The children are reduced to bones
And skin.  Their tiny bodies
Have heads appearing far too large
And eyes that cry for help.

But there’s no shortage yet of guns
And bullets — or of bombs.

And soon enough, you hear them come –
The jets that scream through skies
And drop the rain that’s so obscene
That voices then fall still.

******
 
The drones that fly like sightless birds,
The tanks that roll through streets,
The men who fire on passers by,
Who buys and pays these?

We!

******
 
The men who shout out, “Allah!”
And the ones who wear the star,
Alike are paid from coffers deep,
Yes, deep enough for war.

For all of this takes money, money,
All of this needs wealth.
And some may bomb with IED’s
While others bomb with Stealth,
But those who have the money, money,
Sit and pull the strings,
As puppets wage the battles fierce,
While entertainer sings.

******
 
And whence came all this money, money,
Whence came all this wealth?
And who has worked to wealth create,
While risking precious health?

Who is it, who buys the stuff?
Who fills the tank with gas?
Who labors every day and yet
Has not enough of cash?

Who gazes at the check and sees
Deductions that are large?
Who tries to pay the rent or bank
And does that wealth enlarge?

Who pays for wars that have no end,
By financing the banks?
Who dies in foreign lands in vain,
From having joined the ranks?

Who votes for those who send to die
The men and women still?
Who does not vote — and so promotes
The ones who wreak what’s ill?

******
 
The children are reduced to bones
And skin.  Their tiny bodies
Have heads appearing far too large
And eyes that cry for help.

But there’s no shortage yet of guns
And bullets — or of bombs.

And soon enough, you hear them come –
The jets that scream through skies
And drop their rain that’s so obscene
That voices then fall still.

The drones that fly like sightless birds,
The tanks that roll through streets,
The men who fire on passers by,
Who buys and pays these?

We!

Babui / Arjun
2012 January 28th, Sat.
Brooklyn

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Forty years ago this month, the country of Bangladesh declared its independence from Pakistan. Then-President Richard Nixon supported Pakistan during the war because he wanted to prove the US would stand by an ally.

Many Americans disagreed with that stance. And when a ship headed for Pakistan with military equipment and ammunition was set to stop at a US port, one group of Americans felt it was necessary to get involved.

“I was ready to risk my life there,” says 78-year-old Richard Taylor. “I just wanted to get in front of that ship.”

In July 1971, Taylor and a group of protesters used canoes and kayaks to try and block the Pakistani freighter Padma from reaching the Port of Baltimore.

The ship was coming from Canada, bound for Pakistan. It was said to be carrying military equipment and ammunition, presumably to aid the government in its war with what was then called East Pakistan.

The US had ordered an arms embargo on new shipments to Pakistan. But newspapers reported that Pakistani freighters like The Padma were still visiting US ports to load military equipment that had been purchased before the embargo.

Taylor’s flotilla of two canoes, three kayaks and a rubber raft left from Baltimore’s Broening Park. The police and Coast Guard tried to stop it. But Taylor says the group was undaunted.

“One of key parts of this was that the US government was sending military aid to the West Pakistani government that was doing the invasion,” says Taylor. “So that made it poignant. People were suffering thousands of miles away, but our government was helping that suffering to happen.”

Timmy Aziz knew that suffering first hand. He grew up in East Pakistan. He was 10 when war broke out. He now teaches environmental design here in Baltimore.

“It’s really impressive how far they would have had to have gone,” says Aziz. “They would have been way in the middle of the water and completely in harm’s way. This massive freighter and these tiny little canoes, which would easily get washed away in the wake of the ship that size.”

Forty years on, Bengalis are expressing a renewed interest in their country’s independence movement. One of them is New Yorker Aris Yousuf. He finds the canoe blockade story so fascinating that he’s making a documentary on it.

“I wanted to see if I could make a film about the history of 1971, Bangladesh’s independence war and what happened in the US and be able to put it together from the people who participated at that time,” says Yousuf.

What happened that time in July 1971 was that the US Coast Guard foiled Richard Taylor and his friends. The Padma made it into the harbor; it was eventually loaded and left. The following month, protesters expanded their actions to include any Pakistani ship trying to dock in the US, regardless of its cargo. And they enticed longshoremen at the Port of Philadelphia to join the boycott.

“The cause had a heart, had a deep heart,” says 64-year-old Elliot Gevis. “And there were tremendous atrocities that were going on.”

Today, Gevis is a pediatrician. But back in 1971, he worked the docks in Philadelphia. He learned about the war in East Pakistan and the canoe protest from flyers, and helped convince other longshoremen not to load ships. The first freighter affected was The Al-Ahmadi. Richard Taylor and other protesters again used canoes and kayaks to try and block the ship. When it ran the blockade, Gevis and other dockworkers refused to unload it.

“Not everybody was supportive of that,” Gevis recalls. “But then again, they did respect unions. And they did respect not crossing picket lines, things of that sort. But at the same time, they had to pay bills and feed families. That was a big consideration.”

When the ship pushed off, no cargo had been loaded or unloaded.

After four more months of intense protests–and picketing in front of the White House– the US government finally ended all arms exports to Pakistan. It marked the end of one of the more unusual protest movements in America’s history.

“We’ve been just humbled by people who are Bengalis saying we couldn’t have done it without this movement here,” says Phyllis Taylor, Richard’s wife.

She, too, was involved in the protests.

“Not us necessarily, but a small group of committed people giving us hope, as Dick said, in the jungles that you could make a change.”

After nine months of fighting, East Pakistanis won the war. Their prize: a country now known as Bangladesh.

By rahnuma ahmed

Today, September 11, 2011, is the tenth anniversary of the attacks on New York city’s Twin Towers, and the Pentagon.

Eleven days after the attack, president Bush, in his address to a joint session of the Congress had said, the attacks were carried out by al Qaeda, a “collection of loosely affiliated terrorist organizations” because they hate our freedoms. Freedom of religion, speech, vote, and assembling and disagreeing with each other. Briefly put, a hatred for the American way of life. They kill not only to end lives “but to disrupt and end a way of life.” “They stand against us because we stand in their way” (September 20, 2001).

But—and I hope this will give grounds for thought to readers and friends, who still cling to the idea that Osama bin Laden was responsible for the attacks, for the deaths of three thousand innocent civilians—the Bush administration had decided by 11am, September 11, 2001 that al-Qaeda was responsible for the attacks. Prior to conducting an indepth police investigation.

That same evening, at 9:30pm, a War Cabinet, with a select number of top intelligence and military advisors, was formed. That very night, at 11:00pm, a mere 12 hours after Bush administrators had declared al Qaeda to be responsible, the `War on Terror’ was officially launched (Michel Chossudovsky, The Truth Behind 9/11, Global Research, September 11, 2008).

Less than 4 weeks later, Afghanistan was bombed and invaded. The occupation, as we know, continues. And US troops, as recent press reports indicate, may stay in Afghanistan until 2024.

But the impression that was then given, that it was a retributive war because of the 9/11 attacks, swiftly and spontaneously mapped out and undertaken, is not true. A large scale war theater is never planned and executed in a number of weeks. “The decision to launch a war and send troops to Afghanistan had been taken well in advance of 9/11.” The attacks had helped galvanise American public opinion, described by CentCom Commander General Tommy Franks, as a “terrorist, massive, casualty-producing event”, to provide support for a war agenda which was already in its final planning stage (Chossudovsky).

Proof that there is truth in what Chossudovsky says, is lent by no other than Wesley Clark, a retired four star general, former commanding general of US European Command, which included all American military activities in 89 countries and territories of Europe, Africa and the Middle East. In a video interview to Democracy Now, given on March 2, 2007, Clark says,
“About ten days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the Joint Staff who used to work for me, and one of the generals called me in. He said, “Sir, you’ve got to come in and talk to me a second.” I said, “Well, you’re too busy.” He said, “No, no.” He says, “We’ve made the decision we’re going to war with Iraq.” This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, “We’re going to war with Iraq? Why?” He said, “I don’t know.” He said, “I guess they don’t know what else to do.” So I said, “Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?” He said, “No, no.” He says, “There’s nothing new that way. They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.” He said, “I guess it’s like we don’t know what to do about terrorists, but we’ve got a good military and we can take down governments.” And he said, “I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail.”

“So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, “Are we still going to war with Iraq?” And he said, “Oh, it’s worse than that.” He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, “I just got this down from upstairs” — meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office — “today.” And he said, “This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran.”

Did Gaddafi know that he would be “taken out”, despite having rendered invaluable service? For, as Human Rights Watch’s recent discovery of hundreds of letters in the Libyan foreign ministry show, the US and UK had extensive ties with the Gaddafi regime on rendition and torture, post-9/11 attacks.

Suspicions about the government’s account have been forcefully expressed by some former top-ranking US government officials. The “conspiracy theory advanced by the administration” cannot be true, says Colonel Ronald D. Ray, deputy assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan administration and a highly-decorated Vietnam veteran. The official story of 9/11 is that of “the dog that doesn’t hunt.” False flag operations have been carried out earlier by the US government to use as a pretext for aggression, says Ray, citing Israel’s attempted sinking of the USS Liberty, which president Lyndon B. Johnson let happen so that Egypt could be blamed, to `kickstart a war.’ “Half a trillion dollars a year and a bunch of guys over in a cave in Afghanistan were able to penetrate that half a trillion dollar network that’s supposed to provide Americans with national security” (Prison Planet.com, July 1, 2006).

Another former top-ranking official to have come out of the closet since is Dr. Steve Pieczenik, who served as deputy assistant secretary of state under Henry Kissinger, Cyrus Vance and James Baker. Dr. Pieczenik, a medical doctor, with doctoral degrees in psychiatry (Harvard), and international relations (MIT), who became `a colonel at the age of 32.’ Pieczenik is an `infowarrior’, i.e., an expert in PsyOps (Special Operations), black ops, also known as covert warfare, which includes psychological warfare. Thirty years ago I understood very clearly that the very essence of relationships between countries, and understanding what our national security is about, has to lie in the psychological political arena. Not in what your mother did, or your father did, but in what kind of image perception propaganda has been created against us, and what we have to create against someone else. I served president Reagan, he understood the importance of perception because he had been an actor and he understood that perception becomes reality. We, I mean the Reagan administration was effectively able to bring down an entire Soviet empire without firing a gun simply by manipulating perception. We forced them into bankruptcy, we manipulated their mind by using their chief of staff, who eventually committed suicide.

The `War on Terror’ is an orchestrated type of war and I think that I didn’t want to believe that for a very long time. “[But] more and more evidence points to the fact that…people who are appointed to the department of defense [Cheney, Rice]…the same whole cast, very tightly controlled and they are managing something that doesn’t make sense to me.” If bin Laden did it, then why would the FBI evacuate the entire family? You wouldn’t go to a criminal scene of investigation and say, “oh, that’s the culprit, let’s get rid of the whole family and not ask anybody any questions.” And look at the fourth plane, which had 75 minutes… “You can’t fly at three or four-hundred feet off the ground… you are telling me that we couldn’t get fighter planes in there [by then, to defend ourselves]? When we had already had two attacks and you are telling me that that was not a military pilot who was trained to crash into the Department of Defense? That’s unbelievable and that was a sleeper.” For those not in the know, a `sleeper’ is an agent who is trained to kill, and is `activated’ many years later. A Manchurian Candidate, asked Alex Jones? Yes. MKUltra mind control? Yes.

“I’m not going [to let] American soldiers die for something that may have been concocted or created. It’s one thing if we are attacked by the Nazis or the Japanese or something. I’m not denying that we were attacked. The question is who did what and how it was orchestrated and if it was orchestrated, then we have a real problem and that will destroy our democracy. That’s why I went public” (Steve Pieczenik: Paradigm Management, interviewed by Alex Jones, Prison Planet.com, April 24, 2002).

