American bankers handled his loot. Oil companies play by his rules. The Bush administration woos him. How the pursuit of oil is propping up the West African dictatorship of Teodoro Obiang.

By Peter Maass
Illustration By: Jeffrey Decoster
Map by Baker Vail

January/February 2005 Issue

The red dirt of the jungle meets a paved road on the outskirts of Ebebiyin, where a national celebration is about to begin. Women are singing and swaying in an African rhythm that is hard to resist, even though their lyrics are not of a can’t-stop-dancing variety: “We await you, Mr. President,” they sing in Fang, the main language in Equatorial Guinea. “We are happy to see you; you are the people’s president.” In the distance, a cloud of Martian dust heralds the arrival of President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo.

The president is accompanied by 40 vehicles and enough firepower to start a small war. In the lead are army-green trucks, with soldiers clad in black ninja outfits. Because the president doesn’t entirely trust his military, the jeeps in front of his Lexus SUV bear his Moroccan security guards, many of them perched on the running boards, clutching Heckler & Koch assault rifles as they scan the horizon.

The motorcade halts at the edge of the town and its chickens-in-the-road squalor. Obiang strolls up the street, shaking hands with people who line the uneven sidewalks, many clad in T-shirts and dresses bearing his image. His bearing is regal. If he has any anxiety because of a recent coup attempt, which involved a gang of couldn’t-shoot-straight mercenaries from South Africa and Britain (allegedly financed by the son of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher), he does not betray it. And if his mind is troubled by a recent U.S. Senate investigation detailing how he siphoned millions from his country’s treasury with the help of Riggs Bank in Washington, D.C., and how he and members of his inner circle extracted large and unorthodox payments from American oil companies, that, too, does not show.

Obiang has traveled to Equatorial Guinea’s mainland from his palace on the island capital of Malabo to celebrate the 36th anniversary of independence from Spain. The three-day gala is replete with references to the 1979 overthrow of Francisco Macias Nguema, the nation’s first dictator. Macias, who once tortured and killed political opponents in a soccer stadium, drowning out their screams by playing “Those Were the Days” on the loudspeakers, was ousted and executed in a coup led by a senior military aide who was also his nephew -- Teodoro Obiang.

For “El Libertador,” as Obiang allows himself to be called, the highlight of the October celebration is a parade down Ebebiyin’s finest stretch of asphalt. About a hundred goose-stepping soldiers lead the way, and through bouts of equatorial heat and showers, delegations from seemingly every town and organization in the nation march by with banners saluting the president and ruling party.

The heat, the soldiers, the jungle, the out-of-tune band -- I was starting to feel I had fallen into a tin-pot time warp. Then I noticed the American flags. These were carried by a delegation from Mobil Equatorial Guinea, Inc., a subsidiary of ExxonMobil. They also carried white Exxon flags and placards bearing ExxonMobil’s name. Behind them came delegations with signs announcing Halliburton, ChevronTexaco, Marathon Oil.

In the past few years, Equatorial Guinea, population 500,000, has become the third-largest oil exporter in sub-Saharan Africa, after Nigeria and Angola. Per capita, it is one of the richest countries on the continent; rated by how much money ends up in the pockets of people not related to the president, it remains one of the poorest. Oil is the reason the desperate-looking cafés and shops in Ebebiyin use ExxonMobil signs as decorations. It is why, although his regime once sent death threats to the U.S. ambassador, Obiang now meets with senior administration officials and even with President Bush. And it’s why no one spoke out as Obiang treated his nation’s treasury as his own private bank account.

Equatorial Guinea sometimes seems a parody of an oil kleptocracy -- a Blazing Saddles of the world of petroleum. Yet it has emerged as an all-too-real example of how a dictator, awash in petrodollars, enriches himself and his family while starving his people. His conduct has been aided by American companies: As detailed in Senate and Treasury Department documents, Riggs Bank helped Obiang shuttle millions into offshore accounts. Oil companies, meanwhile, made payments to his regime that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is now scrutinizing under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

If America’s interest in foreign countries were predicated on human rights, Equatorial Guinea would have seized our attention long before its 1995 oil boom. Francisco Macias Nguema, whose self-bestowed titles included “Leader of Steel,” “The Sole Miracle of Equatorial Guinea,” and, of course, “President for Life,” was a morph of Idi Amin and Pol Pot. He killed or forced into exile nearly a third of the population, decimating in particular the small educated class. Some of his victims were crucified on the road leading to the airport. It was one of the 20th century’s most brutal genocides, but no foreign power except for Equatorial Guinea’s former colonial ruler paid attention to it, and the fascist regime of Spain’s Francisco Franco was not overly troubled by human rights abuses. Obiang’s coup was a welcome event, and his rule has not been nearly as ruthless as his uncle’s. Of course,that’s not much of an achievement.

