By Helen Kennedy

Monday, February 8th 2010

A crazed G.I. was arrested for waterboarding his 4-year-old daughter because she wouldn't say her ABCs.

Cops said Army Sgt. Joshua Tabor, 27, who served 15 months in Iraq, admitted to punishing his daughter by holding her down on the kitchen counter in suburban Washington State and repeatedly pushing her head backward into a full sink.

"He explained she's deathly afraid of water," said Todd Stancil, police chief in Yelm, Wash.

"He would lay her down on her back and push her head into the water right up to her eyeline. He was open about it. He did it all the time. To him, that was an acceptable form of punishment - because she wasn't able to say the alphabet."

Stancil said neighbors told cops that he also ran water over the flailing girl's face, taking her to the edge of drowning, but Tabor denied that.

"It was hot! The water was hot!" the girl said, according to the police report.

Tabor, who was arrested Jan. 31, will be arraigned Feb. 16.

"We originally booked him on third-degree assault, but if he did put the water over her face, that would constitute a more tortuous type of crime," Stancil said. "We are looking into those allegations."

Waterboarding, in which water is poured into an immobilized target's nose and mouth, was used by the CIA on prisoners in Iraq until President Obama banned it in January 2009.

Tabor is out on $10,000 bail and restricted to his base, Ft. Lewis, in Tacoma, Wash.

He was arrested after his girlfriend called the cops at 2 a.m. to say he was drunkenly stalking around the neighborhood brandishing his Kevlar helmet and threatening to break windows.

The girlfriend then told cops Tabor beat his daughter. Cops found the little girl hiding in the bathroom.

"She had just multiple bruises all over her body, from the ears to the legs," Stancil said. "She said, 'Daddy did this.'"

The child had only been in her father's court-ordered custody for two months.

Her father had barred her from contacting her mother's parents, who had raised her. When police put the worried grandma on the phone, the little girl cried from happiness, the police report says.

ABC News reports that high-powered rifle sights provided to the US Army and Marines by Michigan weapons maker Trijicon include coded references to Bible passages about Jesus Christ:

The sights are used by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the training of Iraqi and Afghan soldiers. The maker of the sights, Trijicon, has a $660 million multi-year contract to provide up to 800,000 sights to the Marine Corps, and additional contracts to provide sights to the U.S. Army.

U.S. military rules specifically prohibit the proselytizing of any religion in Iraq or Afghanistan and were drawn up in order to prevent criticism that the U.S. was embarked on a religious "Crusade" in its war against al Qaeda and Iraqi insurgents.

One of the citations on the gun sights, 2COR4:6, is an apparent reference to Second Corinthians 4:6 of the New Testament, which reads: "For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ."

U.S. Military Weapons Inscribed With Secret 'Jesus' Bible Codes (ABC News)
Trijicon (corporate website)

One year after his election, Barack Obama's approval rating is lower at this stage than for any US president since Eisenhower. So why has the optimism surrounding his victory disappeared so suddenly?

Gary Younge in Prestonsburg

The Guardian, Saturday 16 January 2010

Article history

Barack Obama's 'rightwing dissenters may be eccentric and racially exclusive but they have also proved highly effective.' Photograph: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images

Every Wednesday at 4.30pm they come: a small steady human trickle rolling down a ravine in Prestonsburg, western Kentucky ­towards the Town Branch church. They come in pick-ups, on foot, alone and with families. Some stop for just a few minutes. Others linger. They come for food and warm second-hand clothes. They come because desperation in this part of America has become a routine part of life.

More than a quarter of the families in Prestonsburg live in poverty; half of the children in Floyd County, where it is situated, are on food stamps. This ­Appalachian coal mining area has never been rich. But no one can remember when it has ever been this poor either. It sits on the old Route 23 – the country music highway of which Dwight Yoakam (a Floyd Country native) sang in Readin', Rightin', Route 23. It was the road that took people north to factory jobs in places such as Detroit and Cleveland and "the good life they had never seen". Now those cities are broke and there's nowhere left to go.

