That ‘No Torture’ Memorandum Scam Again

Those cover-your-ass pieces of worthless paper the UK use to pretend they are not outsourcing torture and in which we are a world leader, this time in Afghanistan-

RAWA:- Britain ‘hands over prisoners in Afghanistan to face torture’. British troops are handing over Taliban suspects to the Afghan security service to face “horrible abuse” and torture, the High Court has been told. By Duncan Gardham

Government denials of such abuse are the result of a “head in the sand” attitude, partly borne out of a close intelligence relationship with the Afghans, the judges were told.

They are the latest allegations of British complicity in torture following investigations into MI5 and MI6.
Human rights lawyers have assembled details of nine cases involving allegations of beatings, sleep deprivation, stress positions, electrocution, and whipping with rubber cables.

They are arguing that Britain has breached the Human Rights Act by handing over prisoners to a country known to participate in torture.

They say the Afghan National Directorate of Security (NDS), the domestic security service, had a reputation for mistreating prisoners and British officers should have known what was happening.

The Ministry of Defence is opposing the application for judicial review and Bob Ainsworth, the Defence Secretary, has said that detention is an important and necessary ability for British forces operating in Afghanistan, and safeguards are in place to prevent mistreatment.

But Michael Fordham QC told the court that the Ministry of Defence and Foreign Office were seeking to protect their detainee transfer policy by adopting the approach “of seeing no evil, hearing no evil and speaking no evil”.

In legal documents put before the court he said there are many reputable reports that torture and ill-treatment is “endemic” in the NDS “even at a very high level”, which has been described as a relic from the days of Soviet occupation.

The NDS was said to have been created in the image of the KGB and allegedly still has a reputation for torturing and killing.

Mr Fordham said the British government had chosen to rely on a “manifestly unsafe” memorandum of understanding with the Afghan authorities that international human rights obligations would be observed by the NDS.

But Britain adopted a “head in the sand” because it did not want to uncover evidence of human rights abuses and therefore refused to investigate thoroughly, he said, adding that the fact the NDS supplied intelligence to the UK was no secret.

Freedom’s On The March

Prosthetic legs line a wall in Kabul, Afghanistan ©Lynsey Addario / VII Network

The Afghan Narco War

A must read, Can Anyone Pacify the World’s Number One Narco-State? The Opium Wars in Afghanistan By Alfred W. McCoy, extract-

Although this area had zero heroin production in the mid-1970s, the CIA’s covert war served as the catalyst that transformed the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands into the world’s largest heroin producing region. As mujahedeen guerrillas captured prime agricultural areas inside Afghanistan in the early 1980s, they began collecting a revolutionary poppy tax from their peasant supporters.

Once the Afghan guerrillas brought the opium across the border, they sold it to hundreds of Pakistani heroin labs operating under the ISI’s protection. Between 1981 and 1990, Afghanistan’s opium production grew ten-fold — from 250 tons to 2,000 tons. After just two years of covert CIA support for the Afghan guerrillas, the U.S. Attorney General announced in 1981 that Pakistan was already the source of 60% of the American heroin supply. Across Europe and Russia, Afghan-Pakistani heroin soon captured an even larger share of local markets, while inside Pakistan itself the number of addicts soared from zero in 1979 to 1.2 million just five years later.

After investing $3 billion in Afghanistan’s destruction, Washington just walked away in 1992, leaving behind a thoroughly ravaged country with over one million dead, five million refugees, 10-20 million landmines still in place, an infrastructure in ruins, an economy in tatters, and well-armed tribal warlords prepared to fight among themselves for control of the capital. Even when Washington finally cut its covert CIA funding at the end of 1991, however, Pakistan’s ISI continued to back favored local warlords in pursuit of its long-term goal of installing a Pashtun client regime in Kabul.

Druglords, Dragon’s Teeth, and Civil Wars: the 1990s

Throughout the 1990s, ruthless local warlords mixed guns and opium in a lethal brew as part of a brutal struggle for power. It was almost as if the soil had been sown with those dragons’ teeth of ancient myth that can suddenly sprout into an army of full-grown warriors, who leap from the earth with swords drawn for war.

