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	Errors and Lies by Paul Krugman New York Times   May 2015   Surprise! It turns out that there’s something to be said for having the brother of a failed president make his own run for the White House. Thanks to Jeb Bush, we may finally have the frank discussion of the Iraq invasion we should have had a decade ago.   But many influential people — not just Mr. Bush — would prefer that we not have that discussion. There’s a palpable sense right now of the political and media elite trying to draw a line under the subject. Yes, the narrative goes, we now know that invading Iraq was a terrible mistake, and it’s about time that everyone admits it. Now let’s move on.   Well, let’s not — because that’s a false narrative, and everyone who was involved in the debate over the war knows that it’s false. The Iraq war wasn’t an innocent mistake, a venture undertaken on the basis of intelligence that turned out to be wrong. America invaded Iraq because the Bush administration wanted a war. The public justifications for the invasion were nothing but pretexts, and falsified pretexts at that. We were, in a fundamental sense, lied into war.   The fraudulence of the case for war was actually obvious even at the time: the ever-shifting arguments for an unchanging goal were a dead giveaway. So were the word games — the talk about W.M.D that conflated chemical weapons (which many people did think Saddam had) with nukes, the constant insinuations that Iraq was somehow behind 9/11.   And at this point we have plenty of evidence to confirm everything the war’s opponents were saying. We now know, for example, that on 9/11 itself — literally before the dust had settled — Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, was already plotting war against a regime that had nothing to do with the terrorist attack. “Judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. [Saddam Hussein] ...sweep it all up things related and not”; so read notes taken by Mr. Rumsfeld’s aide.   This was, in short, a war the White House wanted, and all of the supposed mistakes that, as Jeb puts it, “were made” by someone unnamed actually flowed from this underlying desire. Did the intelligence agencies wrongly conclude that Iraq had chemical weapons and a nuclear program? That’s because they were under intense pressure to justify the war. Did prewar assessments vastly understate the difficulty and cost of occupation? That’s because the war party didn’t want to hear anything that might raise doubts about the rush to invade. Indeed, the Army’s chief of staff was effectively fired for questioning claims that the occupation phase would be cheap and easy.   Why did they want a war? That’s a harder question to answer. Some of the warmongers believed that deploying shock and awe in Iraq would enhance American power and influence around the world. Some saw Iraq as a sort of pilot project, preparation for a series of regime changes. And it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that there was a strong element of wagging the dog, of using military triumph to strengthen the Republican brand at home.   Whatever the precise motives, the result was a very dark chapter in American history. Once again: We were lied into war.   Now, you can understand why many political and media figures would prefer not to talk about any of this. Some of them, I suppose, may have been duped: may have fallen for the obvious lies, which doesn’t say much about their judgment. More, I suspect, were complicit: they realized that the official case for war was a pretext, but had their own reasons for wanting a war, or, alternatively, allowed themselves to be intimidated into going along. For there was a definite climate of fear among politicians and pundits in 2002 and 2003, one in which criticizing the push for war looked very much like a career killer.   On top of these personal motives, our news media in general have a hard time coping with policy dishonesty. Reporters are reluctant to call politicians on their lies, even when these involve mundane issues like budget numbers, for fear of seeming partisan. In fact, the bigger the lie, the clearer it is that major political figures are engaged in outright fraud, the more hesitant the reporting. And it doesn’t get much bigger — indeed, more or less criminal — than lying America into war.   But truth matters, and not just because those who refuse to learn from history are doomed in some general sense to repeat it. The campaign of lies that took us into Iraq was recent enough that it’s still important to hold the guilty individuals accountable. Never mind Jeb Bush’s verbal stumbles. Think, instead, about his foreign-policy team, led by people who were directly involved in concocting a false case for war.   So let’s get the Iraq story right. Yes, from a national point of view the invasion was a mistake. But it was worse than a mistake, it was a crime. Visit the related web page
	Egypt: Generation of young activists imprisoned in bid to crush all dissent by Amnesty International   Continuing repression against young activists by the Egyptian authorities is a blatant attempt to crush the spirit of the country’s bravest and brightest young minds, and nip in the bud any future threat to their rule, said Amnesty International in a new briefing.   Generation Jail: Egypt’s youth go from protest to prison focuses on the cases of 14 young people who are among thousands who have been arbitrarily arrested, detained and jailed in Egypt over the past two years in connection with protests. The briefing shows that the country has reverted fully to being a police state.   “Two years after the ousting of President Mohamed Morsi, mass protests have been replaced by mass arrests. By relentlessly targeting Egypt’s youth activists, the authorities are crushing an entire generation’s hopes for a brighter future,” said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, Deputy Director of the Middle East and North Africa Programme at Amnesty International.   “After the 2011 uprising, Egypt’s youth were lauded as a beacon of hope by the country’s military leaders and its international partners alike. It was their idealism and commitment to calls for ‘bread, freedom and social justice’ that proved a crucial driving force for change. Yet, today, many of these young activists are languishing behind bars, providing every indication that Egypt has regressed into a state of all-out repression.”   More than a year after he came to power, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s government has shown no sign of easing its repressive rule. The crackdown has seen more than 41,000 people arrested, charged or indicted with a criminal offence, or sentenced after unfair trials, according to the last available estimates by Egyptian human rights activists.   “The scale of the crackdown is overwhelming. The Egyptian authorities’ have shown that they will stop at nothing in their attempts to crush all challenges to their authority,” said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui.   “Those behind bars range from internationally lauded youth movement leaders, to human rights defenders, to students arrested for wearing T-shirts with anti-torture slogans.”   The Protest Law, passed in November 2013, enables the authorities to arrest and prosecute peaceful demonstrators on a whim, and criminalizes the very act of 10 or more people taking to the streets without prior authorization. It also grants the security forces free reign to use excessive and lethal force against peaceful protesters.   “The Protest Law has become a fast-track to prison for peaceful demonstrators, who are being treated like criminals. It must be scrapped immediately,” said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui.   A crackdown that began with the arrests of Mohamed Morsi and his supporters, including leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood movement, in July 2013 has rapidly expanded to encompass the whole of Egypt’s political spectrum.   Among those arbitrarily imprisoned are activists from the “6 April Youth Movement”, bloggers, university students, teachers, protesters, and prominent human rights defenders.   Many have been imprisoned for defying Egypt’s draconian Protest Law, or other legislation that arbitrarily restricts the right to freedom of peaceful assembly.   A new wave of arrests in mid-2015 saw at least 160 people detained in conditions amounting to enforced disappearance according to the Egyptian activist group Freedom For the Brave. The Muslim Brotherhood movement separately reported new arrests of its members.   The Egyptian authorities have often sought to justify their heavy handed tactics by saying they are maintaining stability and security. While some demonstrators have used violence during protests, the response of the security forces has routinely been disproportionate.   Many of those detained have found themselves hauled before courts on trumped-up or politically motivated charges, or sentenced during mass trials in which hundreds have been convicted based on little or no evidence, or solely on the basis of testimonies from the security forces or investigations by National Security.   Others have been detained for prolonged periods without charge or trial. They include student Mahmoud Mohamed Ahmed Hussein, who was just 18 years old while he was arrested on his way home from a protest because of the slogan on his T-shirt. He spent his 19th birthday in prison and has now spent more than 500 days without charge or trial.   The thousands of protesters convicted on spurious charges or because of laws that arbitrarily restrict freedom of peaceful assembly and expression, stand in stark contrast to the paltry number of security forces prosecuted for human rights violations since January 2011. No members of the security forces has faced criminal charges over the deaths of hundreds of Morsi supporters at Rabaa Adawiya and al-Nadha Squares on 14 August 2013.   Amnesty International is warning Egypt’s international partners not to sacrifice human rights in their talks with the authorities.   The leaders of EU countries, have all sat down with President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi while his administration has been putting thousands of its political opponents behind bars. The US government announced in March that it was lifting a freeze on arms transfers to Egypt and would continue military and security assistance to the country’s army.   “World leaders are breaking the pledges they made to stand by Egypt’s young people when Mubarak fell in February 2011. Egypt is jailing peaceful activists while the international community looks the other away.   Egyptian authorities have justified the crackdown by pointing to a rise in political violence. Egypt is facing attacks from armed groups, which the authorities have said have led to the deaths of hundreds of members of the security forces, particularly in the north of the Sinai Peninsula, as well as a number of civilians. Amnesty International unreservedly condemns attacks on civilians. However, the organization urges the Egyptian authorities not to use such threats as a pretext for trampling upon human rights.   http://www.amnesty.org/press-releases/2015/06/egypt-generation-of-young-activists-imprisoned-in-ruthless-bid-to-crush-dissent-1/ http://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde12/1873/2015/en/ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/reporters-notebook-tahrir-square-five-years-later/   UK surveillance Tribunal reveals the Cameron government spied on Amnesty International.   In a shocking revelation, the UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) has notified Amnesty International that UK government agencies had spied on the organization by intercepting, accessing and storing its communications.   In an email sent today, the Tribunal informed Amnesty International its 22 June ruling had mistakenly identified one of two NGOs which it found had been subjected to unlawful surveillance by the UK government. Today’s communication makes clear that it was actually Amnesty International that was spied on in addition to the Legal Resources Centre in South Africa.   The NGOs were among 10 organizations that launched a legal challenge against suspected unlawful mass surveillance of their work by the UK’s spy agencies.   “After 18 months of litigation and all the denials and subterfuge that entailed, we now have confirmation that we were in fact subjected to UK government mass surveillance. It’s outrageous that what has been often presented as being the domain of despotic rulers has been occurring on British soil, by the British government,” said Salil Shetty, Amnesty International’s Secretary General.   “How can we be expected to carry out our crucial work around the world if human rights defenders and victims of abuses can now credibly believe their confidential correspondence with us is likely to end up in the hands of governments?   “The revelation that the UK government has been spying on Amnesty International highlights the gross inadequacies in the UK’s surveillance legislation. If they hadn’t stored our communications for longer than they were allowed to by internal guidelines, we would never even have known. What’s worse, this would have been considered perfectly lawful.”   Today’s IPT email made no mention of when or why Amnesty International was spied on, or what was done with the information obtained.   This shows the urgent need for significant legal reform, including proper pre-judicial authorization and meaningful oversight of the use of surveillance powers by the UK security services, and an independent inquiry into how and why a UK intelligence agency has been spying on human rights organizations. It also underlines Amnesty International’s call for an end to mass communications surveillance by governments.   http://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/07/uk-surveillance-tribunal-reveals-the-government-spied-on-amnesty-international/ Visit the related web page
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