Recent State Department reports define Equatorial Guinea as a nominal democracy but note that “in practice power is exercised by President Teodoro Obiang Nguema.” In the latest election, Obiang was reelected with 97 percent of the vote in an election “marred by extensive fraud and intimidation.” “Corruption among officials is widespread,” one report adds; the distribution of oil revenues, meanwhile, has “lacked transparency despite repeated calls from international financial institutions and citizens for greater financial openness.” And finally, “There is little evidence that the country’s oil wealth is being devoted to the public good.”

Human rights abuses continue unchecked. An oil company employee was recently beaten unconscious by gendarmes when he refused to pay a bribe. In 2002, more than a dozen security officials at the airport in Bata, the country’s commercial center, were arrested after they allowed an opposition leader to board a plane for Gabon. If you happen to be a member of the opposition, or even a suspected member of the opposition, you live precariously.

For an intimate portrait of what “torture” and “abuse” mean in the context of Equatorial Guinea, I consulted Tropical Gangsters by Robert Klitgaard, an economist who worked in Malabo during the late 1980s. The book ends with Klitgaard protesting the torture of a local colleague who was taken to the presidential compound above Malabo’s harbor, blindfolded, and had his hands tied behind his back. He was then hung by his ankles -- as Klitgaard writes, “like a marlin at the weight scale” -- and lowered into a barrel of soapy water and kept there until he choked. He was pulled out, questioned, and submerged again. This went on for several hours. Later, electric shocks were administered to his genitals. He was eventually released.

Even foreign officials have not been excluded from thuggery. John Bennett was the U.S. envoy to Equatorial Guinea from 1991 to 1994, and his outspokenness about such abuses angered Obiang. One evening he received a death threat at the U.S. Embassy. When I talked with Bennett recently, he recalled meeting the country’s president after the incident. “Obiang said he couldn’t believe anyone would threaten the American ambassador,” Bennett said drolly. “It was pretty low comedy.” Soon after, in 1995, the embassy was closed because of concerns over corruption and human rights.

The country might have disappeared from our geopolitical radar had Mobil not struck oil in the waters off Malabo later that year. It quickly became clear that the Zafiro oil field was world-class. After a decade of development, oil production in Equatorial Guinea stands at more than 300,000 barrels a day, which at current prices translates to nearly $5.5 billion a year. A gas field owned by Marathon Oil has also become a major producer, and the ocean beds off Equatorial Guinea are being combed for additional deposits. Energy companies have invested several billion dollars in Equatorial Guinea, and Marathon is building a major liquefied natural gas facility. It is now possible to fly nonstop from Malabo to Texas on a weekly flight known as the “Houston Express.”

Equatorial Guinea is not the only country in the region to have emerged as a major oil supplier for the United States. West Africa is central to America’s effort to reduce dependency on Middle East oil. The region currently supplies 15 percent of America’s energy, and that figure is expected to rise to 25 percent within a few years. A report prepared by the African Oil Policy Initiative Group (AOPIG), a panel of U.S. government and energy industry officials brought together by the Jerusalem-based neoconservative Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, proposed that the Gulf of Guinea be declared a “vital interest” in U.S. national security policy. The report, unveiled at a press conference in 2002 by several congressmen, proposed that the U.S. military presence be enhanced to include a unified military command for Africa and a home port in São Tomé, an island state in this gulf. Three months later, President Bush convened a meeting with Obiang and nine other Central African leaders at the United Nations to discuss military and energy security. And in a sign of Equatorial Guinea’s new strategic role, a lieutenant colonel in the Special Forces -- the U.S. military attaché from neighboring Cameroon -- represented the Pentagon in the grandstand at the independence parade in Ebebiyin.

U.S. corporations are now investing more in Equatorial Guinea than in any other African country except for Nigeria and South Africa. In 2003, the Bush administration reopened the embassy, a move sharply criticized by human rights groups as a favor to the oil companies and to Obiang. Frank Ruddy, U.S. ambassador to Equatorial Guinea in the mid-1980s, decries current U.S. policy, saying that Bush administration officials are “big cheerleaders for the government -- and it’s an awful government.”

Obiang has few friends. He has alienated the Spanish -- and through them the entire European Union -- by accusing Madrid of involvement in the March 2004 coup attempt. Aside from the Chinese, only the Bush administration seems to like Obiang. No senior administration official has issued a public word of criticism against his regime. Instead, in June 2004, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham each met privately with Obiang in Washington. When I interviewed Gabriel Nguema Lima, Obiang’s son, he warmly saluted the Bush administration: “The United States, like China, is careful not to get into internal issues.”