When northern resistance forces finally captured Kabul from the communist regime, which had outlasted the Soviet withdrawal by three years, Pakistan still backed its client Hekmatyar. He, in turn, unleashed his artillery on the besieged capital. The result: the deaths of an estimated 50,000 more Afghans. Even a slaughter of such monumental proportions, however, could not win power for this unpopular fundamentalist. So the ISI armed a new force, the Taliban and in September 1996, it succeeded in capturing Kabul, only to fight the Northern Alliance for the next five years in the valleys to the north of the capital.

During this seemingly unending civil war, rival factions leaned heavily on opium to finance the fighting, more than doubling the harvest to 4,600 tons by 1999. Throughout these two decades of warfare and a twenty-fold jump in drug production, Afghanistan itself was slowly transformed from a diverse agricultural ecosystem — with herding, orchards, and over 60 food crops — into the world’s first economy dependent on the production of a single illicit drug. In the process, a fragile human ecology was brought to ruin in an unprecedented way.

Located at the northern edge of the annual monsoon rains, where clouds arrive from the Arabian Sea already squeezed dry, Afghanistan is an arid land. Its staple food crops have historically been sustained by irrigation systems that rely on snowmelt from the region’s high mountains. To supplement staples such as wheat, Afghan tribesmen herded vast flocks of sheep and goats hundreds of miles every year to summer pasture in the central uplands. Most important of all, farmers planted perennial tree crops — walnut, pistachio, and mulberry — which thrived because they sink their roots deep into the soil and are remarkably resistant to the region’s periodic droughts, offering relief from the threat of famine in the dry years.

During these two decades of war, however, modern firepower devastated the herds, damaged snowmelt irrigation systems, and destroyed many of the orchards. While the Soviets simply blasted the landscape with firepower, the Taliban, with an unerring instinct for their society’s economic jugular, violated the unwritten rules of traditional Afghan warfare by cutting down the orchards on the vast Shamali plain north of Kabul.

Malalai Joya In The NYT

Lacking access to broadcasters and the media within Afghanistan means that her message “for women’s rights, for human rights, against injustice and occupation,” can be spread only by telephone, by clandestine meetings in safe houses and through a poster campaign.

The United States cited the status of women among reasons for its intervention in Afghanistan. Yet Ms. Joya, who taught girls in secret basement schools during the Taliban years, argues that the situation of women has not improved.

Pointing to the 1920s, when Afghan women traveled to Turkey to study without head scarves or male relatives to accompany them, and to the 1950s, when Afghan women had professional careers, she said that the decline of women’s rights in her country was above all an issue of power.

Levels of domestic violence, rape, forced marriage and suicide make the condition of women today “worse than hell,” she says. For that she blames what she calls President Hamid Karzai’s “corrupt, misogynistic government and his circle of warlords” and on his appointments to Afghan courts.

Hamed Elmi, deputy spokesman for Mr. Karzai in Kabul, discounted Ms. Joya’s accusations. “The government is not corrupt, but we have some corrupt people in government — we try to identify and tackle the issue,” Mr. Elmi said by telephone.

He added that Afghanistan had made progress in involving women at all levels of government and that it could not be ascertained that there were warlords in Parliament since the courts had not proven them guilty. “We have an independent judiciary system,” he said. As for whether the government was misogynistic, he said simply: “She is wrong.”

Back in her homeland, Ms. Joya said, the NATO forces were perpetuating the repression of women by propping up warlords she described as interchangeable with the Taliban.

She called for the immediate departure of foreign troops, even if it would lead to more violence in the civil war. “It is better to leave us alone,” she said. “We will know what to do with our destiny.”

Surging On

(AFP) – The United States plans a major offensive this year in the Taliban bastion of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan, a senior official said Friday, calling a hard-fought ongoing operation a mere prelude. The remarks were the latest sign that President Barack Obama’s administration plans to step up the fight against the Taliban as part of its strategy of pouring thousands more troops into Afghanistan.

PS.

Kabul – The United Nations said Wednesday that 346 children were killed in Afghanistan last year, more than half of them by NATO forces, mostly in airstrikes. “In 2009, 346 children were killed,” Radhika Coomaraswamy, the special representative of the UN secretary general for children and armed conflict, said in Kabul after a seven-day visit the country. She said 131 children were killed in airstrikes, while 22 were killed in nighttime raids by international special forces. Taliban militants were responsible for the deaths of 128 children last year, with seven of the children used by militants as suicide bombers, she said. In 38 cases, it was not possible to determine who had killed the children. More than 2,400 civilians were killed last year, the deadliest for Afghan civilians since the fall of the Taliban regime in late 2001, according to the UN.

