سجن تونسيين بتهمة محاولة الالتحاق بالمقاومة العراقية

سجن تونسيين بتهمة محاولة الالتحاق بالمقاومة العراقية

    7:53 AM   No comments

قضت المحكمة الابتدائية في تونس بسجن خمسة شبان لفترات تراوحت بين خمس وثماني سنوات نافذة، بموجب قانون مكافحة الإرهاب، بتهمة محاولة هؤلاء الشبان الالتحاق "بالمقاومة العراقية" عن طريق السعودية.

وقال المحامي سمير بن عمر إن القاضي محرز الهمامي أصدر اليوم أحكاماً بالسجن لمدة ثماني سنوات على الحبيب بن عمر وأشرف السلطاني بينما حكم على الثلاثة الآخرين بالسجن خمسة أعوام.

ويؤكد بن عمر أنه ليست لهؤلاء الشبان أي علاقة بالمقاومة العراقية، وقال إنهم "ذهبوا للحج وبقوا في السعودية بعد انتهاء تأشيراتهم قبل أن تعتقلهم السلطات السعودية دون أوراق لتعيدهم إلى تونس دون أن توجه لهم تهماً".

ووجهت المحكمة للشبان الخمسة تهم "الانضمام إلى تنظيم اتخذ من الإرهاب وسيلة لتحقيق أغراضه، واستعمال تراب الجمهورية لارتكاب جرائم إرهابية ضد بلد آخر، وجمع أموال مع العلم بأن الغرض منها تمويل أشخاص وتنظيمات إرهابية".

ويطبق قانون مكافحة الإرهاب بصرامة في تونس منذ عام 2003، ويقدر محامون تونسيون أن عدد المعتقلين وفق هذا القانون لا يقل عن 1500 شخص معظمهم من الشبان.

Un diplomate tunisien jugé en France pour tortures

Un diplomate tunisien jugé en France pour tortures

    7:04 AM   No comments

Lundi 15 décembre, un diplomate tunisien, Khaled Ben Saïd, devra répondre devant la cour d'assises de Strasbourg d'actes de torture et de barbarie commis sur une ressortissante tunisienne, Zulaikha Gharbi, douze ans plus tôt, en Tunisie. Ce procès, qui ne durera qu'une journée, a un caractère historique. C'est la première fois qu'un diplomate sera jugé en France sur le principe de compétence universelle, qui permet de poursuivre les auteurs présumés de crimes graves, quel que soit le lieu où ils ont été commis.

Le 11 octobre 1996, M^me Gharbi, mère de cinq enfants, 32 ans, est interpellée à son domicile de Jendouba, petite ville au nord-ouest de Tunis. Elle est conduite dans un local de police. Là, elle est dévêtue et soumise à divers actes de torture pendant vingt-quatre heures : suspension à une barre posée entre deux tables, coups multiples sur le visage et le corps, violences sur les parties génitales, insultes...

Les policiers veulent lui soutirer des renseignements sur son mari, un islamiste membre du parti Ennahda (interdit). Mais Mouldi Gharbi, instituteur, a fui la Tunisie, via l'Algérie, trois ans plus tôt, et obtenu l'asile politique en France. Quand Zulaikha Gharbi sort, traumatisée, du commissariat de police, on lui conseille de se tenir tranquille. "Ton dossier est ouvert", lui dit-on.

Chaque jour de l'année suivante, M^me Gharbi va vivre "dans la terreur qu'on vienne (l')arrêter à nouveau". En octobre 1997, elle obtient le droit de rejoindre son mari en France, au titre du regroupement familial. Quand elle se présente au commissariat de police de Jendouba pour obtenir son passeport et celui de ses enfants, elle découvre avec stupeur que son interlocuteur est l'un de ses anciens tortionnaires. "Je n'avais pas oublié son visage, dit-elle. Je ne l'oublierai jamais." Elle apprend le nom de ce commissaire de police : Khaled Ben Saïd. "Il m'a reconnue, et je l'ai reconnu, se souvient-elle, mais j'ai préféré faire comme si de rien n'était. Il me fallait nos passeports." Elle relève toutefois que l'homme "semble gêné".

En mai 2001, alors que Zulaikha Gharbi a rejoint son mari et vit en région parisienne avec toute sa famille, elle est avertie que Khaled Ben Saïd a été nommé vice-consul de Tunisie à Strasbourg. Soutenue par la Fédération internationale des ligues des droits de l'homme (FIDH) et l'avocat Eric Plouvier, elle dépose une plainte. La FIDH et la Ligue française des droits de l'homme (LDH) se constituent parties civiles.

La procédure qui va suivre sera longue et ardue. Convoqué par la police puis par le juge d'instruction en charge du dossier, Khaled Ben Saïd s'enfuit en Tunisie. En juillet 2003, un mandat d'arrêt international est lancé contre lui. En vain. Après sept années d'enquête, et en dépit de tous les obstacles, l'ordonnance de mise en accusation devant la cour d'assises du Bas-Rhin est finalement rendue, le 16 février 2007.

Aux dernières nouvelles, Khaled Ben Saïd travaille à Tunis et jouit d'une entière liberté. Le procès de Strasbourg se déroulera donc, lundi, selon la procédure de "défaut criminel" ou contumace. M. Ben Saïd sera représenté par un avocat du barreau de Colmar, M^e Salichon, qui n'a pas souhaité répondre à nos questions.

Les autorités tunisiennes ont démenti vigoureusement les faits reprochés à Khaled Ben Saïd. "Ces accusations sont totalement imaginaires. Elles visent à induire l'opinion publique en erreur", a indiqué, le 15 novembre, à Tunis, un responsable tunisien, en refusant d'être cité sous son nom, avant de mettre en doute la compétence de la justice française à statuer sur la plainte.

Vêtue d'une djellaba crème, le visage ceint d'un foulard, Zulaikha Gharbi avoue timidement que le procès de Strasbourg lui "fait un peu peur". Elle sera présente à l'audience, avec son mari. "Je ne veux pas faire de tort à mon pays, la Tunisie, souligne-t-elle, mais je dois aller jusqu'au bout. Il faut que les tortionnaires sachent qu'ils ne sont plus à l'abri", explique-t-elle dans un français maladroit.

De son côté, le président d'honneur de la FIDH, M^e Patrick Baudouin, rappelle que si la Tunisie présente des aspects positifs, en matière de droit des femmes notamment, " elle mérite un zéro pointé en ce qui concerne les droits civils et politiques". Or elle a ratifié la Convention internationale contre la torture en 1988. Pour cet avocat, "il est grand temps que cesse l'impunité totale dont jouissent les tortionnaires tunisiens".

Florence Beaugé

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Dix ans de prison ferme pour les leaders des émeutes de Gafsa

Six dirigeants du mouvement de protestation sociale dans la région minière de Gafsa (350 km de Tunis) ont été condamnés, dans la nuit du 11 au 12 décembre, à dix ans de prison ferme. Le porte-parole du mouvement, Adnane Haji, et cinq de ses coaccusés ont écopé la peine maximale, alors que Mohieddine Cherbib, coordinateur en France d'un comité de soutien aux habitants de Gafsa, était condamné par défaut à deux ans de prison.

38 Tunisiens étaient poursuivis pour leur implication dans les troubles survenus à Gafsa lors du premier semestre de cette année. Les manifestants dénonçaient le chômage, le coût de la vie, la corruption et le népotisme. Les prévenus ont été reconnus coupables d'"entente criminelle portant atteinte aux personnes et aux biens et rébellion armée".

Des avocats ont dénoncé le déroulement du procès, qualifié de "parodie de justice". "C'est un scandale, les prévenus n'ont pas été interrogés et les avocats n'ont pas plaidé, le verdict a été prononcé à la sauvette au milieu d'une salle remplie de policiers", a déclaré M^e Mokhtar Trifi, président de la Ligue tunisienne de défense des droits de l'homme. - (AFP.)

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La compétence universelle

Le principe. La compétence universelle donne la possibilité à un pays d'arrêter, de poursuivre et de juger un ressortissant étranger qui se trouve sur son territoire et est l'auteur présumé de crimes graves, quel que soit le lieu où ils ont été commis et quelle que soit la nationalité des auteurs ou des victimes. La compétence universelle permet ainsi la poursuite d'un criminel, où qu'il se trouve, suite à une plainte, une dénonciation, ou une arrestation fortuite.

Un cas précédent en France. Le procès de Strasbourg sera le premier procès en France d'un présumé tortionnaire tunisien, et surtout le premier procès d'un diplomate. Mais ce sera le second procès en France fondé sur le mécanisme de compétence universelle. Le 7 juillet 2005, un militaire mauritanien, Ely Ould Dah, a été condamné par contumace à dix ans de prison ferme pour tortures perpétrées en Mauritanie au début des années 1990. Arrêté en France en 1999, alors qu'il effectuait un stage au sein de la gendarmerie française, puis placé en résidence surveillée, il avait pris la fuite en avril 2000.

Source

Dix ans de prison ferme pour les meneurs de manifestations à Gafsa, en Tunisie

Dix ans de prison ferme pour les meneurs de manifestations à Gafsa, en Tunisie

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Plus de trente personnes ont été condamnées, dans la nuit de jeudi 11 à vendredi 12 décembre, pour leur implication dans le mouvement de protestation qui a soulevé la région de Gafsa, dans le sud-ouest tunisien, au premier semestre 2008, après le trucage d'un concours d'embauche chez le principal employeur local. Des peines de dix ans de prison ferme ont été prononcées contre six dirigeants du mouvement, dont son porte-parole, Adnane Hajji, par un tribunal de première instance de la ville, située à 350 kilomètres de Tunis.

Selon le verdict du procès, seuls cinq des trente-huit Tunisiens prévenus pour leur implication dans les troubles ont été relaxés. Une source judiciaire, citée par l'AFP, indique que les autres ont été condamnés "à des peines allant de deux ans d'emprisonnement avec sursis à dix ans d'emprisonnement ferme".

Les prévenus ont été reconnus coupables "d'entente criminelle portant atteinte aux personnes et aux biens et rébellion armée commise par plus de dix personnes au cours de laquelle des voies de faits ont été exercées sur des fonctionnaires dans l'exercice de leur fonction", précise cette source judiciaire.

"UNE PARODIE DE JUSTICE"

Mohieddine Cherbib, coordinateur d'un comité de soutien des habitants de Gafsa en France, a été condamné par défaut à deux ans de prison, tandis que l'opposant Fahem Boukaddous, correspondant de la chaîne dissidente Al-Hiwar émettant d'Italie, a été condamné, lui aussi par défaut, à six ans de prison, selon leur avocat joint par téléphone à Gafsa.

Pour la défense, ce procès, ouvert le 4 décembre et suivi par deux avocats et deux syndicalistes français, constitue une "parodie de justice". M^e Mokhtar Trifi, président de la Ligue de défense des droits de l'homme, affirme que des "prévenus n'ont pas été interrogés", que "les avocats n'ont pas plaidé", et que "le verdict a été prononcé à la sauvette au milieu d'une salle remplie de policiers".