"We're getting more and more ­people coming here as time goes by," says Tom Price, who helps administer the church's Feed My Sheep pantry. "The bottom's just fallen out of it all." He blames it on Barack Obama. "Is there a direct correlation [between Obama's victory and the region's bad times]? I don't know. But I do know a lot of people are hurting."

Part 1, Meet the 9-12ers - an excerpt from Opposing Obama
Link to this audio

A week may be a long time in politics. But a year has not been enough for the Democratic president to meet the expectations of his candidacy, deal with the situation he inherited or defuse the barbed charges of his detractors. For many the change that Obama promised when he was inaugurated a year on Wednesday has ended up being a change for the worse. Unemployment is rising, houses prices are falling, unpopular wars are still raging. After 100 days only Ronald Reagan had higher approval ratings for his first few months in office than Obama. But as his first year draws to a close nobody has had lower ratings at this stage since Dwight Eisenhower.

Part 2, Miner issue - an excerpt from Opposing Obama
Link to this audio

Keith Bartley, Floyd County's Democratic chairman, says one key reason why Obama's such a tough sell here is because of the effect of his cap and trade policy on the coal industry. Lt Governor Daniel Mongiardo, the Democratic frontrunner in Kentucky's senatorial race later this year, says he would not want Obama to come and stump for him on the campaign trail, particularly because of his environmental policies. "With some of the positions he has taken, especially on coal, no. He certainly can't come into eastern or western Kentucky and help. Nor would I want him to."

But the disenchantment goes beyond one region or one industry. The official narrative of Obama's inauguration – the fairytale most of the US media told itself and that the international community wanted to believe – was that after a ­rancourous campaign a divided country came together to celebrate the historic election of its first African-American president. The reality was always quite different. The editor of the Grayson County News Gazette in Leitchfield, a small town 230 miles west of Prestonsburg, recalls that the day after the election much of the area wore sombre faces. The week he was elected gun sales across the country leapt about 50% compared with the same period the year before.

For all of his aspirations for bipartisanship, after the first three months Obama had the most polarised early job approval ratings of any president in the past four decades. The gap between how Democrats and Republicans rated him at this stage was greater than George Bush Jr's in 2001 and twice as high as Richard Nixon's during the height of the Vietnam war in 1969. This was partly because Democrats loved him so much – but it was also because so few Republicans were willing to give him a hearing. Obama didn't create that partisan divide, he inherited it. Not only has he not been able to cure it, but his presence seems to have exacerbated it.

Truth be told they never really liked Obama much in Floyd County. He won only 5% of the vote against Hillary Clinton's 94% in the primaries. But until recently they did love Democrats. In the 2004 election John Kerry won the county with a 25-point margin. In 2008, John McCain took it by 2 points – the first time a Republican had won Floyd in living memory. That's to say following hurricane Katrina, the failure in Iraq, the collapse of the economy and the unravelling in Afghanistan, a sizeable portion of Floyd's voters took a look at Obama and decided that this time, for the first time, they would turn their back on the Democrats.

Back at the Feed My Sheep food ­pantry Cindy Hernandez has just picked up her groceries and is rifling through the secondhand clothes. She has no doubts about why Obama struggled in a county that is 98% white.

"That's because Obama was black. Let's get real," she says with a laugh.

"You mean people are prejudiced in eastern Kentucky?" asks Tom Nelson, the church's pastor who seems genuinely upset by what she said.

"You do not believe that?" replies Hernandez.

"I know some are, but not altogether," says Nelson. Fearing I should get the wrong impression Nelson suggested I talk to Price.

"I voted for McCain," says Price. "Because, well I voted for the old white guy. At least he's American." A few days earlier, the chairman of the Republican party in Jackson County, Arkansas, insisted electing Obama is destroying America in the same way electing Nelson Mandela destroyed South Africa. "Handing it over to the wrong people."

