accused in four other cases. “Non production of the accused is stalling the proceedings in all the four cases. The other accused are unnecessarily suffering for no fault of theirs.

The judge hopes the directions would be carried out with positive response. Khursheed Ahmed Lone son of Abdul Gani Lone of Sopore, a fruit trader was arrested by police at Srinagar on the ‘suspicion’ of providing logistic support to two suicide bombers who were killed in an “encounter” with police near Dalgate in the capital Sri Nagar, hours before the then PM Manmohan Singh was scheduled to address a gathering at Sher-e- Kashmir Cricket Stadium at Srinagar in 2005.

All judicial directions in this regard are gathering dust. The accused has not been produced before the court till date.” When a judge is powerless what about the ordinary Muslims in the country?

Once the JK State President of Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP) reiterated that Kashmiris (Muslims) should leave Jammu and go to the Kashmir valley, immediately. “Those Kashmiri touts of National Conference, PDP, and Geelani”, who have constructed houses in Jammu region should immediately vacate the land in the summer capital and go back to Kashmir.

Ultra communal outfit BJP considers and says that Congress, like PDP, NC, CPI, CPI (M), and PDP and all other Kashmir-based politicians and separatists have communal mindset. Taking a dig at former Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad, it was said, “It was during his minority status regime that all the Jammu-based Congress ministers joined hands to appease fanatics and reversed land transfer order under which 8000 kanals of land at Baltal had been transferred to the Shri Amarnath Shrine Board (SASB) for creating “facilities” for the pilgrims.” The BJP State President has repeatedly threatened “Kashmiri touts” of “dire consequences” if they don’t quit the Jammu forthwith.

Interestingly, today the Kashmiri touts of PDP runs a government in JK with BJP support and with a Hindu as deputy CM.

Obviously, the fact that the reversals they received in their secret dealings to steal the forest land for temple structure constructions have not been tolerated by Hindus who do everything according to their wishes in India and therefore felt shaken and rather threatened by this, has made them agitate over the issue to get the land back for temple purposes.

Can Indian judiciary also be insensitive to human sufferings and play into the hands of the regime and admit political victimization of Muslims and anti-Kashmirism and anti-Muslims in the country?

All these year of brutality, genocide, rape and crime and illegal dealings in Kashmir by occupying Indian government, Kashmiris have not yet openly asked the Indian terrorist forces to QUIT KASHMIR”, but now Hindus in Jammu have , especially the Hindutva outfit parties have done so by asking Kashmiris to quit Jammu.

Theory vs. practice

The legal premises or thesis no innocent should be punished but as many guilty persons as possible can escape a possible punishment is not a healthy argument.

How can a corrupt and dishonest lawyer become an honest and lawful after becoming a judge or justice? How can corrupt judge be expected to deliver honest judgments? No wonder corruption has become a part of Indian justice delivery system and jurisprudence.

When dishonest lawyers become judges they continue to mint money and this explains as to why many judges are being caught across the globe in bribery scandals.

Won’t there be murder of judgments in courts? Why politicians and top bureaucrats boldly take bribes and make illegal wealth so openly?

When corrupt and greedy lawyers are the judges in courts, people cannot expect real and honest judgments
Can thieves and criminals become police and judges? But that perhaps is happening. The judiciary and jurisprudence has fallen a mute victim (Your lord!).

Politicians and government functionaries take undue advantage of this disastrous lacuna, detrimental to the honest upbringing of a society. .

Of course, suggestion is made here that Indian system would be fair and honest if lawyers are not promoted as judges as has been the case hitherto but judges are trained right from the beginning after their excellent degrees in law (unlike the shameful practice of undergoing a law course just for obtaining degrees without proper attendance, at times on payment basis to practice law) as future hopes of Indian honest and fair judges to uphold pride and dignity of judiciary. Much more is required to make the system work honestly.

Corruption in courts at high levels, involving judges is a serious concern. Bribery for judges is very serious crime. But when judges accept or demand bribes for ‘favourable’ judgments they become criminals. Just like politicians and bureaucrats do, Judges use middlemen for making quick wealth as they won’t be caught or punished for disproportionate asset cases.

That makes the entire system of a nation suspicious and dirty.

Hence judges have to be saved from dishonesty and discredit they may suffer due the presence of wrong or corrupt or extremely self-centered judges among genuine judges.

Judicial review

Unfortunately, the nation is upset that judges and judgments generally go by the demand of the stronger party and who can offer more money. Media also play disastrous role in arm-twisting judges to deliver judgments to support the cause of the majority people.

Judges constitute a critical force for interpretation and implementation of a constitution, thusde facto in common law countries creating the body of constitutional law. For a people to establish and keep the ‘Rule of Law’ as the operative norm in social constructs great care is taken in the election and/or appointment of unbiased and thoughtful legal scholars whose loyalty to an oath of office is without reproach.

If law is to govern and find acceptance generally courts must exercise fidelity to justice which means affording those, subject to its jurisdictional scope the greatest presumption of inherent cultural relevance within this framework.

In the US during recent decades the judiciary became active in economic issues related with economic rights established by constitution because “economics may provide insight into questions that bear on the proper legal interpretation”. Since many countries with transitional political and economic systems continue treating their constitutions as abstract legal documents disengaged from the economic policy of the state, practice of judicial review of economic acts of executive and legislative branches have begun to grow.

In the 1980s, the Supreme Court of India for almost a decade had been encouraging public interest litigation on behalf of the poor and oppressed by using a very broad interpretation of several articles of the Indian Constitution.

Corruption and nepotism by judges

When a Chief justice of India is shamelessly taking bribes in cores to deliver a favorable judgment, one can gauge the damage already in judiciary by all concerned.

Since corruption level in judiciary has also been alarming, giving other spheres impetus to go on rampage in corrupt practices, not very long ago the Indian Supreme Court sent out a loud warning to the high and mighty, including politicians, not to try to change the course of judicial proceedings with corrupt practices and said any such attempt would be dealt with an iron hand. “Please keep corrupt practices away from judiciary. At least this institution should be spared,” a bench of Justices T S Thakur and Rohinton F Nariman said while hearing a petition by mining baron Gali Janardhan Reddy, who is accused of paying a bribe of Rs 10 crore to a trial judge for getting bail. Reddy approached the court seeking that two cases filed against him — one for illegal mining and another for bribery — be heard together as the facts and evidence of the cases arose from the same offence.

Knowing the role money plays in judgments, Reddy submitted that the two cases against him were related and should be tried together, possibly to “deal” with the cases by money. He said his defense would be exposed if the cases were not clubbed together. “What defence can a person have for bribing a judge,” the bench asked.
The CBI has alleged that trial judge T Pattabhirama Rao granted bail to Reddy after the mining baron agreed to pay Rs 10 crore. The judge was later suspended by the Andhra Pradesh High Court and the CBI filed an FIR against him, his son and five others including Reddy.

Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa was released from a Bangalore jail on disproportionate wealth early this year by a Judge by falsely commuting the accounting to show that Jayalalithaa has no case at all- this the judge later admitted .

Expressing concern over attempts to bribe judges, the bench said, “People are having so much money that they are now bribing the greedy judges. When money comes in abundance, then people don’t know what to do with the money. They try to subvert the entire system and judicial process. Anyone who plays with the court system must be dealt with heavily. This virus has to be eliminated.” It added that people who adopted corrupt practices like bribing a judicial officer were actually attempting to hijack the system.

The bench asked the counsel appearing for Reddy how much money was paid to the judge. The lawyer tried to skirt the question but the bench insisted on knowing the amount. “Don’t feel embarrassed to tell the amount,” the bench said. The counsel said the allegation against his client was that he paid Rs 10 crore.

In a shocking disclosure, a special CBI judge said on Aug 17, 2014 that the high-profile accused in the alleged Syndicate Bank bribery case had sought to influence her.

“Please tell your clients to stop sending love letters to me. I am already from a well off background, if you don’t stop this act, I will direct CBI to take action against you,” Special CBI Judge Mrs. Swarana Kanta Sharma said. The woman judge warned of action against the accused for making attempts of “influencing” her by writing “love letters” to her. The court made these strong remarks while remanding the bank’s suspended CMD Sudhir Kumar Jain and others to judicial custody till August 29. It was an open court and the judge refrained from elaborating on the attempts of the accused to influence However, she strictly directed the defence counsels to make their clients behave. It was not clear if her remarks were against some of the accused or against all the accused in the case.