Selon un autre avocat, M^e Chokri Belaid, "les prévenus ont été molestés et évacués de la salle, l'audience à été interrompue pendant plusieurs heures avant une annonce surprise et irrégulière du verdict en pleine nuit".

Malgré les demandes de la défense, le président du tribunal a refusé des expertises médicales pour des détenus se disant victimes de torture, ainsi que la citation de plusieurs témoins. La source judiciaire citée par l'AFP affirme, elle, que "certains des avocats de la défense ont affiché leur hostilité au respect de la procédure (...), s'opposant à la poursuite normale de l'examen du dossier".

Source

Tunisian trade union leader on trial for role in protests

Tunisian trade union leader on trial for role in protests

    6:58 AM   No comments

A trade union leader and 37 others face trial in Tunisia on Thursday, accused of fomenting unrest during protests earlier this year in the Gafsa region. Adnan Hajji, Secretary General of local office of the General Union of Tunisian Workers (UGTT) in Redeyef, and his co-accused face charges including "forming a criminal group with the aim of destroying public and private property".

If convicted, they could face up to more than ten years of imprisonment. At least six of 38 accused are to be tried in their absence.

The phosphate-rich Gafsa region, in south-east Tunisia, was wracked by a wave of popular protests in the first half of this year. They began in the town of Redeyef after the region’s major employer, the Gafsa Phosphate Company, announced the results of a recruitment competition.

These results were denounced as fraudulent by those who were unsuccessful and others, including the UGTT, and the protests, which developed into a more general protest about high unemployment and rising living costs, then spread to other towns as the authorities deployed large numbers of police and other security forces into the region.

Hundreds of protestors were arrested and more than 140 have been charged with offences, some of whom have been convicted and sentenced to jail terms.

Amnesty International has called on the Tunisian government to order an independent investigation into allegations of torture and other abuses by security forces when quelling the protests.

In a letter to Tunisia's Minister of Justice and Human Rights Béchir Tekkari, Amnesty International called for the authorities to disclose the outcome of an official investigation. The organization said the investigation had been set up after police opened fire on demonstrators on 6 June 2008, killing one man and injuring others, sparking allegations that police had used excessive force.

The letter also detailed cases in which people suspected of organizing or participating in protests are reported to have been detained and tortured by police. The police are accused of forcing them to sign incriminating statements that could be used against them at trial and falsified their arrest dates in official records.

السجن عشر سنوات لتونسيين شاركوا بمظاهرات جنوب البلاد

السجن عشر سنوات لتونسيين شاركوا بمظاهرات جنوب البلاد

    6:54 AM   No comments

السجن عشر سنوات لتونسيين شاركوا بمظاهرات جنوب البلاد

قضت محكمة قفصة الابتدائية في تونس بالسجن عشر سنوات في حق ستة من المتهمين بتنظيم ما عرف باحتجاجات "الحوض المنجمي" التي شهدتها مدينة الرديف جنوب البلاد بوقت سابق من العام الجاري واستمرت شهورا.

وحسب مصادر حقوقية، فقد مثل أمس أمام القضاء 31 معتقلا بهذه القضية معظمهم قياديون نقابيون ومدرسون وموظفون، تمت متابعتهم بعد مشاركتهم بالمظاهرات والتحركات التي شهدتها الرديف.

ووجهت للمعتقلين تهمة "تشكيل مجموعة إجرامية بهدف تدمير ممتلكات عامة وخاصة" وقالت هيئة الدفاع إن المحكمة رفضت طلبا بإطلاق الموقوفين وعرضهم على الفحص الطبي متهمة الشرطة بالاعتداء على عدد منهم قبل بدء المحاكمة.

وأورد شهود عيان أن أعدادا كبيرة من قوات الأمن انتشرت بمحيط المحكمة والشوارع الكبرى بمدينة قفصة، وحضر الجلسة ملاحظون أجانب وممثلون عن نقابات وهيئات وأحزاب سياسية.

وقد بدأت المظاهرات بالرديف احتجاجا على ما قيل إنه "تلاعب" في تعيينات بمؤسسة عمومية، ثم تحول الأمر إلى احتجاجات عارمة على تفاقم الأزمة الاجتماعية جراء البطالة وضآلة فرص التنمية بالمنطقة.

In The News (ITN): Islamic World Newswire; Muslim World News: US Marine, Andre Shepherd, seeks asylum in Germany

In The News (ITN): Islamic World Newswire; Muslim World News: US Marine, Andre Shepherd, seeks asylum in Germany

    7:31 AM   No comments

In The News (ITN): Islamic World Newswire; Muslim World News: US Marine, Andre Shepherd, seeks asylum in Germany: "An AWOL Cleveland soldier may become the first to test German and international laws that could grant asylum to deserters.

Spc. Andre Shepherd, 31, had served in Iraq as an Apache helicopter mechanic, and was based in Germany when he went absent without leave a year and a half ago.

On the Military Counseling Network's Web site, he called the war in Iraq 'illegal,' 'internationally condemned' and 'shown to be founded on a series of lies.'

Shepherd said in a telephone interview Monday that he originally wanted to settle in Germany, where he had been living underground since deserting, but found that he would not be allowed without proof of his discharge from the Army."

Syria condemns deadly 'US raid'

Syria condemns deadly 'US raid'

    7:41 AM   No comments

Syria has condemned an alleged US raid that killed at least eight people in the country's east, close to the border with Iraq, calling it an act of "serious aggression".

Damascus was considering its response to the attack, a spokesperson for the Syrian information ministry told Al Jazeera on Monday.

"No doubt there will be a reaction [from Syria] of some kind," Reem Haddad told Al Jazeera.

The US has not officially responded to Syria's accusation, but an unnamed US military official was reported by The Associated Press as saying that the raid by US special forces targeted al-Qaeda-linked foreign fighters who were moving through Syria into Iraq.

"We are taking matters into our own hands," he was quoted as saying.

The US military in Iraq said it did not have any information about the incident.

'Terrorist groups'

The raid on Sunday targeted an area used by fighters responsible for cross-border attacks into Iraq, Ali al-Dabbagh, the Iraqi government spokesman, said on Monday.

"The attacked area was the scene of activities of terrorist groups operating from Syria against Iraq," he told the Reuters news agency.

"The latest of these groups ... killed 13 police recruits in an (Iraqi) border village. Iraq had asked Syria to hand over this group which uses Syria as a base for its terrorist activities."

Al-Dabbagh would not say who had carried it out.

"Iraq is always seeking distinguished relations with its sister Syria," he said.

"The presence of some anti-Iraq groups in Syria, which are supporting and participating in activities against Iraqis, would hinder improvement of these relations".

Syrian anger

Following the attack, the Syrian government summoned the senior US and Iraqi envoys to Damascus to protest against the raid, the Syrian Arab news agency (Sana) reported.

A Syrian government statement said: "Syria condemns this aggression and holds the American forces responsible for this aggression and all its repercussions."

The statement also called for the Iraqi government to launch an investigation into the attack.

"This is a flagrant violation of the new [security] agreement between Iraq and the US," Haddad told Al Jazeera.

"Because one of the points of that agreement is that they do not attack bordering countries."

Workers killed

Syrian state television said four American helicopters raided the village of Sukariya - close to the town of Abu Kamal, 8km inside the Syrian border - before flying back towards Iraqi territory.

During the raids, two of the helicopters landed and dropped off eight US soldiers, who then entered a house, Syrian media reported.
"Four American helicopters violated Syrian airspace around 4:45pm local time [13:45 GMT] on Sunday," state television reported.

"American soldiers ... attacked a civilian building under construction and fired at workmen inside, causing eight deaths."

The government said that those killed in the raid were workers.

Akram Hameed, a man in his 40s who said he was injured in the attack while fishing in the Euphrates river, told Syrian television he saw four helicopters coming from the border area under a heavy blanket of fire.

"One of the helicopters landed in an agricultural area and eight members disembarked," Hameed said.

"The firing lasted about 15 minutes and when I tried to leave the area on my motorcycle, I was hit by a bullet in the right arm about 20 metres away."

Syria TV showed what it said was the injured wife of the building's guard, in bed in hospital with a tube in her nose, saying that two helicopters landed and two remained in the air during the attack.

US incursion

The US and the US-backed Iraqi government frequently accuse Damascus of not doing enough to stop anti-US fighters, including those from al-Qaeda, crossing the border into Iraq.

But Syrian analysts say the demands are unfounded.

"Syria has one million and a half refugees - it is impossible to make it a full-proof frontier," Samir al-Taqi, director of the Orient Centre for International Studies, a Syrian think-tank, told Al Jazeera.

"Syria has requested technical assistance to be able to control [the border with Iraq] and the Americans were reluctant," he said.

The Americans failed to reply to all the requests by the Syrian government and to allow the Iraqis to build up security co-ordination across the border."

Since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, there have been some instances in which American troops crossed areas of the 600km border in pursuit of fighters. Israeli aircraft have also in the past violated Syria's airspace.

'Foreign fighters'

Sunday's alleged raid comes just days after the commander of US forces in western Iraq said American troops were redoubling efforts to secure the Syrian border, which he called an "uncontrolled" gateway for fighters entering Iraq.

US Major-General John Kelly said on Thursday that Iraq's western borders with Saudi Arabia and Jordan were fairly tight as a result of good policing by security forces in those countries but that Syria was a "different story".

"The Syrian side is, I guess, uncontrolled by their side," Kelly said. "We still have a certain level of foreign fighter movement."

Lieutenant-Colonel Chris Hughes, a spokesman for US forces in western Iraq, said the US division that operates on the Iraqi side of the border was not involved in Sunday's incident.

The area targeted lies close to the Iraqi border city of Qaim, which in the past has been a crossing point for fighters, weapons and money used to fuel the armed Sunni opposition against Iraq's government.

U.S. military 'Red Team': Jihadist, Islamist, Needed Terms

U.S. military 'Red Team': Jihadist, Islamist, Needed Terms

    7:07 AM   No comments

In The News (ITN): Islamic World Newswire; Muslim World News: "A U.S. military 'Red Team' charged with challenging conventional thinking says that words like 'jihad' and 'Islamist' are needed in discussing 21st-century terrorism and that federal agencies that avoid the words soft-pedaled the link between religious extremism and violent acts.

'We must reject the notion that Islam and Arabic stand apart as bodies of knowledge that cannot be critiqued or discussed as elements of understanding our enemies in this conflict,' said the internal report, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times.

The report, 'Freedom of Speech in Jihad Analysis: Debunking the Myth of Offensive Words,' was written by unnamed civilian analysts and contractors for the U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for the Middle East and South Asia. It is thought to be the first official document to challenge those in the government who seek to downplay the role of Islam in inspiring some terrorist violence.

Read the Report

    7:14 AM   No comments

US admits higher Afghan raid toll

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/7604137.stm (play video clip)

The video thought to show victims of the attack was apparently recorded on a mobile phone

A US military inquiry has found that an air strike on militants in western Afghanistan on 22 August killed many more civilians than first acknowledged.

US Central Command said 33 civilians, not seven, had died in the village of Azizabad in Herat province.

