Guantanamo Was "Hell On Earth": Former Gitmo Detainee

While it's necessary to take reports from detainees from Guantanamo with a grain of salt. However, when someone who is released when he got home, then probably they didn't belong there in the first place. While I don't doubt this man exaggerated, I also don't doubt there were psychological casualties at Gitmo, including numerous suicides.

AlterNet:

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'Some of my colleagues in the prison lost their sight, some lost their limbs and others ended up mentally disturbed,' recalls Mohamed Saleban Bare. 'I'm OK compared to them.'

A Somali just home from eight years in the U.S. jail at Guantanamo Bay told AFP the prison was "hell on Earth," and alleged torture there had scarred some of his fellow inmates.

Mohamed Saleban Bare, who arrived in his hometown of Hargeisa on Saturday, said he was innocent of any charges that would have caused security forces to arrest him in Pakistan in 2001 and transfer him to the U.S. jail via Afghanistan.

[..]"At Bagram and Kandahar, the situation was harsh but when we were transferred to Guantanamo the torture tactics changed. They use a kind of psychological torture that kills you mentally," he said.

This included depriving prisoners of sleep for at least four nights in a row and feeding them once a day with only a biscuit, he said.

"And in the cold they let you sleep without a blanket. Some of the inmates face harsher torture, including with electricity and beating," he said.

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US surge plays into Taliban hands

The war in Afghanistan was never winnable. What was doable, was Senator Kerry's 2004 Campaign idea of a police action against Al Qaeda.

Asia Times Online

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"The jihadi war room is now aware that the administration has narrowed its scope to defeat the so-called al-Qaeda organization, limiting its goal to depriving the Taliban from achieving full victory - ie depriving them of 'the momentum'. In strategic wording, this means that the administration won't give the time and the means, let alone the necessary long-term commitment, to fully defeat the Taliban as a militia and militant network."

The jihadi strategists now understand that Washington's advisers still recommend talking to the Taliban, the entire Taliban, but only after the latter feels weak and pushed back enough to seek such talks. Underneath this perception, the Salafi Islamists' analysts realize that present American analysis concludes that al-Qaeda and the Taliban are two different things, and that it is possible to defeat the first and eventually engage the second.

Such a jihadi understanding of the US's defective perceptions will give the Taliban and al-Qaeda a first advantage: knowing that your enemy, the United States, isn't seeing you as you really are.

Strategic engagement
The US has reconfirmed that the goal of the mission in Afghanistan is to destroy al-Qaeda and train the Afghan armed forces, but not to engage in nation-building. Unlike previous American commitments, which weren't very successful anyway, the current strategy officially ignores the ideological battle.

Hence the Taliban understand that their lifeline to further recruitment based on madrassa (seminary) graduates is wide open. Washington's efforts and dollars won't touch the ideological factory of jihadism, which is the strategic depth of the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Hence, the jihadi network in Afghanistan will continue and further develop its indoctrination structures, untouched and unbothered by American military escalation. US Marines and other NATO allies will be fighting today's Taliban, while tomorrow's jihadis will be receiving their instruction in full tranquility.

By the time the US deadline to withdraw is reached, in 2011, 2012 or even beyond, the future forces of the enemy will be ready to be deployed. One wave of terrorists will be weakened by the action of the US and NATO armed forces, while the next wave will be prepared to take over later.

Deadly deadline
The administration's plan included a timeline for withdrawal from Afghanistan (although reinterpreted as the beginning of withdrawal). Basing their assessment on the notion of "no open-ended engagement", the shapers of the new Afghanistan strategy have told the enemy's war room on camera that America's time in Afghanistan is until 2013 maximum, after which it will be Taliban time again.

As many analysts have concluded, all the jihadis war planners have to do is to wait out the hurricane of escalation. The deadly deadline proposed in the strategy has no precedent in the history of confrontation with totalitarian forces. The Taliban have already waited out eight years; what are two, three or eight more years, if the US-led coalition's action is not qualitatively (not just quantitatively) different?

As presented to the Afghan people, the administration's new plan for the battlefield is seen as a last surge before the general exit of the country. The Taliban's war room has understood the equation. Thirty thousand more US troops will deploy with their heavy equipment, backed by another 5,000 to 10,000 allied forces. Offensives will take place in southern Helmand province and other areas. Special forces will move to multiple places and shelling will harass the Islamist militias for as long as two years or more.

The Taliban will incur losses and al-Qaeda's operatives will be put under heavier pressure: all that is noted in Taliban leader Mullah Omar's book and saved on the laptop of al-Qaeda's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Then what?

Then the time for exit arrives, and US and NATO forces begin their withdrawal. When that happens, the surviving Taliban, plus the new wave just graduating from madrassas, or the jihadi volunteers sent from the four corners of the virtual "caliphate", will have a choice to make: either they will accept the US negotiators' offer to join the Afghan government or - depending on their assessment then - reject the offer and shell the "infidel troops" as they pull out.
In a nutshell, the new strategy is convenient to the Taliban war room: they now can figure it all out until the Mayan year of 2012 - and way beyond.

All that it takes for democracies to offer the totalitarians victories is to not understand the latter's long-term goals. And the US has just done that, so far.

Dr Walid Phares is director of the Future Terrorism Project at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and author of The Confrontation: Winning the War against Future Jihad.

(Copyright 2009 Walid Phares.)

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Tsunami Warning: Carbon Capitalists Warming to Climate Market Using Derivatives

You think we've had a financial crisis? Imagine what will happen when carbon futures will become the trade center for derivatives. Everything having to do with fossil fuels, most of our energy will be speculated to the unwitting investor. When another $2 trillion dollar bubble collapses, will the world economy survive? It seems doubtful.


Carbon Capitalists Warming to Climate Market Using Derivatives - Bloomberg.com

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"Michelle Chan, a senior policy analyst in San Francisco for Friends of the Earth, isn’t convinced.

“Should we really create a new $2 trillion market when we haven’t yet finished the job of revamping and testing new financial regulation?” she asks. Chan says that, given their recent history, the banks’ ability to turn climate change into a new commodities market should be curbed.

“What we have just been woken up to in the credit crisis -- to a jarring and shocking degree -- is what happens in the real world,” she says.

Even George Soros, the billionaire hedge fund operator, says money managers would find ways to manipulate cap-and-trade markets. “The system can be gamed,” Soros, 79, remarked at a London School of Economics seminar in July. “That’s why financial types like me like it -- because there are financial opportunities.”

Masters says U.S. carbon markets should be transparent and regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Standardized derivatives contracts -- securities that can be bought and sold by anyone -- should be traded on exchanges or centrally cleared, she says. The British-born Masters, who has an economics degree from Cambridge University, took over JPMorgan’s commodities business in 2007."

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Arctic Climate Threat--Methane from Thawing Permafrost

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Do you think global warming can wait until a consensus develops about what to do? Think again!

Arctic Climate Threat--Methane from Thawing Permafrost: Scientific American

• Methane bubbling up into the atmosphere from thawing permafrost that underlies numerous Arctic lakes appears to be hastening global warming.
• New estimates indicate that by 2100 thawing permafrost could boost emissions of the potent greenhouse gas 20 to 40 percent beyond what would be produced by all natural and man-made sources.
• The only realistic way to slow the thaw is for humankind to limit climate warming by reducing our carbon dioxide emissions."

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• UN climate chief: hacked e-mails are damaging (sfgate.com)
• Earth more sensitive to carbon dioxide than previously thought (scienceblog.com)
• Study: Slowdown in warming last year not permanent (sfgate.com)