The arrest of Sudhir Kumar Jain is one of most high profile cases involving a serving state-run bank chief in over two decades. CBI officials had said that Jain was arrested from Bangalore when one of his relatives, a chartered accountant, was taking Rs 50 lakh as bribe from a private company. Two companies for which Jain allegedly raised the credit limit are Prakash Industries and Bhushan Steel, which are being probed by the CBI in the coal block allocation scam, officials at the agency had said. Bhushan Steel Vice Chairman Neeraj Singal, Chief Financial Officer of Bhushan Steel Arun Agarwal, Vineet Godha, Puneet Godha and Vijay Pahuja were the other accused who were sent to judicial custody. Jain, who was suspended as chairman and managing director after his arrest early this month, and Singal were produced in court after expiry of their judicial custody while the other accused were brought from jail on court’s production warrants.

The court, on August 12, had issued production warrants against them. The CBI has filed two cases against Jain — accusing him of receiving a bribe of Rs 50 lakh through conduits and abusing his official position to enhance the credit limits of some companies in violation of laid-down procedures. Singal was arrested by CBI on August 7, hours after the court had issued a Non-Bailable Warrant against him and a middleman, Purushotam Totlani in the case. On August 2, CBI had arrested six accused, including Jain and Agarwal.

Chief Justice of Karnataka Subhro Kamal Mukherjee on 07th July 2016 confirmed what he had said in court a day earlier: someone had offered him money to deliver a favourable judgment. “Whatever I have revealed in the open court hall is true,” he told Express. Asked what action he was planning against the bribery attempt, he said recusal from the case was action enough. The sensational disclosure that a Bengali-speaking person had visited his house and tried to bribe him has brought forth shocked responses from the legal fraternity.

Advocates’ bodies are urging the judiciary to take up a suo motu case and conduct an inquiry to identify the person who had tried to influence the justice system. C Shivaramu, president, Advocates’ Association of Bengaluru, described the incident as unfortunate. “Immediate action is called for against the visitor and those behind the visitor,” he said. “Such interference can be curbed if the culprit is suitably punished.”

Karnataka State Bar Council Chairman A R Patil had heard about Mukherjee’s disclosure. “I don’t know whether the Chief Justice has filed a complaint with the police. But dubious visitors should not be allowed near judges,” he said. Mukherjee made the sensational disclosure as he was hearing a revision petition filed by Umrah Developers against the Revenue Department and the Deputy Commissioner of Bengaluru Urban district.
After telling the court a visitor had tried to buy a favourable verdict, he rescued himself from the case, and told a senior counsel to take a photocopy of the visiting card the visitor had left behind. CBI claimed to have recovered Rs 21 lakh in cash from Jain’s residence besides gold worth Rs 1.68 crore and documents of fixed deposits of up to Rs 63 lakh. In the two FIRs, CBI has named Singal, Ved Prakash Agarwal, Chairman-cum-Managing Director of Prakash Industries, Pawan Bansal, chartered accountant, Vineet and Puneet Godha (relatives of Jain), Vijay Pahuja, Totlani and Pankaj Bansal. The accused have been booked under various provisions of the Prevention of Corruption Act and criminal conspiracy under the IPC.

Story involves investigation of crimes committed by Judges is On-Line-Publicized with avowed Patriotic intention to weed-out corrupt Judges on one-hand & on the other to improve Quality of Justice as well as to enhance Confidence of General Public in Judiciary.

Only CBI is authorized to investigate Crimes committed by Judges; the Jurisdiction of State Police of any State is barred.

The gist of story is flashed to all Members of Parliament to enable them to discuss in Parliament to find ways & means to reduce and if possible to eradicate Corruption in Judiciary. It enables every MP to discuss vote for National Judicial Services Bill, to amend Judges (Judicial Officers’ Protection) Act, & other such laws so as to bring the erring Judges within the reach of Common Law. With full evidence, court records, live cases, and admittance to crimes by the judges themselves.

Judges want to get a plot from the housing society by misusing their position. A story involves is of a (Microscopic) Housing Society consisting of 867 judges out of total 2600 public/government servants. The membership is not compulsory inter alia is restricted only to “Employees of Karnataka State Judicial Department” but on voluntary basis. The aims and objects of Judges becoming members of this society is to get a PLOT of land in exchange for PLOTS viz., misusing their positions including their offices to further the illegal aims and objects of the society.

What Crimes have they Committed, necessitating Peoples’ Resolution?

The “Long & Short of Crimes Judges have committed” is this that if were to be committed by any ordinary persons/Advocates/Ministers; same would have been languishing in Jail. The Corrupt Judges, PLOTTERS for the heck of a PLOT of land have made many conspiracies (PLOTs); to defeat laws of India, Rendered & Secured fraud judgments, legalized illegals. Evidences of crimes perpetrated on Laws, Govt. & Court are adduced by themselves. They admit that JUDICIAL LAY-OUT or Judges Slum is a result of not only Fraud Judgments but also of Un-Holy Alliance of Judiciary with Govt. of Karnataka (if not Legislature also) and corporate lords since 1985. Few cases are alive in Supreme Court & High Court (which are well informed in this website/CD); which cases inadvertently prove our earlier statements. Estimated amount involved is Rs. 17 Lakh Billion.

It is most unfortunate that Judicial Emp. HBCS which should have been model to other Housing Societies has itself become the Leading Law breaker without the least fear or Care for Law; Propriety or Public Interest. It has indulged in acts of Favor, Cronyism and capricious indifference to Law at Will, obviously under the hubris that having S.C & H.C. Judges as its Members & beneficiaries will ensure immunity to all its Illegal acts.
What is more disquieting is the Readiness with which sitting S.C & H.C Judges who are not “Employees” under any Government but are Constitutional functionaries, should have eagerly become members of Employees HBCS and obtained sites. Having registered office in Karnataka high Court building itself invoking “Awe & Terror in the Minds of various Government Agencies who have to take action against the Society as per law, do not create an atmosphere of Fairplay, Straightforwardness or Impartial dispensation of JUSTICE”

The Investigations reveal that this Society’s Illegal activities have topped list of Cheating & Frauds in this Country; by the way society has violated Gravest-of Grave Laws the JUDICIAL LAY-OUT, has become MOTHER of ALL ILLEGAL ACTIVITIES. Committee has received complaints that stating that other Societies have also indulged in Similar illegal Activities.

Therefore to take stringent action against illegal activities of Karnataka state Judicial department Employees’ House Building Co-operative Housing Society, it was recommended to supersede the Society forthwith & to initiate Criminal prosecution against persons who are responsible for such nefarious Activities.
Such actions would go a long way to streamline the anti-corruption campaign in judicatory/
Judicial corruption as constitutional sin

When judges are reported to b taking bribes to settle cases, when a former Chief Justice is caught involved in corrupt practices to the tune of crores of Indian currency, very little the people can trust judiciary’s ability to be honest. From discreet nature judiciary corruption has become open. In public as many top politicians get out of prisons and when judges write fake judgments in their favor, obviously on payment basis.

Judgments are being sold just like some government decisions and orders come out on similar conditions favoring compote lords and important persons controlling the elected governments. . . .

Is it justice?

Corruption, common not just in third world but even in western countries, has affected even military and judiciary. Bribery, being practiced by most people, has harmed the poor and common people the most. There is some hope that judiciary can help and save them. Rulers and parliaments, themselves are basically corrupt, don’t wish to reform the corrupt system.

Corruption is rampant in India’s courts. According to Transparency International, judicial corruption in India is attributable to factors such as “delays in the disposal of cases, shortage of judges and complex procedures, all of which are exacerbated by a preponderance of new laws”. Most disturbing is the fact that corruption has reached the highest judicial forum i.e. Supreme Court of India. Some notable cases include: In December 2009, legal activist and Supreme Court lawyer Prashant Bhushan stated in court, “out of the last 16 to 17 Chief Justices, half have been corrupt. In November 2010, former Law Minister, Shanti Bhushan echoed Prashant Bhushan’s claim.

Not many people are happy with the judiciary and judges for their apparently faulty judgments and reasons for this state of affairs could be several. Reliability of judgments is questioned.

There have been allegations that judges with doubtful integrity are elevated within the higher judiciary and campaigns held for their impeachment have not been successful. In November 2011, a former Supreme Court Justice Ruma Pal slammed the higher judiciary for what she called the seven sins. She listed the sins as: Turning a blind eye to the injudicious conduct of a colleague; Hypocrisy – the complete distortion of the norm of judicial independence; Secrecy – the fact that no aspect of judicial conduct including the appointment of judges to the High and Supreme Court is transparent; Plagiarism and prolixity – meaning that very often SC judges lift whole passages from earlier decisions by their predecessors and do not acknowledge this – and use long-winded, verbose language; Self Arrogance – wherein the higher judiciary has claimed crass superiority and independence to mask their own indiscipline and transgression of norms and procedures; Professional arrogance – whereby judges do not do their homework and arrive at decisions of grave importance ignoring precedent or judicial principle; Nepotism – wherein favors are sought and dispensed by some judges for gratification of varying manner

In 2011, Soumitra Sen, former judge at the Calcutta High Court became the first judge in the India to be impeached by the Rajya Sabha for misappropriation of funds.