One cannot help but appreciate Dr. Pieczenik’s coming out, about his deep concern for America’s democracy, although one may, rightly, be less appreciative of his disregard for that of other nations.

Civilians too, do not believe the government’s conspiratorial account of events. RememberBuilding7, a nonpartisan campaign led by 9/11 family members, has been active in raising public awareness of World Trade Center Building 7 through television and other forms of advertising, aimed at compelling the New York City Council and Manhattan District Attorney to open an investigation into the building’s destruction.

Building 7 was a 47-story skyscraper, part of the World Trade Center complex which collapsed at 5:20pm on September 11, 2001. It was not hit by a plane. It had suffered minimal damage compared to other buildings closer to the Twin Towers, Buildings 3, 4, 5 and 6, which were severely damaged by falling debris, and fires that burned for hours. But none of them collapsed. At the time of its destruction, Building 7 exclusively housed government agencies and financial institutions (IRS, US Secret Service, Securities and Exchange Commission).

It also housed NY city mayor Rudy Guiliani’s Office of Emergency Managment, a special bunker designed precisely for managing an emergency such as 9/11. Guiliani and his team, interestingly enough, had set up office in a different headquarters that day. A coincidence similar to the sudden cancellation of travel plans for the next morning by a group of top Pentagon generals on September 10, 2001, `apparently because of security concerns’ (Newsweek, September 23, 2001).

International Hearings are being held on this 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, in the city of Toronto, Canada, from September 8-11, 2011. Sponsored by the International Center for 9/11 Studies, Ryerson university, its objectives include presenting evidence that the US government’s official investigation is `seriously flawed and has failed to describe and account for the 9/11 events.’ To `single out the most weighty evidence of the inadequacy of the US government’s investigation’, to organise, classify and preserve it, and to make it widely known to national and international institutions, and to the world public. Expert, and eye witnesses, will speak of their research findings and their experiences, which will be listened to by an international panel of distinguished citizens.

Why? The 9/11 attacks, according to the Hearings organisers, have provided a pretext for replacing one global conflict framework, the Cold War framework, with the War on Terror one. Military invasions and occupations have taken place within this new framework, as have violations of international law and human rights. Global military spending has increased.

I look forward to the concluding report of the International Hearings. Surely, it will expose to the world public the global ruling elite’s hatred for other peoples’ freedom, including civil liberties of western citizens? Because we, collectively, stand in their way of occupation, loot, plunder, death and destruction.

Published in New Age, Sunday, September 11, 2011

By Greg Mitchell

The Nation

In the weeks following the atomic attacks on Japan sixty-six years ago this week, and then for decades afterward, the United States engaged in airtight suppression of all film shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the bombings. This included vivid color footage shot by U.S. military crews and black-and-white Japanese newsreel film.

The public did not see any of the newsreel footage for twenty-five years, and the shocking US military film remained hidden for nearly four decades. While the suppression of nuclear truths stretched over decades, Hiroshima sank into “a kind of hole in human history,” as the writer Mary McCarthy observed. The United States engaged in a costly and dangerous arms race. Thousands of nuclear warheads remain in the world, often under loose control; the United States retains its “first-strike” nuclear policy; and much of the world is partly or largely dependent on nuclear power plants, which pose their own hazards.

Our nuclear entrapment continues to this day—you might call it “From Hiroshima to Fukushima.”

The color US military footage would remain hidden until the early 1980s, and has never been fully aired. It rests today at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, in the form of 90,000 feet of raw footage labeled #342 USAF. When that footage finally emerged, I spoke with and corresponded with the man at the center of this drama: Lt. Col. (Ret.) Daniel A. McGovern, who directed the US military film-makers in 1946, managed the Japanese footage, and then kept watch on all of the top-secret material for decades. I also interviewed one of his key assistants, Herbert Sussan, and some of the Japanese survivors they filmed.

“I always had the sense,” Dan McGovern told me, “that people in the Atomic Energy Commission were sorry we had dropped the bomb. The Air Force—it was also sorry. I was told by people in the Pentagon that they didn’t want those [film] images out because they showed effects on man, woman and child…. They didn’t want the general public to know what their weapons had done—at a time they were planning on more bomb tests. We didn’t want the material out because…we were sorry for our sins.”

Sussan, meanwhile, struggled for years to get some of the American footage aired on national TV, taking his request as high as President Truman, Robert F. Kennedy and Edward R. Murrow, to no avail.

The Japanese Newsreel Footage

On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb over the center of Hiroshima, killing at least 70,000 civilians instantly and perhaps 50,000 more in the days and months to follow. Three days later, it exploded another atomic bomb over Nagasaki, slightly off target, killing 40,000 immediately and dooming tens of thousands of others. Within days, Japan had surrendered, and the US readied plans for occupying the defeated country—and documenting the first atomic catastrophe.

But the Japanese also wanted to study it. Within days of the second atomic attack, officials at the Tokyo-based newsreel company Nippon Eigasha discussed shooting film in the two stricken cities. At this point, the American public knew little about conditions in the atomic cities beyond Japanese assertions that a mysterious affliction was attacking many of those who survived the initial blasts (claims that were largely taken to be propaganda). Newspaper photographs of victims were non-existent, or censored. Life magazine would later observe that for years “the world…knew only the physical facts of atomic destruction.”

Tens of thousands of American GIs occupied the two cities. Because of the alleged absence of residual radiation, no one was urged to take precautions.

Then, on October 24, 1945, a Japanese cameraman in Nagasaki was ordered to stop shooting by an American military policeman. His film, and then the rest of the 26,000 feet of Nippon Eisasha footage, was confiscated by the US General Headquarters (GHQ). An order soon arrived banning all further filming. It was at this point that Lt. Daniel McGovern took charge.

Shooting the US Military Footage

In early September, 1945, less than a month after the two bombs fell, Lt. McGovern—who as a member of Hollywood’s famed First Motion Picture Unit shot some of the footage for William Wyler’s “Memphis Belle”—had become one of the first Americans to arrive in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was a director with the US Strategic Bombing Survey, organized by the Army the previous November to study the effects of the air campaign against Germany, and now Japan.

As he made plans to shoot the official American record, McGovern learned about the seizure of the Japanese footage. He felt it would be a waste to not take advantage of the newsreel footage, noting in a letter to his superiors that “the conditions under which it was taken will not be duplicated, until another atomic bomb is released under combat conditions.” McGovern proposed hiring some of the Japanese crew to edit and “caption” the material, so it would have “scientific value.” He took charge of this effort in early January 1946.

At the same time, McGovern was ordered by General Douglas MacArthur on January 1, 1946, to document the results of the US air campaign in more than twenty Japanese cities. His crew would shoot exclusively on color film, Kodachrome and Technicolor, rarely used at the time even in Hollywood. McGovern assembled a crew of eleven, including two civilians. Third in command was a young lieutenant from New York named Herbert Sussan.

The unit left Tokyo in a specially outfitted train, and made it to Nagasaki. “Nothing and no one had prepared me for the devastation I met there,” Sussan later told me. “We were the only people with adequate ability and equipment to make a record of this holocaust…I felt that if we did not capture this horror on film, no one would ever really understand the dimensions of what had happened. At that time people back home had not seen anything but black and white pictures of blasted buildings or a mushroom cloud.”

Along with the rest of McGovern’s crew, Sussan documented the physical effects of the bomb, including the ghostly shadows of vaporized civilians burned into walls; and, most chillingly, dozens of people in hospitals who had survived (at least momentarily) and were asked to display their burns, scars, and other lingering effects for the camera as a warning to the world. At the Red Cross Hospital in Hiroshima, a Japanese physician traced the hideous, bright red scars that covered several of the patients—and then took off his white doctor’s shirt and displayed his own burns and cuts.

After sticking a camera on a rail car and building their own tracks through the ruins, the Americans filmed hair-raising tracking shots that could have been lifted right from a Hollywood movie. Their chief cameramen was a Japanese man, Harry Mimura, who in 1943 had shot Sanshiro Sugata—the first feature film by a then-unknown director named Akira Kurosawa.

The Suppression Begins

While all this was going on, the Japanese newsreel team was completing its work of editing. Several of them took the courageous step of ordering from the lab a duplicate of the footage they had shot before the Americans took over the project—and hiding it in a ceiling at the lab.

The following month, McGovern was abruptly ordered to return to the United States. He hauled the 90,000 feet of color footage to the Pentagon and turned it over to General Orvil Anderson. Locked up and declared top secret, it did not see the light of day for more than thirty years. McGovern would be charged with watching over it. Sussan would become obsessed with finding it and getting it aired.

Fearful that his film might get “buried,” McGovern stayed on at the Pentagon as an aide to Gen. Anderson, who was fascinated by the footage and had no qualms about showing it to the American people. “He was that kind of man, he didn’t give a damn what people thought,” McGovern told me. “He just wanted the story told.”

Once they eyeballed the footage, however, most of the top brass didn’t want it widely shown and the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was also opposed, according to McGovern. It nixed a Warner Brothers feature film project based on the footage that Anderson had negotiated, while paying another studio about $80,000 to help make four training films.

In a March 3, 1947, memo, Francis E. Rundell, a major in the Air Corps, explained that the film would be classified “secret.” This was determined “after study of subject material, especially concerning footage taken at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

The color footage was shipped to the Wright-Patterson base in Ohio. McGovern went along after being told to put an I.D. number on the film “and not let anyone touch it—and that’s the way it stayed,” as he put it. After cataloging it, he placed it in a vault in the top secret area.

Sussan wrote a letter to President Truman, suggesting that a film based on the footage “would vividly and clearly reveal the implications and effects of the weapons that confront us at this serious moment in our history.” A reply from a Truman aide threw cold water on that idea, saying such a film would lack “wide public appeal.” (He also censored the first Hollywood movie, an MGM epic, about the bomb, a wild tale.)

McGovern, meanwhile, continued to “babysit” the film, now at Norton Air Force base in California.

The Japanese Footage Emerges

At the same time, McGovern was looking after the Japanese footage. The Japanese government repeatedly asked the US for the full footage of what was known in that country as “the film of illusion,” to no avail.

Despite rising nuclear fears in the 1960s, before and after the Cuban missile crisis, few in the United States challenged the consensus view that dropping the bomb on two Japanese cities was necessary. The United States maintained its “first-use” nuclear policy: under certain circumstances it would strike first with the bomb and ask questions later. In other words, there was no real taboo against using the bomb. This notion of acceptability had started with Hiroshima. A firm line against using nuclear weapons had been drawn—in the sand. The United States, in fact, had threatened to use nuclear weapons during the Cuban missile crisis and on other occasions.

On September 12, 1967, the Air Force transferred the Japanese footage to the National Archives Audio Visual Branch in Washington, with the film “not to be released without approval of DOD (Department of Defense).”

Then, in the summer of 1968, Erik Barnouw, author of landmark histories of film and broadcasting, discovered a clipping from a Tokyo newspaper sent by a friend. It indicated that the US had finally shipped to Japan a copy of black and white newsreel footage shot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Japanese had negotiated with the State Department for its return. From the Pentagon, Barnouw learned in 1968 that the original nitrate film had been quietly turned over to the National Archives, so he went to take a look.

Attempting to create a subtle, quiet, even poetic, black and white film, he and his associates cut it from 160 to sixteen minutes, with a montage of human effects clustered near the end for impact. “Hiroshima-Nagasaki 1945” proved to be a sketchy but quite moving document of the aftermath of the bombing, captured in grainy but often startling black and white images: shadows of objects or people burned into walls, ruins of schools, miles of razed landscape viewed from the roof of a building.

