Teff is one of my topics of the day; it is the smallest grain in the world.
The latin name is Eragrostis abyssinica; each teff seed is one hundred fiftieth the size of a wheat grain. The name teff itself derives from the classical Amharic word teffa, which means lost- and its easy to see how a single seed could become so!
In English, teff is also known as lovegrass (although there are 250 species as part of this genus, and most are not agriculturally viable or edible), and annual bunch grass. The French call it mil éthiopien.
Teff contains calcium, fibre, iron, and protein. I found one source which says that it has seventeen times the calcium in whole wheat or barley.
It is indigenous to Ethiopia and Eritrea, where it is part of the daily staple bread injera, which is made from fermented teff flour and is cooked as a flatbread. The grain has no gluten, which makes it ideal for those who suffer from celiac disease and must out of necessity avoid this component of bread products.
In Ethiopia, teff is actually more expensive than other foods like wheat or sorghum. Therefore injera that is made only with teff commands the highest price, is thought to be the most delicious, and of the best quality. The grain has its own symbiotic yeast that ferments the flatbread. Most Ethiopians make their injera exclusively with teff in their homeland; western resteraunts produce a fascimile, due to the relative inaccessibility of the grain here, that is a mix of wheat flour and teff flour together; proportions vary. Injera is something that only the middle and upper classes in Ethiopia eat; for the poor, it is considered unaffordable and a great luxury. Teff is especially popular in the western provinces, where people eat it once or twice a day. It is also made into a porridge, called muk, and a sweet bread called kita firfir or chéchébsa.
In the ancient kingdom of Aksum, which existed in Ethiopia 1,700 years ago, teff was available: it was found in the tombs of Bieta Gyorgis, the oldest known site in the entire kingdom, in a 1993 excavation, according to National Geographic. Two Italian Egyptologists also made a claim in a published work in 1939 that teff was found by another archaeologist in 1866 in a brick of the Dassur Pyramid, which dates to 3359 BC. However, wikipedia notes that there is dispute as to the latter assertion- both the discoverer and the teff not being available- and that some in the field feel that the grain discovered was another, wild grass species. Regardless, it is generally held that teff originated from between 4,000 and 1,000 BC.
There are three main varieties of teff: white, red, and brown. As the crop has not been mass commercialized, each group has tons of substrains that have been cultivated by different landowners, with slightly differing properties.
White teff is considered the most desirable form of the grain, although it can only grow in the Highlands of Ethiopia and is not cultivated in Eritrea. Traditionally, only the most noble lineages in Ethiopia had access to this form of the grain- it denoted status in much the way white bread did when it was first introduced into North American society. This is the rarest and most precious grain. I have seen resources that refer to it as tasting like chestnuts.
Red teff is at the bottom of the teff hierarchy, but it has the highest amount of iron. As a darker grain, it was consumed by soldiers and servants in ancient Ethiopian society.
Brown teff is somewhere in the middle in terms of iron content; it doesn't have as much red, but has more than white. In Ethiopia, it is of course considered superior to red teff, but has always been eschewed in favour of white. It can be eaten as cereal and is thought to taste like hazelnuts. Ethiopians also brew alcohol out of brown teff. According to the World Health Organization, the Gurage ethnic group brews alcohol in Ethiopia out of three different grains, of which teff is one, and it is a local beer called shamit.
Interestingly, some variants of teff are actually more bitter, but it is surmisable that they have survived because, while not popular, they do have much higher yields than more pleasant tasting grains and northern Africa has been subject to famine, so high performers count mightily in this atmosphere. They are not promoted outside of Ethiopia, however, and I have never tasted bitter teff in the west.
Teff has a boosted fibre content when compared to other grains, because there is less endosperm, or inside, as it is a smaller grain. Due to its teensiness, it actually cannot be processed. So the outer hull is always a part of the deal when you eat it.
The plants have a large crown and a shallow root system. It will put up with a great deal of drought but is flexible with a much higher water supply, and with many different soil conditions, but it absolutely requires a great deal of sun, and flowers best with twelve hour days of light.
A major reason why teff is so popular in Ethiopia, apart from its rich taste, is that it will ripen with little rain. In like conditions, its rivals wither.
Teff hay is currently being touted to feed foundered horses, and for equines in general, in places like California, (where it is currently in the initial throes of cultivation), and teff's byproducts have long been used for livestock in their traditional environment. It was first grown in the United States in Idaho, where there is an annual supply harvested for health food and ethnic speciality stores.
One of the most amazing things about teff is because it is so small, the seed to sow an entire field can be contained in the palm of one hand, meaning that it is hugely transportable and even semi-nomads can grow it. Given this, its always been a bit strange to me that teff seeds didn't spread far and wide from their home base in Africa, especially when you consider Ethiopia's proximity to the Middle East.
If you are using teff, it is important to remember that the grains should be stored in a cool, dark, dry place in containers that are tightly covered to prevent from inadvertently sprouting, spoiling, or going rancid.
From a fact sheet on ancient grains: "Teff flour can be used as a substitute for part of the flour in baked goods, or the grains added uncooked or substituted for part of the seeds, nuts, or other small grains. Due to it's small size, only 1/2 Cup of teff is needed to replace 1 cup of sesame seeds. It is a good thickener for soups, stews, gravies, and puddings and can also be used in stir-fry dishes, and casseroles. Teff may be added to soups or stews in either of two ways: 1) Add them, uncooked to the pot a half-hour before serving time. 2) Add them cooked to the pot 10 minutes before serving. Cooked teff can be mixed with herbs, seeds, beans or tofu, garlic, and onions to make grain burgers. The seeds can also be sprouted and the sprouts used in salads and on sandwiches.
To cook teff place 2 cups purified water, 1/2 cup teff, and 1/4 tsp. sea salt (optional) in a saucepan. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer covered for 15 to 20 minutes or until the water is absorbed. Remove from heat and let stand covered for 5 minutes."
This grain makes a fabulous breakfast porridge or pudding. The following is a pudding recipe from Bob's Red Mill. I have made this in the past and really like it.
INGREDIENTS:
1 cup cooked & cooled Teff (Tef, T'ef) Whole Grain
1 cup Tofu
2 to 4 Tb Honey or Maple Syrup
1 tsp Vanilla
In a blender combine tofu, maple syrup (or honey if using) and vanilla extract. Blend until smooth and light. Pour cooked and cooled teff grains and tofu mixture into a bowl. Mix thoroughly, cover and chill.
Yield: 2 cups (4 servings)
Variation: add sliced bananas, raisins or other favorite fruit.
Makes 2 servings.
NUTRITIONAL INFORMATION
Serving Size: 1 Serving (89g)
Calories 280, Calories from Fat 25, Total Fat 2.5g, Saturated Fat 0.5g, Cholesterol 0mg, Sodium 0mg, Total Carbohydrates 61g, Dietary Fiber 4g, Sugars 13g, Protein 7g.
Tuesday, May 26, 2009
Monday, May 25, 2009
Touche
It is worth noting that Russian officialdom is not known for its sense of humour. The best TV show in Russian recent history, of course, is no longer on air: Kukly (Puppets), with its sometimes brilliant caricatures of 1990s Russia, was an early victim of the Putin clampdown. Swedes found this skit tremendously funny, partly for the faux-mafia encounter at the beginning (which mocks Swedish naivety in dealing with Russian gangsters) but also for the glorious pastiche of Russian visual and musical clichés in the second half. It is not Russia’s Eurovision entry, but it almost could have been. The Russian embassy in Stockholm was not amused, denouncing the broadcast and claiming that the people involved must be mentally ill.
Death Throes
It is interesting to watch this drag on and on.
What is "broader debt restructuring"? Surely they're going to have to sell SOMETHING.
Canwest secures $175M financing, aims for recapitalization deal by July 15
5 days ago
TORONTO — Canwest Global Communications Corp. (TSX:CGS) has lined up $175 million in fresh debt financing and is aiming to have a broader debt restructuring completed by mid-July, the media company says.
The Winnipeg-based broadcaster and newspaper publisher, struggling under $4 billion in debt, said Wednesday that some of its current debtholders have agreed to provide an additional $100 million.
In return, they would receive new senior notes with a face value of $105 million paying a hefty annual interest rate of 12 per cent. That would translate into a yield of 12.6 per cent on the $100 million they actually provide to Canwest.
In addition, CIT Business Credit Canada Inc. will provide a $75-million senior secured revolving asset-based loan facility.
The transactions were expected to close Thursday.
DBRS analyst Chris Diceman described the refinancing as "an interim step to possibly getting a recapitalization completed in the future" but added it's too soon to say whether that will be accomplished by Canwest's target date of July 15.
The new money Canwest gets from its noteholders will be used to retire senior secured debt owed to the company's bankers.
In return, the unsecured debtholders will receive "quite a high return" on the $100 million they provide, Diceman said.
Canwest said Wednesday that the "sufficient credit availability to operate its business in the ordinary course as it continues its work to effect a recapitalization transaction."
The Winnipeg-based TV and newspaper conglomerate said the noteholder committee has extended its forbearance until June 15, by which time an agreement in principle on a long-term recapitalization is to be framed.
A definitive agreement is to be reached on or before July 15.
Diceman said it's too hard to say at this point whether Canwest can meet that timetable, since it all depends on the company's behind-the-scenes negotiations with the noteholder committee - primarily representing large U.S. funds that deal in high-yield debt.
Canwest has failed to pay US$30.4 million in interest that was due March 15 on US$761 million in eight per cent senior subordinated notes.
Canwest has received several extensions from the noteholders while the company worked on selling assets and renegotiating its debt agreements.
"Nobody but those two parties really knows where that is as far as where those discussions are," Diceman said. "But clearly they've laid out some milestones that they must meet. That could be part of the negotiating as well," Diceman said.
Canwest, like many media companies, has been hit by a decline in advertising revenue due to the recession and increased competition for its conventional television stations from specialty cable channels and the Internet.
In addition, it has been burdened with the debt associated with its acquisition of many of the former Hollinger newspapers, including the National Post.
The company's shares closed Wednesday at 39 cents, up four cents, on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
What is "broader debt restructuring"? Surely they're going to have to sell SOMETHING.
Canwest secures $175M financing, aims for recapitalization deal by July 15
5 days ago
TORONTO — Canwest Global Communications Corp. (TSX:CGS) has lined up $175 million in fresh debt financing and is aiming to have a broader debt restructuring completed by mid-July, the media company says.
The Winnipeg-based broadcaster and newspaper publisher, struggling under $4 billion in debt, said Wednesday that some of its current debtholders have agreed to provide an additional $100 million.
In return, they would receive new senior notes with a face value of $105 million paying a hefty annual interest rate of 12 per cent. That would translate into a yield of 12.6 per cent on the $100 million they actually provide to Canwest.
In addition, CIT Business Credit Canada Inc. will provide a $75-million senior secured revolving asset-based loan facility.
The transactions were expected to close Thursday.
DBRS analyst Chris Diceman described the refinancing as "an interim step to possibly getting a recapitalization completed in the future" but added it's too soon to say whether that will be accomplished by Canwest's target date of July 15.
The new money Canwest gets from its noteholders will be used to retire senior secured debt owed to the company's bankers.
In return, the unsecured debtholders will receive "quite a high return" on the $100 million they provide, Diceman said.
Canwest said Wednesday that the "sufficient credit availability to operate its business in the ordinary course as it continues its work to effect a recapitalization transaction."
The Winnipeg-based TV and newspaper conglomerate said the noteholder committee has extended its forbearance until June 15, by which time an agreement in principle on a long-term recapitalization is to be framed.
A definitive agreement is to be reached on or before July 15.
Diceman said it's too hard to say at this point whether Canwest can meet that timetable, since it all depends on the company's behind-the-scenes negotiations with the noteholder committee - primarily representing large U.S. funds that deal in high-yield debt.
Canwest has failed to pay US$30.4 million in interest that was due March 15 on US$761 million in eight per cent senior subordinated notes.
Canwest has received several extensions from the noteholders while the company worked on selling assets and renegotiating its debt agreements.
"Nobody but those two parties really knows where that is as far as where those discussions are," Diceman said. "But clearly they've laid out some milestones that they must meet. That could be part of the negotiating as well," Diceman said.
Canwest, like many media companies, has been hit by a decline in advertising revenue due to the recession and increased competition for its conventional television stations from specialty cable channels and the Internet.
In addition, it has been burdened with the debt associated with its acquisition of many of the former Hollinger newspapers, including the National Post.
The company's shares closed Wednesday at 39 cents, up four cents, on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
For Those Who Pray
Good to know there are people out there waging a campaign of human decency.
'A little Guantanamo'
Attorney finding it difficult to investigate treatment of mentally ill detainees
By Kelly Davis
'A little Guantanamo'
Ann Menasche should be able to walk into any psychiatric facility at any time to investigate allegations of neglect and abuse. All the disability-rights attorney needs is probable cause. Except, it seems, when the allegations involve patients held by the federal government for allegedly violating immigration laws.
For the last several weeks, Menasche, an attorney with Disability Rights California, has tried unsuccessfully to get into Alvarado Parkway Institute (API), a La Mesa psychiatric hospital, to interview mentally ill detainees who’ve been sent there because staff at federal detention facilities, like the Otay Detention Facility, can’t adequately care for them. Menasche was given a formal tour of the facility on March 6—she could see detainees but not speak with them. When she submitted a request to return to API to interview specific patients, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) official told her she needed to give 72 hours advance notice and submit what’s known as a G-28 form—a form immigration attorneys whose services have already been retained are required to file.
Disability Rights California’s interest in talking to detainees is “wholly unrelated to immigration,” Menasche wrote in a May 5 letter to ICE lawyers. In the letter, Menasche pointed out that ICE was imposing on her requirements that went beyond the agency’s own policies: “Attorneys representing detainees on legal matters unrelated to immigration are not required to complete a Form G-28,” she quoted from ICE visitation standards.
“I want to talk to everybody, and at this rate, I’m not getting very far,” Menasche said in a May 14 interview with CityBeat.
ICE spokesperson Lauren Mack said in a written statement that officials requested the 72-hour notice because the medical condition of the two detainees Menasche wished to speak with was "unstable."
"ICE officials requested of the attorney up to 72 hours to work with the API staff to accomodate the visit while ensuring it would not adversely impact the detainees' recovery and treatment they were receiving," Mack said.
"By the time 72 hours was up, they were back at Otay," Menasche said. "So, if they were so unstable, they certainly recovered rather quickly."
On Monday, Menasche learned that one of those detainees, whom she’d recently interviewed at the Otay Detention Facility, had been deported. The detainee had been sent to API for refusing to eat and angrily described to Menasche having to spend 25 days at the psychiatric hospital shackled to a bed. Menasche immediately faxed a letter to API’s CEO, Patrick Ziemer, letting him know she’d be conducting an inspection of the hospital on Wednesday, May 20.
What Menasche’s seen for herself—and officials have confirmed—is that each detainee sent to API is shackled to a bed 24 hours a day and monitored by two armed guards. They are kept “in virtual isolation,” Menasche said, forbidden from sending or receiving mail or having access to a phone. Family members aren’t informed of a detainee’s whereabouts, told only that they’ve been transferred. At API, detainees aren’t allowed to watch TV—Menasche said she was told that it’s because the TV can be used as a weapon—or read a newspaper. They’re unshackled only to use the bathroom or take a shower, and the only exercise they get is whatever the short distance the chain connecting their ankle to the bed will allow.
Nancy Kincaid, a spokesperson for the state’s Department of Mental Health, couldn’t comment on the conditions at API but said state laws governing the use of restraint dictate a procedure hospitals must follow.
“You can’t just restrain people or seclude people,” she said. “It has to be documented; the doctor has to actually see them. The doctor has to document why that person is in seclusion and restraint; they have to be checked every 15 minutes, and each hour the doctor has to see them again to re-evaluate.”
Patrick Ziemer, Alvarado Parkway’s CEO, didn’t respond to a phone call and e-mail from CityBeat by press time. Ziemer told a San Diego Union-Tribune reporter that state law allows him to limit a patient’s rights if he determines that there’s “good cause.” API is required to provide a quarterly report to San Diego County’s Department of Health and Human Services documenting why a hospitalized individual’s rights are denied and, according to state law, “denial of a person’s rights shall in all cases be entered into the person’s treatment record.”
Menasche said she’s requested, but hasn’t yet been given, access to patient files.
“API is not following state law—they may fill out the paperwork for denial of rights, but it is pro forma,” she said. “Good cause for denial of rights is to be based on an individual assessment, not on a blanket policy on a group of patients.”
Menasche sent a letter to county Mental Health Director Alfredo Aguirre on May 5 informing him of the conditions at API. On May 18, she received a message from Aguirre saying he was aware of the situation and would be following up with API and ICE. A county spokesperson told CityBeat that the county was unaware of detainee conditions prior to receiving Menasche’s letter.
“This has been going on under the radar for many years,” Menasche said.
Menasche said she was told that security concerns drive policy. In an April 24 letter to ICE’s California field directors, she summarized what she’d been told by Assistant Field Director John Garzon: “That the locked psychiatric facility at API was less secure than the Otay Detention facility, for example; that ICE was concerned about the possibility of escape from API (apparently, despite the presence of two armed guards per detainee); that a television could be used as a weapon; and that API had no provisions for monitoring mail or telephone calls, normally done at the Otay facility.”
Menasche said she was told these rules had become stricter since 9/11, though she noted in the April 24 letter that “Mr. Garzon was unable to point to any of the 700 detainees currently held at Otay that were being charged with terrorism or a terrorism-related crime.
“We are unaware of any relationship between national security concerns and the issues addressed herein,” she concluded.
In a written statement, ICE spokesperson Lauren Mack said Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano “has called for a comprehensive review of the nation’s immigration detention practices” and that “ICE is currently reviewing its visitation and telephone access practices for immigration detainees being housed in private psychiatric facilities to ensure they have appropriate access to both.”
Greg Pleasants, an attorney with Mental Health Advocacy Services in Los Angeles who brought the conditions at API to Menasche’s attention—two of his clients were held incommunicado for extended periods of time at various private psychiatric hospitals, API among them—emphasized that immigrant detainees should not be equated with prisoners being held for criminal violations.
“People who don’t understand immigration law think two things: that these people are somehow criminals and that they’re all undocumented—they’re all illegal, so to speak—they never had any status, they just entered the country illegally, but that’s not an accurate picture.
“Some of these people have never been convicted of crimes,” Pleasants said. “Second of all, they’re not in criminal custody—this is a civil matter entirely. Third of all, lots of these people, all of my clients or most, are long-term permanent residents who’ve been in the United State since they were children and have families here and work jobs here and pay taxes here and all the rest. They’re stuck in an immigration detention system that is bursting at the seams and is operating in a culture where the only important thing is deportation.”
Unlike criminal defendants, ICE detainees are not entitled to court-appointed legal representation. Nor are mentally ill detainees allowed a hearing before being committed involuntarily to a psychiatric hospital, Pleasants said.
“The Constitution requires—and this is binding on ICE just like it’s binding on everyone—that when a person in detention, when a prisoner or even a civil detainee… is involuntarily hospitalized, there has to be a procedure followed,” he said. “The person is entitled to a kind of hearing where they can say, ‘I don’t deserve to be hospitalized, I want to present evidence on my behalf, I want someone to help me.’ What we’re seeing in [ICE’s] conduct is this law is not being followed. They’re simply placing people in these facilities and basically involuntarily hospitalizing people without any kind of due process.
“They’ve created basically a little Guantanamo for people with severe mental-health issues,” Pleasants said. “And that doesn’t fly from a due-process standpoint.”
This story has been updated since its initial publication to include comments from ICE that came in after CityBeat's deadline.
Write to kellyd@sdcitybeat.com and editor@sdcitybeat.com.
Armenians should not take this personally. Love Armenia, love Armenians, love love Atom Egoyan and Arsinee. But this was depressing :(
Armenian Activist Deemed 'Mentally Ill,' Then Freed
Shant Harutiunian
May 15, 2009
Shant Harutiunian, an Armenian opposition activist arrested last year following deadly postelection clashes with security forces in Yerevan, has been released from prison after being found to be mentally ill.
A Yerevan court on May 13 suspended Harutiunian's trial two months ago and subjected him to a psychiatric examination.
He was transferred to a mental hospital where he spent more than one month.
Armenia's Court of Appeals says that Health Ministry psychiatrists have concluded that Harutiunian was not sane when he delivered speeches to thousands of opposition protesters after the March 1 presidential election, which the opposition says was fraudulent.
Harutiunian told RFE/RL's Armenian Service that he has no mental problems.
Known for his nationalist views, he said Armenian officials "couldn't take me back to court because my trial would have been a greater embarrassment for them."
Harutiunian said he will not "participate in or support the opposition" in the May 31 municipal elections but said he's ready "to take any step, including a revolution, for the sake of my friends who are still in prison."
Scores of opposition activists are still jailed for their actions after last year's election.
Armenian Activist Deemed 'Mentally Ill,' Then Freed
Shant Harutiunian
May 15, 2009
Shant Harutiunian, an Armenian opposition activist arrested last year following deadly postelection clashes with security forces in Yerevan, has been released from prison after being found to be mentally ill.
A Yerevan court on May 13 suspended Harutiunian's trial two months ago and subjected him to a psychiatric examination.
He was transferred to a mental hospital where he spent more than one month.
Armenia's Court of Appeals says that Health Ministry psychiatrists have concluded that Harutiunian was not sane when he delivered speeches to thousands of opposition protesters after the March 1 presidential election, which the opposition says was fraudulent.
Harutiunian told RFE/RL's Armenian Service that he has no mental problems.
Known for his nationalist views, he said Armenian officials "couldn't take me back to court because my trial would have been a greater embarrassment for them."
Harutiunian said he will not "participate in or support the opposition" in the May 31 municipal elections but said he's ready "to take any step, including a revolution, for the sake of my friends who are still in prison."
Scores of opposition activists are still jailed for their actions after last year's election.
Uh-Oh
Grassroots Effort Emerges to Fight Russian Corruption
By Peter Fedynsky
Moscow
15 May 2009
Activists from civic groups hold a roundtable at Moscow's Independent Press Center to discuss corruption in Russia, 15 May 2009
A group of private Russian citizens is seeking to establish a network of corruption victims as a means of advancing President Dmitri Medvedev's plans to battle the country's oppressive bureaucracy and courts. Participants at an organizational meeting in Moscow defined the extent of the problem, but raised questions whether citizens can fight corruption if government employees not only benefit from it, but actively undermine reform efforts.
Activists from several civic groups held a roundtable at Moscow's Independent Press Center to discuss the extent of Russian corruption and what could be done about it. A few victims of corruption gave personal accounts of bureaucrats who cheat the system to deprive people of property, money and rights.
Yuri Arkhipov
Yuri Arkhipov of the independent Corruption Commission said some people in Russia's notoriously corrupt bureaucracy are interested in reforms, but they are hounded by a majority that abuses authority to make money.
Arkhipov says honest bureaucrats are outcasts who are surrounded by an atmosphere of intolerance, because they are not convenient to bureaucrats or embezzlers, whose main goal is to cast the minority aside. The main question, to Arkhipov, is whether the bureaucratic apparatus wants someone to document corruption.
Yuri Zinichev
At the same, time, Yuri Zinichev of the All-Russian Corruption Witness Network, says Russia can blossom if a connection is made between the country's government and people.
Zinichev says if Russians combine efforts then no special organizations will be needed. He notes there already are government institutions - the executive, legislative and judicial branches, and also non-commercial organizations that receive government funding to solve such problems. Zinichev says all that is needed is the establishment of effective relations among these institutions.
Valeriy Gabisov
Valeriy Gabisov of the independent Civil Rights Committee noted that corruption exists everywhere and can at best be minimized, not eliminated. Gabisov chided participants for failure to discuss more specific measures, and noted the brutal lengths to which corrupt officials go if they are exposed in the press.
Gabisov says that as soon as an editor in the regions begins to say reasonable things, they smash his head, declare him mentally ill or put him in prison on whatever charges.
The only government official at the meeting was a young Interior Ministry representative who was asked to convey the group's documents to his superiors. Whether anything happens remains to be seen. President Medvedev said on Tuesday that no one is dizzy with success over Russia's struggle with corruption and that Russians are at the very, very beginning of the road in the fight against it.
By Peter Fedynsky
Moscow
15 May 2009
Activists from civic groups hold a roundtable at Moscow's Independent Press Center to discuss corruption in Russia, 15 May 2009
A group of private Russian citizens is seeking to establish a network of corruption victims as a means of advancing President Dmitri Medvedev's plans to battle the country's oppressive bureaucracy and courts. Participants at an organizational meeting in Moscow defined the extent of the problem, but raised questions whether citizens can fight corruption if government employees not only benefit from it, but actively undermine reform efforts.
Activists from several civic groups held a roundtable at Moscow's Independent Press Center to discuss the extent of Russian corruption and what could be done about it. A few victims of corruption gave personal accounts of bureaucrats who cheat the system to deprive people of property, money and rights.
Yuri Arkhipov
Yuri Arkhipov of the independent Corruption Commission said some people in Russia's notoriously corrupt bureaucracy are interested in reforms, but they are hounded by a majority that abuses authority to make money.
Arkhipov says honest bureaucrats are outcasts who are surrounded by an atmosphere of intolerance, because they are not convenient to bureaucrats or embezzlers, whose main goal is to cast the minority aside. The main question, to Arkhipov, is whether the bureaucratic apparatus wants someone to document corruption.
Yuri Zinichev
At the same, time, Yuri Zinichev of the All-Russian Corruption Witness Network, says Russia can blossom if a connection is made between the country's government and people.
Zinichev says if Russians combine efforts then no special organizations will be needed. He notes there already are government institutions - the executive, legislative and judicial branches, and also non-commercial organizations that receive government funding to solve such problems. Zinichev says all that is needed is the establishment of effective relations among these institutions.
Valeriy Gabisov
Valeriy Gabisov of the independent Civil Rights Committee noted that corruption exists everywhere and can at best be minimized, not eliminated. Gabisov chided participants for failure to discuss more specific measures, and noted the brutal lengths to which corrupt officials go if they are exposed in the press.
Gabisov says that as soon as an editor in the regions begins to say reasonable things, they smash his head, declare him mentally ill or put him in prison on whatever charges.
The only government official at the meeting was a young Interior Ministry representative who was asked to convey the group's documents to his superiors. Whether anything happens remains to be seen. President Medvedev said on Tuesday that no one is dizzy with success over Russia's struggle with corruption and that Russians are at the very, very beginning of the road in the fight against it.
Psychiatric patients sterilised and mistreated
01 April, 2009
Fourteen women with mental disabilities have been sterilised in the Perm region of Russia against their will and without an appropriate court ruling.
This was the striking discovery made by the region’s human rights committee over the course of a two-year investigation, revealing numerous grave offences.
After receiving more than 50 complaints from patients of the 15 psychiatric asylums in the Perm region, an investigation was launched to analyse living conditions in these institutions. After two years of detailed study, a series of shocking discoveries was made.
Fourteen young women, born in the 1970s and 1980s were sterilised against their will, without the signed permission of their families or any appropriate court ruling. As the report states, the most poignant justification of these actions came from an unnamed asylum staff member. They did it so that the women “would not give birth to lunatics”.
"These women were proven legally incompetent by the court. So what, we have to wait for the court to give us a separate document that approves the sterilization?" a doctor told RT.
In the Russian legislation, sterilisation of legally capable women is only permissible with their accord and when they’re aged over 35, or already have two children. When the woman is not legally capable, the signed permission of two gynaecologists and a court ruling are required.
There exists, however, an appendix to the law, which states that sterilisation can be carried out based purely on medical reasons if there exists “a threat to the woman’s life or health”. Staff have tended to interpret this appendix at will, using it to cover many sterilisations.
According to the human rights commission, the staff at the institutions were not even aware that a court decision was required to conduct the procedure. They based their decision simply on the advice of the institution’s administration.
Other infringements
It was discovered that the shocking cases of unlawful sterilisation were not the only cases of severe breaches of human rights in these psychiatric institutions. The official report drafted by Tatyana Margolina outlined three main areas of severe infringements of human rights in these institutions: medical care, the right to housing and the right to fair employment.
Perhaps the most fundamental malpractice in the institutions is the lack of adequate healthcare provision. According to the report some psychiatric institutions do not even have an appropriate medical licence.
Despite being state organisations, the institutions need to renew their medical licence every few years. Of those whose license had expired, the most recent renewal was in 2001. Since then, no new medical or diagnostic supplies were provided and no new medical personnel had been taken on.