Equatorial Guinea exemplifies what is known as the “resource curse,” the paradox by which countries rich in oil, gas, or minerals tend to suffer rather than benefit, because the abundance of “easy money” undermines healthy economic and political development. In Nigeria -- to cite a classic example -- total oil revenues have topped hundreds of billions of dollars, but poverty is worse than it was before the oil rush began more than 20 years ago; corruption is a national sport, and the country is fissuring along ethnic lines.

In Equatorial Guinea, nearly half of all children under five are malnourished. Even major cities lack clean water and basic sanitation. A health consultant who recently visited Equatorial Guinea for the first time since 1993 wrote with dismay in the International Herald Tribune: “Despite the oil boom, I was unable to see any improvements in the living standards of ordinary people.” (Obiang is not among the ordinary: In 1999 he paid $2.6 million -- cash -- for a mansion outside Washington, D.C. One of his wives had a $10,000 daily limit on her Riggs Bank debit card.)

On my way to Ebebiyin, I was stopped several times by underpaid or rarely paid soldiers who demanded bribes -- in their parlance cerveza, or beer money. In the town itself, the main hospital is a place for dying, not healing. The wards are dingy rooms with soiled mattresses and no medical equipment except for a couple of IV drips. By contrast, the town’s sparkling conference hall is air-conditioned and had, during a reception for Obiang’s cabinet the evening before the parade, a 25-foot table stocked with bottles of Johnnie Walker, Smirnoff, and Spanish wine. Apart from such showcase buildings, even government facilities can be decrepit. When I interviewed the minister of education in his office, only one of the two light fixtures had a bulb and I could not tell whether it worked because the power was out.

Yet to Western oil companies, Equatorial Guinea is an ideal partner. Nearly all of its oil and gas reserves are offshore, which means securing the fields is relatively easy. ExxonMobil and Marathon workers live in gated compounds that operate their own electrical, water, and communication systems. Unlike in Nigeria or Saudi Arabia, foreign workers do not face major security threats, and the government’s brutish security apparatus has kept the violent-crime rate low. Expats freely cruise the rutted streets of Malabo in their pickup trucks and hang out at the most popular bars, like La Bamba and Shangri-La, among an abundance of professional women, known as “night fighters” because they bicker over prospective clients.

Most important for oil companies, Equatorial Guinea is a profitable place to do business. According to a 1999 report by the International Monetary Fund, oil companies received “by far the most generous tax and profit-sharing provisions in the region.” The state received only 15 to 40 percent of the revenues from its oil fields, while the norm in sub-Saharan Africa was 45 to 90 percent.

Even so, the government is expected to reap $1.5 billion in oil revenues this year, or about $3,000 per capita. But that figure is deeply misleading; for the average Equatoguinean, scraping by on roughly $2 a day, $3,000 is an unimaginable fortune. So where does the money go?

Hollywood reject breaks US film record
By Catherine Elsworth in Los Angeles
(Filed: 04/01/2005)

It was rejected by Hollywood and has only ever played in one cinema. But Uncle Nino, a low-budget, feel-good comedy about the importance of family, is quietly emerging as one of 2004's most enduring films.

The gentle tale of an eccentric Italian relative whose visit helps heal a fractured American family has beaten Superman II and even The Passion of the Christ to become last year's longest playing release.

	Uncle Nino cost less than £1.54 million and was shot in 25 days

What was supposed to be a brief trial showing in Grand Rapids, Michigan, turned into a year-long run after Uncle Nino proved an enormous hit with local cinema-goers. The test screening turned into the longest in history -currently in its 55th week.

Now the rest of the US will discover what the fuss is about after a distributor secured a deal to show it across America from February. It is also hoping to take the film to an international audience later in the year.

The independent production, which cost less than £1.54 million and was shot in 25 days, is the work of Robert Shallcross, a Chicago director who wrote the 1994 film Little Giants and has spent years directing television adverts.

He was inspired by his hectic lifestyle which left him too little time for his four children.

"I wanted to tell a story about an American family that was missing out on some of the simple, important pleasures in life."

Shallcross took the finished film to Hollywood, but all the major studios turned it down. Eventually a friend persuaded the president of Celebration Cinema, a regional, family-owned cinema in Michigan, to show it in Grand Rapids for two weeks in December 2003.

"We didn't think it would survive Christmas," said Ron Van Timmeren, an executive vice president for Celebration Cinema. "But it opened well and then went up.

"I think the film's wholesomeness appeals to an older generation without cutting out the younger audience."

Uncle Nino stars Joe Mantegna and Anne Archer as disconnected suburban parents and Pierrino Mascarino as the Italian uncle.