In recent years scandals about lack of integrity have besmirched the reputation of the judiciary. The sub-ordinate judiciary works in appalling conditions. Any reform undertaken must be in its totality rather than in isolation.

On 12 January 2012, a Supreme Court bench said that people’s faith in judiciary was decreasing at an alarming rate, posing a grave threat to constitutional and democratic governance of the country. It acknowledged some of the serious problems of a large number of vacancies in trial courts, unwillingness of lawyers to become judges, and the failure of the apex judiciary in filling vacant posts of HC judges.

Apex Court wanted to seek answers from the government on amicus curiae’s suggestion that access to justice must be made a constitutional right and consequently the executive must provide necessary infrastructure for ensuring every citizen enjoyed this right. It also wanted the Government of India to detail the work being done by the National Mission for Justice Delivery and Legal Reforms.

There have been cases where ordinary citizens have been charged for espionage while overstaying their visa or straying across the international land or maritime boundary and languishing in prison for years due to the slow redressal process.

Need for Indian Judicial Service (IJS)

At par with IAS, IFS, IPS, there is a need for an institution like Indian Judicial Service (IJS) to train and recruit the judicial personnel- the judges, mainly. The process of final selection of judges of all levels should be rigorous so people stop suspecting the judges and judges deliver genuine justice to nation and people.

India should do away with the practice of appointing senior lawyers as judges, which has not worked well as malpractices and corruption have become rampant and prevalent at all levels. Judgments encourage corruption especially at lower courts. Only rich or people with a lot of money alone can approach the upper or lower courts.

Government should ensure the Indian Judicial Service serves the cause of speedy and genuine justice to the people while Indian Judicial Service should ensure that only persons of integrity are selected for the top ranked jobs in judiciary and, therefore, the nation. Top judges of Supreme and High courts who make the Indian Judicial Service commission should certify that the personnel chosen are indeed fit for the top judiciary jobs.

Observations

Of course, corruption is rampant and all pervasive. Whole thing started with political corruption and nepotism in societies, permitted by the government and state where judiciary remains a mute witness without having power to intervene on its own. This helplessness where corruption cum nepotism enjoys respect in offices has rendered judiciary a rather weak domain that could be manipulated by one and sultry is growing in alarming proportion.

Political corruption has percolated into every domain of societal interaction, badly affecting the judiciary as well as lawyers and judges, among others, are engaged in corrupt practices with state protection
Entire system has become totally rotten. It appears there is no visible remedy to set things right because everyone seeks to mint money by all means.

In such a system, people at large are obviously fast losing faith judiciary, judges and doubt judgments. And that is indeed a devastating trend a demoralizing society can witness world over. The belief that money can win – and is winning- even the most difficult court cases because it can engage not only the top lawyers but also buy the judges is not a wrong preemption and not a healthy sign of any normal civilized society. Common people cannot afford to approach higher courts and hence judgments in lower courts also have to be truthful and credible.

It can’t be denied that a few genuine advocates have made themselves into good judges as well. They do deliver genuine unbiased judgments. But that is not the case in many cases where judges use constitution to validate certain hypothesis to help even the known criminals and international frauds.

Reports say a former Chief Justice of India by name Balakrishnan was reportedly involved in expensive corruption deals. Many judges are named as bribe takers. Some judges have misused their power to get lands and housing plots. (Government should consider giving permanent residence for the Chief justice and land to judges free cost if they do not have their houses or lands for housing so that this class could saved from chasing “sources” for houses or lands).

In order to loot the nation’s resources and promote bribery-dowry system, Indian politicians have done away with what is very dear to a nation: honesty and truth. That is the crux of negative predicaments of Indian nation. A parliament of rich and agents of corporate lords cannot be honest. The rich lawyers, who become judges by immoral means and after playing all sorts of mischief with the common people that approach them with genuine problems for help, cannot honestly decide the fate of Indian nation, either.

Judiciary should serve the cause of justice delivery by way of honest judgments. For this to happen, judges should be honest.

The system has spoiled judges with a very few exceptions. Good crops of judges alone can deliver the most genuine judgments to make a nation proud of its judiciary system, its capacity to deliver true judgments.
India always looks to get guidance from western countries. Since they all are also promoting corrupt judiciaries, there is no need to expect western ‘democracies’ to launch the necessary judicial reforms by preparing judges in a special stream.

India could initiate steps to make the judicial system really credible and judgments very genuine. India could urgently create Judicial Commission to promote good lawyers and create real judges not from the best of lawyers as the practice now but from among the direct recruits as judges. The said commission should have top luminaries of law and top judges who served the nation with dedication and dignity and without getting involved in any immoral disputes or bribery scandals – officially or otherwise, Judges with genuinely clean image would be in the commission in order to save judiciary and jurisprudence.

The recruits as new judges also should have enough experience in watching and commenting on proceedings and judgments for a number of years before being appointed as judges at higher courts and they should be rigorously tested before appointments so that they don’t become a part of old system of corrupt judiciary. . During probation their professional movements should be carefully watched, monitored and evaluated by a team of highly experienced specialists so that judges are really worthy leaders in law.

The Judicial or Law Commission should not have any bureaucrats or politicians like law minister etc, for; they could influence the legal process or selection process of judges. Only law secretary could be there.
There could be two streams in law education – one stream be meant training for lawyers and another for the creation of trust worthy judges. Training for judges could be undertaken by Judiciary Commission or law academy of efficient judges and academicians who oppose corruption of any kind.
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Genuine judges and judiciary alone can serve and save the nation from going decay. The fictitious case of Babri Mosque is still pending judgment possibly because the federal government, responsible for the destruction of the Mosque by Hindu communal elements as per the plan of RSS, is creating hurdles to the court to believer judgment. Essentially anti-Muslim Indian government’s attitude has been one of “we decide” the Mosque issue.

By Joshua Chudnow*

As the long-advertised campaign to retake the Iraqi city of Mosul from the Islamic State begins, governments around the world need to start implementing tighter security controls. If the coalition succeeds in freeing Mosul from the tyranny of the Islamic State, it is highly likely that the group will lash out in a Western country in order to remain a relevant force in the media.

The battle for Mosul is a military endeavor that forces Islamic State to commit a great deal of its resources and its finest fighters. This is an extraordinary burden on the group and one which may cause them to lose their foothold in Iraq. While Islamic State has no doubt learned over the past two years that holding territory is extremely difficult, they have also learned that conducting or inspiring terrorist attacks abroad is relatively easy.

Recent losses on the battlefield have been followed by increasingly frequent and vicious terrorist attacks abroad. A report by HIS Conflict Monitor estimates that Islamic State has shrunk by about 16 percent in the first nine months of 2016. During that span there have been ten different terrorist attacks in European countries such as France, Germany, Belgium, and Turkey. Some of these attacks were directly carried out by Islamic State operatives while others were merely inspired by Islamic State’s calls to strike at Western countries. These are in addition to the Islamic State-inspired mass shooting in Orlando that left 49 people dead and 53 wounded in June 2016, as well as the numerous bombings around the MENA region in countries such as Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen.

As battlefield losses mount, terrorist attacks in Western countries have given the Islamic State an opportunity to stay relevant in the media narrative. CIA Director John Brennan stated in June 2016 that “as the pressure mounts on ISIL, we judge that it will intensify its global terror campaign to maintain its dominance of the global terrorism agenda.”

This brings us to the current situation in Mosul. By most accounts this is going to be a long and brutal fight for the city. Coalition forces are still miles away from the city but there are already reports of bobby traps and IEDs lining the roads in. Warnings of Islamic State using human shields and crude chemical weapons have garnered international headlines. While Islamic State may have a tremendous amount of resources committed to this battle, they have come to realize that carrying out or inspiring foreign terrorist attacks is not so resource intensive. If they feel that they are losing ground in Mosul, or that the fall of the city is imminent, I expect them to put forth a massive effort to coordinate international terrorist attacks in Western countries.

Terrorism is a weapon of the weak, used by people who feel the need to gain attention through acts shocking to the general public. Time and time again, Islamic State has proven that when it is reeling from recent battlefield losses, it turns to terrorist acts in order to reassert its dominance in the media. It is a desperate tactic from a group that is far outmatched on the battlefield by superior weapons and numbers, but it is a deadly tactic nonetheless. It is also a very successful tactic in regards to shocking the public and letting the world know that they are still a force to be feared no matter where you live.