“In several institutions medical attention was not provided and people simply died,” Margolina pointed out in the report. “Their death was a result of appropriate measures not being taken in due course.”
The lack of a medical licence resulted in the absence of basic medicines and diagnostic equipment. This has resulted in several deaths due to negligence in the last two years alone. The report refers to a number of unnamed cases. The causes of death named by coronary analysis include untreated and misdiagnosed pneumonia, a stomach ulcer and meningitis.
The last case is given specific attention. The patient was admitted to an institution and passed away only days later. The orderly simply gave the patient medicines against flu-like symptoms and proceeded to ignore the case for the next two days, during which the patient’s condition steadily worsened. Renewed medical attention was only given when the patient was on his deathbed, but it was too late. Even then, an appropriate diagnosis was not made.
Staff members point out that they don’t even call ambulances for the patients since the medics simply refuse to drive out to the institutions. In most places, no individual rehabilitation programmes were developed for patients. Some do not even have a stock of the required anti-psychotic drugs.
As a result, the patients’ abilities are not developed to their fullest potential. According to the report, some of the patients would have had the chance to do basic manual work and provide for themselves if given the appropriate training. Nevertheless, such fundamentals as sports equipment, professional and educational training and development programmes simply do not exist in Perm region institutions.
The living space provided for the patient is often far less than the basic minimum required by the Russian state. Some patients live in as few as three square metres of individual space with no access to privacy – nurses often break through locked doors and into restrooms as well as shower facilities.
The report points out that the conditions in the institutions breach several clauses of the UN charter and the human rights declaration: the patients do not have access to medical care, individual space, basic dignity, employment and personal development. Nevertheless, the report only goes as far as “advising” the local administration and the relevant institution to take these facts into account.
Regional problem?
Despite the gravity of the problem and its deep-rooted nature, the local administration appears to be inert in dealing with it. RT tried to get information of what the regional government is planning to do in order to resolve this shocking breach of basic human rights.
“Tatiana Margolina is refusing to give any comments on the situation, referring to the fact that it is a regional problem and the report was released regionally,” the human rights commissioner’s press office told RT.
When the local administration’s press office was contacted directly, RT was told that the general office does not have the competence to comment on such issues, and the human rights commission should be contacted.
As a result, no official comment was given on how the living conditions of the psychiatric patients will be ameliorated. So, despite the severe cases of human rights breaches and even abuse from state care providers being brought to public light, it remains unclear what will be done.
"Unfortunately, even we only get to know about problems by seeing them. if we go to care homes, and talk to the people there – thats how we find out. And judging by what we see – nothing changes. What we say has very little effect," Sergey Isaev from thePerm Human Rights Centre.
Anna Bogdanova, RT
01 April, 2009
Fourteen women with mental disabilities have been sterilised in the Perm region of Russia against their will and without an appropriate court ruling.
This was the striking discovery made by the region’s human rights committee over the course of a two-year investigation, revealing numerous grave offences.
After receiving more than 50 complaints from patients of the 15 psychiatric asylums in the Perm region, an investigation was launched to analyse living conditions in these institutions. After two years of detailed study, a series of shocking discoveries was made.
Fourteen young women, born in the 1970s and 1980s were sterilised against their will, without the signed permission of their families or any appropriate court ruling. As the report states, the most poignant justification of these actions came from an unnamed asylum staff member. They did it so that the women “would not give birth to lunatics”.
"These women were proven legally incompetent by the court. So what, we have to wait for the court to give us a separate document that approves the sterilization?" a doctor told RT.
In the Russian legislation, sterilisation of legally capable women is only permissible with their accord and when they’re aged over 35, or already have two children. When the woman is not legally capable, the signed permission of two gynaecologists and a court ruling are required.
There exists, however, an appendix to the law, which states that sterilisation can be carried out based purely on medical reasons if there exists “a threat to the woman’s life or health”. Staff have tended to interpret this appendix at will, using it to cover many sterilisations.
According to the human rights commission, the staff at the institutions were not even aware that a court decision was required to conduct the procedure. They based their decision simply on the advice of the institution’s administration.
Other infringements
It was discovered that the shocking cases of unlawful sterilisation were not the only cases of severe breaches of human rights in these psychiatric institutions. The official report drafted by Tatyana Margolina outlined three main areas of severe infringements of human rights in these institutions: medical care, the right to housing and the right to fair employment.
Perhaps the most fundamental malpractice in the institutions is the lack of adequate healthcare provision. According to the report some psychiatric institutions do not even have an appropriate medical licence.
Despite being state organisations, the institutions need to renew their medical licence every few years. Of those whose license had expired, the most recent renewal was in 2001. Since then, no new medical or diagnostic supplies were provided and no new medical personnel had been taken on.
“In several institutions medical attention was not provided and people simply died,” Margolina pointed out in the report. “Their death was a result of appropriate measures not being taken in due course.”
The lack of a medical licence resulted in the absence of basic medicines and diagnostic equipment. This has resulted in several deaths due to negligence in the last two years alone. The report refers to a number of unnamed cases. The causes of death named by coronary analysis include untreated and misdiagnosed pneumonia, a stomach ulcer and meningitis.
The last case is given specific attention. The patient was admitted to an institution and passed away only days later. The orderly simply gave the patient medicines against flu-like symptoms and proceeded to ignore the case for the next two days, during which the patient’s condition steadily worsened. Renewed medical attention was only given when the patient was on his deathbed, but it was too late. Even then, an appropriate diagnosis was not made.
Staff members point out that they don’t even call ambulances for the patients since the medics simply refuse to drive out to the institutions. In most places, no individual rehabilitation programmes were developed for patients. Some do not even have a stock of the required anti-psychotic drugs.
As a result, the patients’ abilities are not developed to their fullest potential. According to the report, some of the patients would have had the chance to do basic manual work and provide for themselves if given the appropriate training. Nevertheless, such fundamentals as sports equipment, professional and educational training and development programmes simply do not exist in Perm region institutions.
The living space provided for the patient is often far less than the basic minimum required by the Russian state. Some patients live in as few as three square metres of individual space with no access to privacy – nurses often break through locked doors and into restrooms as well as shower facilities.
The report points out that the conditions in the institutions breach several clauses of the UN charter and the human rights declaration: the patients do not have access to medical care, individual space, basic dignity, employment and personal development. Nevertheless, the report only goes as far as “advising” the local administration and the relevant institution to take these facts into account.
Regional problem?
Despite the gravity of the problem and its deep-rooted nature, the local administration appears to be inert in dealing with it. RT tried to get information of what the regional government is planning to do in order to resolve this shocking breach of basic human rights.
“Tatiana Margolina is refusing to give any comments on the situation, referring to the fact that it is a regional problem and the report was released regionally,” the human rights commissioner’s press office told RT.
When the local administration’s press office was contacted directly, RT was told that the general office does not have the competence to comment on such issues, and the human rights commission should be contacted.
As a result, no official comment was given on how the living conditions of the psychiatric patients will be ameliorated. So, despite the severe cases of human rights breaches and even abuse from state care providers being brought to public light, it remains unclear what will be done.
"Unfortunately, even we only get to know about problems by seeing them. if we go to care homes, and talk to the people there – thats how we find out. And judging by what we see – nothing changes. What we say has very little effect," Sergey Isaev from thePerm Human Rights Centre.
Anna Bogdanova, RT
Fears for health of pregnant woman detained on islandYuko Narushima
May 12, 2009
A PREGNANT woman is among 454 people detained on Christmas Island and medical professionals warn of potential health repercussions for the mother and child.
The island in the Indian Ocean is now home to at least 45 children aged one to 17. Another 31 asylum seekers intercepted on a boat north of Darwin yesterday are on their way.
Two detained mothers have given birth since the Rudd Government came to power.
The first woman was in a prison-style detention centre while the second was in community detention.
The woman pregnant on Christmas Island is in community detention, a spokesman for the Immigration Department said.
But to make the distinction was an exercise in semantics with little bearing on the isolation of pregnant detainees, the Professor of Developmental Psychiatry at Monash University, Louise Newman, said.
"In no way should someone who is pregnant be in such a remote location," she said.
Research into the impact of detention found that it diminished the adult's capacity to parent, she said.
The departmental spokesman stressed women did not give birth in a detention facility. Asylum seekers who claimed to be pregnant were first tested, then flown to the mainland for medical checks at 34 weeks.
Babies were delivered in hospital and taken into detention when the mother was deemed medically fit to return, he said.
However, a clinical psychologist from the University of NSW, Zachary Steel, said it was the loss of control that led to mental deterioration in detainees. Compounding that for children was witnessing adult distress, Dr Steel said.
In July last year the Minister for Immigration, Chris Evans, said detention was a last resort and reiterated a 2005 pledge to keep children out of maximum security detention centres.
Yesterday, border control intercepted a boat with 31 male asylum seekers believed to be from Afghanistan. The boat, the 12th intercepted this year, was 23 nautical miles north of the Tiwi Islands.
May 12, 2009
A PREGNANT woman is among 454 people detained on Christmas Island and medical professionals warn of potential health repercussions for the mother and child.
The island in the Indian Ocean is now home to at least 45 children aged one to 17. Another 31 asylum seekers intercepted on a boat north of Darwin yesterday are on their way.
Two detained mothers have given birth since the Rudd Government came to power.
The first woman was in a prison-style detention centre while the second was in community detention.
The woman pregnant on Christmas Island is in community detention, a spokesman for the Immigration Department said.
But to make the distinction was an exercise in semantics with little bearing on the isolation of pregnant detainees, the Professor of Developmental Psychiatry at Monash University, Louise Newman, said.
"In no way should someone who is pregnant be in such a remote location," she said.
Research into the impact of detention found that it diminished the adult's capacity to parent, she said.
The departmental spokesman stressed women did not give birth in a detention facility. Asylum seekers who claimed to be pregnant were first tested, then flown to the mainland for medical checks at 34 weeks.
Babies were delivered in hospital and taken into detention when the mother was deemed medically fit to return, he said.
However, a clinical psychologist from the University of NSW, Zachary Steel, said it was the loss of control that led to mental deterioration in detainees. Compounding that for children was witnessing adult distress, Dr Steel said.
In July last year the Minister for Immigration, Chris Evans, said detention was a last resort and reiterated a 2005 pledge to keep children out of maximum security detention centres.
Yesterday, border control intercepted a boat with 31 male asylum seekers believed to be from Afghanistan. The boat, the 12th intercepted this year, was 23 nautical miles north of the Tiwi Islands.
The prisoners—several thousand of them, clad in orange—were crowded behind
concertina wire. "The encampment they were in when we saw it at first looked
like one of those Hitler things, like a concentration camp, almost," Davis said.
"They're in there, in their little jumpsuits, outside in the mud. Their rest
rooms was running over. It was just disgusting. You didn't want to touch
anything. Whatever the worst thing that comes to your mind, that was it—the
place you would never, ever, ever, ever send your worst enemy."..
By way of orientation, the soldiers of the 372nd who were assigned guard duty at
the hard site were given a tour of the place. They saw the ordinary cellblocks
for Iraqi criminals and the highly restricted M.I. block, where the most "high
value" security detainees were held, during and pending interrogation, in
single-occupancy cells. "That's when I saw the nakedness," Javal Davis said.
"I'm like, 'Hey, Sarge, why is everyone naked?' You know—'Hey, that's the M.I.
That's what the M.I. does. That's the M.I. thing. I don't know.' 'Why do these
guys have on women's panties?' Like—'It's to break them.' " Davis was wide-eyed.
"Guys handcuffed in stress positions, in cells, no lights, no windows. Open the
door, turn the light on—'Oh my God, Allah.' Click, turn the light off, close the
door. It's like, Whoa, what is that? What the hell is up with all this stuff?
Something's not right here."
And you could inflict pain. "You also had stress positions, and you escalated
the stress positions," Davis said. "Hand-cuffs behind their backs, high up, in
very uncomfortable positions, or chained down. Then you had the submersion. You
put the people in garbage cans, and you'd put ice in it, and water. Or stick
them underneath the shower spigot naked. They'd be freezing." It was a routine,
he said: "Open a window while it was, like, forty degrees outside and watch them
disappear into themselves . . . before they go into shock."
.."We had some kind of incinerator at the end of
our building," Specialist Megan Ambuhl said. "It was this huge circular thing.
We just didn't know what was incinerated in there. It could have been people,
for all we knew—bodies." Sergeant Davis was not in doubt. "It had bones in it,"
he said, and he called it the crematorium. "But hey, you're at war," he said.
"Suck it up or drive on."
But,Last week there was a great deal of "humanitarian" concern about a marines
treatment of a puppy on a U-tube video.
War Criminals like air pilot Mc Cain pulling levers , or pressing buttons ,for dropping
bombs on helpless Vietnam civilians have long been able to disassociate their own
actions (like pilots over Hiroshima and Nagasaki) from real world reality and able to
pose as Amerikan heroes "fighting" what he terms "Gooks" the depersonalised
enemies of expanding empire .Nowadays ,lately this hero has sang the chant "bomb
bomb Iran" to the great pleasure of his fans. Literally.
The initial "Shock and Awe" attacks on the Iraqi people resembled nothing more than
the appearance of a Video game for those Americans and Australians chewing on
their TV dinners in between cheers. The end of the game was nothing less than the
tearing down by American tanks and mercenaries of a statue of Saddam Hussein.
Thereby demonstrating that unlike in the film "Planet of the Apes" that the Statue of
Liberty was invulnerable and ever victorious. Mission accomplished!
But, perhaps not as satisfying as a re-run of the military victory finale of the first
gulf war, when tens of thousands were slaughtered on the sitting duck-shoot
"Highway to Hell".
The video game market for persynal computers has not changed much in the last few
years. It seems to have reached a saturation point and the pc has lost out to Nintendo
and its imitations, the creations of billion dollar marketing businesses like Microsoft.
La Rouche, permanent economic crisis theorist and religious paranoid US patriot,
asks:
"Is the Devil in Your Laptop?"
And says, "Indeed, the Presidential candidates all, presently, stink. But why, thus far,
is today's 16-to-25-year-old generation, so unable to respond? Where is the youth
movement to address this crisis, and create a future for humanity?"
"There is a mass-based fascist movement on college campuses, today," LaRouche
said, identifying it as presently the greatest threat to the survival of our
nation. This threat, he said, has three faces:
*MySpace, directed by Rupert Murdoch
*Facebook, directed by Bill Gates
*Computer games, particularly the homicidal maniac versions.
If you allow an entire youth generation to be destroyed by these things,
La Rouche said, there will be no future for the United States.
Therefore, these three things, presently dominating our culture, must each be
destroyed, just as a contagious killer virus or bacteriological disease must be
properly diagnosed, and cured. This disease, of course, is not a biological one,
per se, but a mental and cultural disease. Our diagnosis, and a pathway towards
a cure, is what follows.
And, although the contents of this pamphlet will be immediately painful to the
minds of those readers, who might be intricately involved in "all the rave"
about MySpace, Facebook, and computer games, the joy of being freed from mental
slavery, thus engaging in solving our present world's dangerous problems, will,
in the longer term, greatly outweigh the short-term pain, of tearing yourself
from a beloved, but deadly, folly".
As well as the old shoot anything that moves games there are -
Government simulation games –resembling real world democracy whereby a small
subject can imagine himself as a mighty even sovereign state subject.
http://sydney.indymedia.org.au/story/state-bourgeois-consciousness-formed-basis-competitive-freedom-property-right
concertina wire. "The encampment they were in when we saw it at first looked
like one of those Hitler things, like a concentration camp, almost," Davis said.
"They're in there, in their little jumpsuits, outside in the mud. Their rest
rooms was running over. It was just disgusting. You didn't want to touch
anything. Whatever the worst thing that comes to your mind, that was it—the
place you would never, ever, ever, ever send your worst enemy."..
By way of orientation, the soldiers of the 372nd who were assigned guard duty at
the hard site were given a tour of the place. They saw the ordinary cellblocks
for Iraqi criminals and the highly restricted M.I. block, where the most "high
value" security detainees were held, during and pending interrogation, in
single-occupancy cells. "That's when I saw the nakedness," Javal Davis said.
"I'm like, 'Hey, Sarge, why is everyone naked?' You know—'Hey, that's the M.I.
That's what the M.I. does. That's the M.I. thing. I don't know.' 'Why do these
guys have on women's panties?' Like—'It's to break them.' " Davis was wide-eyed.
"Guys handcuffed in stress positions, in cells, no lights, no windows. Open the
door, turn the light on—'Oh my God, Allah.' Click, turn the light off, close the
door. It's like, Whoa, what is that? What the hell is up with all this stuff?
Something's not right here."
And you could inflict pain. "You also had stress positions, and you escalated
the stress positions," Davis said. "Hand-cuffs behind their backs, high up, in
very uncomfortable positions, or chained down. Then you had the submersion. You
put the people in garbage cans, and you'd put ice in it, and water. Or stick
them underneath the shower spigot naked. They'd be freezing." It was a routine,
he said: "Open a window while it was, like, forty degrees outside and watch them
disappear into themselves . . . before they go into shock."
.."We had some kind of incinerator at the end of
our building," Specialist Megan Ambuhl said. "It was this huge circular thing.
We just didn't know what was incinerated in there. It could have been people,
for all we knew—bodies." Sergeant Davis was not in doubt. "It had bones in it,"
he said, and he called it the crematorium. "But hey, you're at war," he said.
"Suck it up or drive on."
But,Last week there was a great deal of "humanitarian" concern about a marines
treatment of a puppy on a U-tube video.
War Criminals like air pilot Mc Cain pulling levers , or pressing buttons ,for dropping
bombs on helpless Vietnam civilians have long been able to disassociate their own
actions (like pilots over Hiroshima and Nagasaki) from real world reality and able to
pose as Amerikan heroes "fighting" what he terms "Gooks" the depersonalised
enemies of expanding empire .Nowadays ,lately this hero has sang the chant "bomb
bomb Iran" to the great pleasure of his fans. Literally.
The initial "Shock and Awe" attacks on the Iraqi people resembled nothing more than
the appearance of a Video game for those Americans and Australians chewing on
their TV dinners in between cheers. The end of the game was nothing less than the
tearing down by American tanks and mercenaries of a statue of Saddam Hussein.
Thereby demonstrating that unlike in the film "Planet of the Apes" that the Statue of
Liberty was invulnerable and ever victorious. Mission accomplished!
But, perhaps not as satisfying as a re-run of the military victory finale of the first
gulf war, when tens of thousands were slaughtered on the sitting duck-shoot
"Highway to Hell".
The video game market for persynal computers has not changed much in the last few
years. It seems to have reached a saturation point and the pc has lost out to Nintendo
and its imitations, the creations of billion dollar marketing businesses like Microsoft.
La Rouche, permanent economic crisis theorist and religious paranoid US patriot,
asks:
"Is the Devil in Your Laptop?"
And says, "Indeed, the Presidential candidates all, presently, stink. But why, thus far,
is today's 16-to-25-year-old generation, so unable to respond? Where is the youth
movement to address this crisis, and create a future for humanity?"
"There is a mass-based fascist movement on college campuses, today," LaRouche
said, identifying it as presently the greatest threat to the survival of our
nation. This threat, he said, has three faces:
*MySpace, directed by Rupert Murdoch
*Facebook, directed by Bill Gates
*Computer games, particularly the homicidal maniac versions.
If you allow an entire youth generation to be destroyed by these things,
La Rouche said, there will be no future for the United States.
Therefore, these three things, presently dominating our culture, must each be
destroyed, just as a contagious killer virus or bacteriological disease must be
properly diagnosed, and cured. This disease, of course, is not a biological one,
per se, but a mental and cultural disease. Our diagnosis, and a pathway towards
a cure, is what follows.
And, although the contents of this pamphlet will be immediately painful to the
minds of those readers, who might be intricately involved in "all the rave"
about MySpace, Facebook, and computer games, the joy of being freed from mental
slavery, thus engaging in solving our present world's dangerous problems, will,
in the longer term, greatly outweigh the short-term pain, of tearing yourself
from a beloved, but deadly, folly".
As well as the old shoot anything that moves games there are -
Government simulation games –resembling real world democracy whereby a small
subject can imagine himself as a mighty even sovereign state subject.
http://sydney.indymedia.org.au/story/state-bourgeois-consciousness-formed-basis-competitive-freedom-property-right
I LUV the Internets
TWILIGHT ZONE': One of the best-known victims of so-called "punitive psychiatry" is dissident and writer Vladimir Bukovsky. In the 1960s and 1970s, as a diagnosed "psychopath," he experienced firsthand the forced-treatment psychiatric units where Soviet authorities sent many of its political opponents.
Bukovsky, now 65, was one of the first to expose the truth behind the Soviet "psikhushki." In the early 1970s, his detailed accounts of the practice were successfully smuggled to the West. He also coauthored "A Manual on Psychiatry for Dissidents," meant to help fellow dissidents fight persecution. In 1976, he was forcibly exiled. He has lived in Britain ever since.
In 1992, Bukovsky traveled to Moscow to visit the place he believed was responsible for a great deal of his misery -- the Serbsky Institute for Social and Forensic Psychiatry. Much of his writing documented the use of Serbsky as a state tool of repression.
In the spirit of reconciliation that came in the early years following the Soviet collapse, Serbsky director Tatyana Dmitriyeva acknowledged the role of the institute in past political repressions.
After the rise of Vladimir Putin to the presidency in 2000, however, Dmitriyeva once again recanted, saying the institute was guilty of no offense and that reports of punitive psychiatry were exaggerated.
Since then, a Serbsky official has gone on record as saying Bukovsky, at the time of his forced care, was undoubtedly "psychopathic." (As evidence, he cited the fact the dissident had written "hundreds of letters of complaint" following one of his arrests.)
Bukovsky is now seeking to return to Russia and secure a place as a candidate in Russia’s March 2008 presidential elections. A group dedicated to supporting his nomination this week issued a statement saying that, unless the Serbsky Institute formally recants, Bukovsky retains the right to sue either the institute or its employees for slander.
The statement also suggests that the Serbsky Institute's revised diagnosis may be used as a pretext for barring Bukovsky from the vote. Authorities have already tried three times to block his candidacy, pointing to the fact that Bukovsky, who was forcibly exiled in 1976, was no longer a Russian citizen and had not spent the past 10 years in Russia, as mandated by Russian law.
Bukovsky has since restored his Russian citizenship, and argues that his involuntary exile should not bar him from the vote. Bukovsky now fears his restored status as a "psychopath," may give election authorities a fresh opportunity to challenge his bid to become a presidential candidate.
The pro-Bukovsky statement notes that Dmitriyeva, the woman responsible for erasing the Serbsky Institute’s culpability in the practice of Soviet-era "punitive psychiatry," is currently a senior member of the dominant pro-Kremlin party Unified Russia.
Asked if punitive psychiatry is once again on the rise, Bukovsky said in an interview with Britain's "The Daily Telegraph" that "anything is possible in Russia. We live in a twilight zone."
Bukovsky, now 65, was one of the first to expose the truth behind the Soviet "psikhushki." In the early 1970s, his detailed accounts of the practice were successfully smuggled to the West. He also coauthored "A Manual on Psychiatry for Dissidents," meant to help fellow dissidents fight persecution. In 1976, he was forcibly exiled. He has lived in Britain ever since.
In 1992, Bukovsky traveled to Moscow to visit the place he believed was responsible for a great deal of his misery -- the Serbsky Institute for Social and Forensic Psychiatry. Much of his writing documented the use of Serbsky as a state tool of repression.
In the spirit of reconciliation that came in the early years following the Soviet collapse, Serbsky director Tatyana Dmitriyeva acknowledged the role of the institute in past political repressions.
After the rise of Vladimir Putin to the presidency in 2000, however, Dmitriyeva once again recanted, saying the institute was guilty of no offense and that reports of punitive psychiatry were exaggerated.
Since then, a Serbsky official has gone on record as saying Bukovsky, at the time of his forced care, was undoubtedly "psychopathic." (As evidence, he cited the fact the dissident had written "hundreds of letters of complaint" following one of his arrests.)
Bukovsky is now seeking to return to Russia and secure a place as a candidate in Russia’s March 2008 presidential elections. A group dedicated to supporting his nomination this week issued a statement saying that, unless the Serbsky Institute formally recants, Bukovsky retains the right to sue either the institute or its employees for slander.
The statement also suggests that the Serbsky Institute's revised diagnosis may be used as a pretext for barring Bukovsky from the vote. Authorities have already tried three times to block his candidacy, pointing to the fact that Bukovsky, who was forcibly exiled in 1976, was no longer a Russian citizen and had not spent the past 10 years in Russia, as mandated by Russian law.
Bukovsky has since restored his Russian citizenship, and argues that his involuntary exile should not bar him from the vote. Bukovsky now fears his restored status as a "psychopath," may give election authorities a fresh opportunity to challenge his bid to become a presidential candidate.
The pro-Bukovsky statement notes that Dmitriyeva, the woman responsible for erasing the Serbsky Institute’s culpability in the practice of Soviet-era "punitive psychiatry," is currently a senior member of the dominant pro-Kremlin party Unified Russia.
Asked if punitive psychiatry is once again on the rise, Bukovsky said in an interview with Britain's "The Daily Telegraph" that "anything is possible in Russia. We live in a twilight zone."
Review by David Gardner
Published: May 24 2009 19:46 | Last updated: May 24 2009 19:46
The News from Ireland
By Maurice Walsh
I.B. Tauris, £20
The Irish war of independence of 1919-21 was the first great victory against modern colonialism. In its timing, it was triumphantly on the right side of history, against empire and for liberty. It wove effortlessly into a universal narrative in a way that is not so easy to sense nearly a century later, when Irish republicanism has a nastier and narrower connotation.
This little gem of a book, scholarly, beautifully written and narrated with verve, reminds us of all that and a great deal more. It reveals in absorbing detail and persuasive argument how the way visiting correspondents wrote up the Irish revolution helped determine its outcome. Not until Vietnam and Algeria would the so-called fourth estate exert such influence on the result of an armed conflict, delivering to Irish patriots what was a moral and political rather than military victory.
A number of stars aligned favourably for the Irish revolutionaries. The suicide of multinational empires in the first world war, alongside efforts by the combatants to incite national uprisings against their rivals, gave nationalism a huge boost. America under Woodrow Wilson dented the legitimacy of the British Empire internationally and gave currency to the notion of self-determination. In the UK, the enlargement of the electorate helped drive the development of mass newspaper audiences and political debate. Irish nationalists, moreover, consciously connected to anti-colonialism internationally; two of them, Annie Besant and Alfred Webb, even became presidents of India’s Congress party.
But the originality of Maurice Walsh’s tale lies in its account of how British and American journalists helped turn the tide in the Fenians’ favour. Part of the reason lay in the way correspondents allowed themselves to be co-opted by government during the first world war. Billeted in handsome houses with cooks, servants, drivers and military chaperones for their occasional and sanitised trips to the front, they were pampered embeds, avant la lettre. The lyrical account by Philip Gibbs of the Daily Chronicle of the first day of the Battle of the Somme “managed to omit mentioning that 20,000 British soldiers were killed”. Gibbs, says Walsh, “became a kept man of the high command”. But he was stung by a passage in Lloyd George’s war memoirs saying: “Gibbs lied merrily like the rest of them”.
The collective sense of shame among these celebrity correspondents, whose reputation was shredded once the full horror of the trenches came to light, led them to seek redemption. In Ireland, their affinity with the forces of the British crown dissolved. The arrival of the Americans brought a Wilsonian moral dimension, an echo of American revolutionary ideals and, as Chicago-by-way-of-Kilkenny journalist Francis Hackett had it, the crusading belief that the press and public opinion could “overcome the weaknesses of political institutions” such as the British Empire.
“The idea of journalists as interpreters of reality and not mere stenographers or hired scriveners had begun to take hold,” Walsh observes. The cause of Irish independence was to benefit. The obtuseness of the British helped, as did their recourse to brutal tactics that exposed the empire as predatory and vindictive and came to be seen by men such as Gibbs as terrorism.
The campaign of reprisals by the Black and Tans triggered a revolt of the press every bit as fatal to imperial interests as the rebellion of the Irish. The judgments of correspondents such as Hugh Martin of the Daily News became the currency of debate in parliament, the evidentiary benchmark.
