US Military Turns Building 'Used By Islamic State' In Libya Into A Giant Hole — Kills Innocents(Video)

As many as 43 people reported killed including Noureddine Chouchane, a Tunisian national said to be involved in a number of terror attacks in Tunisia. Two kidnapped Serbs were among some of the victims at the location.

Crater where an "ISIS-controlled" building once stood in western Libya. (Screen capture from YouTube video.)

By Ahmed Elumami and Aidan Lewis
U.S. warplanes launched air strikes against a suspected Islamic State training camp in western Libya on Friday, killing more than 40 people, likely including a militant connected to two deadly attacks last year in neighboring Tunisia.

It was the second U.S. air strike in three months against Islamic State in Libya, where the hardline Islamist militants have exploited years of chaos following Muammar Gaddafi's 2011 overthrow to build up a presence on the southern shores of the Mediterranean Sea.

The Pentagon said it had targeted an Islamic State training camp. The facility in the city of Sabratha was linked to Noureddine Chouchane, a Tunisian blamed by his native country for attacks last year on a Tunis museum and the Sousse beach resort, which killed dozens of tourists.

"Destruction of the camp and Chouchane's removal will eliminate an experienced facilitator and is expected to have an immediate impact on ISIL's ability to facilitate its activities in Libya, including recruiting new ISIL members, establishing bases in Libya, and potentially planning external attacks on U.S. interests in the region," the Pentagon said, using an acronym for Islamic State, also known as ISIS or Daesh.

U.S. officials said Chouchane is most likely dead but White House spokesman Josh Earnest said he could not yet confirm the results of the air assault. He said the raid showed U.S. willingness to fight Islamic State.

"It's an indication that the president will not hesitate to take these kinds of forceful, decisive actions," Earnest said.

In Libya, photos released by the municipal authorities showed a massive crater in gray earth. Several wounded men lay bandaged in hospital.

The mayor of Sabratha, Hussein al-Thwadi, told Reuters the planes hit a building in the city's Qasr Talil district, home to many foreigners.

Locals officials said 43 people were killed.

The strikes targeted a house in a residential district west of the center, municipal authorities said in a statement.

The house had been rented to foreigners including Tunisians suspected of belonging to Islamic State, and medium-caliber weapons including machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades had been found in the rubble, the statement said.

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Russia’s Human Rights Abuses in the Dagestan Insurgency — Report

Local residents cleaning up the debris of a house destroyed in a counterinsurgency operation in Novyi Agachaul,
Dagestan. (Photo by Varvara Pakhomenko

By Human Rights Watch
For more than a decade, Russian security forces in Dagestan, a southern republic of the Russian Federation, have been battling an armed insurgency conducted by an array of Islamist militant groups which were until recently affiliated to the Caucasian Emirate, but are now increasingly pledging allegiance to the Islamic State (also known as ISIS). Both the Caucasian Emirate and ISIS have been banned by Russia’s Supreme Court as “terrorist” organizations. The insurgents have committed numerous lethal attacks against state officials, law enforcement and security forces, and civilians.

Human Rights Watch condemns attacks on civilians and recognizes that the Russian government has a duty to prevent attacks, pursue the perpetrators and bring those responsible to account. Attacks on civilians, public officials, and police and security forces are serious crimes. Russia, like any government, has an obligation to investigate and prosecute such crimes and to do so while respecting Russian and international human rights law.

Regrettably, law enforcement and security forces involved in counterinsurgency in Dagestan often do not respect or adhere to these laws, and counterinsurgency efforts in Dagestan have been marked by a wide range of serious human rights violations. This report documents violations that took place mostly between 2012 and 2014. It also describes some attacks by insurgents on civilians that took place just prior to and during that time. It is based on five Human Rights Watch fact-finding missions to Dagestan in 2013, 2014, and 2015.

In countering the insurgency, the authorities have cast an excessively wide net by essentially treating Salafis (adherents of Salafism, a fundamentalist interpretation of Sunni Islam that is increasingly popular in Dagestan) as criminal suspects without charging them with any specific offense. During the special counterterrorism operations Human Rights Watch documented, law-enforcement personnel have forcibly displaced civilians leaving them homeless; destroyed or damaged civilian property, for which most owners have not received compensation; and in some cases blown up homes of families of suspected insurgents, claiming they were detonating bombs stored there.