While voicing regret, it said US forces had followed rules of engagement.

Officials from the UN and the Afghan government say up to 90 people - including 60 children - died in the strike on Azizabad.

Video footage, apparently of the aftermath of the raid, showed some 40 dead bodies lined up under sheets and blankets inside a mosque.

The majority of the dead captured on the video were children, babies and toddlers, some burned so badly they were barely recognisable.

US forces had originally said seven civilians were killed in a "successful" US raid targeting a Taleban commander in Azizabad.

Announcing the findings of US Central Command's inquiry, Lt Gen Martin Dempsey said that US forces had acted on credible intelligence, in self-defence and in line with rules of engagement.

The US forces had called for air support during the operation with Afghan troops, after they were fired upon from a suspected Taleban compound.

Lt Gen Dempsey said that 22 insurgents had also been killed in the attack.

"We are deeply saddened at the loss of innocent life in Azizabad," he added.

"We go to great lengths to avoid civilian casualties in Afghanistan in all our operations, but as we have seen all too often, this ruthless enemy routinely surround themselves with innocents.

Story from BBC NEWS:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/south_asia/7660356.stm

Published: 2008/10/08 22:38:56 GMT

© BBC MMVIII

30 Civilians Died in Afghan Raid, U.S. Inquiry Finds

30 Civilians Died in Afghan Raid, U.S. Inquiry Finds

    7:32 AM   No comments

WASHINGTON — An investigation by the military has concluded that American airstrikes on Aug. 22 in a village in western Afghanistan killed far more civilians than American commanders there have acknowledged, according to two American military officials.

The military investigator’s report found that more than 30 civilians — not 5 to 7 as the military has long insisted — died in the airstrikes against a suspected Taliban compound in Azizabad.

The investigator, Brig. Gen. Michael W. Callan of the Air Force, concluded that many more civilians, including women and children, had been buried in the rubble than the military had asserted, one of the military officials said.

The airstrikes have been the focus of sharp tensions between the Afghan government, which has said that 90 civilians died in the raid, and the American military, under Gen. David D. McKiernan, the top American military commander in Afghanistan, which has repeatedly insisted that only a handful of civilians were killed.

The report was requested by General McKiernan on Sept. 7, more than two weeks after the airstrikes, in response to what he said at the time was “emerging evidence” about the raids. While American commanders in Afghanistan have contended that 30 to 35 militants were killed in the raid, the new report concludes that many among that group were in fact civilians, the military officials said.

Read full article...

America and its Wars on Terror

America and its Wars on Terror

    10:29 AM   No comments

As the US-led "War on Terror" has moved towards an attritional conflict with groups perceived as extremist, Al Jazeera investigates the full implications of this war as it affects the politics and people of the world.

In 2007, America's military spending was higher than at any time since the Second World War but terrorist attacks around the world have increased every year since 2001.

We visit Iraq and Afghanistan, sites of the most prolific terrorist incidents to investigate the human cost of the "War on Terror" as it is played out across ordinary peoples' lives.

With Iraq and Afghanistan enduring as the war's primary focus, we go to Somalia to uncover what some regard as the unofficial third front of the so-called war on terror.

As US-backed Ethiopian forces engage in gun battles with divergent bands of militia intent on resistance, we analyse how this violence and unrest has become a microcosm of the wider war and try to glean what lessons can be learned from the fighting in East Africa.

Al Jazeera's senior political analyst Marwan Bishara is joined by leading analysts as well as the former US commander of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Watch the show online:

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Torture, murder at Iraqi juvenile prison

Torture, murder at Iraqi juvenile prison

    6:30 AM   No comments

'Worse than the adult prisons'
U.S.: Torture, murder at Iraqi juvenile prison
Utahn involved in probe that uncovered abuses by detention guards
By Matthew D. LaPlante The Salt Lake TribuneSalt Lake Tribune
Article Last Updated:07/13/2008 08:12:06 AM MDT
American investigators probing allegations of torture at an Iraqi-run juvenile prison in Baghdad found clear evidence earlier this year that Sunni children had been murdered by their Shiite captors, according to a lead officer on the investigative team. "The security detail came in literally as they were cleaning the blood from the floor - they had just killed two Sunni kids," said Lt. Col. Craig J. Simper, a Judge Advocate General Corps officer from the Utah-based 419th Fighter Wing, who helped arrange the inspection. "The explanation was that these guys were trying to escape, but our investigation concluded that they were actually scheduled for release." As part of an ongoing effort to transfer control of traditional government functions, the U.S. military is seeking to put more prisons and prisoners under regional leadership. But Iraq security experts say that, in some cases, the result of decentralization has been inadequate funding, training and oversight over detention operations in several Iraqi ministries, including the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, which has responsibility for Iraq's juvenile detention facilities. And that can create an environment ripe for abuse. That's what Simper, a Brigham City resident, says the U.S. Department of Justice's Law and Order Task Force found during its unannounced inspection of the Tobchi Juvenile Detention Facility shortly after Easter. The next month, the U.S. halted the transfer of 130 juvenile detainees to the facility. Under the social affairs ministry, juvenile detention centers are supposed to offer academic and vocational training, but Simper described "a prison in the very worst sense . . . it was worse than the adult prisons." "We found lots of evidence of torture, of physical and sexual abuse, just deplorable conditions," he said. "The rats were the size of Chihuahuas and the juveniles were being housed 50 to a cell." Simper said the boys being held in the prison were as young as 6 years old. The two boys who were killed were in their midteens, he said. But speaking on background, a senior official of the task force still in Bagdad gave a different account. The official said that there were "unsubstantiated allegations that two Sunni juveniles were executed on the street outside the facility after they were released" and that the task force "found no records of the incident and no documentary evidence." Further, the official said other allegations of torture and abuse were from Iraqi Army or Police units prior to the placement of the juveniles in the facility. "Over the past six months, there have been significant improvements to the conditions," at the facility, the official said. * * * 'Torture dungeons' U. N. inspectors have reported on problems with overcrowding and hygiene at the west Baghdad detention center in the past, but officials who run the facility have always been given notice of upcoming inspections. And although rumors of abuse and torture abound, there have been few, if any, confirmed cases. Although officially a government facility, the Tobchi center was almost wholly run by members of the Mahdi Army, a militia under the command of influential Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, Simper said. Simper, whose tour of duty ended in May, said the American investigation has been turned over to Iraqi officials, but it is unclear what actions have been taken in response. The task force's conclusions are not the first findings of gross human rights abuses within Iraq's central government. U.S. forces staged several high-profile raids on adult detention centers run by Iraq's Ministry of the Interior in 2005 and 2006, uncovering several "torture dungeons" where, in some cases, prisoners - most often Sunni men accused of insurgent activity - had been mutilated with chains, knives and power drills. There have been fewer public disclosures of such "liberations" of abused detainees in the wake of the Sunni-Shiite civil war, which reached a violent apex in 2007. * * * Overwhelmed system But Kevin Lanigan, a former Army officer who served as an adviser to the Ministry of the Interior in 2006 and 2007 and now directs the U.S. Law and Security Program at the New York City nonprofit Human Rights First, said he cannot say whether that is the result of improvements in the way those working for the ministry - which by law isn't allowed to detain anyone for more than 72 hours - treat their prisoners. "Nobody has good oversight or supervision," Lanigan said, noting that in many cases local militias have taken control of government operations. "There's just not a lot that's transparent about it." Lanigan said Iraq's criminal detainees are supposed to be held in facilities run by Iraq's Ministry of Justice, though in practice the responsibility for prisoners is spread out over several other ministries, including the Shiite-dominated Interior Ministry, which does not get funding, training or oversight for that task. Already, Lanigan said, the prisoners being held by the Iraqi government are straining resources. Transferring tens of thousands of additional detainees, currently under U.S. control, would create "lots of problems," he said. "There are already, at the very least, serious problems of confinement and neglect," Lanigan said. "If you overwhelm a guard force . . . a very predictable outcome is going to be mistreatment of detainees." As of the end of 2007, Tobchi was operating at twice its normal capacity of 200 detainees, according to the U.N. Assistance Mission for Iraq. mlaplante@sltrib.com

Sourse: http://www.sltrib.com/portlet/article/html/fragments/print_article.jsp?articleId=9866059&siteId=297

نص مذكرة اتهام البشير بالإبادة وجرائم حرب بدارفور

نص مذكرة اتهام البشير بالإبادة وجرائم حرب بدارفور

    6:20 AM   No comments

لاهاي، في 14 تموز/ يوليو 2008ICC-OTP-20080714-PR341-ARAالحالة: دارفور، السودان

قام السيد لويس مورينو أوكامبو المدعي العام للمحكمة الجنائية الدولية اليوم بتقديم الأدلة التي تبرهن على أن الرئيس السوداني عمر حسن أحمد البشير قد ارتكب جرائم الإبادة الجماعية، والجرائم ضد الإنسانية، وجرائم الحرب في دارفور.

فبعد مرور ثلاث سنوات على طلب مجلس الأمن بالتحقيق في دارفور، واستنادا إلى الأدلة الدامغة يرى المدعي العام أن هناك مبررات معقولة للاعتقاد بأن عمر حسن أحمد البشير يتحمل المسؤولية الجنائية فيما يخص التهم الموجهة بارتكاب جرائم الإبادة الجماعية، والجرائم ضد الإنسانية، وجرائم الحرب. وتبين الأدلة التي قدمها المدعي العام أن البشير قد دبر ونفذ خطة لتدمير جزء كبير من مجموعات الفور، والمساليت والزغاوة، لأسباب إثنية.

احتج بعض أعضاء هذه المجموعات الثلاث، وهم من ذوي النفوذ في دارفور منذ زمان، على تهميش الولاية، وشرعوا في التمرد. لم يتمكن البشير من هزم الحركات المسلحة. فصار يهاجم الشعب. ويقول المدعي العام إن دوافعه سياسية في معظمها. وهو يتذرع بحجة "مكافحة التمرد". أما نيته فهي "الإبادة الجماعية".

بأمر من البشير، ولأكثر من خمس سنوات، هاجمت مليشيا الجنجويد القرى ودمرتها وتابعت الأشخاص الذين نجوا إلى الصحاري. وأخضع من تمكن من الوصول إلى مخيمات المشردين داخليا للعيش في ظروف مدروسة ليكون مصيره هو التدمير. إن البشير يعرقل تقديم المعونة الدولية. والقوات التابعة له تحيط بالمخيمات.

فقد قال أحد الشهود "عندما نراهم، نفر جريا. فينجو بعضنا، ويقبض على البعض الآخر، فيقاد ويغتصب– يغتصب جماعيا. فقد يغتصب حوالي عشرين رجلا امرأة واحدة وهذا أمر عادي بالنسبة لنا نحن هنا في دارفور. إنه أمر يحدث باستمرار. لقد شهدت أنا أيضا عمليات اغتصاب. ليس مهما من يراهم وهم يغتصبون إحدى النساء. فهم يغتصبون الفتيات بحضور أمهاتهن وآبائهن".

