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Sydney siege ends after 16 hrs, three dead

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Sydney siege

Sydney: Heavily armed police officers ended a hostage crisis at the Lindt Chocolate Cafe here around 2:45 am local time on Tuesday, storming its premises where an armed man — said to be a self-proclaimed Sheik — held employees and customers, including two Indians, captive for more than 16 hours.

The two Indians, Vishwakant Ankireddy and Pushpendra Ghosh, both employees of Infosys, are safe.

The number of casualties was not immediately clear, but agencies reported that three people were dead, including the gunman.

“Sydney siege is over. More details to follow,” the New South Wales Police said in a tweet.

Earlier, the police said that the hostage-taker was Man Haron Monis, an Iranian-born man in his 50s with a criminal record, who called himself Sheik Haron.

Monis was carrying a black flag with white Arabic script similar to those used by Islamic militants on other continents, and the flag was later displayed in the window of the cafe.

Five people, including two cafe employees, had fled by 7 pm local time, but it was not clear whether the assailant had allowed them to leave or they had escaped. Helicopters hovered over the city, the train network was temporarily stopped and buildings, including the nearby Sydney Opera House, were shut down.

According to “The Age”, Monis was out on bail in two separate criminal cases. He was charged in November 2013 for murdering his ex-wife, Noleen Hayson Pal, who was stabbed and set on fire in an apartment in Werrington.

In April 2014, Monis was charged for sexual assault. The police said that Monis held himself out as a spiritual healer and conducted business on Station Street, Wentworthville. A website apparently associated with Monis includes condemnation of the US and Australia for their military actions against Islamic militants in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A Muslim community leader in Sydney, Dr Jamal Rifi, said in a televised interview: “Everything he stands for is wrong. It has nothing to do with Islam.”

Prime Minister Tony Abbott, before Monis was publicly identified, referred to him as “an armed person claiming political motivation.” The US Consulate General in Sydney, about a block from the cafe, and the Consulate General of India in Sydney, barely 400 metres from the cafe, were evacuated.

An Islamic State spokesman, Abu Muhammad al-Adnani, issued a statement in September asking Muslims in Australia to carry out attacks. On September 12, Abbott raised Australia’s terrorism alert level to high from medium. He gave the police broader powers to arrest terror suspects and tightened restrictions on the media’s reporting on national security matters. Two weeks later, police fatally shot a man who attacked them with a knife.

(Agencies)

Hostages held in Sydney cafe siege

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Five people emerge from Lindt Cafe in Australian city’s financial district amid negotiations with hostage-taker.

Sydney cafe siege

by Al Jazeera

Five people have escaped from a cafe where a man has an unknown number of hostages in the heart of Sydney’s financial and shopping district .

Two people inside the cafe were earlier seen holding up a flag with an Islamic declaration of faith that has often been used by armed groups.

The first three people ran out of the Lindt Chocolat Cafe in Sydney’s Central Building District six hours into Monday’s hostage crisis, and two women sprinted from a fire exit into the arms of waiting police shortly afterwards.

Both women were wearing aprons with the Lindt chocolate logo, indicating they were cafe employees.

It was not clear exactly how many people remained inside the cafe at Martin Place, a plaza that is packed with holiday shoppers this time of year.

The hostage-taker is reported to have conveyed some demands when an Australian media network interviewed some of the hostages over phone.

Some media networks have announced that they are complying with a request from New South Wales Police not to report the demands.

Andrew Scipione, New South Wales Police commissioner, said police did not know the hostage taker’s motivation.

“We have not yet confirmed it is a terrorism-related event,” he said.

“We’re dealing with a hostage situation with an armed offender.”

As the drama dragged into its 10th hour, NSW Police Deputy Commissioner Catherine Burn said negotiators were talking with the hostage-taker.

Officials had no information to suggest anyone had been harmed, although a hospital said it was treating a man in satisfactory condition.

Pacing back and forth

Television video shot through the cafe’s windows showed several people with their arms in the air and hands pressed against the glass, and two people holding up a black flag with the Shahada, or Islamic declaration of faith, written on it.

Seven Network television news staff watched the hostage-taker and hostages for hours from a fourth floor window of their Sydney offices, opposite the cafe.

The man could be seen pacing back and forth past the cafe’s four windows. Reporter Chris Reason, a reporter for Seven Network, said the man carried what appeared to be a pump-action shotgun, was unshaven and wore a white shirt and a black cap.

Network staff counted about 15 different faces among hostages forced up against the windows.

“The gunman seems to be sort of rotating these people through these positions on the windows with their hands and faces up against the glass,” Reason said in a report from the vantage point.

“One woman we’ve counted was there for at least two hours – an extraordinary, agonising time for her surely having to stand on her feet for that long.