This report documents numerous cases in which federal and local police and security forces detained suspects using excessive violence and forcibly disappeared them or held them incommunicado in undisclosed locations without access to family or lawyers. In some cases documented by Human Rights Watch, family members or lawyers later found the detainees in official custody, and some detainees alleged they had been tortured. In the case of some enforced disappearances documented by Human Rights Watch the families still do not know the whereabouts or fate of their relatives. Police beat some detainees severely to compel them to provide confessions, testimony, and, in one case, to pressure a man to provide a DNA sample. In many cases documented by Human Rights Watch, authorities denied detainees access to lawyers of their own choosing.

This 97-page report also shows how lawyers and human rights advocates who defend Salafis or other people targeted in counterinsurgency efforts, and journalists who investigate such issues, face serious threats to their lives and well-being.

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Invisible War: Russia’s Abusive Response to the Dagestan Insurgency

Reprinted with permission from Human Rights Watch.

Why Israel Lost: Israel's Military Commanders Decided They Should Declare Victory and Withdraw While They Could

Masked Palestinian militants from Islamic Jihad run with homemade rockets on the outskirts of Gaza City
to put in place before later firing them into Israel - January, 2009. (Photo by Amir Farshad Ebrahimi)

By Paul Rogers
A new, seventy-two-hour ceasefire in Gaza began to take effect on the morning of 5 August 2014. Whether or not it lasts, both the Israeli government and the Hamas leadership will need to claim success after twenty-eight days of bitter conflict that has left more than 1,800 Palestinians killed and thousands injured. Israeli politicians are saying that the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) have been able to withdraw from Gaza following the destruction of the infiltration tunnels, and that the air-force is still able to hit targets throughout the territory. The implication is that Israel has good cause to claim success.

A closer look suggests otherwise. Three incidents on particular days during the war indicate why.

The first was twelve days into the war, 20 July, when the IDF was moving ground-troops into Gaza, aiming partly to continue destroying rocket-launchers but also to uncover the tunnels. On that day alone, the elite Golani brigade lost thirteen men killed and well over fifty injured. The dead included a battalion deputy commander and the wounded the brigade’s commanding officer, Colonel Ghassan Alian (see “Gaza: Context and Consequences”, Oxford Research Group, 31 July 2014). The overall level of resistance, and especially the abilities of the Hamas paramilitaries, came as a shock to the IDF, even as it was coming to realise that the tunnels constituted a far more serious problem than expected (see "Israel vs Hamas, a war of surprises", 24 July 2014).

The second incident, on 28 July, confirmed this. By then, large numbers of IDF personnel were in Gaza, the emphasis being very much on detecting and destroying the tunnels. Yet in the midst of this intensive operation a Hamas group was in an extraordinary way able to use an undetected tunnel, emerge on the Israeli side of the border, and attack a border post (not civilians in a kibbutz, Nahal Oz, as was reported at an early stage). The group killed five young Israeli soldiers, all sergeants aged 18 to 21, who were on a leadership-training exercise.

The third incident, on 30 July, was the shelling of a United Nations school in the Jabaliya refugee camp, which killed twenty-one people, including children asleep at the time (it was 4.40 a.m.) and injuring scores. The attack is reported to have been carried out using long-range artillery, and to have been aimed at Hamas paramilitaries threatening an IDF unit attempting to destroy a tunnel entrance, within 320 metres of the school. A UN review found that ten shells were fired over approximately five minutes, three hitting the school and two more striking within fifty metres (see Ben Hubbard & Jodi Rudoreren, “Questions over deadly barrage on shelter”, New York Times, 5 August 2014).

At the time the school was sheltering 3,220 people in a twenty-four-room complex, part of a much wider UN sheltering programme catering for 260,000 people in ninety schools and other facilities. It was one of six UN sites hit during the four-week war, provoking severe criticism that using inaccurate long-range artillery against targets in densely populated urban areas is (at least) highly questionable (see "America, Israel, Gaza: missiles and politics", 19 July 2014).