In the weeks ahead, however, none of the (then) three TV networks expressed interest in airing it. “Only NBC thought it might use the film,” Barnouw later wrote, “if it could find a ‘news hook.’ We dared not speculate what kind of event this might call for.” But then an editorial in the Boston Globe blasted the networks, saying that everyone in the country should see this film: This at last pushed public television into the void. What was then called National Educational Television (NET) agreed to show the documentary on August 3, 1970, to coincide with the twenty-fifth anniversary of the dropping of the bomb.

The American Footage Comes Out

About a decade later, by pure chance, Herb Sussan would spark the emergence of the American footage, ending its decades in the dark.

In the mid-1970s, Japanese antinuclear activists, led by Tsutomu Iwakura, discovered that few pictures of the aftermath of the atomic bombings existed in their country. Many had been seized by the US military after the war, they learned, and taken out of Japan. The Japanese had as little visual exposure to the true effects of the bomb as most Americans. Activists managed to track down hundreds of pictures in archives and private collections and published them in a popular book. In 1979 they mounted an exhibit at the United Nations in New York.

There, by chance, Iwakura met Sussan, who told him about the US military footage.

Iwakura found that the color footage, recently declassified, might be at the National Archives. A trip to Washington, DC, verified this. He found eighty reels of film. About one-fifth of the footage covered the atomic cities. According to a shot list, reel #11010 included, for example: “School, deaf and dumb, blast effect, damaged Commercial school demolished School, engineering, demolished.School, Shirayama elementary, demolished, blast effect Tenements, demolished.”

The film had been quietly declassified a few years earlier, but no one in the outside world knew it. An archivist there told me later, “If no one knows about the film to ask for it, it’s as closed as when it was classified.”

Eventually 200,000 Japanese citizens contributed half a million dollars and Iwakura was able to buy the film. He then traveled around Japan filming survivors who had posed for Sussan and McGovern in 1946. Iwakura quickly completed a documentary called Prophecy and in late spring 1982 arranged for a New York premiere.

Later a small part of the McGovern/Sussan footage turned up for the first time in an American film, one of the sensations of the New York Film Festival, called Dark Circle. Its co-director, Chris Beaver, told me, “No wonder the government didn’t want us to see it. I think they didn’t want Americans to see themselves in that picture. It’s one thing to know about that and another thing to see it.”

Despite this exposure, not a single story had yet appeared in an American newspaper about the shooting of the footage, its suppression or release. And Sussan was now ill with a form of lymphoma doctors had found in soldiers exposed to radiation in atomic tests during the 1950s—or in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Still, the question of precisely why the footage remained secret for so long lingered. But McGovern told me, “The main reason it was classified was because of the horror, the devastation. The medical effects were pretty gory. The attitude was: do not show any medical effects. Don’t make people sick.”

But who was behind this? “I always had the sense,” McGovern answered, “that people in the AEC were sorry they had dropped the bomb. The Air Force—it was also sorry. I was told by people in the Pentagon that they didn’t want those images out because they showed effects on man, woman and child. But the AEC, they were the ones that stopped it from coming out. They had power of God over everybody. If it had anything to do with nukes, they had to see it. They were the ones who destroyed a lot of film and pictures of the first US nuclear tests after the war.”

As Dark Circle director Chris Beaver had said, “With the government trying to sell the public on a new civil defense program and Reagan arguing that a nuclear war is survivable, this footage could be awfully bad publicity.”

Today

In the summer of 1984, I made my own pilgrimage to the atomic cities, to walk in the footsteps of Dan McGovern and Herb Sussan, and meet some of the people they filmed in 1946. (The month-long grant was arranged by the current mayor of Hiroshima, Tadatoshi Akiba. My new book and e-book has a lengthy chapter describing what it’s like to be in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and to interview survivors.) By then, the McGovern/ Sussan footage had turned up in several new documentaries. On September 2, 1985, however, Herb Sussan passed away. His final request to his children: Would they scatter his ashes at ground zero in Hiroshima?

In the mid-1990s, researching Hiroshima in America, a book I would write with Robert Jay Lifton, I discovered the deeper context for suppression of the US Army film: it was part of a broad effort to suppress a wide range of material related to the atomic bombings, including photographs, newspaper reports on radiation effects, information about the decision to drop the bomb, even a Hollywood movie.

Then, in 2003, as chief adviser to a documentary film, Original Child Bomb, I urged director Carey Schonegevel to draw on the atomic footage as much as possible. Original Child Bomb went on to debut at the 2004 Tribeca Film Festival, win the top Silverdocs award, and debut on the Sundance cable channel. After sixty years at least a small portion of that footage reached part of the American public in the unflinching and powerful form its creators intended. Now i’ve written the first book and e-book about all of this, one of the last little told stories of World War II.

Americans who saw were finally able to fully judge for themselves what McGovern and Sussan were trying to accomplish in shooting the film, why the authorities felt they had to suppress it, and what impact their footage, if widely aired, might have had on the nuclear arms race—and the nuclear proliferation that plagues, and endangers, us today. But only small parts of the movie have been used (see the video below), only a small number of Americans have seen any of it. A major documentary on the footage, and the suppression, should still be made.

More on the new book Atomic Cover-Up can be found here.  Also available as an e-book. Greg Mitchell’s e-mail is: epic1934@aol.com

An inspiring soliloquy by Chris Hedges to those preparing for arrest in front of the White House protesting the continuous wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, intercut with interviews with Daniel Ellsberg and returning war veterans

Europe’s Open-face Democracy

By Rahnuma Ahmed

France bans full-face veils in public. Women wearing the niqab cannot enter government buildings, public transport, streets and markets. Burkas are not “welcome” on French soil, says Sarkozy. It is a sign of women’s “subservience,” it undermines France’s secular tradition. The Spanish parliament is debating a proposal. Burkas are hardly compatible with “human dignity,” says the justice minister. Barcelona bans burkas and niqabs from government buildings. They hinder personal identification. Full-face veil banned in Belgium. Streets, gardens, all buildings accessed by members of the public are no-go areas for women wearing the niqab.

It’s now or never, everything on hold till I finish my manuscript, no columns, no calls, no visitors, I thought as I furiously tapped away at the keyboard, barely scanned newspaper headlines, refused to download e-zines and newsletters, felt embarassed at repeatedly telling Zaman (deputy editor, New Age) as he nabbed me on g-chat, rahnuma’pa, how much longer? hmm, maybe a few more weeks?…but still, somehow, news of the burka ban gathering momentum in European countries seeped through, into my self-enforced confinement.

Less than a week after Belgium passed its law, an Italian woman was fined $650 for wearing a burka under a 1975 law, which prohibits people from covering their faces in public. Amsterdam and Utrecht propose cutting social security benefits to unemployed women who wear the burka. A German lawmaker calls for a complete ban on full-face burkas all over Europe. Veiled women irritate her, she says; she cannot judge them for who they are, what their intentions are. It’s a “massive attack on the rights of women. It is a mobile prison.” Eight out of 16 federal states in Germany have already banned female schoolteachers from wearing the headscarf. If the burka is not banned, threatens the Freedom Party of Netherlands, it’ll not join the minority coalition government. The burqa and the niqab have no place in our society, says the Danish prime minister. Denmark is an “open, democratic society where we look at the person to whom we are talking.”

There is talk of banning the burqa beyond Europe’s borders too, in what were once white-settler colonies, and now, sovereign states. Quebec’s immigration minister says, “If you want to integrate into Quebec society, here are our values. We want to see your face,” as its premier pushes a bill banning any sort of full-face veil. If passed, women will be denied receiving or applying for government services, including non-emergency medicine and day care. An Australian blogger, appreciative of senator Cory Bernardi’s recent call for an Aussie ban on full-face veiling writes, if the burqa and niqab are accepted, if they are normalised and legitimised, what do we teach Australian girls? That they shouldn’t be proud to show their face and have a voice in society? “That women’s rights are [not] inalienable and worth fighting for, except where gender oppression is religiously or culturally endorsed?”

The mind works in curious ways. For some reason I am reminded of Laura Bush and Cherie Blair. Of Mrs Bush’s unprecedented radio broadcast to rally support against the Taliban; she was the first wife of a US president to deliver the whole of the weekly address (November 1, 2001), expressing profound sorrow and deepest sympathies for the women of Afghanistan. “Life under the Taliban is so hard and repressive, even small displays of joy are outlawed—children aren’t allowed to fly kites; their mothers face beatings for laughing out loud. Women cannot work outside the home, or even leave their homes by themselves.” Two days later, the wife of the former British prime minister joined in the commiseration. The Taliban regime, Mrs Blair informed us, is repressive, cruel and joyless. The human rights of women and girls within Afghanistan “have been denied, people have been executed in football stadiums in front of cheering crowds, girls have had to be educated in secret.” Britain needs to “help them free that spirit and give them their voice back, so they can create the better Afghanistan we all want to see.”

Twenty-two months after the US-led invasion there were no signs of an Afghanistan that was less hard and less repressive for its women and children. Linda S Heard wrote, millions of Afghan women and children continue to face major health and nutrition problems with maternal and infant mortality among “the worst in the world.” Gunmen commit human rights abuses and warlords have been “propelled into power by the US and its coalition partners after the Taliban fell in 2001.”

But surely a decade on, the spirits of Afghan women are now free? Girls are now receiving education? A better Afghanistan is being created? Malalai Joya, the youngest Afghan to be elected member of parliament (2005-2007) says, the current situation is a disaster. People suffer from extreme insecurity, many have stopped sending their children to school, especially girls for fear that they might be raped or killed. The most pressing problems are cultivation and trafficking of drugs and narcotics (the opium industry is “solely designed by the US,” its annual production during the Taliban regime was 185 metric tons, it has now magnified to 8,500 tons annually), 50% unemployment and severe poverty which forces some parents to sell their children for $10 for a piece of bread, appalling corruption (the present Afghan government is “the most corrupt in our whole history”), and the installation of war criminals and terrorists into power through fraudulent elections (a “dirty game” played by the US and NATO). Needless to add, Joya is hardly sighted in the mainstream western media.

In some cities women’s conditions have slightly improved since the Taliban regime. But the situation was far better in the 1960s, says Joya, when Afghan women had more rights. Rapes, abductions, murders, violence, and forced marriages are increasing at an alarming rate. Women’s suicide rate is climbing in many provinces. “Afghanistan still faces a women’s rights catastrophe. Every aspect of life in Afghanistan today is tragic.” We are sandwiched between two enemies, the Taliban on one side and the US/NATO forces and their warlord friends on the other. The policy of the US government and its allies is to foster warlords and criminals, to marginalise and put pressure on progressive and democratic movements and individuals “out of fear that the latter will mobilise Afghan people against the occupation forces.”

And who were among America’s coalition partners in Operation Enduring Freedom, in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) which invaded and occupied Afghanistan in 2001? Among NATO countries, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands and Spain. Among non-NATO ones, Australia and Sweden.

They are still there (NATO update Oct 2010).

Do the rulers of these European nations—visionaries of open-faced democracy—have the courage to face up to the facts, as enumerated by Malalai Joya? Hardly. They’d have to face up to other facts then: that the invasion was an obvious breach of international law, having not been authorised by the UN Security Council. That Afghanistan was not involved in the events of 9/11. That if the US government’s account is to be believed, 15 of the 19 alleged hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, so why invade Afghanistan? That the Afghan government did not refuse to extradite Osama bin Laden, their offer was subject to conditions, which was unacceptable to the US administration. That the latter had not only supported the “Islamic terror network,” it was instrumental in installing the Taliban government (1995-96). That the politicians who arranged it, supported it, are liable to be tried as war criminals. And that, is quite a lot of facing up to do.

President Obama has escalated the war in Afghanistan by sending 34,000 more troops; he has extended it to Pakistan by expanding the CIA-led killer drone campaign, because al-Qaeda—who had, according to Bush, committed “faceless” and “cowardly” acts—now operates in the border areas. But drone pilots do not `show’ their face. They are `hidden’ tens of thousands of miles away from the so-called battlefield, `concealed’ behind computer screens and remote audio-feed. There are no means of `identifying’ them personally.