“Just two hours ago when we saw that rush of escapees, we could see from up here in this vantage point the gunman got extremely agitated as he realised those five had got out. He started screaming orders at the people, the hostages who remain behind.”

St Vincent’s hospital spokesman David Faktor said a male hostage was in satisfactory condition in the hospital’s emergency department. He was the only one of the freed hostages to be taken to a hospital.

Hundreds of police flooded into the area, streets were closed and offices evacuated. The public was told to stay away from Martin Place, site of the state premier’s office, the Reserve Bank of Australia, and the headquarters of two of the nation’s largest banks.

The state parliament house is a few blocks away.

“This is a very disturbing incident,” Tony Abbott, Australia’s prime minister, said.

“It is profoundly shocking that innocent people should be held hostage by an armed person claiming political motivation.”

Terror threat warning

The Australian government raised the terror warning level in September in response to the domestic threat posed by supporters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group.

Counterterror law enforcement teams later conducted dozens of raids and made several arrests in Australia’s three largest cities – Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.

One man arrested during a series of raids in Sydney was charged with conspiring with an ISIL leader in Syria to behead a random person in downtown Sydney.

ISIL, which now holds a third of Syria and Iraq, has threatened Australia in the past.

In September, Abu Mohammed al-Adnani, an ISIL spokesperson, issued an audio message urging “lone wolf” attacks abroad, specifically mentioning Australia.

Lindt Australia posted a message on its Facebook page on Monday thanking the public for its support.

“We are deeply concerned over this serious incident and our thoughts and prayers are with the staff and customers involved and all their friends and families,” the company wrote.

Thousands march against U.S police killings

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Demonstrators gather in Washington and New York to rally against the killings of unarmed black men by police officers.

Thousands rallied in Washington in what was dubbed a 'Justice for All' march [Reuters]

Thousands rallied in Washington in what was dubbed a ‘Justice for All’ march [Reuters]

by Al Jazeera

Thousands of demonstrators have marched in Washington and New York to protest against the killings of unarmed black men by police officers and to urge politcians to do more to protect African-Americans.

Organisers said that Saturday’s marches in Washington DC and New York City would rank among the largest in the recent wave of protests against killings that have brought the treatment of minorities by police onto the national agenda.

Decisions by grand juries to not indict the police officers involved in the deaths of Michael Brown in Missouri and Eric Garner in New York have sparked weeks of protests in major cities across the country.

Al Sharpton, a leading civil rights activist, called for “legislative action that will shift things both on the books and in the streets”.

Sharpton, whose National Action Network organised the Washington rally, urged the US Congress to pass legislation that would allow federal prosecutors to take over cases involving police.

He said local district attorneys often work with police regularly, raising the potential of conflicts of interest when prosecutors investigate incidents, he said.

Al Jazeera’s Patty Culhane, reporting from Washington, said there had been impassioned speeches and that the crowd seemed overwhelmingly positive.

Families of Eric Garner and Akai Gurley, who were killed by New York police; Trayvon Martin, slain by a Florida neighbourhood watchman in 2012; and Michael Brown, killed by an officer in Ferguson attended the protest.

At a parallel march in New York tens of thousands of people braved cold weather to join the protest, Al Jazeera’s Courtney Kealy reported.

“Some of the protesters are calling for the police commissioner to resign, for the officer blamed for the death of Eric Garner to be fired and for an independent prosecutor’s office to be set up to look into police brutality,” Kealy said.

“They want to see change in the judicial system, not just take to the streets, but have actual political and judicial reform.”

Hundreds of protesters also took to the streets of California, Nashville and Boston, where state police arrested 23 people after clashes broke out.

Politicians have talked of the need for better police training, body cameras and changes in the grand jury process to restore faith in the legal system.

CIA 'torture' practices started long before 9/11 attacks

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A U.S. soldier walks between cells with Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad on May 17, 2004. REUTERS

A U.S. soldier walks between cells with Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad on May 17, 2004. REUTERS

by Jeff Stein, Newsweek

“The CIA,” according to the Senate Intelligence Committee, had “historical experience using coercive forms of interrogation.” Indeed, it had plenty, said the committee’s report released Tuesday: about 50 years’ worth. Deep in the committee’s 500-page summary of a still-classified 6,700-page report on the agency’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” after 9/11 there is a brief reference to KUBARK, the code name for a 1963 instruction manual on interrogation, which was used on subjects ranging from suspected Soviet double agents to Latin American dissidents and guerrillas.

The techniques will sound familiar to anybody who has followed the raging debate over interrogation techniques adopted by the CIA to break Al-Qaeda suspects in secret prisons around the world. When the going got tough, the CIA got rough.