The three incidents together highlight major difficulties for the Israeli government. The shelter attack, for example, is amplified by the new social media. Even since the last major ground-assault into Gaza - Operation Cast Lead in 2008-09 - there has been rapid development of instant smartphone video-recording and distribution techniques.

The effect is twofold: to spread directly and worldwide graphic images of the impact on civilians, and to make western media outlets more likely to show that same impact in greater detail. Support for the war inside Israel has remained strong throughout, but the country's reputation has suffered considerably across the world, and some major western news outlets that would normally be broadly supportive express huge doubts about the long-term consequences of Israel's assault (see ("Israel and the world: us and them", Economist, 1 August 2014).

The war beneath

Even so, it might at first sight seem to be stretching it to talk of Israel “losing” this war. A fuller analysis does however point in this direction. Recall the stated initial aim, which was to suppress rocket fire. This has simply not happened, amid strong suspicions that Hamas and other militias may have expended less than half of their arsenals; the IDF itself estimates that Hamas still has 3,000 rockets available.

The second aim was to destroy the infiltration tunnels, and here too the operation is flawed. As of 3 August the IDF had uncovered forty tunnels, invariably with multiple access-points, far more than anticipated. Moreover, Hamas strategists will have prepared for just this kind of IDF operation. Building tunnels deep underground and completely back-filling the entry-points would make them difficult if not impossible to detect; with knowledge of the approximate location of the incomplete tunnels, they can be found, opened up and completed after the withdrawal of IDF forces.

It is not commonly realised just how remarkable are the tunnelling abilities that have been acquired in Gaza. A single infiltration tunnel ran for 2.4 kilometres, was twenty metres below ground level and utilized 350 tons of concrete in the lining (see Shane Harris, “Extensive Hamas Tunnel Network Points to Israeli Intelligence Failure”, Foreign Policy, 3 August 2014).

The explanation for this capability is in part the huge experience of building access tunnels for commercial transit under the border with Egypt over recent years. A report on Al-Jazeera says that over 500 of these tunnels have been constructed to connect Gaza with Egypt, with 7,000 Gazans employed in their building. Even if the IDF had destroyed all the Hamas infiltration tunnels, which is highly unlikely, constructing more would not take long. It is the knowledge and the trained workforce that count here.

In addition, perhaps the least recognized aspect of Protective Edge has been the level of Israeli casualties, which has far exceeded initial fears. (The Palestinian losses - over 1,800 killed and 9,000 injured, more than 68% of them civilians - are of course much greater). A comparison with Cast Lead in 2008-09 is instructive. In that operation the IDF killed 1,440 Palestinians over twenty-three days, and lost nine soldiers in combat, as well as four in a friendly-fire incident. This time the IDF has so far lost sixty-four soldiers in twenty-eight days. Military censorship has allowed reporting of deaths but very little information on injuries, but an informed Israeli source puts these at over 400.

The Jewish population of Israel is about one-tenth of the population of the UK. This means that the proportional losses in twenty-eight days exceed the UK’s combined losses in six years' fighting in Iraq and twelve years in Afghanistan. In a revealing assessment, a retired United States army major-general, Robert H Scales, and a defense analyst, Douglas A Ollivant, put it this way:

“Gone are the loose and fleeting groups of fighters seen during Operation Cast Lead in 2008. In Gaza they have been fighting in well-organized, tightly bound teams under the authority of well-connected, well-informed commanders. Units stand and fight from building hideouts and tunnel entrances. They wait for the Israelis to pass them by before ambushing them from the rear” (see “Terrorist armies fight smarter and deadlier than ever”, Washington Post, 4 August 2014).