Mascarino has made numerous trips to Michigan, appearing at screenings unannounced and in character and hugging audience members as they leave

Georgia Sheriff Fires Workers, but Then a Judge Intervenes

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: January 5, 2005

JONESBORO, Ga., Jan. 4 (AP) - On his first day at work, the new sheriff of Clayton County called 27 employees into his office on Monday, fired them and had snipers stand guard on the roof as they were escorted out the door.

A judge on Tuesday ordered him to rehire the employees.

The sheriff, Victor Hill, 39, defended the firings and said he had the right to shake up the department in whatever way he felt necessary.

Sheriff Hill also said it was necessary to fire the workers the way he did, including taking some deputies home in vans normally used to transport prisoners because the deputies were barred from using county cars.

Sheriff Hill was among a spate of black candidates elected last year in the county, which was once dominated by rural whites. The fired employees included four of the highest-ranking officers, all of them white. Sheriff Hill told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that their replacements would be black.

Sheriff Hill's move provoked an angry reaction from the newly elected chairman of the county commission, Eldrin Bell, who is black. He called the move illegal and filed for the restraining order granted by the judge, Stephen Boswell.

Judge Boswell granted a 30-day restraining order, halting the firings, and wrote that it appeared that "employees of the sheriff were terminated without cause" and in violation of the county's civil service rules.

Sheriff Hill disagreed.

"A lot of people are under the impression that the sheriff's office is under civil service laws," he said. "But my research shows the employees work at the pleasure of the sheriff."

Sheriff Hill said one of the reasons for the security accompanying the firings was the assassination of Sheriff Derwin Brown in neighboring DeKalb County in 2000. Sheriff Brown was gunned down in the driveway of his home three days before he was to be sworn in. The former sheriff, Sidney Dorsey, was found guilty of plotting to kill him and sentenced to life in prison.

"Derwin Brown sent out letters to 25 to 30 people letting them know they would not be reappointed when he took office," Sheriff Hill said.

The Clayton County Sheriff's Department employs 345 people.
 

Bush's Counsel Sought Ruling About Torture

By DAVID JOHNSTON and NEIL A. LEWIS
Published: January 5, 2005

WASHINGTON, Jan. 4 - Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel, intervened directly with Justice Department lawyers in 2002 to obtain a legal ruling on the extent of the president's authority to permit extreme interrogation practices in the name of national security, current and former administration officials said Tuesday.
 
Mr. Gonzales's role in seeking a legal opinion on the definition of torture and the legal limits on the force that could be used on terrorist suspects in captivity is expected to be a central issue in the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearings scheduled to begin on Thursday on Mr. Gonzales's nomination to be attorney general.

The request by Mr. Gonzales produced the much-debated Justice Department memorandum of Aug. 1, 2002, which defined torture narrowly and said that Mr. Bush could circumvent domestic and international prohibitions against torture in the name of national security.

Until now, administration officials have been unwilling to provide details about the role Mr. Gonzales had in the production of the memorandum by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel. Mr. Gonzales has spoken of the memorandum as a response to questions, without saying that most of the questions were his.

Current and former officials who talked about the memorandum have been provided with firsthand accounts about how it was prepared. Some discussed it in an effort to clear up what they viewed as a murky record in advance of Mr. Gonzales's confirmation hearings. Others spoke of the matter apparently believing that the Justice Department had unfairly taken the blame for the memorandum.

A White House spokeswoman, Erin Healy, said Tuesday that while Mr. Gonzales personally requested the August opinion, he was only seeking "objective legal advice and did not ask the Office of Legal Counsel to reach any specific conclusion."

As the White House's chief lawyer, Mr. Gonzales supervised the production of a number of legal memorandums that shaped the administration's legal framework for conducting its battle against Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Of the documents that have been made public, only one was written by Mr. Gonzales. In that memorandum, dated January 2002, he advised Mr. Bush that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to fighters captured in Afghanistan. The next month the White House decided that the Geneva Conventions would be applied to Taliban captives but not to detainees linked to Al Qaeda.

As a result, a major area of questioning at his confirmation hearing is expected to be the role he played in the production of the other documents, like the August 2002 memorandum. That memorandum concluded that interrogators had great leeway to question detainees using coercive techniques that they could assert were not torture.

The Justice Department formally rescinded the August memorandum last week and in its place issued a legal opinion saying that torture should be more broadly defined and that there was no need to say that Mr. Bush had the authority to sanction torture because he has said unequivocally that it is not permitted.

The revision stated that "torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and international norms." It rejected the language in the earlier memorandum, which said that only physical pain "of an intensity akin to that which accompanies serious physical injury such as death or organ failure" constituted torture punishable by law.

Administration officials said over the last few days that Mr. Gonzales had played a role in the decision to issue the new legal opinion as well, but they did not offer specifics.