The 1963 KUBARK manual included the “principal coercive techniques of interrogation: arrest, detention, deprivation of sensory stimuli through solitary confinement or similar methods, threats and fear, debility, pain, heightened suggestibility and hypnosis, narcosis and induced regression,” the committee wrote.

Many such methods were used on a Cold War-era Soviet defector whom a few CIA officials suspected of being a double agent. They came to light in a congressional investigation over 25 years ago. “In 1978, [CIA Director] Stansfield Turner asked former CIA officer John Limond Hart to investigate the CIA interrogation of Soviet KGB officer Yuri Nosenko using the KUBARK methods—to include sensory deprivation techniques and forced standing,” the committee reported.

Hart found the methods repugnant, he told a congressional committee investigating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. “It has never fallen to my lot to be involved with any experience as unpleasant, in every possible way as…the investigation of this [Nosenko] case and…the necessity of lecturing upon it and testifying,” Hart told the committee. “To me, it is an abomination, and I am happy to say that it is not in my memory typical of what my colleagues and I did in the agency during the time I was connected with it.”

But the CIA reached for KUBARK when U.S.-backed Latin American military regimes were faced with human rights protests, left-wing subversion and armed insurgencies. “Just five years” after Hart expressed his dismay about torture on Capitol Hill, “in 1983 a CIA officer incorporated significant portions of the KUBARK manual into the Human Resource Exploitation (HRE) Training Manual, which the same officer used to provide interrogation training in Latin America in the early 1980s,” the Intelligence Committee report said. The new HRE manual was also “used to provide interrogation training to” a party whose name was censored in the committee’s report but was almost certainly the Nicaraguan Contras, a rebel group the CIA created to overthrow the Marxist revolutionary government in Managua.

“A CIA officer was involved in the HRE training and conducted interrogations” that may have gone overboard, the committee’s report said. “The CIA inspector general later recommended that he be orally admonished for inappropriate use of interrogation techniques.” While it’s not clear whether the officer was disciplined, he was sufficiently rehabilitated so that two decades later, “in the fall of 2002, [he] became the CIA’s chief of interrogations in the CIA’s Renditions Group, the officer in charge of CIA interrogations.”

According to the report, an unnamed head of the interrogation program—possibly the same man—threatened to quit over ethical concerns about CIA methods. “This is a train [wreck] waiting to happen and I intend to get the hell off the train before it happens,” the CIA officer wrote in an email to colleagues obtained by the committee. He said he had notified the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center of his impending resignation and cited a “serious reservation” about “the current state of affairs.”

Other veterans of the Latin American counterinsurgency wars were key players in the questionable post-9/11 interrogation practices exposed by the Senate committee, although they went unmentioned in its report because they were not CIA officers.

Retired Army Colonel James Steele, along with another retired army colonel, James H. Coffman, helped the Iraqi government set up police commando units and “worked…in detention centres that were set up with millions of dollars of U.S. funding,” the London-based Guardian newspaper and the BBC reported in a joint project in 2013.

Steele had been commander of the U.S. military advisory group in El Salvador during its 1980s civil war, a struggle remembered chiefly for the “death squads” the regime used against nuns and priests allied with the poor. Steele had previously been decorated for his service in South Vietnam as a U.S. Army reconnaissance patrol leader.

Oddly, the CIA’s vast interrogation experience from the Vietnam War gets scant mention in those parts of the Senate committee report dealing with the methods’ origins. It notes only that in May 2013, “a senior CIA interrogator would tell personnel from the CIA’s Office of Inspector General” that the harsh methods being adopted by the agency after 9/11 originated in a practice used by North Vietnamese Communist interrogators to extract “confessions for propaganda purposes” from U.S. prisoners “who possessed little actionable intelligence.” The CIA, the interrogator believed, “need[ed] a different working model for interrogating terrorists where confessions are not the ultimate goal.”

The CIA’s Vietnam interrogation centers, jointly run in most cases with its South Vietnamese counterparts, were chiefly designed to extract information from captured Communist guerrillas, spies and suspected underground political agents, in order to launch attacks. Sometimes, however, a confession was used to then parade an apostate through South Vietnamese-controlled neighborhoods, like a trophy.

And prisoner abuse, including torture in so-called “tiger cages,” was common, according to many witnesses and other sources over the years. In 1969, the Army filed murder charges against the commander of the Green Berets in Vietnam and seven of his men after they used hallucinogenic drugs on a suspected double agent and killed him after he failed to confess. The charges were eventually dropped after a fierce lobbying campaign by then-CIA director Richard Helms, who feared a trial would expose abuses under the agency’s secret Phoenix assassination program.

