Anyone linked to Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate should be treated like al-Qaida or Taliban, interrogators told US authorities describe the main Pakistani intelligence service as a terrorist organisation in secret files obtained by the Guardian. Recommendations to interrogators at Guantánamo Bay rank the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) alongside al-Qaida, Hamas and Hezbollah in Lebanon as threats. Being linked to any of these groups is an indication of terrorist or insurgent activity, the documents say. “Through associations with these … organisations, a detainee may have provided support to al-Qaida or the Taliban, or engaged in hostilities against US or coalition forces [in Afghanistan],” says the document, dated September 2007 and called the Joint Task Force Guantánamo Matrix of Threat Indicators for Enemy Combatants. It adds that links to these groups is evidence that an individual poses a future threat. The revelation that the ISI is considered as much of a threat as al-Qaida and the Taliban will cause fury in Pakistan. It will further damage the already poor relationship between US intelligence services and their Pakistani counterparts, supposedly key allies in the hunt for Osama bin Laden and other Islamist militants in south Asia. Relations between America and Pakistan have been tense for years. A series of high-level attempts have been made in recent weeks to improve ties after the American CIA contractor Raymond Davis killed two Pakistanis in January . In November the Guardian published evidence that US intelligence services had been receiving reports of ISI support for the Taliban in Afghanistan for many years. The reports were frequent and detailed, if unconfirmed and sometimes speculative. The Threat Indicator Matrix is used to decide who among the hundreds of Guantánamo detainees can be released. The ISI is listed among 36 groups including Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led by al-Qaida deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahiri; the Sabotage Battalion of Chechen Martyrs; the Iranian intelligence services; and the Muslim Brotherhood. Though the document dates from 2007 it is unlikely the ISI has been removed from the current Threat Indicator Matrix. In classified memos outlining the background of 700 prisoners at Guantánamo there are scores of references, apparently based on intelligence reporting, to the ISI supporting, co-ordinating and protecting insurgents fighting coalition forces in Afghanistan, or even assisting al-Qaida. Pakistani authorities have consistently denied any links with insurgents in Afghanistan or al-Qaida. The documents detail extensive collaboration between the ISI and US intelligence services. Many of those transferred to Guantánamo Bay, including senior al-Qaida figures such as Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, who planned the 9/11 attacks, and Abu Farraj al-Libbi, one of the group’s most capable operators, were arrested with Pakistani help or turned over to American authorities by Pakistani intelligence services. The memos rely on a variety of sources to make their case. Though the broad argument for releasing or detaining an individual has sometimes been made public during military tribunals at Guantánamo, the material underpinning those arguments has remained secret until now. Sources for that material include the interrogation of the detainee whose release is being discussed, as well as the records of the questioning of hundreds of other prisoners. Intelligence from elsewhere, including foreign spy agencies such as the Afghan National Directorate of Security, appears to have been extensively used. There is little independent corroboration for the reporting and some of the information is likely to have been obtained under duress. Systematic human rights abuses have been recorded at Guantánamo. The details of the alleged ISI support for insurgents at the very least give an important insight into the thinking of American strategists and senior decision-makers who would have been made aware of the intelligence as it was gathered. Many documents refer to alleged ISI activities in 2002 or 2003, long before the policy shift in 2007 that saw the Bush administration become much more critical of the Pakistani security establishment and distance itself from Pervez Musharraf, who was president. One example is found among reasons given by Guantánamo officials for the continued detention of Harun Shirzad al-Afghani , a veteran militant who arrived there in June 2007. His file states he is believed to have attended a meeting in August 2006 at which Pakistani military and intelligence officials joined senior figures in the Taliban, al-Qaida, the Lashkar-e-Taiba group responsible for the 2008 attack in Mumbai and the Hezb-e-Islami group led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The meeting was to discuss operations in Afghanistan against coalition forces, says the memo. It cites an unidentified letter in the possession of US intelligence services describing the meeting which, it says, ended with a decision by the various insurgent factions “to increase terrorist operations in the Kapisa, Kunar, Laghman and Nangarhar provinces [of Afghanistan], including suicide bombings, mines, and assassinations”. Harun Shirzad al-Afghani was reported to have told his interrogators that in 2006 an unidentified Pakistani ISI officer paid 1m Pakistani rupees to a militant to transport ammunition to a depot within Afghanistan jointly run by al-Qaida, the Taliban and Hekmatyar’s faction. According to Afghani, who was captured in the eastern Nangarhar province, the depot contained “about 800 rockets, AK-47 and machine gun ammunition, mortars, RPGs [rocket propelled grenades] and mines” and had been established “in preparation for a spring 2007 offensive”. More than 230 western troops were killed in Afghanistan in the course of 2007; 99 between January and June. A separate document about a 42-year-old Afghan detainee cites intelligence reports claiming that in early 2005 Pakistani officials were present at a meeting chaired by Mullah Mohammed Omar, the supreme