ceedee’s posterous

Karl Rove: 'Waterboarding kept world safe'

A senior adviser to former US President George W Bush has defended tough interrogation techniques, saying their use helped prevent terrorist attacks.

In a BBC interview, Karl Rove, who was known as "Bush's brain", said he "was proud we used techniques that broke the will of these terrorists".

He said waterboarding, which simulates drowning, should not be considered torture.

In 2009, President Barack Obama banned waterboarding as a form of torture.

But the practice was sanctioned in written memos by Bush administration lawyers in August 2002, providing legal cover for its use.

In 2008, CIA head Michael Hayden told Congress it had only been used on three high-profile al-Qaeda detainees, and not for the past five years.

One of those was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a key suspect in the 9/11 attacks.

Mr Rove said US soldiers were subjected to waterboarding as a regular part of their training.

A less severe form of the technique was used on the three suspects interrogated at the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, he added.

"I'm proud that we used techniques that broke the will of these terrorists and gave us valuable information that allowed us to foil plots such as flying aeroplanes into Heathrow and into London, bringing down aircraft over the Pacific, flying an aeroplane into the tallest building in Los Angeles and other plots," Mr Rove told the BBC.

"Yes, I'm proud that we kept the world safer than it was, by the use of these techniques. They're appropriate, they're in conformity with our international requirements and with US law."

Mr Rove has just written a memoir, Courage and Consequence, in which he defends the two terms of the Bush administration as "impressive, durable and significant".

The highest land point on the Maldives is only 2.4 metres above sea level. Photograph: Corbis/Craig Tuttle

The Maldives will begin to divert a portion of the country's billion-dollar annual tourist revenue into buying a new homeland - as an insurance policy against climate change that threatens to turn the 300,000 islanders into environmental refugees, the country's first democratically elected president has told the Guardian.

Mohamed Nasheed, who takes power officially tomorrow in the island's capital, Male, said the chain of 1,200 island and coral atolls dotted 500 miles from the tip of India is likely to disappear under the waves if the current pace of climate change continues to raise sea levels.

The UN forecasts that the seas are likely to rise by up to 59cm by 2100, due to global warming. Most parts of the Maldives are just 1.5m above water. The president said even a "small rise" in sea levels would inundate large parts of the archipelago.

"We can do nothing to stop climate change on our own and so we have to buy land elsewhere. It's an insurance policy for the worst possible outcome. After all, the Israelis [began by buying] land in Palestine," said Nasheed, also known as Anni.

The president, a human rights activist who swept to power in elections last month after ousting Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, the man who once imprisoned him, said he had already broached the idea with a number of countries and found them to be "receptive".

Randeep Ramesh discusses the radical ideas of the first democratically elected president of the Maldives
Link to this audio

He said Sri Lanka and India were targets because they had similar cultures, cuisines and climates. Australia was also being considered because of the amount of unoccupied land available.

"We do not want to leave the Maldives, but we also do not want to be climate refugees living in tents for decades," he said.

Environmentalists say the issue raises the question of what rights citizens have if their homeland no longer exists. "It's an unprecedented wake-up call," said Tom Picken, head of international climate change at Friends of the Earth. "The Maldives is left to fend for itself. It is a victim of climate change caused by rich countries."

Nasheed said he intended to create a "sovereign wealth fund" from the dollars generated by "importing tourists", in the way that Arab states have done by "exporting oil". "Kuwait might invest in companies; we will invest in land."

The 41-year-old is a rising star in Asia, where he has been compared to Nelson Mandela. Before taking office the new president asked Maldivians to move forward without rancour or retribution - an astonishing call, given that Nasheed had gone to jail 23 times, been tortured and spent 18 months in solitary confinement.

"We have the latitude to remove anyone from government and prosecute them. But I have forgiven my jailers, the torturers. They were following orders ... I ask people to follow my example and leave Gayoom to grow old here," he said.

The Maldives is one of the few Muslim nations to make a relatively peaceful transition from autocracy to democracy. The Gayoom "sultanate" was an iron-fisted regime that ran the police, army and courts, and which banned rival parties.

Public flogging, banishment to island gulags and torture were routinely used to suppress dissent and the fledging pro-democracy movement. Gayoom was "elected" president six times in 30 years - but never faced an opponent. However, public pressure grew and last year he conceded that democracy was inevitable.

Upmarket tourism had become a prop for the dictatorial regime. Gayoom's Maldives became the richest country in South Asia, with average incomes reaching $4,600 a year. But the wealth created was skimmed off by cronies - leaving a yawning gap between rich and poor. Speedboats and yachts of local multimillionaires bob in the lagoon of the capital's harbour, while official figures show almost half of Maldivians earn less than a dollar a day.

Male is the world's most densely populated town: 100,000 people cram into two square kilometres. "We have unemployment at 20%. Heroin has become a serious social issue, with crime rising," Nasheed said, adding that the extra social spending he pledged would cost an immediate $243m. He said that without an emergency bailout from the international community, the future of the Maldives as a democracy would be in doubt.