After Vietnam and El Salvador, Steele went on to work in Baghdad under General David Petraeus, according to the account by the Guardian and BBC. He took Coffman with him. Petraeus commanded CIA and military special ops groups working jointly against Al-Qaeda in Iraq. “They worked hand in hand,” an Iraqi general, Muntadher al-Samari, said of Steele and Coffman. “I never saw them apart in the 40 or 50 times I saw them inside the detention centres. They knew everything that was going on there…the torture, the most horrible kinds of torture.” Steele and Coffman could not be reached for comment.

“Every single detention centre would have its own interrogation committee,” added al-Samari, whose account was buttressed by others. “Each one was made up of an intelligence officer and eight interrogators. This committee [would] use all means of torture to make the detainee confess, like using electricity or hanging him upside down, pulling out their nails, and beating them on sensitive parts.”

Coffman was later awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, “for exceptionally valorous conduct while assigned as the Senior Advisor to the 1st Iraqi Special Police Commando Brigade” during the battle for Mosul, Iraq, in 2004, “during which the unit likely would have been overrun were it not for the courageous leadership of Colonel Coffman and the one Commando officer not wounded.”

The prison abuses in Iraq, however, turned out to be the loose strings in the otherwise tightly wound U.S. interrogation program. When the photos of the abuses at Abu Ghraib exploded in the media in April 2004, at least one American ambassador in an unidentified country demanded to know if the CIA was doing anything similar under his roof that he didn’t know about. The Senate Intelligence Committee was disturbed enough by the Abu Ghraib revelations to arrange a classified briefing. “The media reports caused members of the Committee and individuals in the executive branch to focus on detainee issues,” the committee’s report said. Top CIA officials were summoned to Capitol Hill.

Their testimony was basically: That’s the Army, not us.

“The CIA used the Abu Ghraib abuses as a contrasting reference point for its detention and interrogation activities,” the committee’s report said. “In a response to a question from a Committee member, CIA Deputy Director [John] McLaughlin said, ‘We are not authorized in [the CIA program] to do anything like what you have seen in those photographs.’”

One member of the committee was soothed. “I understand,” the senator said, that the “norm” of CIA interrogations was “transparent law enforcement procedures [that] had developed to such a high level…that you could get pretty much what you wanted” without torture.

“The CIA did not correct the Committee member’s misunderstanding,” Tuesday’s report said, “that CIA interrogation techniques were similar to techniques used by U.S. law enforcement.”

That understanding would come later.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko warns new Cold War is looming

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Petro Poroshenko

by David Wroe, SMH

Visiting Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has warned Europe is sliding towards a new Cold War and urged the world to stand up to Russia for the sake of global law and order.

Speaking in Sydney during a three-day tour as part of closer relations with Prime Minister Tony Abbott in the wake of the MH17 disaster, Mr Poroshenko also vowed that any Australian uranium sold to his country under a possible deal would be safely used.

But Russia – whose dominance of energy exports to Ukraine would be undermined by any deal between Canberra and Kiev – has already raised doubts about the prospect of Australian uranium sales, which Mr Abbott and Mr Poroshenko flagged on Thursday.

A spokesman for Moscow’s embassy in Canberra branded talk of a uranium deal a “political statement” and warned that given the conflict in eastern Ukraine, nuclear material could “fall into the wrong hands” – though Kiev’s adversaries in the conflict are rebels backed by Russia itself.

Mr Poroshenko told Sydney’s Lowy Institute that the crisis resulting from Russia’s aggression towards its smaller neighbour needed to be “tackled” by the world, not just for Ukraine’s sake but for the good of world peace and order.

“Ukraine is burning, and Europe is dangerously close to slipping back to the Cold War,” he said. “This is not a question of Ukrainian or regional security, this is a question of global security because this aggression demonstrates uneffectiveness of the post-war security system based on the Security Council of the United Nations.”

Russia wields considerable power as a veto-holding member of the Security Council but Mr Poroshenko said “we should propose to the world another idea to keep the world stable”.

Australia and Ukraine have been drawn together by the downing of flight MH17, for which Kiev and the West believe Russian-backed rebels were responsible. Fighting continues in eastern Ukraine with what are believed to be Kremlin arms and troops steadily encroaching on the region.

Mr Poroshenko said Ukraine would welcome further help from the West, including Australia, in military technology for communications, reconnaissance and intelligence “to defend ourselves” but did not need weapons.

Australia is already supplying Ukraine with non-lethal military equipment and clothing.

Mr Poroshenko also vowed the safety of any Australian uranium exports to his country, saying: “We have state of the art technology to keep it safe.”

Ukraine already has a nuclear power sector, with 15 reactors supplying about half the nation’s electricity.

But talk by Mr Abbott of supplying uranium and coal to Ukraine sends a strong political signal because it would unshackle the country from its heavy dependence on energy, including uranium and gas from its adversary Russia.

Russian embassy spokesman Alexander Odoevskiy said Australia should bear in mind that eastern Ukraine was “a conflict zone”.