The battle for Mosul will take weeks, maybe months, before any real progress is made against Islamic State. The coalition fighting on the ground faces a long and arduous road to get to the heart of the city. Once they reach it they can expect brutal urban combat with an entrenched enemy. During this time, Islamic State will have to commit more and more of its resources to holding the city, which is its prize territory in Iraq. If at any point, the Islamic State begins to feel that they are losing the battle, expect a strong effort to launch or inspire terrorist attacks abroad. The security apparatuses in the most at risk countries such as France, Germany, Turkey and the United States have to be ready for any possible signs of attack on their soil.

This article was published by Geopolitical Monitor.com

By Samuel Helfont*

(FPRI) — It has been over two years since the Islamic State sacked the Iraqi city of Mosul and captured much of the Sunni Arab regions in northern and western Iraq. The country remains mired in military conflict and political instability. This week Iraqi forces, with the backing of the American led coalition, are currently fighting to re-take Mosul. They hope that doing so will deliver a serious blow to the Islamic State. However, this battle, while extremely important, will not put an end to the crisis in Iraq or the threat of the Islamic State. To understand why, one must put the battle into its larger political context. In this post, I will try do just that and then attempt to provide a brief look ahead at the short, medium, and long term repercussions for the crisis in Iraq.

Iraq is currently divided into three distinct regions: Iraq proper, which is governed by Baghdad; the Kurdish autonomous zone; and the areas controlled by the Islamic State. Militarily, the Iraqi Armed Forces, with significant aid from popular mobilization forces (al-hashd al-sha‘bi), Kurdish Peshmerga, and American-led coalition forces, have been advancing steadily on the Islamic State’s positions. The Islamic State has been losing territory for over a year, and because of coalition air superiority, has not been able to mass forces for a counter-attack since the Spring of 2015. This success has often come at a steep price. While there has been some token Sunni Arab participation in the popular mobilization forces, they are dominated by sectarian, often Iranian-backed, Shi‘i militias. As these forces advance into Sunni Arab territory, they have clashed with the local populations. Human Rights Watch has “documented summary killings, enforced disappearances, torture, and the destruction of homes” by elements of the popular mobilization forces.[1]

The current focus of the combined military operations in Iraq is to re-take the city of Mosul. Theoretically, a military operation to re-take the city is fairly straightforward. However, in practice, it has been delayed for some time because it needs to be carried out in a manner that is consistent with the long-term political goals of a unified Iraq. A military assault that defeats the Islamic State while alienating much of the population or creating a humanitarian crisis will ultimately prove counter-productive. Recent Iraqi campaigns to re-take Sunni Arab cities left them in ruins and displaced most of their populations. Those cities had, at most, a few hundred thousand residents each. Mosul has almost two million residents. Thus, if the Iraqi forces employ their previous tactics in Mosul, they will likely trigger an acute humanitarian crisis. There are also fears that disputed areas liberated by the Kurds will be forced into the Kurdish autonomous region against the will of Arabs and non-Kurdish minorities.

American and coalition forces clearly understand this dynamic. In July, U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter hosted a defense ministers summit and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry hosted a parallel foreign ministers summit.[2] In both meetings, representatives of the anti-Islamic State coalition emphasized the importance of post-conflict stabilization and development in Sunni Arab sections of Iraq. By doing so, they hope to reassure Iraq’s Sunni Arabs that they have a place in a united Iraq. These efforts face difficult challenges. Atrocities carried out by Kurdish and Shi‘i militias have had a deep impact on Sunni Arabs in Iraq. Some of the Sunni Arab population in Iraq continues to see Shi‘i and Kurdish forces as greater evils than the Islamic State. It is difficult to determine the extent of this sentiment, but there are some troubling signs. A recent, un-scientific poll conducted by al-Jazeera found that “72 percent of respondents said they supported the Islamic State over the Shia militias in the battle of Fallujah; 84 percent said that the Iranian occupation posed a greater threat than the Islamic State; and 86 percent said the goal of the Fallujah campaign was to consolidate Iranian occupation of Iraq rather than to fight terrorism.”[3] As un-scientific as these numbers may be, if they bear even a passing resemblance to reality, they signal a difficult road ahead. If Iraq’s Sunni Arabs continue to view the Iraqi government as a greater threat than the Islamic State, then retaking Mosul will represent little more than a tactical victory. And the strategic landscape will be ripe for the reemergence of the Islamic State or a similar group in the near future.

Over the long-term, the anti-Islamic State coalition’s goal of convincing Sunni Arabs to support the Iraqi government faces several structural political and economic problems. First, for several centuries, Sunni Arabs formed Iraq’s social, political, and economic elite. In 2003, the American-led invasion of Iraq disrupted the country’s system of rule, leaving Iraq’s Shi‘i majority in control. This created a disparity between the historical positions of Iraq’s Sunni Arabs and the possibilities they face under an even semi-democratic Iraq. As a result, they have been ambivalent at best about their prospects under the current regime in Baghdad. That situation will continue to provide openings for groups such as the Islamic State well into the future.

The two most widely discussed solutions to this problem are: (1) to de-centralize the government in Iraq, giving the Sunni Arab regions much more autonomy; and (2) to create a power-sharing system in Baghdad that would grant the Sunni Arabs more power. However, Iraq’s main oil fields are in the Shi‘i south and the Kurdish north. Thus, in a decentralized system, Baghdad would have to finance the Sunni Arab regions while agreeing to limit its political control over them. Such an arrangement is unlikely to be popular in non-Sunni Arab regions. Furthermore, since 2003, Iran has worked to install its allies in Baghdad. It has significant influence in many of the most important ministries, including the Ministry of Interior. Because Iran views Iraq as part of a broader regional struggle with Sunni Arab powers, particularly Saudi Arabia, it is likely to block policies that cede power to Sunni Arabs.

To put it succinctly, the crisis in Iraq is not going to disappear after the liberation of Mosul and as long as the political and military conflicts in Iraq remain unresolved, Iraq will continue to be a source for terrorism and mass migration. Retaking Mosul is a vital first step in alleviating these problems, but we should be under no illusions that it will end the crisis in Iraq, or that the U.S. can refocus its attention elsewhere.

About the author:
*Samuel Helfont is a Robert A. Fox Fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Program on the Middle East, and holds a post-doctoral lectureship in the University of Pennsylvania’s interdisciplinary International Relations Program. In May 2015, he completed a PhD in Princeton University’s Near Eastern Studies Department, where he wrote his dissertation on Saddam Hussein’s instrumentalization of religion as well as its legacy beyond 2003. His research is based on newly-available Ba’th Party and Iraqi state records.

Source:
This article was published at FPRI.

Notes:
[1] https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/07/31/iraq-ban-abusive-militias-mosul-operation

[2] http://www.militarytimes.com/story/military/war-on-is/2016/07/20/defense-foreign-ministers-plan-next-steps-against-isis/87339754/

[3] http://carnegieendowment.org/syriaincrisis/63834

Over the last three years, I’ve been monitoring the Periodic Review Boards, the most recent review process at the prison, set up to give some semblance of justice to the cases of men held year after year without charge or trial, and subjected to varying forms of abuse and, in some cases, torture. See our definitive Periodic Review Board list here.

The first two review processes — the Combatant Status Review Tribunals and the Administrative Review Boards — took place under President Bush. Consisting of panels of three military officers, they were essentially designed to rubber-stamp the men’s designation, on capture, as “enemy combatants” who could be held indefinitely without charge or trial. The prisoners were allowed to be present for the unclassified section of the hearings, but were not allowed to hear classified material, and often had no idea where the allegations against them had arisen.

The third review process, which did not involve any interaction with the prisoners themselves, took place in 2009, under President Obama. The Guantánamo Review Task Force was a high-level, inter-agency process in which the cases of the 240 men who were held when President Obama took office were examined, and decisions taken about whether to release them, to put them on trial, or to continue holding them without charge or trial. In its final report, in January 2010, the task force approved 156 men for release and 36 for prosecution, and designated 48 others for ongoing imprisonment without charge or trial, on the basis that they were allegedly “too dangerous to release,” even while acknowledging that insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial.

This latter designation was profoundly troubling, of course, not just because it involved President Obama explicitly supporting imprisonment without charge or trial, but also because of the basis for their designation as “too dangerous to release.” If insufficient evidence existed to put them on trial, that was because the evidence was actually inadequate, and did not rise to the level of evidence, because it consisted, in many cases, of statements made by the prisoners themselves, about themselves or their fellow prisoners, which were often made under circumstances that were not conducive to truth-telling — under torture or other forms of abuse, or even being bribed with better living conditions.

Other dubious information evidently came from US military and intelligence reports, and from Guantánamo itself came assessments of their purported dangerousness based on their behavior during their imprisonment.

And yet, these assessments have proven to be wildly inaccurate. Of the 48 men described as “too dangerous to release,” 41 have faced PRBs, and 28 have been approved for release. Just ten have had their ongoing imprisonment upheld, and three others are awaiting decisions.