To raise cash, his government will sell off state assets, reduce the cabinet and turn the presidential palace into the country's first university.

"It's desperate. We are a 100% Islamic country and democracy came from within. Do you want to lose that because we were denied the money to deal with the poverty created by the dictatorship?" he said.

At a glance

• The highest land point in the Maldives is 2.4 metres above sea level, on Wilingili island in the Addu Atoll

• The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that sea levels could rise by 25-58cm by 2100

• The country comprises 1,192 islands grouped around 26 Indian Ocean atolls. Only 250 islands are inhabited. The population is 380,000

• The main income is from tourism, with 467,154 people visiting in 2006

Just in case you were wondering where the idea for a web blocking amendment came from, we attach to this blog post [click on link!] a copy of the BPI’s draft, along with their justification for it.

Now, amendments often come from lobby and campaign groups, including us, not least because it’s the easiest way for them to show parliamentarians what they want. But the fact that twice, with the original copyright by diktat proposal, and then the web blocking proposal, the BPI essentially got to write what they wanted and get it proposed more or less wholesale as law, in such a tremendously sensitive area and in such a one-sided manner, shows something is very wrong with the way this debate is being conducted.

Parliamentarians need to recognize that copyright touches everyone and every technology in the digital age. It is no longer a question of inter-business regulation and deals. Getting copyright wrong has the potential to mess up our freedom of speech, prevent us from getting the benefits of new technologies, and damage society in other very profound ways.

It is therefore deeply inappropriate for such fundamental proposals to have been introduced by both the government or the opposition parties at the behest of one side of the debate. That applies just as much to disconnection, which Mandelson introduced in the summer at the last minute under pressure again from the BPI and other rights holders.

As the Conservatives launch their digital policies today - we again ask why these proposals are being supported, in such direct contradiction to their apparent aims?

Take action

We again urge you to take action on the Digital Economy Bill, and challenge your local candidates to say what they think.

(And come to our demonstration on March 24)

£8 billion

That was the financial cost to the UK taxpayer of our involvement in the Iraq War - over & above what we were going to spend on defence anyway. It's £8 billion of additional spending.

That's not my estimate. That is the figure that Gordon Brown himself gave to the Iraq Inquiry (to check that, click HERE and read the paragraph from line 10 to line 19 on page 84).

£8,000,000,000.

It is a colossal sum of money - enough, in fact, to employ over 20,000 nurses for an entire decade. Or almost 15,000 police officers, again for 10 whole years. And that's everything - not just salary, but National Insurance contributions, pension costs, all that stuff too.

Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/Getty Images

Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, the head of MI5 throughout most of the years of the so-called war on terror, insisted yesterday that she had not known that Khalid Shiekh Mohammed was being waterboarded.

In a response to the appeal court's judgment that MI5 officers had a "dubious record" on torture, she sought to blame the US and maintained that only after she retired in 2007 did she discover that the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks had been waterboarded 160 times.

"The Americans were very keen that people like us did not discover what they were doing," she said. Critics, though, said the former head of the security service was stretching credulity by claiming the matter had come as such a surprise.

10 January 2002 An MI6 officer, carrying out one of the first British interrogations in Afghanistan after 9/11, reports back to London that the individual was mistreated by Americans before the questioning began. The incident is reported by the Intelligence and Security committee (ISC) , the group of MPs and peers that is supposed to provide oversight of MI5 and MI6.

11 January 2002 Every MI6 and MI5 officer in Afghanistan is issued with legal advice stating that they are under no obligation to intervene to prevent torture, as long as the victim is not in UK "custody or control", but that British intelligence officers "cannot be party to such ill treatment nor can we be seen to condone it". Critics of MI5 say this advice failed to meet its obligations under international law, and was subsequently used to facilitate torture. Later in the month, the Pentagon releases pictures taken by US navy photographers, showing hooded and shackled detainees being dragged across the ground at the newly opened detention centre at Guantánamo Bay.

April 2002 The CIA hands MI5 more than 50 classified documents that detail the mistreatment of Binyam Mohamed, a British resident detained at Karachi airport in Pakistan on 10 April. A judicial summary of those documents – released by the court of appeal last month after an 18-month battle by the government to conceal it from the public – shows that MI5 knew Mohamed was being "continuously deprived of sleep", threatened with being "disappeared", and that this was "having a marked effect upon him and causing him significant mental stress and suffering".

Manningham-Buller was deputy director general of MI5 at the time the agency received these CIA documents. Having learned the details of Mohamed's mistreatment, MI5 sends one of its officers, a man known as Witness B, to Karachi to question Mohamed. The high court later concludes: "The probability is that Witness B read the reports either before he left for Karachi or before he conducted the interview ... a briefing document was prepared for sending to him." Witness B is now the subject of a Scotland Yard investigation.