Coomaraswamy said she met with NATO commander in Afghanistan US General Stanley McChrystal, who assured her that troops “will work with the UN to ensure better protection for children.” But she noted that “recent events in the past months are cause of concern.” About 50 civilians have been killed since the NATO forces began their biggest-ever operation in the southern province of Helmand nearly two weeks ago. At least 27 of the casualties were caused by a NATO airstrike, and 12 others were killed by NATO rockets. McChrystal said he has put protecting civilians at centre of his war strategy and has ordered the 113,000 international troops to limit the use of airstrikes. Attacks by Taliban on schools reached their highest level in 2009, with more than 600 incidents recorded, Coomaraswamy said.

The Loan Sharks of War

I guess this is inflation, the Friedman unit is played out, it’s time for the McChrystal unit, c’mon just another 12-18 months-

The general overseeing the US military campaign in Afghanistan has warned that the offensive against the Taliban in southern Helmand province’s Marjah town is just the start of an operation that could last 18 months. General David Petraeus, the commander of US Central Command, said on Sunday that the months ahead will be “tough”.

Petraeus said the campaign, which started on February 13, would not stop with Marjah and nearby Nad Ali.  “This is just the initial operation of what will be a 12 to 18-month campaign as General [Stanley] McChrystal [the head of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan] and his team mapped it out,”

Operation Moshtarak Propaganda

Back in Afghanistan, McClatchy’s Saeed Shah reports that only about 1200 residents have fled the Afghan city of Marjah in Nad Ali district, ahead of a major NATO/ Afghan invasion planned for later this week. The city of 80,000 is controlled by some 2000 Taliban fighters and there are many heroin labs, the profits of which help to support the Taliban.

The lucrative poppy crops grown in this region are all that is left of a 1950s & 1960s US irrigation scheme that went bad, and Marjah and environs were nicknamed “Little America.”

The refusal of locals to leave in any large numbers may be what prompted US commanders to begin telling the people of Marjah to ‘stay inside their homes’ and stay out of the way of the fighting. This message is a 180 degree reversal of the earlier message, that locals should leave.

CBS News reports embedded with the US Marines outside Marjah, to the southwest of the Helmand capital of Lashkar Gah. This report gives the impression that substantial numbers of civilians have left or are leaving, but this assertion appears not to be true.

The NATO / Kabul plan is to chase the Taliban out of Marjah, win local hearts and minds, and garrison it with Afghan army troops in the aftermath to ensure that the Taliban do not return. This plan requires that the operation not do so much damage to the city and kill so many locals that they are alienated in the long term.

This would require a good deal more care than the US led forces have taken so far, so I expect the in/em -bed reporters of corporate news will be again working overtime to portray a favourable spin to mass civilian deaths. Expect stories of tragic yet heroic soldiers killed by eveel swarthy hordes and maybe in a throwaway last line ‘and 400 Afghans killed today’. The BBC is going with- Afghan villages abandoned before Nato-led operation Hundreds of villagers living in a Taliban-controlled area of southern Afghanistan are leaving before a major Nato-led offensive gets under way. -While carefully avoiding mention of the vast majority, the thousands who are still there except in a little fact box that is entitled ‘MARJAH: ‘TALIBAN STRONGHOLD’ see how that works? So while the on the ground assault is called Operation Moshtarak, is that also the name for the media warfare operation that is clearly already being deployed?

TomDispatch- Nick Turse: America’s Shadowy Base World

Nearly a decade after the Bush administration launched its invasion of Afghanistan, TomDispatch offers the first actual count of American, NATO, and other coalition bases there, as well as facilities used by the Afghan security forces.  Such bases range from relatively small sites like Shinwar to mega-bases that resemble small American towns.  Today, according to official sources, approximately 700 bases of every size dot the Afghan countryside, and more, like the one in Shinwar, are under construction or soon will be as part of a base-building boom that began last year.

MORE

Dogs Of War

Le Monde diplomatique, February 9, 2010, Marie-Dominique Charlier:-
Estimates of the numbers of PMC personnel in Afghanistan vary from 130,000 to 
160,000, the second-largest deployment after Iraq, which it is set to overtake in the near future. The 30,000 extra US troops bound for Afghanistan could be accompanied by up to 56,000 additional contractor personnel. PMC contractors will then account for nearly two-thirds of all the Pentagon’s personnel in Afghanistan, the highest ratio in any conflict 
in the history of the US.