23 other PRBs have taken place for men initially recommended for prosecution, who were made eligible for PRBs when the basis for prosecutions largely collapsed in 2012 and 2013. Just eight convictions have been secured in the military commission trial system set up for the Guantánamo prisoners, and four of those decisions were overturned, when appeals court judges ruled that the war crimes for which the men had been convicted were not legitimate and had been invented by Congress.

In these cases, the task force’s caution appears to have been more justified, as 15 of the 23 have had their ongoing imprisonment approved. Two others are awaiting decisions, but that still means that six men — long regarded as so significant that they were recommended for trials — have instead been approved for release. Nevertheless, the decisions to continue holding prisoners remain contentious — in part because the PRBs are a parole-type process, designed to seek out contrition and peaceful and constructive post-Guantánamo plans, even though parole is a process for men who have been tried and convicted of crimes, but also because of the validity of ongoing doubts in some cases, and the blunt truth that anyone against whom allegations of terrorism can be levelled should be put on trial and not held indefinitely without being charged or tried.

As the PRBs have taken place, we have been watching and writing about the examples of extreme, misplaced caution, and the severe inadequacies in the intelligence-gathering process — the six men seized in Karachi in September 2002 and regarded as an Al-Qaeda cell, for example, who were finally told that the US government no longer believed that such a cell had ever existed (five of the six have now been approved for release and two have been freed, and the sixth is awaiting a decision); an Afghan (Abdul Zahir) alleged to have been a chemical and biological weapons maker, who was finally revealed as a case of mistaken identity; and a Yemeni (Mustafa al-Shamiri) regarded as a senior al-Qaida military trainer, who was also eventually revealed to have been a case of mistaken identity.

These are just the most noticeable examples, but throughout the PRBs distortion and exaggeration about the significance of prisoners has been widespread.

The Miami Herald’s recent report

In a recent article for the Miami Herald, “New Guantánamo intelligence upends old ‘worst of the worst’ assumptions,” Carol Rosenberg, who has been writing about Guantánamo since the prison opened, examined these cases, and others, like the so-called “Dirty 30,” purported bodyguards for Osama bin Laden who, it has long been clear, had their role massively exaggerated.

I wrote about the distortions in the descriptions of the “Dirty 30” way back in April 2009, in an article for FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting) entitled, “Dangerous Revisionism Over Guantánamo,” responding to a November 2008 New York Times front-page article which opened, as I described it, with “an unqualified opening line that could have been written by the Pentagon”: “They were called the Dirty 30—bodyguards for Osama bin Laden captured early in the Afghanistan war.”

Rosenberg began her article with the Afghan poisoner who wasn’t — Abdul Zahir, who was one of ten prisoners put forward for a trial by military commission in the trials’ first incarnation under President Bush. “US Rangers captured him and some ‘suspicious items’ in a July 11, 2002, raid on his home on suspicion of ‘involvement with chemical/biological weapons activity,’” Rosenberg wrote. Zahir was accused of being an al-Qaida conspirator named Abdul Bari, which was a name he had also used, but it was also an extremely common name. When he was approved for release in July, it was, as Rosenberg noted, in large part because an intelligence assessment had concluded that he “was probably misidentified as the individual who had ties to al-Qaida weapons facilitation.”

Air Force Lt. Col. Sterling Thomas, who had been his defense attorney since 2010 — as part of his ongoing but unfulfilled eligibility for a military commissions trial — told Rosenberg, “They had the wrong guy the whole time. Abdul Zahir shared a name with a terrorist that they thought they were looking for. He unfortunately was further condemned by the fact that United States forces couldn’t distinguish between bomb-making materials and the salt, sugar and petroleum jelly he had nearby when he was wrongly arrested.”

The State Department, Rosenberg noted, is currently “pursuing a plan to resettle or repatriate him.”

In a number of interviews, Rosenberg spoke to intelligence sources — including people who served at Guantánamo in what she described as “the wobbly world of early war-on-terror intelligence gathering and analysis,” in which “a suspicion built on circumstances of capture gelled into allegations of membership in a terror cell that on reflection more than a decade later probably didn’t exist.” Her sources “blamed bad intelligence on a combination of urgency to produce, ignorance about al-Qaida and Afghanistan at the prison’s inception and inexperience in the art of investigation and analysis.”

Mark Fallon is one of the experts who spoke to Rosenberg. A veteran NCIS agent, from 2002 to 2004 he was the deputy commander of the Criminal Investigation Task Force, which sought prosecutions for alleged terrorists held at Guantánamo, and he is the author of Unjustifiable Means: The Inside Story of How the CIA, Pentagon, and US Government Conspired to Torture, to be published in January 2017.

“It was clear early on that the intelligence was grossly wrong,” Fallon said, pointing out that most of the prisoners at Guantánamo “weren’t battlefield captives.” As Rosenberg described it, he called many “bounty babies” — “men captured by Afghan warlords or Pakistani security forces and sent to Guantánamo ‘on the sketchiest bit of intelligence with nothing to corroborate.’”

A Seton Hall Law School investigation in 2006 established, drawing on the Pentagon’s own records, that “[o]nly 5% of the detainees were captured by United States forces,” while “86% of the detainees were arrested by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance and turned over to United States custody.” Moreover, many of those handed over were in fact sold, as the US was making bounty payments averaging $5000 a head to their Afghan and Pakistani allies for al-Qaeda or Taliban suspects — or those who could be presented as such. In his 2006 autobiography, In the Line of Fire, no less a figure than Pakistan’s President Musharraf bragged that, in return for handing over 369 terror suspects to the US, “We have earned bounty payments totaling millions of dollars.”

Once these men got to Guantánamo, as Rosenberg described Fallon’s assessment, “the task of discerning tidbit from truth was complicated by an Army leadership unskilled in military intelligence,” who argued that “you couldn’t coddle the enemy.”

This was the period of the most extreme and wide-ranging torture at Guantánamo — applied to at least one in six of the men held, when the authorities used “manipulation of temperatures, sleep, diet and solitary confinement to get a captive talking at a time when Fallon’s team was advocating rapport building.” As he explained, “Sleep deprivation only muddles memories,” but as it was used widely the interrogators using coercion ended up with “a lot of false information based on some pretty poor interrogations being done partly by military interrogators in that time frame.”

He added that it was “no surprise that early prisoner profiles are imploding under Periodic Review Board scrutiny.” As he explained, “That’s why people are so successful doing cold case homicide cases. People make decisions based on what they knew then. I don’t want to say that the facts changed. The facts grew. When you’re working cases, cases evolve. As you get additional facts, you interpret it differently.”

One analyst who worked at Guantánamo in its early years for the Joint Intelligence Group, which coordinates interrogation operations at the prison, spoke about how the JIG was “looking for anything you can pin on these guys.” The soldier-turned-civilian contractor, who spoke anonymously, said that analysts “weren’t making things up.” As he explained, “We were working overtime trying to figure out who we had, learning this culture as we go along.” His unit, he revealed, “was isolated, started off knowing more about Russia and Bosnia than Afghanistan and al-Qaida and was under pressure to help stop the next terror attack.”

“Everybody’s drinking the Kool-Aid. You see conspiracies everywhere,” he said, adding that the intelligence unit was “picking up on one or two things and holding on to it tightly like it was gospel.”

One result, as Carol Rosenberg explained, was how “being captured with a cheap Casio watch on your wrist made you a terrorist.”

As she described it, “Analysts were told that an al-Qaida bomb-making course gave its graduates Casio F-91W or A159W models as gifts. Separately, it was understood that those models could be used as detonation devices. So possession of one became ‘an indicator of al-Qaida training in the manufacture of improvised explosive devices,’ according to a 2006 intelligence unit Matrix of Threat Indicators for Enemy Combatants’” released by WikiLeaks in 2011. I worked with WikiLeaks as a media partner on the release of these files, and discussed this document at the time.

The analyst called the Casio watch scenario “[a]bsolutely ridiculous,” and “an awfully big leap,” especially because, as Rosenberg added, “a footnote in the very same matrix explained that ‘approximately one-third’ of Guantánamo prisoners who were captured with that ubiquitous model of watch ‘have known connections to explosives.’ Meaning two-thirds did not.”

Fallon, discussing the problems with the intelligence-gathering, said, “They would take any tidbit of information and use that. It’s what the psychologists call confirmation bias. If you are predisposed that that person never leaves Guantánamo, you make judgments and conclusions on those facts based on that predisposition. We were looking for corroborated information, not just a tidbit. That’s why you do investigations, not just interrogations, to corroborate that information.”