September 2002 MI5 knows that Binyam Mohamed is no longer in Pakistan, having been "rendered" elsewhere, but, the high court later concludes, continues to supply "information as well as questions which they knew were to be used in interview of [Mohamed] from the time of his arrest whilst he was held incommunicado and without access to a lawyer or review by a court or tribunal".

October 2002 Eliza Manningham-Buller is appointed director general of the Security Service.

4 April 2004 Salahuddin Amin, a terrorism suspect from Luton, is questioned by MI5 officers 11 times after surrendering to a Pakistani intelligence agency whose use of torture is widely documented. An Old Bailey judge later says Amin's treatment in Pakistan was "physically oppressive" and unlawful, but fell short of torture. Pakistani intelligence officers told Human Rights Watch last year that Amin's account of being tortured before being questioned by MI5 was "essentially accurate", and that both British and American officials were "perfectly aware that we were using all means possible to extract information from him and were grateful that we were doing so".

27 April 2004 Pictures of US troops abusing inmates at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad are broadcast on the US television news programme 60 Minutes.

13 May 2004 The New York Times reports that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was subjected to waterboarding by the CIA. The newspaper says it learned this from current and former counter-terrorism officials, and says the FBI has warned its officers not to become involved in interrogations during which waterboarding was employed, after the bureau's director, Robert Mueller, was warned they could face prosecution. The newspaper adds: "These techniques were authorised by a set of secret rules for the interrogation of high-level Qaeda prisoners, none known to be housed in Iraq, that were endorsed by the Justice Department and the CIA."

24 May 2004 In an apparent response to the release of the Abu Ghraib pictures, Tony Blair writes to the ISC to tell the committee of changes to the UK interrogation policy that was passed to MI5 officers and MI6 officers in January 2002. One change is that MI5 and MI6 officers are told to inform London whenever they see US counterparts mistreating inmates. They are also told they must not return to question detainees who complain they are being tortured. In practice, according to several torture victims, UK intelligence officers hand over to US interrogators after hearing such a complaint. Other changes to the interrogation policy remain secret. The government refuses to publish the policy, with David Miliband, the foreign secretary, saying that to do so could "give succour" to the UK's enemies.

22 June 2004 The White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez and the Pentagon general counsel, Jim Haynes, hold a press conference at which they release a series of documents setting out the legal advice justifying the use of abusive interrogation techniques employed at Guantánamo.

15 May 2005 Zeeshan Siddiqui, a terrorism suspect from west London, is arrested in Pakistan, tortured, and then questioned by British intelligence officers. Pakistani intelligence officer later tell Human Rights Watch that these were MI6 officers, who were aware at all times that Siddiqui was being "processed in the traditional way", and that the British were "effectively" interrogating Siddiqui. When Siddiqui is brought before court, the magistrate orders his immediate hospitalisation. He is eventually deported to the UK and subjected to a control order.

20 August 2005 A medical student from west London is held in a building opposite the British deputy high commission offices in Karachi and tortured, for two months, before being questioned by British intelligence officers. Pakistani agents later tell Human Rights Watch that British officials across the road knew the student was being mistreated and were "breathing down our necks for information". The student is later released without charge.

7 August 2006 Rashid Rauf, from Birmingham, is arrested in Pakistan for questioning over an alleged plot to blow up several airliners over the Atlantic. He later tells his lawyer he was tortured before being questioned by men with both British and American accents. Human Rights Watch says that both British and Pakistani intelligence officers have told them that he was mistreated.

20 August 2006 An MI6 officer suggests to Pakistani intelligence officers that they might want to detain a British terrorism suspect, Rangzieb Ahmed, after police in Manchester decide to let him leave the UK on a flight to Islamabad. According to statements made in the Commons, Manchester crown court – sitting in secret – learned that UK intelligence officers knew that those Pakistani officials tortured terrorism suspects. MI5 and Greater Manchester police draw up questions to be put to Ahmed, who is beaten, deprived of sleep, and has three of his fingernails removed with pliers.

When Ahmed is deported to the UK to be put on trial, on the basis of evidence largely gathered before he flew to Pakistan, prosecutors attempt to claim that his fingernails were removed before he went to Pakistan. The crown's own pathologist says the injuries show this is impossible. The judge rules that UK complicity in Ahmed's torture is not so great that his trial cannot go ahead. The judge's full ruling on Ahmed's torture is being kept secret, at the request of the Crown Prosecution Service, following representations by MI5 and Greater Manchester police. Ahmed is now launching an appeal, on the basis of what the judge said in his secret ruling.

23 November 2006 Manningham-Buller tells the ISC that she regrets not asking the CIA for more information about the whereabouts of Binyam Mohamed after he was rendered from Pakistan to Morocco in July 2002. It is a case "where, with hindsight, we would regret not seeking proper full assurances," she says. In a report published in July 2007, the committee concludes: "Whilst no assurances were sought, this is understandable given the lack of knowledge, at the time, of any possible consequences of US custody of detainees."