Extending their analysis to wider regional developments, including the Islamists in Iraq, they deliver a somewhat bombastic concluding paragraph that (given the source) is still worth quoting:

“What we see in Gaza, Syria and Iraq should serve as a cautionary tale for any Beltway guru calling for a return of U.S. forces to Iraq. U.S. soldiers and Marines are still the global gold standard, but their comparative advantage has diminished. As terrorist groups turn into armies, pairing their fanatical dedication with newly acquired tactical skills, renewed intervention might generate casualties on a new scale - as the Israelis have been painfully learning.”

On 4 August, the Israelis first offered a short ceasefire and have now agreed a three-day pause. This contrasts markedly with prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s insistence - just a day earlier - on "completing the mission". Perhaps the sudden change stems from reports from Israeli ambassadors around the world, perhaps the Barack Obama administration finally exerted pressure. But perhaps it was the IDF commanders who had a much clearer vision than their political leaders and simply said they should declare victory and withdraw while they could.

Reprinted with permission from openDemocracy.

Secret Prisons, Disappearances and Torture — America After 9/11: European Court Passes Excoriating Judgment on the US 'War on terror'

By Rory O'Connell
On 24 July the European Court of Human Rights released two important Chamber judgments: Al Nashiri and Husayn (Abu Zubaydah) v Poland (applications 28761/11 and 7511/13). While Poland is the respondent state, the focus of the judgments is on detailing the profound abrogation of fundamental human-rights norms during the US-led global “war on terror”, announced in the aftermath of the September 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

Modern human-rights law protects a range of civil, cultural, economic, social and political rights. Most of the rights in the international system are subject to various qualifications: they can be limited to protect a legitimate public interest or subjected to special limits in times of emergency. There are few absolutes in this system but one remains: the prohibition on torture. The language used in international treaties permits no exception, as article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights exemplifies:

No one shall be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

While many rights are subject to exceptions, balancing, proportionate restrictions, such language does not appear in the texts on the prohibition of torture. Yet the unimaginable attacks on “9/11” provoked an unthinkable reaction—a determined effort by some democratic governments, most notably that of the US, to dilute the absolute prohibition on torture.

Still held

In the wake of “9/11”, the US government created a programme for the capture and interrogation of “high-value detainees” (HVD) in the “war on terror”. The applicants in these cases are two such detainees, alleged to be involved with the al-Qaeda network. Both are still held by the US in Guantanamo, more than a decade after their original detention.

Abu Zubaydah was alleged to be a leading member al-Qaeda when he was arrested in Pakistan in 2002, during an operation in which he was seriously wounded. His medical condition and mental health are reported to be extremely poor. Al Nashiri was captured in Dubai in 2002. He is accused of involvement in attacks including that on the USS Cole. He is facing trial, and a possible death sentence, in the US. In late 2002 and for most of 2003, the two men were detained at a secret facility in Poland.

Both were subjected to the HVD regime of the Central Intelligence Agency, details of which are catalogued in the documents, reports and news media canvassed by the court in its judgments. While much of this was known, as my colleague Fionnuala Ní Aoláin says, there is value in the “judicial articulation” of this process. Much of the often chilling information comes from a CIA background paper detailing the interrogation techniques.

The detainees were transported in jets operated by Jeppeson, a subsidiary of Boeing. They were carried shackled, blindfolded and hooded, not knowing where they were going. The detentions were unacknowledged, the details of the prisoners were kept secret (one expert says they were treated as “cargo”), and the flight plans were disguised. The flights criss-crossed a “spider’s web” of destinations including Morocco, Thailand and several European democracies, such as Poland, Romania and Lithuania. The creation of this network dates to the initial stages of the “war on terror”.

“Black hole”

The aim of the system of secret detention and transport was to maintain these detainees incommunicado in undisclosed locations where the rule of law—be it US law or international law—could not reach. The Guantanamo version of this was labelled a “legal black hole” by the UK judge Lord Steyn but these cases address such a black hole on the territory of a European democracy.

A CIA document published in 2009 and discussed in the case (Al Nashiri, paragraph 62) said:

Effective interrogation is based on the concept of using both physical and psychological pressures in a comprehensive, systematic and cumulative manner to influence HVD behaviour, to overcome a detainee’s resistance posture. The goal of interrogation was to create a state of learned helplessness and dependence.