“Given Ukraine’s current geopolitical situation, can it provide enough security for this nuclear industry and safeguards so [uranium] doesn’t fall into the wrong hands? I’m not sure about whether the government institutions in Ukraine are capable of providing these stringent controls.”

Brazil, Uruguay move away from US dollar in trade

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Reuters/Andrew RC Marshall

Reuters/Andrew RC Marshall

by RT

Brazil and Uruguay have switched to settling bilateral trade with local currency to stimulate turnover, bypassing the US dollar.

Payments in the Brazilian real and Uruguayan peso started on Monday. The agreement was signed on November 2 by the head of Brazilian Central Bank Alexandro Tombini and his Uruguayan counterpart Alberto Grana. Both countries believe such a move would strengthen trade across Latin America.

“The agreement was the result of long negotiations between the countries belonging to Mercosur [the common market of South American countries – Ed.], as well as the global strategies of BRICS,” RIA quotes Carlos Francisco Teixeira da Silva, Professor of International Relations at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Silva says the measure is a “step forward” in Latin American monetary independence, and “the best opportunity for the countries of South America to get rid of the old mechanisms of economic regulations dictated by the United States.”

If the new mechanism proves to be successful, it can be further expanded to countries such as Paraguay, Bolivia, or Venezuela.

Alex Luis Ferreira, a doctor of economic sciences from the University of Sao Paulo, says “the Brazilian real is likely to be used as an exchange and reserve medium.”

In November President Vladimir Putin said Russia plans to leave the “dollar dictatorship” of the market and increase the use of the ruble and the yuan in trading with China. Settlements in yuan between China and Russia have increased 800 percent in annual terms between January and September 2014.

Russia, China and Latin American countries are not the only ones interested in ditching the US dollar. The Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) which also includes Belarus and Kazakhstan is planning to create a single market for financial services by 2025 which will simplify switching to dollar-free trading. Earlier this week the Russian State Duma proposed the creation of a single area for payment in national currencies. Such measures are expected to minimize Western influence on the economy of the EEU.

The CIA’s torture orgy: 100 or more prisoners tortured to death in U.S detention

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CIA torture, crushing democracy and Britain’s new military base in Bahrain all deliver a toxic message

Guantanamo Bay

by Seumas Milne, The Guardian

We may have known the outline of the global US kidnapping and torture programme for a few years. But even the heavily censored summary of the US senate torture report turns the stomach in its litany of criminal barbarity unleashed by the CIA on real and imagined US enemies.

The earlier accounts of US brutality in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo pale next to the still sanitised record of forced rectal “infusions” and prolapses, multiple “waterboarding” drownings and convulsions, the shackled freezing to death of a man seized in a mistaken identity case, hooded beatings and hanging by the wrists, mock executions, and sleep deprivation for up to 180 hours.

What has been published is in fact only a small part of a much bigger picture, including an estimated 100 or more prisoners tortured to death in US detention. Added to the rampant lying, cover-ups and impunity, it’s a story that the champions of America’s “exceptionalism” will find hard to sell around the world. And it’s hardly out of line with a CIA record of coups, death squads, torture schools and covert war stretching back decades, some revealed by an earlier senate report in the 1970s.

There is of course nothing exceptional about states that preach human rights and democracy, but practise the opposite when it suits them. For all the senate’s helpful redactions, Britain has been up to its neck in the CIA’s savagery, colluding in kidnapping and torture from Bagram to Guantánamo while dishing out abuses of its own in Iraq and Afghanistan.

So you’d hardly think this reminder of the horrors unleashed in the name of the war on terror was the time for Britain to announce its first permanent military base in the Middle East for four decades. The presence of western troops and support for dictatorial Arab regimes were, after all, the original reasons given by al-Qaida for its jihad against the west.

The subsequent invasions, occupations and bombing campaigns led by the US, Britain and others have been endlessly cited by those who resisted them in the Arab and Muslim world, or launched terror attacks in the west. But last week, foreign secretary Phillip Hammond proudly declared that Britain would reverse its withdrawal from “east of Suez” of the late 1960s and open a navy base “for the long term” in the Gulf autocracy of Bahrain.

The official talk is about protecting Britain’s “enduring interests” and the stability of the region. But to those fighting for the right to run their own country, the message could not be clearer. Britain, the former colonial power, and the US, whose 5th Fleet is already based in Bahrain, stand behind the island’s unelected rulers. No wonder there have already been protests against the base.

Bahrainis campaigning for democracy and civil rights, in a state where the majority are Shia and the rulers Sunni, were part of the Arab uprisings in 2011. With US and British support, Saudi Arabia and the UAE crushed the protests by force. Mass arrests, repression and torture followed.