But we too, would like to see their faces. We would like to see the face that’s doing the killing. Occupying forces are not `welcome’ either. Not on Afghan soil, nor on Iraq’s soil. For they bring with them a `massive attack’ on the rights of women, they make women and children prisoners in their own land. Their veil of rhetoric hides their `intentions.’

But may be `concealment’ is essential so that they can’t prosecuted for murder under the domestic law of the country in which they conduct targeted killings? May be they need to `hide’ their faces to avoid being prosecuted for violations of applicable US law? According to a news report, The Year of the Drone Strike, 2009, netted 5 actual militant leaders, killed 700 innocent civilians. What do these faceless killers teach us, the global public? That no face-saving gestures of European rulers can conceal their complicity in war crimes in Afghanistan (and Iraq)?

Ernest Hemingway had said, We must take away their planes, their automatic weapons, their tanks, their artillery and teach them dignity (For Whom the Bell Tolls). Dignity? Do those who are `subservient’ to America’s military and economic interests, have any?

concluding instalment next week..

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At a time when Bangladesh is being asked (against the wishes of its citizens) to send troops to Afghanistan, an interesting article on the complex forces that are at play in the region.

related article: Sitting on a man’s back

By MATTHIEU AIKINS
Published1 October 2010
CARAVAN

Matthieu Aikins is a journalist whose feature writing and photography have appeared in such US, Canadian, British and Indian publications as Harper’s Magazine, the Globe & Mail, the National Post, the Coast, the Toronto Sun, The Caravan, Progress Magazine, the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, the Kingston Whig-Standard, Bad Idea Magazine, SAIL Magazine, and on CBC’s ‘The National’ and Global TV’s ‘National News’.

THEY WERE BOTH YOUNG. One had just the first wisps of hair on his cheeks, like an adolescent. The other was not much older, his short-trimmed beard caked with dried blood. There were gaping exit wounds in his shoulder, and in the pale skin of his belly, where his undershirt had been pulled up to reveal the damage. The two boys were lying dead amongst scattered bricks, at the feet of a crowd of gaping onlookers and journalists, in an abandoned construction site in Kabul.

“Where do you think they’re from?” a reporter asked the policeman who was taking a picture of the bodies with his cell phone, his assault rifle dangling from his other hand. The glaze of adrenaline still shone on the cop’s cheeks and eyes. “Pakistan,” he said. “Definitely not Afghans.” They always say that here, as if you could tell. They looked like Pashtuns, at least.

It was just one of several attacks in Kabul this summer, unremarkable in its execution and impact, but as a result, a series of extraordinary events had been triggered that would serve as a bellwether of India’s waning influence in Afghanistan. It was 29 May, the first day of the National Consultative Peace Jirga, and the two militants had managed to set up in the empty site and fire rockets at the Polytechnic University, the site of the peace jirga—a carefully stage-managed event that had brought handpicked tribal elders and civil society figures to endorse President Hamid Karzai’s plan to reconcile with the Taliban.

Karzai was furious that the jirga had been disrupted, in the middle of his inaugural speech, no less. One of the rockets had severed the leg of one of his personal bodyguards, and the two attackers had held out for several hours in a gun battle with police before finally being shot to death.

The following week, Karzai called a meeting with Hanif Atmar, the Minister of the Interior, and Amrullah Saleh, the chief of the National Directorate of Security (NDS)— the Afghan intelligence service—where he accused them of deliberately failing to provide adequate security in order to undermine the jirga. In a heated exchange, both offered their resignations. It wasn’t the first time that either of them had offered their resignations in response to an angry outburst by Karzai, but this time the president accepted.

Of course, there was more to the forced resignations than just the incident at the peace jirga. Both Atmar and Saleh were favourites of Afghanistan’s Western donor countries, particularly the United States. They had been responsible for Western-backed reforms in Afghanistan’s internal security agencies. They were also officials who had been seen as very friendly to India, in particular Saleh, who had shown a marked and public hostility towards Pakistan, and was a strong opponent of reconciliation with the Taliban.

“It’s clear from what’s been said around the palace that the president had issues with Atmar and Saleh and suspicions that they were too loyal to the foreigners,” said Kate Clark, a political analyst in Kabul. “He’s tried to get rid of Atmar before and the foreigners said no.”

The incident showed how much India’s fortunes have been bound to the US-led nation-building project in Afghanistan, and how much the downward spiral of that project has diminished India’s position here. Saleh’s ouster was particularly damaging to India, as it has hampered co-operation between the NDS and India’s external intelligence service, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), and was seen as a significant milestone in the rehabilitation of Karzai’s once-tense relationship with Pakistan.

“By and large, India for a long time has put all its eggs in one basket and that is American presence,” said Harsh Pant, a professor and expert on Indian foreign policy and security issues at King’s College London. “America will sort everything out and will not leave Afghanistan until it’s achieved its objective. Suddenly, that has come crashing down because of the West’s desire to leave.”

Today, almost nine years after a US-led invasion deposed the Taliban regime, large swaths of the south and southeast have fallen under Taliban control, while Kandahar city, the linchpin of the south, has become a battleground of targeted killings, air strikes and improvised explosive devices. Even once-safe areas in the north and west have become dangerous. The rising insecurity is not simply a function of the insurgency, but a revival of centrifugal forces that have plagued the Afghan state for centuries, with local warlords and criminal gangs increasingly emboldened to defy a corrupt and ineffectual central government.

The final elements of the US military surge arrived at the end of this summer without any significant gains. The Taliban in Baghlan Province is now threatening the main highway north from Kabul to Mazar-e Sharif, as well as the road south to Kandahar, and the result is an atmosphere of pessimism and mounting panic that has reached even into the relatively secure bubble of the capital. In September, when the top officials of the country’s largest private bank, Kabul Bank, were removed over revelations they had made hundreds of millions of dollars in bad loans to politically connected businessmen, thousands of Afghans mobbed bank branches around the country, desperately seeking to withdraw their deposits. The incident added to the ‘end of days’ sensation in Kabul and cast a pall over Eid-ul-Fitr.

In several months of conversations over the course of this summer—many of them off-the-record—in Kabul and Delhi with current and former Indian bureaucrats with the Ministry of External Affairs and with India’s intelligence services, as well as with Afghan, Pakistani and Western officials and observers, the consensus was that India’s policy in Afghanistan is facing the seemingly impossible task of managing the collapse of the nation-building project in Afghanistan and containing Pakistan’s rising influence. Despite a massive commitment of 1.3 billion dollars in Indian aid, the Karzai administration and Pakistan have drawn closer, both as a result of the failure of US-led efforts to contain the insurgency, and the rising momentum for negotiations with the Taliban. There was confusion, however, over India’s basic interests in Afghanistan and what sort of plausible situations might be imagined. One thing was clear though: the growing fragmentation of Afghanistan could conceivably herald a return to the chaos of the civil war in the 1990s.

IF YOU VISIT THE BORDER CROSSING at Spin Boldak, between Kandahar city and Quetta in Pakistan, you’ll find a sort of semi-organised mayhem. Here, hundreds of local Pashtuns pass back and forth without documentation each day. This is, in fact, one of the best controlled places along the Durand Line, demarcated by the British Empire and the Emir of Afghanistan,
Abdur Rahman Khan in 1893, which extends through the Pashtun heartland—rugged tribal country where clans overlap the border, on up through to the Khyber Pass and then into the western reaches of the Himalayas.

Like they were in the time of the British Empire, the lands skirting the Durand Line are barely controlled or controllable, and are rife with smuggling and militancy. They have been a continual source of contention between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Relations between the two countries worsened when Daoud Khan, who in 1973 deposed his cousin King Zahir Shah to become the first president of Afghanistan, revived the Pashtunistan issue. Pakistan began to support traditional Islamic rebels who were resisting Daoud’s attempts at state modernisation, while in turn, Daoud hosted thousands of displaced Baloch and Pashtun fighters.

The Soviet Union first supported the Afghan communist groups that led a coup in Afghanistan in 1978, and then, 20 months later, invaded in order to prop them up. India, though initially uneasy about the wisdom of the invasion, gave its support. “We were taken by surprise, they hadn’t told us they were going to invade,” said Vikram Sood, a former head of RAW who retired in March 2003. “Both of the superpowers have made a mess for our policies.”

Although a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement, India had then moved into closer co-operation with the Soviet Union, signing the Indo-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation in 1971 and receiving significant Soviet military aid. Pakistan, for its part, had fallen into the US sphere of influence, signing a security agreement in 1959 and, in time, becoming the conduit for billions of dollars in US aid to the mujahideen.

With the war in Afghanistan fuelled by the two competing superpowers, the border also became another front in the conflict between India and Pakistan, which after flaring into full-scale wars in 1965 and 1971, was then being carried out in several parts of South Asia. As RAW already had a close relationship with the KGB, this extended to cooperation with Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, KhAD, the predecessor to NDS. They had a common enemy in Pakistan.

“It was a close relationship,” said Sood of the three intelligence services, KGB, RAW and KhAD. “It was a closeness that flowed from the political closeness of our governments.”

The KGB and KhAD carried out assassinations and sabotage in Pakistan, and RAW found its cooperation with them useful; in particular for intelligence on Sikh groups training in militant camps, according to the memoirs of Bahukutumbi Raman, a former RAW officer.

When, after ten years of a fruitless counterinsurgency campaign, the Soviet Union withdrew its troops from Afghanistan, a brutal civil war broke out between mujahideen factions. It was the sudden rise of the Taliban, a group of strict Islamic fighters who brought order to the south of Afghanistan, as the country’s pre-eminent military force that coalesced the conflict into sharp geographic, ethnic, and regional battle lines. The Taliban had indigenous beginnings that stretched back through the anti-Soviet jihad, but once they began to gather momentum, Pakistan threw its support behind them, supplying them with weapons, logistics, and battlefield guidance.

“There was a feeling in Delhi at the time that all was lost,” said Sood. “We were the guys who said ‘no, it’s not over, something can be done.’”

To counter the Taliban, Russia, Iran, and India gave weapons, money and supplies to the United Front, commonly known as the Northern Alliance, which included in a loose confederation Abdul Rashid Dostum and his Uzbek militia in the northwest, Ismail Khan in the west in Herat, and Karim Khalili in the Hazara-dominated central highlands, along with the forces of Ahmad Shah Massoud, whose Shura-e Nezar, or ‘Supervisory Council,’ drew on a core of loyalists from the Panjshir Valley, a Tajik-inhabited valley north of Kabul that successfully held out against both the Soviets and Taliban. Massoud, a charismatic leader, soon became the most prominent figure in the Northern Alliance.

“He was a man who could have easily disappeared with a lot of money but he stayed and fought until the end,” said Lieutenant General Ravi Sawhney, who was the director general of Indian military intelligence throughout the 1990s until his retirement in October 2001. He would meet Massoud in Iran and Tajikistan, where India has a small airbase and field hospital at Farkhor, through which they brought in supplies. “There was no contiguity of the borders, we couldn’t do much besides financial aid.”

Dostum and Ismail Khan were eventually forced to flee Afghanistan, while Massoud’s forces were pushed by the Taliban into a tiny northern corner of the country. A Taliban victory seemed near, but the attacks of 11 September and the US military intervention abruptly altered the course of Afghanistan’s history. Though Massoud had been killed by al-Qaeda in a suicide attack two days before those at the World Trade Center (he died in Farkhor’s field hospital), his deputies swept into power on the back of the US-led bombing campaign that led to the rapid collapse of the Taliban regime.