However, almost five years before Manningham-Buller gave evidence to the ISC, MI5 had given its officers legal advice that facilitated the questioning of people being tortured. This was done after the service had been made aware, by an MI6 officer, that detainees were being mistreated. The ISC had been told about this legal advice – and the reasons it was issued – in September 2004, almost three years before it reported that a lack of knowledge of the mistreatment of detainees by the US authorities was understandable.

27 October 2006 The US vice-president, Dick Cheney, confirms that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was subjected to waterboarding, telling an interviewer that the use of the technique was a "no-brainer", and that "our ability to interrogate high-value detainees like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – that's been a very important tool that we've had to be able to secure the nation." This is widely reported on both sides of the Atlantic.

21 April 2007 Manningham-Buller steps down as director-general of the Security Service.

15 October 2009 Manningham-Buller's successor, Jonathan Evans, defends MI5's co-operation with intelligence agencies known to use torture, saying that it thwarted many terrorist attacks after 9/11 and saved British lives. "In my view we would have been derelict in our duty if we had not worked, circumspectly, with overseas liaisons who were in a position to provide intelligence that could safeguard this country from attack," he says.

Have a look at this cutting I found from the Wall Street Journal, 2nd March:

Market has encountered resistance since hitting new highs Tuesday, natural in view of the sweeping rally up to then. Previous pauses in early Jan. and mid-Feb. were followed by renewed rallying; evidence this is a similar period of consolidation seen in pattern of declining volume on recessions, indicating line of least resistance remains upward.

With the Dow today on 10,500 and the FTSE around 5,500, are we moving onwards and upwards towards a recovery?

Nope! The date line on that cutting was 2nd March 1931. That’s about the same length of time after the Wall Street Crash as we are now from the crisis of September 2008.

At the start of 1933, just two years on from that optimistic Wall Street Journal market view the Dow would be one quarter the value it was in ‘31.

That was the same year that the Chancellor of a new UK National Government, Philip Snowden, produced an emergency budget which imposed severe cuts in public spending and wages. Public sector wages and unemployment pay were cut by 10%. Income Tax was raised by 11%. By 1933 unemployment had risen by 150% and exports were down 50%.

What is on offer to the British public in the coming General Election? First, the Conservatives are not advocating a replay of the Eighties. No, Osborne boasts that ‘the cuts will be worse that those of Margaret Thatcher’. It will start with an emergency budget.

Labour on the other hand advocates a steady fiscal tightening to placate the markets; an earlier rather than later introduction of consolidation to remove the structural deficit and a handing over of the baton from the public to the private sector.

But this is exactly what Japan did in the early 1990’s when they ended their economic stimuli too soon. As the chart below, courtesy of Mike Shedlock, shows over the last twenty years Japan has choked off four or five nascent recoveries when political will crumbled.

The Nikkei peaked in 1990 at 38.9k. Property prices had risen by 50% in the previous four years. A year later the Nikkei fell to 20.2k only to rebound 35% during the next four months to 27.3k, which is very similar to our position today.

Over the next year the Nikkei halved to 14.2k and today, twenty years later, it is at the dark depths of 10.25k. What you are looking at in this chart is not a double dip recession but a six (and counting) dip recession! That would mean for us a FTSE level of 2050 in the year 2028 (and Japan had its export performance to help out). A thirty five year old today would have to work ‘til they were 75 or 80 to fund a sufficient pension.

And what does Japan tell us about property prices over a period of persistent demand deflation? Since 1991, property prices in Japan have halved. Not with a dramatic single-year fall, but with a steady decline over those 20 years. No-one would say that housing was exactly affordable at the moment but the social and economic consequences of a twenty year decline in house prices would be a mighty big problem for a lot of people.

There are fears that inflation is just around the corner. The prices of imports and commodities may be rising, and prices generally may be up 5%, but wage increases are far behind. People will just cut back. That is what they did when commodities rose in 2007, which may have started the rot in the first place. A round of price inflation can’t take root unless it is accompanied by wage inflation. Unemployment is taking care of that eventuality.

Demand deflation remains the greatest threat, and ordinary people (that is those who are not in the Westminster Village and neighbouring Commentariat or down in the City) sense this. It is expressed in their private fears about jobs, about wages, about pensions, about their homes. This shows in the polls.

Last week’s Channel 4 New’s YouGov poll of 60 Con/Lab marginals is revealing and should be a clarion call to radicals. It asked respondents what Gordon Brown could do to improve their opinion of him. Taking more radical steps to protect people from the economic crisis, at 44%, was the most popular answer.