Fallon added that there was also “pressure to defend the use of Guantánamo” as a whole. Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the prison from 2002-04, who had no experience of interrogation, spoke endlessly about securing “actionable intelligence” at Guantánamo, and so “[t]he rush to justify the place as gathering ‘actionable intelligence’ … did not ‘allow for more sober thoughtful analysis.’”

The anonymous analyst also noted that fear of recidivism — of prisoners returning to the battlefield — “infected” the assessment process and added that some analysts were aware that the prisoners’ treatment could also have had negative results. “If this guy wasn’t an enemy before, he is now,” as he put it.

In her article, Carol Rosenberg discussed the recidivism reports, released by US government departments — initially, the Pentagon, and more recently the Director of National Intelligence — that have had a profoundly negative impact on securing the release of prisoners from Guantánamo throughout Obama’s presidency. She cited the most recent report claiming that 17.6 percent of former prisoners have taken part in terrorist or insurgent activities after their release, but as no details are ever provided for these claims, it is impossible to take them at face value — although, as I have been reporting for many years, that has never stopped the mainstream media from repeating them uncritically.

Turning to the assessments of the Guantánamo Review Task Force, Rosenberg spoke to Matt Olsen, the task force’s director, who “went on to run the National Counterterrorism Center that today prepares prisoner profiles for the parole-style board.” Olsen told her that, even in 2009, the task force members “struggled at times to definitively identify detainees because of the multiple names they used,” and he added that there were “a few pretty complicated cases.”

Reaching “beyond Defense Department analysis to include material from the CIA and other agencies,” Olsen explained, the task force uncovered labels, like the “worst of the worst,” adding that some of them were “‘myths’ that would be debunked.”

He also explained, “We started looking at the detainees and we realized these guys were not all the same. There were important differences among the detainees, the role they played and threat they posed. We had to dig into terms like ‘associated with al-Qaida,’ for example, to understand exactly what that meant from a threat perspective and whether those links were strong or tenuous.”

One example of the task force’s extreme caution was the case of Mustafa al-Shamiri, assessed in his 2008 military file released by WikiLeaks as “a ‘high risk’ captive of consequence, a senior al-Qaida training camp trainer and guesthouse logistician.” He was declared “too dangerous to release” by the task force, but in January this year his PRB declared that the earlier intelligence in his case was “discredited,” and that he had been confused with someone with a similar name. Although cleared for release, al-Shamiri is still at Guantánamo, awaiting a third country that will take him in, as the entire US establishment refuses to allow any Yemenis to be repatriated, citing security concerns.

Seeking to discover “who got it wrong, and when,” Rosenberg spoke to Cully Stimson, the Pentagon’s deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs in 2006 and 2007, who recalled that “the intelligence was at times puzzling enough that he’d go to Guantánamo to study material in the JIG’s evidence locker,” where “[s]helves of the prefab building in the Detention Center Zone were stacked with material that arrived on the cargo planes carrying the captives from Afghanistan — from wallets and wristwatches to notebooks and family photos.”

A former prosecutor and defense lawyer, Stimson’s job “included recommending to then-Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England whether to release” certain prisoners. He said that he was involved in “delving deeper than written reports to try to distinguish tip from truth in a captive’s file.”

Discussing releases based on updated intelligence, Stimson told Rosenberg, “The skeptical side of me says the scales are tipped in the favor of transfer and they’re going to do what they need to do bureaucratically to get it done. I would hate to think that people are shading or suppressing raw intelligence to the contrary. At the same time what I don’t know is if additional information has been developed over time that would lead a reasonable person to that conclusion. If that’s the case, then it is what it is.”

The former analyst, however, pointed out that there was a widespread awareness of possible errors in the early years. He said he “recalled analysts writing assessments in a secure facility poking fun at one another,” asking, for example, “How’s your kingpin over there?” But he also explained that “it was hard to be the spoiler who poked holes in a previous analyst’s pronouncements.”

Mark Fallon also explained another key point — that, in Afghanistan, soldiers were required to send prisoners to Guantánamo with “no effective screening mechanisms,” something I have been writing about ever since I first began researching Guantánamo in 2006. As I explained in 2011, “as former interrogator Chris Mackey (a pseudonym) explained in his book The Interrogators, the US high command, based in Camp Doha, Kuwait, stipulated that every prisoner who ended up in US custody had to be transferred to Guantánamo — and that there were no exceptions.”

Fallon explained that this situation meant that analysts “had to start from scratch trying to figure out who the US held in the cages at Camp X-Ray,” as Rosenberg described it. As Fallon put it, “Guantánamo became more of a dumping ground rather than a place, at least from my position, that we were told was supposed to be a facility for high-value targets for either intelligence or prosecution.”

For the “Dirty 30,” the evolution of the threat they supposedly posed arose because, as Carol Rosenberg described it, “The intelligence unit was sorting files, and somebody tasked with finding bodyguards noticed the common capture of 30 men delivered by Pakistani security forces and so labeled them. But by the time the files leaked, in 2011, a review of prison and court records shows, the Bush administration had repatriated 10 of them, including a Moroccan profiled as a leader of the Dirty 30 in July 2003. Updated, unclassified profiles cast doubt on whether some still were bodyguards — or that aspect of the assessment has simply vanished.”

She also noted how the leaked 2006 “Matrix of Threat Indicators” had taken as “an act of faith” the existence of the “Karachi 6” terror cell, and yet, in December 2015, the intelligence community “debunked the idea of the Karachi 6 in a series of intelligence profiles,” stating that “it is more likely the six Yemenis were elements of a large pool of Yemeni fighters that senior al-Qaida planners considered potentially available to support future operations.”

In other cases, Rosenberg concluded, the PRBs have “disclosed new information that may have eluded the prison’s intelligence unit.” This is currently the case with additional material that is being looked at in the cases of five men whose ongoing imprisonment has already been recommended, and who may, as a result, be recommended for release, but it also happened in the case of Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi suspected of being the intended 20th hijacker on 9/11, who was subjected to a specific torture program in Guantánamo. Al-Qahtani’s PRB revealed a previously unknown — or previously undisclosed — history of severe mental illness back in Saudi Arabia, although this information did not lead to a recommendation for his release.

With the population of Guantánamo down to just 60 men, it is important to credit the role the PRBs have played, with 20 men released as a result of the board’s deliberations, and 14 others awaiting release. However it remains disheartening that, nearly 15 years since Guantánamo opened, we are still discovering the extent to which thoroughly unreliable information has been used to continue holding men described as the “worst of the worst” when, in so many cases, that was simply not true at all.

I wrote the above article for the “Close Guantánamo” website, which I established in January 2012, on the 10th anniversary of the opening of Guantánamo, with the US attorney Tom Wilner. Please join us — just an email address is required to be counted amongst those opposed to the ongoing existence of Guantánamo, and to receive updates of our activities by email.

By Adam Garfinkle*

(FPRI) — There are times when a person has to pinch himself to make sure he’s not dreaming. This happens when one’s sense of reality fails to jive with that of seemingly everyone else. I pinched hard back in September/October 2013 during the denouement to the Syrian “Red Line” fiasco—specifically, the part that involved the Russian-induced deal that supposedly removed and destroyed all of Syria’s chemical weapons. I knew the Syrian declaration was false and that some chemical munitions would remain—probably more recent and usable stocks and some munitions already weaponized.

As the days and then the weeks and months passed, I was certain that many others would go into English- or Western-language print, or otherwise join me, in supporting my view. To the best of my knowledge, at the time and since, not a single U.S. news source did so. On October 3, 2013, The Economist expressed some doubts about the veracity of the Syrian regime’s declaration. Both Amy Smithson and Gwyn Winfield, chemical weapons experts, reasoned at the time that the Syrian regime had incentives to distort its declaration, but neither charged the regime with lying once the disclosure was handed over. Days later, when a belated Syrian revelation of four additional sites raised concern about the veracity of the declaration among government experts, the press was mainly mute.

Only in the Israeli press at the time were doubts expressed.[1] And only in the Israeli press was Ambassador Samantha Power’s early October tweet reported: “Must keep pressure on regime so it doesn’t hide CW capability.”

There followed in January 2014 Ambassador Robert Mikulak’s comment to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) Executive Council that the October phase of facilities destruction was incomplete, reversible, and did not meet agreed requirements. Mikulak’s comment rated a brief CBS News report, but no major U.S. newspaper mentioned it. May 2014 brought forth a belated and muted expression of doubt on the part of British Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant; it disappeared as a whisper in the ether. Throughout the period from September 2013 to January 2015, when the process supposedly ended successfully, there was not so much as a peep from any U.S. mainstream media source that things might not be as the Obama Administration made them seem. Contrarily, when in October 2013 Secretary of State John Kerry pronounced himself “very pleased” at Syrian compliance, the press spread that bubbly remark far and wide. Who says the press isn’t interested in good news, even when it’s not accurate?