Mr. Gonzales's request resulting in the original August 2002 memorandum was somewhat unusual, the officials said, because he went directly to lawyers at the Office of Legal Counsel, bypassing the office of the deputy attorney general, which is often notified of politically delicate requests for legal opinions made by executive-branch agencies, including the White House.

The memorandum has become one of the most hotly debated legal documents in the so-called war on terror. Democrats and human rights groups have complained that it created a permissive atmosphere that led to serious abuses of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The memorandum was addressed to Mr. Gonzales and was signed by Jay S. Bybee, then the head of the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department.
 
Officials dispute how much senior Justice Department officials knew of the memorandum as it was being prepared. A former official and a current one said that neither Attorney General John Ashcroft nor his deputy, Larry D. Thompson, were aware of the memorandum until it was about to be submitted to the White House.

Another former official said, however, that they were given progress reports as the memorandum took shape.

John Yoo, a senior Justice Department lawyer who wrote much of the memorandum, exchanged draft language with lawyers at the White House, the officials said. Mr. Yoo, now a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, said in an article published Sunday in The San Jose Mercury News that Mr. Gonzales did not apply any pressure on him to tailor the memorandum to accommodate the White House.

Instead, Mr. Yoo said that Mr. Gonzales was merely seeking to "understand all available options" in a perilous time, when the United States faced unprecedented threats.

But a senior administration official disagreed, saying that the memorandum's conclusions appeared to closely align with the prevailing White House view of interrogation practices. The official said the memorandum raised questions about whether the Office of Legal Counsel had maintained its longstanding tradition of dispensing objective legal advice to its clients in executive-branch agencies.

While the nature of Mr. Gonzales's specific discussions with the Justice Department remains unclear, administration officials said that Mr. Gonzales's customary way of dealing with Justice Department lawyers was to pose questions about issues rather than offer his own conclusions, although one said his preferences could sometimes be inferred easily from his questions.

Justice Department officials said that the timing of the revised memorandum, which was posted on the Justice Department's Internet site without announcement late on Dec. 30, was a result of instructions from James B. Comey, the deputy attorney general.

Mr. Comey, the officials said, told lawyers to complete the revised opinion before the end of the year. At the same time, officials said they were mindful that issuance of the new opinion might help neutralize the issue for Mr. Gonzales even as it served as a sharp critique of the earlier opinion.

Mr. Gonzales talked about the August 2002 memorandum in a meeting with reporters last June, when the White House sought to defend its actions at the height of the uproar over abuses of prisoners in Iraq.

Without discussing his own role in soliciting the document, Mr. Gonzales said that the memorandum was not a policy directive to officials in the field but a response to questions about the scope of the federal law prohibiting torture and the international convention on torture.

"The president has given no order or directive that would immunize from prosecution anyone engaged in conduct that constitutes torture," Mr. Gonzales said. "All interrogation techniques actually authorized have been carefully vetted, are lawful, and do not constitute torture."

Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, who has signaled an intent to question Mr. Gonzales vigorously about his role in the memorandums, said Tuesday that he has been continually frustrated by the White House in trying to obtain answers and documents.

In a letter to Mr. Gonzales on Tuesday, Mr. Leahy wrote, "I am disappointed that, contrary to your promises to me to engage in an open exchange and answer my questions in connection with your confirmation process, you have not answered my letters" requesting documents.

But Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania and the new chairman of the committee, said that Mr. Leahy's complaints appeared unjustified.

GAZA, Palestine, January 3, 2005 (IPC + WAFA) - - The Ministry of Prisoners and Ex-Detainees Affairs considered on Sunday that 2004 was the worst year for Palestinian prisoners, as detention conditions inside Israeli jails deteriorated to a level never seen in 30 years.

A report issued by the ministry's information department indicated that the year 2004 witnessed fierce attacks inside Israeli jails that reached all prisoner categories, pointing out that the most dangerous measure Israeli authorities attempted was to label those prisoners as terrorists, and treat them in the same way as Guantanamo prisoners in order to strip them of international sympathy.

The report pointed out that the Israeli government has given the administration of prisons to radical military generals who deal with the prisoners in an absolute military sense, leading to the increase of oppression, persecution and aggression against those prisoners.

Mr. Riyadh Al Ashqar, director of the information department, said that since 1967 more than half a million Palestinian prisoners have been imprisoned in Israeli jails.

"Since Al Aqsa Intifada, Israeli occupation forces arrested about 35 thousand prisoners, eight thousands of them still inside the different Israeli jails. Of those still imprisoned, 361 children and 126 females in addition to about a thousand patients suffering different diseases, including paralysis, blindness and amputations.