On the state of the economy, only a minority (29%) blamed the government for causing the problems, but they think the government’s reaction has been ineffective or counter-productive. Only 12% think that the actions Gordon Brown has taken, or is planning, will improve matters. 24% think they will make things worse. 75% think the government are out of touch with how the economic problems are hitting ordinary people.

In Conservative seats the swing to them is far less than in Labour areas. It is among their previous core vote that the sense that ‘something more radical must be done’ is most pronounced.

Some amongst the Liberal Democrats have been saying that the cuts must come, sooner rather than later. You get the feeling that these people wouldn’t mind being part of a Coalition or even a National Government helping to enable those cuts, taking those ‘tough’ decisions.

Some Labour supporters are openly saying that this would be a good election to lose. That it would be better to let the Conservatives get on with the unpleasant task of cutting expenditure.

To both sets I ask, could this country’s already precarious community relations cope with a Japanese style period of continuing deflation, a doubling of long term unemployment and persistent fall in home values? What role would the far right seize? How long would free trade survive? Quo Europe? How would even the arms-length mutualism of the present welfare state survive declining tax revenues and rising demands on benefits, heath care costs and security?

Some argue that the Conservatives won’t go through with their tough talk. We cannot leave this to chance.

Some say that the Liberal Democrats could moderate Conservative economic policy. The risks are too great.

Some say that there is no alternative, that we have tried extraordinary monetary creation. But QE was devised by bankers to support the banking sector and the stock market in the hope that this support would spill across into the rest of the economy. It hasn’t. Companies may have raised £42 billion in new share capital, but they have cut investment by £45 billion.

Some say that the gilt markets won’t buy anymore gilts. But what is stopping us paying for government commissioned investment, intellectual and physical, by issuing cheques on the Government’s account at the Bank of England – direct money creation, direct demand stimulation operating through ordinary people and not through bonus loving financial intermediaries?

The answer is ‘nothing but the fear of politicians who want to behave like bankers and bankers who want to behave like politicians’.

Our fight is always and everywhere against those who would use deflation and unemployment to achieve power and protect their own interests.

Our fight is always and everywhere to help people take and use power so that they are free from domination; be it the domination of arbitrary decisions or the domination suffered by the hardest pressed, by the un-informed and by the dependent that rises during economic decline.

The paramount task for Liberal Democrats is therefore to avert an Osborne Budget. The society it would lead to, the unemployment and dereliction it would create would wreck lives, tear families apart, divide communities and confiscate freedoms and opportunities from the many to the few.

The second task is to ensure that fiscal and monetary policy after the election continues to stimulate economic activity in the short term by compensating for insufficient private investment, replacing depleted demand with the necessary public led and commissioned investment in infrastructure projects, small and large, physical and intellectual, that will provide longer term economic activity, opportunities and capacities.

And in Birmingham this weekend we should declare loudly and persistently that this is our stance now and after the election – whatever the result – so that they know what they get with their vote and they know where we stand if the Commons is balanced.

“And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.”

Wise words from Molly, the "economics speaker for the green party" (here writing on her own behalf)

I'm struggling to understand what has happened with the Icesave debacle. It seems to me a fairly open-and-shut case. A bunch of naive but self-interested investors, egged on by internet and media commentators who made their living from touting risky financial ventures, put their money into banks outside our national jurisdiction. It is the first rule of money that the higher the return the higher the risk. Their gamble did not pay off and they lost their money.

This much makes sense. The bit I find hard to follow is why anybody who did not take the same risk, who did not enjoy the same returns, who invested their own money closer to home, perhaps in a secure, mutual savings institution now has to contribute to recompensing the high-risk investors for their loss. How is this different from innocent bystanders having to club together to repay a drunken gambler for a misguided punt on the National?

Now let's look at it from the Icelandic side. The ordinary people of Iceland have no doubt going about their ordinary business - catching fish, wallowing in hot pools, enjoying mud massages applied by lowly paid Baltic workers, whatever they get up to to keep themselves sane through the long dark winters. They had no democratic control over the activities of their Viking raiders, who sucked massive amounts of capital into their country from the unstable global economy. Anybody daft enough to invest anything significant in a company apparently domiciled in such a minute and wind-blown volcanic island was surely due for a catastrophic fall at some point.

But now these same self-respecting Icelanders are expected to put their hands in their pockets to compensate foreign governments whose foreign citizens made bad choices. And this is no small amount of compensation. If you add together the £2.3bn. offered to the UK government in the latest negotiations and the £1bn. offered to the Dutch and divide the total by Iceland's tiny 300,000 population you soon realise that every pensioner, worker, and child has to find £11,000 to support this compensation. I wonder how many of the individual investors in the UK and Netherlands lost so much.

The prime lesson from the past two years of credit crisis has been that the gains have been privatised while the losses remain with the public. The Icelandic public are rebelling against this law; we should do the same.