I warned about Syrian dissimulation several times in this period (details below), but it was like yelling down a well and hearing no echo come back. I even later warned about the implications for the P5+1 negotiations with Iran: If the Syrians could get away with lying to the U.S. government, would not the Iranian regime perhaps conclude that it could do the same? Thanks to David Samuels’ revelational interview with Ben Rhodes, we get the distinct sense that the Iranians tried and the Obama White House let them slide in its own dissimulating desperation to get a deal.

I pinched hard: What was the matter with everyone? On what basis did supposedly serious American journalists—to take just one class of observers—give a regime that had lied to every U.S. administration since that of Dwight Eisenhower a free pass on this count? I just couldn’t understand it.

Things got worse when the media began claiming in June 2014 that all Syrian chemical weapons were now out of the country and awaiting destruction. After the passage of a few more months, when the cleansing-and-destruction process was supposedly complete, Obama Administration spokesmen, senior and otherwise, began claiming in August 2014 that all chemical weapons stocks—some 1,300 tons—had been removed from Syria and destroyed. No one (except me, it seemed,) in this entire beautiful and expansive country of ours bothered to publicly express doubt.

There was not a disparaging word even from responsible Republicans who had a good partisan reason to speak up, as other less-responsible Republicans obsessed over their idiotic partisan witch-hunt of “Benghazi.” The Syria chemical weapons stuff was low-hanging fruit; why didn’t anyone on the GOP side think to pick it? (Of course, now I realize that a party that let Donald Trump become its presidential nominee was even then capable of almost any screw-up.) I pinched so hard it left a mark.

The Long-Awaited Admission

The mainstream press began to figure this stuff out in May 2015, thanks to an intel operation and its subsequent leak, first via a Reuters dispatch and then in front page stories in the New York Times  and the Times (of London). The American Interest ran a short post on the news on May 11 quoting my analysis from September 30, 2013.  Two days later, I beat the drum again, summarizing as follows: “The Syrians lied; the deal therefore held zero military significance; we would end up as hazmat collectors for the Syrians; and we would stupidly foot the bill.”

But now, finally, real proof is at hand—irrefutable proof detailed in spades, so that no reasonable person can continue to remain deluded.

On July 4, 2016, the Declarations Assessment Team of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons reported to the treaty’s day-to-day governing body, the 41-member Executive Council, that it had considerable evidence challenging the veracity of Syria’s declaration about its chemical-weapons facilities. We, the (attentive) public, only learned of this report, however, a week or two ago. As Amy Smithson puts it in a comprehensive essay in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

The treaty’s inspectors classified the July report as “highly protected,” but details went public when the organization’s director, Ahmet Uzumcu, sent a two-page summary and a redacted version of the report to the UN Security Council over the protests of Russia’s Executive Council representative. Among other things, the report stated that inspectors have quietly met with Syrian officials and inspected Syrian facilities numerous times since April 2014, taking 122 samples that often directly refute Syria’s declaration.

Of course the Russian government would protest any information going public: As the Assad regime’s lawyer, it was a full partner to the original lie.

This was perhaps not so easy for Uzumcu to do, for, after all, he is the one who previously declared all Syrian stocks destroyed on January 4, 2015. How does one say “eat crow” in Turkish?

Smithson continues:

In the 1990s, Saddam Hussein used inaccurate and incomplete declarations about his nuclear, chemical, biological, and missile programs to try to dupe UN inspectors and the international community into believing he was relinquishing his unconventional capabilities. Fortunately, the UN inspectors did not fall for this ploy; with dogged perseverance they dug out facts contradicting those declarations and eliminated the weapons capabilities Hussein was trying to hide. In a move right out of Saddam’s hide-and-seek playbook, the Syrians told inspectors from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons that they had destroyed all records of their program, purportedly fearing the documents would fall into the wrong hands. The absence of records makes it much more difficult for inspectors to verify what they are told about a weapons program but Assad’s government further complicated matters by refusing to let inspectors speak with senior officials in Syria’s chemical-weapons program. . . . [M]uch of Syria’s declaration was hogwash, though the organization’s chief put it in more technical terms. Uzumcu characterized Syria’s misleading and conflicting explanations for the detection of several undeclared warfare agents as “not scientifically or technically plausible.” With missing chemical munitions and the majority of 122 samples from several undeclared sites pointing to falsehoods in Syria’s declaration, evidence indicates Syria, a serial violator of the chemical convention, may still harbor a chemical-weapons program.

That’s exactly right, and stocks too, which is why overrun depots have furnished some material for ISIS to use chemical weapons now and again on its large array of foes in Syria. When evidence surfaced of ISIS chemical use, an array of theories sprang forth as to how they came by such materials. Some said they were smart and technologically facile enough to fabricate them de novo. Not likely. Some say they bought them, from somewhere. Not likely. Some say they found what amounted to a small rounding error from the mammoth volume of old Syrian stocks, the result of an honest oversight on the part of the Russian personnel who oversaw the transportation (but not the destruction[2]) of the old toxic slime. Perhaps; this seems to be the most popular explanation within the U.S. intelligence community. Vastly more likely is the simplest explanation: ISIS overran some regime stocks, and perhaps loaded, weaponized canisters, because the stocks and canisters were still there to be overrun.

If this is the simplest explanation, then why the struggle to violate Occam’s Razor to concoct some alternative? Pinch, pinch, pinch.

Some other usable stocks and weapons no doubt remain in regime possession, to be used en extremis if the Alawi regime elite should be threatened ultimately in its Latakia redoubts. If that ever happens, you’d think that a lot of seemingly smart people would be very embarrassed. They won’t be. Pretty much no one remembers esoteric stuff that’s more than a few days old anymore; there’s no time or facility to connect dots amid the mainstream media’s 24/7 swirl of fragmented, evanescent images. That’s the font of our post-factual world, besides which who wants to embarrass colleagues if it can be avoided, lest one day the truth sets a rival free to embarrass you?

Will the Obama Administration in its waning days admit that it believed too much, claimed too much, and fawned over its supposed success just a little too much?  Not a chance.

A Friendly Reminder

Now, it is time to remind you, dear reader, what I wrote about abject fraud, and when I wrote it. I’ll keep this brief, since the I-told-you-so tense grates on some people. Besides, you always have the option of skipping the three excerpts that follow to attend to other matters.

Here is what I wrote on September 30, 2013:

The Syrian regime needs only a small fraction of its chemical arsenal for any imaginable military purposes. Most of its stocks are old and of questionable potency; the only reason they’re still there is because it’s very expensive and dangerous to get rid of them. (We’re still getting rid of buried World War I-era stocks in Washington, DC, after all!) So even if (and it’s a very big “if”) the UN manages to get rid of 90 percent of Syria’s chemical stocks, the military significance of so doing will be zero. Note, too, that Syria’s cooperation with the OPCW so far is probably designed to give Syria the right to veto inspections of any site the regime has not “declared” in its manifest. The regime can declare 90 percent or more of the relevant sites and lose nothing in military terms. It even gains financially: Others will now pay to dispose of stuff that’s useless and dangerous, and the bill will be quite large—in the billions of dollars, very likely, if it ever comes to that.

Here’s what I wrote inter alia on January 14, 2014:

There is nothing wrong with eliminating Syria’s chemical weapons in the face of a possibly crumbling Syrian state, but the deal does not eliminate all of Syria’s chemical weapons. It may end up eliminating only those the regime itself declared—and we have no reliable means of verifying the existence of what was not declared. Very likely, the most up-to-date and lethal munitions were not declared, leaving the so-called international community—mainly the United States, as it predictably turned out—to play the role of hazmat garbage collector, and to foot the bill to boot.

And here from May 13, 2014:

…the Syrians never declared, from the start, all their stockpiles and fabrication sites. They declared 26. There are at least thirty, and according to Israeli estimates there were around 50, although some were in isolated areas and have since been consolidated or moved during the civil war. As I wrote when this whole thing started, the Syrian government has lied to every U.S. administration since that of Dwight Eisenhower, and it is lying now to the Obama Administration.

A little background may make what has been happening a bit clearer. Syria’s chemical weapons program goes back to the mid-1970s, and really got going with Soviet help in the 1980s. The Soviets taught the Syrians the know-how, and Russians have continued to do so because the Syrians have been unable to institutionalize the technical knowledge among themselves. Precursors for nerve gas, which are industrial chemicals made in often large amounts and available commercially, are, like Sarin itself, moderately unstable and deteriorate over time, and so must be restocked. (One of them, for example, is a chemical used to leach bauxite ore to produce alumina.) Over a more than 40-year period, most of Syria’s old chemical stocks of precursors became worthless for military purposes, but still toxic. The Syrians never bothered to invest in capabilities to denature the toxins, so they just piled up. We essentially have played the role of hazmat garbage collectors, paying out of our own pocket to get rid of all this useless stuff—hundreds of tons of it—but leaving the newer and better materials off the books and in regime hands (possibly now in Latakia province). The result is that while the effort marginally reduces the danger of Islamist crazies getting their hands on the precursors, it has absolutely zero effect on the Syrian chemical war order of battle.