لأزيد من خمس سنوات، شرد الملايين من المدنيين من أراضيهم التي شغلوها لقرون، ودمرت جميع وسائل عيشهم، واغتصبت أراضيهم وسكنها مستوطنون جدد. "في المخيمات، يجبر البشير على قتل الرجال واغتصاب النساء. إنه يريد إلغاء تاريخ شعوب الفور، والمساليت والزغاوة"، يقول المدعي العام، ثم يسترسل قائلا "فأنا لا أحتمل غض الطرف، لدي أدلة".

لأزيد من خمس سنوات، أنكر البشير وقوع هذه الجرائم. فهو يقول لا وجود للاغتصاب في السودان. إن كل هذا مجرد ادعاءات. "إن البشير قد جعل ارتكاب المزيد من الجرائم ممكنا بمنعه الكشف عن الحقيقة بشأن الجرائم، وإخفاء جرائمه تحت قناع "إستراتيجية مكافحة التمرد"، أو "الاصطدامات بين القبائل"، أو "أفعال مليشيات غير قانونية ومستقّلة. لقد شجع مرؤوسيه، ومكنهم من الإفلات من العقاب من أجل ضمان رغبتهم في ارتكاب جرائم الإبادة الجماعية"، يقول المدعي العام.

إن نية البشير في ارتكاب جرائم الإبادة الجماعية أصبحت واضحة إبان الهجمات المنسقة تنسيقا جيدا. "إن البشير قد نظم إفقار الأشخاص الناجين، إنه لم يكن في حاجة إلى الرصاص. فقد استخدم غير ذلك من الأسلحة. لقد استخدم الاغتصاب، والتجويع والخوف. وهي وسائل كلها في نفس الفعالية. لكنها أسلحة صامتة"، يقول المدعي العام.

تبين الأدلة اليوم أن البشير، بدلا من مساعدة أهل دارفور قد عبأ جهاز الدولة بأكمله، بما في ذلك القوات المسلحة، وجهاز الاستخبارات، والدوائر الدبلوماسية والإعلامية، والجهاز القضائي من أجل إجبار الأشخاص الذين يعيشون في مخيمات المشردين داخليا، ومعظمهم من المجموعة المستهدفة، على العيش في ظروف مدروسة لتدميرهم جسديا.

وأضاف السيد لويس مورينو أوكامبو قائلا "إن البشير هو الرئيس. وهو القائد الأعلى. لقد استعمل جهاز الدولة بأكمله. واستخدم الجيش، وجند مليشيا الجنجويد. إن هذه الأجهزة جميعا تحت مسؤوليته، وهي كلها تطيعه. إنه يتمتع بسلطة مطلقة".

ستنظر الدائرة التمهيدية الأولى الآن في الأدلة. وإذا رأى القضاة أن هناك مبررات معقولة تدعو إلى الاعتقاد بأن الشخص المسمى قد ارتكب الجرائم المزعومة، فستقرر ما هي أنجع السبل لامتثاله أمام المحكمة، فقد طلب المدعي العام إصدار أمر بإلقاء القبض.

In Algeria, a Tug of War for Young Minds

    7:50 AM   No comments

June 23, 2008

Generation Faithful

In Algeria, a Tug of War for Young Minds

By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

ALGIERS — First, Abdel Malek Outas’s teachers taught him to write math equations in Arabic, and embrace Islam and the Arab world. Then they told him to write in Latin letters that are no longer branded unpatriotic, and open his mind to the West.

Malek is 19, and he is confused.

“When we were in middle school we studied only in Arabic,” he said. “When we went to high school, they changed the program, and a lot is in French. Sometimes, we don’t even understand what we are writing.”

The confusion has bled off the pages of his math book and deep into his life. One moment, he is rapping; another, he recounts how he flirted with terrorism, agreeing two years ago to go with a recruiter to kill apostates in the name of jihad.

At a time of religious revival across the Muslim world, Algeria’s youth are in play. The focus of this contest is the schools, where for decades Islamists controlled what children learned, and how they learned, officials and education experts here said.

Now the government is urgently trying to re-engineer Algerian identity, changing the curriculum to wrest momentum from the Islamists, provide its youth with more employable skills, and combat the terrorism it fears schools have inadvertently encouraged.

It appears to be the most ambitious attempt in the region to change a school system to make its students less vulnerable to religious extremism.

Read on...

Hezbollah army arises as a potent force under Lebanon's peace deal

Hezbollah army arises as a potent force under Lebanon's peace deal

    5:23 AM   No comments

Christopher Torchia, Associated Press

Sunday, June 1, 2008

(06-01) 04:00 PDT Beirut --

Hezbollah fighters have pulled back since seizing parts of Lebanon's capital, but their brazen display has made one thing clear: A private army blamed for terrorist attacks on Western interests and dedicated to the destruction of Israel will be a fixture in this weakened country for a long time.

Lebanon is an ideal incubator for Hezbollah's military clout, just as Afghanistan served al Qaeda. Lebanon's U.S.-funded military doesn't interfere with the thousands of rockets and missiles that militants are believed to have hidden in basements and bunkers throughout Shiite Muslim areas of the tiny country.

Hezbollah's refusal to discuss disarmament at talks with Lebanese factions in Qatar recently means it has formidable firepower to unleash at will. This could have wider implications, given Hezbollah's summer war with Israel two years ago, though some Lebanese suspect Hezbollah's main objectives include local power grabs and settling ethnic scores.

"Hezbollah's mask has dropped," said Ayman Kharma, a Sunni Muslim cleric whose fourth-floor apartment in the northern city of Tripoli was blasted during fighting this month with a militia allied to Hezbollah. "We were in favor of Hezbollah when it was fighting Israel. Now we see it from the inside."

Kharma was talking about the sectarian tone of the violence, with Shiite militants from Hezbollah targeting Sunnis tied to the government. He spoke in the blackened wreckage of what was his living room, littered with fragments of rocket-propelled grenades.

Hezbollah says its chief goal is to fight Israel, and its combat record - burnished by the 2006 war - has earned it respect throughout the Arab world. The attire of a Shiite fighter in the recent fighting in Lebanon testified to past and present conflicts: an Israeli helmet, green fatigues with a "U.S. Army" stamp, a black T-shirt and an American-made M4 carbine with a telescopic sight.

Witnesses say Hezbollah fighters used automatic rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, but refrained from shelling parts of Beirut with mortar rounds, which would have threatened civilians for minimal military gain.

The witnesses said militants handed out cell phone numbers to shopkeepers, telling them to call if anyone attacked their stores. Hashim Jaber, a former brigadier general in the Lebanese army, described many Hezbollah combatants as "grade C, grade B" operatives who acted like military police officers, supervising unruly fighters from allied militias.

Unlike Sunni al Qaeda, Shiite Hezbollah is a social and political movement inspired by Iran's Islamic revolution. It has stepped back from the spectacular bombings, kidnappings and hijackings in which it was implicated in the 1980s and 1990s, but praises Palestinian suicide bombers and helps the Palestinian group Hamas, which has repeatedly fired rockets into Israel from Gaza.

The United States lists Hezbollah as a terrorist group and denounces suspected aid by Iran and Syria. Washington also says Islamic militants linked to al Qaeda have taken advantage of instability to infiltrate Lebanon, where extremism breeds in Palestinian refugee camps.

Hezbollah says it doesn't have a foreign branch, but it is believed to have operatives and fundraisers as far afield as Latin America, and among other Shiite Muslim communities in Lebanon's diaspora of more than 10 million.

In 2006, Hezbollah fired thousands of rockets at Israel, and intelligence experts believe it now has a longer-range arsenal.

Gen. Amos Yadlin, Israel's chief of military intelligence, says Hezbollah maintains a "massive" presence close to Lebanon's southern border with Israel, including rockets, combat forces and observation points, in violation of a U.N.-brokered cease-fire that ended the 2006 war. U.N. patrols in the area have not reported similar claims, though the United Nations has complained of illicit arms shipments to Hezbollah and Israeli overflights.

"If there is a future flare-up, Hezbollah will try to attack Israel not only from the area south of the Litani (River) but from deep inside Lebanon as well," Yadlin said in an interview with Israel's Haaretz newspaper.

He said Hezbollah has munitions that "now cover large areas of Israel" in contrast to rockets that mostly hit only the north during the war. The comments match claims by Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

Hezbollah has built a private telephone network to shield operatives from eavesdropping and be more resistant to aerial bombing. The government reversed a decision to ban the fiber-optic system after Hezbollah's fighters and allies overran parts of Beirut and other areas earlier this month, killing dozens in scenes reminiscent of Lebanon's 1975-90 civil war.

A purported map of the phone network, released by a government ally, shows links that stretch from Hezbollah's base of Dahiyeh in the southern suburbs of Beirut, through the coastal cities of Sidon and Tyre to areas near the Israeli border and up the entire length of the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon's interior. It follows Lebanon's sectarian divide, connecting virtually all Shiite Muslim areas but not Sunni Muslim and Christian areas.

Jaber, the former military commander, said the network was designed for military rather than commercial use, and should be included in any discussion of Hezbollah's weaponry.

The best Hezbollah fighters are believed to have trained in Iran, others at camps in northeast Lebanon, near Syria.

Shlomo Brom, former head of strategic planning on the Israeli military's general staff, said Israeli intelligence estimated that Hezbollah lost 500 to 600 fighters in the 2006 war.

"The only area where it is not clear whether they were able to reconstruct successfully since the war is the training of new cadres, because they had quite a large number of casualties," he said. "It is not easy to replace them, because those were people who were trained for the past 10 years."

