Hezbollah figure behind bombings of Israeli sites in Argentina killed

Adam Goldman and Ellen Nakashima have a report in the Washington Post that looks at cooperation between the US CIA and the Israeli Mossad in the killing of Imad Mughniyah, Hezbollah’s international operations chief, in Syria on February 12, 2008.

The United States has never acknowledged participation in the killing of Mughniyah, which Hezbollah blamed on Israel. Until now, there has been little detail about the joint operation by the CIA and Mossad to kill him, how the car bombing was planned or the exact U.S. role. With the exception of the 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden, the mission marked one of the most high-risk covert actions by the United States in recent years.

U.S. involvement in the killing, which was confirmed by five former U.S. intelligence officials, also pushed American legal boundaries.

Mughniyah was targeted in a country where the United States was not at war. Moreover, he was killed in a car bombing, a technique that some legal scholars see as a violation of international laws that proscribe “killing by perfidy” — using treacherous means to kill or wound an enemy.

...

“Remember, they were carrying out suicide bombings and IED attacks,” said one official, referring to Hezbollah operations in Iraq.

The authority to kill Mughniyah required a presidential finding by President George W. Bush. The attorney general, the director of national intelligence, the national security adviser and the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department all signed off on the operation, one former intelligence official said.

The former official said getting the authority to kill Mughniyah was a “rigorous and tedious” process. “What we had to show was he was a continuing threat to Americans,” the official said, noting that Mughniyah had a long history of targeting Americans dating back to his role in planning the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut.

“The decision was we had to have absolute confirmation that it was self-defense,” the official said.

Among other attacks, Imad Mughniyah was believed to have been responsible for bombs that were used in two attacks in Argentina, the 1992 suicide bombing of the Israeli Embassy and the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center.

While I don't remember this attack being covered in the book, you might want to check out Mark Mazzetti's The Way of the Knife which goes into some detail about how the Bush administration worked to transform the CIA, JSOC and other US forces into into kidnapping, torturing and killing units after 9/11. The CIA had gotten out of the killing and torture business following scandals in the 1970s and 1980s, imperfectly so, but were brought back in following the September 11th attacks.

It wasn't exactly a transformation that all CIA accepted but the Bush administration supported those in the agency who would carry out their demands. That's one reason why greater blame should be placed on civilian officials who ordered the CIA torture program. The CIA would not have gotten into the business had that not been what they were told to do.

Mark goes behind the scenes on some of the debates surrounding capture vs. kill, the legality of carrying out missions in countries where we were not at war, and the competition/coordination between CIA and Defense. It's a good, easy read.

I highly recommend the book. I almost assigned it for the September 11, 2001 and Beyond class I am teaching this semester. Mark is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who writes on national security issues for the New York Times and other outlets. We also graduated from Regis High School together in 1992.

A Commitment to Equity in Guatemala?

Guatemala remains one of the most unequal countries in the Americas and with a poverty rate that exceeds 50 percent. Government after government, program after program, is supposed to tackle inequality and poverty but to no effect. Maynor Cabrera, Nora Lustig and Hilcías E. Morán recently completed a Commitment to Equity (CEQ) Policy Assessment for the country and the results are not that pretty. Here is their abstract:

In 2010, according to the CEQ analysis for Guatemala, fiscal policy did almost nothing to change inequality and poverty. Recent developments on fiscal policy make things worse. A reduction in social spending, particularly in the flagship CCT program “Mi Bono Seguro” will negatively impact poverty and inequality. A reform of the personal income tax will result in lower fiscal revenues. The combined effects of these changes will likely result in an increase of poverty and inequality and reinforce the chronic status quo of poverty and inequality in Guatemala. 

Come on, there needs to have been something positive?

Our analyses of the redistributive effects of fiscal policy were made for the year of 2010. What has happened since? Have there been changes that would result in an increase the income redistribution and poverty reduction effects of fiscal policy? Quite the contrary. Because tax revenues have been insufficient to cover government spending and have been growing at a slow rate (despite fiscal reforms introduced in 2002), the tax burden (revenues as a percentage of GDP) remained at about 11 percent in the last three years.

In order to offset this weakness on the revenue side, the Guatemalan government has reduced public investment and spending on some social programs. As a result, the fiscal deficit has declined and public debt has stabilized at around 25 percent of GDP. Instead of strengthening the revenue base through a more aggressive direct tax collection on Guatemala’s wealthy (on income and property), the government reduced the tax burden on the rich and increased the tax burden on the middle class. Furthermore, spending on targeted anti-poverty programs was cut.

Nope.

Plaza Publica interview on STD tests in Guatemala

CNN

In October 2010, we learned that the US and Guatemalan governments had worked together to purposefully infect hundreds of Guatemalans (thousands it would appear), including institutionalized mental patients, with gonorrhea, syphilis, and chancroid. They did so without the subjects' knowledge or permission in order to study their effects.

In an English-language interview for Plaza Publica, Louisa Reynolds speaks with Wellesly College professor Susan Reverby who published the research.

Four years after your paper came out and the world learnt about the Guatemalan experiment, what impact do you think it has had?

I think it’s too soon to see whether it will have any impact on the way people understand bioethics. With Tuskegee, because it happened in the US, there’s the African American community to carry the story forward. But who’s going to carry out this story forward in the collective memory? We have a very small Guatemalan community here and it has lots of other issues. That’s the question: will knowledge about it go forward or will it become another tick in a list of awful things in which the US has become involved?

It's a good but, obviously, pretty sick read.