News n Notes from the Web

Suspected Leader of Attacks on 9/11 Is Said to Confess
By Adam Liptak, New York Times - Published: March 15, 2007

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, long said to be the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, confessed to them at a military hearing held in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, on Saturday, according to a transcript released by the Pentagon yesterday. He also acknowledged full or partial responsibility for more than 30 other terror attacks or plots.
“I was responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z,” he said. In a rambling statement, Mr. Mohammed, the chief aide to Osama bin Laden, said his actions were part of a military campaign. “I’m not happy that 3,000 been killed in America,” he said. “I feel sorry even. I don’t like to kill children and the kids.”
He added: “The language of war is victims.”

Though American officials had linked Mr. Mohammad to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and to several others, his confession was the first time he spelled out in his own words a panoply of global terror activities, ranging from plans to bomb landmarks in New York City and London to assassination attempts against former Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton and Pope John Paul II. Some of the plots he claimed to plan, including the attempt on Mr. Carter, had not previously been publicly disclosed. Mr. Mohammad indicated in the transcript that some of his earlier statements to C.I.A. interrogators were the result of torture. But he said that his statements at the tribunal on Saturday were not made under duress or pressure.
His actions, he said, were like those of other revolutionaries. Had the British arrested George Washington during the Revolutionary War, Mr. Mohammed said, “for sure they would consider him enemy combatant.”

Mr. Mohammed spoke before a combatant status review tribunal that has the narrow task of determining whether President Bush had properly designated him an enemy combatant. Mr. Mohammed’s confession will almost certainly be used against him if and when he is tried for war crimes by a military commission.
Parts of the transcript were redacted by the military, and there were suggestions in it that Mr. Mohammed was mistreated while in the custody of the C.I.A. after his arrest in 2003. He was transferred to military custody at Guantánamo Bay last year.
Mr. Mohammed was aided during the tribunal by a “personal representative,” not a lawyer. His attempt to call two witnesses was denied. And the tribunal indicated that it would consider classified evidence not made available to Mr. Mohammed.
In answer to a question from the president of the tribunal, a Navy captain whose name was not released, Mr. Mohammed suggested that he had made false statements in the past under duress. But he agreed that he was not “under any pressure or duress” at the hearing itself.

While not contesting his own guilt, Mr. Mohammed asked the United States government to “be fair with people.” He said that many people who had been arrested as terrorists were innocent. Mr. Mohammed’s representative, an Air Force lieutenant colonel whose name was not released, read a statement on Mr. Mohammed’s behalf “with the understanding he may interject or add statements if he needs to.”
In the statement, Mr. Mohammed described himself as the “military operational commander for all foreign operations around the world” for al Qaeda.
He also took responsibility for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the bombing of a nightclub in Bali. Mr. Mohammed also outlined a vast series of plots that were not completed. Among his targets, he said, were office buildings in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York; suspension bridges in New York; the New York Stock Exchange “and other financial targets after 9/11”; the Panama Canal; British landmarks including Big Ben; buildings in Israel; American embassies in Indonesia, Australia and Japan; Israeli embassies in India, Azerbaijan, the Philippines and Australia; airliners around the world; and nuclear power plants in the United States. Mr. Mohammed also said that he had taken part in “surveying and financing for the assassination of several former American presidents, including President Carter.” He added that he was responsible for an assassination attempt against President Clinton in the Philippines.

But Mr. Mohammed interrupted his representative to clarify that he was not solely responsible for an attempt on the life of Pope John Paul II during a visit to the Philippines. “I was not responsible,” Mr. Mohammed said, “but share.”

At the end of the recitation, Mr. Mohammed was asked, “Were those your words?” “Yes,” he answered. Later, he said: “What I wrote here, is not I’m making myself hero, when I said I was responsible for this or that. But you are military man. You know very well there are language for war.”

It is not clear how many of Mr. Mohammad’s expansive claims were legitimate. In 2005, the Sept. 11 commission said that Mr. Mohammad was noted for his extravagant ambitions, and, using his initials, described his vision as “theater, a spectacle of destruction with KSM as the self-cast star, the superterrorist.”
Mr. Mohammed declined to speak under oath, saying his religious beliefs prohibited it. But he said he was telling the truth. “To be or accept the tribunal as to be, I’ll accept it,” he said. “That I’m accepting American Constitution, American law or whatever you are doing here. That is why religiously I cannot accept anything you do.” He added: “When I not take oath does not mean I’m lying.”