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/01/MNJ810TFTJ.DTL

This article appeared on page A - 11 of the San Francisco Chronicle

وزارة العدل تأخرت في فتح الحوار مع معتقلي السلفية الجهادية المضربين عن الطعام

وزارة العدل تأخرت في فتح الحوار مع معتقلي السلفية الجهادية المضربين عن الطعام

    8:27 AM   No comments

مهتاد لـ"الرأي": وزارة العدل تأخرت في فتح الحوار مع معتقلي السلفية الجهادية المضربين عن الطعام

عبد الرحيم مهتاد رئيس جمعية النصير لمساندة المعتقلين الإسلاميين

14/04/08 GMT 2:32 AM

الرأي – عادل نجدي: نفى عبد الرحيم مهتاد رئيس جمعية النصير لمساندة المعتقلين الإسلاميين، أن يكون لفرار تسعة معتقلين إسلاميين مدانين في قضية تفجيرات الدار البيضاء عام 2003، منذ أسبوع من سجن القنيطرة، تبعات على أوضاع نحو 1000 معتقل إسلامي ينتمون إلى ما يسمى ب"السلفية الجهادية". وقال مهتاد "لا أعتقد أن الإدارة سوف تعاقب المعتقلين بسبب ماقام به هؤلاء، ولاسيما أن الفارين أكدوا في رسالتهم أنهم يتحملون لوحدهم المسؤولية عن فعلهم". وأضاف في حوار مع"الرأي""من المؤكد أن الإدارة سوف ترفع من درجة حرصها ويقظتها، مما سيخلق نوعا من التضييق على المعتقلين وعائلاتهم خلال الزيارة، لكني أعتقد أن الزمن كفيل بأن يبدد هذه الغيوم، لأن المشكلة ليست في المحافظة على الحقوق والمكتسبات داخل السجون، ولكن في العمل على تصفية هذا الملف الذي يتزايد تعقيدا بتزايد أعداد المعتقلين والمحاكمين بقانون الإرهاب". وعن اتهام جمعيته بتبني قضايا الإرهابيين المعتقلين وأسرهم وتوفير الدعم القانوني والإعلامي لهم، قال مهتاد "نحن نشتغل في إطار قانوني وفي جمعية حقوقية معترف بها، وما نقوم به لا يتنافى مع ما اعتمدته المواثيق والأعراف الدولية في مجال حقوق الإنسان، أما تهمة الإرهاب وغيرها من التهم، فإنها لا تنفي عن الإنسان آدميته أو تضعه في درجة أقل من ذلك، فنحن نهتم بالإنسان كإنسان ولا شيء غير ذلك من التوصيفات والتهم". فإلى الحوار مع رئيس جمعية النصير لمساندة المعتقلين الإسلاميين. * بماذا تفسرون في جمعية النصير فرار 9 سجناء إسلاميين من السجن المركزي بالقنيطرة ؟ - أولا تجب الإشارة إلى أن ظاهرة الفرار من السجون ليست مقتصرة على معتقلين من صنف معين، بل هي شاملة وعامة ونجدها في كل بلدان العالم وان اختلفت الوسائل والطرق من أجل تحقيقها وتنفيذها. وفيما يخص المعتقلين الإسلاميين المتواجدين بالسجون المغربية، تكون هذه الحالة هي الأولى من نوعها في صفوفهم، وتمت بالسجن المركزي بالقنيطرة، وشملت تسعة عناصر من المحكومين بأحكام ثقيلة، الشيء الذي أعطاها زخما وقيمة مضافة، وليس لنا من تفسير لها إلا ما جاء في الرسالة التي تركها المعتقلون الفارون أنفسهم، ولكم أن تقرؤوها لتكتشفوا أنهم أقدموا على ذلك بعدما سدت أمامهم أبواب الأمل في إيجاد حل لقضية اعتقالهم، ولكم نص الرسالة كاملا: (لا للظلم ، فهو ظلمات يوم القيامة ، سلكنا كل السبل، وطرقنا كل الأبواب دون جدوى، فلم يبق لنا سوى هذه الوسيلة، نتمنى أن تتفهموا الأمر، فلم نؤد أحدا إلا إذا آذيتمونا، نريد حريتنا فقط، كما نتمنى أن لا تكرروا أخطاءكم السابقة، وسياسة العقاب الجماعي، وتحميل المسؤولية لمن يتحملها فقط، فنحن من يتحملها فقط، ولا دخل لسجين بريء ولا لموظف بسيط، ونعتذر لكم على الإزعاج، هذا هو الحل). أوضاع المعتقلين الإسلاميين بالسجون المغربية ----------------------------- * يرى البعض أن الحديث عن وجود أوضاع مأساوية يعيشها المعتقلون الإسلاميون في السجون يجانب الصواب، فهؤلاء يتمتعون بامتيازات لا يتمتع بها باقي السجناء؟ - هنا وجب الفصل بين مرحلتين، ففي بداية اعتقال هؤلاء أمضوا سنوات داخل السجون لا أجد تفسيرا لها إلا ما كتبوه بأيديهم في كتاب أصدروه سنة 2005 تحت عنوان ( هكذا عذبونا وانتهكوا حقوقنا).هذا الكتاب الذي وصفوا فيه ما تعرضوا له ويتعرضون له من تعذيب وإهانة وتحقير، أما المرحلة الثانية، وهي التي أعقبت إضرابهم العام عن الطعام في شهر مايو 2005 والذي أخرج قضيتهم إلى الوجود بعدما لم يكن يهتم بها إلا القليل، وتلا ذلك سلسلة من مراحل الإفراج عن هؤلاء بمقتضى العفو، وفي مراحل بلغ عدد المستفيدين منه 315 فردا، فيما استفاد العديد منهم من التخفيض من العقوبة من طرف محاكم الاستئناف، وهذه المرحلة اتسمت باعتراف الدولة بحصول تجاوزات في حقهم كما جاء ذلك في حوار ملك البلاد مع جريدة "البايس"الإسبانية، واستطاع المعتقلون حينها من الحصول على بعض الحقوق والمكتسبات. ولكن ما لبتت الأمور أن عرفت تراجعا وتقهقرا بعد اعتقالات نوفمبر 2006، حيث تم اللجوء مرة أخرى إلى سياسة التضييق على المعتقلين الإسلاميين وتوزيعهم على مختلف سجون المملكة، واشتد الحصار عليهم بعد أحداث الدار البيضاء في شهر أبريل 2007. والخلاصة، أن أوضاع المعتقلين الإسلاميين بالسجون المغربية لم تعرف استقرارا حتى يتم الحكم عليها إيجابا أو سلبا. فرضية الالتحاق بالقاعدة ----------------- * بعد مرور أسبوع على هروب المعتقلين دون أن تعثر أجهزة الأمن المغربية على خيط يقود إلى اعتقالهم، هل يمكن القول بأن فرضية التحاقهم بتنظيم "القاعدة في بلاد المغرب الإسلامي" بالجزائر أصبحت راجحة؟ - كيف يمكن لي أن أجزم بذلك؟ خصوصا أن من بين المعتقلين الذين نفذوا عملية الفرار، من كانوا قد تقدموا بطلبات العفو ولم يخطر ببالهم الفرار حتى عندما كانوا ( بسجن عين البرجة) وكانت إمكانية هربهم أسهل؟ تبعات الفرار ------- * في نظركم ما تبعات ما حدث على أوضاع نحو 1000 معتقل إسلامي؟ - لا أعتقد أن الإدارة سوف تعاقب المعتقلين بسبب ما قام به هؤلاء، ولاسيما أن الفارين أكدوا في رسالتهم أنهم يتحملون لوحدهم المسؤولية عن فعلهم، من المؤكد أن الإدارة سوف ترفع من درجة حرصها ويقظتها، مما سيخلق نوعا من التضييق على المعتقلين وعائلاتهم خلال الزيارة، لكني أعتقد أن الزمن كفيل بأن يبدد هذه الغيوم، لأن المشكلة ليست في المحافظة على الحقوق والمكتسبات داخل السجون، ولكن في العمل على تصفية هذا الملف الذي يتزايد تعقيدا بتزايد أعداد المعتقلين والمحاكمين بقانون الإرهاب. خطر إضراب المعتقلين الإسلاميين عن الطعام ---------------------------- * طالبتم وزارة العدل المغربية بالتدخل لوقف الإضراب عن الطعام الذي ينفذه معتقلو السلفية الجهادية في ثلاثة سجون، هل وصل الأمر إلى درجة خطيرة؟ - وهل هناك خطر أكبر من أن يدخل المعتقلون الإسلاميون أسبوعهم الرابع من الإضراب المفتوح عن الطعام؟ أخال أن الإدارة العامة للسجون والوزارة الوصية قد تأخرت في فتح الحوار مع هؤلاء والاستجابة إلى مطالبهم. أما الأوضاع الصحية للمعتقلين، فإننا سجلنا لحد الساعة تدهورا خطيرا لصحة ستة معتقلين نقلوا إلى المستشفى من أجل تلقي العلاج. * تتهمون في لجنة النصير بأنكم تتبنون قضايا الإرهابيين المعتقلين وأسرهم وتوفرون لهم الدعم القانوني والإعلامي؟ - نحن نشتغل في إطار قانوني وفي جمعية حقوقية معترف بها، وما نقوم به لا يتنافى مع ما اعتمدته المواثيق والأعراف الدولية في مجال حقوق الإنسان، أما تهمة الإرهاب وغيرها من التهم، فإنها لا تنفي عن الإنسان آدميته أو تضعه في درجة أقل من ذلك، فنحن نهتم بالإنسان كإنسان ولا شيء غير ذلك من التوصيفات والتهم، ولعلمكم، فإن من هؤلاء المعتقلين من خلف وراءه سبعة أطفال، ولنا أن نتساءل: ماذا سيكون مصير هؤلاء الأطفال غدا أو بعد غد في غياب الرعاية والعناية بهم؟ الشد والجدب مع السلطات المغربية --------------------- * كيف تصفون في الجمعية علاقتكم بالسلطات المغربية؟ - منذ تأسيس جمعية النصير سنة 2004 ونحن في شد وجدب مع السلطات المغربية كما هو حال باقي الجمعيات العاملة في الساحة، يسمح لنا بتنظيم وقفات واحتجاجات ونشاطات أحيانا ونتعرض للمنع مع ما يرافقه من ضرب وركل وسب واعتقال...أحيانا أخرى، ويكفي أننا منعنا صبيحة يوم الاثنين 07 أبريل من تنظيم وقفة بالبيضاء أمام بوابة سجن عكاشة تضامنا مع المعتقلين المضربين عن الطعام رغم أننا تقدمنا إلى السلطات وبشكل قانوني بطلب من أجل ذلك.

Morocco's war on terrorism

Morocco's war on terrorism

    8:22 AM   No comments

جمعية النصير تناشد سلطات المغرب مؤازرة معتقلين إسلاميين

المعتقلون بدؤوا إضرابا عن الطعام منذ نحو شهر (الفرنسية-أرشيف)

طالبت جمعية "النصير" لمساندة المعتقلين الإسلاميين وزارة العدل المغربية بالتدخل لوقف الإضراب عن الطعام الذي ينفذه هؤلاء المعتقلون في ثلاثة سجون بالبلاد.

وقال رئيس الجمعية عبد الرحيم مهتاد في اتصال مع الجزيرة إن أوضاع المضربين تدهورت وإن ثلاثة منهم نُقلوا إلى المستشفى.

وناشد مهتاد المعتقلين المضريبن منذ نحو شهر وقف إضرابهم في انتظار التوصل إلى تسوية مع المصالح المختصة لتحسين ظروف اعتقالهم.

وتتزامن هذه المطالب مع عملية فرار تسعة معتقلين إسلاميين منذ أيام من سجن القنيطرة شمال العاصمة المغربية الرباط، وهم المدانون في قضية تفجيرات الدار البيضاء عام 2003.

كما تزامنت مع بدء السلطات المغربية مؤخرا حملة قالت مصادر حقوقية إنها تهدف إلى التضييق على الإسلاميين وبالأخص جماعة العدل والإحسان وحزب العدالة والتنمية.

Behind Military Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand

Behind Military Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand

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By DAVID BARSTOW

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some network officials, meanwhile, acknowledged only a limited understanding of their analysts’ interactions with the administration. They said that while they were sensitive to potential conflicts of interest, they did not hold their analysts to the same ethical standards as their news employees regarding outside financial interests. The onus is on their analysts to disclose conflicts, they said. And whatever the contributions of military analysts, they also noted the many network journalists who have covered the war for years in all its complexity.