Al Ashqar noted that the administrative detention frequencies have increased drastically, a thing that caused the administrative detainees to boycott the court hearings to protest the renewal of their terms. 2464 administrative detainees are still inside Israeli jails, of them 434 have spent more than ten years, 140 spent more than 15 years and 16 spent more than 20 years, while five prisoners, including the oldest Palestinian prisoner Saeed Al Ataba, have spent more than 25 years in prison.

The Ministry documented more than 2000 arrests this year, compared with 500 cases in 2001. The number of deaths among the prisoners also increased during 2004, as 176 prisoners died inside Israeli jails, compared with 165 deaths until 2003.

Also, the year 2004 recorded an increase in the number of life terms, as the number of prisoners sentenced to more than one life terms in Israeli jails reached 444 prisoners, including Abdullah Barghouti, who was sentenced to 67 life terms in prison, which is considered the highest verdict ever made in Israeli courts.

As for detention conditions inside the jails, the year 2004 witnessed the revoking of kitchen access to Palestinian prisoners, and instead the kitchen was handed over to Israeli criminal convicts, and thus Palestinian prisoners refused to eat what those convicts cook as it contradicts their beliefs and traditions, forcing them to prepare their own food and incur more expenses due to the increase in foodstuffs prices.

The prisoners also complained of the bad food being served in Israeli jails, which resulted in many food-poisoning cases among them. Additionally, Israeli jail administrations imposed many penal measures against Palestinian prisoners, including banning family visits, imposing high fines for worthless reasons, frequent transfer of prisoners from one jail to another to destabilize the prisoners.

One of the prisoners, Aladdin Al Bezyan, who is a blind man sentenced to 20 years in jail, has been denied family visits for four years now.

Al Ashqar further mentioned that during 2004 a large number of female prisoners was recorded, as 63 out of a total of 126 prisoners remain inside Israeli jails.

The Ministry of Prisoners Affairs report asserted that the number of patient prisoners soared inside Israeli jails, due to the bad detention conditions as well as decreased hygiene and lack of proper health care.

The number of sick prisoners rose from 700 in 2003 to more than a thousand in 2004 including dozens whose conditions are serious and require immediate surgeries, according to outside doctors who reviewed their medical files.

The report confirmed that there have been a deliberate lack of medical attention by the Israeli Prison Service towards Palestinian prisoners, especially those hospitalized at Al Ramleh prison hospital, where 140 prisoners are staying there with minimum attention.

the year 2004 also saw the opening of new jails to accommodate the large number of prisoners being arrested everyday by random arrest campaigns and raids throughout the Gaza Strip and West Bank. The 'Gilboa' prison was recently opened in the Bisan Valley near 'Shatta' prison, and can accommodate 200 prisoners.

The Israeli Prison Service made this new prison to isolate the leaders of the prisoners' movement.

Israeli authorities also opened a new block in 'Ayalon' prison, which was previously a horse stable, and will be used to detain civilians, and later turned it into a block for Palestinian prisoners. Another new block was also opened in 'Negev' desert prison.

As for weapons, Israeli authorities used a variety of chemical agents against the prisoners, such as hot pepper rounds that paralyze the prisoner and cause him to suffer excruciating pains.

The year 2004 also witnessed a grave escalation towards minor prisoners, as Israeli authorities dealt with them as 'ticking bombs', imprisoning and torturing them as adult prisoners, which is a blatant violation of all human rights law and international conventions.

The number of patient children inside Israeli jails rose to 48, compared with 34 in 2003.

At the end of its report, the Ministry of Prisoners Affairs demanded all the legal and human rights organizations to urgently interfere and help the Palestinian prisoners, as well as expose the Israeli violations against them and intensify visits to Israeli jails to get a closer picture on the prisoner's catastrophic conditions, especially patients and minors, whose detention lacks the simplest rights stated by the Fourth Geneva Convention

Lawsuit Says Agency Urged False Reporting on Iraqi Arms

A senior CIA operative who handled sensitive informants in Iraq asserts that CIA managers asked him to falsify his reporting on weapons of mass destruction and retaliated against him after he refused.

The operative, who remains under cover, asserts in a lawsuit made public yesterday that a co-worker warned him in 2001 "that CIA management planned to 'get him' for his role in reporting intelligence contrary to official CIA dogma."

"Our mission is to . . . report the facts," Anya Guilsher, a CIA spokeswoman, says of the agency.

The subject of that reporting has been blacked out by the CIA, and the word "Iraq" does not appear in the heavily redacted version of the legal complaint, but the remaining language and context make clear that the officer's work related to prewar intelligence on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction.

In the lawsuit, the officer asserts that CIA managers retaliated against him for refusing their demands by beginning a counterintelligence investigation of allegations that he had sex with a female asset and by initiating an inspector general's investigation into allegations that he stole money meant to be used to pay human assets.