Three years later, Bahrain’s human rights situation has got worse, and even the US government voices concerns. But British ministers purr about the “progress” of the monarchy’s “reforms”, praising phoney elections to a toothless parliament, boycotted by the main opposition parties. Last week Bahraini activist Zainab al-Khawaja was sentenced to three years in jail for tearing up the king’s photograph. Her father, Abdulhadi, is already serving a life sentence for encouraging peaceful protest.

In reality, the British base’s main job won’t be to prop up the Bahraini regime, but to help protect the entire network of dictatorial Gulf governments that sit on top of its vast reserves of oil and gas – and provide a springboard for future interventions across the wider Middle East. British troops never really left the region and have been part of one intervention after another.

The US itself controls an archipelago of military bases across the Gulf: in Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and the UAE, as well as Bahrain. And despite Barack Obama’s much-heralded pivot to Asia, they are also clearly there for the long haul. After the US accepted the overthrow of the Egyptian dictator Mubarak three years ago, the Gulf autocrats are looking for extra security, which Britain and France are glad to provide. For the London elite, the Gulf is now as much about arms sales and finance as about oil and gas – and a web of political, commercial and intelligence links that go to the heart of the British establishment.

So the British military is also looking to beef up its presence in the UAE, Oman, Qatar and Kuwait. The crucial thing is that these colonial creations remain in the grip of their ruling families and democratisation is put on the back burner. That’s the only guarantee that this corrosive relationship will endure – on the back of disenfranchised populations and armies of grotesquely exploited migrant labour.

On a larger scale, the return of western-backed dictatorship in Egypt, the Arab world’s most important country, has helped re-establish the conditions that led to the war on terror in the first place. Obama has traded the CIA’s Bush-era kidnap-and-torture programme for expanded special forces and CIA drone killings, often of people targeted only by their “signatures” – such as being males of military age. And British forces have this week been accused of training and providing intelligence for Kenyan death squads targeting suspected Islamist activists.

The impact of all this – the revelations of the CIA’s torture orgy, the growing western military grip, the vanishing chances of democratic change – on the Arab and Muslim world should by now be obvious, along with the social backlash in countries such as Britain.

But with its new commitment to station troops in Bahrain, we can have no doubt where the British government stands: behind autocracy and “enduring interests”. Just as the refusal to hold previous US governments to account for terror and torture laid the ground for what happened after 9/11, the failure of parliament even to debate the decision to garrison the Gulf is an ominous one. Britain’s new base isn’t in the interests of either the people of Britain, Bahrain or the Middle East as a whole – it’s a danger and affront to us all.

UNICEF declares 2014 ‘devastating year' for millions of children trapped by conflict

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Nearly 400,000 children in Gaza are suffering from psychosocial distress as a result of the 50-day armed conflict in 2014. Photo: UNICEF/Alessio Romenzi

Nearly 400,000 children in Gaza are suffering from psychosocial distress as a result of the 50-day armed conflict in 2014. Photo: UNICEF/Alessio Romenzi

by Countercurrents

Globally, an estimated 230 million children now live in countries and areas affected by armed conflicts, said the UNICEF.

As many as 15 million children are caught up in violent conflicts in the Central African Republic, Iraq, South Sudan, the State of Palestine, Syria and Ukraine – including those internally displaced or living as refugees, informed UNICEF. “Never in recent memory have so many children been subjected to such unspeakable brutality”, said Anthony Lake, UNICEF Executive Director.

A New York/Geneva, December 8, 2014 datelined UNICEF press release said:

The year 2014 has been one of horror, fear and despair for millions of children, as worsening conflicts across the world saw them exposed to extreme violence and its consequences, forcibly recruited and deliberately targeted by warring groups.

Yet many crises no longer capture the world’s attention, warned the global organization.

“This has been a devastating year for millions of children,” said Lake. “Children have been killed while studying in the classroom and while sleeping in their beds; they have been orphaned, kidnapped, tortured, recruited, raped and even sold as slaves.”

In 2014, hundreds of children have been kidnapped from their schools or on their way to school. Tens of thousands have been recruited or used by armed forces and groups. Attacks on education and health facilities and use of schools for military purposes have increased in many places.