The best known PMCs, Xe (Blackwater), DynCorp, MPRI (Military Professional Resources Inc) and Kellog Brown and Root, are all part of a grouping known as Private Security Companies of Afghanistan. Their involvement takes a big bite out of the funds intended for the reconstruction of the Afghan National Army (ANA).

Although they are supposed to play an auxiliary role to the coalition, and to the US army, the legal status of the PMCs is vague. But behind the “turnkey” solutions they offer lie big business interests, which influence military decisions in the field. There is a convergence of financial interests between the PMCs and big US industrial conglomerates: most PMCs have been bought up by conglomerates through mergers and acquisitions, many since 2001.

Moreover, the boom in outsourcing coincides with the need of the US military to assure their own redeployment: most of the senior management of the PMCs are former military officers, who find it easy to make the transition from the public to the private sector. Former senior officers of US armed forces working for PMCs enjoy a close relationship with the Pentagon, which gives them easy access to classified information and guarantees a degree of impunity.

A British contractor said recently that the Americans, the British and other armed forces were in Afghanistan to win the war, but for his firm, the more the security situation deteriorated the better. This is not necessarily compatible with conflict stabilisation and the “Afghanisation” of peace.

MORE

Sales Conference…

I do enjoy it when people who call the rational (albeit ruthlessly criminal) business motivations that play a part in warfare as ‘conspiracy theories’ as if all human history didn’t contain repeated evidence of the venal motivations behind various conflicts. They may not be the prime reason, or even in the top three but no aggressive war was ever engaged in without regard to the potential treasure the blood would obtain. I suppose they think that was the bad brutal unevolved past and we would never be so unenlightened now, bless ’em. And arguing over what was the prime reason (especially in the war on terror theatre where almost no one can agree what the reasons really are) is a bit of an angels dancing on the head of a pin exercise, surely we can agree that the motivations were not those of a good faith engagement with the human rights of everyone concerned and war inevitably is a generator of atrocity (again that seems to a contentious issue for those who think humanity has left its dark past behind and war will follow laws and troops really are free to refuse illegal orders). I think there are various reasons for Afghan war, an outraged Empire, the need to move a population into a war mindset with an easy victory that also meant assets could begin to be deployed for the big push on Iraq (and having a client state on another border with Iran, certainly the neocons/zionist axis are always keen on anything that does that or projects US, and therefore to their thinking Israeli, sphere of influence across the Middle East), disgust at the Taliban that in their uninformed romanticism thought the Norther Alliance were ‘good guys’ and even some actual good faith belief that even though Bush came to power in a coup this invasion would bring a better govt to Afghanistan and better human rights. Anyways, as I say there are many factors few of which however are particularly noble and when you come to the actual decision makers, I would say none. So now Karzai is trying to promote the treasure aspect, it does not mean the invasion was simply about this, but it does mean those who reject rational capital interests as playing any part should maybe pack it in, get a subscription to the Disney channel and enjoy that fictional children’s world which will not challenge their shiny worldview unduly.

RAWA:-

KABUL — Afghanistan, one of the world’s poorest countries, is sitting on mineral and petroleum reserves worth an estimated one trillion dollars, President Hamid Karzai said Sunday. The war-ravaged nation could become one of the richest in the world if helped to tap its geological deposits, Karzai told reporters. “I have very good news for Afghans,” Karzai said. “The initial figures we have obtained show that our mineral deposits are worth a thousand billion dollars — not a thousand million dollars but a thousand billion,” he said.

He based his assertion, he said, on a survey being carried out by the United States Geological Survey (USGS), due to be completed in “a couple of months”. The USGS, the US government’s scientific agency, has been working on the 17-million dollar survey for a number of years, Karzai said.

While Afghanistan is not renowned as a resource-rich country, it has a wide range of deposits, including copper, iron ore, gold and chromite, as well as natural gas, oil and precious and semi-precious stones. Little has been exploited because the country has been mired in conflict for 30 years, and is embroiled in a vicious insurgency by Islamist rebels led by the Taliban.

More than 100,000 foreign troops under US and NATO command are battling the insurgents, with another 40,000 due for deployment this year. China and India have bid for contracts to develop mines, with the Chinese winning a copper contract. An iron ore contract is due to be awarded later this year.