Those investigations, the lawsuit asserts, were "initiated for the sole purpose of discrediting him and retaliating against him for questioning the integrity of the WMD reporting . . . and for refusing to falsify his intelligence reporting to support the politically mandated conclusion" of matters that are redacted in the lawsuit.

The lawsuit marks the first public instance in which a CIA employee has charged directly that agency officials pressured him to produce intelligence to support the administration's prewar position that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were a grave and gathering threat, and to suppress information that ran counter to that view.

"Their official dogma was contradicted by his reporting and they did not want to hear it," said Roy Krieger, the officer's attorney.

Anya Guilsher, a CIA spokeswoman, said the agency could not comment on the lawsuit but added, "The notion that CIA managers order officers to falsify reports is flat wrong. Our mission is to call it like we see it and report the facts."

Critics of the Iraq war have asserted the administration pressured analysts and operators to produce information that bolstered the administration's case for invading Iraq. Congressional investigations did not find evidence to support that charge, but found that the CIA did not have enough spies in Iraq and that the analysis of the highly circumstantial evidence was mischaracterized as firmer than it was.

No biological or chemical weapons have been found in Iraq. A subsequent CIA-led investigation found that Iraq was nowhere near producing a nuclear weapon, as the administration had asserted.

The unnamed operative is a 23-year officer of Middle Eastern descent who spent much of his career on secret and covert operations to collect intelligence on and interdict weapons of mass destruction, the lawsuit says.

In 2002, the lawsuit says, the CIA officer "attempted to report routine intelligence" from a human asset "but was thwarted by CIA superiors." It goes on to say that he was subsequently approached by a senior desk officer "who insisted that Plaintiff falsify his reporting," and that when he refused, the "management" of the CIA's Counterproliferation Division ordered that he "remove himself from any further 'handling' " of the unnamed asset, who is referred elsewhere in the document as "a highly respected human asset."

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington on Friday and placed in the public court docket yesterday after a judge said it could proceed using a pseudonym for the plaintiff, says his superiors falsely promised him that they would report his findings to President Bush and falsely claimed that they had disseminated some of his other reports through normal channels.

In 2003, the lawsuit says, the CIA officer learned of the counterintelligence investigation of allegations that he was having sex with a female asset. Five days later, it says, he was told that a promotion was being canceled "because of pressure from the DDO [Deputy Director of Operations] James Pavitt."

Pavitt declined to comment.

In September 2003, the CIA placed the officer on administrative leave without explanation, the lawsuit says. Eight months later, it says, the inspector general's office advised him that he was under investigation for "diverting to his own use monies provided him for payment to human assets." The document says the allegations were made by the same managers who had asked him to falsify reports.

In August 2004, he was terminated "for unspecified reasons," the lawsuit says. It requests that his employment, salary and promotions be restored and that the CIA pay compensatory damages and legal fees.

In a letter to CIA acting general counsel John Rizzo dated Dec. 6, Krieger requested a meeting between the officer and CIA Director Porter J. Goss because of "the serious nature of the allegations in this case, including deliberately misleading the President on intelligence concerning weapons of mass destruction."

The Real Lock Box

The good news: Social Security is still solvent. The bad news: It's all in T-Bonds!

by Mary Pitt

01/03/05 "ICH" -- When a bank is robbed by a common criminal, the police at all levels are on high alert and the thieves are pursued until they are caught. However, when the theft is by a bank insider with access to the books, the theft can be covered up for a long time while the guilty parties make their getaway to live a long, luxurious life in a foreign country. The victims, the depositors have theiir money replaced by tax funds, and the only losers are the American taxpayers. Now we find that there is an "inside job" going on that is stealing a vitally important trust fund and all indications are that the thieves are going to get away with it, due to adept manipulation of the funds and obfuscation of the truth.

Back in the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the people in our beleaguered government realized that the elderly of our nation were doomed to be a burden on the children whom they had carefully and patiently reared in the hope for a better life for them and those children were faced with bitter choices on a daily basis. No family was ever able to provide the necessities of life for everybody and the choices were whether to provide for the needs of elderly parents or for their own children. In most cases, the choice was for all to share what little there was and for everyone to go hungry. The nation was in the grip of the Great Depression; those who had carefully saved money had lost it all in the stock market crash and the bank closures, the only earnings that were available were from what one had and could sell, what one could grow and trade for products and services, and hungry people worked all day at heavy labor for a meal handed out the back door by a householder. Nobody who was not alive in those days can comprehend their misery. This level of privation had not been experienced since the earliest days of the settlement of this continent.