Facts

A few of the facts provided by the UNICEF include:

  • In the Central African Republic, 2.3 million children are affected by the conflict, up to 10,000 children are believed to have been recruited by armed groups over the last year, and more than 430 children have been killed and maimed – three times as many as in 2013
  • In Gaza, 54,000 children were left homeless as a result of the 50-day conflict during the summer that also saw 538 children killed, and more than 3,370 injured.
  • In Syria, with more than 7.3 million children affected by the conflict including 1.7 million child refugees, the UN verified at least 35 attacks on schools in the first nine months of the year, which killed 105 children and injured nearly 300 others.
  • In Iraq, where an estimated 2.7 million children are affected by conflict, at least 700 children are believed to have been maimed, killed or even executed this year. Women and girls have suffered physical and sexual assault, sexual slavery, trafficking and forced marriage. Some have been sold in open markets. Children have been tortured by ISIL and many have been forced to watch and take part in executions and torture.
  • In Syria and Iraq, children have been victims of, witnesses to and even perpetrators of increasingly brutal and extreme violence.
  • In South Sudan, an estimated 235,000 children under five are suffering from severe acute malnutrition. An estimated 1.7 million children are internally displaced mainly as a result of conflict and more than 320,000 are living as refugees. According to UN verified data, more than 600 children have been killed and over 200 maimed this year, and around 12,000 children are now being used by armed forces and groups. According to UN verified data, nearly 100 were subjected to sexual violence and 311 were abducted.
  • In Ukraine, the number of internally displaced children is estimated at 128,000. At least 36 children were killed and more than 100 were injured in Donetsk and Luhansk regions between mid-April and end of October.
  • Adding further suffering of the children, in countries stricken by Ebola, at least 5 million children aged 3-17 are unable to go back to school because of the outbreak. Thousands of children have lost one or two parents to the disease.

Forgotten

The UN organization said:

The sheer number of crises in 2014 meant that many were quickly forgotten or captured little attention. Protracted crises in countries like Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, continued to claim even more young lives and futures.

This year has also posed significant new threats to children’s health and well-being, most notably the Ebola outbreak in Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, which has left thousands of children orphaned and an estimated 5 million out of school.

Hope

The world is still struggling to save the children. There is still hope.

The UNICEF SAID:

Despite the tremendous challenges children have faced in 2014, there has been hope for millions of children affected by conflict and crisis. In the face of access restrictions, insecurity, and funding challenges, humanitarian organizations including UNICEF have worked together to provide life-saving assistance and other critical services like education and emotional support to help children growing up in some of the most dangerous places in the world.

In Central African Republic, a campaign is under way to get 662,000 children back to school as the security situation permits.

Nearly 68 million doses of the oral polio vaccine were delivered to countries in the Middle East to stem a polio outbreak in Iraq and Syria.

In South Sudan, more than 70,000 children were treated for severe malnutrition.

In Ebola-hit countries, work continues to combat the virus in local communities through support for community care centers and Ebola treatment Units; through training of health workers and awareness-raising campaigns to reduce the risks of transmission; and through supporting children orphaned by Ebola.

“It is sadly ironic that in this, the 25th anniversary year of the Convention on the Rights of the Child when we have been able to celebrate so much progress for children globally, the rights of so many millions of other children have been so brutally violated,” said Lake. “Violence and trauma do more than harm individual children – they undermine the strength of societies. The world can and must do more to make 2015 a much better year for every child. For every child who grows up strong, safe, healthy and educated is a child who can go on to contribute to her own, her family’s, her community’s, her nation’s and, indeed, to our common future.”
The New York Times report by Rick Gladstone said:

“The report was basically a summation of the well-documented afflictions that affected children in 2014. But taken in their entirety, they presented what Unicef called a devastating picture.”

Citing the UNICEF report the NYT report added:

“The nearly four-year-old war in Syria, which spilled into Iraq this year with the ascendance of the militant group the Islamic State, was a leading contributor of trauma to children.”

UK and Israel supported Kenyan program of extrajudicial killings

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Kenyan officers suggest program in which terrorism suspects were killed without trial on basis of Western intelligence

Kenya extrajudicial killings

by Al Jazeera

Kenyan police have assassinated nearly 500 terrorism suspects as part of an extrajudicial killing program supported by intelligence provided by Israel and the United Kingdom, an Al Jazeera investigation has revealed.

Officers from four units of Kenya’s Anti-Terrorism Police Unit (ATPU) said that police assassinated terrorist suspects on government orders.

The police killings, according to an ATPU officer, were ordered by Kenya’s National Security Council and run into the hundreds every year. “Day in, day out, you hear of eliminating suspects,” the officer said.

“Since I was employed, I’ve killed over 50. Definitely, I do become proud because I’ve eliminated some problems,” said another officer.

The ATPU officers contend that Kenya’s weak judicial system forced them to resort to assassinations, as police have failed to produce strong enough evidence to prosecute terrorism suspects.

“If the law cannot work, there’s another option … eliminate him,” an officer explained.

Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta and National Security Council members — including the deputy president, defense secretary and policy chief — denied the allegations.

In April, Abubaker Shariff Ahmed, an armed fighter known as Makaburi, was gunned down outside a Mombasa court after being charged under Kenya’s terrorism laws. Human rights groups allege police killed him.

ATPU officers confirmed the allegations. “Makaburi was killed by the police,” said one officer. “That execution was planned in Nairobi by very top, high-ranking police officers and government officials.”