Could it be that the U.S. government has not known this all along? I find it hard to believe. . . . Yet, as best I can tell, it was only three days ago that the very first statement by a U.S. government official about this problem emerged. Jen Psaki, the State Department spokeswoman, let loose on May 9 that “we remain skeptical” as to whether the Syrian government “has revealed the full extent of its stockpiles.” This statement was reported in the May 10 Khaleej Times, but not in any American newspaper that I saw. Just a day latter, in a Washington Post interview, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said: “It is true and positive that step by step, they got rid of them. Today the work is about 90 percent done. Provided that they did not hide anything from us.” Unfortunately, the interviewer, the estimable Lally Weymouth, failed to understand the significance of Fabius’s afterthought or to follow up on it.

Certainly the President has never raised the inconvenient possibility. He said at the end of April that 87 percent of Syria’s chemical weapons had been removed, and “the fact that we didn’t have to fire a missile to get that accomplished is not a failure to uphold international norms, it’s a success.” Really, do tell.

Yes, there is more, but I’ll spare you.

So back to the original question: Why did the U.S. mainstream media behave so credulously toward the Syrian regime, the officialdom of OPCW, and the Obama Administration? Why and how did their sense of history and reality abandon them, along with the responsibility to use their critical investigative talents to write a truthful first draft of history? You tell me, please, and so let the pinching stop. It hurts.

About the author:
*Adam Garfinkle is a Robert A. Fox Fellow in the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Program on the Middle East. He is founding editor of The American Interest.

Source:
This article was published at FPRI

Notes:
[1] The abbreviated English-language material is: Dan Williams, “Israeli Officials: Syria Hid Chemical Weapons After Giving Up Raw Materials,” Ha’aretz, September 18, 2014, and Amos Harel, “Israeli Intelligence: Syria Retains Small WMD Capacity,” Ha’aretz, October 1, 2014.

[2] In an otherwise excellent analysis, Anna Borshchevskaya and Jeremy Vaughan state that Putin volunteered to have Russia “oversee the destruction of Assad’s chemical weapons arsenal in 2013.” Not so; he volunteered to transport it out of Syria, not to destroy it. Most of the obsolete, denatured stocks that were destroyed were destroyed abroad the MV Cape Ray off the coast of Italy. It took 42 days to destroy about 581 metric tons of Syria’s accumulated toxic materials. U.S. taxpayers did indeed foot the bill. The British took care of most of the rest as the effluents from the Cape Ray made their way to Finland and Germany for burial or disposal. Neither the Syrians nor the Russians forked over a cent. Borshchevskaya and Vaughan, “How the Russian Military Reestablished Itself in the Middle East,” WINEP policy Watch 2709, October 17, 2016.

The blockchain technology underlying Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is attracting growing interest. This column argues that if transactions facilitated by this technology become pervasive, it will have implications for the conduct (and success) of central bank monetary policy. Central banks should embrace the technologies that underpin cryptocurrencies, or risk being cut out from intermediation and surveillance and also risk payment service providers moving to other currency areas with an institutional environment that is more appealing for buyers and sellers.

By Dirk Niepelt*

While excitement about Bitcoin appears to have subsided, the blockchain technology underlying Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is attracting growing interest (e.g. Oliver Wyman 2016). Central banks have joined the FinTechs and bricks-and-mortar financial institutions in paying attention (Economist 2016). Not a week passes without a monetary authority declaring interest in the technology, and in opportunities to employ it. What are the likely implications of this for central banks and the monetary system?

Internet-based technology has made it cheap to collect information and to network. This has empowered the sharing economy and allows FinTechs to seize intermediation business from banks. The banks, reputationally damaged by the financial crisis, are degraded and may become utilities as a result. But both FinTechs and ‘sharing economy’ businesses manage information centrally – they serve as middle-men – exactly as traditional financial institutions do.

Blockchain technology undermines the ‘middle-man’ business model. It makes it harder to cheat in transactions, and so reduces the value of credibility lent by trusted intermediaries. It is less important that counterparties may not know and trust each other. A lack of trust becomes less of an impediment to trade.

This opens up new possibilities for financial market participants. Getting rid of middle-men saves cost, speeds clearing and settlement (possibly easing capital requirements), and reduces operational risks. It can also help to implement tailor-made transaction protocols, or to keep transaction details confidential while at the same time providing records for supervisors. Maybe most importantly, it improves the bargaining power of buyers and sellers when they deal with brokers. If you are in the intermediation business, this is worrying.

Blockchain technologies may lend credibility to decentralised transactions, whether denominated in traditional fiat currency or virtual cryptocurrencies. This creates novel challenges and opportunities for central banks (see Raskin and Yermack 2016 for a discussion of the legal implications).

Consider first the rise of cryptocurrencies and the currency competition that derives from it. Cryptocurrencies have a fundamental advantage, which is the power to commit using ‘smart contracts’. Unlike the supply of fiat monies that hinges on discretionary decisions by monetary policymakers, the supply of cryptocurrencies can, in principle, be insulated against human interference ex post, and at the same time be conditioned on arbitrary verifiable outcomes. Cryptocurrencies have the potential to overcome commitment problems that have long been at the heart of monetary policy, for example by having a smart contract fix the growth rate of the virtual currency subject to clearly defined escape clauses. Currently, however, the issuing bodies of most cryptocurrencies do not make use of this possibility. Like traditional monetary authorities, they allow discretionary interference by their respective ‘monetary policy committees’ instead.

In other respects, cryptocurrencies are similar to US dollars in a dollarised economy. Demand for these currencies is fostered by loss of trust in the domestic central bank or a desire among transacting parties to hide their identities. Widespread use would have important implications. For example, the more payments are made using cryptocurrencies, the lower the demand for traditional central-bank-issued cash and reserves.

As a consequence:

• Seignorage revenues fall;
• Therefore, the central bank’s ability to monitor the payments system diminishes; and
• In the extreme, the monetary authority may not only lose control over the money supply and credit, but also the ability to provide lender-of-last-resort support

Don’t panic (yet)

Cryptocurrencies offer limited benefits for users who do not have overwhelming privacy needs. Their usefulness as money suffers from limited liquidity, which creates exchange rate volatility. As long as the number of people using cryptocurrencies is small, the incentive for others to adopt them too remains limited. But strong network effects may quickly disrupt the payments system once a critical mass of users coordinate on, and adopt, a specific cryptocurrency.

Blockchain-facilitated transactions denominated in domestic currency may affect central banks much faster and more directly. Consider a security purchase paid with domestic currency using the blockchain. The change of ownership of the security may go hand-in-hand with an exchange of claims on domestic currency (the seller’s account at a bank participating in the blockchain is credited, for example), or of actual central bank money (following Koning 2014, we might call this ‘Fedcoins’). In the former case, payment eventually requires clearing through traditional central bank managed channels, at the cost of added complexity and resources. In the case of Fedcoins, it doesn’t. If base money ‘lives’ on the blockchain, the buyer can directly transfer domestic currency to the seller. Transfer of ownership of the security and of central bank money may then occur jointly, in real time.

So, to fully reap the benefits of distributed ledger technologies, it is in the interest of traders to have the central bank participate in the blockchain. Eventually, having central banks on board could even lead towards dismantling central bank-managed payments systems. We can shift all clearing to the new, decentralised networks.

Should central banks oppose the new technology?

If central banks don’t join forces, they risk being cut out from intermediation and surveillance. They also run the risk that payment service providers may move to other currency areas with an institutional environment that is more appealing for buyers and sellers. Neither can be in the interest of monetary authorities, even if the technical and legal challenges of engagement are huge.

Central banks increasingly are under pressure to keep ‘their’ currencies attractive. They should let the general public access electronic central bank money, not just financial institutions ( Niepelt 2015). To do this, they should embrace the blockchain.

About the author:
* Dirk Niepelt, Director, Study Center Gerzensee; Professor, University of Bern

References:
Economist (2016), “Redistributed ledger”, 19 March.

Koning, J P (2014), “Fedcoin,” Moneyness blog, 19 October.

Niepelt, D (2015), “Reserves For Everyone—Towards a New Monetary Regime?,” VoxEU, January 21.

Oliver Wyman (2016), “Blockchain in Capital Markets: The Prize and the Journey,” Oliverwyman.com

Raskin, M and D Yermack (2016), “Digital Currencies, Decentralized Ledgers, and the Future of Central Banking,” NBER Working Paper No. 22238.