Pervez Musharraf, then Pakistan’s military dictator, had offered his support to the Americans, but according to recently declassified diplomatic correspondence, he repeatedly expressed his concerns that the Northern Alliance would take over Kabul. His fears were realised when, despite US pressure, forces led by the Shura-e Nazar entered Kabul in strength and occupied the ministries.

The northerners consolidated their strong position on the ground at the 2001 Bonn Conference, which charted a roadmap for Afghanistan’s political future. The most important ministerial positions in the interim government were entirely occupied by Shura-e Nazar figures, who simply took on the roles they had had under Massoud’s administration: Marshal Fahim as Defence Minister, Yunus Qanuni as Interior Minister, Abdullah Abdullah as Foreign Minister, and as head of the newly-formed NDS, Muhammed Arif Sarwari, who had been the CIA’s primary liaison under Massoud. With the exception of Qanuni, who became the Minister of Education and the Special Advisor on Security to Karzai, all of these figures kept their positions through the Transitional Authority that oversaw the Constitutional Loya Jirga in 2003, up to the first presidential elections in 2004.

For the first time in Afghanistan’s history, you had an interior minister, defence minister, a foreign minister, and a chief of intelligence who were all from the Panjshir Valley. These were men who had been, a month before, fighting desperately against a Pakistani-supported Taliban while taking military and financial aid from India. Now they were the masters of Kabul, far more powerful than Karzai, who had just arrived from exile in Pakistan and had no military base of his own.

These were good times for Indo-Afghan relations, and India reciprocated with substantial support, committing 1.3 billion dollars in development projects such as roads, dams, the Indira Gandhi Children’s Hospital, a power line between Kabul and Uzbekistan and sponsoring hundreds of scholarships for Afghan students to India, making it the largest bilateral donor in the region and the fifth largest overall, after the US, Britain, Japan and Germany.

Even the new parliament building on Darulaman Road is being built by India for 83 million dollars, though Afghans are beginning to wonder when it will ever be finished (the government says 2011). The Manmohan Singh administration has also embraced co-operation in security matters with Afghanistan, seeing it as a crucial battleground in fighting terrorism in the region. Though India, primarily due to US objections stemming from Pakistan’s concerns, has not sent its military to take part in the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, it has helped build the capacity of the Afghan security forces, providing pilot and counterinsurgency training and even mentoring the Afghan Army’s marching band.

The NDS figured prominently in this scheme. The CIA, which directly controlled the NDS’s budget until 2008, has worked to grow what is widely regarded as one of the most effective and cohesive institutions in Afghanistan, outperforming the Afghan Army and the dismal Afghan National Police. “It’s been a tremendously powerful institution in Afghanistan, certainly since the 1978 revolution,” said analyst Kate Clark.

The basic material for the organisation came from two sources: Shura-e Nazar’s pre-existing intelligence men, and former members of KhAD. They had previously been merged during the short-lived Rabbani government in 1992, when Fahim was put in charge of the intelligence service. After the Northern Alliance took Kabul in 2001, that setup was reconstituted. It was not unusual for communist-era figures with experience in security or bureaucracy—particularly those associated with Najibullah’s rule—to participate in the post-2001 regime, as they represented some of Afghanistan’s most well-trained talent.

Both the Panjshiris and the former KhAD members had experience working with Indian intelligence against Pakistan and its proxies in Afghanistan. RAW picked up these pre-existing relationships after 2001. “We knew a lot of these guys from their KhAD days,” said a former Indian intelligence official who recently retired. According to current and former intelligence officials within RAW and the NDS, the relationship between the two agencies had been co-operative, though less close than in the KhAD days, with NDS officials visiting India for training and RAW maintaining information gathering operations in Afghanistan.

Saleh, who took over as NDS chief in 2004 and had been groomed for the position by the Americans, is also from the Panjshir Valley, though at 38 he had been a relatively minor figure in Massoud’s administration. As a director in the Northern Alliance’s office in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, he had been a liaison with foreign intelligence services. “One of the most brilliant people I’ve met,” said Sawhney. “Slightly short-tempered, but if there’s anyone who knows the Taliban and Pakistan’s hand in the game, it’s him.”

During his tenure as NDS chief, Saleh would publicly accuse the Pakistani government of waging an active campaign of support for militant groups in Afghanistan. “The tribal agencies of Pakistan, like Bajaur and North and South Waziristan, are kept by the government as a strategic pool of fighters. From there, fundamentalist warriors are sent to fight in Afghanistan or elsewhere,” Saleh told Der Spiegel, a prominent German magazine, in 2009.

“Amrullah Saleh was very hostile,” said a senior Pakistani official. “He gathered Panjshiris and Karmalists [former communists] around him who were ideologically opposed to Pakistan.”

The extent of the NDS’s operations in Pakistan is a matter of dispute. As a function of its counterintelligence and counterterrorism roles, the NDS has been working actively to penetrate the Taliban and other insurgent groups, both within Afghanistan and across the border in Pakistan’s tribal areas, where the CIA has active intelligence gathering operations as well. (A key figure in this had been Dr Abdullah Laghmani, the Pashtun deputy head of the NDS who was killed in a suicide attack in Mehtar Lam in 2009.) However, Pakistani officials claim that NDS under Saleh has gone further than that, taking the fight to Pakistan by cultivating links with militant groups on Pakistani soil.

One Pakistani official in Kabul accused the NDS of actively supporting elements of the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan that had turned against the Pakistani military, namely groups in Orakzai, the Swat Valley and South Waziristan— all locations of Pakistan’s selective military campaign in the tribal regions. “They were working very closely in Orakzai with NDS,” he said. “NDS had contacts with Maulana Fazlullah and with Baitullah Mehsud in South Waziristan.” Afghan officials denied providing any support to militant groups.

The NDS has also been accused by Pakistan of harbouring militant Baloch separatists, including Brahamdagh Bugti, leader of the Baloch Republican Party. In November 2007, Balach Marri, a key militant separatist leader, was killed in Afghanistan, according to some news reports at the time, due to a NATO air strike that mistook him and his men for Taliban. The Pakistani source claimed that Marri had in fact been killed in a suicide attack in Uruzgan. “They brought his dead body here to the military hospital in Kabul. The family got in touch with us and they wanted the body.” Initially, the Afghan government was too embarrassed to give up Marri’s remains, but, the source said, “eventually they gave us the body.” Marri was later buried by his family in Balochistan.

Pakistan’s further suggestion is that RAW has been working with the NDS inside Pakistan. “India was essentially using Saleh’s networks,” said the Pakistani official. In the minds of many in Pakistan’s military and intelligence community, today is a replay of the jihad period, when KhAD and the KGB launched assassination and sabotage campaigns in Pakistan, and RAW played an active, if minor role, in the covert war against Pakistan. Yet the NDS today is not what KhAD was at its full strength. For one, it has a far less effective penetration of the current Taliban than KhAD did of mujahideen groups, due to its relative weakness as an institution and its lack of the same deep links among Pashtuns. For another, the NDS’ close co-operation with the CIA would likely place limits on actions that might be seen to jeopardise American co-operation with Pakistan.

Indian intelligence officials denied any active involvement in Pakistan, a contention that has been supported in public by the US. Regardless of their truth, however, allegations that India has been meddling in Balochistan have been effectively used by Pakistan to pressure India over Afghanistan and Kashmir.

DELHI HAS SEEN a number of high-profile visits from Afghan politicians since this summer. The most significant, of course, was President Karzai’s two-day visit at the end of April, his last stop on a circuit of Islamabad, Tehran and Beijing. Karzai discussed his plans for the reconciliation process and the then-upcoming peace jirga with Manmohan Singh, who expressed cautious support, and their joint statement expressed their intention “to combat the forces of terrorism which pose a particular threat to the region.” This was followed up by Delhi visits from Foreign Minister Zalmay Rasul and National Security Advisor Rangin Dadfar Spanta, both of whom are considered friends of India.

One visit that was not announced, however, was that of one of Karzai’s principal rivals among southern Pashtuns— Gul Agha Sherzai, Governor of Nangarhar. Sherzai arrived the first week of this August and met with a number of Indian officials, including YP Sinha, the Ministry of External Affairs Joint Secretary in charge of Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan and Alok Prasad, the Deputy National Security Advisor, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the visit.

A garrulous bear of a man with a popular touch, Sherzai is a former mujahideen commander and the Karzai family’s strongest rival in their home province of Kandahar. Originally installed as governor of Kandahar by the Americans in 2001, he was transferred to Jalalabad in 2003 after losing a power struggle with Ahmed Wali Karzai. Despite his reputation for brutality and corruption, he is looked favourably upon by Western donors, particularly the Americans, for his relatively trouble-free tenure in Nangarhar Province that has seen, among other things, a drastic reduction in opium cultivation.

Sherzai had been considered one of the leading contenders to Karzai in the 2009 presidential elections, but the two brokered a last-minute deal that saw Sherzai withdraw his candidacy just prior to the end of the nomination period. Nangarhar, whose capital city of Jalalabad sits astride the Kabul-Peshawar route, is a strategic province in which India has heavily invested in infrastructure and development projects, as well as provided support for media and broadcasting.

Sherzai’s visit is part of India’s new strategy of broadening its outreach to better include southern Pashtuns, in response to increasing concerns about Karzai’s reliability as an ally and to the prospect of future peace negotiations that will bring groups associated with the insurgency back into power. “I think one thing that has gotten through to the government is that you have to talk to absolutely everybody,” said Radha Kumar, an Indian academic and expert on Afghanistan.

Karzai, who received his postgraduate degree in political science at Himachal Pradesh University in Shimla, has long been considered a friend of India, something that had been strengthened by the intense personal animosity that developed with Pakistan’s former military dictator.

“He had a personal rift with Musharraf,” said a Pakistani diplomat who had been personally familiar with the relationship between the two. “There was a personal angle to that bad relationship between the two countries.”

But India’s close relationship with Karzai has been overshadowed by the even closer relationship with the US that the Manmohan Singh administration has charted both in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The deterioration of the US-Karzai relationship has thus brought significant negative fallout for India.

As part of its strategy of shaping up Afghanistan enough to begin to effect a withdrawal, the Obama administration has been determined to pressure Karzai into reducing corruption, which it sees as fuelling the insurgency. Part of this has involved a shift in public rhetoric right from the beginning, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton referring to Afghanistan as a “narco-state” during her confirmation hearings before the US Senate. The choice of Karl Eikenberry as ambassador was seen as another move towards getting tough on Karzai. Eikenberry had been the top American commander in Afghanistan during the period that saw Karzai’s increasing estrangement from the West, when Karzai had been forced by the internationals to remove two of his allies that he had appointed as the governors of the key southern provinces Helmand and Uruzgan: Sher Mohammad Akhundzada and Jan Mohammed Khan. In a leaked set of classified cables to Washington sent in November 2009, just prior to the decision to surge in 30,000 additional US troops, Eikenberry criticised the military’s counterinsurgency strategy and argued that “President Karzai is not an adequate strategic partner.”

Relations further deteriorated as a result of the presidential elections, when high-ranking US officials such as Richard Holbrooke openly met with opposition candidates, in particular Abdullah. India came along for the ride, offering its own measured support for other candidates, as well as Karzai. At the Independence Day celebrations at the Indian Embassy on 15 August 2009, five days before the presidential election, Abdullah Abdullah was the most prominent Afghan guest in attendance. India’s then-ambassador, Jayant Prasad, took him from table to table, where he posed for pictures and chatted in his fluent Hindi with the guests, according to a source present at the event.

“Perhaps because the West was so critical of Karzai, India thought that perhaps the West would have enough leverage to bring in another candidate,” said Pant. “To balance that possibility, India started its outreach to other candidates, and that damaged the relationship with Karzai.”

In the end, India and the West miscalculated badly. Karzai hung on to office, and indeed, there was little chance that Abdullah could have won, especially in the south of the country. After all, despite the massive fraud, it was clear that out of all the candidates, Karzai had received the most support from the populace. The battle between Karzai and the international community only served to delegitimise both parties.