The propagandists of Sinn Féin, which had won a landslide in the December 1918 elections and constituted itself as the Dail Eireann or Assembly of Ireland, were, furthermore, brilliant – “the most effective operation of its kind yet seen”, Walsh judges. It was in the hands of Desmond FitzGerald (father of Garret FitzGerald, Taoiseach from 1982-87), an urbane, well-connected Imagist poet with an English drawl, and Erskine Childers, an Anglo-Irish public schoolboy and spy novelist with impeccable contacts in London. Their mimeographed Irish Bulletin, pared down on hyperbole but written with great flair, became a primary source for correspondents. They hid in plain sight in Harcourt Street while Dublin Castle became, like Baghdad’s Green Zone, a beleaguered city within a city.
Basil Clarke, a former Daily Mail correspondent on the western front, was recruited by Dublin Castle and in August 1921 proposed reverting to a system of licensed embeds living with the Crown forces. It was too late. The British had lost control of the narrative and thereby lost Ireland.
The writer is the FT’s chief leader writer and author of Last Chance: The Middle East in the Balance (I.B. Tauris)
.Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
Published: May 24 2009 19:46 | Last updated: May 24 2009 19:46
The News from Ireland
By Maurice Walsh
I.B. Tauris, £20
The Irish war of independence of 1919-21 was the first great victory against modern colonialism. In its timing, it was triumphantly on the right side of history, against empire and for liberty. It wove effortlessly into a universal narrative in a way that is not so easy to sense nearly a century later, when Irish republicanism has a nastier and narrower connotation.
This little gem of a book, scholarly, beautifully written and narrated with verve, reminds us of all that and a great deal more. It reveals in absorbing detail and persuasive argument how the way visiting correspondents wrote up the Irish revolution helped determine its outcome. Not until Vietnam and Algeria would the so-called fourth estate exert such influence on the result of an armed conflict, delivering to Irish patriots what was a moral and political rather than military victory.
A number of stars aligned favourably for the Irish revolutionaries. The suicide of multinational empires in the first world war, alongside efforts by the combatants to incite national uprisings against their rivals, gave nationalism a huge boost. America under Woodrow Wilson dented the legitimacy of the British Empire internationally and gave currency to the notion of self-determination. In the UK, the enlargement of the electorate helped drive the development of mass newspaper audiences and political debate. Irish nationalists, moreover, consciously connected to anti-colonialism internationally; two of them, Annie Besant and Alfred Webb, even became presidents of India’s Congress party.
But the originality of Maurice Walsh’s tale lies in its account of how British and American journalists helped turn the tide in the Fenians’ favour. Part of the reason lay in the way correspondents allowed themselves to be co-opted by government during the first world war. Billeted in handsome houses with cooks, servants, drivers and military chaperones for their occasional and sanitised trips to the front, they were pampered embeds, avant la lettre. The lyrical account by Philip Gibbs of the Daily Chronicle of the first day of the Battle of the Somme “managed to omit mentioning that 20,000 British soldiers were killed”. Gibbs, says Walsh, “became a kept man of the high command”. But he was stung by a passage in Lloyd George’s war memoirs saying: “Gibbs lied merrily like the rest of them”.
The collective sense of shame among these celebrity correspondents, whose reputation was shredded once the full horror of the trenches came to light, led them to seek redemption. In Ireland, their affinity with the forces of the British crown dissolved. The arrival of the Americans brought a Wilsonian moral dimension, an echo of American revolutionary ideals and, as Chicago-by-way-of-Kilkenny journalist Francis Hackett had it, the crusading belief that the press and public opinion could “overcome the weaknesses of political institutions” such as the British Empire.
“The idea of journalists as interpreters of reality and not mere stenographers or hired scriveners had begun to take hold,” Walsh observes. The cause of Irish independence was to benefit. The obtuseness of the British helped, as did their recourse to brutal tactics that exposed the empire as predatory and vindictive and came to be seen by men such as Gibbs as terrorism.
The campaign of reprisals by the Black and Tans triggered a revolt of the press every bit as fatal to imperial interests as the rebellion of the Irish. The judgments of correspondents such as Hugh Martin of the Daily News became the currency of debate in parliament, the evidentiary benchmark.
The propagandists of Sinn Féin, which had won a landslide in the December 1918 elections and constituted itself as the Dail Eireann or Assembly of Ireland, were, furthermore, brilliant – “the most effective operation of its kind yet seen”, Walsh judges. It was in the hands of Desmond FitzGerald (father of Garret FitzGerald, Taoiseach from 1982-87), an urbane, well-connected Imagist poet with an English drawl, and Erskine Childers, an Anglo-Irish public schoolboy and spy novelist with impeccable contacts in London. Their mimeographed Irish Bulletin, pared down on hyperbole but written with great flair, became a primary source for correspondents. They hid in plain sight in Harcourt Street while Dublin Castle became, like Baghdad’s Green Zone, a beleaguered city within a city.
Basil Clarke, a former Daily Mail correspondent on the western front, was recruited by Dublin Castle and in August 1921 proposed reverting to a system of licensed embeds living with the Crown forces. It was too late. The British had lost control of the narrative and thereby lost Ireland.
The writer is the FT’s chief leader writer and author of Last Chance: The Middle East in the Balance (I.B. Tauris)
.Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
Sunday, May 24, 2009
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Government Whistleblowers, Trauma Recovery Expert and Roseanne Barr to Speak Out Against Torture and Mind Control
Cathy O'Brien and Mark Phillips will be joined by Dr. Colin Ross (an expert on clinically diagnosing and treating trauma based personality disorders) and TV legend Roseanne Barr at a speaking event in Los Angeles on June 5th.
Many of the same criminals in control of the government today were in control of me
And they are acutely aware that torture and trauma causes humankind to forget.
Now that torture is finally a predominant political issue, the reality of how it's actually being used continues to be kept from the public by those in control of the government and corporate media. Those who control information control knowledge, which in turn controls the thoughts, perceptions, opinions, and actions of those they inform.
Considering today's technological advancements, pharmaceuticals, computerization, and classified mind manipulating weaponry, it's clear to see that torture is not only archaic, but is actually a diversionary issue from more prevalent forms of mass mind manipulation being used on the human population.
evolved system of remote human physical and psychological manipulation that has only recently been officially recognized by accredited mental health physicians for what it is - absolute mind control.
CIA Mind Control: Out Of Darkness, Into the Light
The CIA Doctors: Human Rights Violations by American Psychiatrists.
the most ground breaking kitchen-sink sitcom since All in the Family, (Entertainment Weekly)
She's the funniest disturber of peace that we have.
Los Angeles, CA (PRWEB) May 11, 2009 -- As the issue of torturing individuals held in detention facilities plays out in the news media, two of the most successful whistleblowers are speaking out on how CIA programs such as MK-ULTRA actually involved torturing U.S. citizens, our allies citizens and how these heinous atrocities were allowed to continue under the 1947 National Security Act.
Cathy O'Brien and Mark Phillips
Cathy O'Brien and Mark Phillips
Cathy O'Brien was a White House/Pentagon level MK-ULTRA mind control victim, who claims torture was used on her to fragment her personality to make her forget secrets and criminal covert operations she had been forced to participate in over a thirty year period. "Many of the same criminals in control of the government today were in control of me," Cathy says. "And they are acutely aware that torture and trauma causes humankind to forget."
Cathy adds, "Now that torture is finally a predominant political issue, the reality of how it's actually being used continues to be kept from the public by those in control of the government and corporate media. Those who control information control knowledge, which in turn controls the thoughts, perceptions, opinions, and actions of those they inform."
What about the argument that torture is justified as a means to extract information? Cathy says, "Considering today's technological advancements, pharmaceuticals, computerization, and classified mind manipulating weaponry, it's clear to see that torture is not only archaic, but is actually a diversionary issue from more prevalent forms of mass mind manipulation being used on the human population."
Cathy was rescued in 1988 by Mark Phillips, a U.S. Intelligence insider knowledgeable on CIA mind-control techniques who acted after he was told by a Chinese Intelligence officer that Cathy and her then eight-year-old daughter, Kelly, were mind-controlled slaves of the U.S. government. Mark says that the super secret technology used on Cathy, Kelly and others is an, "evolved system of remote human physical and psychological manipulation that has only recently been officially recognized by accredited mental health physicians for what it is - absolute mind control."
Cathy and Mark circumvented the news media's blackout on their case with the greatest true life love story of extraction and recovery from the CIA 's mind control project ever told.
You can hear their story along with a discussion on the issue of torture at an event called "CIA Mind Control: Out Of Darkness, Into the Light" which will be held on Friday June 5th, 2009 in Los Angeles. The event begins at 7PM at Hollywood United Methodist Church located at 6817 Franklin Avenue (at Highland Ave.). For more info call 805-653-1588 or visit GoodKarmaPR.com. A portion of the proceeds go to Children of the Night, a non profit that rescues children from the ravages of prostitution and domination of pimps.
Joining Cathy and Mark will be Dr. Colin Ross, a globally recognized expert on trauma related disorders and author of "The CIA Doctors: Human Rights Violations by American Psychiatrists." Dr. Ross provides proof, based on 15,000 pages of documents obtained from the CIA through the Freedom of Information Act, that there have been pervasive, systematic violations of human rights by American psychiatrists over the last 65 years. As well, he proves that the Manchurian Candidate "super spy" is fact, not fiction. He describes CIA documented experiments by psychiatrists to create amnesia, new identities, hypnotic access codes, and implanting new memories in the minds of experimental subjects.
Also scheduled to appear is comedian Roseanne Barr. In addition to being a champion for the rights of abused children everywhere, she was treated by Dr. Colin Ross for DID recovery.
About The Speakers and Organizers...
Cathy O'Brien is a fully rehabilitated US Government White House/Pentagon level mind control survivor whose testimony for the US Congressional Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Oversight was censored for so-called "Reasons of National Security". Upon the advice of an attorney in 1995, this testimony was released en masse in book form, aptly entitled TRANCE Formation of America, to bring truth to light and survive whistle blowing on US Government tortures. Despite media censorship and death threats and attempts, these proven, documented facts have now reached over 48 countries, been licensed and translated into 8 languages, and are in major universities worldwide such as the Oxford Law Library. More on Cathy O'Brien...
Mark Phillips is a native of Nashville, Tennessee. For nearly 30 years he was a highly successful marketing and advertising executive for two airlines and a medical equipment manufacturing company. While he lacks the published academic credentials as a scholar, professional writer, or mental health physician he is recognized internationally by mental health and law enforcement professionals as a credible authority on the secret science concerning external control of the mind. Throughout his career he also held a DoD issued Top Secret Security clearance as he was exposed to various classified behavioral modification projects. Mark was required to sign an oath of secrecy. To this day he's restricted by sedition laws from revealing certain specific still classified details that directly relates to his employment. More on Mark Phillips...
Roseanne Barr's creation and portrayal of Roseanne Conner on ABC's Roseanne has been hailed as "the most ground breaking kitchen-sink sitcom since All in the Family, (Entertainment Weekly)" adding, "She's the funniest disturber of peace that we have." In 1998, she hosted her own talk show, The Roseanne Show, for two seasons. Currently, she speaks truth to power at her website and blog RoseanneWorld.com and can be heard Wednesdays at 5PM PT on Pacifica Radio's KPFK 90.7FM. She also has a Sunday radio show at KCAARadio.com and a program on FreeSpeech TV called Tipping Point. She is proud to work with organizations such as ACORN and Children of the Night.
Dr. Colin Ross is an internationally renowned clinician, researcher, author and lecturer in the field of traumatic stress and trauma related disorders. He's the founder and president of the Colin A. Ross Institute for Psychological Trauma and is the Executive Medical Director of three trauma programs located in Dallas, Texas - Grand Rapids, Michigan - and Torrance, California. Dr. Ross has written extensively on the subject of dissociation and trauma. His latest books include The Trauma Model: A Solution to the Problem of Comorbidity in Psychiatry and Schizophrenia: Innovations in Diagnosis and Treatment. He is a member of the American Psychiatric Associations and the Int'l Society for the Study of Traumatic Stress, and is currently a consultant on the hit Showtime series United States of Tara (1st season).
Children of the Night is a private, non-profit, tax-exempt organization founded in 1979 that is dedicated to assisting children between the ages of 11 and 17 who are forced to prostitute on the streets for food to eat and a place to sleep. Since 1979 Children of the Night has rescued girls and boys from prostitution and the domination of vicious pimps. This much needed organization provides all programs with the support of private donations.
Good Karma PR is a small public relations firm dedicated to helping promote the works of those individuals and organizations that are doing something good for the world. Good Karma PR has worked with; Roseanne Barr, Cynthia McKinney For President, Ed Asner, John Trudell, Dr. Steven Jones, William Rodriguez, Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Clifford Carnicom and Dr. Gwen Scott ND. They've also helped launch films such as America: Freedom to Fascism, Washington You're Fired and The Elephant in the Room.
Views expressed in this Press Release are not necessarily those of the United Methodist Church, or Children of the Night. This event is supported by We Are Change Los Angeles.
###
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Roseanne Barr will speak out against torture on Friday June 5th 2009 in Hollywood.
Roseanne Barr will speak out against torture on Friday June 5th 2009 in Hollywood.
Roseanne Barr
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PRWeb, a leader in online news and press release distribution, has been used by more than 40,000 organizations of all sizes to increase the visibility of their news, improve their search engine rankings and drive traffic to their Websites.
:: BlogThis
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Government Whistleblowers, Trauma Recovery Expert and Roseanne Barr to Speak Out Against Torture and Mind Control
Cathy O'Brien and Mark Phillips will be joined by Dr. Colin Ross (an expert on clinically diagnosing and treating trauma based personality disorders) and TV legend Roseanne Barr at a speaking event in Los Angeles on June 5th.
Many of the same criminals in control of the government today were in control of me
And they are acutely aware that torture and trauma causes humankind to forget.
Now that torture is finally a predominant political issue, the reality of how it's actually being used continues to be kept from the public by those in control of the government and corporate media. Those who control information control knowledge, which in turn controls the thoughts, perceptions, opinions, and actions of those they inform.
Considering today's technological advancements, pharmaceuticals, computerization, and classified mind manipulating weaponry, it's clear to see that torture is not only archaic, but is actually a diversionary issue from more prevalent forms of mass mind manipulation being used on the human population.
evolved system of remote human physical and psychological manipulation that has only recently been officially recognized by accredited mental health physicians for what it is - absolute mind control.
CIA Mind Control: Out Of Darkness, Into the Light
The CIA Doctors: Human Rights Violations by American Psychiatrists.
the most ground breaking kitchen-sink sitcom since All in the Family, (Entertainment Weekly)
She's the funniest disturber of peace that we have.
Los Angeles, CA (PRWEB) May 11, 2009 -- As the issue of torturing individuals held in detention facilities plays out in the news media, two of the most successful whistleblowers are speaking out on how CIA programs such as MK-ULTRA actually involved torturing U.S. citizens, our allies citizens and how these heinous atrocities were allowed to continue under the 1947 National Security Act.
Cathy O'Brien and Mark Phillips
Cathy O'Brien and Mark Phillips
Cathy O'Brien was a White House/Pentagon level MK-ULTRA mind control victim, who claims torture was used on her to fragment her personality to make her forget secrets and criminal covert operations she had been forced to participate in over a thirty year period. "Many of the same criminals in control of the government today were in control of me," Cathy says. "And they are acutely aware that torture and trauma causes humankind to forget."
Cathy adds, "Now that torture is finally a predominant political issue, the reality of how it's actually being used continues to be kept from the public by those in control of the government and corporate media. Those who control information control knowledge, which in turn controls the thoughts, perceptions, opinions, and actions of those they inform."
What about the argument that torture is justified as a means to extract information? Cathy says, "Considering today's technological advancements, pharmaceuticals, computerization, and classified mind manipulating weaponry, it's clear to see that torture is not only archaic, but is actually a diversionary issue from more prevalent forms of mass mind manipulation being used on the human population."
Cathy was rescued in 1988 by Mark Phillips, a U.S. Intelligence insider knowledgeable on CIA mind-control techniques who acted after he was told by a Chinese Intelligence officer that Cathy and her then eight-year-old daughter, Kelly, were mind-controlled slaves of the U.S. government. Mark says that the super secret technology used on Cathy, Kelly and others is an, "evolved system of remote human physical and psychological manipulation that has only recently been officially recognized by accredited mental health physicians for what it is - absolute mind control."
Cathy and Mark circumvented the news media's blackout on their case with the greatest true life love story of extraction and recovery from the CIA 's mind control project ever told.
You can hear their story along with a discussion on the issue of torture at an event called "CIA Mind Control: Out Of Darkness, Into the Light" which will be held on Friday June 5th, 2009 in Los Angeles. The event begins at 7PM at Hollywood United Methodist Church located at 6817 Franklin Avenue (at Highland Ave.). For more info call 805-653-1588 or visit GoodKarmaPR.com. A portion of the proceeds go to Children of the Night, a non profit that rescues children from the ravages of prostitution and domination of pimps.
Joining Cathy and Mark will be Dr. Colin Ross, a globally recognized expert on trauma related disorders and author of "The CIA Doctors: Human Rights Violations by American Psychiatrists." Dr. Ross provides proof, based on 15,000 pages of documents obtained from the CIA through the Freedom of Information Act, that there have been pervasive, systematic violations of human rights by American psychiatrists over the last 65 years. As well, he proves that the Manchurian Candidate "super spy" is fact, not fiction. He describes CIA documented experiments by psychiatrists to create amnesia, new identities, hypnotic access codes, and implanting new memories in the minds of experimental subjects.
Also scheduled to appear is comedian Roseanne Barr. In addition to being a champion for the rights of abused children everywhere, she was treated by Dr. Colin Ross for DID recovery.
About The Speakers and Organizers...
Cathy O'Brien is a fully rehabilitated US Government White House/Pentagon level mind control survivor whose testimony for the US Congressional Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Oversight was censored for so-called "Reasons of National Security". Upon the advice of an attorney in 1995, this testimony was released en masse in book form, aptly entitled TRANCE Formation of America, to bring truth to light and survive whistle blowing on US Government tortures. Despite media censorship and death threats and attempts, these proven, documented facts have now reached over 48 countries, been licensed and translated into 8 languages, and are in major universities worldwide such as the Oxford Law Library. More on Cathy O'Brien...
Mark Phillips is a native of Nashville, Tennessee. For nearly 30 years he was a highly successful marketing and advertising executive for two airlines and a medical equipment manufacturing company. While he lacks the published academic credentials as a scholar, professional writer, or mental health physician he is recognized internationally by mental health and law enforcement professionals as a credible authority on the secret science concerning external control of the mind. Throughout his career he also held a DoD issued Top Secret Security clearance as he was exposed to various classified behavioral modification projects. Mark was required to sign an oath of secrecy. To this day he's restricted by sedition laws from revealing certain specific still classified details that directly relates to his employment. More on Mark Phillips...
Roseanne Barr's creation and portrayal of Roseanne Conner on ABC's Roseanne has been hailed as "the most ground breaking kitchen-sink sitcom since All in the Family, (Entertainment Weekly)" adding, "She's the funniest disturber of peace that we have." In 1998, she hosted her own talk show, The Roseanne Show, for two seasons. Currently, she speaks truth to power at her website and blog RoseanneWorld.com and can be heard Wednesdays at 5PM PT on Pacifica Radio's KPFK 90.7FM. She also has a Sunday radio show at KCAARadio.com and a program on FreeSpeech TV called Tipping Point. She is proud to work with organizations such as ACORN and Children of the Night.
Dr. Colin Ross is an internationally renowned clinician, researcher, author and lecturer in the field of traumatic stress and trauma related disorders. He's the founder and president of the Colin A. Ross Institute for Psychological Trauma and is the Executive Medical Director of three trauma programs located in Dallas, Texas - Grand Rapids, Michigan - and Torrance, California. Dr. Ross has written extensively on the subject of dissociation and trauma. His latest books include The Trauma Model: A Solution to the Problem of Comorbidity in Psychiatry and Schizophrenia: Innovations in Diagnosis and Treatment. He is a member of the American Psychiatric Associations and the Int'l Society for the Study of Traumatic Stress, and is currently a consultant on the hit Showtime series United States of Tara (1st season).
Children of the Night is a private, non-profit, tax-exempt organization founded in 1979 that is dedicated to assisting children between the ages of 11 and 17 who are forced to prostitute on the streets for food to eat and a place to sleep. Since 1979 Children of the Night has rescued girls and boys from prostitution and the domination of vicious pimps. This much needed organization provides all programs with the support of private donations.
Good Karma PR is a small public relations firm dedicated to helping promote the works of those individuals and organizations that are doing something good for the world. Good Karma PR has worked with; Roseanne Barr, Cynthia McKinney For President, Ed Asner, John Trudell, Dr. Steven Jones, William Rodriguez, Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Clifford Carnicom and Dr. Gwen Scott ND. They've also helped launch films such as America: Freedom to Fascism, Washington You're Fired and The Elephant in the Room.
Views expressed in this Press Release are not necessarily those of the United Methodist Church, or Children of the Night. This event is supported by We Are Change Los Angeles.
###
Post Comment:
Trackback URL: http://www.prweb.com/pingpr.php/RW1wdC1UaGlyLVBpZ2ctWmV0YS1TaW5nLUNvdXAtWmVybw==
Technorati Tags cathy o'brien cathy obrien mark phillips tranceformation roseanne barr dr. colin ross mind control mk-ultra mk-ultra cia children of the night
Bookmark - Del.icio.us | Furl It | Technorati | Ask | MyWeb | Propeller | Live Bookmarks | Newsvine | TailRank | Reddit | Slashdot | Digg | Stumbleupon | Google Bookmarks | Sphere | Blink It | Spurl
OPTIONS
Printer Friendly Version
Download PDF Version
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BlogThis
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Close Move
Share The News
Submit this press release easily to any of these major bookmarking and social media sites.
Email-It
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Ask
Y!MyWeb
Netscape
Live Bookmarks
Newsvine
TailRank
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StumbleUpon
Google Bookmarks
CONTACT INFORMATION
JULIA JECKER
Good Karma PR
805-653-1588
Email us Here
ATTACHED FILES
Roseanne Barr will speak out against torture on Friday June 5th 2009 in Hollywood.
Roseanne Barr will speak out against torture on Friday June 5th 2009 in Hollywood.
Roseanne Barr
ABOUT PRESS RELEASES
If you have any questions regarding information in these press releases please contact the company listed in the press release. Please do not contact PRWeb. We will be unable to assist you with your inquiry. PRWeb disclaims any content contained in these release. Our complete disclaimer appearshere.
Disclaimer: If you have any questions regarding information in these press releases please contact the company listed in the press release.
Please do not contact PRWeb®. We will be unable to assist you with your inquiry.
PRWeb® disclaims any content contained in these releases. Our complete disclaimer appears here.
© Copyright 1997-2009, Vocus PRW Holdings, LLC.
Vocus, PRWeb , PRWeb UK and Publicity Wire are trademarks or registered trademarks of Vocus, Inc. or Vocus PRW Holdings, LLC.
Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | Copyright
Presumption of competence. Because being accused of mental illness is similar to
being accused of crime, we ought to presume that psychiatric "defendants" are
mentally competent, just as we presume that criminal defendants are legally
innocent. Individuals charged with criminal, civil, or interpersonal offenses
ought never to be treated as incompetent solely on the basis of the opinion of
mental health experts. Incompetence ought to be a judicial determination and the
"accused" ought to have access to legal representation and a right to trial by
jury. Thomas Szasz, MD
being accused of crime, we ought to presume that psychiatric "defendants" are
mentally competent, just as we presume that criminal defendants are legally
innocent. Individuals charged with criminal, civil, or interpersonal offenses
ought never to be treated as incompetent solely on the basis of the opinion of
mental health experts. Incompetence ought to be a judicial determination and the
"accused" ought to have access to legal representation and a right to trial by
jury. Thomas Szasz, MD
Are Children the Enemy?
COMMON SENSE
JOHN MAXWELL
Sunday, May 10, 2009
ON my return in 1971 from five years' exile in England, my friends seemed to think I needed to be reintroduced to Jamaica.
JOHN MAXWELL
They were right. My first shock was downtown Kingston, which resembled parts of Berlin as it was then. In 1966 when I went to Berlin, there were huge gaps in the cityscape caused by allied military action - by aircraft or tanks during the Second World War.
Kingston's wounds were caused by friendly fire, the work of the misnamed Ministry of Development and Welfare and the equally oxymoronic Urban Development Corporation.
Between them, 40 years ago, they were going to turn Kingston into a tropical Miami with all mod cons. Instead of proceeding one building or one block at a time, Mr Edward Seaga and Mr Moses Matalon were going to transform the city, overnight. Boom! Another one gone!
As we drove through the silent ruins of Port Royal Street, Harbour Street, Rumbo Lane, Little Port Royal Street and South Street, something strange began to happen. Whenever we stopped the car by some derelict building so that I could try to envisage what had been, suddenly into the headlights erupted hordes of little boys, scuttling like rats or cockroaches in every direction, running as fast as their meagre legs would carry them.
"Why are they running?" I asked.
"They think we're the police, come to catch them and beat them up."
MYERS... hanged himself last week
This was new to me. I had written a great deal about police brutality before being forced to take my talents elsewhere, but I hadn't heard, till then, of the police hunting children.
About three years later, when Mr Eli Matalon was minister of national security, I embarrassed him and Michael Manley's government by asking the minister on television, what he planned to do with the dozens of children then being brutalised in police lockups. He said he wasn't aware of that situation. When I provided him with some facts about the police lockup a couple of hundred yards from the JBC studios - "the Black Hole of Half-Way-Tree" - he promised to get the children out of the lockups. A few years later, again on TV, I asked the then minister of youth and community development, Douglas Manley, the question I'd asked Matalon. He actually had been moving children out of lockups and into places of safety. The problem was that the system had not been designed to deal with 'trickle-down' development. The police fish-pots kept trapping the small fry.
Sexual Predators?
Two weeks ago, the Miami Herald carried one of the saddest stories I've ever read.
It begins:
"At age 7, Gabriel Myers was already well on his way to becoming a sexual predator.
"He had exposed himself to classmates. He had kissed another boy. And his uncle warned child-welfare administrators Gabriel had described what he wanted to do with several little girls at his Christian private school.
"Gabriel, who may himself have been sexually molested by another boy in Ohio before moving to South Florida, had been on several strong psychiatric drugs before he hanged himself last week at a Margate foster home."
One of the Herald's readers posted a comment that expressed much of what I felt when I read the story:
"Shame on The Miami Herald for allowing this defamatory piece of trash to post. This poor child who was utterly failed by most if not all in his life is now being further victimised in his death. This disgusts me and I will cancel my subscription. We treat animals more humanely than you have this child. I hope you will write more to uncover what travesty lead to this untimely death which I would hardly term a suicide. A child who has barely been on this earth a few years and was in the care of the state for less than a year is tragically gone due to circumstances that were not at all within his control. You have left me angered and disappointed."
Another wrote:
"Wow. So, a seven-year-old child "kills himself" after behaving in a manner strongly suggestive of severe abuse ... and the Miami Herald devotes an entire article to the most salacious details of the kid's sexual misbehaviour? A molested seven-year-old's 'suicide' is mentioned once - as a small-print caption, no less - though there's somehow enough article space to reference his "list of touchable classmates" twice? "This is sensationalistic journalism at its absolute sickest. You are preying on a dead child to drum up web traffic."
The Los Angeles Times in June last year reported:
"Police said the women routinely beat the boy, [the child of one of them] forced him to put his hands on a hot stove, burned his body and genitals with cigarettes and often would not let him eat or drink. 'At a news conference Friday, LAPD Assistant Chief Jim McDonnell said that because of the burns from the stove, the boy no longer can open his hands. Lt Vincent Neglia of the LAPD's Abused Child Unit said in a statement Saturday that the abuse was "akin to a level of torture we hope our military personnel would never encounter."
Three weeks ago the Times of London reported: "An 11-year-old boy was left fighting for his life and his nine-year-old friend was found bleeding from head to toe after being attacked and tortured by other children. The boys' attackers demanded mobile phones, money and trainers. When they refused they were said to have been burnt with cigarettes, cut with a knife and beaten with bricks. Two boys aged 10 and 11 have been arrested."
The Infinite evil of Infants
Fifty years ago, after completing her masterwork, My Mother Who Fathered Me, Edith Clarke began research into social conditions in the slums of Kingston. She hadn't been able to complete the research for lack of funds, but she was uncovering a toxic stew of sexual and other physical abuse of girls and boys, mainly by stepfathers.