The document described the processes involved clinically. Detention conditions included the use of white noise and constant lighting to disorient the detainee and ensure better security. “Conditioning techniques”—nudity, sleep deprivation and dietary manipulation—were intended to convince the detainee that he had “no control over basic human needs”. Sleep deprivation was achieved by vertically shackling the detainee, provided with a diaper for sanitary purposes.

The next stage was the application of “corrective techniques”—described as the insult slap, the abdominal slap, the facial hold and the attention grasp. Finally, the “coercive techniques” consisted of walling (being thrown against a flexible false wall), water-dousing, use of stress positions, wall-standing and cramped confinement in a box.

These “enhanced interrogation techniques” were authorised for use by the CIA interrogators. Al Nashiri was also subject to unauthorised techniques: use of a stiff brush to bathe him, blowing of smoke in his face, standing on his shackles and mock execution involving a handgun and a power drill. Both applicants were subjected to waterboarding.

Complicit

The European Court of Human Rights can hear cases brought by persons against a state party to the European Convention on Human Rights. The US is not such a state and so is not the official respondent in these cases. That is Poland—and the European court found that the Polish state was complicit in the system of secret prisons and torture, even if none of its officials had actively participated in the interrogations.

The US had operated a secret prison near a Polish airport. The procedures for landing the planes and transporting the prisoners were intended to ensure that no Polish national would be a witness. But they could not have been realised without the co-operation of senior Polish officials and military intelligence (the CIA preferred to work with military-intelligence services, as these were less likely to undergo civilian oversight).

The court pulls no punches in its characterisation of the treatment. The administration of George W Bush had notoriously sought to equivocate on the definition of torture. The elaborate detailing of “enhanced interrogation techniques” was meant to create a category of tactics that would not fall within the prohibition on torture. The European court had however little hesitation in finding that the techniques met the level of severity required for a finding of torture and that they were inflicted for definite purposes.

The court also found that the Polish authorities had failed to investigate the allegations of torture promptly or effectively. A Polish parliamentary committee had considered the allegations during a closed inquiry, which produced no statement other than a denial of anything “untoward” (Al Nashiri, para 128). A more elaborate inquiry by the prosecutor’s office had been plagued by delay and had not led to any prosecutions—or, indeed, any identification of suspects. The involvement in incommunicado detention was also a breach of the right to liberty (convention article 5) and the right to respect for private and family life (article 8).

The transfer of the applicants outside the territory of Poland also violated article 6, the right to a fair trial. A convention state may not permit the removal of a person to another state, where this would result in a flagrant breach of article 6. In the context of the process for trying persons in Guantanamo—before a military commission, itself in breach of US law and where evidence obtained by torture might be admissible—removal to face such a “trial” would constitute such a contravention.

The removal of Al Nashiri violated the prohibition on the death penalty. His trial is due to begin in September; the judgment requires Poland to use all its influence to prevent capital punishment were he to face conviction.

The court also found that Poland had failed to co-operate with its hearing. It had requested information and offered guarantees of confidentiality. It noted that it had a long history of dealing with sensitive information in cases involving national security and that as a court it was entitled to be master of its own procedures.

In light of the numerous, serious violations the court ordered Poland to pay €100,000 to each applicant in respect of non-pecuniary damage.

Rights reaffirmed

The court’s ruling is welcome for many reasons. It unequivocally reaffirms the importance of the rights to freedom from torture, to personal liberty, to a fair trial and privacy. It condemns torture, disappearances and secret prisons.

Given the secrecy of the programme, the reluctance of the Polish state to co-operate fully and the isolation of the applicants incarcerated in Guantanamo, the court might have had difficulties in determining the facts. It however rose to this challenge, relying on the wealth of information in a series of reports—US, European (the Marty reports of 2007 and 2011 to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, the Fava and Flautre reports of the European Parliament), media and NGO—to make reasonable assumptions and to evidence its conclusions.

The court has not only restated the absolute prohibition of torture but has also made an important contribution to defending the public’s right to know. And more may yet emerge. This week sees the release of the summary of a US Senate report on the CIA programme. There is a related case before the European court against Romania (application 33234/12). And there are continuing unanswered questions about the role of the United Kingdom in the “war on terror”.