Even more serious damage to US-Karzai relations has been done by aggressive US efforts to tackle corruption within Karzai’s government, which was almost certainly an important factor in precipitating Atmar and Saleh’s downfall. Over the summer of 2009, the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration moved to create two new units within the Ministry of the Interior: the Major Crimes Task Force (MCTF) and the Sensitive Investigations Unit (SIU). The idea was to insulate them politically from the rest of the government by providing them with their own judges, prosecutors, police officers and investigators, operating in conjunction with international mentors. Around the same time, the CIA helped the NDS and the Ministry of the Interior establish a joint wiretapping centre on the northern outskirts of Kabul. Karzai was reportedly unaware of the nature of these developments.

In January this year, the MCTF and the SIU raided the hawala money-transfer agency, the New Ansari Exchange, and seized some 42,000 documents. New Ansari was Afghanistan’s largest hawala company and had deep connections with the administration, including to Mahmoud Karzai, the President’s brother. Karzai was furious about the raid, summoning Hanif Atmar to an emergency cabinet meeting to complain, where he threatened to disband the investigative units, though Atmar himself had not been notified of the raid until moments before it occurred. There was a sense in the palace that these were American-controlled units that were running amok.

In March, Karzai issued a presidential decree bringing the Electoral Complaints Commission, which had been a thorn in his side during the election, under his direct control. In response, the White House revoked an invitation to visit that month, and Karzai, tit for tat, invited Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to visit, who flew to Kabul and delivered a speech laced with trenchant anti-American rhetoric.

In May, the White House and Karzai patched things up enough for Karzai to visit and hold a joint press conference with Obama. Then in June, at the height of international goodwill over the peace jirga, Karzai provoked Atmar and Saleh into resigning. The internationals were completely blindsided by the move.

“The peace jirga, even though it was political theatre, it did actually empower Karzai,” said Kate Clark. “The foreigners were not in any position to go against him.”

Now Karzai had cleared the way for the coming showdown: In late July, the investigative units made their first move against a member of Karzai’s inner circle, arresting Mohammed Zia Salehi, Head of Administration in the National Security Council. Included in the evidence for the arrest were recorded conversations provided by the wiretapping centre set up under Atmar and Saleh. Karzai reacted immediately, personally ordering Salehi’s release and opening a commission tasked with an investigation into the MCTF and the SIU for, among other things, “human-rights abuses.”

The battle that ensued between Karzai and the US escalated to a level of open, public animosity not seen since the presidential election, with US officials leaking to the press that members of Karzai’s administration, including Salehi, were taking payments from the CIA. (Salehi, incidentally, is a former aide to Dostum who spent several years post- 2001 in Delhi serving as a key liaison with India.) In August, Karzai fired Fazel Ahmed Faqiryar, the Deputy Attorney General, for his resistance to blocking the investigations, and the Western-mentored corruption inquiries have been frozen, according to news reports. As a replacement for Saleh, Karzai selected the little-known engineer Rahmatullah Nabixl, a protégé of Ibrahim Spinzada, another Karzai loyalist who has become the eminence grise on the National Security Council and now the NDS. The appointment of Nabil, who had been head of Karzai’s security detail at the Presidential Palace, was a move seen to weaken the NDS and bring it more directly under his supervision. “He worries most about the Americans,” said a non-Western diplomat who meets regularly with Karzai.

The other factor behind India’s decline in influence in Kabul is that its erstwhile Northern Allies in the civil war, so dominant in 2001, have been gradually but inexorably pushed out of that position in a process that has been on one hand a natural reflection of the Pashtun plurality, and on the other a testament to Karzai’s cunning for consolidating his own power base. In the early years, Karzai deftly used international support for ‘institution-building’ to sideline mujahideen-era figures he found troublesome. In addition to pushing out Sherzai from Kandahar, Karzai had Ismail Khan removed as governor of Herat in 2004, and Dostum was forced to spend a year of exile in Turkey after he was nearly put in jail for kidnapping and assaulting an opponent in 2008, before Karzai enlisted him in his re-election campaign. Karzai has also succeeded in splitting and weakening many of the former northern blocks, a task made easy by the voracious corruption endemic to Afghanistan’s ruling elite, fuelled by international cash. For his vice presidents in the 2009 election he chose Karim Khalili, the Hazara warlord and Fahim, whose family’s business interests have become tightly interwoven with Karzai’s. The move put Khalili at odds with the leading Hazara politician, Mohammad Mohaqiq, and Fahim—who is now seriously ill with diabetes— has since fallen out with Abdullah Abdullah and Massoud’s two brothers, splitting the Panjshiris.

In his search for alternate allies, Karzai has made common cause with a number of former members of Hizb-e Islami, particularly at the district and provincial level. He’s also brought some political operators who have helped build closer connections with elements of the former Taliban regime into his inner circle. One of the most important examples is Omer Daudzai, from Qarabagh, a former UNDP officer in Peshawar during the jihad. “He had very good relations with the Taliban when he was with UNDP,” said a UN staffer in Kabul who had been present then.

Daudzai became Karzai’s chief of staff in 2003, and apart from a stint as ambassador to Iran from 2005 to 2007, has kept his influential position. He is now considered to be one of Karzai’s closest and most trusted aides, and India has watched his rising influence with anxiety. “Close to Iran, close to Pakistan, rumoured to still have good links with the Taliban,” was how a current Indian intelligence official categorised him.

Of course, Karzai continues his deft balancing act on the contradictory forces around him, and India doesn’t remain without friends in his government. Appointed as interior minister was the friendly figure of Bismillah Khan Mohammadi, a senior Shura-e Nazar figure close to Fahim, whose children are studying in India. “India insisted on someone who could guarantee their interests,” said a source familiar with discussions between Indian and Afghan officials in the wake of Saleh and Atmar’s resignations.

And Spanta—who went public with his unhappiness at Saleh’s resignation—remains Karzai’s designated man for moments when anti-Pakistan rhetoric needs to be cranked up. In a recent blistering op-ed in The Washington Post titled, ‘Pakistan is the Afghan war’s real aggressor,’ Spanta downplayed Afghan corruption as a cause of the insurgency and stated that “Pakistan continues to provide sanctuary and support to the Quetta Shura, the Haqqani network, the Hekmatyar group and Al Qaeda.”

Still the long-term trend seems clear to most observers. Karzai and Pakistan have powerful interests in common, given the American withdrawal. Nor is it just Karzai who is interested in improving relations with Pakistan. One Pakistani diplomat in Kabul ticked off a list of powerful northern figures who he claimed had made overtures to Pakistan, and then explained how the surge in ‘stabilisation’ funding for insurgency-afflicted areas in Afghanistan—most of it US money—has created powerful incentives for Afghan government figures to get a cut by working with Pakistani companies that could operate in Taliban-held areas. “Even Fahim has accepted the situation, and we’re getting along,” said the diplomat. “India can’t compete with Pakistan.”

THE HAMID GUESTHOUSE sits on a busy side street in the heart of Kabul. It feels about as far away as you can get from the war in Afghanistan, but this February two gunmen rampaged here for hours, killing six Indian nationals, including two army officer and an engineer, as well as eight Afghans, a French filmmaker and an Italian diplomat.

According to statements by Afghan and US intelligence officials, the attackers, who spoke Urdu to each other during the raid, were members of Lashkar-e Taiba that had been brought into the city via the logistics lines of the Haqqani network, an Afghan militant group based in North Waziristan in the Pakistani tribal areas that has close links with the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Like the massive suicide car bomb attacks on the embassy in 2008 and 2009, Pakistan was a prime suspect, though the accusations were more muted than in 2008. At that time, immediately after the bombing, Manmohan Singh announced an additional 450 million dollars in aid to Afghanistan, a sign to Pakistan that India would not be deterred from its involvement there, but also a move that had some scratching their heads at the perverse incentives this involved. “What are we rewarding Afghanistan for?” said an Indian observer in Kabul. “Every time India gets attacked, the government responds with another pledge of millions of dollars.”

The lack of success of the US military’s surge and counterinsurgency campaign, and President Obama’s commitment that July 2011 will mark the beginning of the US troop withdrawal, has focused the region’s attention on a post-US Afghanistan. A high-level strategic review scheduled for December could bring additional impetus for a faster drawdown of US forces. While, given American concerns over the potential for terrorist attacks against the US emanating from the tribal regions, it seems implausible that the American military will completely leave Afghanistan in the near future. What has been abandoned is the hope of a military victory over the Taliban. In June, Admiral Michael Mullen, the highest-ranking officer in the US military, stated that there were no purely military solutions in Afghanistan and that “the only solution” was a political one.

“It came into focus earlier this year at the London conference,” said Pant, “where it was clear that India was marginal to the strategic landscape.” At the top-level London Conference on Afghanistan this January, it was established that a negotiated settlement was necessary, and that there should be a two-tiered process—a reintegration process where low-level combatants would be encouraged to quit fighting via economic incentives and the promise of amnesty, along with a reconciliation process whereby the Taliban leadership would be engaged in negotiations.

The problem, from India’s perspective, is that Pakistan retains close oversight over the senior Taliban leadership within its territory and thus an effective veto over the negotiation process. While Karzai has held discreet talks with members of the Taliban and other insurgent groups in the past, including recent meetings with delegates from Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s group, this January, Pakistan arrested Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the number-two figure in the Quetta Shura, the Taliban’s senior leadership council. Afghan, US and Pakistani officials told The New York Times, among other newspapers, that Baradar had been arrested because he had been overly independent in his approaches with the Karzai administration.

Pakistan’s message seems to be: you go through us, or not at all. And the carrot has followed the stick: both General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani and ISI chief Lieutenant General Ahmad Shuja Pasha stepped up their visits to Karzai in Kabul this summer, reportedly offering to broker a deal with Mullah Omar and Sirajuddin Haqqani. At the same time, there have been persistent rumours among palace insiders that Daudzai might be appointed as special emissary to Iran and Pakistan, a position that would put him in a key position in reconciliation efforts. Daudzai has played an active role in the past in organising the Karzai’s administrations contacts with insurgent groups.

One response to the increasing likelihood of a negotiation process is that India has sought greater cooperation with Iran and Russia on Afghanistan. “If the West is going to leave, if Pakistan retains an upper hand, we would once again see the kind of alliances and the kinds of things that were happening when the Soviets left,” said Pant.

Iran in particular has deep ties—it once hosted Gulbuddin Hekmatyar for six years after he fled the Taliban regime— and US and Afghan officials have accused it of low-level support to militant groups fighting in Afghanistan. Recently, there has been an increase in high-level diplomatic activity between Iran and India. “Suddenly there is a new momentum in the relationship,” said Pant. “Afghanistan has been big factor in cementing this relationship.”

A series of meetings held over the past three years in Dubai and the Maldives between current Afghan politicians and prominent figures linked to the Taliban and Hizb-e Islami have been partially funded with Iranian support via Hekmatyar’s son-in-law Humayoun Jarir, according to Afghans who have participated. But the US has been wary of a regional peace process, not least because Russia and Iran would both like to see the Americans eventually withdraw their troops from the region, a point of disagreement they have with India. There is also serious friction over one of India’s largest projects in Afghanistan, the 116 million-dollar Salma Dam in Herat, delayed by years because of insecurity and political issues, which Iran is disputing because of its effect on the Hari Rud, a river which flows across the border into eastern Khorasan.

The prospect of a US withdrawal, a collapse of the Karzai government in the face of an emboldened Taliban and increasing interference from regional actors has also raised the spectre of a resurrection of the centrifugal dynamics that plunged the country into its brutal civil war during the 1990s. In July, after his resignation, Saleh toured northern Afghanistan, holding public meetings where he warned of the danger of Karzai’s negotiations with the Taliban (he’s also started a popular Facebook page).