It is, of course, almost impossible to get any reliable estimates of violence against children and young people especially since the victimisation of boys is concealed by homophobia and other fundamentalist lunacies. It is suggestive, however, that one survey carried out in relation to campaigns against HIV, found that in the parish of St Ann 16 per cent, more than one in six teenage boys, had contemplated or attempted suicide. In the case of girls one Caribbean victimisation survey revealed that 48 per cent of adolescent girls' sexual initiation was "forced" or "somewhat forced" in nine Caribbean countries (Halcon et al, 2003).
People like those who drafted our latest sexual offences act appear to believe, like their cohorts all over the Christian world, that children are born evil and are simply awaiting the opportunity to demonstrate their satanic proclivities.
In Britain a few months ago, the case of "Baby P" - horrifically mistreated to death - created a huge stink, eventually resolved by finding a convenient scapegoat, the head of children's services in the London borough of Haringey.
She was named, shamed and fired, but the real author of the scandal is even now being honoured - Margaret Thatcher who, along with Ronald Reagan, led the western world into its terminal heresy - "there is no such thing as society" and the idea that government is the problem, never the solution. The social workers have never been given the resources they need and in places like Miami, the state transfers its responsibilities to private, so-called non-profit enterprises whose humanity is expressed in prescription psychotropic drugs.
To these bozos and their acolytes like Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, the real problem is the sturdy beggars who won't work and expect the world to take care of them. Their principals, salting away their ill-gotten gains in Cayman, Bermuda and similar criminal laundromats, refuse to pay even the derisory flat taxes imposed by people like Mr Patterson, considering it outrageous that they ought to contribute to the common good in some proportion to the profits they have gained from exploiting cheap labour and turning human beings into units of human resources.
The medieval poor laws were in some ways in advance of modern capitalist behaviour. Although "sturdy beggars" could be jailed, whipped and even hanged, the society recognised that there was a case to be made to help those who could not help themselves.
In our societies, it is simpler to warehouse in prison, half a million black, poor, handicapped or otherwise 'sub-normal' people and to dose their women and children with psychotropic drugs to keep them from breaching the peace.
At the age of seven, little Gabriel Myers opted out.
Copyright©2009 John Maxwell
COMMON SENSE
JOHN MAXWELL
Sunday, May 10, 2009
ON my return in 1971 from five years' exile in England, my friends seemed to think I needed to be reintroduced to Jamaica.
JOHN MAXWELL
They were right. My first shock was downtown Kingston, which resembled parts of Berlin as it was then. In 1966 when I went to Berlin, there were huge gaps in the cityscape caused by allied military action - by aircraft or tanks during the Second World War.
Kingston's wounds were caused by friendly fire, the work of the misnamed Ministry of Development and Welfare and the equally oxymoronic Urban Development Corporation.
Between them, 40 years ago, they were going to turn Kingston into a tropical Miami with all mod cons. Instead of proceeding one building or one block at a time, Mr Edward Seaga and Mr Moses Matalon were going to transform the city, overnight. Boom! Another one gone!
As we drove through the silent ruins of Port Royal Street, Harbour Street, Rumbo Lane, Little Port Royal Street and South Street, something strange began to happen. Whenever we stopped the car by some derelict building so that I could try to envisage what had been, suddenly into the headlights erupted hordes of little boys, scuttling like rats or cockroaches in every direction, running as fast as their meagre legs would carry them.
"Why are they running?" I asked.
"They think we're the police, come to catch them and beat them up."
MYERS... hanged himself last week
This was new to me. I had written a great deal about police brutality before being forced to take my talents elsewhere, but I hadn't heard, till then, of the police hunting children.
About three years later, when Mr Eli Matalon was minister of national security, I embarrassed him and Michael Manley's government by asking the minister on television, what he planned to do with the dozens of children then being brutalised in police lockups. He said he wasn't aware of that situation. When I provided him with some facts about the police lockup a couple of hundred yards from the JBC studios - "the Black Hole of Half-Way-Tree" - he promised to get the children out of the lockups. A few years later, again on TV, I asked the then minister of youth and community development, Douglas Manley, the question I'd asked Matalon. He actually had been moving children out of lockups and into places of safety. The problem was that the system had not been designed to deal with 'trickle-down' development. The police fish-pots kept trapping the small fry.
Sexual Predators?
Two weeks ago, the Miami Herald carried one of the saddest stories I've ever read.
It begins:
"At age 7, Gabriel Myers was already well on his way to becoming a sexual predator.
"He had exposed himself to classmates. He had kissed another boy. And his uncle warned child-welfare administrators Gabriel had described what he wanted to do with several little girls at his Christian private school.
"Gabriel, who may himself have been sexually molested by another boy in Ohio before moving to South Florida, had been on several strong psychiatric drugs before he hanged himself last week at a Margate foster home."
One of the Herald's readers posted a comment that expressed much of what I felt when I read the story:
"Shame on The Miami Herald for allowing this defamatory piece of trash to post. This poor child who was utterly failed by most if not all in his life is now being further victimised in his death. This disgusts me and I will cancel my subscription. We treat animals more humanely than you have this child. I hope you will write more to uncover what travesty lead to this untimely death which I would hardly term a suicide. A child who has barely been on this earth a few years and was in the care of the state for less than a year is tragically gone due to circumstances that were not at all within his control. You have left me angered and disappointed."
Another wrote:
"Wow. So, a seven-year-old child "kills himself" after behaving in a manner strongly suggestive of severe abuse ... and the Miami Herald devotes an entire article to the most salacious details of the kid's sexual misbehaviour? A molested seven-year-old's 'suicide' is mentioned once - as a small-print caption, no less - though there's somehow enough article space to reference his "list of touchable classmates" twice? "This is sensationalistic journalism at its absolute sickest. You are preying on a dead child to drum up web traffic."
The Los Angeles Times in June last year reported:
"Police said the women routinely beat the boy, [the child of one of them] forced him to put his hands on a hot stove, burned his body and genitals with cigarettes and often would not let him eat or drink. 'At a news conference Friday, LAPD Assistant Chief Jim McDonnell said that because of the burns from the stove, the boy no longer can open his hands. Lt Vincent Neglia of the LAPD's Abused Child Unit said in a statement Saturday that the abuse was "akin to a level of torture we hope our military personnel would never encounter."
Three weeks ago the Times of London reported: "An 11-year-old boy was left fighting for his life and his nine-year-old friend was found bleeding from head to toe after being attacked and tortured by other children. The boys' attackers demanded mobile phones, money and trainers. When they refused they were said to have been burnt with cigarettes, cut with a knife and beaten with bricks. Two boys aged 10 and 11 have been arrested."
The Infinite evil of Infants
Fifty years ago, after completing her masterwork, My Mother Who Fathered Me, Edith Clarke began research into social conditions in the slums of Kingston. She hadn't been able to complete the research for lack of funds, but she was uncovering a toxic stew of sexual and other physical abuse of girls and boys, mainly by stepfathers.
It is, of course, almost impossible to get any reliable estimates of violence against children and young people especially since the victimisation of boys is concealed by homophobia and other fundamentalist lunacies. It is suggestive, however, that one survey carried out in relation to campaigns against HIV, found that in the parish of St Ann 16 per cent, more than one in six teenage boys, had contemplated or attempted suicide. In the case of girls one Caribbean victimisation survey revealed that 48 per cent of adolescent girls' sexual initiation was "forced" or "somewhat forced" in nine Caribbean countries (Halcon et al, 2003).
People like those who drafted our latest sexual offences act appear to believe, like their cohorts all over the Christian world, that children are born evil and are simply awaiting the opportunity to demonstrate their satanic proclivities.
In Britain a few months ago, the case of "Baby P" - horrifically mistreated to death - created a huge stink, eventually resolved by finding a convenient scapegoat, the head of children's services in the London borough of Haringey.
She was named, shamed and fired, but the real author of the scandal is even now being honoured - Margaret Thatcher who, along with Ronald Reagan, led the western world into its terminal heresy - "there is no such thing as society" and the idea that government is the problem, never the solution. The social workers have never been given the resources they need and in places like Miami, the state transfers its responsibilities to private, so-called non-profit enterprises whose humanity is expressed in prescription psychotropic drugs.
To these bozos and their acolytes like Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, the real problem is the sturdy beggars who won't work and expect the world to take care of them. Their principals, salting away their ill-gotten gains in Cayman, Bermuda and similar criminal laundromats, refuse to pay even the derisory flat taxes imposed by people like Mr Patterson, considering it outrageous that they ought to contribute to the common good in some proportion to the profits they have gained from exploiting cheap labour and turning human beings into units of human resources.
The medieval poor laws were in some ways in advance of modern capitalist behaviour. Although "sturdy beggars" could be jailed, whipped and even hanged, the society recognised that there was a case to be made to help those who could not help themselves.
In our societies, it is simpler to warehouse in prison, half a million black, poor, handicapped or otherwise 'sub-normal' people and to dose their women and children with psychotropic drugs to keep them from breaching the peace.
At the age of seven, little Gabriel Myers opted out.
Copyright©2009 John Maxwell
WASP Ascendancy
The Obama presidency seals the ascendancy of this new and powerful Establishment. So what should we expect? Anyone with the slightest acquaintance with elite institutions knows that the new Establishment has inherited the genteel progressivism of the old WASP Establishment. The Ivy League universities provide the clearest case study. Every leftist agenda under the sun has a sinecure--and all the while the institutions carefully protect their mainstream academic predominance.
The easy combination of progressive ideals with institutional conservatism characterizes Establishment leadership. When the chips are down, what matters most is protecting the status quo. Therefore, the new Establishment evident in the Obama administration is likely to govern from the middle, as did the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, which were dominated by the old Establishment. Expect moderate economic interventions and no fundamental changes in foreign policy.
Establishments, however, are not friendly to all sectors of society. They try to tamp down competitors. The power of new money is always a threat. Wealthy outsiders and upstarts challenge the status quo. It's not an accident that the 1950s and 1960s, decades of Establishment dominance, saw high marginal tax rates.
We should expect the same from the new Establishment, along with greater governmental management of economic affairs. It's troubling when the wrong sorts of people get rich, and doubly troubling when they use their new wealth to try to influence politics.
Establishments are always suspicious of grassroots movements and populism. The new Establishment may be committed to progressive social ideals, but it wants people with advanced degrees to lead the charge. The universities, foundations, and judiciary are favored instruments for social change. Experts need to lead the way, because ordinary folks can't be trusted to understand the complexities of social systems and identify their own best interests
. Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? provides an excellent argument in support of the new Establishment tendency toward progressive paternalism.
The easy combination of progressive ideals with institutional conservatism characterizes Establishment leadership. When the chips are down, what matters most is protecting the status quo. Therefore, the new Establishment evident in the Obama administration is likely to govern from the middle, as did the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, which were dominated by the old Establishment. Expect moderate economic interventions and no fundamental changes in foreign policy.
Establishments, however, are not friendly to all sectors of society. They try to tamp down competitors. The power of new money is always a threat. Wealthy outsiders and upstarts challenge the status quo. It's not an accident that the 1950s and 1960s, decades of Establishment dominance, saw high marginal tax rates.
We should expect the same from the new Establishment, along with greater governmental management of economic affairs. It's troubling when the wrong sorts of people get rich, and doubly troubling when they use their new wealth to try to influence politics.
Establishments are always suspicious of grassroots movements and populism. The new Establishment may be committed to progressive social ideals, but it wants people with advanced degrees to lead the charge. The universities, foundations, and judiciary are favored instruments for social change. Experts need to lead the way, because ordinary folks can't be trusted to understand the complexities of social systems and identify their own best interests
. Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? provides an excellent argument in support of the new Establishment tendency toward progressive paternalism.
There are 70 conflicts worldwide, so why do we focus on just one?
By Stephen King
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Yes, there is public feeling about the Palestinians and their rotten deal. I’ve never heard Chechnya being discussed on the DART, whereas I have heard Israel being trashed on buses as well as at smart dinner parties. Besides, who’s ever heard of a "Sri Lanka out of Tamil Eelam" march through Cork or calls for a boycott of Russia?
I OWE Micheál Martin an apology of sorts. I admit that when I read media reports of his discussions with Ban Ki-moon in New York at the weekend my eyes rolled up to the heavens.
The country’s most senior representative to the rest of the world has a rare opportunity to raise Ireland’s issues with the UN secretary-general and what’s his top priority? Yes, you guessed it – Gaza.
It’s not that Gaza isn’t an important issue facing the world. It is. What Gaza is not, though, is an issue where Europe, let alone Ireland, can wield much positive influence. Gaza will only be sorted when the Arab states, the US and Israel – probably in that order – decide it should be sorted.
But I was wrong. I had swallowed the media line. Yes, Micheál Martin and Ban Ki-moon did talk about Gaza, but it was just one subject among others.
In fact, when you look at the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) press release, the first item of discussion listed was one where Ireland has a very direct interest, namely Chad.
So what caused my blood pressure to rise? Was Gaza the topic the DFA’s spindoctors were pushing? Possibly. Was the position on Gaza the most objectively newsworthy? Again, possibly: the Pope is in the region and Ireland tends to be at one end of the European spectrum of opinion on anything to do with Israel.
The third possibility, and the one that seems to me most likely, is that the media has a fixation on Israel (and its supposed crimes) which is, for want of a better word, disproportionate. That’s why the line about Gaza led several media reports of Minister Martin’s meeting.
If I were Jewish, I would be told I’m paranoid for thinking the world and its media are out to get me. After all, the fact that Israel is the world’s one and only Jewish state – amidst a vast ocean of Muslim states – inevitably makes many Jewish people think it’s them, and not Israel as such, which is in the media’s sights. But I’m not Jewish. Besides, just because people are paranoid doesn’t mean others aren’t out to get them.
A quick scan of the world’s trouble spots makes my point. The well-respected International Crisis Group is currently tracking 70 conflicts around the world, from Afghanistan and Algeria to Yemen and Zimbabwe. Yes, 70: we live in a dangerous world.
Some of these are very familiar to us: Northern Ireland, Iraq, the Basque country, North Korea and, of course, Israel and the Palestinian territories. Others are not nightly news: Kashmir, Burma, Eritrea and so on. And then there are the conflicts we have forgotten about, or never really heard about too much because they are far away or poor, or both: Armenia versus Azerbaijan, Mindanao in the Philippines, Morocco/western Sahara and Aceh.
Some of the 70 hotspots are especially deadly. Millions of black Africans have died in Congo in the past decade, well below most people’s radar.
Sri Lanka has had a bit of a focus in recent weeks – though hardly the minute-by-minute wraparound coverage Gaza had in January. How many of us were really aware of the fact that more than 80,000 people have died in a quarter of a century of civil war?
Try this. Google "Tamil Tigers" and you will receive 2.3 million results. Google "Hamas" and you get 10 times as many – and Hamas hasn’t been around nearly as long. It’s the same if you Google "Tamils" and "Palestinians". Is the difference that the Tigers might have killed Rajiv Gandhi but, unlike the Palestinians, have rarely brought their murderous tactics to Europe directly? The Sri Lankan conflict, at least in its military phase, looks as though it is coming to an end. The work of peace-building will last for years to come.
The same could be said about Chechnya. The Russians have just announced the end of their "counter-terrorism" operation. There are no solid figures for the number of civilians killed since the second war began there in late 1999, but estimates range anywhere between 25,000 and 200,000.
Put that in context. Israel might be geographically small – smaller than Munster – but in population terms Chechnya is absolutely tiny. A region with a little more than one million inhabitants has seen anything up to one-fifth of its civilian population killed in two decades of war. And one school siege aside, we have largely looked the other way.
By comparison, 6,000 Palestinians – armed and civilian together – out of a Palestinian population in the territories three to four times that of Chechnya have died since the second intifada of 2001.
It goes without saying that any civilian death is a tragedy – and, very often, an outrage – but search for Chechnya on the DFA website and you only receive one-tenth of the number of hits that you do for Israel. No-one believes the DFA is somehow in league with the Russians and supports their quasi-colonial war against Chechnya, but it does go to show some perspective has been lost somewhere along the line.
Yes, there is public feeling about the Palestinians and their rotten deal. I’ve never heard Chechnya being discussed on the DART, whereas I have heard Israel being trashed on buses as well as at smart dinner parties. Besides, who’s ever heard of a "Sri Lanka out of Tamil Eelam" march through Cork or calls for a boycott of Russia?
But whose fault is that? Dare I suggest, the media? As a result, Israel has learned a lesson from the Russians and the Sri Lankans: impose a media ban and the world leaves you pretty much alone. No one could condone the ban during the Gaza offensive – and being host to the world’s second largest press corps, after Washington, means you pay a high price in terms of stroppy hacks – but it does seem to work.
SO WHY why the obsession with Israel? It’s the only country in the world whose existence is queried is one reason. It’s the Holy Land to the world’s two largest faiths is another. That al-Qaeda sometimes backs the Palestinian cause makes Israel/Palestine strategically important – but that’s true of Chechnya, too.
Maybe it’s the oil in the Middle East region that makes Arab countries important in western capitals (while distracting from their own despotism)?
Could it be some wrongheaded notion of guilt for having set up Israel after the Holocaust, when actually Israel fought British imperialism for its independence? Could it be, as many Israelis believe, that we see Israelis as Jews and, therefore, as bloodthirsty sub-humans in the latest manifestation of centuries-old anti-semitism?
Or is it just anti-Americanism? Perhaps it’s a little to do with each of these factors. But could it actually be that we see Israelis as very much like ourselves – sophisticated, prosperous, well-educated, fairly pale-skinned democrats? Do we hate ourselves that much? It’s either that or Israel simply isn’t deadly enough to deter the journalists too afraid to work in fly-ridden Congo.
Gaza for breakfast, back to the pool at the American Colony Hotel in time for tea, and pick up an attractive girl or strapping lad at a bar after dinner. Same again tomorrow, please. Just try doing that in Darfur.
Read more: http://www.examiner.ie/story.aspx?id=91585&m=5.3.3.0&h=there-are-70-conflicts-worldwide-so-why-do-we-focus-on-just-one#ixzz0GTI4g1IF&B
By Stephen King
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Yes, there is public feeling about the Palestinians and their rotten deal. I’ve never heard Chechnya being discussed on the DART, whereas I have heard Israel being trashed on buses as well as at smart dinner parties. Besides, who’s ever heard of a "Sri Lanka out of Tamil Eelam" march through Cork or calls for a boycott of Russia?
I OWE Micheál Martin an apology of sorts. I admit that when I read media reports of his discussions with Ban Ki-moon in New York at the weekend my eyes rolled up to the heavens.
The country’s most senior representative to the rest of the world has a rare opportunity to raise Ireland’s issues with the UN secretary-general and what’s his top priority? Yes, you guessed it – Gaza.
It’s not that Gaza isn’t an important issue facing the world. It is. What Gaza is not, though, is an issue where Europe, let alone Ireland, can wield much positive influence. Gaza will only be sorted when the Arab states, the US and Israel – probably in that order – decide it should be sorted.
But I was wrong. I had swallowed the media line. Yes, Micheál Martin and Ban Ki-moon did talk about Gaza, but it was just one subject among others.
In fact, when you look at the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) press release, the first item of discussion listed was one where Ireland has a very direct interest, namely Chad.
So what caused my blood pressure to rise? Was Gaza the topic the DFA’s spindoctors were pushing? Possibly. Was the position on Gaza the most objectively newsworthy? Again, possibly: the Pope is in the region and Ireland tends to be at one end of the European spectrum of opinion on anything to do with Israel.
The third possibility, and the one that seems to me most likely, is that the media has a fixation on Israel (and its supposed crimes) which is, for want of a better word, disproportionate. That’s why the line about Gaza led several media reports of Minister Martin’s meeting.
If I were Jewish, I would be told I’m paranoid for thinking the world and its media are out to get me. After all, the fact that Israel is the world’s one and only Jewish state – amidst a vast ocean of Muslim states – inevitably makes many Jewish people think it’s them, and not Israel as such, which is in the media’s sights. But I’m not Jewish. Besides, just because people are paranoid doesn’t mean others aren’t out to get them.
A quick scan of the world’s trouble spots makes my point. The well-respected International Crisis Group is currently tracking 70 conflicts around the world, from Afghanistan and Algeria to Yemen and Zimbabwe. Yes, 70: we live in a dangerous world.
Some of these are very familiar to us: Northern Ireland, Iraq, the Basque country, North Korea and, of course, Israel and the Palestinian territories. Others are not nightly news: Kashmir, Burma, Eritrea and so on. And then there are the conflicts we have forgotten about, or never really heard about too much because they are far away or poor, or both: Armenia versus Azerbaijan, Mindanao in the Philippines, Morocco/western Sahara and Aceh.
Some of the 70 hotspots are especially deadly. Millions of black Africans have died in Congo in the past decade, well below most people’s radar.
Sri Lanka has had a bit of a focus in recent weeks – though hardly the minute-by-minute wraparound coverage Gaza had in January. How many of us were really aware of the fact that more than 80,000 people have died in a quarter of a century of civil war?
Try this. Google "Tamil Tigers" and you will receive 2.3 million results. Google "Hamas" and you get 10 times as many – and Hamas hasn’t been around nearly as long. It’s the same if you Google "Tamils" and "Palestinians". Is the difference that the Tigers might have killed Rajiv Gandhi but, unlike the Palestinians, have rarely brought their murderous tactics to Europe directly? The Sri Lankan conflict, at least in its military phase, looks as though it is coming to an end. The work of peace-building will last for years to come.
The same could be said about Chechnya. The Russians have just announced the end of their "counter-terrorism" operation. There are no solid figures for the number of civilians killed since the second war began there in late 1999, but estimates range anywhere between 25,000 and 200,000.
Put that in context. Israel might be geographically small – smaller than Munster – but in population terms Chechnya is absolutely tiny. A region with a little more than one million inhabitants has seen anything up to one-fifth of its civilian population killed in two decades of war. And one school siege aside, we have largely looked the other way.
By comparison, 6,000 Palestinians – armed and civilian together – out of a Palestinian population in the territories three to four times that of Chechnya have died since the second intifada of 2001.
It goes without saying that any civilian death is a tragedy – and, very often, an outrage – but search for Chechnya on the DFA website and you only receive one-tenth of the number of hits that you do for Israel. No-one believes the DFA is somehow in league with the Russians and supports their quasi-colonial war against Chechnya, but it does go to show some perspective has been lost somewhere along the line.
Yes, there is public feeling about the Palestinians and their rotten deal. I’ve never heard Chechnya being discussed on the DART, whereas I have heard Israel being trashed on buses as well as at smart dinner parties. Besides, who’s ever heard of a "Sri Lanka out of Tamil Eelam" march through Cork or calls for a boycott of Russia?
But whose fault is that? Dare I suggest, the media? As a result, Israel has learned a lesson from the Russians and the Sri Lankans: impose a media ban and the world leaves you pretty much alone. No one could condone the ban during the Gaza offensive – and being host to the world’s second largest press corps, after Washington, means you pay a high price in terms of stroppy hacks – but it does seem to work.
SO WHY why the obsession with Israel? It’s the only country in the world whose existence is queried is one reason. It’s the Holy Land to the world’s two largest faiths is another. That al-Qaeda sometimes backs the Palestinian cause makes Israel/Palestine strategically important – but that’s true of Chechnya, too.
Maybe it’s the oil in the Middle East region that makes Arab countries important in western capitals (while distracting from their own despotism)?
Could it be some wrongheaded notion of guilt for having set up Israel after the Holocaust, when actually Israel fought British imperialism for its independence? Could it be, as many Israelis believe, that we see Israelis as Jews and, therefore, as bloodthirsty sub-humans in the latest manifestation of centuries-old anti-semitism?
Or is it just anti-Americanism? Perhaps it’s a little to do with each of these factors. But could it actually be that we see Israelis as very much like ourselves – sophisticated, prosperous, well-educated, fairly pale-skinned democrats? Do we hate ourselves that much? It’s either that or Israel simply isn’t deadly enough to deter the journalists too afraid to work in fly-ridden Congo.
Gaza for breakfast, back to the pool at the American Colony Hotel in time for tea, and pick up an attractive girl or strapping lad at a bar after dinner. Same again tomorrow, please. Just try doing that in Darfur.
Read more: http://www.examiner.ie/story.aspx?id=91585&m=5.3.3.0&h=there-are-70-conflicts-worldwide-so-why-do-we-focus-on-just-one#ixzz0GTI4g1IF&B
Ultra right vs immigrants in EU vote
By Sophie Pons
Agence France-Presse
First Posted 12:22:00 05/24/2009
Filed Under: Elections, Politics, Justice & Rights, Migration
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Close this PRAGUE, Czech Republic—Spreading an unashamedly anti-Islamic, anti-immigrant, and anti-European message, far-right parties are aiming to take the European Union Parliament by storm in looming elections.
From Bulgaria in the east of the 27-nation club to Britain in the wealthier west, hard-line parties are seizing on the fears of communities who have seen jobs lost and homes seized in the recession.
Governments across the European Union, particularly in the former communist East Bloc, have expressed concern about the rise of the extreme right.
The National Party in the Czech Republic has touted a "final solution of the Gypsy question" in television adverts for the elections which will be held across Europe from June 4 to 7.
"'The final solution' was a Nazi euphemism for a premeditated murder of millions of Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and people with disabilities," said Council of Europe secretary general Terry Davis.
"The European Convention on Human Rights guarantees the right to the freedom of expression, but the Convention also sets limits. Personally, I believe that a call for 'a final solution to the Gypsy issue' falls well outside these limits."
Neo-Nazis from the rival Workers Party have held anti-Roma marches as part of their campaign effort and Czech Prime Minister Jan Fischer this week called for the party to be banned.
In Hungary, hard-hit by the crisis, the ultra-nationalist Jobbik party has launched just as aggressively into the election campaign.
"The lesson from the 1930s is that an economic and social crisis, if it is not contained, not controlled, can give ground to a significant strengthening of radical movements," said Hungarian Prime Minister Gordon Bajnai. "And we should stop that," he added.
The far-right could get at least 15 extra seats in the 736-member European parliament.
The British National Party (BNP) expects to get at least one seat as it steps up a breakthrough which has worried some commentators and mainstream politicians in the country.
With a "British jobs for British workers" slogan, the party's Cambridge University educated chairman Nick Griffin could get one seat.
The BNP has exploited a national scandal over lawmakers' expenses and warned against what it calls the European Union's "dangerous drive... to give 80 million low-wage Muslim Turks the right to swamp Britain."
Turkey's campaign to join the EU has featured strongly in many countries.
Bulgaria's Ataka party expects to win four seats with its "No to Turkey in Europe" campaign. In the Netherlands, polls suggest the Party for Freedom (PVV) of islamophobic lawmaker Geert Wilders will take two or three seats.
The Freedom Party of Austria (FPO) campaign calls for "the West in the hands of Christians." It could get up to 19 percent of votes in the election, giving it three of Austria's 17 European Parliament seats.
The other far-right party, the Alliance for the Future of Austria (BZO), may also get one European lawmaker, according to polls.
In Romania, the Greater Romania Party also hopes to get an EU parliament seat after a campaign under the headline: "Christians and patriots to rid this country of thieves."
In Finland, opinion polls have named Timo Soini, head of the True Finns party, as the most recognizable and most popular single candidate.
The party has seen a spectacular rise in support in recent years which observers attribute to its criticism of the government's immigration and EU policies.
"As long as there is a complicated and tense economic, financial, and hence social situation, we may expect violent reactions and an impact on voters' behavior," Brussels political analyst Pascal Delwit told AFP.
He said this was particularly true for eastern European countries, which have seen years of economic expansion halted by the crisis.
Delwit said it was difficult to assess how successful the far-right parties would be as "a considerable part of far-right voters generally do not show up for the EU elections."
The extreme-right is better organized now than ever before however.
Up to now, all the parties have never formed a lasting alliance at European level. But the new eurosceptic Libertas party, which stresses national sovereignty, expects to present its candidates in all 27 EU countries.
"Their rhetoric places them in the rich vein of populism, with the same discourse of denouncing the system," said Delwit.
By Sophie Pons
Agence France-Presse
First Posted 12:22:00 05/24/2009
Filed Under: Elections, Politics, Justice & Rights, Migration
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Close this PRAGUE, Czech Republic—Spreading an unashamedly anti-Islamic, anti-immigrant, and anti-European message, far-right parties are aiming to take the European Union Parliament by storm in looming elections.
From Bulgaria in the east of the 27-nation club to Britain in the wealthier west, hard-line parties are seizing on the fears of communities who have seen jobs lost and homes seized in the recession.
Governments across the European Union, particularly in the former communist East Bloc, have expressed concern about the rise of the extreme right.