The US wants to deny that Turkey's slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915 was genocide. But the evidence is there, in a hilltop orphanage near Beirut

The unmarked grave at Antoura for the bones that were found there in 1993

It's only a small grave, a rectangle of cheap concrete marking it out, blessed by a flourish of wild yellow lilies. Inside are the powdered bones and skulls and bits of femur of up to 300 children, Armenian orphans of the great 1915 genocide who died of cholera and starvation as the Turkish authorities tried to "Turkify" them in a converted Catholic college high above Beirut. But for once, it is the almost unknown story of the surviving 1,200 children – between three and 15 years old – who lived in the crowded dormitory of this ironically beautiful cut-stone school that proves that the Turks did indeed commit genocide against the Armenians in 1915.

Barack Obama and his pliant Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton – who are now campaigning so pitifully to prevent the US Congress acknowledging that the Ottoman Turkish massacre of 1.5 million Armenians was a genocide – should come here to this Lebanese hilltop village and hang their heads in shame. For this is a tragic, appalling tale of brutality against small and defenceless children whose families had already been murdered by Turkish forces at the height of the First World War, some of whom were to recall how they were forced to grind up and eat the skeletons of their dead fellow child orphans in order to survive starvation.

Jemal Pasha, one of the architects of the 1915 genocide, and – alas – Turkey's first feminist, Halide Edip Adivar, helped to run this orphanage of terror in which Armenian children were systematically deprived of their Armenian identity and given new Turkish names, forced to become Muslims and beaten savagely if they were heard to speak Armenian. The Antoura Lazarist college priests have recorded how its original Lazarist teachers were expelled by the Turks and how Jemal Pasha presented himself at the front door with his German bodyguard after a muezzin began calling for Muslim prayers once the statue of the Virgin Mary had been taken from the belfry.

Hitherto, the argument that Armenians suffered a genocide has rested on the deliberate nature of the slaughter. But Article II of the 1951 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide specifically states that the definition of genocide – "to destroy in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group" – includes "forcibly transferring children of the group to another group". This is exactly what the Turks did in Lebanon. Photographs still exist of hundreds of near-naked Armenian children performing physical exercises in the college grounds. One even shows Jemal Pasha standing on the steps in 1916, next to the young and beautiful Halide Adivar who – after some reluctance – agreed to run the orphanage.

Before he died in 1989, Karnig Panian – who was six years old when he arrived at Antoura in 1916 – recorded in Armenian how his own name was changed and how he was given a number, 551, as his identity. "At every sunset in the presence of over 1,000 orphans, when the Turkish flag was lowered, 'Long Live General Pasha!' was recited. That was the first part of the ceremony. Then it was time for punishment for the wrongdoers of the day. They beat us with the falakha [a rod used to beat the soles of the feet], and the top-rank punishment was for speaking Armenian."

Panian described how, after cruel treatment or through physical weakness, many children died. They were buried behind the old college chapel. "At night, the jackals and wild dogs would dig them up and throw their bones here and there ... at night, kids would run out to the nearby forest to get apples or any fruits they could find – and their feet would hit bones. They would take these bones back to their rooms and secretly grind them to make soup, or mix them with grain so they could eat them as there was not enough food at the orphanage. They were eating the bones of their dead friends."

Using college records, Emile Joppin, the head priest at the Lazarite Antoura college, wrote in the school's magazine in 1947 that "the Armenian orphans were Islamicised, circumcised and given new Arab or Turkish names. Their new names always kept the initials of the names in which they were baptised. Thus Haroutioun Nadjarian was given the name Hamed Nazih, Boghos Merdanian became Bekir Mohamed, to Sarkis Safarian was given the name Safouad Sulieman."

Lebanese-born Armenian-American electrical engineer Missak Kelechian researches Armenian history as a hobby and hunted down a privately printed and very rare 1918 report by an American Red Cross officer, Major Stephen Trowbridge, who arrived at the Antoura college after its liberation by British and French troops and who spoke to the surviving orphans. His much earlier account entirely supports that of Father Joppin's 1949 research.

"Every vestige, and as far as possible every memory, of the children's Armenian or Kurdish origin was to be done away with. Turkish names were assigned and the children were compelled to undergo the rites prescribed by Islamic law and tradition ... Not a word of Armenian or Kurdish was allowed. The teachers and overseers were carefully trained to impress Turkish ideas and customs upon the lives of the children and to catechize [sic] them regularly on ... the prestige of the Turkish race."

Halide Adivar, later to be lauded by The New York Times as "the Turkish Joan of Arc" – a description that Armenians obviously questioned – was born in Constantinople in 1884 and attended an American college in the Ottoman capital. She was twice married and wrote nine novels – even Trowbridge was to admit that she was "a lady of remarkable literary ability" – and served as a woman officer in Mustafa Ataturk's Turkish army of liberation after the First World War. She later lived in both Britain and France.