To ask where racism ends and politics begins in all of this is to set up a false dichotomy – America's politics has always been steeped in race and racism is a political force. The psychic scars of centuries are not removed in one election or as a result of one person. Indeed they may be deepened and made even more raw as a result of them.

The movement that has emerged to oppose him is almost exclusively white. In Little Rock, Arkansas, a city that is 40% black in a state that is 80% white, an anti-tax Tea party rally of several hundred had not one black attendee – apart from an anti-abortion speaker. The doubts they have cast about his Christianity and his birthplace (some claim Obama wasn't born in America) are really proxies for race – a bid to cast him as the ultimate "other". At an anti-healthcare reform rally in Washington in September several racist placards were spotted. One bore a picture a lion and the words, "The zoo has an African lion and the White House has a lyin' African"; another said "'Cap' Congress and 'trade' Obama back to Kenya".

But while racism might inform the intensity and shape the nature of the attacks on Obama they do not drive them. Obama's administration has raised taxes on the rich, expanded public spending, pledged to withdraw troops from Iraq and argued – if only halfheartedly – for universal healthcare. Conservatives have good reasons to be against him that have nothing to do with race.

"It's hard to specify a single source for the opposition," says Rev Wendell Griffin, a Baptist pastor and judge in Arkansas. "Part of the opposition to Obama is philosophical. There is in every society a strand of thought that glories in the myth of rugged individualism [and] he challenges that notion. He believes that the idea of a government is to have a concern not just for the individual but for the society as a whole. Some people don't like that." Griffin went on to list racism, economic desperation and the fact that he is no longer an underdog as other reasons.

His rightwing dissenters may be eccentric and racially exclusive but they have also proved highly effective. They have a populist message that excoriates Bush and the bank bailouts as well as Obama and a TV channel – Fox News – to which they are devoted and which is happy to promote their work. A recent poll showed that if the Tea party – a ­protest movement set up earlier this year to rally opposition to the stimulus bill and "big government" – were a party it would beat the Republican party.

Every week a "9/12" group meet at the non-alcoholic All Bar None in Lexington, Kentucky. This was an initiative started by Fox presenter Glenn Beck, in order to return America to the values of patriotism and godliness that he says America embraced the day after 11 September. Fourteen showed up the night I was there. A straw poll revealed that none of them blamed Obama exclusively for America heading in the wrong direction, with all preferring to blame the entire political establishment. Half believed Obama is a Muslim, just one thought he's a Christian and the overwhelming majority thought he was a communist, socialist and Marxist. None believe that he was born in America; most said they did not know.

"A lot of information about Obama's background is missing," says Abigail Billings. "The media in America is not doing any research. They're not asking any questions. They're not reporting any longer. They're now opinionated talk shows. They're no longer offering factual news coverage." They all watch Fox News.

Many on America's left are also ­disgruntled with Obama. They believe the healthcare reform, without a public option, will be inadequate, that the war in Afghanistan will unravel, the stimulus bill was insufficient to kick-start the economy and that his economic team is being run by Wall Street. But unlike the right they have so far failed to turn their disillusionment into a potent political force.

"I'd have thought in the past that if Charles Manson ran against a Republican in Floyd County he would win," says Bartley. "But Charles Manson could beat Barack Obama here right now. Thousands of miners out of work, the entire local economy in the tank. But he's got a couple of years where he could turn this round. If he does that he could win. If he doesn't, Charles Manson could come in and win."

Part one of Gary Younge's documentary Opposing Obama will air 1 February on BBC World Service at 10am, 3pm and 8pm GMT

• By Noah Shachtman noah.shachtman@gmail.com
• January 8, 2010            

The Taliban not only has the “momentum” after the most successful year in its campaign against the United States and the Kabul government. “The Afghan insurgency can sustain itself indefinitely,” according to a briefing from Major General Michael Flynn, the top U.S. intelligence officer in the country. “The Taliban retains [the] required partnerships to sustain support, fuel legitimacy and bolster capacity.”