In a long monologue that fills about four single-spaced pages of the transcript, Mr. Mohammed said his motives were military ones. “If America they want to invade Iraq they will not send for Saddam roses of kisses, they send for a bombardment,” he said. “I consider myself, for what you are doing, a religious thing as you consider us fundamentalist. So, we derive from religious leading that we consider we and George Washington doing the same thing.” He pleaded on behalf of some of his fellow detainees. “I’m asking you again to be fair with many detainees which are not enemy combatant,” Mr. Mohammed said. “Because many of them have been unjustly arrested.”

Combatant status review tribunals are informal hearings created in response to a 2004 decision by the United States Supreme Court to judge whether prisoners at Guantánamo were properly designated as enemy combatants and subject to indefinite detention. Unlike the military commissions that hear war crimes charges, the combatant status review tribunals offer minimal procedural protections and are not recognizably judicial. In the past, the hearings have been partly open to the press. But a series of recent hearings, involving some of the 14 so-called high-value detainees transferred to Guantánamo from secret C.I.A. prisons last year, were closed. In addition to the Mohammed transcript, the Pentagon yesterday also released transcripts of the hearings of Abu Faraj al-Libi and Ramzi Bin al-Shib. The tribunals in all three cases reserved judgment on the question of whether the men were indeed properly classified as enemy combatants, but there is little doubt that the president’s designation will be affirmed. The prisoners may appeal the conclusions of the tribunals to a federal appeals court in Washington. The unclassified part of the hearing lasted for a little more than an hour, according to the transcript.

Near the end, Mr. Mohammed summed up. “The American have human right,” he said. “So, enemy combatant itself, it flexible word.” “War start from Adam when Cain killed Abel until now,” he said.
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Britain proposes carbon limits
From correspondents in London - news.com.au
March 14, 2007 04:34am

BRITAIN overnight became the first country to propose legislation setting binding limits on greenhouse gases as it stepped up its campaign for a new global warming pact to succeed the Kyoto Protocol. In its draft Climate Change Bill, the government said carbon dioxide emissions had to be cut by at least 60 per cent by 2050, set out five-year carbon budgets to reach the target and created an independent monitoring committee to check annual progress.

Prime Minister Tony Blair put climate change at the top of the international agenda when Britain was head of the Group of Eight industrialised nations in 2005 and it could now become the first nation to limit emissions by statute. "This bill is an international landmark," Environment Minister David Miliband said. "It is the first time any country has set itself legally-binding carbon targets. It is an environmental contract for future generations."

The draft bill also sets a legally-binding interim target for carbon cuts of 26 to 32 per cent by 2020. Mr Miliband said failure to meet targets could land governments in court. "Governments that fail to meet the stipulations of the bill will be subject to judicial review. It will be for the courts to decide what sanctions to apply," he said.

Environmentalists welcomed the carbon cut budgets which require any overshoot in a given year to be recouped later. The draft bill will go to three months of public and parliamentary consultation before becoming law next year, but green campaigners want to raise the 2050 target to 80 per cent and set annual three per cent cut targets to ensure compliance.

The UK government rejects annual targets as being too rigid to make allowances for climate variations from year to year. Andrew Pendleton, senior climate policy officer at charity Christian Aid, praised the bill but said: "If the final legislation is not significantly stronger, the process would represent a massive lost opportunity. It is the first step on a long journey."

Edward Hanna, senior lecturer in Climate Change at the University of Sheffield was also unimpressed: "(It) doesn't go far enough fast enough to confidently combat the significant threats posed by human-induced global warming. I fear that as we are closing the stable door, the horse has already bolted."

The Kyoto Protocol is a global pact on tackling carbon gas emissions from burning fossil fuels for power and transport that scientists say will boost average temperatures by between 1.8 and 4.0 degrees Celsius this century. It runs out in 2012. Britain and Germany are leading the charge to extend Kyoto and expand its scope to bring in Australia and the United States which rejected it in 2001, and boom economies such as China and India, which - although signatories - are not bound by it. The British draft bill comes after European Union leaders agreed last week to cut carbon emissions by 20 per cent by 2020.