Reprinted with permission from openDemocracy.

All Out War and Concentration Camps Are Recommendations Reportedly Offered to the Post-Coup Ukraine Government by the Rand Corporation Think Tank

Screen capture from the alleged Rand Corporation instructions to the post-coup
Ukraine government.

RELATED STORY: Rand Corporation denies it authored "memo" for Ukraine government

Recommendations Offered to the Ukraine Government
by the Rand Corporation Think Tank
 Click the arrow (<) on the left side to view the document without thumbnails.

Brazilian Colonel Found Dead A Month After Confessing to Torture

Colonel Paulo Malhães giving his deposition at the Brazilian National Truth Commission
in March 2014. (Photo by Marcelo Oliveira / ASCOM – CNV)

By Fernanda Canofre, Translated by Fernanda Canofre
At the end of March, retired Colonel Paulo Malhães arrived at the building of the Brazilian National Truth Commission (CNV) sitting in a wheelchair and wearing sunglasses. He was about to begin one of the most powerful depositions to be heard so far on the country’s period of dictatorship, which endured from March 31, 1964 to March 15, 1985.

Just one month later, on April 25, 2014, the confessed torturer and killer was found dead. According to information released by the police, Malhães was held hostage by three men alongside his wife and an employee at his home in Nova Iguaçu, Rio de Janeiro.

The police are considering the theories of destroying files, vengeance and armed robbery – since the robbers made off with the colonel’s personal gun collection – as probable motives for the crime. The coroner's report pointed to death by natural causes. The family has already confirmed that Malhães, 76, suffered from a cardiac condition. The colonel's wife and his employee were left alive.

Still, the CNV asked that the federal police join in the investigation of the case.

Confess, but never regret
According to information published by Carta Capital magazine , during “private depositions” Malhães had testified that he feared for his life. The colonel refused to provide names of government agents who worked with him during the military regime, claiming that “he could not let slip the names because he would be putting his life at risk”.

At the depositions given to Sao Paulo’s State Truth Commission and to the National Truth Commission, Malhães confessed and described the practice of torture, murder and the disposal of bodies – which included removing dental arches and mutilating bodies to make identification more difficult. Last February, he took responsibility for the disappearance of the body of state deputy Rubens Paiva [en], a well-known case from the dictatorship era, but shortly after took back his testimony.

When asked how many people he had killed, the colonel coldly replied, “As many as were necessary”. Since the beginning of the CNV's mission in 2012, Malhães was the fifth agent to testify in front of a public audience, the second one to admit the recurrent practice of torture and the first one to confess his part in such crimes.

He never admitted regret. On the contrary, as soon as the hearing session began, he declared:

As I do with everything in life, I gave the very best of myself to this job. […] I fulfilled my duty. I don’t regret it.

‘Taking justice into your own hands’
Malhães’ death forced Brazil to see its dictatorship as an age that, perhaps, hasn't ended. It also gave rise to a debate about the criminals of the recent past who never faced punishment. The Amnesty Law, still in effect in the country, does not allow torturers to be brought to trial.

Blogger and activist Douglas Belchior – best know as Negro Belchior – said he felt sorry for the torturer’s death, recalling the wave of popular justice that spread throughout Brazilian cities at the beginning of 2014:

Was it a settling of accounts undertaken by resistance groups related to the dictatorship? Was it revenge by a torture victim's family and friends? I don’t believe so. It is more reasonable to imagine that it is an action with the sole intention of intimidating possible whistleblowers of the future on the atrocities committed by official forces of the state during the years of repression.

But I want to talk here about the message that stays: the idea of taking justice into your own hands. Murders, torture, disappearances and lynching, more frequent each time and trivialized, beginning with police actions, of which we aren't lacking examples. And that now are promoted by the “people”.

The fascist discourse makes itself stronger: “It is the absence of law! The criminal does whatever he wants to do and the population feels unprotected. The tendency is to take justice into your own hands”.

Reprinted with permission from Global Voices.