The National Party in the Czech Republic has touted a "final solution of the Gypsy question" in television adverts for the elections which will be held across Europe from June 4 to 7.
"'The final solution' was a Nazi euphemism for a premeditated murder of millions of Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and people with disabilities," said Council of Europe secretary general Terry Davis.
"The European Convention on Human Rights guarantees the right to the freedom of expression, but the Convention also sets limits. Personally, I believe that a call for 'a final solution to the Gypsy issue' falls well outside these limits."
Neo-Nazis from the rival Workers Party have held anti-Roma marches as part of their campaign effort and Czech Prime Minister Jan Fischer this week called for the party to be banned.
In Hungary, hard-hit by the crisis, the ultra-nationalist Jobbik party has launched just as aggressively into the election campaign.
"The lesson from the 1930s is that an economic and social crisis, if it is not contained, not controlled, can give ground to a significant strengthening of radical movements," said Hungarian Prime Minister Gordon Bajnai. "And we should stop that," he added.
The far-right could get at least 15 extra seats in the 736-member European parliament.
The British National Party (BNP) expects to get at least one seat as it steps up a breakthrough which has worried some commentators and mainstream politicians in the country.
With a "British jobs for British workers" slogan, the party's Cambridge University educated chairman Nick Griffin could get one seat.
The BNP has exploited a national scandal over lawmakers' expenses and warned against what it calls the European Union's "dangerous drive... to give 80 million low-wage Muslim Turks the right to swamp Britain."
Turkey's campaign to join the EU has featured strongly in many countries.
Bulgaria's Ataka party expects to win four seats with its "No to Turkey in Europe" campaign. In the Netherlands, polls suggest the Party for Freedom (PVV) of islamophobic lawmaker Geert Wilders will take two or three seats.
The Freedom Party of Austria (FPO) campaign calls for "the West in the hands of Christians." It could get up to 19 percent of votes in the election, giving it three of Austria's 17 European Parliament seats.
The other far-right party, the Alliance for the Future of Austria (BZO), may also get one European lawmaker, according to polls.
In Romania, the Greater Romania Party also hopes to get an EU parliament seat after a campaign under the headline: "Christians and patriots to rid this country of thieves."
In Finland, opinion polls have named Timo Soini, head of the True Finns party, as the most recognizable and most popular single candidate.
The party has seen a spectacular rise in support in recent years which observers attribute to its criticism of the government's immigration and EU policies.
"As long as there is a complicated and tense economic, financial, and hence social situation, we may expect violent reactions and an impact on voters' behavior," Brussels political analyst Pascal Delwit told AFP.
He said this was particularly true for eastern European countries, which have seen years of economic expansion halted by the crisis.
Delwit said it was difficult to assess how successful the far-right parties would be as "a considerable part of far-right voters generally do not show up for the EU elections."
The extreme-right is better organized now than ever before however.
Up to now, all the parties have never formed a lasting alliance at European level. But the new eurosceptic Libertas party, which stresses national sovereignty, expects to present its candidates in all 27 EU countries.
"Their rhetoric places them in the rich vein of populism, with the same discourse of denouncing the system," said Delwit.
Pill wars: debate heats up over 'brain booster' drugs.
Adults are taking stimulants like Ritalin and Adderall, normally used to treat serious medical conditions, to boost their concentration and job performance. Critics ask: Is it making Americans too dependent on their medicine cabinets?
By Gregory M. Lamb | / staff writer
from the May 10, 2009 edition
Print this Letter to the Editor Republish Email and shareE-mail newsletters RSS
Boston - It's a play right out of the Twitter era and the family medicine cabinet. "Distracted," at an off-Broadway theater in New York, examines the ever-shortening attention span of modern life – including the moral conundrum of whether a restive 9-year-old should be given pills to alter his mood.
At one point, an actor breaks from character to address the audience directly and advocate the use of Ritalin and Adderall, two prescription stimulants, which, he says, helped him learn his lines. [Editor's note: The
original version wrongly called Ritalin and Adderall over-the-counter drugs.]
The aside encapsulates a growing debate in scientific circles and living rooms across America: Should adults be using so-called "brain-boosting" drugs – normally intended to treat serious medical conditions – to improve concentration and performance?
College students, of course, have been using stimulants for years: They take such things as modafinil, Adderall, and Ritalin (euphemistically known on campuses as "vitamin R") to enhance their memories for exams or to stay up all night and press out a term paper. By one estimate, at least 10 percent of American college students use prescription drugs as study aids.
Now the general adult population is turning to the pills, too – often illegally – to boost productivity and enhance their mental prowess on the job. Some experts laud the development: They think it's time to consider making the stimulants legal for brain-boosting functions.
But critics worry it will accelerate a slide toward a drugged society. In an era when people take everything from Viagra to enhance their romance to steroids to enhance their baseball statistics, they argue that the addition of so-called "cognitive enhancement" drugs will only make us more dependent on the pill bottle.
Ultimately, it raises the most fundamental questions about identity and what it means to be human: Are we the sum of our experiences or the sum of our pills? As Carl Elliott writes in his book, "Better than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream": "Today, enhancement technologies are not just instruments for self-improvement, or even self-transformation – they are tools for working on the soul."
LAST SUMMER, Michael Arrington, the founder of the influential technology blog TechCrunch, wrote a post asking, "How many Silicon Valley start-up executives are hopped up on Provigil?" He was referring to the stimulant, which is the brand name for modafinil, that doctors normally prescribe to treat excessive drowsiness associated with narcolepsy and other sleep disorders. "[T]he buzz lately is that it's the 'entrepreneur's drug of choice' around Silicon Valley," the post said.
In an online poll in the British science journal Nature last year, answered by 1,400 people in 60 countries, 1 in 5 said they had used drugs for nonmedical reasons "to stimulate their focus, concentration, or memory." Only about half had a prescription for the drug they were using. A third had bought the drugs over the Internet. And even though about half reported unpleasant side effects, 4 out of 5 "thought that healthy adults should be able to take the drugs if they want to," Nature reported.
Philip Harvey is one who uses them. A professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory University in Atlanta, he regularly flies from Georgia to Europe on business. To prepare for his flight, he takes modafinil. He uses the stimulant to feel alert and rested, despite lost sleep, allowing him to return to his family faster. He has no trouble getting a prescription from his doctor. "From Atlanta, I can get to Europe by 6 a.m. and give a 9 a.m. presentation," he says. "It lets you go and come back the same day, or go over one day and come back the next."
In the current debate over brain boosters, the focal point of much of the discussion has been a commentary in the December issue of Nature. Seven prominent bioethicists noted that the drugs "are 'disruptive technologies' that could have a profound effect on human life in the twenty-first century." While calling for more research to better understand the safety and effectiveness of use in healthy individuals, the piece went on to advocate that "mentally competent adults should be able to engage in cognitive enhancement using drugs."
In the months since, the paper has met with both hearty approval and deep reservations from scientists and other bioethicists. "Anything that can help our brains deal better with the complex challenges of the twenty-first century is to be not only welcomed but actively sought," wrote Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, in a letter to the journal.
The commentary served its purpose to "kick up" a needed discussion, says Henry Greely, a bioethicist and professor of law at Stanford University and one of the coauthors of the Nature commentary. He received far more e-mails about the article than for any other he's published. The aim, he said, was to argue that "enhancement is not fundamentally a dirty word."
"I think people should think of [drugs] as just one more of many different ways we try to improve our minds," Dr. Greely says. "I'm a teacher. I'm in the enhancement business. I'm trying to enhance my students' brains."
But others were disappointed with the commentary. "It's not really a piece of science. It's an editorial arguing that we should use more drugs," says George Annas, chairman of the department of Health Law, Bioethics, and Human Rights at Boston University. He wonders why an article taking the other side of the debate didn't accompany it, and why the authors called for looser strictures on use of the drugs before more is known about them. "The way you make sure they're not harmful is you do a study before you widely advise people to use them," he says.
Critics argue more time is needed with the petri dishes and field testing before the drugs are used as mind enhancers. "The reality [is] that there is very little research to document whether [these drugs] are universally beneficial, whether they could be detrimental, what are the long-term outcomes, what are the side effects," says Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a US government agency. "There's really very, very limited knowledge."
What troubles Dr. Volkow is how the commentary dismissed the dangers of these drugs, equating taking them with drinking coffee, "which is, to say the least, an irresponsible way to present it and an inaccurate one," she says.
In March, Volkow published a small preliminary study showing that taking modafinil might be addictive in humans, increasing the levels of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that plays a major role in addiction.
Nearly everyone talking about brain-boosting drugs agrees that they ought to be both safe and effective before being widely used. But some worry about other problems they present. Would workers, for example, feel coerced to use enhancement drugs in order to win promotions or even simply to keep their jobs?
"For example, what if hospitals started to demand that medical residents dose up on methylphenidate, a drug used to improve concentration, as a prerequisite for employment?" asks Jacob Appel in an article last year in the Journal of Medical Ethics called "When the boss turns pusher." Or what if fast-food chains insisted that employees take antidepressants to keep them calm and upbeat when confronted by dissatisfied customers?
Employers may face a dilemma. "Denying some individuals the opportunity to enhance in this way clearly undermines their right to do with their bodies as they choose," he says. "However, to permit some to engage in these enhancements may lead to an inevitable race to the bottom – or top – in which employers and market forces pressure more and more American workers to place their brains at the disposal of their bosses."
More broadly, some worry that as more brain-enhancing drugs come on the market in the next 10 to 15 years, countries may battle for "neuro competitive advantage" in the workforce. If you're a 58-year-old person living in Boston who's competing with a 25-year-old in Mumbai, for instance, you might be tempted to use the drugs – whether or not they're legal in the US, notes Zach Lynch, executive director of the Neurotechnology Industry Organization, a trade group.
Moreover, even if they are illegal, or regulated, enforcing those controls would be difficult. "Living in a global economy, I think it's going to be very hard to regulate the use of these [drugs] in the future, if they're safe and effective," Mr. Lynch says.
Brain-boosting drugs are already being considered for another workplace – the military. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is working on "all kinds of drugs to make you stronger, to make you eat less," says Dr. Annas. "They want soldiers to function for up to five days without sleep. That would certainly require drugs. Whether that would have any long-term consequences, I don't think anybody knows yet."
A drug called donepezil, developed to treat Alzheimer's disease, has been shown to modestly increase memory in healthy people. It may become a Viagra-like hit with baby boomers worried about cognitive decline. Work is also under way to use drugs or other methods to selectively erase memories, something that could be used to ease post-traumatic stress among soldiers returning from war, allowing them to forget what they did on the battlefield. Annas sees problems here. "I think we want to have remorse about killing," he says.
Advocates point out that humans already "enhance" their thinking in a variety of ways, from drinking beverages with caffeine (a known stimulant), to exercising to brighten their mood, to relying on a computer to increase knowledge, to simply getting a good night's sleep before a big test.
But for some, a caution light goes on when we're changing the way the brain works, particularly when so little is known about it. "Not only do we not have a model for how our brains do complex tasks, we can't even imagine one," Dr. Karl Deisseroth, a neuroscientist at Stanford University, told Wired magazine earlier this year.
AT THE MOST FUNDAMENTAL LEVEL, the drugs challenge perceptions of who we are. Some people believe the next big scientific revolution will be turning our technological prowess on the world within, notably our brains, rather than the world around us. Neuroscience, which includes the development of brain enhancers, is part of this "revolution."
In this realm, some experts suggest that using pills to alter thinking or mood comes too close to altering our sense of self. "In seeking by these [biotechnologies] to be better than we are or to like ourselves better than we do, we risk 'turning into someone else,' confounding the identity we have acquired through natural gift cultivated by genuinely lived experiences," wrote Leon Kass in a 2003 report on human enhancement from the President's Council on Bioethics.
Yet others argue the definition of what is one's "real" self will be up to the individual – and should be.
"It's not at all clear that people feel more themselves when they're unmedicated than when they're medicated," says James Hughes, director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies in Hartford, Conn. "Some people are going to feel more 'themselves' when they take the drugs, and some are not going to feel more themselves."
As drug and biotechnology companies look to expand their products and markets, more possibilities for illicit use may lie ahead. Cephalon Inc. is planning to launch Nuvigil, a longer-lasting version of Provigil, later this year. The company sold nearly $1 billion of Provigil last year, but the drug is going off patent in 2012. Cephalon says a study shows that Nuvigil works to alleviate jet lag, and it is expected to ask the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to add jet lag as a new medical condition.
Many argue that more research is needed on existing drugs before we start thinking about new ones. Greely, for one, says we don't have any "real evidence about the effects, short-term or long-term," of Adderall and Ritalin, which are both used to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, on healthy people. As companies seek approval from the FDA for new drugs, if they seem likely to be used for enhancement, "we should require some research on those off-label uses," he says.
If a drug is truly quite safe, he says, the FDA could make an early decision to permit over-the-counter sales. On the other hand, it also could place tough limits on who could prescribe a particular drug or limit the number of pills per prescription.
In the end, if it's true that we only use a small part of our brain now, people are always going to try to improve on that, Annas says, "and drugs are a way in."
"But we certainly want to think this through and do careful, controlled studies before we move toward over-the-counter sales."
• Sarah More McCann contributed to this story
Adults are taking stimulants like Ritalin and Adderall, normally used to treat serious medical conditions, to boost their concentration and job performance. Critics ask: Is it making Americans too dependent on their medicine cabinets?
By Gregory M. Lamb | / staff writer
from the May 10, 2009 edition
Print this Letter to the Editor Republish Email and shareE-mail newsletters RSS
Boston - It's a play right out of the Twitter era and the family medicine cabinet. "Distracted," at an off-Broadway theater in New York, examines the ever-shortening attention span of modern life – including the moral conundrum of whether a restive 9-year-old should be given pills to alter his mood.
At one point, an actor breaks from character to address the audience directly and advocate the use of Ritalin and Adderall, two prescription stimulants, which, he says, helped him learn his lines. [Editor's note: The
original version wrongly called Ritalin and Adderall over-the-counter drugs.]
The aside encapsulates a growing debate in scientific circles and living rooms across America: Should adults be using so-called "brain-boosting" drugs – normally intended to treat serious medical conditions – to improve concentration and performance?
College students, of course, have been using stimulants for years: They take such things as modafinil, Adderall, and Ritalin (euphemistically known on campuses as "vitamin R") to enhance their memories for exams or to stay up all night and press out a term paper. By one estimate, at least 10 percent of American college students use prescription drugs as study aids.
Now the general adult population is turning to the pills, too – often illegally – to boost productivity and enhance their mental prowess on the job. Some experts laud the development: They think it's time to consider making the stimulants legal for brain-boosting functions.
But critics worry it will accelerate a slide toward a drugged society. In an era when people take everything from Viagra to enhance their romance to steroids to enhance their baseball statistics, they argue that the addition of so-called "cognitive enhancement" drugs will only make us more dependent on the pill bottle.
Ultimately, it raises the most fundamental questions about identity and what it means to be human: Are we the sum of our experiences or the sum of our pills? As Carl Elliott writes in his book, "Better than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream": "Today, enhancement technologies are not just instruments for self-improvement, or even self-transformation – they are tools for working on the soul."
LAST SUMMER, Michael Arrington, the founder of the influential technology blog TechCrunch, wrote a post asking, "How many Silicon Valley start-up executives are hopped up on Provigil?" He was referring to the stimulant, which is the brand name for modafinil, that doctors normally prescribe to treat excessive drowsiness associated with narcolepsy and other sleep disorders. "[T]he buzz lately is that it's the 'entrepreneur's drug of choice' around Silicon Valley," the post said.
In an online poll in the British science journal Nature last year, answered by 1,400 people in 60 countries, 1 in 5 said they had used drugs for nonmedical reasons "to stimulate their focus, concentration, or memory." Only about half had a prescription for the drug they were using. A third had bought the drugs over the Internet. And even though about half reported unpleasant side effects, 4 out of 5 "thought that healthy adults should be able to take the drugs if they want to," Nature reported.
Philip Harvey is one who uses them. A professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory University in Atlanta, he regularly flies from Georgia to Europe on business. To prepare for his flight, he takes modafinil. He uses the stimulant to feel alert and rested, despite lost sleep, allowing him to return to his family faster. He has no trouble getting a prescription from his doctor. "From Atlanta, I can get to Europe by 6 a.m. and give a 9 a.m. presentation," he says. "It lets you go and come back the same day, or go over one day and come back the next."
In the current debate over brain boosters, the focal point of much of the discussion has been a commentary in the December issue of Nature. Seven prominent bioethicists noted that the drugs "are 'disruptive technologies' that could have a profound effect on human life in the twenty-first century." While calling for more research to better understand the safety and effectiveness of use in healthy individuals, the piece went on to advocate that "mentally competent adults should be able to engage in cognitive enhancement using drugs."
In the months since, the paper has met with both hearty approval and deep reservations from scientists and other bioethicists. "Anything that can help our brains deal better with the complex challenges of the twenty-first century is to be not only welcomed but actively sought," wrote Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, in a letter to the journal.
The commentary served its purpose to "kick up" a needed discussion, says Henry Greely, a bioethicist and professor of law at Stanford University and one of the coauthors of the Nature commentary. He received far more e-mails about the article than for any other he's published. The aim, he said, was to argue that "enhancement is not fundamentally a dirty word."
"I think people should think of [drugs] as just one more of many different ways we try to improve our minds," Dr. Greely says. "I'm a teacher. I'm in the enhancement business. I'm trying to enhance my students' brains."
But others were disappointed with the commentary. "It's not really a piece of science. It's an editorial arguing that we should use more drugs," says George Annas, chairman of the department of Health Law, Bioethics, and Human Rights at Boston University. He wonders why an article taking the other side of the debate didn't accompany it, and why the authors called for looser strictures on use of the drugs before more is known about them. "The way you make sure they're not harmful is you do a study before you widely advise people to use them," he says.
Critics argue more time is needed with the petri dishes and field testing before the drugs are used as mind enhancers. "The reality [is] that there is very little research to document whether [these drugs] are universally beneficial, whether they could be detrimental, what are the long-term outcomes, what are the side effects," says Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a US government agency. "There's really very, very limited knowledge."
What troubles Dr. Volkow is how the commentary dismissed the dangers of these drugs, equating taking them with drinking coffee, "which is, to say the least, an irresponsible way to present it and an inaccurate one," she says.
In March, Volkow published a small preliminary study showing that taking modafinil might be addictive in humans, increasing the levels of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that plays a major role in addiction.
Nearly everyone talking about brain-boosting drugs agrees that they ought to be both safe and effective before being widely used. But some worry about other problems they present. Would workers, for example, feel coerced to use enhancement drugs in order to win promotions or even simply to keep their jobs?
"For example, what if hospitals started to demand that medical residents dose up on methylphenidate, a drug used to improve concentration, as a prerequisite for employment?" asks Jacob Appel in an article last year in the Journal of Medical Ethics called "When the boss turns pusher." Or what if fast-food chains insisted that employees take antidepressants to keep them calm and upbeat when confronted by dissatisfied customers?
Employers may face a dilemma. "Denying some individuals the opportunity to enhance in this way clearly undermines their right to do with their bodies as they choose," he says. "However, to permit some to engage in these enhancements may lead to an inevitable race to the bottom – or top – in which employers and market forces pressure more and more American workers to place their brains at the disposal of their bosses."
More broadly, some worry that as more brain-enhancing drugs come on the market in the next 10 to 15 years, countries may battle for "neuro competitive advantage" in the workforce. If you're a 58-year-old person living in Boston who's competing with a 25-year-old in Mumbai, for instance, you might be tempted to use the drugs – whether or not they're legal in the US, notes Zach Lynch, executive director of the Neurotechnology Industry Organization, a trade group.
Moreover, even if they are illegal, or regulated, enforcing those controls would be difficult. "Living in a global economy, I think it's going to be very hard to regulate the use of these [drugs] in the future, if they're safe and effective," Mr. Lynch says.
Brain-boosting drugs are already being considered for another workplace – the military. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is working on "all kinds of drugs to make you stronger, to make you eat less," says Dr. Annas. "They want soldiers to function for up to five days without sleep. That would certainly require drugs. Whether that would have any long-term consequences, I don't think anybody knows yet."
A drug called donepezil, developed to treat Alzheimer's disease, has been shown to modestly increase memory in healthy people. It may become a Viagra-like hit with baby boomers worried about cognitive decline. Work is also under way to use drugs or other methods to selectively erase memories, something that could be used to ease post-traumatic stress among soldiers returning from war, allowing them to forget what they did on the battlefield. Annas sees problems here. "I think we want to have remorse about killing," he says.
Advocates point out that humans already "enhance" their thinking in a variety of ways, from drinking beverages with caffeine (a known stimulant), to exercising to brighten their mood, to relying on a computer to increase knowledge, to simply getting a good night's sleep before a big test.
But for some, a caution light goes on when we're changing the way the brain works, particularly when so little is known about it. "Not only do we not have a model for how our brains do complex tasks, we can't even imagine one," Dr. Karl Deisseroth, a neuroscientist at Stanford University, told Wired magazine earlier this year.
AT THE MOST FUNDAMENTAL LEVEL, the drugs challenge perceptions of who we are. Some people believe the next big scientific revolution will be turning our technological prowess on the world within, notably our brains, rather than the world around us. Neuroscience, which includes the development of brain enhancers, is part of this "revolution."
In this realm, some experts suggest that using pills to alter thinking or mood comes too close to altering our sense of self. "In seeking by these [biotechnologies] to be better than we are or to like ourselves better than we do, we risk 'turning into someone else,' confounding the identity we have acquired through natural gift cultivated by genuinely lived experiences," wrote Leon Kass in a 2003 report on human enhancement from the President's Council on Bioethics.
Yet others argue the definition of what is one's "real" self will be up to the individual – and should be.
"It's not at all clear that people feel more themselves when they're unmedicated than when they're medicated," says James Hughes, director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies in Hartford, Conn. "Some people are going to feel more 'themselves' when they take the drugs, and some are not going to feel more themselves."
As drug and biotechnology companies look to expand their products and markets, more possibilities for illicit use may lie ahead. Cephalon Inc. is planning to launch Nuvigil, a longer-lasting version of Provigil, later this year. The company sold nearly $1 billion of Provigil last year, but the drug is going off patent in 2012. Cephalon says a study shows that Nuvigil works to alleviate jet lag, and it is expected to ask the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to add jet lag as a new medical condition.
Many argue that more research is needed on existing drugs before we start thinking about new ones. Greely, for one, says we don't have any "real evidence about the effects, short-term or long-term," of Adderall and Ritalin, which are both used to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, on healthy people. As companies seek approval from the FDA for new drugs, if they seem likely to be used for enhancement, "we should require some research on those off-label uses," he says.
If a drug is truly quite safe, he says, the FDA could make an early decision to permit over-the-counter sales. On the other hand, it also could place tough limits on who could prescribe a particular drug or limit the number of pills per prescription.
In the end, if it's true that we only use a small part of our brain now, people are always going to try to improve on that, Annas says, "and drugs are a way in."
"But we certainly want to think this through and do careful, controlled studies before we move toward over-the-counter sales."
• Sarah More McCann contributed to this story
Die Zeit, Germany
Germany Must Accept U.S. Request on Guantanamo Prisoners
"Reason and humanity demand that we comply with the request of the United States. Barack Obama was in office not 48 hours when he ordered the prison camp at Guantánamo closed within a year. For this he is deserving of the highest recognition - and all the help we can give."
By Mattias Nass
Translated By Jonathan Lobsien
May 21, 2009
Germany - Die Zeit - Original Article (German)
Detainees await processing at Guantanamo: Closing the facility is turning out to be a lot harder than opening it, with allies hesitant to accept those who will be released, and U.S. states unwilling to accept them, either - even if deemed 'not dangerous.'
BBC NEWS VIDEO: U.S. Congress blocks funding for closure of Guantanamo Bay, May 21, 00:01:32RealVideo
The names of nine Uyghurs are on the list that Barack Obama’s special envoy, Daniel Fried, recently handed over to the German government. They currently sit along with some 250 other detainees in the U.S. prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Germany, according to the request of the Obama government, may take in the Uyghurs in order to make the closure of the camp easier. According to a U.S. court, the nine pose no danger, but in their homeland of China, they would be threatened again with imprisonment and torture. Should Germany grant the men asylum? A fierce debate has erupted within the grand [ruling] coalition in Berlin concerning this matter. Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier (Social Democratic Party) is for hosting them, while Minister of the Interior Wolfgang Schäuble (Christian Democratic Union), as well as a few SDP insiders, object.
But of course! Reason and humanity demand that we comply with the request of the United States. Barack Obama was in office not 48 hours when he ordered the prison camp at Guantánamo closed within a year. For this he is deserving of the highest recognition - and all the help we can give.
Finally, after Europeans pushed George W. Bush for years, this institutionalized breach of the law will end. Angela Merkel put it this way: “The use of such prisons is incompatible with my understanding of the rule of law.” Now, at last, this shameful chapter is to be concluded.
Therefore, our answer to the request of the Americans can only be: Whoever's innocence is proven; whoever survived torture and understandably doesn't want to make America his new home but cannot return to his original country because they would be threatened with further persecution, they should find acceptance among us.
Posted by WORLDMEETS.US
Now however, hypocritical guardians of domestic and external security have been unleashed, as if the Americans wanted to see our security unhinged! As if they're being crafty to protect themselves from lawsuits seeking compensation (which, by the way, are just as easily conducted from Munich). As if they wanted to deflect the wrath of Beijing, which sees the Uyghurs at Guantánamo as East Turkestan terrorists, toward the naive Germans (who nevertheless renewed good business ties with China even after the chancellor received the Dalai Lama).
U.S. Vice President Joe Biden has stated: “These people are truly innocent. We're ready with all of our power to support them so that they integrate quickly [translated quote].” Naturally, the Chinese are more believable than Biden. One can and should investigate possible connections between the Uyghurs and the East Turkestan Islamic separatist movement.
The only thing one hears above the cries for “more information” is excuses, excuses, excuses! It is the same couldn’t-care-less morality exhibited by head of the Chancellery Frank-Walter Steinmeier in the case of Murat Kurnaz. There may even be something to these allegations! Incidentally: what's it to us?
Germany Must Accept U.S. Request on Guantanamo Prisoners
"Reason and humanity demand that we comply with the request of the United States. Barack Obama was in office not 48 hours when he ordered the prison camp at Guantánamo closed within a year. For this he is deserving of the highest recognition - and all the help we can give."
By Mattias Nass
Translated By Jonathan Lobsien
May 21, 2009
Germany - Die Zeit - Original Article (German)
Detainees await processing at Guantanamo: Closing the facility is turning out to be a lot harder than opening it, with allies hesitant to accept those who will be released, and U.S. states unwilling to accept them, either - even if deemed 'not dangerous.'
BBC NEWS VIDEO: U.S. Congress blocks funding for closure of Guantanamo Bay, May 21, 00:01:32RealVideo
The names of nine Uyghurs are on the list that Barack Obama’s special envoy, Daniel Fried, recently handed over to the German government. They currently sit along with some 250 other detainees in the U.S. prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Germany, according to the request of the Obama government, may take in the Uyghurs in order to make the closure of the camp easier. According to a U.S. court, the nine pose no danger, but in their homeland of China, they would be threatened again with imprisonment and torture. Should Germany grant the men asylum? A fierce debate has erupted within the grand [ruling] coalition in Berlin concerning this matter. Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier (Social Democratic Party) is for hosting them, while Minister of the Interior Wolfgang Schäuble (Christian Democratic Union), as well as a few SDP insiders, object.
But of course! Reason and humanity demand that we comply with the request of the United States. Barack Obama was in office not 48 hours when he ordered the prison camp at Guantánamo closed within a year. For this he is deserving of the highest recognition - and all the help we can give.
Finally, after Europeans pushed George W. Bush for years, this institutionalized breach of the law will end. Angela Merkel put it this way: “The use of such prisons is incompatible with my understanding of the rule of law.” Now, at last, this shameful chapter is to be concluded.
Therefore, our answer to the request of the Americans can only be: Whoever's innocence is proven; whoever survived torture and understandably doesn't want to make America his new home but cannot return to his original country because they would be threatened with further persecution, they should find acceptance among us.
Posted by WORLDMEETS.US
Now however, hypocritical guardians of domestic and external security have been unleashed, as if the Americans wanted to see our security unhinged! As if they're being crafty to protect themselves from lawsuits seeking compensation (which, by the way, are just as easily conducted from Munich). As if they wanted to deflect the wrath of Beijing, which sees the Uyghurs at Guantánamo as East Turkestan terrorists, toward the naive Germans (who nevertheless renewed good business ties with China even after the chancellor received the Dalai Lama).