Five years into the Iraq war, most details of the architecture and execution of the Pentagon’s campaign have never been disclosed. But The Times successfully sued the Defense Department to gain access to 8,000 pages of e-mail messages, transcripts and records describing years of private briefings, trips to Iraq and Guantánamo and an extensive Pentagon talking points operation.

These records reveal a symbiotic relationship where the usual dividing lines between government and journalism have been obliterated.

Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as “message force multipliers” or “surrogates” who could be counted on to deliver administration “themes and messages” to millions of Americans “in the form of their own opinions.”

Though many analysts are paid network consultants, making $500 to $1,000 per appearance, in Pentagon meetings they sometimes spoke as if they were operating behind enemy lines, interviews and transcripts show. Some offered the Pentagon tips on how to outmaneuver the networks, or as one analyst put it to Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, “the Chris Matthewses and the Wolf Blitzers of the world.” Some warned of planned stories or sent the Pentagon copies of their correspondence with network news executives. Many — although certainly not all — faithfully echoed talking points intended to counter critics.

“Good work,” Thomas G. McInerney, a retired Air Force general, consultant and Fox News analyst, wrote to the Pentagon after receiving fresh talking points in late 2006. “We will use it.”

Again and again, records show, the administration has enlisted analysts as a rapid reaction force to rebut what it viewed as critical news coverage, some of it by the networks’ own Pentagon correspondents. For example, when news articles revealed that troops in Iraq were dying because of inadequate body armor, a senior Pentagon official wrote to his colleagues: “I think our analysts — properly armed — can push back in that arena.”

The documents released by the Pentagon do not show any quid pro quo between commentary and contracts. But some analysts said they had used the special access as a marketing and networking opportunity or as a window into future business possibilities.

John C. Garrett is a retired Army colonel and unpaid analyst for Fox News TV and radio. He is also a lobbyist at Patton Boggs who helps firms win Pentagon contracts, including in Iraq. In promotional materials, he states that as a military analyst he “is privy to weekly access and briefings with the secretary of defense, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other high level policy makers in the administration.” One client told investors that Mr. Garrett’s special access and decades of experience helped him “to know in advance — and in detail — how best to meet the needs” of the Defense Department and other agencies.

In interviews Mr. Garrett said there was an inevitable overlap between his dual roles. He said he had gotten “information you just otherwise would not get,” from the briefings and three Pentagon-sponsored trips to Iraq. He also acknowledged using this access and information to identify opportunities for clients. “You can’t help but look for that,” he said, adding, “If you know a capability that would fill a niche or need, you try to fill it. “That’s good for everybody.”

At the same time, in e-mail messages to the Pentagon, Mr. Garrett displayed an eagerness to be supportive with his television and radio commentary. “Please let me know if you have any specific points you want covered or that you would prefer to downplay,” he wrote in January 2007, before President Bush went on TV to describe the surge strategy in Iraq.

Conversely, the administration has demonstrated that there is a price for sustained criticism, many analysts said. “You’ll lose all access,” Dr. McCausland said.

With a majority of Americans calling the war a mistake despite all administration attempts to sway public opinion, the Pentagon has focused in the last couple of years on cultivating in particular military analysts frequently seen and heard in conservative news outlets, records and interviews show.

Some of these analysts were on the mission to Cuba on June 24, 2005 — the first of six such Guantánamo trips — which was designed to mobilize analysts against the growing perception of Guantánamo as an international symbol of inhumane treatment. On the flight to Cuba, for much of the day at Guantánamo and on the flight home that night, Pentagon officials briefed the 10 or so analysts on their key messages — how much had been spent improving the facility, the abuse endured by guards, the extensive rights afforded detainees.

The results came quickly. The analysts went on TV and radio, decrying Amnesty International, criticizing calls to close the facility and asserting that all detainees were treated humanely.

“The impressions that you’re getting from the media and from the various pronouncements being made by people who have not been here in my opinion are totally false,” Donald W. Shepperd, a retired Air Force general, reported live on CNN by phone from Guantánamo that same afternoon.

The next morning, Montgomery Meigs, a retired Army general and NBC analyst, appeared on “Today.” “There’s been over $100 million of new construction,” he reported. “The place is very professionally run.”

Within days, transcripts of the analysts’ appearances were circulated to senior White House and Pentagon officials, cited as evidence of progress in the battle for hearts and minds at home.

Charting the Campaign

By early 2002, detailed planning for a possible Iraq invasion was under way, yet an obstacle loomed. Many Americans, polls showed, were uneasy about invading a country with no clear connection to the Sept. 11 attacks. Pentagon and White House officials believed the military analysts could play a crucial role in helping overcome this resistance.

Torie Clarke, the former public relations executive who oversaw the Pentagon’s dealings with the analysts as assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, had come to her job with distinct ideas about achieving what she called “information dominance.” In a spin-saturated news culture, she argued, opinion is swayed most by voices perceived as authoritative and utterly independent.

And so even before Sept. 11, she built a system within the Pentagon to recruit “key influentials” — movers and shakers from all walks who with the proper ministrations might be counted on to generate support for Mr. Rumsfeld’s priorities.

In the months after Sept. 11, as every network rushed to retain its own all-star squad of retired military officers, Ms. Clarke and her staff sensed a new opportunity. To Ms. Clarke’s team, the military analysts were the ultimate “key influential” — authoritative, most of them decorated war heroes, all reaching mass audiences.

The analysts, they noticed, often got more airtime than network reporters, and they were not merely explaining the capabilities of Apache helicopters. They were framing how viewers ought to interpret events. What is more, while the analysts were in the news media, they were not of the news media. They were military men, many of them ideologically in sync with the administration’s neoconservative brain trust, many of them important players in a military industry anticipating large budget increases to pay for an Iraq war.

Even analysts with no defense industry ties, and no fondness for the administration, were reluctant to be critical of military leaders, many of whom were friends. “It is very hard for me to criticize the United States Army,” said William L. Nash, a retired Army general and ABC analyst. “It is my life.”

Other administrations had made sporadic, small-scale attempts to build relationships with the occasional military analyst. But these were trifling compared with what Ms. Clarke’s team had in mind. Don Meyer, an aide to Ms. Clarke, said a strategic decision was made in 2002 to make the analysts the main focus of the public relations push to construct a case for war. Journalists were secondary. “We didn’t want to rely on them to be our primary vehicle to get information out,” Mr. Meyer said.

The Pentagon’s regular press office would be kept separate from the military analysts. The analysts would instead be catered to by a small group of political appointees, with the point person being Brent T. Krueger, another senior aide to Ms. Clarke. The decision recalled other administration tactics that subverted traditional journalism. Federal agencies, for example, have paid columnists to write favorably about the administration. They have distributed to local TV stations hundreds of fake news segments with fawning accounts of administration accomplishments. The Pentagon itself has made covert payments to Iraqi newspapers to publish coalition propaganda.

Rather than complain about the “media filter,” each of these techniques simply converted the filter into an amplifier. This time, Mr. Krueger said, the military analysts would in effect be “writing the op-ed” for the war.

Assembling the Team

From the start, interviews show, the White House took a keen interest in which analysts had been identified by the Pentagon, requesting lists of potential recruits, and suggesting names. Ms. Clarke’s team wrote summaries describing their backgrounds, business affiliations and where they stood on the war.

“Rumsfeld ultimately cleared off on all invitees,” said Mr. Krueger, who left the Pentagon in 2004. (Through a spokesman, Mr. Rumsfeld declined to comment for this article.)

Over time, the Pentagon recruited more than 75 retired officers, although some participated only briefly or sporadically. The largest contingent was affiliated with Fox News, followed by NBC and CNN, the other networks with 24-hour cable outlets. But analysts from CBS and ABC were included, too. Some recruits, though not on any network payroll, were influential in other ways — either because they were sought out by radio hosts, or because they often published op-ed articles or were quoted in magazines, Web sites and newspapers. At least nine of them have written op-ed articles for The Times.

The group was heavily represented by men involved in the business of helping companies win military contracts. Several held senior positions with contractors that gave them direct responsibility for winning new Pentagon business. James Marks, a retired Army general and analyst for CNN from 2004 to 2007, pursued military and intelligence contracts as a senior executive with McNeil Technologies. Still others held board positions with military firms that gave them responsibility for government business. General McInerney, the Fox analyst, for example, sits on the boards of several military contractors, including Nortel Government Solutions, a supplier of communication networks.

Several were defense industry lobbyists, such as Dr. McCausland, who works at Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney, a major lobbying firm where he is director of a national security team that represents several military contractors. “We offer clients access to key decision makers,” Dr. McCausland’s team promised on the firm’s Web site.

Dr. McCausland was not the only analyst making this pledge. Another was Joseph W. Ralston, a retired Air Force general. Soon after signing on with CBS, General Ralston was named vice chairman of the Cohen Group, a consulting firm headed by a former defense secretary, William Cohen, himself now a “world affairs” analyst for CNN. “The Cohen Group knows that getting to ‘yes’ in the aerospace and defense market — whether in the United States or abroad — requires that companies have a thorough, up-to-date understanding of the thinking of government decision makers,” the company tells prospective clients on its Web site.

There were also ideological ties.

Two of NBC’s most prominent analysts, Barry R. McCaffrey and the late Wayne A. Downing, were on the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, an advocacy group created with White House encouragement in 2002 to help make the case for ousting Saddam Hussein. Both men also had their own consulting firms and sat on the boards of major military contractors.

Many also shared with Mr. Bush’s national security team a belief that pessimistic war coverage broke the nation’s will to win in Vietnam, and there was a mutual resolve not to let that happen with this war.

This was a major theme, for example, with Paul E. Vallely, a Fox News analyst from 2001 to 2007. A retired Army general who had specialized in psychological warfare, Mr. Vallely co-authored a paper in 1980 that accused American news organizations of failing to defend the nation from “enemy” propaganda during Vietnam.

“We lost the war — not because we were outfought, but because we were out Psyoped,” he wrote. He urged a radically new approach to psychological operations in future wars — taking aim at not just foreign adversaries but domestic audiences, too. He called his approach “MindWar” — using network TV and radio to “strengthen our national will to victory.”

The Selling of the War

From their earliest sessions with the military analysts, Mr. Rumsfeld and his aides spoke as if they were all part of the same team.

In interviews, participants described a powerfully seductive environment — the uniformed escorts to Mr. Rumsfeld’s private conference room, the best government china laid out, the embossed name cards, the blizzard of PowerPoints, the solicitations of advice and counsel, the appeals to duty and country, the warm thank you notes from the secretary himself.

“Oh, you have no idea,” Mr. Allard said, describing the effect. “You’re back. They listen to you. They listen to what you say on TV.” It was, he said, “psyops on steroids” — a nuanced exercise in influence through flattery and proximity. “It’s not like it’s, ‘We’ll pay you $500 to get our story out,’ ” he said. “It’s more subtle.”

The access came with a condition. Participants were instructed not to quote their briefers directly or otherwise describe their contacts with the Pentagon.

In the fall and winter leading up to the invasion, the Pentagon armed its analysts with talking points portraying Iraq as an urgent threat. The basic case became a familiar mantra: Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons, was developing nuclear weapons, and might one day slip some to Al Qaeda; an invasion would be a relatively quick and inexpensive “war of liberation.”