At the beginning of September there were rumours, carried by local television, that Abdullah, Saleh and Dostum had been in Delhi to receive Indian endorsement for the formation of a northern coalition, which were denied by Abdullah and Saleh. (Dostum had in fact visited Delhi during the last week of August, according to an Afghan source who met him while he was staying at the Taj Palace Hotel, though he said at the time that it was just to get his liver looked after.)

Some have even suggested that splitting Afghanistan along ethnic lines—an impossible task in reality—would be a solution to the country’s troubles. Robert Blackwill’s recent op-ed in the Financial Times, which called for a de facto partition of Afghanistan, has been well read and much discussed in Delhi. Blackwill, the US ambassador in Delhi during the first George W Bush administration, has worked as a paid lobbyist for the Indian government. There seemed to be the sentiment in Delhi that this was an eventuality that was at least no longer unthinkable. Of course, there is an element of strategic communication in the suggestion that a revival of a post-Soviet proxy war might be in the cards.

“The idea is that by making the threat of a post-West Afghanistan look like a post-Soviet Afghanistan,” said Pant, “America can be forced to pressure Pakistan into some sort of accommodation with the other regional powers.”

The prospect of a divided Afghanistan, thrown back into brutal civil war, or a Taliban-governed Afghanistan, no longer so friendly to India, begs the question of what India’s vital interests in Afghanistan really are. The Indian government says that it wants a stable, democratic Afghanistan friendly to India, but the prospect of one that has all three characteristics is looking increasingly dim. Others would say India’s interest is access to Central Asian energy, or reducing the potential for terrorism such as the attacks in Mumbai. But on those grounds, India has little to show for its investment. Of course, one can make the case that the violence and destabilisation in Afghanistan has actually benefited India by weakening Pakistan and tying up its resources and military forces on its western border.

“When has a stable, strong enemy ever been to your benefit?” asked Sood. “That being said, they’ve diminished in a very dangerous kind of way.”

Of course, India has staked so much on its play in Afghanistan— its very role as a rising regional power—that its involvement has become something that justifies itself. “It has become almost a test case for India,” said Pant. And some wonder whether it has blinded India to larger concerns.

“Is it not our stakes in Afghanistan that have made us take Pakistan more seriously than they perhaps deserve to be seen nowadays?” asked one veteran Indian observer in Kabul.

If Afghanistan returns to a state of chaos, India may once again reap the whirlwind. But in preparing for the worst, whether with covert or overt action, might India hasten its onset? The tragedy, for ordinary Afghans, Indians, and Pakistanis alike, is that the Great Game might once again go from a nation-building project to proxy war.

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YouTube clip shows IDF soldier belly-dancing beside bound Palestinian woman

IDF orders immediate probe after Channel 10 airs clip on national TV.

By Haaretz Service

A video uploaded to YouTube shows an Israel Defense Forces soldier wriggling in a belly dance beside a bound and handcuffed Palestinian woman, to the cheers of his comrades who were documenting the incident.

The IDF’s internal investigation department ordered an immediate probe into the matter after the Ch. 10 television program Tzinor Laila caught wind of the clip on the internet. The full clip and the details behind the incident will be broadcast on the show just before midnight on Monday.

A number of IDF soldiers have over the last year faced investigation and penalty for documenting themselves performing questionable acts in front of Palestinian prisoners or while on patrol.

In August, former soldier Eden Abergil raised controversy by posting pictures of herself beside a bound and blindfolded Palestinian prisoner on her Facebook page.

Days later, three IDF soldiers were arrested taking photographs of themselves alongside cuffed and blindfolded Palestinian detainees using their cellphones.

Photographs uploaded by Abergil and labeled “IDF – the best time of my life,” depicted her smiling next to Palestinian prisoners with their hands bound and their eyes covered.
A comment attached to one of the photos of the soldier smiling in front of two blindfold men and posted by one of Abergil’s friends read “That looks really sexy for you,” with Abergil’s response reading: “I wonder if he is on Facebook too – I’ll have to tag him in the photo.”

A comment allegedly added by Abergil to her Facebook page later that wee said that she would “gladly kill Arabs – even slaughter them.”

“In war there are no rules,” Abergil allegedly wrote on the wall of her profile page.

Other soldiers faced disciplinary action over the last year for uploading video of themselves stopping a patrol in the West Bank to dance to American electro-pop singer Kesha’s hit Tick Tock.

The video “Batallion 50 Rock the Hebron Casbah” shows six dancing Nahal Brigade soldiers, armed and wearing bulletproof vests, patrolling as a Muslim call to prayer is heard. Then the music changes and they break into a Macarena-like dance.

The video was uploaded over the weekend, and quickly spread across Facebook pages and blogs before it was removed by those who uploaded it.

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“The average person believes implicitly that the photograph cannot falsify. Of course, you and I know that this unbounded faith in the integrity of the photograph is often rudely shaken, for, while photographs may not lie, liars may photograph.”

Lewis Hine 1909

Photographers often get defensive when reminded that many of them resort to ‘digital manipulation’ using the new tools currently available. Discussions about the limits of what is permissible regularly sparks off heated debates, particularly in contests. Jobs have been lost, awards cancelled, and credibility undermined when photographers have digitally manipulated photographs to create the image they have wanted.

Sadly, the arguments raised have largely dealt with issues of technique rather than issues of ethics. One school of thought suggests, ‘if it was doable in a darkroom, then it can be doable in a computer’. Others claim that conventional darkroom techniques, such as dodging, burning, or changing contrast are acceptable, but inserting, taking away, or displacing visual elements are off limits (though these too were, and had been, done in the darkroom). More ‘artistic’ criteria suggest that the essential ‘mood and character’ of the original image must be preserved. None of this addresses the central issue Hine had brought up in 1909. Is the photographer lying?

I believe the discussion needs to shift from ‘how’ the image was altered to ‘why’ it was altered. Indeed, photographers have ‘enhanced’ their images by using filters to darken skies, dodged and burned in the darkroom to change relative emphasis of visual elements, sometimes even eliminated visuals that distracted from what was considered central to the photograph. Subtle changes in tonality and gradation altered the ‘feel’ of an image, affecting the emotional response one might have to the visual experience.  In the analogue days, the skill sets required hand-eye  coordination to a far greater extent than is needed today. The modern photographer needs to learn about pixels, paths and plug-ins. The software used, the amount of RAM and processor speed are the new vocabulary that replaces darkroom tools of yore. But even in the digital age, the skill of the practitioner often determines whether the change is detectable.

There are those who subvert the process and deliberately play on detectability of the process, confronting the viewer with their interventions, questioning her perception of what is acceptable, stretching her boundaries of credibility. Indeed, on occasions, flaunting these very norms to raise uncomfortable issues of how images are read. Early theorists like Professor Fred Ritchin, currently at Tisch School of The Arts, New York University, have eloquently analysed how this ‘manipulation’, instead of undermining the credibility of the photograph, has returned the onus of authenticity upon the integrity of the author rather than the acceptability of the tools (human or mechanical).  One believes a photograph, as one believes a word, based on the reliability of the source, rather than the mode of production. The hugely talented pioneer of digital photography, the Mexican photographer Pedro Meyer, playfully, intelligently and skillfully, toyed with us, shaking the pillars of our age old beliefs, forcing us to question the process of seeing and believing.

Of course the photograph still retains the characteristic of being the primary source. “I was there. I saw it with my own eyes. I have photographs.” It is precisely because the photograph or the video, is seen as an unmoderated fact, that it is so powerful. It is precisely the reason why lying through a video or photograph can be so effective.

In this age of spin, rhetoric and hyperbole, does the liar, by shaking our confidence in the medium, undermine the veracity of the one source that we still implicitly trust? In some ways of course it does, but by doing so, the liar does us a favour. It reminds us to question, not merely the medium but also the source.

Buddha, Moses, Jesus and Mohammed were believed because they were trustworthy. They had established their credibility. They had a track record that gave their word a respectability that others who said otherwise did not have. I have no way to vouch for the veracity of the incredible claims that they made. That is the basis of a very different discussion. But it is undeniably true that centuries after they have gone, there are people who live by their ideals and are prepared to die for them. The lives that they lived, made their words believable. We believed their actions, which led to us believing their words.

That brings me to the point of this article. The video of the attack on the flotilla. People have correctly pointed to the technical errors in the released videos. The fact that there were white frames inside the sequence, that consecutive frames did not match, that crude alterations revealed the manipulation where people are seen to be walking through metal pylons, the amateurish display of a catapult by turning towards a camera on a tripod and holding it high, in the middle of an attack by armed soldiers, the fact that a voice inserted in the video is that of a woman on another ship, all make the video a laughable piece of ‘evidence’. Indeed, the detection of the tampering is what is being used as evidence of lies being told.

My argument is elsewhere. What if the Israelis had produced the perfect video, backing up their claims. What if their technicians had been more skilled, their computer animations more realistic, their actors more adept and telling their version of the story. Would that have validated their version of the story? I would like to return to who is telling the story. The veracity of the source.

Lies are more difficult to protect than the truth. If the version they had presented had been genuine, there would have been no need to confiscate all the visual material, releasing selective segments, with obvious tampering. If they had nothing to hide there would have been no need to jam the communications at the moment of attack, or to erase the audio from certain segments of the video. There would have been no reluctance to make all the evidence available and let the viewers decide. Suspicious behavior gives rise to suspicion. For a nation known for manipulating the truth at all levels, casting doubts on authentic data, vilifying honest citizens, persecuting every hint of dissent, it is the fact that the source is Israel that is the greatest reason for disbelief.

If a time were to come when Israel had a change of heart and for once spoke the truth, like Matilda in her burning house, there would be none to believe her. That fire is imminent and Israel’s house of lies might well be close to burning.

———————ENDS————————–

Other points of view.

BBC Panorama Video 1

BBC Panorama Video 2

“>Al Jazeera Storming of Gaza aid convoy

Legal assessment of Gaza Flotialla raid

Related links:

Military ties between India and Israel

In Defense of Helen Thomas

Human Rights Council Condemnation of Israeli Attacks

Adopted by a recorded vote of 32 to 3, with 9 abstentions.
The voting was as follows:
In favour: Angola, Argentina, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Chile, China, Cuba, Djibouti, Egypt, Gabon, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Kyrgyzstan, Mauritius, Mexico, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Russian Federation, Saudia Arabia, Senegal, Slovenia, South Africa, Uruguay;
Against: Italy, Netherlands, United States of America;
Abstaining: Belgium, Burkina Faso, France, Hungary, Japan, Republic of Korea, Slovakia, Ukraine, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland:

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By Satish Sharma

Forget about the power that, according to Mao, flows from the Barrels of Guns!

A lot more power actually flows through the matte black barrels of lenses. Camera lenses! And this is a power that flows a lot more silently and, most of the time, it works it magic very subtly.

Very rarely do pictures explode on the media scene like the now infamous cover picture on the August 9th issue of Time magazine. Very rarely do pictures present us with such a questionable and ‘teachable’ moment about photography and its political uses. Rarely do photographs become such a powerful peg for discussions that go on and on. Discussions that need to go on because we have to understand, dissect and discuss the spaces that photography occupies in contemporary society. Spaces that are hardly any different from the times when photography was a medium controlled by the political and secret department of a British colonial government. Photography, we have to remember, was invented at a time when colonialism was at its height and became a major player in the colonial game. Something that British army cadets, who were to be posted in the colonies, were specially taught and equipped for.

Images of Afghanistan by Mohammad Qayoumi (prior to CIA intervention and Russian invasion).

Photography is a powerful language, a valuable voice of authority for authorities. One has to understand how it is used. A “Writing with Light”- Photo Graphy is becoming more powerful than any other human language. It is more than just the world’s first universally understood language, one that needs no translators and appears to have no word language limitations because it is a technology driven by newer and newer technologies which give it a reach and power that no language ever had.