U.S. Vice President Joe Biden has stated: “These people are truly innocent. We're ready with all of our power to support them so that they integrate quickly [translated quote].” Naturally, the Chinese are more believable than Biden. One can and should investigate possible connections between the Uyghurs and the East Turkestan Islamic separatist movement.
The only thing one hears above the cries for “more information” is excuses, excuses, excuses! It is the same couldn’t-care-less morality exhibited by head of the Chancellery Frank-Walter Steinmeier in the case of Murat Kurnaz. There may even be something to these allegations! Incidentally: what's it to us?
She’s With Stroger
She’s With Stroger
“Famous hothead” Chris Geovanis has emerged as a voice for the beleaguered Cook County Board president.
By Michael Miner
May 21, 2009
Chris Geovanis recalls the chat that sent her into action. It was with a “nice lady who considers herself politically progressive” and had just announced her intention to vote for the white, north-side challenger, Forrest Claypool, over black, south-side incumbent Cook County Board president John Stroger in the 2006 Democratic primary.
“She said, ‘I’m excited at the opportunity to vote for him—we need a reformer in there.’” says Geovanis. “I said, ‘What makes you think he’s a reformer? The man has a photo of Ayn Rand on his office wall.’ She said, ‘He’s independent—he’s not tied up with the machine.’ I said, ‘Darling, he was Daley’s chief of staff, not once but twice.’ She said, ‘I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that.’ I know why she didn’t—he’s the smooth-talking white boy, she took him at face value.
“That conversation was the final straw. The next day I took an unpaid leave of absence to work on John’s campaign.”
Which was the legal thing to do as Geovanis was a county employee, already working for Stroger in his communications office. She’s been writing and researching for the county for the past 17 years.
Then John Stroger had a stroke but defeated Claypool anyway, and then party bosses replaced him on the ticket with his son Todd, whose tainted election has helped make him the most scorned, ridiculed, and lambasted board president Cook County has ever known.
But when I heard Geovanis on the radio recently speaking for Todd Stroger, my estimation of him shot up. In the past year, back at work in his communications office, she’s emerged publicly as a name in the news and a voice on the newscasts—and a piercing voice at that. No mere empty suit would dare assign a Chris Geovanis to burnish his public image.
The thing about Stroger, she tells me, is that “he’s basically a very nice, extremely polite, somewhat reserved individual who is typically much more thoughtful and much less inclined to work on the slick sound bite than a lot of people we see running for and winning elective office. He’s not a smoothie.”
And though she concedes he’s made mistakes, she insists he’s unfairly getting hammered for everything wrong with county government even though he controls a small part of it—about $190 million of a $3 billion annual budget.
Not by everybody, of course. Here, for example, is the Reader’s Ben Joravsky wondering in March why the media—and the politicians running for Congress in the Fifth District—treated Stroger as a punching bag but laid off Mayor Daley: “The answer, I suspect is that they pull their punches when it comes to Daley because they don’t want to take on the real power in this town. Plus, there’s something about black patronage, as opposed to white patronage, that irritates the hell out of a lot of white people. So the north siders pound away at Stroger, an easy target without the political capital to pound back.”
And here’s John Kass in the Tribune:
“Stroger is the media’s favorite piñata because they’re not afraid of him. I’m no fan of Urkel’s, but let’s acknowledge his true role. He’s a hapless puppet, used to frighten the children of Chicagoland into believing that without the Daleys running things, the Urkels will get them. That’s been the subtext for years. If you can’t see race in that, then please have your eyes examined. Many who rip on Stroger for ‘corruption’ and support Cook County Commissioner Claypool (including many in the media) willfully ignore a critical fact: That Claypool was Daley’s chief of staff at City Hall when kinky deal after kinky deal went down, and not one peep then from the brave reformer, Sir Forrest of Claypool.”
“Those are two smart guys,” says Geovanis of Joravsky and Kass. When she preaches on the public persecution of Todd Stroger, the two columnists’ view of the hypocrisy of it all is scripture.
Geovanis also likes to say the journalistic ranks in Chicago have been so ravaged by layoffs that no one has the time or personnel any longer to probe beyond stereotypes, and that at the Sun-Times in particular—the paper that broke the story of Stroger’s $12,000 tax lien this month—“the facts will never trump the frame. The frame is that Todd Stroger needs to find another job. That frame comes from high up the food chain.”
So what about “Urkel”? I ask her. That’s Kass’s pet name for Stroger—after the nerdy black kid in the old sitcom Family Matters. “That language has been invoked around a dynamic that is racist to its core,” she says. So much for Kass.
Until she hooked up publicly with Stroger, I thought of Geovanis as primarily a zealot on behalf of the indy-media movement. But name a cause, and if she’s for it she will not be silenced. “I want to be clear,” she says. “There’s my day job and there’s my after-hours pro bono work. For my pro bono work, I guarantee you that if I’d worked for the city, I’d have been fired. That administration does not tolerate deviation from the norm, and Daley would certainly not have tolerated one of his own staffers protesting his retrograde policy on freedom of speech and police brutality.”
Freedom of speech?
“I’ve done the press for every important antiwar protest in the city since 2001 on a pro bono basis,” says Geovanis. “One of the huge issues has been the city’s refusal to allow people access to Michigan Avenue, so we’ve essentially had to mount legal permit battles with the city every year since the war began. It’s a standing free-speech fight with the city of Chicago.”
And police brutality?
“In the wake of the [1999] shootings of LaTanya Haggerty and Robert Russ there were three weeks of protests at City Hall. I coordinated those protests on my lunch hour.”
She didn’t have to leave the building.
Indy media figured in both her arrests. One time she was pinched during a protest at the Mexican consulate, “when an independent media colleague of ours was shot and killed in Oaxaca. I was told I couldn’t actually lean a picture of the guy killed against the consulate wall, and we went back and forth and it was clear he was looking for an excuse to arrest me.”
The other arrest I wrote about in 2002, introducing Geovanis to my readers as a “famous hothead in Chicago’s progressive media circles.” She was at a conference at Loyola University sponsored by Chicago Media Watch, a grassroots organization fighting the takeover of American media by a handful of corporate giants like the Tribune Company. (It was a different era.) Sut Jhally, a renowned exegete of marketing messages, made it clear in advance what his message would be—in his view the American public’s support for Israel was “the end result of perhaps the most powerful example of propaganda and public relations we can find in the world.” This being a message that divided the conference into two camps, CMW president Liane Casten decided the way to go was to send someone to the mike after Jhally spoke to give Israel’s side. Jhally and everyone who agreed with him were outraged.
As Casten began to introduce the pro-Israel speaker, Geovanis’s voice rang out from the floor. “Why? Why are you giving him equal time?” she shrieked. “You have done a disgusting disservice to media activists here like myself that you brought in under false pretext to have to listen to an apologist for a racist state.”
And she kept shrieking: “You have betrayed the principles of this organization. I’m ashamed to know you! I’m ashamed to know you! It’s disgusting! It’s disgusting. It’s disgraceful. You’re a disgrace. You sold out the basic principles of this organization, Liane!”
Casten called for security, and Geovanis was ordered to leave the campus. When instead she lit a cigarette, security turned her over to the Chicago police. She was charged with criminal trespass.
Ever been convicted? I ask Geovanis. “There’s no official city charge of lippiness,” she says. “So no convictions.”
I ask her what pro bono crusades she’s been up to lately.
“Oh my God,” she says. “Like today we were working on getting the word out about Gay Liberation Network cofounder Andy Thayer [a Chicagoan], who was just arrested in Moscow with 30 other LGBT activists. They’re protesting the big European pop music festival in Moscow. Russia is viciously hostile to gay rights, so much so that at annual pride events what typically happens is that the Moscow police arrest everyone and rightist thugs beat the shit out of everybody. That’s been the dynamic since the fall of the Soviet Union.”
And then there’s Viva Palestina. “It’s a joint project of the British progressive MP George Galloway and Ron Kovic. Locally we’re organizing for support.” The goal is to raise $10 million, buy medical supplies and ambulances in Cairo, and convoy them into Gaza. “If we’re able to pull this off,” she says, “it’ll be the single largest grassroots humanitarian aid campaign on behalf of the people of Gaza in U.S. history.”
She allows that in her years doing pro bono work as a county employee there have been bosses “who have looked askance.” In the mid-90s she discreetly did her movement writing under the nom de guerre Lilith del Cerdo. “I drew the first name from the old Hebrew myth,” she explains. “Lilith was a powerful woman of ancient mythology and an absolute stone feminist. She did not tolerate patriarchy and male oppression. And ‘del cerdo’ of course means ‘of the pig,’ a wise and extremely intelligent animal that gets mightily maligned.”
But she’s out in the open now. “I never got any grief from John Stroger about this work, I never got any grief from [interim president] Bobbie Steele about this work, and I have never gotten any grief from Todd Stroger about this work. Todd Stroger is totally aware of my activist work. John and Todd have both been very opposed to the war in Iraq. Of course this has never gotten any coverage.”
“Famous hothead” Chris Geovanis has emerged as a voice for the beleaguered Cook County Board president.
By Michael Miner
May 21, 2009
Chris Geovanis recalls the chat that sent her into action. It was with a “nice lady who considers herself politically progressive” and had just announced her intention to vote for the white, north-side challenger, Forrest Claypool, over black, south-side incumbent Cook County Board president John Stroger in the 2006 Democratic primary.
“She said, ‘I’m excited at the opportunity to vote for him—we need a reformer in there.’” says Geovanis. “I said, ‘What makes you think he’s a reformer? The man has a photo of Ayn Rand on his office wall.’ She said, ‘He’s independent—he’s not tied up with the machine.’ I said, ‘Darling, he was Daley’s chief of staff, not once but twice.’ She said, ‘I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that.’ I know why she didn’t—he’s the smooth-talking white boy, she took him at face value.
“That conversation was the final straw. The next day I took an unpaid leave of absence to work on John’s campaign.”
Which was the legal thing to do as Geovanis was a county employee, already working for Stroger in his communications office. She’s been writing and researching for the county for the past 17 years.
Then John Stroger had a stroke but defeated Claypool anyway, and then party bosses replaced him on the ticket with his son Todd, whose tainted election has helped make him the most scorned, ridiculed, and lambasted board president Cook County has ever known.
But when I heard Geovanis on the radio recently speaking for Todd Stroger, my estimation of him shot up. In the past year, back at work in his communications office, she’s emerged publicly as a name in the news and a voice on the newscasts—and a piercing voice at that. No mere empty suit would dare assign a Chris Geovanis to burnish his public image.
The thing about Stroger, she tells me, is that “he’s basically a very nice, extremely polite, somewhat reserved individual who is typically much more thoughtful and much less inclined to work on the slick sound bite than a lot of people we see running for and winning elective office. He’s not a smoothie.”
And though she concedes he’s made mistakes, she insists he’s unfairly getting hammered for everything wrong with county government even though he controls a small part of it—about $190 million of a $3 billion annual budget.
Not by everybody, of course. Here, for example, is the Reader’s Ben Joravsky wondering in March why the media—and the politicians running for Congress in the Fifth District—treated Stroger as a punching bag but laid off Mayor Daley: “The answer, I suspect is that they pull their punches when it comes to Daley because they don’t want to take on the real power in this town. Plus, there’s something about black patronage, as opposed to white patronage, that irritates the hell out of a lot of white people. So the north siders pound away at Stroger, an easy target without the political capital to pound back.”
And here’s John Kass in the Tribune:
“Stroger is the media’s favorite piñata because they’re not afraid of him. I’m no fan of Urkel’s, but let’s acknowledge his true role. He’s a hapless puppet, used to frighten the children of Chicagoland into believing that without the Daleys running things, the Urkels will get them. That’s been the subtext for years. If you can’t see race in that, then please have your eyes examined. Many who rip on Stroger for ‘corruption’ and support Cook County Commissioner Claypool (including many in the media) willfully ignore a critical fact: That Claypool was Daley’s chief of staff at City Hall when kinky deal after kinky deal went down, and not one peep then from the brave reformer, Sir Forrest of Claypool.”
“Those are two smart guys,” says Geovanis of Joravsky and Kass. When she preaches on the public persecution of Todd Stroger, the two columnists’ view of the hypocrisy of it all is scripture.
Geovanis also likes to say the journalistic ranks in Chicago have been so ravaged by layoffs that no one has the time or personnel any longer to probe beyond stereotypes, and that at the Sun-Times in particular—the paper that broke the story of Stroger’s $12,000 tax lien this month—“the facts will never trump the frame. The frame is that Todd Stroger needs to find another job. That frame comes from high up the food chain.”
So what about “Urkel”? I ask her. That’s Kass’s pet name for Stroger—after the nerdy black kid in the old sitcom Family Matters. “That language has been invoked around a dynamic that is racist to its core,” she says. So much for Kass.
Until she hooked up publicly with Stroger, I thought of Geovanis as primarily a zealot on behalf of the indy-media movement. But name a cause, and if she’s for it she will not be silenced. “I want to be clear,” she says. “There’s my day job and there’s my after-hours pro bono work. For my pro bono work, I guarantee you that if I’d worked for the city, I’d have been fired. That administration does not tolerate deviation from the norm, and Daley would certainly not have tolerated one of his own staffers protesting his retrograde policy on freedom of speech and police brutality.”
Freedom of speech?
“I’ve done the press for every important antiwar protest in the city since 2001 on a pro bono basis,” says Geovanis. “One of the huge issues has been the city’s refusal to allow people access to Michigan Avenue, so we’ve essentially had to mount legal permit battles with the city every year since the war began. It’s a standing free-speech fight with the city of Chicago.”
And police brutality?
“In the wake of the [1999] shootings of LaTanya Haggerty and Robert Russ there were three weeks of protests at City Hall. I coordinated those protests on my lunch hour.”
She didn’t have to leave the building.
Indy media figured in both her arrests. One time she was pinched during a protest at the Mexican consulate, “when an independent media colleague of ours was shot and killed in Oaxaca. I was told I couldn’t actually lean a picture of the guy killed against the consulate wall, and we went back and forth and it was clear he was looking for an excuse to arrest me.”
The other arrest I wrote about in 2002, introducing Geovanis to my readers as a “famous hothead in Chicago’s progressive media circles.” She was at a conference at Loyola University sponsored by Chicago Media Watch, a grassroots organization fighting the takeover of American media by a handful of corporate giants like the Tribune Company. (It was a different era.) Sut Jhally, a renowned exegete of marketing messages, made it clear in advance what his message would be—in his view the American public’s support for Israel was “the end result of perhaps the most powerful example of propaganda and public relations we can find in the world.” This being a message that divided the conference into two camps, CMW president Liane Casten decided the way to go was to send someone to the mike after Jhally spoke to give Israel’s side. Jhally and everyone who agreed with him were outraged.
As Casten began to introduce the pro-Israel speaker, Geovanis’s voice rang out from the floor. “Why? Why are you giving him equal time?” she shrieked. “You have done a disgusting disservice to media activists here like myself that you brought in under false pretext to have to listen to an apologist for a racist state.”
And she kept shrieking: “You have betrayed the principles of this organization. I’m ashamed to know you! I’m ashamed to know you! It’s disgusting! It’s disgusting. It’s disgraceful. You’re a disgrace. You sold out the basic principles of this organization, Liane!”
Casten called for security, and Geovanis was ordered to leave the campus. When instead she lit a cigarette, security turned her over to the Chicago police. She was charged with criminal trespass.
Ever been convicted? I ask Geovanis. “There’s no official city charge of lippiness,” she says. “So no convictions.”
I ask her what pro bono crusades she’s been up to lately.
“Oh my God,” she says. “Like today we were working on getting the word out about Gay Liberation Network cofounder Andy Thayer [a Chicagoan], who was just arrested in Moscow with 30 other LGBT activists. They’re protesting the big European pop music festival in Moscow. Russia is viciously hostile to gay rights, so much so that at annual pride events what typically happens is that the Moscow police arrest everyone and rightist thugs beat the shit out of everybody. That’s been the dynamic since the fall of the Soviet Union.”
And then there’s Viva Palestina. “It’s a joint project of the British progressive MP George Galloway and Ron Kovic. Locally we’re organizing for support.” The goal is to raise $10 million, buy medical supplies and ambulances in Cairo, and convoy them into Gaza. “If we’re able to pull this off,” she says, “it’ll be the single largest grassroots humanitarian aid campaign on behalf of the people of Gaza in U.S. history.”
She allows that in her years doing pro bono work as a county employee there have been bosses “who have looked askance.” In the mid-90s she discreetly did her movement writing under the nom de guerre Lilith del Cerdo. “I drew the first name from the old Hebrew myth,” she explains. “Lilith was a powerful woman of ancient mythology and an absolute stone feminist. She did not tolerate patriarchy and male oppression. And ‘del cerdo’ of course means ‘of the pig,’ a wise and extremely intelligent animal that gets mightily maligned.”
But she’s out in the open now. “I never got any grief from John Stroger about this work, I never got any grief from [interim president] Bobbie Steele about this work, and I have never gotten any grief from Todd Stroger about this work. Todd Stroger is totally aware of my activist work. John and Todd have both been very opposed to the war in Iraq. Of course this has never gotten any coverage.”
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Another Resister
Afghanistan: US soldier says sorry for occupation’s crimes
Tony Iltis
16 May 2009
At an April 5 anti-NATO protest in Strasboug, Matthis Chiroux apologised to Afghan feminist Malalai Joya for the crimes of the US-led occupation of Joya’s country.
Chiroux is a US soldier facing prosecution for refusing to be deployed to Iraq on the grounds that the US-led occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan are unjust and criminal. Joya is an opponent of the foreign occupation and an elected representative in Afghanistan’s parliament unable to take her seat due to death threats from US-backed Islamic fundamentalists.
Common Dreams said on April 15 that Chiroux, who served in Afghanistan in 2005, told Joya: “I want to tell you, Malalai, how sorry I am for the violence that my Army has done to your people, to your country. I want to apologize to you for the role that I played in it.”
He presented Joya with a dove pin to symbolise peace.
Joya accepted the apology, but said: “It is your government that must apologise first of all to great people like you: they are deceiving you and they use you for not a good cause; they use you for a war which only adds to the suffering of my people.
“And it is your government that must apologize to the Afghan people for invading their land and imposing a mafia government of warlords and drug-lords on them.”
This was echoed in a statement by Kabul students read at a May 10 demonstration against US air strikes in Bala Boluk that killed 147 people on May 4: “Our people are fed up with Taliban beheadings and suicide bombings. On the other hand, the massacre of civilians by the American forces is a crime that our people will never forget.”
Killing surge
The impact of US President Barack Obama’s “troop surge” in Afghanistan was felt in the May 4 Bala Boluk massacre of 147 civilians, including 95 children. While the monthly numbers of Afghan civilians killed by occupation forces has increased under Obama, so has the number of insurgent attacks.
The US military has denied claims that it used white phosphurus in the air strikes, despite reports by Afghan doctors of “highly unusual burns” in some of the victims. The use of white phosphorus as a weapon is banned under international law. However, its use by US forces was documented in November in Fallujah, Iraq.
The extra 21,000 soldiers deployed by Obama brings the US-led occupation force to 70,000. Australian PM Kevin Rudd has had his own mini-surge on April 29, increasing the Australian contingent by 450 soldiers to 1550.
The political endorsement contained in the increase is helpful for Obama, who has had difficulty persuading Washington’s NATO allies to increase the size of their contingents in Afghanistan.
The website of the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), , said on April 30 that the number of Afghan civilians killed by occupation forces in the first three months of 2009 was 10% higher than the same period in 2008.
Air attacks were responsible for 80% of these deaths. US air strikes increasingly use unpiloted drones, responsible for 46% of Afghan civilian deaths caused by the occupation forces in 2009.
Facing re-election in August, US-installed President Hamid Karzai has tried to distance himself from his sponsors.
In a May 8 CNN interview he said: “We demand an end to these operations, an end to air strikes ... We cannot justify in any manner, for whatever number of Taliban or for whatever number of significantly important terrorists, the accidental or otherwise loss of civilians.”
The December report by European think-tank International Council on Security and Development said the Taliban held a permanent presence in 72% of Afghanistan, compared with 54% a year earlier.
Far from weakening the Taliban, the US-led occupation is gaining it recruits.
The December 16 Guardian quoted Mullah Zubiallah Akhund, a Taliban leader in Uruzgan, as saying: “The people who are fighting with the Taliban are the brothers, uncles and relatives of those killed by the Americans. They have joined the Taliban and are fighting because they want to avenge their brothers, fathers or cousins.
“There are now Taliban in every village; many of them have rejoined the movement after the savage attacks carried out by Americans.”
Pakistan
Pakistan has remained a base of both the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The Pakistani military and political elite has tried to stay engaged with both sides in the Afghan conflict, receiving military aid from the US while still sponsoring the Taliban.
Both sides have killed Pakistani civilians: the Taliban through terrorist attacks and brutal practices in areas it controls, and the US through drone attacks.
In February, Pakistan’s government made a peace deal that surrendered territory in the Swat Valley to the Taliban. However, after Taliban infiltration came within 100 kilometres of the capital Islamabad, Pakistan's army began an offensive in April that has displaced about 1 million civilians, a May 14 BBC report said.
The US invasion of Afghanistan came with a propaganda offensive portraying the war as a fight for democracy, development and gender equality (claimed as “Western values”). The reality is the Afghan pro-occupation forces are identical to the Taliban and their allies in ideology and practice.
The Karzai government’s recent Shia Marriage Law, which legalises rape in marriage, is evidence of this.
Statistics published by RAWA on April 30 said Western development aid spending in Afghanistan was only one 20th of expenditure on the military occupation. Much of that goes to Afghan warlords, Western corporations or the bloated expat community in Kabul — whose uncommonly high wages have pushed up rents in the impoverished, war-ravaged city.
Rejecting foreign occupation as a solution to Afghanistan’s problems, Joya called for “support for the democratic-minded people of Afghanistan, who are the only alternative for the future of Afghanistan: they alone are able to fight against terrorism and fundamentalism.
“The suffering people of Afghanistan, nobody listens to their voice — while [occupation] troops are killing our innocent people, most of them women and children, and on the other side these Taliban and the Northern Alliance terrorists are continuing their fascism under the rule of the US/NATO.”
From: International News, Green Left Weekly issue #795 20 May 2009.
Tony Iltis
16 May 2009
At an April 5 anti-NATO protest in Strasboug, Matthis Chiroux apologised to Afghan feminist Malalai Joya for the crimes of the US-led occupation of Joya’s country.
Chiroux is a US soldier facing prosecution for refusing to be deployed to Iraq on the grounds that the US-led occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan are unjust and criminal. Joya is an opponent of the foreign occupation and an elected representative in Afghanistan’s parliament unable to take her seat due to death threats from US-backed Islamic fundamentalists.
Common Dreams said on April 15 that Chiroux, who served in Afghanistan in 2005, told Joya: “I want to tell you, Malalai, how sorry I am for the violence that my Army has done to your people, to your country. I want to apologize to you for the role that I played in it.”
He presented Joya with a dove pin to symbolise peace.
Joya accepted the apology, but said: “It is your government that must apologise first of all to great people like you: they are deceiving you and they use you for not a good cause; they use you for a war which only adds to the suffering of my people.
“And it is your government that must apologize to the Afghan people for invading their land and imposing a mafia government of warlords and drug-lords on them.”
This was echoed in a statement by Kabul students read at a May 10 demonstration against US air strikes in Bala Boluk that killed 147 people on May 4: “Our people are fed up with Taliban beheadings and suicide bombings. On the other hand, the massacre of civilians by the American forces is a crime that our people will never forget.”
Killing surge
The impact of US President Barack Obama’s “troop surge” in Afghanistan was felt in the May 4 Bala Boluk massacre of 147 civilians, including 95 children. While the monthly numbers of Afghan civilians killed by occupation forces has increased under Obama, so has the number of insurgent attacks.
The US military has denied claims that it used white phosphurus in the air strikes, despite reports by Afghan doctors of “highly unusual burns” in some of the victims. The use of white phosphorus as a weapon is banned under international law. However, its use by US forces was documented in November in Fallujah, Iraq.
The extra 21,000 soldiers deployed by Obama brings the US-led occupation force to 70,000. Australian PM Kevin Rudd has had his own mini-surge on April 29, increasing the Australian contingent by 450 soldiers to 1550.
The political endorsement contained in the increase is helpful for Obama, who has had difficulty persuading Washington’s NATO allies to increase the size of their contingents in Afghanistan.
The website of the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), , said on April 30 that the number of Afghan civilians killed by occupation forces in the first three months of 2009 was 10% higher than the same period in 2008.
Air attacks were responsible for 80% of these deaths. US air strikes increasingly use unpiloted drones, responsible for 46% of Afghan civilian deaths caused by the occupation forces in 2009.
Facing re-election in August, US-installed President Hamid Karzai has tried to distance himself from his sponsors.
In a May 8 CNN interview he said: “We demand an end to these operations, an end to air strikes ... We cannot justify in any manner, for whatever number of Taliban or for whatever number of significantly important terrorists, the accidental or otherwise loss of civilians.”
The December report by European think-tank International Council on Security and Development said the Taliban held a permanent presence in 72% of Afghanistan, compared with 54% a year earlier.
Far from weakening the Taliban, the US-led occupation is gaining it recruits.
The December 16 Guardian quoted Mullah Zubiallah Akhund, a Taliban leader in Uruzgan, as saying: “The people who are fighting with the Taliban are the brothers, uncles and relatives of those killed by the Americans. They have joined the Taliban and are fighting because they want to avenge their brothers, fathers or cousins.
“There are now Taliban in every village; many of them have rejoined the movement after the savage attacks carried out by Americans.”
Pakistan
Pakistan has remained a base of both the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The Pakistani military and political elite has tried to stay engaged with both sides in the Afghan conflict, receiving military aid from the US while still sponsoring the Taliban.
Both sides have killed Pakistani civilians: the Taliban through terrorist attacks and brutal practices in areas it controls, and the US through drone attacks.
In February, Pakistan’s government made a peace deal that surrendered territory in the Swat Valley to the Taliban. However, after Taliban infiltration came within 100 kilometres of the capital Islamabad, Pakistan's army began an offensive in April that has displaced about 1 million civilians, a May 14 BBC report said.
The US invasion of Afghanistan came with a propaganda offensive portraying the war as a fight for democracy, development and gender equality (claimed as “Western values”). The reality is the Afghan pro-occupation forces are identical to the Taliban and their allies in ideology and practice.
The Karzai government’s recent Shia Marriage Law, which legalises rape in marriage, is evidence of this.
Statistics published by RAWA on April 30 said Western development aid spending in Afghanistan was only one 20th of expenditure on the military occupation. Much of that goes to Afghan warlords, Western corporations or the bloated expat community in Kabul — whose uncommonly high wages have pushed up rents in the impoverished, war-ravaged city.
Rejecting foreign occupation as a solution to Afghanistan’s problems, Joya called for “support for the democratic-minded people of Afghanistan, who are the only alternative for the future of Afghanistan: they alone are able to fight against terrorism and fundamentalism.
“The suffering people of Afghanistan, nobody listens to their voice — while [occupation] troops are killing our innocent people, most of them women and children, and on the other side these Taliban and the Northern Alliance terrorists are continuing their fascism under the rule of the US/NATO.”
From: International News, Green Left Weekly issue #795 20 May 2009.
From the feminist blog, Gender Across Borders:
A looming threat from Al Qaeda & the Taliban militia and an in-flux of Afghan refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs) has left Pakistan in a worst refugee crisis since the partition in 1947. US led drone strikes and Pakistan military’s onslaught against the Talibans has crippled a great mass of Afghan and Pakistani civilians. Why do states always carry out post-mortem reports on innocent war causalities, instead of ensuring civilians’ security prior to the attacks?
In view of Pakistan and Afghanistan’s corrupt governments and the rising number of people uprooted by the growing conflict in north-west Pakistan, can we trust these governments enough to tackle the fragile situation or is it a case of another humanitarian disaster? Perhaps another Kashmir, another Palestine. The victims in the end are always the civilians, who end up losing their only prized possession; their identity.
May 5, 2009: Afghan officials say up to 120 non-combatants were killed when US warplanes dropped bombs on two villages in Bala Baluk, a Taliban-controlled district in the western province of Farah.
May 11, 2009: UN estimates, over 360,000 people have escaped from the three worst affected areas of Dir, Swat and Buner.