Confidential police reports obtained by Al Jazeera allegedly show Makaburi had extensive links to Somali armed group Al-Shabab and planned and financed bombings in Kenya.

According to the ATPU officers, the intelligence that drives Nairobi’s “elimination program,” is supplied by Western intelligence agencies.

“Once they give us the information, they know what they have told us. It is ABCD — ‘Mr. Jack’ is involved in such and such a kind of activity. Tomorrow he’s no longer there. We have worked. Definitely the report that you gave us has been worked on,” the officer said.

A Kenyan National Police spokesman refused to comment on the allegations.

According to the officers, Israel and the U.K. provide training, equipment and intelligence to Kenyan officers on how to “eliminate” suspects targeted by Kenyan security forces.

Israel and the U.K. denied involvement. The U.K. Foreign Office added that it had “raised concerns” with Kenya over the “serious allegations.”

Mark Ellis, head of the International Bar Association, a leading organization of legal practitioners, said the alleged complicity of these countries could violate international law.

“It’s clear, based on these interviews, that there’s at least prima facie evidence to suggest that these third-party countries are involved, and therefore they all have responsibility to investigate,” Ellis said. “We should stop providing any type of assistance or training to police units in Kenya until there is a clear change … in how the Kenyan authorities deal with suspects.”

UN Reveals Israeli Links With Syrian Rebels

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Reports by UN observers in the Golan submitted to 15 members of Security Council detail regular contact between IDF officers and armed Syrian opposition figures at the border.

Israeli soldiers stand near the border with Syria in the occupied Golan Heights as they prepare to evacuate a wounded Syrian let in for medical treatment, September 23, 2014. Photo by Reuters

Israeli soldiers stand near the border with Syria in the occupied Golan Heights as they prepare to evacuate a wounded Syrian let in for medical treatment, September 23, 2014. Photo by Reuters

by Barak Ravid, Haaretz

Reports by UN observers in the Golan Heights over the past 18 months reveal the type and extent of cooperation between Israel and Syrian opposition figures. The reports, submitted to the 15 members of the UN Security Council and available on the UN’s website, detail regular contacts held on the border between IDF officers and soldiers and Syrian rebels.

The observer force, UNDOF, was established in 1974 as part of the separation of forces agreement between Israel and Syria. The agreement set up a buffer zone several kilometers wide. About 1,000 UN observers supervised the implementation of the agreement until 2013, when the Syrian civil war severely reduced the force’s ability to function.

While Croatia and Austria pulled out and Ireland, Fiji and India agreed to send troops, the increase of attacks on UN forces in recent months caused the force to abandon many of its positions along the front and to transfer its command to the Israeli side of the border.

The observers have continued to file reports to New York, which were relatively mundane; but their content changed in March 2013, when Israel started admitting injured Syrians for medical treatment in Safed and Nahariya hospitals. The Syrian ambassador to the UN complained of widespread cooperation between Israel and Syrian rebels, not only treatment of the wounded but also other aid.

Israel at first asserted the injured were civilians reaching the border of their own initiative and without prior coordination because they could not obtain suitable treatment in Syria. Later, as the numbers increased, Israel said it was coordinating with civilians but not opposition groups. However, the reports reveal direct contact between the IDF and armed opposition members.

According to a report from December 3, 2013, a person wounded on September 15 “was taken by armed members of the opposition across the ceasefire line, where he was transferred to a civilian ambulance escorted by an IDF vehicle.” Moreover, from November 9 to 19 the “UNDOF observed at least 10 wounded persons being transferred by armed members of the opposition from the Bravo side across the ceasefire line to IDF.”

Further reports indicated similar incidents. However, cooperation between the IDF and Syrian rebels that was revealed in UN observer reports does not just include transferring the wounded. Observers remarked in the report distributed on June 10 that they identified IDF soldiers on the Israeli side handing over two boxes to armed Syrian opposition members on the Syrian side.

The last report distributed to Security Council members, on December 1, described another meeting between IDF soldiers and Syrian opposition members that two UN representatives witnessed on October 27 some three kilometers east of Moshav Yonatan. The observers said they saw two IDF soldiers on the eastern side of the border fence opening the gate and letting two people enter Israel. The report, contrary to previous ones, did not note that the two exiting Syria were injured or why they entered Israel.

This specific event is of particular interest in light of what happened on the Syrian side of the border in the exact same region. According to the report, UN observers stated that tents were set up about 300 meters from the Israeli position for some 70 families of Syrian deserters. The Syrian army sent a letter of complaint to UNDOF in September, claiming this tent camp was a base for “armed terrorists” crossing the border into Israel. The Syrians also warned that if the UN would not evacuate the tent camp, the Syrian army would view it as a legitimate target.

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