In 2007, China’s state-owned metals giant Metallurgical Group Corporation (MCC) signed a three-billion-dollar contract to develop the Aynak copper mine — one of the world’s biggest — over the next 30 years. First discovered in 1974, the site, 30 kilometres (20 miles) south of Kabul in Logar, is estimated to contain 11.3 million tonnes of copper.

The Hajigak iron ore mine in Bamiyan province, north of Kabul, is currently under tender, with one Chinese and half a dozen Indian firms bidding. The contract is for exploitation of almost two billion tonnes of high-grade ore, involving processing, smelting, steel production and electricity production.

Self-Immolation Still Rising Among Afghan Women

RAWA- More Afghan women are choosing suicide to escape the violence and brutality of their daily lives, says a new human-rights report prepared by Canada’s Foreign Affairs Department. The 2008 annual assessment paints a grim picture of a country where violence against women and girls is common, despite rising public awareness among Afghans and international condemnation. “Self-immolation is being used by increasing numbers of Afghan women to escape their dire circumstances, and women constitute the majority of Afghan suicides,” said the report, completed in November 2009. The document was obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act.

RAWA photo essay on self immolation, very disturbing images.

The director of a burn unit at a hospital in the relatively peaceful province of Herat reported that in 2008 more than 80 women tried to kill themselves by setting themselves on fire, many of them in their early 20s. Many of those women died, the report said. The frank evaluation of the plight of women was written against the backdrop of international debate last year over the Afghanistan government’s so-called rape law. The legislation, aimed at courting votes in the minority Shiite community, legalized rape within a marriage. It prompted outrage in Canada and many other countries. The move was an attempt to codify social and religious practises, but the international condemnation forced the government to review the law. It was eventually enacted with some amendments, although the basic tenets remained unchanged.

2009 Deadliest Year For Afghan Children

RAWA– KABUL (PAN): The outgoing year was the deadliest year for Afghan children since the ouster of the Taliban regime in late 2001, a human rights watchdog said here on Wednesday.

More than 1,050 children under 18 years of age were killed in suicide attacks, air strikes, improvised explosive device blasts and crossfire between warring parties in 2009, the organisation said.

In a detailed report released today, the Afghanistan Rights Monitor (ARM) alleged children were recruited for military purposes, harassed, sexually exploited and detained illegally.

They were deliberately deprived of access to basic rights such as education and health by Taliban insurgents, pro-government forces and other armed groups, the group added.

ARM Director Ajmal Samadi said: “At least three children were killed in war-related incidents everyday in 2009 and many others suffered in diverse but mostly unreported ways.” Around 2,080 incidents of grave violations of child rights were reported during the year.

About 64 percent of the child victims were killed in 2009 as a result of violent incidents perpetrated by the Taliban militants, who recruited dozens of underage boys as foot soldiers and suicide attackers.

Besides murdering several children on charges of espionage or working for the government and its foreign supporters, the insurgents deprived hundreds of thousands of boys and girls of education.

Widespread attacks on aid workers, humanitarian convoys and facilities denied thousands of children access to life-saving services such as food aid and immunisation against deadly diseases.

Afghan and foreign forces did little to ensure child protection in counterinsurgency operations, the ARM complained, saying the alleged killing of eight students in Narang district of Kunar province on December 26 by US Special Forces and their Afghan companions appeared to be an appalling act of crime against civilians.

“NATOs accusation that the teenagers were involved in bomb-making activities does not justify their group-killing,” Samadi said, adding the claim that foreign forces came under fire contradicted government findings, which the victims were not combatants.

According to the report, the recruitment and use of children by police and private security companies continued throughout 2009 with little government intervention to curb the unlawful practice.

Several cases of sexual violence against children were reported with the alleged involvement of police officers, forces from registered private security firms and other militia actors but no case reached formal adjudication due to rampant corruption in government institutions and lack of support for victims.

“Whilst children were increasingly affected by war and crimes in Afghanistan, the government failed to introduce appropriate legal and practical mechanisms to mitigate their sufferings, protect them against the harm of war and bring alleged criminals to justice,” said Samadi.

ARM urged warring parties to pay attention to the plight of children and publicly recommit to their protection, safety and well-being. It went on to ask the government to establish an authorised body to work on child protection issues and to constantly liaise with warring parties on child rights.