May 12, 2009: A total of 501,496 displaced people from the new influx had been formally registered by authorities, with UNHCR’s help, since May 2.
May 13, 2009: The number of people who have fled the fighting in northwest Pakistan this month and been registered or recorded by authorities reached 670,906 on Wednesday, up from just over half a million the day before.
May 15, 2009: Almost 1 million displaced people so far registered this month by authorities and UNHCR are in addition to another 550,000 uprooted people who fled fighting since last August. According to the latest figures, 987,140 people have been registered from the current influx, including 907,298 outside camps and 79,842 in camps.
What will be the outcome of Pakistan’s face-off with the Talibans? Will success be measured on the battlefield in the Swat Valley and the Pakistan-Afghanistan border or will it be measured by the number of civilian casualties?
Refugee camps; like Chotha Lahore near Swabi are now housing a mass of IDPs fleeing out of the Swat Valley. This is in addition to the 360,000+ displaced people who have been provided shelter in the refugee camps in the northwest. Most of the camp inhabitants have not only lost their homes, but also their land and any other source of income, which was ensuring their livelihood. Will these people have the opportunity to re-start? Let’s take a brief overview of some of the past happenings:
2008;
An official at Iran’s Interior Ministry says the estimated 1.5 million Afghan refugees illegally living in the country could face arrest and detention for up to five years. He says Iranian officials now have legal authority to begin moving unregistered refugees into detention camps with prison-like conditions. Iran began expelling tens of thousands of Afghan immigrants last April by loading them on buses and dropping them off at the Iran-Afghanistan border.
2009;
Afghan refugees in Pakistan say that arrests of Afghans are increasing in the country’s eastern Punjab Province. Awami National Party spokesman Zahid Khan told RFE/RL’s Radio Free Afghanistan that what the “government is doing against [the ethnic] Pashtuns and Afghans deserves condemnation.”
Arrests have escalated since Baytullah Mehsoud, Pakistan’s Taliban leader, announced that he had sent suicide bombers into the province to attack a military school in Lahore. Pakistani authorities in Lahore, Rawalpindi, and Islamabad arrested some 800 Afghans after Mehsoud claimed responsibility for the attack.
Alongside the refugee crisis stands the threat posed by Pakistan’s extremist political groups and organizations, like Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD); which was found to be linked with last November’s Mumbai massacre. The charity group has reestablished itself in the wake of the refugee crisis by providing relief to refugees under a new brand name; Falah-e-Insaniat (Human Welfare) Foundation.
Have a look at these interesting remarks by Congressman Ron Paul:
“We are bombing a sovereign country,” Paul said. “Where do we get the authority to do that? Did the Pakistani government give us written permission? Did the Congress give us written permission to expand the war and start bombing in Pakistan?”.
“Many, many thousands of Pashtuns that are right smack in the middle, getting killed by our bombs, and then we wonder why they object to our policies over there.”
“How do you win the hearts and minds of these people if we’re seen as invaders and occupies?” he also asked.
As Paul finished his remarks, a Pakistani in the audience commented, “This American lawmaker has defended Pakistan more eloquently than our ambassador ever has.”
Peace in Afghanistan cannot be achieved with a flick of a switch or by waging wars; how much more bloodshed till the Talibans give in to gender parity and world peace? Pakistan and Afghanistan’s leaders might be shaking hands today, but how coordinated will their strategies be? And what if we find out tomorrow that the Talibans have now migrated to Iran, will that be the next target? How many targets are we going to chase; how many civilians are we willing to sacrifice?
While the clock ticks away, I pray for the lives of young girls and boys who are caught in this world of war and violence. May they not sleep to hunger and tears, may they get the opportunity to reach for their stars.
from → Activism, Afghanistan, Asia, Family, Immigration/Refugee Status, Iran, Pakistan, Politics, Race/Ethnicity, United States, War/violence
A looming threat from Al Qaeda & the Taliban militia and an in-flux of Afghan refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs) has left Pakistan in a worst refugee crisis since the partition in 1947. US led drone strikes and Pakistan military’s onslaught against the Talibans has crippled a great mass of Afghan and Pakistani civilians. Why do states always carry out post-mortem reports on innocent war causalities, instead of ensuring civilians’ security prior to the attacks?
In view of Pakistan and Afghanistan’s corrupt governments and the rising number of people uprooted by the growing conflict in north-west Pakistan, can we trust these governments enough to tackle the fragile situation or is it a case of another humanitarian disaster? Perhaps another Kashmir, another Palestine. The victims in the end are always the civilians, who end up losing their only prized possession; their identity.
May 5, 2009: Afghan officials say up to 120 non-combatants were killed when US warplanes dropped bombs on two villages in Bala Baluk, a Taliban-controlled district in the western province of Farah.
May 11, 2009: UN estimates, over 360,000 people have escaped from the three worst affected areas of Dir, Swat and Buner.
May 12, 2009: A total of 501,496 displaced people from the new influx had been formally registered by authorities, with UNHCR’s help, since May 2.
May 13, 2009: The number of people who have fled the fighting in northwest Pakistan this month and been registered or recorded by authorities reached 670,906 on Wednesday, up from just over half a million the day before.
May 15, 2009: Almost 1 million displaced people so far registered this month by authorities and UNHCR are in addition to another 550,000 uprooted people who fled fighting since last August. According to the latest figures, 987,140 people have been registered from the current influx, including 907,298 outside camps and 79,842 in camps.
What will be the outcome of Pakistan’s face-off with the Talibans? Will success be measured on the battlefield in the Swat Valley and the Pakistan-Afghanistan border or will it be measured by the number of civilian casualties?
Refugee camps; like Chotha Lahore near Swabi are now housing a mass of IDPs fleeing out of the Swat Valley. This is in addition to the 360,000+ displaced people who have been provided shelter in the refugee camps in the northwest. Most of the camp inhabitants have not only lost their homes, but also their land and any other source of income, which was ensuring their livelihood. Will these people have the opportunity to re-start? Let’s take a brief overview of some of the past happenings:
2008;
An official at Iran’s Interior Ministry says the estimated 1.5 million Afghan refugees illegally living in the country could face arrest and detention for up to five years. He says Iranian officials now have legal authority to begin moving unregistered refugees into detention camps with prison-like conditions. Iran began expelling tens of thousands of Afghan immigrants last April by loading them on buses and dropping them off at the Iran-Afghanistan border.
2009;
Afghan refugees in Pakistan say that arrests of Afghans are increasing in the country’s eastern Punjab Province. Awami National Party spokesman Zahid Khan told RFE/RL’s Radio Free Afghanistan that what the “government is doing against [the ethnic] Pashtuns and Afghans deserves condemnation.”
Arrests have escalated since Baytullah Mehsoud, Pakistan’s Taliban leader, announced that he had sent suicide bombers into the province to attack a military school in Lahore. Pakistani authorities in Lahore, Rawalpindi, and Islamabad arrested some 800 Afghans after Mehsoud claimed responsibility for the attack.
Alongside the refugee crisis stands the threat posed by Pakistan’s extremist political groups and organizations, like Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD); which was found to be linked with last November’s Mumbai massacre. The charity group has reestablished itself in the wake of the refugee crisis by providing relief to refugees under a new brand name; Falah-e-Insaniat (Human Welfare) Foundation.
Have a look at these interesting remarks by Congressman Ron Paul:
“We are bombing a sovereign country,” Paul said. “Where do we get the authority to do that? Did the Pakistani government give us written permission? Did the Congress give us written permission to expand the war and start bombing in Pakistan?”.
“Many, many thousands of Pashtuns that are right smack in the middle, getting killed by our bombs, and then we wonder why they object to our policies over there.”
“How do you win the hearts and minds of these people if we’re seen as invaders and occupies?” he also asked.
As Paul finished his remarks, a Pakistani in the audience commented, “This American lawmaker has defended Pakistan more eloquently than our ambassador ever has.”
Peace in Afghanistan cannot be achieved with a flick of a switch or by waging wars; how much more bloodshed till the Talibans give in to gender parity and world peace? Pakistan and Afghanistan’s leaders might be shaking hands today, but how coordinated will their strategies be? And what if we find out tomorrow that the Talibans have now migrated to Iran, will that be the next target? How many targets are we going to chase; how many civilians are we willing to sacrifice?
While the clock ticks away, I pray for the lives of young girls and boys who are caught in this world of war and violence. May they not sleep to hunger and tears, may they get the opportunity to reach for their stars.
from → Activism, Afghanistan, Asia, Family, Immigration/Refugee Status, Iran, Pakistan, Politics, Race/Ethnicity, United States, War/violence
I found this comment forum really sweet under this game.
But the whole thing was kind of ugh. So Americans having been making all these games about shooting up the Middle East, and now the Middle East makes one about shooting Israel. Yuk.
Anyway, the article is at the following link, and the comments are below it.
Hope everyone is having a wonderful evening. It was twenty six degrees out here today, and the light was at the edge of glowing butter without being overwhelming. I have some pictures, but can't upload them just now.
But the whole thing was kind of ugh. So Americans having been making all these games about shooting up the Middle East, and now the Middle East makes one about shooting Israel. Yuk.
Anyway, the article is at the following link, and the comments are below it.
Hope everyone is having a wonderful evening. It was twenty six degrees out here today, and the light was at the edge of glowing butter without being overwhelming. I have some pictures, but can't upload them just now.
This is one of this month, May's, selections, from poetsagainstwar. You can visit them at http://poetsagainstthewar.org.
Jumah
You’ve attempted suicide twelve times and now you’re on another hunger strike. Strapped into a restraint chair, a feeding tube forced up your nose, down your throat, and into your stomach, you scream. Officials at Guantánamo pump you full of liquid nutrients and laxatives and keep you in the chair until you shit yourself. A soldier tells you he is sorry. You thank him. He doesn’t want your thanks. He says he wants you to know that we’re not all bad. Another soldier cries. These are examples, you write in a letter your lawyer smuggles out of Camp Delta, to show the reader that there are some soldiers who have humanity… The chair in which you’re lashed, Jumah, was made by someone who lives in a small town near where I live. I drive there. Is anything happening in Denison? I ask the woman behind the desk at the Budget Inn.
Not that I know of, she says, handing me a key.
It is unusually cold for early September in Iowa. I’m shivering in my thin Shut Down Guantánamo T-shirt.
I sleep in my clothes, wake at eight, check out of my room, and breakfast at the Trio Café across from Landscapes Unlimited, a cement lawn ornament store on Denison’s main drag — Lincoln Highway. Inside, the walls are decorated with paintings of animals dressed in hunting caps with guns. There are papers at the counter. On the front page of the Sioux City Journal is a photo of Iraqis burning an effigy of the Pope. I order an English muffin and coffee.
Everyone here knows each other — it’s obvious by the way they talk and joke. I pretend to read the paper, but really I’m eavesdropping. At one table, a woman talks about her mother: I tried her cell phone and she ain’t answering. She’s got half-timers — forgets half of what you tell her.
The other talk is of cutting hay, the price of houses, and of living in the country where you don’t have to see your neighbors.
The first person I say more than a few words to in Denison is dressed in a blue vest. I meet her at Thrifty White, a drug store in the city center. No, we don’t stock film, she apologizes. It expires before we can sell it and everyone shoots digital these days. She has shockingly blue eyes and her white hair is cut short. I ask if she’s lived here long. Forty-two years.
She tells me she moved here to bury her first husband. Then she met her second one. I ask if she knows Tom Hogan, the man who made the chair in which you’re presently being tortured, Jumah. He’s a super guy, Jan says. Someone told me he was a general in the military! Heard him on the radio this morning talking about the storm. Have you been out to his house and seen his chairs? I used to live next door to him. He should be down at the sheriff’s office now. I’m sure he’ll talk to you.
I exit the Thrifty White and stroll past the coming attractions window at the Reed Theater on Broadway. The Odd Will Get Even, the displayed movie poster reads. I continue on, stepping around a construction site and a wooden billboard announcing the birth of a new jail. At the police station, a man on the other side of a thick window buzzes me in. I climb the stairs and answer a thin woman’s what do you want? Minutes later, I’m shaking hands with Tom Hogan.
Jumah, the reason I’m telling you all this is the same reason I keep writing you letters that keep getting returned, some ripped open, others unread, all of the envelopes stamped refused: because my not writing would imply writing doesn’t matter, and I cannot stand such a thought. Even if what I write is simply a record of barbarism (as Walter Benjamin maintains there is no cultural document that is not at the same time a record of barbarism), it is still a record. Ultimately, though, I know the real issue is whether such records are read and responded to… Did you know, Jumah, that when asked for a nonviolent solution to WWII, Mahatma Gandhi proposed that those imprisoned in camps commit suicide to show the others outside what they claimed they couldn’t see, and that thereafter George Orwell stated such nonviolent forms of protest depend upon a sane society — a society in which people respond to what they see morally?
Gandhi is my hero. I’m a pacifist, but not always. Bear with me because it’s gruesome, but if I believe in my cause enough to pour gasoline over my enemy’s women and children and set them on fire — because that’s what war is — then I’ll do it, Tom Hogan tells me.
I sit across from him in his office above the county jail, hunched in my thick, zipped-up, hooded sweatshirt, as he winds a rubber band around his hand, then rubs it back and forth across the desk that has on it a six-inch model pig next to a piece of bullet-shattered glass. Named after what slaughterhouse workers call aggressive pigs, ‘The Biting Sow Award’ is Hogan’s way of rewarding those who admit their petty professional mistakes. He places the pig with its one ear cocked, obscenely turned up snout, and ridiculous grin, on officers’ desks whenever they confess to bending a police car fender, say, or forgetting a bullet proof vest at a crime scene. The sow came back to bite Hogan, though, when he got a speeding ticket in a neighboring county this February.
Hogan is talking about what he calls ‘plausible deniability.’ He tells me he hopes that if he lived next door to Auschwitz he wouldn’t ignore the suffering. I say I’ve come to ask him the same questions I am asking myself about the roles we play in other peoples’ suffering because I can’t sit in my room fearing that people are being tortured and not do something. I’m not sure I believe in a just war, I say. I don’t think I could set fire to anybody. I believe in protest. But I’m not sure it works anymore. Anyway, everyone should be allowed at least this human right, especially those detained at Guantánamo.
The problem is, Hogan argues, protest does work. Look at Gandhi. If he was alive, I bet he’d wish he hadn’t done what he did. He’d want the British back there. And if Martin Luther King had lived, he would have thought, ‘What did I do?!’ when he saw the Watts Riots —
I disagree, I say. I think ‘those people,’ — I mark the quotations in the air with my fingers — are happy to have their independence!
Ha, Hogan snorts. Then what about the Iraqis?
Do they have independence? I ask. Or an occupied country?
I think prisoners should be allowed to protest. But as soon as they’re in danger, we should intervene. If those chairs did help save lives, I’m proud, Hogan smiles.
It all began when a colleague broke his own arm trying to restrain someone. Anytime you restrain someone there’s a risk, Hogan explains.
He lists examples. When he gets to the hog tie, he acts it out for me. It’s where you cuff the arms and then tuck the legs behind them like this. The hog tie can asphyxiate. So we made the chair.
We? I ask.
My wife and I. Then hospitals wanted it. I said okay. I could see the need. Then the military wanted it —
I interrupt to ask whether he’ll continue to sell the chair to the military given twenty-five of his chairs have ended up at Guantánamo. He doesn’t answer. Instead he says, Commandant Hood at called me the other day and said, ‘I bet you never got a call from Cuba before.’ Then he told me, ‘I just want to let you know we’re not torturing anybody down here.’ That made me feel better. I slept better that night.
Let me put it another way. If you knew absolutely that the chair was being used to torture, would you stop selling it? I ask him.
I’d like to believe I am good. We all have good and bad in us. You never know. I’m a capitalist. But I deplore torture. I think any time you demean or humiliate someone that’s torture and we should uphold the Geneva Conventions every single one. As soon as you say you can waterboard, it’s a slippery slope. But you see I’m not sure how my chair’s being used.
I look out the window to my left. The day has turned overcast.
In Denison’s basement jail Hogan shows me the chair. An exact replica of the one you’re in now, Jumah, it sits against the block wall looking like a weight-lifting bench someone’s folded in half. We walk over to it and Hogan reads me the warning rubber-banded to the chair handle, underlining each word with his finger. Then he says, A mentally ill person told me it should have padding and be painted blue, so we changed it. She said, ‘I didn’t think you would listen to me because I’m mentally ill,’ but I said, ‘I think you’re the person we should be listening to.’
A guard leads a young woman in an orange uniform into a cell directly to the left of where Hogan and I are standing. I watch as the prisoner unfolds a black blanket and wraps it around her shoulders. Have you heard of an autistic woman who designed a restraint chair like yours to calm herself? I ask Hogan.
No, I haven’t, he says. Then he turns to the guard. Do you remember the prisoner who used to ask to be put in the chair? We would tell him, ‘No, you have to be violent to be put in the chair,’ and he’d say, ‘I’ll get violent then!’ He would beg for it?
If you’re talking about the same person I’m thinking of, I think it was a mental problem, the guard nods. He’d sit there and he’d fight it a little. Then he’d say, ‘Okay, I feel better now.’
The restraint chair breaks your hunger strike, Jumah. You aren’t near death. They don’t force feed you to save you, even though Hogan says he designed the chair to help save lives. I study the photograph taken of you before you were detained. Dressed in a blue sweater, you hold a pencil to your mouth as you talk on the phone. I study your ruffled brown hair and averted eyes and imagine smoking cigarettes with you in a garden and talking about books. I’m not sure why I feel close to you, close enough to imagine a correspondence. Perhaps, initially, it was seeing this photo in which you seem so like me — because this snapshot portrays the recognizable need you, too, have to communicate. I have read your prison narrative.
I have read, As I hold my pen, my hand is shaking; I have read of your being urinated on, Jumah, of your being made to walk barefoot on barbed wire, forced to breathe chemical odors, stripped of clothes and left naked with no pillow, no mattress, only the cold metal of a cage. I have read of petrol injected into your penis and of the time your lawyer came and you excused yourself, made a noose, and jumped from the sink in the restroom. No one, Jumah, should be shackled to the ground beneath a naked, menstruating female guard. No one. How, in the face of this, can I write to you? And of what can I write? Of the color of the sweater I am wearing — pale-green?
Topsy
In 1903, we used electricity to put you to death after you killed three men in three years. At first it was thought you — a ten foot tall, twenty foot long, domesticated Indian elephant — would publicly hang, but an animal rights organization protested. Hanging, they insisted, was cruel and inhumane. Electrocution had recently replaced the gallows in New York State (after a dentist proposed the idea that death by electrocution was neither cruel nor painful), so it was decided that you, too, should ‘humanely’ fry. First you were fed carrots poisoned with cyanide. Then you were dressed in copper shoes, covered with electrodes, and led to a special platform on Coney Island where you’d lived and performed for a number of years.
In ten seconds you were dead. One thousand five hundred people gathered to watch and Thomas Edison caught it all on film.
The most obviously devastating footage in Mr. Death — a documentary about Fred Leuchter, electric chair specialist and Holocaust denier — is its appropriation of Edison’s short film of your electrocution. In it, you prance. There is a sense in your mammothness of your superiority. Then rope-like fasteners are strung to your unsuspecting body. (On the chairs Leuchter both oversees and rebuilds, such fasteners are referred to as non-incremental restraint systems and are fashioned out of nylon.) Ultimately, you jerk and collapse, hide smoking.
Leuchten, in German, means to be lit or shining. Leuchter is a chandelier. Leuchter, the man, traveled to Auschwitz for his honeymoon and chipped away at gas chambers while his wife waited for him in the car. I don’t know that we ever slept in the same bed there, Leuchter’s wife comments in Mr. Death.
Their relationship didn’t last. Leuchter doesn’t speak of this in Mr. Death, but talks instead about the electric chair and how messy it is. People, he says, urinate and defecate in the chair. As urine is a conductor, his job, he argues, is to make sure the persons doing the electrocuting don’t also get electrocuted.
Mr. Death plays on my computer, but I’m not watching. I am on my back on the floor of my Colonial Terrace apartment in Iowa City, studying the ceiling. Leuchter’s monotone babbling is frightening: How do I sleep at night? I sleep very well at night knowing these persons are going to have a humane execution…
What is humane, Topsy? Is it shooting prisoners full of electricity so they can suffer less when it comes to their state-determined deaths? I think of your life — of the domesticating done to you, and I see you being led to the special platform where they electrocuted you all the more clearly. They tricked you. You thought you were performing and you pranced. I rewind Mr. Death to your electrocution. You are luminous. The film is silent, shot as if in a state of moral and emotional anesthesia.
It plays on
Jumah
You’ve attempted suicide twelve times and now you’re on another hunger strike. Strapped into a restraint chair, a feeding tube forced up your nose, down your throat, and into your stomach, you scream. Officials at Guantánamo pump you full of liquid nutrients and laxatives and keep you in the chair until you shit yourself. A soldier tells you he is sorry. You thank him. He doesn’t want your thanks. He says he wants you to know that we’re not all bad. Another soldier cries. These are examples, you write in a letter your lawyer smuggles out of Camp Delta, to show the reader that there are some soldiers who have humanity… The chair in which you’re lashed, Jumah, was made by someone who lives in a small town near where I live. I drive there. Is anything happening in Denison? I ask the woman behind the desk at the Budget Inn.
Not that I know of, she says, handing me a key.
It is unusually cold for early September in Iowa. I’m shivering in my thin Shut Down Guantánamo T-shirt.
I sleep in my clothes, wake at eight, check out of my room, and breakfast at the Trio Café across from Landscapes Unlimited, a cement lawn ornament store on Denison’s main drag — Lincoln Highway. Inside, the walls are decorated with paintings of animals dressed in hunting caps with guns. There are papers at the counter. On the front page of the Sioux City Journal is a photo of Iraqis burning an effigy of the Pope. I order an English muffin and coffee.
Everyone here knows each other — it’s obvious by the way they talk and joke. I pretend to read the paper, but really I’m eavesdropping. At one table, a woman talks about her mother: I tried her cell phone and she ain’t answering. She’s got half-timers — forgets half of what you tell her.
The other talk is of cutting hay, the price of houses, and of living in the country where you don’t have to see your neighbors.
The first person I say more than a few words to in Denison is dressed in a blue vest. I meet her at Thrifty White, a drug store in the city center. No, we don’t stock film, she apologizes. It expires before we can sell it and everyone shoots digital these days. She has shockingly blue eyes and her white hair is cut short. I ask if she’s lived here long. Forty-two years.
She tells me she moved here to bury her first husband. Then she met her second one. I ask if she knows Tom Hogan, the man who made the chair in which you’re presently being tortured, Jumah. He’s a super guy, Jan says. Someone told me he was a general in the military! Heard him on the radio this morning talking about the storm. Have you been out to his house and seen his chairs? I used to live next door to him. He should be down at the sheriff’s office now. I’m sure he’ll talk to you.
I exit the Thrifty White and stroll past the coming attractions window at the Reed Theater on Broadway. The Odd Will Get Even, the displayed movie poster reads. I continue on, stepping around a construction site and a wooden billboard announcing the birth of a new jail. At the police station, a man on the other side of a thick window buzzes me in. I climb the stairs and answer a thin woman’s what do you want? Minutes later, I’m shaking hands with Tom Hogan.
Jumah, the reason I’m telling you all this is the same reason I keep writing you letters that keep getting returned, some ripped open, others unread, all of the envelopes stamped refused: because my not writing would imply writing doesn’t matter, and I cannot stand such a thought. Even if what I write is simply a record of barbarism (as Walter Benjamin maintains there is no cultural document that is not at the same time a record of barbarism), it is still a record. Ultimately, though, I know the real issue is whether such records are read and responded to… Did you know, Jumah, that when asked for a nonviolent solution to WWII, Mahatma Gandhi proposed that those imprisoned in camps commit suicide to show the others outside what they claimed they couldn’t see, and that thereafter George Orwell stated such nonviolent forms of protest depend upon a sane society — a society in which people respond to what they see morally?
Gandhi is my hero. I’m a pacifist, but not always. Bear with me because it’s gruesome, but if I believe in my cause enough to pour gasoline over my enemy’s women and children and set them on fire — because that’s what war is — then I’ll do it, Tom Hogan tells me.
I sit across from him in his office above the county jail, hunched in my thick, zipped-up, hooded sweatshirt, as he winds a rubber band around his hand, then rubs it back and forth across the desk that has on it a six-inch model pig next to a piece of bullet-shattered glass. Named after what slaughterhouse workers call aggressive pigs, ‘The Biting Sow Award’ is Hogan’s way of rewarding those who admit their petty professional mistakes. He places the pig with its one ear cocked, obscenely turned up snout, and ridiculous grin, on officers’ desks whenever they confess to bending a police car fender, say, or forgetting a bullet proof vest at a crime scene. The sow came back to bite Hogan, though, when he got a speeding ticket in a neighboring county this February.
Hogan is talking about what he calls ‘plausible deniability.’ He tells me he hopes that if he lived next door to Auschwitz he wouldn’t ignore the suffering. I say I’ve come to ask him the same questions I am asking myself about the roles we play in other peoples’ suffering because I can’t sit in my room fearing that people are being tortured and not do something. I’m not sure I believe in a just war, I say. I don’t think I could set fire to anybody. I believe in protest. But I’m not sure it works anymore. Anyway, everyone should be allowed at least this human right, especially those detained at Guantánamo.
The problem is, Hogan argues, protest does work. Look at Gandhi. If he was alive, I bet he’d wish he hadn’t done what he did. He’d want the British back there. And if Martin Luther King had lived, he would have thought, ‘What did I do?!’ when he saw the Watts Riots —
I disagree, I say. I think ‘those people,’ — I mark the quotations in the air with my fingers — are happy to have their independence!
Ha, Hogan snorts. Then what about the Iraqis?
Do they have independence? I ask. Or an occupied country?
I think prisoners should be allowed to protest. But as soon as they’re in danger, we should intervene. If those chairs did help save lives, I’m proud, Hogan smiles.
It all began when a colleague broke his own arm trying to restrain someone. Anytime you restrain someone there’s a risk, Hogan explains.
He lists examples. When he gets to the hog tie, he acts it out for me. It’s where you cuff the arms and then tuck the legs behind them like this. The hog tie can asphyxiate. So we made the chair.
We? I ask.
My wife and I. Then hospitals wanted it. I said okay. I could see the need. Then the military wanted it —
I interrupt to ask whether he’ll continue to sell the chair to the military given twenty-five of his chairs have ended up at Guantánamo. He doesn’t answer. Instead he says, Commandant Hood at called me the other day and said, ‘I bet you never got a call from Cuba before.’ Then he told me, ‘I just want to let you know we’re not torturing anybody down here.’ That made me feel better. I slept better that night.
Let me put it another way. If you knew absolutely that the chair was being used to torture, would you stop selling it? I ask him.
I’d like to believe I am good. We all have good and bad in us. You never know. I’m a capitalist. But I deplore torture. I think any time you demean or humiliate someone that’s torture and we should uphold the Geneva Conventions every single one. As soon as you say you can waterboard, it’s a slippery slope. But you see I’m not sure how my chair’s being used.
I look out the window to my left. The day has turned overcast.
In Denison’s basement jail Hogan shows me the chair. An exact replica of the one you’re in now, Jumah, it sits against the block wall looking like a weight-lifting bench someone’s folded in half. We walk over to it and Hogan reads me the warning rubber-banded to the chair handle, underlining each word with his finger. Then he says, A mentally ill person told me it should have padding and be painted blue, so we changed it. She said, ‘I didn’t think you would listen to me because I’m mentally ill,’ but I said, ‘I think you’re the person we should be listening to.’
A guard leads a young woman in an orange uniform into a cell directly to the left of where Hogan and I are standing. I watch as the prisoner unfolds a black blanket and wraps it around her shoulders. Have you heard of an autistic woman who designed a restraint chair like yours to calm herself? I ask Hogan.
No, I haven’t, he says. Then he turns to the guard. Do you remember the prisoner who used to ask to be put in the chair? We would tell him, ‘No, you have to be violent to be put in the chair,’ and he’d say, ‘I’ll get violent then!’ He would beg for it?
If you’re talking about the same person I’m thinking of, I think it was a mental problem, the guard nods. He’d sit there and he’d fight it a little. Then he’d say, ‘Okay, I feel better now.’