And it was Kelechian yet again who found Adivar's long-forgotten and self-serving memoirs, published in New York in 1926, in which she recalls how Jemal Pasha, commander of the Turkish 4th Army in Damascus, toured Antoura orphanage with her. "I said: 'You have been as good to Armenians as it is possible to be in these hard days. Why do you allow Armenian children to be called by Moslim [sic] names? It looks like turning the Armenians into Moslims, and history some day will revenge it on the coming generation of Turks.' 'You are an idealist,' he answered gravely and like all idealists lack a sense of reality ... This is a Moslem orphanage and only Moslem orphans are allowed.'" According to Adivar, Jemal Pasha said that he "cannot bear to see them die in the streets" and promised they would go "back to their people" after the war.

Adivar says she told the general that: "I will never have anything to do with such an orphanage" but claims that Jemal Pasha replied: "You will if you see them in misery and suffering, you will go to them and not think for a moment about their names and religion." Which is exactly what she did.

Later in the war, however, Adivar spoke to Talaat Pasha, the architect of the 20th century's first holocaust, and recalled how he almost lost his temper when discussing the Armenian "deportations" (as she put it), saying: "Look here, Halide ... I have a heart as good as yours, and it keeps me awake at night to think of the human suffering. But that is a personal thing, and I am here on this earth to think of my people and not of my sensibilities ... There was an equal number of Turks and Moslems massacred during the [1912] Balkan war, yet the world kept a criminal silence. I have the conviction that as long as a nation does the best for its own interests, and succeeds, the world admires it and thinks it moral. I am ready to die for what I have done, and I know that I shall die for it."

The suffering of which Talaat Pasha spoke so chillingly was all too evident to Trowbridge when he himself met the orphans of Antoura. Many had seen their parents murdered and their sisters raped. Levon, who came from Malgara, was driven from his home with his sisters aged 12 and 14. The girls were taken by Kurds – allied to the Turks – as "concubines" and the boy was tortured and starved, Trowbridge records. He was eventually forced by his captors into the Antoura orphanage.

Ten-year-old Takhouhi – her name means "queen" in Armenian and she was from a rich background – from Rodosto on the Sea of Marmara was put with her family on a freight train to Konia. Two of her two brothers died in the truck, both parents caught typhus – they died in the arms of Takhouhi and her oldest brother in Aleppo – and she was eventually taken from him by a Turkish officer, given the Muslim name of Muzeyyan and ended up in Antoura. When Trowbridge suggested that he would try to find someone in Rodosto and return her family's property to her, he said she replied: "I don't want any of those things if I cannot find my brother again." Her brother was later reported to have died in Damascus.

Trowbridge records many other tragedies from the children he found at Antoura, commenting acidly that Halide "and Djemal [sic] Pasha delighted in having their photographs taken on the steps of the orphanage ... posing as the leaders of Ottoman modernism. Did they realise what the outside world would think of those photographs?" According to Trowbridge's account, only 669 of the children finally survived, 456 of them Armenian, 184 of them Kurds, along with 29 Syrians. Talaat Pasha did indeed die for his sins. He was assassinated by an Armenian in Berlin in 1922 – his body was later returned to Turkey on the express orders of Adolf Hitler. Jemal Pasha was murdered in the Turkish town of Tiflis. Halide Edip Adivar lived in England until 1939 when she returned to Turkey, became a professor of English literature, was elected to the Turkish parliament and died in 1964 at the age of 80.

It was only in 1993 that the bones of the children were discovered, when the Lazarite Fathers dug the foundations for new classrooms. What was left of the remains were moved respectfully to the little cemetery where the college's priests lie buried and put in a single, deep grave. Kelechian helped me over a 5ft wall to look at this place of sadness, shaded by tall trees. Neither name-plate nor headstone marks their mass grave.

The majority of the UK's import emissions are released in rapidly industrialising parts of the developing world such as China. Photograph: Stringer Shanghai/Reuters

 

 

Britain's demand for imported goods is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions abroad than any other European country, according to a new study published today.

 

The report shows that 253m tonnes of carbon dioxide are released overseas each year in the manufacture of products bound for UK shores, the equivalent of 4.3 tonnes per person. The average Briton's carbon footprint is 9.7 tonnes, not including emissions from goods.

 

Only the US and Japan have higher emissions linked to their imports, at 699m tonnes and 284m tonnes of carbon dioxide per year respectively, the study found.

 

The majority of the emissions are released in rapidly industrialising parts of the developing world, such as China and India.

 

The study, by scientists at the Carnegie Institute of Washington in California, highlights the unresolved issue of responsibility for carbon dioxide that is released to make products for foreign markets.

 

Under the Kyoto protocol, emission targets apply to the country where the gases are produced. But China has so far resisted binding emissions targets, as it does not accept responsibility for emissions associated with making goods that are exported to wealthy nations.

 

Previous studies, by the Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research last year and Oxford University in 2007, have found that the UK is "outsourcing" much of its carbon emissions for the manufacture of goods to China.