And if that isn’t enough, Flynn also warns that “time is running out” for the American-lead International Security Assistance Force. “Regional instability is rapidly increasing and getting worse,” the report says.

Since General Stanley McChrystal took over as top commander in Afghanistan, there have been a series of dark appraisals about the state of the war. In August, McChrystal warned of an “urgent need for a significant change to our strategy and the way that we think and operate.” A report recently obtained by NBC News said Afghanistan’s security forces won’t be ready to fight the Taliban for years — if ever. Earlier this week, Flynn issued a white paper complaining that “eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy.”

But Flynn’s December 23rd presentation on the “State of the Insurgency: Trends, Intentions and Objectives” may be the gloomiest public assessment of the war yet. The “loosely organized” Taliban is “growing more cohesive” and “increasingly effective.” The insurgents now have their own “governors” installed in 33 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces. And the “strength and ability of [that] shadow governance increasing,” according to the presentation. The Taliban’s “organizational capabilities and operational reach are qualitatively and geographically expanding.”

Improvised bomb “events” have nearly tripled since 2007 — 7228 this year, compared to 2718 two years ago. The bombs have grown bigger — the majority are now 25 pounds or more. “80 to 90 percent” of them are made with homemade fertilizer, rather than military ordnance. That makes it much harder to track and block the distribution of the bomb-making material. Add to that steady supply of cash, thanks to the drug trade and the corrupt Kabul government, and a glut of weapons and ammunition,” and it becomes clear why, in Flynn’s words, “the insurgency is confident…  looking toward post-ISAF Afghanistan.”

The presentation also cast doubt on some of the war’s stated central aims. The Obama administration has repeatedly said that additional troops are necessary to prevent a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan — which would then allow Al Qaeda the re-establigh its safe haven there. According to interviews with detainees, however, the insurgents “view Al Qaeda as a handicap – a view that is increasingly prevalent.” The Taliban feel they have to “manage [the] relationship with AQ to avoid alienating Afghan population, but encourage support from [the] global jihad network.”

Flynn’s presentation also, indirectly, warns that one of the central U.S. tactics in Pakistan — drone strikes against suspected militants — could backfire. “violations of Pakistan sovereignty may contribute to radicalizing the population and diminishes credibility of the GoP [Government of Pakistan].” Such violations “demonstrat[e] an inability of the government; perception they cannot protect their own; exacerbates anti-western sentiment.”

Within military circles, there’s a sense that Flynn may be underplaying recent American successes in Helmand province and elsewhere. And Flynn does note that there’s still hope for the American effort in the region. “We have a key advantage – [the] Taliban is not a popular movement (yet),” the report says. What’s more, there are “persistent fissures among insurgent leadership at local levels” and an “over-reliance on external support.”

Exploiting those fissures — and beating the Taliban — will “requir[e] operating / thinking in a fundamentally new way.”

WASHINGTON (AP) The suicide bomber who killed eight people inside a CIA base in eastern Afghanistan last week was a Jordanian doctor recruited by Jordanian intelligence, a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a foreign government official confirmed Monday.

The bombing killed seven CIA employees_ four officers and three contracted security guards_ and a Jordanian intelligence officer, Ali bin Zaid, according to a second former U.S. intelligence official. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the incident.

The former senior intelligence official and the foreign official said the bomber was Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, a 36-year old doctor from Zarqa, Jordan. NBC News was the first to first report the bomber's identity and that he was a double-agent.

He was arrested more than a year ago by Jordanian intelligence and was thought to have been persuaded to support U.S. and Jordanian efforts against al-Qaida, according to the NBC report. He was invited to Camp Chapman, a tightly secured CIA forward base in Khost province on the fractious Afghan-Pakistan frontier, because he was offering urgent information to track down Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's right-hand man.