The government stressed individual behaviour needed to change and people needed incentives to reduce carbon footprints and become energy producers as well as consumers.
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The Line Between Torture and Cruelty
By Nicholas Bakalar - New York Times - March 6, 2007
The United Nations and the United States government make a distinction between torture on the one hand and “cruel, degrading and inhumane treatment” on the other. But a study published yesterday uses data obtained from survivors to suggest that the distinction does not exist in practice, and may inadvertently provide justification for torture.
The conclusions appear to contradict a Justice Department memorandum of Dec. 30, 2004. Citing the United Nations Convention Against Torture, the memorandum argued that a broad range of interrogation techniques, among them forced standing, hooding, subjection to loud noises and deprivation of sleep, food and drink, might be inhumane but did not constitute torture unless they resulted in “prolonged mental harm.”
“Until now, both sides of the debate have expressed opinions based on personal impressions,” said Dr. Metin Basoglu, the lead author of the study. “But these data clearly suggest that you cannot make a distinction between physical forms of torture and something else called ‘cruel and degrading treatment.’ ”
Dr. Basoglu is a psychiatrist and a specialist in trauma studies at King’s College London.
Using structured interviews and diagnostic questionnaires, including an established scale that seeks to draw out information on 46 forms of torture, the researchers examined 279 survivors from the former Yugoslavia. Most had experienced physical and psychological torture.
The interviews were conducted from March 2000 to July 2002, an average of eight years after the subjects had last been tortured. The study, published in The Archives of General Psychiatry, found that most participants with little or no experience of physical torture nevertheless developed post-traumatic stress disorder at some point, and that some people survived even severe physical torture without suffering the disorder.
The presence of post-traumatic stress disorder or other long-term psychological suffering would therefore not constitute a usable definition for torture, because it would exclude many people who actually were severely physically tortured.
Dr. Israel Liberzon, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Michigan, said the lack of a control group made the findings less compelling. Dr. Gregg Bloche, a psychiatrist and a professor of law at Georgetown University, said what the researchers did was “artful, even brilliant,” considering the circumstances. “You can’t design alternative torture regimens,” Dr. Bloche said, “which is what you would have to do to meet the scientific criteria for a controlled clinical trial. You have to work with real survivors.”
The participants in the study were asked to rate types of stress on two 5-point scales — fairly to extremely distressing and slightly controllable to not controllable at all. The physical torture categories included beating, burning and electric shocks. The other categories included rope bondage, cold showers, excrement in food and deprivation of basic needs like sleep or toilets. On a scale of 0 to 4, the mean distress rating for physical torture was 3.2 to 3.8. The mean distress ratings for 16 of the 33 nonphysical stressors were in the same range. For example, sham executions, the fondling of genitals and threats of rape were rated 3.6 to 3.7. On the scale measuring loss of control, there was no difference between physical torture and psychological manipulation.
A spokesman for the Justice Department, Erik Amblin, declined to specify what treatments would be cruel and degrading but would not qualify as torture. Mr. Amblin did say, however, that “acting with the specific intent of causing prolonged mental harm” would be illegal under United States and international law.
Even though the United Nations Convention prohibits cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment as well as torture, Dr. Basoglu said, “the distinction makes people able to argue that torture is O.K. “They distinguish low levels of physical pain and high levels, as if that’s what makes the experience traumatic. But it’s not dependent on the amount of pain. It’s the issue of control and the extent of distress one experiences.”
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Terrorism in Baghdad, March 2007
The book market along Mutanabi Street was a throwback to the Baghdad of old, the days of students browsing for texts, turbaned clerics hunting down religious tomes and cafe intellectuals debating politics over backgammon. Somehow it survived the war, until Monday, when a powerful suicide car bomb hit the market, slicing through the heart of the capital’s intellectual scene. It killed at least 20 people and wounded more than 65. ...

There are no Americans or Iraqi politicians here — there are only Iraqi intellectuals who represent themselves and their homeland, plus stationery and book dealers,” said Abdul Baqi Faidhullah, 61, a poet who frequently visits the street. “Those who did this are like savage machines intent on harvesting souls and killing all bright minds.” ...

“Those terrorists do not represent Islam,” said Wissam Arif, 45, an engineer and eager browser of the book market. “They are fighting science. They hate the light of science and scientists. Haven’t they killed hundreds of prophets and intellectuals? Yesterday they killed the prophets and today they are killing the books. But hopefully the just, the science and the light will win. We’ll be patient until we achieve victory.”
-Baghdad Car Bomb Kills 20 on Booksellers’ Row, NYT 5 Mar 2007
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