The endless flow of camera constructed pictures is, today, increasingly constructing our social and political landscape. Constructing us, actually, by manipulating the mental spaces that we live in. Defining our Drishti – our perception and very sense of self ! There are, after all, more photographs shot every year than there are bricks in the world. And photography, in its different, camera lens based, avatars (film and television, for example) is what makes us what we are -who we are manufactured to be.

Cameras construct our worlds in ways that word oriented languages did not because the visual language they present us with is perceived to have credibility, a veracity and a connection to objective truth that words did not. Pictures are becoming the bricks that construct our contemporary, increasingly visual world. A world that can no longer just ban the making of pictures as it once did or tried to do. A world in which technologies drive the move away from the word driven and language riven cultures towards vast visual information landscapes that are increasingly becoming part of a real, war driven, information wars . Wars that are, says the Project for a New American Century, about Full Spectrum Domination.

Domination that is blatant about not allowing any challenges –‘military, economic or cultural”. Domination that seeks ‘control of all international commons including Space and Cyberspace, Culture not excluded’ and is driven by never ending wars that see whole societies as a battlefield. A battlefield where – in the language of the US Marines’ ‘Fourth generation Warfare’ – “ the action will occur concurrently- throughout all participants depth , including their society as a cultural and not just as physical entity”. Special Human Terrain teams now work alongside the American Armed Forces. These anthropologists, ethnographers etc are uniformed cultural warriors. They are, very problematically, working in battlefields to understand and subvert cultures and peoples. Humanity is now a terrain to be controlled.

It is against this background of militrarised information and cultural control that one needs to look at the Time magazine cover. It was its founder, after all, who first projected the idea of the 20th century as ‘An American Centrury’. Henry Luce founded a media empire to project his agenda. Time, Fortune, Life and even the March of Time film series served to mediate his synarchist ideas of corporate control of political power. That he was a member of Yale university’s secretive Skull and Bones society like so many other American leaders, only adds to ones suspicions of hidden agendas.

Interestingly enough, Luce first used the term ‘American Century’ in a publication that is iconic in its use of photography. The words appeared in a 1941, Life magazine editorial.

Born in China, (a country which has interesting links to both synarchism and the Skull and Bones Society) he was the son of an American missionary and wanted the United States to be more missionary in the global and universal projection of its power beyond its territories. Go beyond territorial control, into the control of ideas and ideologies

It is the fact that he foresaw the power of photography in doing that and foregrounded it in his publications that interests and intrigues me. I am not surprised that “Time’ _ the first Magazine he founded – is still used (and uses photography) to push the ideas of a New American Century promoted by 21st century synarchists like Dick Cheney . No Wikileaks, digital world, challenge to mainstream, corporate media is to be allowed, or go unchallenged . Not in these days of information wars and their clear cut ideas on ”Perception Management”.

The introduction in the August 9th issue of Time by the editor, Richard Stengel, makes it very clear that the magazine was aiming to counter the information leaked by Wikileaks on the uncontrollable net.

“The much publicized release of classified documents by WikiLeaks has already ratcheted up the debate about the war. Our story and the haunting cover image by the distinguished South African photographer Jodi Bieber are meant to contribute to that debate. We do not run this story or show this image either in support of the U.S. war effort or in opposition to it. We do it to illuminate what is actually happening on the ground. As lawmakers and citizens begin to sort through the information about the war and make up their minds, our job is to provide context and perspective on one of the most difficult foreign policy issues of our time. What you see in these pictures and our story is something that you cannot find in those 91,000 documents: a combination of emotional truth and insight into the way life is lived in that difficult land and the consequences of the important decisions that lie ahead.”

The cover photograph offers an insight, but it is an insight into the workings of corporate media. It is definitely not about any truth – emotional or otherwise. It is, for all practical purposes, a political poster that you pay for. The accompanying text about “What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan” is a statement and not a question. It is a statement about staying on militarily, and it ignores the fact that Bibi Aisha’s mutilation occurred last year, at a time when the American led forces had been in the country for nearly nine years and with their own puppet government in place. Had intervened in, decades earlier, to actually create the Taliban. A government that hardly gives women any real space in the new Sharia ruled Islamic Republic that exists under American largesse. Reports by Afghan and womens’ human right groups actually show, from the times of the Taliban, an increase in the violence against women.
The cover photograph itself is a cynical attempt to photograph a desired future. It closely echoes the Steve McCurry photograph of another young Afghan girl on the cover of another American magazine. That ‘National Geographic’ cover represented the sad state of Afghanistan under Soviet occupation. This is one actually about life in Afghanistan after decades of American intervention and a decade of actual occupation.

Both the covers, interestingly enough, presented young and good looking women. Ones a western audience would be comfortable with. Ones the women in the west could connect with more easily. It is after all, they who are the actual targets of the propaganda. They and the lobbying they represent. Lobbying that is seen as necessary to keep the other international, partner armies in Afghanistan.

It is an earlier WikiLeaks document which makes that agenda clear. The CIA’s “Red Cell Special Memorandum: Afghanistan: Sustaining West European Support for the NATO-led Mission- Why Counting on Apathy Might Not Be Enough” presents a plan for a propaganda war designed to shore up declining public support in Germany and France. Support for a continued war in Afghanistan.
The memo is classified as ‘Confidential/No Foreign Nationals’ and presents a well thought out plan for the targeted manipulation of public opinion in the two NATO ally countries. Winning hearts and minds! This time in Europe and in America.

The fall of the Dutch government on the issue of Dutch troops in Afghanistan, worried the CIA. They became worried about repeat events in the countries that have the third and fourth largest troop contingents to the ISAF mission and proposed PR strategies that focused on pressure points that had been identified within these countries. For France it was the sympathy of the public for Afghan refugees and women. For Germany it was the fear of the consequences of defeat (drugs, more refugees, terrorism) as well as Germany’s standing in NATO.

The CIA report had clear bullet points. Power points, actually! They are about reinforcing Power.
• “Public Apathy Enables Leaders To Ignore Voters”
• “…But Casualties Could Precipitate Backlash”
• “Tailoring Messaging Could Forestall or At Least Contain Backlash”

The CIA thought that “Appeals by President Obama and Afghan Women Might Gain Traction” and very clearly stated that “Afghan women could serve as ideal messengers in humanizing the ISAF role in combating the Taliban because of women’s ability to speak personally and credibly about their experiences under the Taliban, their aspirations for the future, and their fears of a Taliban victory. Outreach initiatives that create media opportunities for Afghan women to share their stories with French, German, and other European women could help to overcome pervasive scepticism among women in Western Europe toward the ISAF mission…

The ‘media opportunities for Afghan women’ became a simple oppurtunistic use of Afghan women. They and their bodies fitted seamlessly into the old orientalist discourses about western, humanising and civilizing missions. Missions meant to liberate oriental women them from their savage and cruel men. This is about white knights in shining steel or modern camouflage armour rescuing dusky, eastern damsels in eternal distress. Distress that photography was successfully used to stress in the beautifully lit and textured colour of a magazine cover reduced to a campaign poster for more war. More occupation of more oriental lands in the name of more oriental women. That the real prizes were and are natural resources is not worthy of mention except when those resources might be seen by a western audience, to pay for western wars.

Jodi Bieber did a great job – aesthetically speaking. The cover portrait could be a professional fashion shoot! And the mainstream media jumped in to push her and their own messages about the need to fight on. They asked no serious questions about how empathy the photograph evoked was used to promote antipathy. To promote more war and further the occupation of a suddenly mineral and oil rich Afghanistan. There were no questions about the price that the civilian population of Afghanistan, including women and children were paying in lives cut horribly short by wars that go on and on and seem to be designed to do just that in an unending war on a tactic that the weak use to resist stronger occupiers of their resource rich lands . Who is terrorising whom, one wonders. And why?

Two interviews with Bieber that I heard on BBC and CNN, were focused in foregrounding her as a now famous photographer. A South African photographer, now based in London she was projected as a white, concerned woman photographer empathising with her Afghan sisters even as she (and they, the media themselves) ignored the privacy concerns of her subjects – women for whom purdah may actually be more than just a dictate by the terrible Taliban. The women who had to continue living their lives in the very badlands of Afghanistan she was showing up as evil and dangerous.

I remember that ‘privacy concerns of victims’ were and are still used to prevent the release of photographs of tortured Iraqis in Abu Ghraib. And even when the pictures were used the faces were carefully blurred out. That concern for privacy and the blurring to hide the identity of Bibi Aisha was not necessary for the Time cover, it seems. Dropping the family name while putting her on the cover of a magazine that sells millions of copies is no real attempt to protect her identity. Concern for the’ rights of victims’ matters when it might show up the ugly face of American occupation but doesn’t when it is the other side that is sought to be demonised. The real story of the mutilation is not important either. Later stories that checked out the Time story found that Aisha’s father in law had done the deed and then got a sanction for it from village elders. It had not been ordered by any Taliban Commander, as the Time story insisted.

Afghanistan becomes “ a broken 13th century country for the British Defense Secretary . A country full of “barbarians with 1200 AD mentality” for Erik Prince , the CEO of the infamous mercenary Blackwater ( now Xe) . What is wiped out of memory is shown by a collection of photographs from the Kabul of the mid 20th century. Recently republished in ‘Foreign Policy’ along with an essay by a Mohammed Qayoumi who lived there then, they present a conveniently forgotten Afghanistan. A country where women could wear western skirts and have bobbed haircuts as they attended universities and trained as doctors and nurses.

There is more to people than just the ugly western stereotypes the Time cover tries to reinforce and create anew. The freedom loving Mujhaideen heroes of the Soviet era are now Talibanised as barbaric terrorists. Terrorists cannot be “humanised” even in photographs that the world will see. I am reminded of the Red Cross photographs of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (wearing a white robe, sporting a long salt and pepper beard and sitting serenely) that were seen as dangerous by a former Research Director of the Combating Terrorism Centre in the US Military Academy at West Point. Jarret Barchman said ‘whats problematic for me is it (the Photograph) really humanises the guy”. The dangerous other is now not even supposed to be a human.

The history of photography, especially in American wars is an intriguing history. It is a story more mistold than told. It is a story of careful control. A control that began after the Vietnam war which, the Pentagon believes, was lost because of the freedom and unhindered access that photographers had in Vietnam and photographs got to the media at home. Since then, photographers and even journalists have a limited (if any) access to American battle fields. One is now embedded into an in-bed -with intimacy that makes dangerous disclosures difficult. Images that are released and printed go through a careful culling by self censoring photographers and the editors at home. Editors who act as censors and become the controllers of what the world is allowed to see. No dead bodies of American soldiers. Not even in flag draped coffins. Rights to privacy of dead soldiers and their families was the official Bush excuse when, actually, no one wanted a repeat of Mogadishu where pictures of dead American soldiers being dragged through the streets had forced an American withdrawal.

I wonder at how easily photography is used as a political weapon even as the medium itself is denied any political space or purpose.
Photography after the Second World War and McCarthyism was consciously pushed into the sanitised spaces of art galleries and museums away from its past as a concerned, conscience pricking tool. We were told by institutional gate keepers like the Museum of Modern Art in New York, that Photography was only about itself. It was an Art form that was about navel gazing photographers and about flattened formalist fields. Photography was not supposed to exist outside its own frame. It was not a medium that could be a window looking out on to the world’s uglier face – holding up a mirror to it. Photography was to be a mirror for a photographer to look into- see and explore his subjective self – express himself as an artist. An artist who never ever read what Roland Barthes says about one of the best ways of destroying the power of photography. Making it a Fine Art. But that is another story!

Related links:

The face that launched a thousand drones?

Once upon a time in Afghanistan

Sitting on a man’s back