At the Pentagon, members of Ms. Clarke’s staff marveled at the way the analysts seamlessly incorporated material from talking points and briefings as if it was their own.

“You could see that they were messaging,” Mr. Krueger said. “You could see they were taking verbatim what the secretary was saying or what the technical specialists were saying. And they were saying it over and over and over.” Some days, he added, “We were able to click on every single station and every one of our folks were up there delivering our message. You’d look at them and say, ‘This is working.’ ”

On April 12, 2003, with major combat almost over, Mr. Rumsfeld drafted a memorandum to Ms. Clarke. “Let’s think about having some of the folks who did such a good job as talking heads in after this thing is over,” he wrote.

By summer, though, the first signs of the insurgency had emerged. Reports from journalists based in Baghdad were increasingly suffused with the imagery of mayhem.

The Pentagon did not have to search far for a counterweight.

It was time, an internal Pentagon strategy memorandum urged, to “re-energize surrogates and message-force multipliers,” starting with the military analysts.

The memorandum led to a proposal to take analysts on a tour of Iraq in September 2003, timed to help overcome the sticker shock from Mr. Bush’s request for $87 billion in emergency war financing.

The group included four analysts from Fox News, one each from CNN and ABC, and several research-group luminaries whose opinion articles appear regularly in the nation’s op-ed pages.

The trip invitation promised a look at “the real situation on the ground in Iraq.”

The situation, as described in scores of books, was deteriorating. L. Paul Bremer III, then the American viceroy in Iraq, wrote in his memoir, “My Year in Iraq,” that he had privately warned the White House that the United States had “about half the number of soldiers we needed here.”

“We’re up against a growing and sophisticated threat,” Mr. Bremer recalled telling the president during a private White House dinner.

That dinner took place on Sept. 24, while the analysts were touring Iraq.

Yet these harsh realities were elided, or flatly contradicted, during the official presentations for the analysts, records show. The itinerary, scripted to the minute, featured brief visits to a model school, a few refurbished government buildings, a center for women’s rights, a mass grave and even the gardens of Babylon.

Mostly the analysts attended briefings. These sessions, records show, spooled out an alternative narrative, depicting an Iraq bursting with political and economic energy, its security forces blossoming. On the crucial question of troop levels, the briefings echoed the White House line: No reinforcements were needed. The “growing and sophisticated threat” described by Mr. Bremer was instead depicted as degraded, isolated and on the run.

“We’re winning,” a briefing document proclaimed.

One trip participant, General Nash of ABC, said some briefings were so clearly “artificial” that he joked to another group member that they were on “the George Romney memorial trip to Iraq,” a reference to Mr. Romney’s infamous claim that American officials had “brainwashed” him into supporting the Vietnam War during a tour there in 1965, while he was governor of Michigan.

But if the trip pounded the message of progress, it also represented a business opportunity: direct access to the most senior civilian and military leaders in Iraq and Kuwait, including many with a say in how the president’s $87 billion would be spent. It also was a chance to gather inside information about the most pressing needs confronting the American mission: the acute shortages of “up-armored” Humvees; the billions to be spent building military bases; the urgent need for interpreters; and the ambitious plans to train Iraq’s security forces.

Information and access of this nature had undeniable value for trip participants like William V. Cowan and Carlton A. Sherwood.

Mr. Cowan, a Fox analyst and retired Marine colonel, was the chief executive of a new military firm, the wvc3 Group. Mr. Sherwood was its executive vice president. At the time, the company was seeking contracts worth tens of millions to supply body armor and counterintelligence services in Iraq. In addition, wvc3 Group had a written agreement to use its influence and connections to help tribal leaders in Al Anbar Province win reconstruction contracts from the coalition.

“Those sheiks wanted access to the C.P.A.,” Mr. Cowan recalled in an interview, referring to the Coalition Provisional Authority.

Mr. Cowan said he pleaded their cause during the trip. “I tried to push hard with some of Bremer’s people to engage these people of Al Anbar,” he said.

Back in Washington, Pentagon officials kept a nervous eye on how the trip translated on the airwaves. Uncomfortable facts had bubbled up during the trip. One briefer, for example, mentioned that the Army was resorting to packing inadequately armored Humvees with sandbags and Kevlar blankets. Descriptions of the Iraqi security forces were withering. “They can’t shoot, but then again, they don’t,” one officer told them, according to one participant’s notes.

“I saw immediately in 2003 that things were going south,” General Vallely, one of the Fox analysts on the trip, recalled in an interview with The Times.

The Pentagon, though, need not have worried.

“You can’t believe the progress,” General Vallely told Alan Colmes of Fox News upon his return. He predicted the insurgency would be “down to a few numbers” within months.

“We could not be more excited, more pleased,” Mr. Cowan told Greta Van Susteren of Fox News. There was barely a word about armor shortages or corrupt Iraqi security forces. And on the key strategic question of the moment — whether to send more troops — the analysts were unanimous.

“I am so much against adding more troops,” General Shepperd said on CNN.

Access and Influence

Inside the Pentagon and at the White House, the trip was viewed as a masterpiece in the management of perceptions, not least because it gave fuel to complaints that “mainstream” journalists were ignoring the good news in Iraq.

“We’re hitting a home run on this trip,” a senior Pentagon official wrote in an e-mail message to Richard B. Myers and Peter Pace, then chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Its success only intensified the Pentagon’s campaign. The pace of briefings accelerated. More trips were organized. Eventually the effort involved officials from Washington to Baghdad to Kabul to Guantánamo and back to Tampa, Fla., the headquarters of United States Central Command.

The scale reflected strong support from the top. When officials in Iraq were slow to organize another trip for analysts, a Pentagon official fired off an e-mail message warning that the trips “have the highest levels of visibility” at the White House and urging them to get moving before Lawrence Di Rita, one of Mr. Rumsfeld’s closest aides, “picks up the phone and starts calling the 4-stars.”

Mr. Di Rita, no longer at the Defense Department, said in an interview that a “conscious decision” was made to rely on the military analysts to counteract “the increasingly negative view of the war” coming from journalists in Iraq. The analysts, he said, generally had “a more supportive view” of the administration and the war, and the combination of their TV platforms and military cachet made them ideal for rebutting critical coverage of issues like troop morale, treatment of detainees, inadequate equipment or poorly trained Iraqi security forces. “On those issues, they were more likely to be seen as credible spokesmen,” he said.

For analysts with military industry ties, the attention brought access to a widening circle of influential officials beyond the contacts they had accumulated over the course of their careers.

Charles T. Nash, a Fox military analyst and retired Navy captain, is a consultant who helps small companies break into the military market. Suddenly, he had entree to a host of senior military leaders, many of whom he had never met. It was, he said, like being embedded with the Pentagon leadership. “You start to recognize what’s most important to them,” he said, adding, “There’s nothing like seeing stuff firsthand.”

Some Pentagon officials said they were well aware that some analysts viewed their special access as a business advantage. “Of course we realized that,” Mr. Krueger said. “We weren’t naïve about that.”

They also understood the financial relationship between the networks and their analysts. Many analysts were being paid by the “hit,” the number of times they appeared on TV. The more an analyst could boast of fresh inside information from high-level Pentagon “sources,” the more hits he could expect. The more hits, the greater his potential influence in the military marketplace, where several analysts prominently advertised their network roles.

“They have taken lobbying and the search for contracts to a far higher level,” Mr. Krueger said. “This has been highly honed.”

Mr. Di Rita, though, said it never occurred to him that analysts might use their access to curry favor. Nor, he said, did the Pentagon try to exploit this dynamic. “That’s not something that ever crossed my mind,” he said. In any event, he argued, the analysts and the networks were the ones responsible for any ethical complications. “We assume they know where the lines are,” he said.

The analysts met personally with Mr. Rumsfeld at least 18 times, records show, but that was just the beginning. They had dozens more sessions with the most senior members of his brain trust and access to officials responsible for managing the billions being spent in Iraq. Other groups of “key influentials” had meetings, but not nearly as often as the analysts.

An internal memorandum in 2005 helped explain why. The memorandum, written by a Pentagon official who had accompanied analysts to Iraq, said that based on her observations during the trip, the analysts “are having a greater impact” on network coverage of the military. “They have now become the go-to guys not only on breaking stories, but they influence the views on issues,” she wrote.

Other branches of the administration also began to make use of the analysts. Mr. Gonzales, then the attorney general, met with them soon after news leaked that the government was wiretapping terrorism suspects in the United States without warrants, Pentagon records show. When David H. Petraeus was appointed the commanding general in Iraq in January 2007, one of his early acts was to meet with the analysts.

“We knew we had extraordinary access,” said Timur J. Eads, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and Fox analyst who is vice president of government relations for Blackbird Technologies, a fast-growing military contractor.

Like several other analysts, Mr. Eads said he had at times held his tongue on television for fear that “some four-star could call up and say, ‘Kill that contract.’ ” For example, he believed Pentagon officials misled the analysts about the progress of Iraq’s security forces. “I know a snow job when I see one,” he said. He did not share this on TV.

“Human nature,” he explained, though he noted other instances when he was critical.

Some analysts said that even before the war started, they privately had questions about the justification for the invasion, but were careful not to express them on air.

Mr. Bevelacqua, then a Fox analyst, was among those invited to a briefing in early 2003 about Iraq’s purported stockpiles of illicit weapons. He recalled asking the briefer whether the United States had “smoking gun” proof.

“ ‘We don’t have any hard evidence,’ ” Mr. Bevelacqua recalled the briefer replying. He said he and other analysts were alarmed by this concession. “We are looking at ourselves saying, ‘What are we doing?’ ”

Another analyst, Robert L. Maginnis, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who works in the Pentagon for a military contractor, attended the same briefing and recalled feeling “very disappointed” after being shown satellite photographs purporting to show bunkers associated with a hidden weapons program. Mr. Maginnis said he concluded that the analysts were being “manipulated” to convey a false sense of certainty about the evidence of the weapons. Yet he and Mr. Bevelacqua and the other analysts who attended the briefing did not share any misgivings with the American public.

Mr. Bevelacqua and another Fox analyst, Mr. Cowan, had formed the wvc3 Group, and hoped to win military and national security contracts.

“There’s no way I was going to go down that road and get completely torn apart,” Mr. Bevelacqua said. “You’re talking about fighting a huge machine.”

Some e-mail messages between the Pentagon and the analysts reveal an implicit trade of privileged access for favorable coverage. Robert H. Scales Jr., a retired Army general and analyst for Fox News and National Public Radio whose consulting company advises several military firms on weapons and tactics used in Iraq, wanted the Pentagon to approve high-level briefings for him inside Iraq in 2006.

“Recall the stuff I did after my last visit,” he wrote. “I will do the same this time.”

Pentagon Keeps Tabs

As it happened, the analysts’ news media appearances were being closely monitored. The Pentagon paid a private contractor, Omnitec Solutions, hundreds of thousands of dollars to scour databases for any trace of the analysts, be it a segment on “The O’Reilly Factor” or an interview with The Daily Inter Lake in Montana, circulation 20,000.