The group called for the government to set up a special fund for financial, health and social support services for war-affected children. It urged the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to sensitise the insurgents about the rights and protection of children in situations of war.

Afghanistan Top Ten

Afghanistan: Ten reasons to resist By Courage to Resist.

1. Like Iraq, it is also illegal
2. No military solution to terrorism
3. Funds used for war are needed at home
4. Civilian casualties are not acceptable
5. War is not good for women in Afghanistan
6. Support the troops: Bring them home now
7. Torture and human rights abuses
8. Climate change and resource wars
9. War destabilizes Afghanistan and the region
10. Respect Afghani self-determination; No to global military intervention

1- Like Iraq, it is also illegal

According to international law experts, the invasion and ongoing occupation of Afghanistan is as illegal as the US presence in Iraq. The United Nations Charter mandates that military force against another country is only justified when used in self-defense or authorized by the UN Security Council. Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, President George W Bush sought an authorization from the UN Security Council to use military force in Afghanistan. The UN resolutions that were passed in response—resolutions 1368 and 1373—never actually authorized military force, but rather, authorized the criminalization and prevention of terrorist activities. Contrary to popular perception, the Bush Administration unfolded an open-ended military operation in Afghanistan with no legal justification for doing so. The administration of Barack Obama is building on this flawed foundation in its continuance and escalation of the war.

“The invasion of Afghanistan was not legitimate self-defense under article 51 of the UN charter because the attacks on September 11, 2001 were criminal attacks, not “armed attacks” by another country. Afghanistan did not attack the United States. In fact, 15 of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia.”
—Marjorie Cohn, president of the National Lawyers Guild

2- No military solution to terrorism

There can be no military solution to terrorism. This is because “terrorism” is a tactic that is not tied to any specific place. By pursuing the ever-elusive “terrorist” enemy, the US has waged an open-ended war of attrition in Afghanistan. This occupation breeds the discontent that gives rise to “terrorism” in the first place and has had the effect of bringing forward local opposition to the occupation.

Military & Families Against The War

Military families and former soldiers will travel from across the country on Monday to demand that Gordon Brown brings the troops home from Afghanistan. They will deliver a petition signed by tens of thousands who believe that the war in Afghanistan is futile to the Prime Minister at Downing Street at 5pm.

Graham Knight, whose son was killed in Afghanistan, said: “We want to remind the government of the sacrifices our loved ones have made and continue to make. “This government has taken us into two wars – unprepared, underfunded and under false pretences.”

Joan Humphries, the grandmother of Kevin Elliot who was killed in August, will also join the protest at Downing Street. “I feel very strongly that the war is unjust and we have no chance of winning,” she said.

Among the former soldiers who will join the families to deliver the petition are Ben Griffin, who served as an SAS soldier in both Iraq and Afghanistan, Kevin Roach who served in Iraq, Bosnia and Kosovo and World War II veterans Bertie Lewis, who served in Bomber Command, and Jim Radford.

Mr Knight added: “Christmas is always a time of reflection for people who have suffered loss. But we don’t have to suffer alone and we don’t have to suffer in silence. In holding a vigil in Downing Street for the loved ones we have lost, we also want to remind the government that over 60 per cent of the British public think the troops should come home.”

Atlanticists Eyeing The Blogoshpere

NATO hosts first ever briefing for bloggers organised by the Atlantic Council of the United Kingdom which is NATO’s PR arm-

The Atlantic Council of the United Kingdom is an independent non-governmental organisation based in London. Its mission is to explain and promote the benefits the UK enjoys from its membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the constructive role the nation can play in ensuring global peace and security.

Patrons
Gordon Brown
“NATO has emerged from the Cold War with a new sense of purpose, and I am keen that the UK is a driving force behind its continued development and strong leadership role; the Atlantic Council of the United Kingdom has an important part to play in spreading this message”

David Cameron
“I am delighted to be a Partron of the Atlantic Council of the United Kingdom and am wholly supportive of both theCouncil and its mission”

Nick Clegg
“I fully support the work of the Atlantic Council of the United Kingdom in promoting and explaining the role of NATO and am delighted to act as Patron”

Mmmm, smell the party political consensus in the 51st state. So blogs are a taken seriously in NATO’s information operations we may now conclude. Interesting.