In that climate, while there was little that could be done for the immediate problem, it was resolved that this should never be allowed to happen again. Many programs and regulations were instituted in order to restore the monetary system, the business climate, and the culture which had been established over the years. Among these programs was that of Social Security. This allowed people to contribute to a fund during their working years so that they could draw from it when they became too old to work. It took many years to pay enough into the fund to qualify, but elderly people worked assiduously to establish this entitlement so that they would not burden their own children as they had been burdened in the past. It was considered to be a trust fund, much like the one to which people now contribute in order to prepare for the education of their children.

At first, it was not complete. Only wage earners were allowed to participate. Farmers were left out as well as the self-employed and, during World War II, soldiers were not covered for their service pay. But, over time, more people were covered and adjustments to the rate of investment were made so that surviving dependents and those who became disabled before reaching the age of 65 were also included. Social Security became a uniquely American institution, providing the much-needed "safety net" for those who could not hope to save enough money from their meager wages to plan for all contingencies. To the working class it was a God-send, an investment in their futures, over and above the income tax which they paid.

Initially, the accounting separated the funds paid into the Social Security account from the general fund and the balances grew in preparation for the needs. However, once the war was over the time came, as it always does, to pay the bills for the post-war rebuilding of our own and other nations. This threw the Federal budget into deficits and the Presidents and Congress feared the repercussions when the people became aware of it. (Even then, government officials were loath to increase taxes to meet needs.) It was decided to cease that separate accounting practice and to list all the money received into the same general fund to hide the degree of national indebtedness. With time and the increases in the amounts withheld from payroll, the fund went into "surplus" because more was paid in than than was paid out to beneficiaries, and this money was "borrowed" in order to keep the deficit down and to pay for all the spending which Congress found so essential.

In 2001, when the current administration took office, there was a "projected surplus" of 1.75 trillion dollars over the next ten years which would carry the program for many years into the future. However, this money was spent for tax cuts and pre-emptive wars, and for subsidies to the multi-national corporations. Now, we are told, not enough money will be paid into the system to pay for the benefits that are going to be drawn out by retirees. They project huge increases in the amounts of deductions that will be necessary when the "baby-boomers" reach retirement age. The alarms are being sounded on a daily basis by the Conservatives and we are being pounded with their theory that the only way to save Social Security is to "privatize" it because the system will go broke under the increased load and be an unreasonable burden on the taxpayer. The "shortage" in the fund now requires that enough tax be paid in each year to pay the current benefits. Once that is done, the "excess" is spent and simply disappears into the general budget for war and pork.

However, noted economist and New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman, tells us that the Social Security System is sufficiently funded to last for another forty years without alteration. Currently the Federal General Fund is indebted to the Social Security Fund in the amount of $800 billion dollars and this amount should be included in the projections which are being made to determine the future of this vital program. After about 2043, according to Mr. Krugman, the program will fall about 20% short of total solvency. Taken in context, this is not a bad situation, since our national budget currently falls 30% short of available income. The arguments for its dissolution are not only fallacious, they are simply politically motivated. The necessary adjustments only require across-the-board tax increases or restraint in other government spending.

So, let's explore the reasons why the demise of this program, so essential to the welfare of the working poor, has been targeted for extinction by this administration. Common sense tells us that we cannot "repair" the program by taking even more money from it to put in the stock market. However, we could make it last a lot longer by increasing the maximum earnings on which the tax is paid or, in a worst-case scenario, adding a "means test" so that people who do not need it won't be drawing the same benefits as those for whom it is a matter of life or death. There are many ways to ensure that the original intent of the Social Security Act remains in force for the welfare of society as a whole but the policy-makers of the Republican Party refuse to consider them. In short, the money is in the bank, but the bankers won't release it because, in doing so, they will expose the fact that the bank itself is insolvent!

This program was designed, first, as "insurance" in which holders pay premiums. Later, it was changed to a "trust fund" concept wherein the money was held for future needs. However, once the government started "borrowing" the money, it was changed to an "entitlement", as are Medicaid and Public Welfare. In short, our money was taken by those into whose trust it was given, and put to other purposes and now they fear that they will not be able to repay it. If you were to start a trust fund at your bank into which you placed your "nest-egg" only to find later that it had disappeared, you would be preferring charges and demanding that the thieves be put behind bars. This time, the thieves are IN the bank and they blandly tell us, "There is no trust fund. The money is gone!" We should tell them, in no uncertain terms, that the money is not gone. It has been wrongfully spent by the officers in charge, it is owed to us, and we demand that they pay it back. If they cannot or will not make restitution, they should go to prison for a very long time.

Mary Pitt is a septuagenarian Kansan who is self-employed and active in the political arena. Her concerns are her four-generation family and the continuance of the United States as a democracy with a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people". Comments and criticism may be addressed to mpitt@cox.net . 

Copyright: Mary Pitt