Omnitec evaluated their appearances using the same tools as corporate branding experts. One report, assessing the impact of several trips to Iraq in 2005, offered example after example of analysts echoing Pentagon themes on all the networks.

“Commentary from all three Iraq trips was extremely positive over all,” the report concluded.

In interviews, several analysts reacted with dismay when told they were described as reliable “surrogates” in Pentagon documents. And some asserted that their Pentagon sessions were, as David L. Grange, a retired Army general and CNN analyst put it, “just upfront information,” while others pointed out, accurately, that they did not always agree with the administration or each other. “None of us drink the Kool-Aid,” General Scales said.

Likewise, several also denied using their special access for business gain. “Not related at all,” General Shepperd said, pointing out that many in the Pentagon held CNN “in the lowest esteem.”

Still, even the mildest of criticism could draw a challenge. Several analysts told of fielding telephone calls from displeased defense officials only minutes after being on the air.

On Aug. 3, 2005, 14 marines died in Iraq. That day, Mr. Cowan, who said he had grown increasingly uncomfortable with the “twisted version of reality” being pushed on analysts in briefings, called the Pentagon to give “a heads-up” that some of his comments on Fox “may not all be friendly,” Pentagon records show. Mr. Rumsfeld’s senior aides quickly arranged a private briefing for him, yet when he told Bill O’Reilly that the United States was “not on a good glide path right now” in Iraq, the repercussions were swift.

Mr. Cowan said he was “precipitously fired from the analysts group” for this appearance. The Pentagon, he wrote in an e-mail message, “simply didn’t like the fact that I wasn’t carrying their water.” The next day James T. Conway, then director of operations for the Joint Chiefs, presided over another conference call with analysts. He urged them, a transcript shows, not to let the marines’ deaths further erode support for the war.

“The strategic target remains our population,” General Conway said. “We can lose people day in and day out, but they’re never going to beat our military. What they can and will do if they can is strip away our support. And you guys can help us not let that happen.”

“General, I just made that point on the air,” an analyst replied.

“Let’s work it together, guys,” General Conway urged.

The Generals’ Revolt

The full dimensions of this mutual embrace were perhaps never clearer than in April 2006, after several of Mr. Rumsfeld’s former generals — none of them network military analysts — went public with devastating critiques of his wartime performance. Some called for his resignation.

On Friday, April 14, with what came to be called the “Generals’ Revolt” dominating headlines, Mr. Rumsfeld instructed aides to summon military analysts to a meeting with him early the next week, records show. When an aide urged a short delay to “give our big guys on the West Coast a little more time to buy a ticket and get here,” Mr. Rumsfeld’s office insisted that “the boss” wanted the meeting fast “for impact on the current story.”

That same day, Pentagon officials helped two Fox analysts, General McInerney and General Vallely, write an opinion article for The Wall Street Journal defending Mr. Rumsfeld.

“Starting to write it now,” General Vallely wrote to the Pentagon that afternoon. “Any input for the article,” he added a little later, “will be much appreciated.” Mr. Rumsfeld’s office quickly forwarded talking points and statistics to rebut the notion of a spreading revolt.

“Vallely is going to use the numbers,” a Pentagon official reported that afternoon.

The standard secrecy notwithstanding, plans for this session leaked, producing a front-page story in The Times that Sunday. In damage-control mode, Pentagon officials scrambled to present the meeting as routine and directed that communications with analysts be kept “very formal,” records show. “This is very, very sensitive now,” a Pentagon official warned subordinates.

On Tuesday, April 18, some 17 analysts assembled at the Pentagon with Mr. Rumsfeld and General Pace, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

A transcript of that session, never before disclosed, shows a shared determination to marginalize war critics and revive public support for the war.

“I’m an old intel guy,” said one analyst. (The transcript omits speakers’ names.) “And I can sum all of this up, unfortunately, with one word. That is Psyops. Now most people may hear that and they think, ‘Oh my God, they’re trying to brainwash.’ ”

“What are you, some kind of a nut?” Mr. Rumsfeld cut in, drawing laughter. “You don’t believe in the Constitution?”

There was little discussion about the actual criticism pouring forth from Mr. Rumsfeld’s former generals. Analysts argued that opposition to the war was rooted in perceptions fed by the news media, not reality. The administration’s overall war strategy, they counseled, was “brilliant” and “very successful.”

“Frankly,” one participant said, “from a military point of view, the penalty, 2,400 brave Americans whom we lost, 3,000 in an hour and 15 minutes, is relative.”

An analyst said at another point: “This is a wider war. And whether we have democracy in Iraq or not, it doesn’t mean a tinker’s damn if we end up with the result we want, which is a regime over there that’s not a threat to us.”

“Yeah,” Mr. Rumsfeld said, taking notes.

But winning or not, they bluntly warned, the administration was in grave political danger so long as most Americans viewed Iraq as a lost cause. “America hates a loser,” one analyst said.

Much of the session was devoted to ways that Mr. Rumsfeld could reverse the “political tide.” One analyst urged Mr. Rumsfeld to “just crush these people,” and assured him that “most of the gentlemen at the table” would enthusiastically support him if he did.

“You are the leader,” the analyst told Mr. Rumsfeld. “You are our guy.”

At another point, an analyst made a suggestion: “In one of your speeches you ought to say, ‘Everybody stop for a minute and imagine an Iraq ruled by Zarqawi.’ And then you just go down the list and say, ‘All right, we’ve got oil, money, sovereignty, access to the geographic center of gravity of the Middle East, blah, blah, blah.’ If you can just paint a mental picture for Joe America to say, ‘Oh my God, I can’t imagine a world like that.’ ”

Even as they assured Mr. Rumsfeld that they stood ready to help in this public relations offensive, the analysts sought guidance on what they should cite as the next “milestone” that would, as one analyst put it, “keep the American people focused on the idea that we’re moving forward to a positive end.” They placed particular emphasis on the growing confrontation with Iran.

“When you said ‘long war,’ you changed the psyche of the American people to expect this to be a generational event,” an analyst said. “And again, I’m not trying to tell you how to do your job...”

“Get in line,” Mr. Rumsfeld interjected.

The meeting ended and Mr. Rumsfeld, appearing pleased and relaxed, took the entire group into a small study and showed off treasured keepsakes from his life, several analysts recalled.

Soon after, analysts hit the airwaves. The Omnitec monitoring reports, circulated to more than 80 officials, confirmed that analysts repeated many of the Pentagon’s talking points: that Mr. Rumsfeld consulted “frequently and sufficiently” with his generals; that he was not “overly concerned” with the criticisms; that the meeting focused “on more important topics at hand,” including the next milestone in Iraq, the formation of a new government.

Days later, Mr. Rumsfeld wrote a memorandum distilling their collective guidance into bullet points. Two were underlined:

“Focus on the Global War on Terror — not simply Iraq. The wider war — the long war.”

“Link Iraq to Iran. Iran is the concern. If we fail in Iraq or Afghanistan, it will help Iran.”

But if Mr. Rumsfeld found the session instructive, at least one participant, General Nash, the ABC analyst, was repulsed.

“I walked away from that session having total disrespect for my fellow commentators, with perhaps one or two exceptions,” he said.

View From the Networks

Two weeks ago General Petraeus took time out from testifying before Congress about Iraq for a conference call with military analysts.

Mr. Garrett, the Fox analyst and Patton Boggs lobbyist, said he told General Petraeus during the call to “keep up the great work.”

“Hey,” Mr. Garrett said in an interview, “anything we can do to help.”

For the moment, though, because of heavy election coverage and general war fatigue, military analysts are not getting nearly as much TV time, and the networks have trimmed their rosters of analysts. The conference call with General Petraeus, for example, produced little in the way of immediate coverage.

Still, almost weekly the Pentagon continues to conduct briefings with selected military analysts. Many analysts said network officials were only dimly aware of these interactions. The networks, they said, have little grasp of how often they meet with senior officials, or what is discussed.

“I don’t think NBC was even aware we were participating,” said Rick Francona, a longtime military analyst for the network.

Some networks publish biographies on their Web sites that describe their analysts’ military backgrounds and, in some cases, give at least limited information about their business ties. But many analysts also said the networks asked few questions about their outside business interests, the nature of their work or the potential for that work to create conflicts of interest. “None of that ever happened,” said Mr. Allard, an NBC analyst until 2006.

“The worst conflict of interest was no interest.”

Mr. Allard and other analysts said their network handlers also raised no objections when the Defense Department began paying their commercial airfare for Pentagon-sponsored trips to Iraq — a clear ethical violation for most news organizations.

CBS News declined to comment on what it knew about its military analysts’ business affiliations or what steps it took to guard against potential conflicts.

NBC News also declined to discuss its procedures for hiring and monitoring military analysts. The network issued a short statement: “We have clear policies in place to assure that the people who appear on our air have been appropriately vetted and that nothing in their profile would lead to even a perception of a conflict of interest.”

Jeffrey W. Schneider, a spokesman for ABC, said that while the network’s military consultants were not held to the same ethical rules as its full-time journalists, they were expected to keep the network informed about any outside business entanglements. “We make it clear to them we expect them to keep us closely apprised,” he said.

A spokeswoman for Fox News said executives “refused to participate” in this article.

CNN requires its military analysts to disclose in writing all outside sources of income. But like the other networks, it does not provide its military analysts with the kind of written, specific ethical guidelines it gives its full-time employees for avoiding real or apparent conflicts of interest.

Yet even where controls exist, they have sometimes proven porous.

CNN, for example, said it was unaware for nearly three years that one of its main military analysts, General Marks, was deeply involved in the business of seeking government contracts, including contracts related to Iraq.

General Marks was hired by CNN in 2004, about the time he took a management position at McNeil Technologies, where his job was to pursue military and intelligence contracts. As required, General Marks disclosed that he received income from McNeil Technologies. But the disclosure form did not require him to describe what his job entailed, and CNN acknowledges it failed to do additional vetting.

“We did not ask Mr. Marks the follow-up questions we should have,” CNN said in a written statement.

In an interview, General Marks said it was no secret at CNN that his job at McNeil Technologies was about winning contracts. “I mean, that’s what McNeil does,” he said.

CNN, however, said it did not know the nature of McNeil’s military business or what General Marks did for the company. If he was bidding on Pentagon contracts, CNN said, that should have disqualified him from being a military analyst for the network. But in the summer and fall of 2006, even as he was regularly asked to comment on conditions in Iraq, General Marks was working intensively on bidding for a $4.6 billion contract to provide thousands of translators to United States forces in Iraq. In fact, General Marks was made president of the McNeil spin-off that won the huge contract in December 2006.

General Marks said his work on the contract did not affect his commentary on CNN. “I’ve got zero challenge separating myself from a business interest,” he said.

But CNN said it had no idea about his role in the contract until July 2007, when it reviewed his most recent disclosure form, submitted months earlier, and finally made inquiries about his new job.

“We saw the extent of his dealings and determined at that time we should end our relationship with him,” CNN said.