Hajj Yacoub, a self-proclaimed spokesman for the Taliban in Pakistan, identified the bomber on Muslim militant Web sites as Hammam Khalil Mohammed, also known as Abu-Dujana al-Khurasani. There was no independent confirmation of Yacoub's statement.

Al-Balawi was not searched for bombs when he got onto Camp Chapman, according to both former officials and a current intelligence official.

He detonated the explosive shortly after his debriefing began, according to one of the former intelligence officials. In addition to the eight dead, there were at least six wounded, according to the CIA.

The former senior intelligence official said one of the big unanswered questions is why so many people were present for the debriefing – the interview of the source – when the explosive was detonated.

A half-dozen former CIA officers told The Associated Press that in most cases, only one or two agency officers would typically meet with a possible informant along with an interpreter. Such small meetings would normally be used to limit the danger and the possible exposure of the identities of both officers and informants.

An online jihadist magazine in September 2009 posted an interview with al-Balawi, according to SITE Monitoring Service, a terrorist watch group that reads and translates messages on extremist forums.

SITE said Monday that al-Balawi used his pseudonym – identified as Khorsani – in the postings, describing how he rose through the ranks of online jihadist forums. He said he went to Afghanistan to fight, and he exhorted others to do violence.

"No words are more eloquent than those proven by acts, so that if that Muslim survives, he will be one who proves his words with acts. If he dies in the Cause of Allah, he will grant his words glory that will be permanent marks on the path to guide to jihad, with permission from Allah," al-Balawi wrote, according to SITE's translation.

A Jordanian government official, who was not authorized to speak to the press, said the Jordanian government has no connection to the bomber. The official said the Jordanian government had not verified whether the bomber was Jordanian.

The Taliban's Yacoub said the Jordanian intelligence officer, bin Zaid, was helping the CIA recruit agents to spy on al-Qaida in Afghanistan. Bin Zaid allegedly recruited the suicide bomber.

Jordan's state news agency Petra identified bin Zaid as an army officer on a humanitarian mission in Afghanistan. It said he was killed Wednesday evening "as a martyr while performing the sacred duty of the Jordanian forces in Afghanistan." It did not provide other details.

The Jordanian military released a brief statement acknowledging bin Zaid had been killed in Afghanistan, but it did not mention he was working with Jordanian intelligence or cooperating with the CIA.

Bin Zaid's family declined to comment.

Bin Zaid is known to be a relative of Jordan's King Abdullah II. He held the title of sharif, or nobleman, which was bestowed upon him by the Jordanian monarch.

King Abdullah and other members of the royal family received Bin Zaid's body, which was repatriated Saturday in a private ceremony. His wake was held in the Royal Palace.

The death of bin Zaid underscored the close relationship between the Jordanian intelligence service and the CIA in the U.S. global war on terrorism.

Jordan is known to have acted as a proxy jailer for the CIA in 2004, when Jordanian intelligence officers interrogated several al-Qaida militants who were flew in on rendition flights from Guantanamo Bay.

The New York-based Human Rights Watch and several other watchdogs rebuked Jordan for what they described then as systematic torture of the detainees. Jordan denied the link to the CIA and the abuse allegations.

A key U.S. ally in the Mideast, Jordan also contributed valuable intelligence data to the United States, which helped track down the former al-Qaida in Iraq leader, Jordanian-born Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in 2006. Al-Zarqawi was killed in a U.S. airstrike in Iraq in June that year.

Christopher Hitchens:

See also Jeff Sharlet’s coverage of evangelicals in the military

Foreign secretary claims security would be harmed by disclosing CIA files on UK involvement in abuse of terror suspects abroad

• Richard Norton-Taylor and Afua Hirsch
• guardian.co.uk, Sunday 13 December 2009 18.41 GMT
• Article history

Undated handout photo of Binyam Mohamed. Photograph: PA

Efforts will be stepped up tomorrow to suppress evidence of British involvement in the unlawful treatment of a UK resident, Binyam Mohamed, who says he was tortured in Pakistan, Morocco, and Afghanistan before being secretly rendered to Guantánamo Bay.