chief of the Taliban, of an array of senior insurgents in Quetta, the Pakistani city where it has long been believed the Taliban leadership are based. “The meeting included high-level Taliban leaders … [and] representatives from the Pakistani government and the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate,” the document says. It adds: “Mullah Omar told the attendees that they should not co-operate with the new infidel government (in Afghanistan) and should keep attacking coalition forces.” Many references are more historic. A memo about another detainee, Abdul Kakal Hafiz , cites intelligence that in January 2003, insurgents in the Zabul province of Afghanistan received a month of training in explosives, bomb-making and assassination techniques from “three Pakistani military officers”. The training was apparently “conducted in preparation for a planned spring campaign to assassinate westerners”. A Red Cross water engineer, Ricardo Mungia, was shot and killed by insurgents on 27 March 2003 in Oruzgan province. The murder had a major effect on humanitarian and development programmes in south and eastern Afghanistan and was a huge setback for western-led efforts. According to the files on an Afghan known simply as Hamidullah , captured by Afghan national army soldiers in July 2003, intelligence “reporting” from December 2002 “linked detainee to a Pakistani ISI initiative to create an office in [the Pakistani frontier city of] Peshawar combining elements of the Taliban, HIG [Hekmatyar's group] and al-Qaida”. The memo said that intelligence indicated “the goal of the initiative was to plan and execute various terrorist attacks in Afghanistan” including one on the HQ of foreign entities in Kabul in January 2003. Another file on a high-profile Afghan religious and political leader detained months after the initial invasion of Afghanistan and released in 2008 refers to ISI operations in the eastern province of Kunar during 2002 that were, the memo says, designed to destabilise the new Afghan government under Hamid Karzai, who had been installed as interim president by the US-led coalition. “In January 2002 ISI financed the activities of several factions … in Kunar … in order to destabilise the Afghan [government]. In March 2002 [the ISI] reportedly provided $12,000 … to finance military operations against the new government,” the document says. The file reveals that the detainee, Mullah Haji Rohullah , was working with the British government, and possibly MI6, when detained. “This detainee … had dealings with the United Kingdom and with the Pakistani [ISI],” says the memo, dated 17 June 2005. The documents show the varying interpretations by American officials of the apparent evidence of ISI involvement with insurgents in Afghanistan. There are repeated “analyst’s notes” in parentheses. Several in earlier documents stress that it is “rogue elements” of the ISI who actively support insurgents in Afghanistan. One describes how ” rogue elements of the ISI are known to have had sympathies for and provided support to anti-coalition militia. The most significant was sniper training and the use of remote control improvised explosive devices.” Another file from 2005 says that “rogue factions from the ISI have routinely pursued private interests and acted against the stated policy of the government of Pakistan “. The analysis that such operations were not sanctioned policy for the ISI was current among US and British intelligence officials as late as 2007. By 2008 the view of western services had changed and such caveats are rare in later documents. The files reveal much of the shadow war in Afghanistan fought out by secret services – a contemporary form of the 19th century Great Game. There are a series of references to Iranian intelligence; these again are unconfirmed. One intelligence report cited in the file on an Afghan called Khair Ulla Said Wali Khairkhwa , who arrived at Guantánamo in May 2002, refers to “a meeting initiated by Iran, possibly by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps” between Iranian officials and Taliban representatives near the Afghan-Iranian border in October 2001. The officials allegedly offered to broker a coalition between the Northern Alliance, which was allied with the west, and the Taliban in their fight against US intervention. According to the memo, the Iranian delegation “offered to open the borders to Arabs who wanted to cross into Afghanistan to fight against US and coalition forces”. Around 18 months after the fall of the Taliban, another memo claims, Iranian intelligence gave a former Taliban commander and Hekmatyar US$2m to fund “anti-coalition militia” activities. Citing further intelligence reports, the file says: “In December 2005, representatives of Ismail Khan, former governor of Herat and minister of water and power in Afghanistan, met with two Pakistanis and three Iranians to discuss the planning of terrorist acts and to create better lines of communication between the [Hekmatyar group] and Taliban.” This latter claim appears highly speculative as Khan is a long-term enemy of Hekmatyar and the Taliban – in 2009 he narrowly survived a suicide attack for which insurgents claimed responsibility. The Guantánamo files Guantánamo Bay Pakistan Afghanistan United States Jason Burke guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …
On World Malaria Day we take a look at the global figures and talk to the World Health Organisation about the importance of good quality data • Get the data April 25 is World Malaria Day . A disease that has affected the world and its people since the beginning of recorded human history, malaria remains an entrenched global health challenge. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), approximately half of the world’s population is at risk . But the global geography of malaria is increasingly disproportionate. The vast majority of malaria cases and malaria-related deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa, which the director-general of the WHO, Margaret Chan, has called ” the heartland of malaria .” Meanwhile, “outside Africa, the malaria map is shrinking, as more and more countries eliminate malaria from their territory,” says Chan. Malaria’s victims are also disproportionately children: the United Nations children’s fund (Unicef) estimates that 85 percent of those who die from malaria are children under 5 years of age . So which countries are hardest hit? Data on malaria is notoriously patchy. The WHO only began commissioning annual reports on the state of malaria in 2008, when Chan made data collection a priority : “To maintain momentum, results must be measured.” But because most of the world’s malaria deaths occur at home, in private clinics, or in informal health centres, data from government records dramatically under-reports the human cost of the disease. According to Richard Cibulskis, co-ordinator of the WHO’s global malaria programme, over 90% of the world’s malaria cases are likely to go unreported. “One of the issues is that the data systems are weakest in the places where malaria is the most common,” says Cibulskis. “For some countries in Africa, we don’t have any good data at all.” While only 117,704 malaria deaths were officially reported in government records for 2009, the WHO estimates that closer to 800,000 people died of the disease that year . Epidemiologists are currently hard at work preparing the next round of country-by-country estimates – a process that is long, controversial, and often heavily politicised. Some countries would prefer inflated malaria figures, while others would rather underplay the impact of the disease. In the meantime, to mark Monday’s focus on malaria, we’ve pulled out what we can from the most recent data – that in the 2010 World Malaria Report (pdf), released last December. The report provides estimates for the world’s 106 malaria-endemic countries and highlights progress – and shortcomings – on key international targets. Overall, the report lauds the recent “massive scale-up” in malaria-control programmes – including the distribution of mosquito nets. But it also says that 2009 saw at least three African countries – Rwanda, São Tome and Principe, and Zambia – witnessed a resurgence in malaria cases, demonstrating what the report called the “fragility of malaria control”. Some highlights from the data: Worldwide, there were 236,863,095 suspected malaria cases in 2009, nearly half of which – 111,095,796 – were recorded in south-east Asia Meanwhile, there were 81,735,305 “probable and confirmed” malaria cases in 2009, the vast majority of which – 68,925,435 – were recorded in Africa Uganda and Kenya were the countries with the highest absolute numbers of probable and confirmed malaria cases in 2009, with some 9.8 million and 8.1 million, respectively Of the world’s 117,704 in-patient malaria deaths in 2009, 111,885 occurred in Africa The Democratic Republic of the Congo recorded the highest number of in-patient malaria deaths – 21,168 – followed by Ivory Coast and Angola Note: This dataset only contains figures for officially recorded cases. New country-level estimates should be available within the next few months. The full data is below. What can you do with it? • Get the data Data summary Download the data • DATA: download the full spreadsheet More data Data journalism and data visualisations from the Guardian World government data • Search the world’s government data with our gateway Development and aid data • Search the world’s global development data with our gateway Can you do something with this data? • Flickr Please post your visualisations and mash-ups on our Flickr group • Contact us at data@guardian.co.uk • Get the A-Z of data • More at the Datastore directory • Follow us on Twitter • Like us on Facebook Development data Malaria Claire Provost guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …
Human rights campaigners report scores of arrests and injuries as crackdown escalates in Damascus and Deraa Syrian security forces and gunmen loyal to President Bashar al-Assad are reported to have shot at unarmed civilians and arrested scores more in the escalating crackdown on pro-democracy protests. A dawn attack in the Damascus suburb of Douma was combined with a communications blackout in the area, according to a human rights campaigner in the capital. Syrian troops and tanks also rolled into the southern town of Deraa, according to witnesses, although their accounts could not be independently confirmed. There were also fears of more clashes in nearby Nawa. The campaigner told Reuters: “There are injured people. Scores have been arrested. The security are repeating the same pattern in all the centres of the democratic uprising. They want to put down the revolution using the utmost brutality.” Residents in Deraa said hundreds of troops had moved in. “They were firing. Witnesses have told me that there have been five deaths so far and houses have become hospitals,” a caller named Mohsen told al-Jazeera by telephone. More than 350 people have been killed since the unrest began in Syria five weeks ago. The worst single day for casualties was Friday, with 112 deaths, according to human rights groups. On Sunday, 13 people died in the coastal town of Jabla as security forces moved in to a Sunni quarter after protests, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Syrian state TV said nine members of the security forces had been killed in the violence of recent days, seven in clashes with “armed gangs” in Nawa. On Monday, there were reports of bulldozers and military vehicles heading there. Thousands of people in the town called for the overthrow of Assad on Sunday at a funeral for protesters killed by security forces. Electricity and communications were cut off in parts of the town and residents, some armed, erected barriers in the streets. “Long live Syria. Down with Bashar!” mourners chanted during the funeral. “Leave, leave! The people want the overthrow of the regime.” Meanwhile, Syrian writers issued a declaration denouncing the crackdown. It was signed by 102 writers and journalists, in Syria and in exile, representing all the country’s main sects. It called on Syrian intellectuals “who have not broken the barrier of fear to make a clear stand. “We condemn the violent, oppressive practices of the Syrian regime against the protesters and mourn the martyrs of the uprising,” it said. Syria Arab and Middle East unrest Bashar Al-Assad Middle East guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …
Office building inside Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi’s Tripoli compound was destroyed in air strike An office building inside Muammar Gaddafi’s Tripoli compound was destroyed early on Sunday as Nato air strikes hit close to the base from where the Libyan leader is believed to direct government strategy in the civil war. At least two large missiles or bombs struck a multistorey building in Bab al-Aziziya, the sprawling complex in the centre of Tripoli, shortly after midnight. Another building, a ceremonial reception area where Gaddafi hosted a delegation from the African Union two weeks ago, was badly damaged. The roof of the office building, which also housed a library in which Gaddafi liked to read according to an official, had caved under the impact. The ground over a wide area was covered in shattered masonry, broken glass and metal, with pools of water forming between piles of rubble. Three hours after the blast, thick dust was still in the air when the foreign media was taken to the site. Reports of light injuries from the blasts varied from none to 45. The Libyan leader’s location was not known. Gaddafi’s supporters, who gather at Bab al-Aziziya nightly to act as human shields against Nato air strikes, climbed on the shattered building as chunks of masonry still fell. They waved loyalist green flags and chanted pro-Gaddafi and anti-Nato slogans. Inside the second building, furniture, picture frames and chandeliers lay amid rubble and covered with dust. The South African president, Jacob Zuma, along with two other Africa presidents, held talks here with Gaddafi earlier this month on a peace proposal. It was the second time Nato had struck inside the compound since its military campaign started. A missile hit another administrative building in the early days of the strikes, causing extensive damage. In the early hours of Saturday, two missiles hit a site a few hundred metres from Bab al-Aziziya. Nato appeared to have targeted an underground bunker, which was visible from the craters caused by the missiles. Three members of the US Senate armed service committee called on Sunday for more military intervention in Libya. Republican Lindsey Graham told CNN that Gaddafi “needs to wake up every day wondering ‘Will this be my last?’” Monday’s strike on Gaddafi’s compound followed two days of heavy assault on the besieged city of Misrata by government forces. Despite the Libyan government’s claims that troops had pulled back from the city, forces on the ground stepped up shelling and rocket fire following gains made on the ground by rebels. Muammar Gaddafi Arab and Middle East unrest Libya Middle East US foreign policy Nato Harriet Sherwood guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …
Nearly 500 inmates of Kandahar prison disappear down 1,000ft tunnel – just in time for ‘fighting season’ Afghan and Nato forces have launched a huge operation to try to recapture 475 prisoners, nearly all of them Taliban insurgents, who staged an extraordinary mass prison breakout using a tunnel. Officials said the inmates had escaped through the tunnel, dug from a house to the wing of the prison where political prisoners are detained in Kandahar. In an email, Zabiullah Mujahid, a Taliban spokesman, said the tunnel was 1,050ft (320 metres) long and had taken five months to construct, “bypassing enemy check posts and Kandahar-Kabul main highway leading directly to the political prison”. He said just three insurgents inside the prison had known about the plot. They helped ferry the prisoners out of the jail in an operation lasting four and a half hours. He said that by 3.30am on Monday morning, the entire political wing of the prison was emptied of inmates. These had been ferried off to “secure destinations” by a fleet of cars the Taliban had organised. The message, written in near-perfect English, crowed over the failures of the security forces: “The most astonishing thing throughout the operation, as reported by mujahideen informants, was that all the enemy forces inside the prison, which includes foreign invaders, did not notice the results of the operation even four hours later and hence has not released any statements. “Mujahideen had also placed a martyrdom-seeking group near the prison, whose need did not arise due to the inaction shown by the enemy.” Amir Mohammad Jamshad, the head of Kandahar’s prisons, told the Guardian the tunnel was a major undertaking by the insurgents, who were unable to use any heavy machinery because it could have attracted attention to their work. Tooryalai Wesa, the governor of Kandahar, said that security forces at the prison had “failed in their duty”, but strenuous efforts were already under way to recapture the prisoners. “Some of the escaped prisoners have been recaptured by the security forces during searching operations, and huge operations have launched inside and on outskirts of Kandahar city for the rest of them,” he said. He also appealed to Kandahar residents to phone in tipoffs about the escaped prisoners to a special hotline set up by authorities. Despite his insistence that the job of recapturing so many prisoners would be made easier by the detailed biometric records held on all the men, including fingerprints and iris scans, the breakout is a major blow to international and Afghan government efforts in the key province. One member of Kandahar’s provincial council, Hajji Hematullah, said that although some prisoners may still be in the city, many others would have made a direct line for the safety of the Pakistani border. The freeing of so many hardened insurgents comes just before the summer “fighting season”, and could potentially reverse some of the gains Nato made over the winter in intensified operations aimed at killing and capturing as many insurgents as possible. It is also the second time huge numbers of prisoners have managed to escape the prison in just three years. In June 2008, the Taliban stormed the prison, using a suicide bomber to break a hole in a prison wall. The operation allowed 870 inmates, including 390 insurgents, to escape. The breakout was followed by days of intense fighting in the outskirts of the city after the insurgents fled to areas where they were immediately able to take up arms against Nato forces. The crumbling prison was extensively reformed and improved in an effort to prevent such an outbreak ever happening again. Taliban Afghanistan Nato Jon Boone guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …
The Guardian, with others, has received access to a cache of more than 700 leaked files on Guantánamo Bay detainees. The files reveal that innocent people were interrogated for years on slimmest pretexts, and that children, elderly and mentally ill among those wrongfully held. Follow live coverage here 8.32am: On Comment is free, the Guardian’s Julian Glover writes that “what is given new prominence by these latest Guantánamo files is the cold, incompetent stupidity of the system: a system that tangled up the old and the young, the sick and the innocent. A system in which to say you were not a terrorist might be taken as evidence of your cunning.” “If you could only know what we can know, you would understand that what we are doing is right,” our leaders used to assure us. Well now we really do know – we have the documents, we have the transcripts of interviews with former prisoners, we have everything it takes to understand the nasty story of Guantánamo, exposed today in 759 leaked documents containing the words of the people who ran the place. And it is obvious that we should have seen through the evasions from the start. The clinical idiocy of this dreadful place is the most chilling thing of all, since it strips away even the cynical but persuasive defence: it was harsh but it worked and it kept the world safe. It didn’t work, much of the time. These files show that some of the information collected was garbage and that many of those held knew nothing that could be of use to the people demanding answers from them. Far from securing the fight against terror, the people running the camp faced an absurdist battle to educate a 14-year-old peasant boy kidnapped by an Afghan tribe and treat the dementia, depression and osteoarthritis of an 89-year-old man caught up in a raid on his son’s house. Other cases are just as pathetic. Jamal al-Harith, born Ronald Fiddler in Manchester in 1966, was imprisoned by the Taliban as a possible spy, after being found wandering through Afghanistan as a Muslim convert. In a movement of Kafkaesque horror the Americans held him in Camp X-Ray simply because he had been a prisoner of its enemy. “He was expected to have knowledge of Taliban treatment of prisoners and interrogation tactics,” the files record. 8am: This morning the Guardian and others have published a cache of files on Guantánamo Bay detainees , which lift the lid on life inside the controversial prison camp in Cuba. The Guantánamo files reveal… • A number of British nationals and residents were held for years despite US authorities being aware they were not Taliban or al-Qaida members. One Briton, Jamal al-Harith was rendered to Guantánamo simply because he had been held in a Taliban prison and was thought to have knowledge of their interrogation techniques. • US authorities relied heavily on information obtained from a small number of detainees under torture. They continued to maintain this testimony was reliable even after admitting that the prisoners who provided it had been mistreated. • US authorities listed the main Pakistani intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), as a terrorist organisation alongside groups like al-Qaida, Hamas, Hezbollah and Iranian intelligence. Some of the most shocking aspects of the leaked files relate to individuals’ stories. The 89-year-old Afghan villager who was detained at Guantanamo Bay despite suffering from dementia, depression and sickness. The 14-year-old boy , who had been an innocent kidnap victim, but was still imprisoned. Other files reveal that almost 100 of the inmates who passed through Guantanamo are listed by their captors as having had depressive or psychotic illness. The Guantánamo files are among hundreds of thousands of documents US soldier Bradley Manning is accused of having turned over to the Wikileaks website more than a year ago. They were obtained by the New York Times, who shared them with the Guardian, which is publishing extracts today, having redacted information which might identify informants. The New York Times says the files were made available to it not by Wikileaks, but “by another source on the condition of anonymity”. Separately a different collaboration of European and US newspapers received the cache from Wikileaks, and has also published on the Guantánamo files today. You can browse the files and visit the Guardian’s Today we’ll follow all the latest reaction to the revelations as it happens. The Guantánamo files Guantánamo Bay United States Afghanistan Adam Gabbatt guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …
Survey says the value of money has fallen by 94% over the past 50 years, with nearly £1,800 needed to match the buying power of £100 in 1960 The cost of a pint of beer could reach £8 by 2060 if prices continue to rise at their current rate, a survey by BM Savings has revealed. According to its report, based on data from the Office for National Statistics , the value of money has fallen by 94% over the past 50 years. An 18-fold increase in retail prices means that someone today would need £1,796 to have the equivalent purchasing power of £100 in 1960. By the same calculation, £5.57 50 years ago would be worth about £100 today. The drop in the value of money is reflected in the cost of everyday items such as food and household goods. Calculations show that the price of beer has increased eleven-fold over the past half century, from 11p to around £2.94 today, while a pint of milk cost just 3p in 1960 but will set consumers back around 44p today. The value of the cash in our pockets eroded at the fastest rate in the 1970s when retail prices increased by an