US drones in Pakistan may be war crime !

Lawyers for Pakistani man whose father was killed by drone strike seek to have sharing of UK intelligence declared unlawful. The British government's support for US drone operations over Pakistan may involve acts of assisting murder or even war crimes, the high court heard on Tuesday.

In the first serious legal challenge in the English courts to the drones campaign, lawyers for a young Pakistani man whose father was killed by a strike from an unmanned aircraft are seeking to have the sharing of UK locational intelligence declared unlawful.

Noor Khan, 27, is said to live in constant fear of a repeat of the attack in North Waziristan in March last year that killed more than 40 other people, who are said to have gathered to discuss a local mining dispute.

The British government has declined to state whether or not its signals intelligence agency GCHQ passes information in support of the CIA drone operations over Pakistan, although the court heard that media reports suggest that it does.

The case opened as the RAF confirmed that it is to double the number of its own drones flying combat and surveillance operations over Afghanistan. The five additional aircraft will be operated from the UK for the first time, rather than the US. The UK's existing Reaper drones, which are used to target suspected insurgents in Helmand province, have been operated from Creech air force base in Nevada because the RAF has not had the capability to fly them from Britain.

Martin Chamberlain, counsel for Khan, said that a newspaper article in 2010 had reported that GCHQ was using telephone intercepts to provide the US authorities with locational intelligence on leading militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The report suggested that the Cheltenham-based agency was proud of this work, which was said to be "in strict accordance with the law".

On the contrary, Chamberlain said, any GCHQ official who passed locational intelligence to the CIA knowing or believing that it could be used to facilitate a drone strike would be committing a serious criminal offence.

"The participation of a UK intelligence official in US drone strikes, by passing intelligence, may amount to the offence of encouraging or assisting murder," he said. Alternatively, it could amount to a war crime or a crime against humanity, he added.

Chamberlain said that no GCHQ official would be able to mount a defence of combat immunity, but added that there was no wish in this case to convict any individual of a criminal offence. Rather, Khan was seeking a declaration by the civil courts that such intelligence-sharing is unlawful.

Between June 2004 and September this year, according to research by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, drone strikes killed between 2,562 and 3,325 people in Pakistan, of whom between 474 and 881 were civilians, including 176 children.

With the number of drone strikes increasing sharply under the Obama administration, the London case is one of several being brought by legal activists around the world in an attempt to challenge their legality of the programme.

In Pakistan, lawyers and human rights activists are mounting two separate court claims: one is intended to trigger a criminal investigation into the actions of two former CIA officials, while the second is seeking a declaration that the strikes amount to acts of war, in order to pressurise the Pakistani air force into shooting down drones operating in the country's airspace.

During the two-day hearing in London, lawyers for Khan are seeking permission for a full judicial review of the lawfulness of any British assistance for the US drone programme.

Lawyers for William Hague, the foreign secretary, say not only that they will neither confirm nor deny any intelligence-sharing activities in support of drone operations, but that it would be "prejudicial to the national interest" for them even to explain their understanding of the legal basis for any such activities.

For Khan and his lawyers to succeed, they say, the court would need to be satisfied that there is no international armed conflict in Pakistan, with the result that anyone involved in drone strikes was not immune from the criminal law, and that there had been no tacit approval for the strikes from the Pakistan government – another matter that the British government will neither confirm nor deny.

The court would also need to consider, and reject, the US government's own legal position: that drone strikes are acts of self-defence. It would also need to be satisfied that the handing over of intelligence amounted to participation in hostilities.

The government also says that Khan's claim would have a "significant impact" on the conduct of the UK's relations with both the US and Pakistan in an "acutely controversial, sensitive and important" area, and also impact on relations between the US and Pakistan.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/oct/23/uk-support-us-drones-pakistan-war-crime

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US shutdown: what does it mean for markets and the global economy?

 

How have financial markets reacted to news of the shutdown?