The foreign secretary, David Miliband, is appealing against six high court judgments ruling that CIA information on Mohamed's treatment, and what MI5 and MI6 knew about it, must be disclosed.

In a case which lawyers on all sides agree is unprecedented, counsel for the Guardian and other media organisations, Mohamed and two civil rights groups, Liberty and Justice, will argue tomorrow that the public interest in disclosing the role played by British and US agencies in unlawful activities far outweighs any claim about potential threats to national security.

Miliband's lawyers will tell Britain's three most senior appeal court judges, led by the lord chief justice, Igor Judge, that if the CIA material is disclosed the US might cut off the supply of intelligence to the UK, thus harming national security.

Since losing in the high court, David Millband has instructed one of the country's most expensive advocates, Jonathan Sumption QC, to represent his position. Sumption, who recently withdrew his application to become a justice of the supreme court after reports of "hostility" from other judges, is reported to earn up to £3m a year and is described by experts as one of the bar's "most formidable" opponents".

Sources say the decision to instruct Sumption comes amid growing concern within the government at the high court rulings, which officials had confidently expected to be in their favour.

In their six judgments, Lord Justice Thomas and Justice Lloyd Jones repeatedly challenged Miliband's claims. It is the first case in which the high court has questioned head-on claims by a government that evidence must be withheld on grounds of national security.

At the heart of the dispute is a seven-paragraph CIA document that the British government insists must remain secret. The two high court judges, who have seen the document, insist it does not contain any sensitive intelligence material. "What is contained in those seven redacted paragraphs gives rise to an arguable case of torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment".

The judges stated after hearing arguments put by Miliband's lawyers: "It was in our view difficult to conceive that a democratically elected and accountable government could possibly have any rational objection to placing into the public domain such a summary of what its own officials reported as to how a detainee was treated by them and which made no disclosure of sensitive intelligence matters."

They added: "Indeed we did not consider that a democracy governed by the rule of law would expect a court in another democracy to suppress a summary of the evidence contained in reports by its own officials, or officials of another state, where the evidence was relevant to allegations of torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, politically embarrassing though it might be".

The two high court judges continued: "The suppression of reports of wrongdoing by officials in circumstances which cannot in any way affect national security is inimical to the rule of law," they ruled.

"A vital public interest requires ... that a summary of the most important evidence relating to the involvement of the British security services in wrongdoing be placed in the public domain ... Championing the rule of law, not subordinating it, is the cornerstone of democracy," they added.

The CIA information includes an account given to British intelligence "whilst [Mohamed] was held in Pakistan ... prior to his interview by an officer of the security service", the judges revealed earlier this year. The officer, known only as Witness B, is being investigated by the Metropolitan police for "possible criminal wrongdoing".

Miliband's claim that Britain's intelligence relationship would be jeopardised "lacks credibility on its face", the judges added.

The Guardian and other newspaper and broadcasting media groups argue that there is no wider public interest to be taken into account in the case than "open justice, the rule of law and democratic accountability".

Miliband was accused in the high court of wanting to suppress information about CIA activities even though details had already been disclosed by the Obama administration. Evidence that Miliband still wanted kept secret related to the question why "it was impossible to believe that President Obama would take action against the United Kingdom", the judges said.

Lawyers acting for the foreign secretary point to a letter sent by the CIA to MI6 in April, saying that if British judges ordered the information at issue to be disclosed the US might reassess its intelligence-sharing relationship with the UK. "The evidence that disclosure would cause serious harm to national security is overwhelming," Miliband's lawyers claim.

They point to a law lords ruling last year that the Serious Fraud Office could not pursue corruption allegations over arms sales by BAE Systems, Britain's biggest weapons maker, to Saudi Arabia because the Saudi government had threatened to stop intelligence-sharing with Britain. The case, in which Sumption also represented the government, has been described by critics as weakening the UK's reputation for observing the rule of law.