 

For this study, Steven Davis and Ken Caldeira used published data on international trade from 2004 to build up a picture of how goods moved between 113 countries or regions and 57 industrial sectors, including machinery, vehicles, chemicals and food. By allocating carbon emissions to products and sources, they calculated the net emissions linked to countries imports and exports.

 

"Instead of looking at carbon dioxide emissions only in terms of what is released inside our borders, we also looked at the amount of carbon dioxide released during the production of the things that we consume," said Caldeira.

 

Over one-third of the carbon emissions linked to goods used in many European countries were actually released in developing countries, the study shows. Imports to Germany and France were responsible for 233m tonnes and 170m tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions abroad respectively. Switzerland "outsourced" more than half of its carbon dioxide emissions, according to the report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

 

"Just like the electricity you use in your home, we found that products imported by the developed countries of western Europe, Japan and the US cause substantial emissions in other countries, especially China," said Davis. Nearly one-quarter of China's annual carbon dioxide emissions, some 1.4bn tonnes, come from the manufacture of products and services that are ultimately exported, the report adds.

 

 

 

Jan Minx, an expert in environmental economics at the Stockholm Environment Institute at the University of York, said the study's system of attributing emissions - based on which country's consumption causes emissions rather than the country where the emissions are released - can help identify when international agreements to cut greenhouse gas emissions are being undermined. Some countries, the UK included, are increasingly becoming service-based economies, but they still import goods from countries that rely heavily on fossil fuels and have no binding emissions targets. "It's not intentional, but it can have a detrimental effect on international agreements," Minx said.

 

Obliging countries to cut carbon emissions beyond their national borders is fraught with political and practical difficulties, but this should not stop import-related emissions being taken into consideration in negotiations to cut emissions, Minx said. "It's most feasible for a country to reduce emissions on their own territory, but this kind of accounting system can provide extra information for policymakers," he added.

 

Adopting such an accounting system for greenhouse gas emissions could be fairer to developing countries, such as China and India, which rely heavily on fossil fuels to manufacture products for wealthy foreigners, the researchers said.

 

"Apart from an opportunity to inform effective climate policy, consumption-based accounting of emissions provides grounding for ethical arguments that the most developed countries - as the primary beneficiaries of emissions and with greater ability to pay - should lead the global mitigation effort," the authors write.

Once more we have to forget the Armenian Holocaust – the first of the 20th century – in order to appease the Turks. Bill Clinton did it.

George W Bush spinelessly caved in to the Turkish generals. And now our favourite Nobel prize winner – another brave president who promised to acknowledge the Armenian genocide if he was elected and then declined to do so – went whinging and whining to the House Foreign Affairs Committee in Washington and pleaded with them not to tell the truth about the savage rape and murder of 1.5 million Armenian civilians by the Turks in 1915. Good for the committee that it did not give in. But it will do no good.

Sure, the Turkish ambassador has been recalled from Washington in a huff. But equally certain is that there will be no vote on the genocide by the full House of Representatives. And if there is, there'll never be a vote in the Senate. Obama will help see to that. The man who wanted change doesn't want change on the little matter of a genocide that led directly to the Nazi murder of 6 million Jews.

The events in Washington prove a few things. The Armenian American community have a more powerful and wealthier lobby than ever before. More seriously – for the Turks – is that this year Turkey did not have the Israeli lobby behind it. In the past, Israel, which disgracefully claims that the Armenian Holocaust was not a genocide, has supported its close ally Turkey. But this year, Israel and Turkey have fallen out and the Israelis are still miffed at Turkey's condemnation of the bloodbath in Gaza.

The Turks sent their generals to bully Bush last time round. This time, the Turkish Foreign Minister warned that "Turkish-US ties are going through a very important phase in which they need strategic co-operation at the highest level in their history." The message is simple. Acknowledge the genocide, and the US will lose its airbases in Turkey and the Turkish roads its military convoys use into Iraq.

The fact, unfortunately, is that these roads are the very highways down which the Armenians were sent on their death marches in 1915. That's not mentioned, of course. Our faithful Turkish ally might even pack up its support for the US in Afghanistan, where they are helping fight "Obama's war". But Robert Gates is still in Washington to remind congressmen what he said last year; that America needed "those roads and so on". Well, let's just hope the American troops don't halt their convoys and dig in the fields around those roads in the coming years. The skeletons are still there in their tens of thousands.

One wonders what would happen if Germany suddenly decided that the Nazi Holocaust was not a genocide. Would Chancellor Merkel get away with it? Would Obama lobby that Germany should be allowed to get away with such an obscenity? Perhaps it's worth remembering that in 1939, Hitler asked his generals – before setting off into Poland to murder the millions of Jews in eastern Europe – a simple question: "Who now remembers the Armenians?" Well, Hitler got the answer he would have wanted from Obama this week.