US markets were closed by the time the formal notices started going out late on Monday night ordering government agencies to suspend their activities – the so-called shutdown.
But on international markets overnight and on Tuesday morning, the dollar has lost around half a percent of its value, pushing the pound up to $1.6238 – the highest level since 3 January 2013. The euro has risen to $1.357, the highest level since early February.
However, international stock markets were largely unmoved by the crisis – French and German shares, for example, were up around 0.5% – with most investors expecting the shutdown to be short-lived, and the impact largely confined to the US.
Some analysts said investors may also be reasoning that the crisis could delay the so-called "tapering" of the Federal Reserve's recession-busting policy of quantitative easing, which helps inflate share prices by pumping cheap money into financial markets.
Ilya Spivak, currency strategist at Daily FX, said: "The somewhat counter-intuitive response seems to reflect investors' continued pre-occupation with the direction of US monetary policy. Filtered through this prism, the shutdown and its negative implications for US growth are seen as delaying a move to 'taper' QE asset purchases, which seems to be driving a swell in risk appetite."

So does that mean it's just a little local difficulty for the Americans?

Yes and no. The direct economic hit may be relatively small: analysts at the ratings agency Moody's suggest a week-long outage could cut a relatively manageable 0.3% off GDP. But a serious knock to confidence could rattle consumers and investors at a crucial time.
The US recovery remains fragile, as the Fed stressed last month when it decided to continue buying $85bn (£52bn)-a-month worth of bonds, instead of "tapering" QE.
A major wobble, throwing the spotlight back on to the health of the US public finances, is the last thing the nascent upturn needs; and it could also exacerbate markets' anxiety in the run-up to the potentially fraught debate over raising the government's budget ceiling in mid-October.

How will the UK be affected?

If the shutdown is short-lived, probably very little; if it is prolonged, then the uptick in sterling could continue, and a stronger pound is the last thing George Osborne wants as he tries to rebalance the economy towards exports, so that Britain can "pay its way in the world".
There is also a risk that as investors turn their minds to the dangers of debt-burdened developed economies struggling to generate a sustainable upturn, they start to scrutinise the policies of other such states – including the UK.
George Osborne's grim pledge in his Conservative party conference speech that austerity will continue until 2020 may partly have been aimed at reminding international markets that the UK system is different to America's, and he has no intention of being diverted from his deficit-cutting course.

What about the rest of the world?

Any prolonged shutdown would rapidly start to hit US consumer spending, as hundreds of thousands of public sector workers are furloughed; and that will crimp America's demand for imports from the rest of the world.
At the margins, weaker investor confidence, and the dollar depreciation that has so far been the main financial impact of the shutdown, could also slow the flood of capital into the US that was one of the key trends in international markets over the summer.
The switch from riskier markets to the perceived safety of America drove up exchange rates and bond yields in many emerging economies, forcing central banks in several countries, including India and Brazil, to take emergency action.
A renewed sense of crisis in the US is likely to stem that flow, particularly after the Fed had already raised questions about the health of the US economy when it declined to "taper" QE in September.

What will China think?

Beijing's attitude is the key to one of the more subtle potential implications of this latest budgetary wrangle.
China holds a mountain of US assets, mostly Treasury bonds, effectively IOUs from Washington – the by-product of running huge trade surpluses over the past decade and a deliberate policy to keep the Chinese currency, the yuan, cheap.
However, Chinese politicians have repeatedly expressed concern over recent years about the growing risks of this large exposure to the US, as Washington has appeared increasingly unable to bring tax-and-spending policy under control. When the US was stripped of its AAA credit rating by Standard & Poors in August 2011, after a previous partisan wrangle over raising the government's debt ceiling – not a problem suffered in autocratic single-party states – China reacted with fury. Xinhua, the official news agency, said: "The days when the debt-ridden Uncle Sam could leisurely squander unlimited overseas borrowing appear to be numbered. To cure its addiction to debts, the US has to re-establish the common sense principle that one should live within its means."
Since then China has deliberately moved towards making the yuan more convertible on international markets, which would allow it to appreciate, and reduce the need to pile up potentially risky US debts – a policy that in the long term could remove the biggest buyer of US debt from the markets, potentially making it far more costly for America to borrow.
Simon Derrick, of BNY Mellon, suggested the lack of outraged comment over the current budget impasse may suggest "the Chinese government has already made its mind up about what it needs to do and sees little point in complaining any further".
By: Heather Stawart

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/oct/01/us-shutdown-markets-global-economy

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