average of 13% a year. They rose the least over the past decade, with an average yearly increase of just 3% since 2000, but even with relatively low inflation £131 at the turn of the millennium is worth just £100 today. BM Savings said the next 50 years could see the value of cash decline by a further 63% if retail prices follow the government’s annual inflation target of 2%. This means a loaf of bread at £1.20 could more than double to £3.23 by 2060. Basic rate taxpayers need to find a savings account paying 5.01% if they are to counter the effects of inflation; a higher rate taxpayer needs to find an account paying at least 6.67%; while 50% taxpayers need to find a return of 8.01%. There are no instant access accounts that will match or beat inflation plus tax at the basic rate, but some bonds – especially longer-term fixed products – will match inflation and help prevent the erosion of savers’ capital. A five-year Post Office bond , available until April 27, will pay inflation (as measured by the retail prices index every April – currently 5.3%) plus 1.5 percentage points on top. National Savings and Investments is also to relaunch its popular index-linked savings bonds at the beginning of May. Consumer affairs Family finances Inflation Carri-Ann Taylor guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …Krugman Endorses Congressional Progessive Caucus’s Radical Tax-Hiking ‘People’s Budget’
April 24, 2011 No Comment
If you had any questions about just how far to the left New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is, they were answered Monday when he expressed enthusiastic support for the Congressional Progressive Caucus's radical tax-hiking “People's Budget.” In his ” Let's Take a Hike ,” the Nobel laureate left no doubt about his desire to swiftly redistribute America's wealth with little regard for the economic consequences: [T]he only major budget proposal out there offering a plausible path to balancing the budget is the one that includes significant tax increases: the “People’s Budget” from the Congressional Progressive Caucus , which — unlike the Ryan plan, which was just right-wing orthodoxy with an added dose of magical thinking — is genuinely courageous because it calls for shared sacrifice. Shared sacrifice? Hardly. As the Washington Examiner's Byron York wrote about this disgraceful plan two weeks ago: The “People's Budget” is the liberals' answer to House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan's 2012 budget proposal, which is “leading us down a road to ruin,” according to caucus co-chairmen Reps. Raul Grijalva and Keith Ellison. The “People's Budget,” Grijalva and Ellison claim, would eliminate the deficit in just 10 years (Ryan's plan would take more than 25 years) while expanding, not cutting, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. “This budget saves the American people from the recklessness of the Republican majority,” Grijalva and Ellison write in a letter to Rep. Chris Van Hollen, senior Democrat on the House Budget Committee. How can such fiscal miracles be accomplished? By tax increases that would make even some top Democrats gasp. Perhaps the most extraordinary is the caucus plan to raise the Social Security tax to cover nearly all of a taxpayer's income. Right now, the tax is imposed on the first $106,000 of earnings. For people who make more than that, the caucus would tax a full 90 percent of income — no matter how high it goes. The caucus would raise the Social Security tax that employers pay as well. The caucus would create three new individual tax brackets for the highest incomes, topping out at 47 percent. It would also raise the capital gains tax, the estate tax and corporate taxes. It would create something called a “financial crisis responsibility fee” and a “financial speculation tax.” And of course it would repeal the Bush tax cuts. Another “feature” of this budget: ” Replace the tax exclusion for interest on state and local bonds with a subsidy for the issuer .” Truly scary stuff, for if state and local governments could no longer issue tax-free bonds, the rates they would have to pay would go significantly higher. To compensate for this, they would receive a 15 percent subsidy for the interest they pay on such bonds, but this would be far less than the discount such entities typically pay versus similarly rated corporate bonds. At a time when virtually every state and local government is having tremendous difficulty balancing their own budgets, this could be devastating leaving them with no other choice but to raise taxes of their own further pressuring already strapped consumers. This would also likely cause a run on outstanding municipal bonds and bond funds as investors flee them in order to get higher returns elsewhere. Such a move could put particular pressure on America's seniors who live on a fixed income and have traditionally relied on municipal bonds to augment their Social Security. ” Tax all capital gains and qualified dividends as ordinary income .” An already dead housing market would be further bludgeoned by such a move as would stocks, and the increased taxation on dividends would add more pressure to seniors who live off such payments. ” Limit the rate at which itemized deductions can reduce tax liability to 28%for [sic] high earners .” This would also put pressure on real estate as so-called “higher earners” would derive less tax benefit from mortgage costs. When you add up all these increased taxes, the hit to small to medium-sized businesses would be devastating sending unemployment to levels not seen since the Great Depression. At that point, the projected deficit savings – which this author is having a hard time arithmetically matching to current projections from CBO – would become moot as tax collections at all levels plummeted. But there's more, for the “People's Budget” wants to expand ObamaCare with a public option while spending ” $1.45 trillion in job creation, education, clean energy and broadband infrastructure, and $213 billion on a “Surface transportation reauthorization bill .” This is what Krugman endorsed Monday. Try to imagine the crash that would occur if enacted.
Continue reading …
UK wants him released but US says he is Bin Laden associate who has incited hunger strikes and ‘runs half the prisoners’ A British resident whose release William Hague has sought from Guantánamo is alleged by the US to be a top al-Qaida terrorist and one of the key leaders inside the camp, leaked files from the prison camp in Cuba reveal. After Shaker Aamer’s nine years of imprisonment without trial, the US is refusing to let him return to the UK despite repeated official requests from Britain. He is one of the 172 untried inmates who remain marooned in the prison camp. The authors of Aamer’s 15-page prison file claim he controls the other inmates, organises hunger strikes, makes false allegations, and is a “close associate” of Osama bin Laden as well as a former key member of the “London cell”. They say he was a former London room-mate of Zaccarias Moussaoui, the 9/11 conspirator serving a life sentence in the US. This lurid picture clashes with a very different British view. The foreign secretary, William Hague, repeated on 31 March that he was pressing the US to return Aamer “to put right some of the damage caused to Britain’s moral authority by allegations of complicity in torture and in rendition leading to torture”. Two years before that, in March 2009, the Foreign Office’s counter-terrorism head, Robert Chatterton-Dixon, told the US state department’s counter-terrorism specialist, Dell Dailey, that neither Britain nor Saudi Arabia would prosecute Aamer if he were released. In a classified cable obtained by the Guardian, Dailey said Robert Hannigan, the UK’s security adviser, was also present. Dixon “raised the Guantánamo detainee case of Shaker Aamer, a Saudi national and former British resident whose wife and children are resident in the UK. He reiterated the British request for Aamer’s release and return to the UK and did not believe Aamer would be subject to British or Saudi criminal proceedings on his return.” Aamer’s Guantánamo file, not updated since November 2007, claims the opposite , saying the Saudis have implicated him in high-level crimes. “Saudi intelligence (Mabahith) stated detainee left Saudi Arabia and joined [Osama bin Laden] in Afghanistan. “The Mabahith identified detainee as a high priority for the government of Saudi Arabia, an indication of his law enforcement value to them.” Aamer has not only alleged he has been tortured , but also led a hunger strike. His file details the GTMO administration’s marked hostility towards him, possibly as a result. The file says: “Detainee is unco-operative and continues to withhold information of intelligence value about his extremist activities and associations. Detainee has failed to fully account for his travels and high-level associates which have been reported by other JTF-GTMO detainees. “Detainee is extremely egotistical, has manipulated debriefers and guard staff, and will continue to attempt to do so to support his political agenda. Detainee refuses to participate in direct questioning, often citing imaginary or assumed mistreatment of himself, or others, as justification of this refusal in a classic example of al-Qaida counter-interrogation techniques.” The file’s authors quote one of his fellow prisoners allegedly saying Aamer “runs all the other detainees” and add their own assessment: “He can summon support from over one half of Camp Delta’s detainee population.” In a list of alleged continuing “activities against the US” while a prisoner, the files quote other prisoners admitting he “passed information to other detainees” and “had the necessary power and control [over the detainees] to issue an order for other detainees to attempt suicide”. Aamer was “very happy about” one such attempt, according to a notorious prison informer, Mohamed Basardah, who has been accused of unreliability. The files claim: “Detainee stated that the death of a detainee at JTF-GTMO would ‘open the eyes of the world and result in the closure of the base’.” Another alleged piece of intelligence attempts to implicate Aamer’s lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, in helping to organise a hunger strike, a claim Stafford Smith has already vigorously denied. The file says that this second informer “stated the primary reason the JTF-GTMO detainees went on the hunger strike was because detainee’s lawyer told them exactly what they needed to do”. The alleged informer also told interrogators that he saw Aamer personally meet Osama bin Laden during the fighting in the Tora Bora mountains of Afghanistan. The informer, described as “highly compliant”, is also recorded claiming knowledge of “the possible procurement of portable nuclear bombs by Chechen mujahideen leaders”. He has subsequently been released, while Aamer remained inside. Aamer was originally captured in Jalalabad by Afghan forces after the retreat from Tora Bora in December 2001. He was turned over to the US and alleges that British intelligence officers were present while he was being maltreated at the Bagram airbase. He was then flown to Guantánamo on 13 February 2002. He is understood to be one of a group of British-based detainees who have received a compensation settlement from the UK government. The Guantánamo files Guantánamo Bay David Leigh Ian Cobain guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …
• Innocent people interrogated for years on slimmest pretexts • Children, elderly and mentally ill among those wrongfully held • 172 prisoners remain, some with no prospect of trial or release More than 700 leaked secret files on the Guantánamo detainees lay bare the inner workings of America’s controversial prison camp in Cuba. The US military dossiers, obtained by the New York Times and the Guardian, reveal how, alongside the so-called “worst of the worst”, many prisoners were flown to the Guantánamo cages and held captive for years on the flimsiest grounds, or on the basis of lurid confessions extracted by maltreatment. The 759 Guantánamo files, classified “secret”, cover almost every inmate since the camp was opened in 2002. More than two years after President Obama ordered the closure of the prison, 172 are still held there. The files depict a system often focused less on containing dangerous terrorists or enemy fighters, than on extracting intelligence. Among inmates who proved harmless were an 89-year-old Afghan villager, suffering from senile dementia, and a 14-year-old boy who had been an innocent kidnap victim . The old man was transported to Cuba to interrogate him about “suspicious phone numbers” found in his compound. The 14-year-old was shipped out merely because of “his possible knowledge of Taliban…local leaders” The documents also reveal: • US authorities listed the main Pakistani intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), as a terrorist organisation alongside groups such as al-Qaida, Hamas, Hezbollah and Iranian intelligence. Interrogators were told to regard links to any of these as an indication of terrorist or insurgent activity. • Almost 100 of the inmates who passed through Guantánamo are listed by their captors as having had depressive or psychotic illnesses . Many went on hunger strike or attempted suicide. • A number of British nationals and residents were held for years even though US authorities knew they were not Taliban or al-Qaida members. One Briton, Jamal al-Harith , was rendered to Guantánamo simply because he had been held in a Taliban prison and was thought to have knowledge of their interrogation techniques. The US military tried to hang on to another Briton, Binyam Mohamed , even after charges had been dropped and evidence emerged he had been tortured. • US authorities relied heavily on information obtained from a small number of detainees under torture. They continued to maintain this testimony was reliable even after admitting that the prisoners who provided it had been mistreated. The leaked files include guidance for US interrogators on how to decide whether to hold or release detainees, and how to spot al-Qaida cover stories. One warns interrogators: “Travel to Afghanistan for any reason after the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 is likely a total fabrication with the true intentions being to support Usama Bin Laden through direct hostilities against the US forces.” Another 17-page file, titled “GTMO matrix of threat indicators for enemy combatants”, advises interrogators to look out for signs of terrorist activity ranging from links to a number of mosques around the world, including two in London, to ownership of a particular model of Casio watch. “The Casio was known to be given to the students at al-Qaida bombmaking training courses in Afghanistan,” it states. The inclusion of association with the ISI as a “threat indicator” in this document is likely to pour fuel on the flames of Washington’s already strained relationship with its key regional ally.A number of the detainee files also contain references, apparently based on intelligence reporting, to the ISI supporting, co-ordinating and protecting insurgents fighting coalition forces in Afghanistan, or even assisting al-Qaida. Obama’s inability to shut Guantánamo has been one of the White House’s most internationally embarrassing policy failures. The files offer an insight into why the administration has been unable to transfer many of the 172 existing prisoners from the island prison where they remain outside the protection of the US courts or the prisoner-of-war provisions of the Geneva conventions. The range of those still held captive includes detainees who have been admittedly tortured so badly they can never be successfully tried, informers who must be protected from reprisals, and a group of Chinese Muslims from the Uighur minority who have nowhere to go. One of those officially admitted to have been so maltreated that it amounted to torture is prisoner No 63, Maad al-Qahtani . He was captured more than nine years ago, fleeing from the site of Osama bin Laden’s last stand in the mountain caves of Tora Bora in 2001. The report says Qahtani, allegedly one of the “Dirty 30″ who were Bin Laden’s bodyguards, must not be released: “HIGH risk, as he is likely to pose a threat to the US, its interests and allies.” The report’s military authors admit his admissions were obtained by what they call “harsh interrogation techniques in the early stages of detention”. At the other end of the spectrum the files detail many innocents or marginal figures swept up by the Guantánamo dragnet because US forces considered they might be of some intelligence value. One man was transferred to the facility “because he was a mullah, who led prayers at Manu mosque in Kandahar province, Afghanistan … which placed him in a position to have special knowledge of the Taliban”. US authorities eventually released him after more than a year’s captivity, deciding he had no intelligence value. Another prisoner was shipped to the base “because of his general knowledge of activities in the areas of Khowst and Kabul based as a result of his frequent travels through the region as a taxi driver”. The files also reveal that an al-Jazeera journalist was held at Guantánamo for six years, partly in order to be interrogated about the Arabic news network. His dossier states that one of the reasons was “to provide information on … the al-Jazeera news network’s training programme, telecommunications equipment, and newsgathering operations in Chechnya, Kosovo and Afghanistan, including the network’s acquisition of a video of UBL [Osama bin Laden] and a subsequent interview with UBL”. The Guantánamo files are among hundreds of thousands of documents US soldier Bradley Manning is accused of having turned over to the WikiLeaks website more than a year ago. The documents were obtained by the New York Times and shared with the Guardian and National Public Radio, which is publishing extracts, having redacted information which might identify informants. A Pentagon spokesperson said: “Naturally we would prefer that no legitimately classified information be released into the public domain, as by definition it can be expected to cause damage to US national security. The situation with the Guantánamo detention facility is exceptionally complex and releasing any records will further complicate ongoing actions.” The Guantánamo files Guantánamo Bay David Leigh James Ball Ian Cobain Jason Burke guardian.co.uk
Continue reading …