The restraint chair breaks your hunger strike, Jumah. You aren’t near death. They don’t force feed you to save you, even though Hogan says he designed the chair to help save lives. I study the photograph taken of you before you were detained. Dressed in a blue sweater, you hold a pencil to your mouth as you talk on the phone. I study your ruffled brown hair and averted eyes and imagine smoking cigarettes with you in a garden and talking about books. I’m not sure why I feel close to you, close enough to imagine a correspondence. Perhaps, initially, it was seeing this photo in which you seem so like me — because this snapshot portrays the recognizable need you, too, have to communicate. I have read your prison narrative.
I have read, As I hold my pen, my hand is shaking; I have read of your being urinated on, Jumah, of your being made to walk barefoot on barbed wire, forced to breathe chemical odors, stripped of clothes and left naked with no pillow, no mattress, only the cold metal of a cage. I have read of petrol injected into your penis and of the time your lawyer came and you excused yourself, made a noose, and jumped from the sink in the restroom. No one, Jumah, should be shackled to the ground beneath a naked, menstruating female guard. No one. How, in the face of this, can I write to you? And of what can I write? Of the color of the sweater I am wearing — pale-green?
Topsy
In 1903, we used electricity to put you to death after you killed three men in three years. At first it was thought you — a ten foot tall, twenty foot long, domesticated Indian elephant — would publicly hang, but an animal rights organization protested. Hanging, they insisted, was cruel and inhumane. Electrocution had recently replaced the gallows in New York State (after a dentist proposed the idea that death by electrocution was neither cruel nor painful), so it was decided that you, too, should ‘humanely’ fry. First you were fed carrots poisoned with cyanide. Then you were dressed in copper shoes, covered with electrodes, and led to a special platform on Coney Island where you’d lived and performed for a number of years.
In ten seconds you were dead. One thousand five hundred people gathered to watch and Thomas Edison caught it all on film.
The most obviously devastating footage in Mr. Death — a documentary about Fred Leuchter, electric chair specialist and Holocaust denier — is its appropriation of Edison’s short film of your electrocution. In it, you prance. There is a sense in your mammothness of your superiority. Then rope-like fasteners are strung to your unsuspecting body. (On the chairs Leuchter both oversees and rebuilds, such fasteners are referred to as non-incremental restraint systems and are fashioned out of nylon.) Ultimately, you jerk and collapse, hide smoking.
Leuchten, in German, means to be lit or shining. Leuchter is a chandelier. Leuchter, the man, traveled to Auschwitz for his honeymoon and chipped away at gas chambers while his wife waited for him in the car. I don’t know that we ever slept in the same bed there, Leuchter’s wife comments in Mr. Death.
Their relationship didn’t last. Leuchter doesn’t speak of this in Mr. Death, but talks instead about the electric chair and how messy it is. People, he says, urinate and defecate in the chair. As urine is a conductor, his job, he argues, is to make sure the persons doing the electrocuting don’t also get electrocuted.
Mr. Death plays on my computer, but I’m not watching. I am on my back on the floor of my Colonial Terrace apartment in Iowa City, studying the ceiling. Leuchter’s monotone babbling is frightening: How do I sleep at night? I sleep very well at night knowing these persons are going to have a humane execution…
What is humane, Topsy? Is it shooting prisoners full of electricity so they can suffer less when it comes to their state-determined deaths? I think of your life — of the domesticating done to you, and I see you being led to the special platform where they electrocuted you all the more clearly. They tricked you. You thought you were performing and you pranced. I rewind Mr. Death to your electrocution. You are luminous. The film is silent, shot as if in a state of moral and emotional anesthesia.
It plays on
Sixty Dead
Troops kill 60 rebels in Afghanistan
Published: 05.23.09, 14:27 / Israel News
Troops killed 60 militants and seized their largest-ever drugs haul, in a just-ended operation in a Taliban stronghold and opium-production center in southern Afghanistan, the US military said Saturday.
The operation in the southern province of Helmand ended overnight when troops used air strikes to destroy their massive haul of 92 tonnes of drugs, heroin-processing chemicals and bomb-making materials, it said in a statement. (AFP)
Published: 05.23.09, 14:27 / Israel News
Troops killed 60 militants and seized their largest-ever drugs haul, in a just-ended operation in a Taliban stronghold and opium-production center in southern Afghanistan, the US military said Saturday.
The operation in the southern province of Helmand ended overnight when troops used air strikes to destroy their massive haul of 92 tonnes of drugs, heroin-processing chemicals and bomb-making materials, it said in a statement. (AFP)
No Succour, No Safety, No Sanction
Can you imagine that there is no safe place on earth for these people? How consumnately dreadful.
Afghan refugees say IDPs’ arrival will add to their miseries
By Fawad Ali Shah
KARACHI: Afghan refugees living on the outskirts of the city suspect that the issue of internally displaced persons (IDPs) would badly affect their lives and would add to their miseries.
Muhammad Ghaffar, a resident of Mohajir camp located outside Sohrab Goth, is already feeling the heat. “Prior to the IDP issue, the police would take bribes from the Afghan refugees one way or the other,” he said, however, for the past few weeks, he alleged that the police have doubled the bribe they ask for and have also started to torture the Afghan refugees. Ghaffar claims that at least 84 Afghan refugees have been arrested during the last two weeks.
Afghan refugees in Karachi have been alleging that the officials of the police are manhandling and abusing them. “We don’t want to be involved in the internal affairs of Pakistan,” said Ghaffar, who works as a rickshaw driver. Stating that the influx of IDPs has added to their miseries as they are finding it difficult to work in the city, Ghaffar reveals that during past week, he has paid Rs 800 as bribe to the police. Gul Mar Jan, an Afghan community elder, claims that members of his community have been attacked more than five times in the last two weeks. The attitude of the people towards the Afghan refugees is changing due to the political environment and the influx of IDPs. “The police and Rangers are treating us very badly,” the community elder said, adding that the lives of Afghan refugees residing in the city are no longer safe. “Yesterday, a policeman in Landhi arrested two Afghan youngsters without a reason,” Jan went on to say. He laments that after the influx of IDPs in the city, the people’s behavior towards Afghan refugees is rapidly changing. “The issue of Swat is Pakistan’s internal problem and we have nothing to do with it,” he says. “Please secure our lives,” he appealed to the provincial government.
However, Maulvi Nisar Ahamd, an Afghan religious leader, sees no change in the atmosphere. “This has been the attitude of the police towards Afghan refugees from the very beginning,” he revealed. When contacted West Zone DIG Zafar Abbas Bukhari told Daily Times that the police have taken stringent security measures to ensure that terrorists do not enter the city under the guise of IDPs. He said as there are more Afghans in the West Zone of the city, security has been heightened there and raids are conducted in Afghan localities following tip-offs regarding presence of terrorists in these areas.
Afghan refugees say IDPs’ arrival will add to their miseries
By Fawad Ali Shah
KARACHI: Afghan refugees living on the outskirts of the city suspect that the issue of internally displaced persons (IDPs) would badly affect their lives and would add to their miseries.
Muhammad Ghaffar, a resident of Mohajir camp located outside Sohrab Goth, is already feeling the heat. “Prior to the IDP issue, the police would take bribes from the Afghan refugees one way or the other,” he said, however, for the past few weeks, he alleged that the police have doubled the bribe they ask for and have also started to torture the Afghan refugees. Ghaffar claims that at least 84 Afghan refugees have been arrested during the last two weeks.
Afghan refugees in Karachi have been alleging that the officials of the police are manhandling and abusing them. “We don’t want to be involved in the internal affairs of Pakistan,” said Ghaffar, who works as a rickshaw driver. Stating that the influx of IDPs has added to their miseries as they are finding it difficult to work in the city, Ghaffar reveals that during past week, he has paid Rs 800 as bribe to the police. Gul Mar Jan, an Afghan community elder, claims that members of his community have been attacked more than five times in the last two weeks. The attitude of the people towards the Afghan refugees is changing due to the political environment and the influx of IDPs. “The police and Rangers are treating us very badly,” the community elder said, adding that the lives of Afghan refugees residing in the city are no longer safe. “Yesterday, a policeman in Landhi arrested two Afghan youngsters without a reason,” Jan went on to say. He laments that after the influx of IDPs in the city, the people’s behavior towards Afghan refugees is rapidly changing. “The issue of Swat is Pakistan’s internal problem and we have nothing to do with it,” he says. “Please secure our lives,” he appealed to the provincial government.
However, Maulvi Nisar Ahamd, an Afghan religious leader, sees no change in the atmosphere. “This has been the attitude of the police towards Afghan refugees from the very beginning,” he revealed. When contacted West Zone DIG Zafar Abbas Bukhari told Daily Times that the police have taken stringent security measures to ensure that terrorists do not enter the city under the guise of IDPs. He said as there are more Afghans in the West Zone of the city, security has been heightened there and raids are conducted in Afghan localities following tip-offs regarding presence of terrorists in these areas.
America's Abyss
So this is it: the US could have a peace deal, but they don't want one.
Timing not right for deal with Taliban: US
17 hours ago
WASHINGTON (AFP) — The chances of a deal between the Afghan government and the Taliban are remote as long as the insurgents enjoy momentum on the battlefield, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates said.
In an interview with NBC television's "Today" show, Gates said the time was not yet ripe for the kind of reconciliation that occurred in Iraq with armed opponents of the Baghdad government.
"I think the view of most of us is that until the momentum of the battle turns against the Taliban... that the likelihood of any kind of reconciliation on the part of the leadership of the Taliban is very small," Gates said.
Asked about a New York Times report that Taliban factions were in talks with the Kabul government and pushing for a deadline for the withdrawal of NATO-led forces, Gates said Washington would "absolutely not" accept any such idea.
The defense secretary said "the end of all such wars involves some measure of reconciliation. We've seen it in Iraq."
"And so the real issue is, will these guys reconcile on the terms of the Afghan government, or are they dictating terms to the Afghan government?"
The Taliban and associated insurgents in Afghanistan have stepped up violent attacks in the past two years despite the presence of 70,000 foreign troops.
President Barack Obama has approved the deployment of more than 21,000 additional US troops to Afghanistan to try to stem the rising violence, especially in the volatile south.
By the end of the year, US officials say the US force will reach 68,000.
The Taliban were ousted in 2001 in a US-led invasion which sent many of its fighters into Pakistan.
Timing not right for deal with Taliban: US
17 hours ago
WASHINGTON (AFP) — The chances of a deal between the Afghan government and the Taliban are remote as long as the insurgents enjoy momentum on the battlefield, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates said.
In an interview with NBC television's "Today" show, Gates said the time was not yet ripe for the kind of reconciliation that occurred in Iraq with armed opponents of the Baghdad government.
"I think the view of most of us is that until the momentum of the battle turns against the Taliban... that the likelihood of any kind of reconciliation on the part of the leadership of the Taliban is very small," Gates said.
Asked about a New York Times report that Taliban factions were in talks with the Kabul government and pushing for a deadline for the withdrawal of NATO-led forces, Gates said Washington would "absolutely not" accept any such idea.
The defense secretary said "the end of all such wars involves some measure of reconciliation. We've seen it in Iraq."
"And so the real issue is, will these guys reconcile on the terms of the Afghan government, or are they dictating terms to the Afghan government?"
The Taliban and associated insurgents in Afghanistan have stepped up violent attacks in the past two years despite the presence of 70,000 foreign troops.
President Barack Obama has approved the deployment of more than 21,000 additional US troops to Afghanistan to try to stem the rising violence, especially in the volatile south.
By the end of the year, US officials say the US force will reach 68,000.
The Taliban were ousted in 2001 in a US-led invasion which sent many of its fighters into Pakistan.
Free
Letter from one of the Toronto 18, who is going to be released:
The following letter was written to an Ontario judge by the first person convicted under Canada's terrorism laws for his involvement in the group dubbed the Toronto 18. He was 17 when charged in 2006 and cannot be identified.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I would like your Honour to know that my goal is to complete my education and obtain employment. I want to complete high school and then college. My focus is on positively contributing to society.
I know that getting an education and finding work is going to be very, very difficult because of my conviction for a terrorist offence. It is hard to imagine anyone that would want to study beside me or hire someone with that type of criminal record.
At times I am concerned about the bad feelings people will have about me because of my record. But all I can hope for is that people are willing to take the time to get to know me and do not pre-judge me. I really hope that even if one person gives me a chance, I will get an opportunity to study and work and show that I am a good person. If no school accepts me, then I will look at all options such as taking classes by correspondence.
If I am given a chance, I promise I will work hard. I, like almost everyone else, want to live a good, peaceful life. I plan to get married one day, have a family and have a good job like an engineer.
I also want the court to know that since being charged, I have thought a lot about my life, and that I want to live a life that does not involve any criminal activity and is free from dependence on others. When I told the probation officer that I have learned and benefited from my time in jail, I only meant that I have come to realize the importance of making my own decisions. I do not want to rely on others in the future.
It has been almost three years since I was charged. I have spent about two years in jail. Since that time I have gone through a lot. I have gone from a teenager to a young man. This has been very stressful for me and my family and I see the harm I have caused to everyone. I would like a chance to learn, achieve and grow as a man.
I am not a violent person and that I do not believe in participating in any acts of violence against anyone. As a convert, I can really understand the importance of being tolerant and accepting of others. My parents and extended family are not Muslim and I love them and do not believe they are deserving of less respect by anyone simply because they are not Muslim. I would not participate in anything that would involve hurting others.
I converted to Islam to have a better life and the sense of belonging to a good community. I am still learning about Islam and I still want to be a good Muslim. I understand that being a Muslim is a way of life that involves living a clean, peaceful life with a focus on prayer and giving back to the community. It also teaches you to stay away from alcohol and drugs. When I converted I was young and learning something for the first time. It took me a while to truly understand new ideas. In the future, I will be sure to learn about religion from people who are good and tolerant.
I will not associate with anyone that has a view of life or religion that does not believe in being a productive and peaceful member of society. Hopefully in the future when my life is on track, I will also speak to young people about the importance of staying away from bad influences.
I shoplifted in the past. I am sorry for that and will not do that again. I don't believe that Muslims are permitted to steal from anyone. That was my bad habit and it is my fault only.
I have spent a lot of time in jail and would like to go home and move on with my life. I miss my family, and my mother is ill. I want to be there for them. I also miss school.
Throughout this experience I have not become angry with anyone. Instead I have focused on living a better life when I am released.
The following letter was written to an Ontario judge by the first person convicted under Canada's terrorism laws for his involvement in the group dubbed the Toronto 18. He was 17 when charged in 2006 and cannot be identified.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I would like your Honour to know that my goal is to complete my education and obtain employment. I want to complete high school and then college. My focus is on positively contributing to society.
I know that getting an education and finding work is going to be very, very difficult because of my conviction for a terrorist offence. It is hard to imagine anyone that would want to study beside me or hire someone with that type of criminal record.
At times I am concerned about the bad feelings people will have about me because of my record. But all I can hope for is that people are willing to take the time to get to know me and do not pre-judge me. I really hope that even if one person gives me a chance, I will get an opportunity to study and work and show that I am a good person. If no school accepts me, then I will look at all options such as taking classes by correspondence.
If I am given a chance, I promise I will work hard. I, like almost everyone else, want to live a good, peaceful life. I plan to get married one day, have a family and have a good job like an engineer.
I also want the court to know that since being charged, I have thought a lot about my life, and that I want to live a life that does not involve any criminal activity and is free from dependence on others. When I told the probation officer that I have learned and benefited from my time in jail, I only meant that I have come to realize the importance of making my own decisions. I do not want to rely on others in the future.
It has been almost three years since I was charged. I have spent about two years in jail. Since that time I have gone through a lot. I have gone from a teenager to a young man. This has been very stressful for me and my family and I see the harm I have caused to everyone. I would like a chance to learn, achieve and grow as a man.
I am not a violent person and that I do not believe in participating in any acts of violence against anyone. As a convert, I can really understand the importance of being tolerant and accepting of others. My parents and extended family are not Muslim and I love them and do not believe they are deserving of less respect by anyone simply because they are not Muslim. I would not participate in anything that would involve hurting others.
I converted to Islam to have a better life and the sense of belonging to a good community. I am still learning about Islam and I still want to be a good Muslim. I understand that being a Muslim is a way of life that involves living a clean, peaceful life with a focus on prayer and giving back to the community. It also teaches you to stay away from alcohol and drugs. When I converted I was young and learning something for the first time. It took me a while to truly understand new ideas. In the future, I will be sure to learn about religion from people who are good and tolerant.
I will not associate with anyone that has a view of life or religion that does not believe in being a productive and peaceful member of society. Hopefully in the future when my life is on track, I will also speak to young people about the importance of staying away from bad influences.
I shoplifted in the past. I am sorry for that and will not do that again. I don't believe that Muslims are permitted to steal from anyone. That was my bad habit and it is my fault only.
I have spent a lot of time in jail and would like to go home and move on with my life. I miss my family, and my mother is ill. I want to be there for them. I also miss school.
Throughout this experience I have not become angry with anyone. Instead I have focused on living a better life when I am released.
Super Maximillian
Aren't prisons for those people who have actually committed crimes?
You can hit a golf ball from the Bear Paw Golf Course into the federal prison complex outside Florence, state Rep. Buffie McFadyen says.
It'd be a heckuva poke, maybe 400 yards. But McFadyen's point is made: the Florence Federal Correctional Complex, 40 miles down the road from Colorado Springs, is not in the middle of nowhere, as Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California said the other day during debate over what to do with war-on-terrorism detainees at the Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
To many in this country and abroad, the Gitmo operation is a symbol of how far former President George W. Bush bent America's legal and moral values after 9/11. In one of his first acts as president, Barack Obama gave the Pentagon 12 months to shut it down.
A debate has been simmering ever since, and it sharpened last Wednesday with a vote by the U.S. Senate to deny the administration the $80 million it sought to close Gitmo.
The debate offers ample proof that at least one American value is still intact - NIMBYism. Nobody wants the 240 detainees in Gitmo to wind up in their backyards.
A lot of Coloradans are getting their backs up when ADX Florence - aka Supermax - enters the conversation. Supermax, the toughest of the Florence prisons, is home to America's worst inmates. McFadyen called it "the most maximum-security federal penitentiary in the country, if not the world."
Other sites mentioned by military officials as possible locations for Guantanamo inmates include the Army prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., the Marines' Camp Pendleton, Calif., and the Navy's brig in Charleston, S.C. All are military operations, so the detainees would not have to be transferred from the military justice system to the civil system.
"Military detainees should not be transported to and held at Supermax because it is not a military facility," said Sen. Michael Bennet. Colorado's other U.S. senator, Mark Udall, also opposes such transfers. A spokeswoman said "his strong preference would be for detainees to stay within the military prison system."
But the military-civil technicality seems to have been eclipsed in the current debate, which is focusing on the supposed threat that the detainees would pose to guards and residents of nearby communities.
When Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, said Wednesday that Supermax was suitable for Gitmo detainees in part because "it isn't in a neighborhood, it isn't in a community," U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn pounced.
"I resent the fact that Senator Feinstein would be so dismissive of the nearly 20,000 people who live in Florence and nearby Cañon City," Lamborn, R-Colorado Springs, said in a news release.
He opposes any transfer of detainees to Supermax. Opinion in Fremont County, where the detainees could bring more corrections and construction jobs, is more nuanced.
"The Bureau of Prisons could handle it if they had to, but we'd have to have the funding, the training," said McFadyen, a Democrat from Pueblo West whose district includes the prison complex.
Of chief concern is a lack of space. Capacity at Supermax is about 490, and there was only one empty bed on Thursday, federal Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman Traci Billingsley told the Associated Press.
Even if a decision was made tomorrow to build a new unit, it would be years before it was ready to receive prisoners.
It would be possible to transfer some inmates out of Supermax to make room for Guantanamo detainees, but it's quite unclear whether the detainees are any more dangerous than the prisoners's they'd replace.
Supermax already is home to a slew of Islamic terrorists, including plotters of 9/11 and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; leaders of the Mafia and the nation's bloodiest street gangs; several drug lords for whom murder was part of the trade; and a variety of racial supremacists, white and black.
Not to mention Theodore Kaczynski, the "Unabomber"; Eric Rudolph, the Atlanta Olympics bomber; and Terry Nichols, who plotted the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. His co-conspirator, Timothy McVeigh, called Supermax home before he was executed in 2001.
Supermax guards are used to dealing with dangerous prisoners. And no one has ever escaped from there.
But some locals are worried that the presence of detainees will make Supermax a higher-profile target for terrorists bent on liberating their jailed colleagues.
McFadyen also said corrections officials in California have intercepted messages from the Supermax cells of leaders of Nuestra Familia, a street gang, to their minions out West. If gang leaders can circumvent a system intended to prevent inmates from operating from their cells, imprisoned terrorists may be able to do the same.
---
You can hit a golf ball from the Bear Paw Golf Course into the federal prison complex outside Florence, state Rep. Buffie McFadyen says.
It'd be a heckuva poke, maybe 400 yards. But McFadyen's point is made: the Florence Federal Correctional Complex, 40 miles down the road from Colorado Springs, is not in the middle of nowhere, as Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California said the other day during debate over what to do with war-on-terrorism detainees at the Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
To many in this country and abroad, the Gitmo operation is a symbol of how far former President George W. Bush bent America's legal and moral values after 9/11. In one of his first acts as president, Barack Obama gave the Pentagon 12 months to shut it down.
A debate has been simmering ever since, and it sharpened last Wednesday with a vote by the U.S. Senate to deny the administration the $80 million it sought to close Gitmo.
The debate offers ample proof that at least one American value is still intact - NIMBYism. Nobody wants the 240 detainees in Gitmo to wind up in their backyards.
A lot of Coloradans are getting their backs up when ADX Florence - aka Supermax - enters the conversation. Supermax, the toughest of the Florence prisons, is home to America's worst inmates. McFadyen called it "the most maximum-security federal penitentiary in the country, if not the world."
Other sites mentioned by military officials as possible locations for Guantanamo inmates include the Army prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., the Marines' Camp Pendleton, Calif., and the Navy's brig in Charleston, S.C. All are military operations, so the detainees would not have to be transferred from the military justice system to the civil system.
"Military detainees should not be transported to and held at Supermax because it is not a military facility," said Sen. Michael Bennet. Colorado's other U.S. senator, Mark Udall, also opposes such transfers. A spokeswoman said "his strong preference would be for detainees to stay within the military prison system."
But the military-civil technicality seems to have been eclipsed in the current debate, which is focusing on the supposed threat that the detainees would pose to guards and residents of nearby communities.
When Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, said Wednesday that Supermax was suitable for Gitmo detainees in part because "it isn't in a neighborhood, it isn't in a community," U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn pounced.
"I resent the fact that Senator Feinstein would be so dismissive of the nearly 20,000 people who live in Florence and nearby Cañon City," Lamborn, R-Colorado Springs, said in a news release.
He opposes any transfer of detainees to Supermax. Opinion in Fremont County, where the detainees could bring more corrections and construction jobs, is more nuanced.
"The Bureau of Prisons could handle it if they had to, but we'd have to have the funding, the training," said McFadyen, a Democrat from Pueblo West whose district includes the prison complex.
Of chief concern is a lack of space. Capacity at Supermax is about 490, and there was only one empty bed on Thursday, federal Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman Traci Billingsley told the Associated Press.
Even if a decision was made tomorrow to build a new unit, it would be years before it was ready to receive prisoners.
It would be possible to transfer some inmates out of Supermax to make room for Guantanamo detainees, but it's quite unclear whether the detainees are any more dangerous than the prisoners's they'd replace.
Supermax already is home to a slew of Islamic terrorists, including plotters of 9/11 and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; leaders of the Mafia and the nation's bloodiest street gangs; several drug lords for whom murder was part of the trade; and a variety of racial supremacists, white and black.
Not to mention Theodore Kaczynski, the "Unabomber"; Eric Rudolph, the Atlanta Olympics bomber; and Terry Nichols, who plotted the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. His co-conspirator, Timothy McVeigh, called Supermax home before he was executed in 2001.
Supermax guards are used to dealing with dangerous prisoners. And no one has ever escaped from there.
But some locals are worried that the presence of detainees will make Supermax a higher-profile target for terrorists bent on liberating their jailed colleagues.
McFadyen also said corrections officials in California have intercepted messages from the Supermax cells of leaders of Nuestra Familia, a street gang, to their minions out West. If gang leaders can circumvent a system intended to prevent inmates from operating from their cells, imprisoned terrorists may be able to do the same.
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Newt and the Uighurs
The first comments ever out of the prisoners of Guantanamo.
Chinese Muslims known as Uighurs, detained for more than six years and counting at the American prison at Guantanamo Bay, are firing back at Newt Gingrich, who has accused them of terrorist ties and says that releasing them into the United States would endanger the country.
The seventeen Uighurs told their translator, Rushan Abbas, how they felt when they heard Gingrich's remarks. Abbas has been working with them in Guantanamo since 2002, initially contracted by the Department of Defense. The Uighurs' rejoinder to Gingrich is the first quasi-interview with detainees still imprisoned in Guantanamo.
The Bush administration has cleared the Uighurs for release; five have already been released to third countries. If returned to China, there is a high probability they'd be tortured. A vibrant Uighur community in Northern Virginia has offered to take them in, but Gingrich and others are objecting.
"Why is that our problem?" Gingrich wondered in a recent TV interview. "Why are we protecting these guys? Why does it become an American problem?"
Gingrich pushed further in an op-ed, claiming that '[b]y their own admission, Uighurs being held at Guantanamo Bay are members of or associated with the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), an al Qaeda-affiliated group designated as a terrorist organization under U.S law."
No, they have never admitted that, says Abbas, adding that the Uighurs call the claim "baseless, factless slander against them." Abbas returned from Guantanamo Monday. She now works with the Uighurs' defense attorneys, but said that her comments to the Huffington Post were not intended as advocacy on their behalf.
The Uighurs call relatives in the United States and Europe often, she says, so stay up on the news. They were surprised to hear the accusation from the former Speaker of the House.
"Why does he hate us so much and say those kinds of things? He doesn't know us. He should talk to our attorneys if he's curious about our background," Abbas relates. "How could he speak in such major media with nothing based in fact? They were very disappointed how Newt Gingrich was linking them to ETIM which they never even heard of the name ETIM until they came to Guantanamo Bay."
Story continues below
The Uighurs are apparently under the misconception that American columnists are fact-checked for accuracy. "They just cannot understand," she says. "How come the media doesn't even verify the story? How could they just publish something like that without checking whether what he says is true or not?"
The Uighurs, before the outburst by Gingrich, were unfamiliar with the former speaker. "Whoever told them this news explained to them he was Speaker of the House and a very high profile person during the Clinton administration," says Abbas.
"Such a high profile person speaking such lies about us," she says they fretted. "They are concerned about their safety where ever they go."
A Gingrich spokesman did not return an e-mail requesting comment. The Uighurs were picked up by bounty hunters in Afghanistan who sold them to the U.S. military.
"China suppresses all the Uighur peaceful movement and labels all the movement terrorist," says Rebiya Kadeer, author of Dragon Fighter: One Woman's Epic Struggle for Peace with China and hailed by President Bush as a human rights champion.
"I hope that some of them will be released to the United States," says Kadeer, who now lives in Northern Virginia, through a separate translator.
Gingrich has been joined by Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) and Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) in objecting to the Uighurs' relocation to the United States. Those objections are weighing on the administration.
Wolf spokesman Dan Scandling noted that Wolf is a champion of the Uighur cause and fought for the release of Kadeer from a Chinese prison. But he isn't convinced of their innocence. "We have had several conversations with people in the intelligence community who have told us otherwise," said Scandling. Wolf represents Langley, Va., where the CIA is headquartered.
Wolf "has not said they should not be released, just that they should not be released into the United States," said Scandling.
Wolf, in objecting to the Uighurs, said that they are fundamentalist Muslims and once smashed a TV because a woman on the screen was baring her arms.
Abbas, however, says that the detainee who went off on the TV has already been released to Albania and that it had nothing to do with any bare arms. Rather, he had repeatedly requested to speak to camp supervisors and had been ignored, so he chose to cause a scene. Scandling said Wolf's account of the TV smashing came from a story in the L.A. Times.
The coming of the Obama administration brought the Uighurs hope. They were "extremely happy" about his election and had "huge faith in President Obama," Abbas says.
They began counting the days after inauguration. They still have hope, she says, but its wearing thin. "Here we are approaching June now. When is this going to happen?" she says they wonder.
Obama has pledged to close the prison by January 2010. The Uighurs don't see how that's possible.
"If we are the innocent ones from day one -- and for the past six years, and the government knew we were innocent -- if we are still here, how he is going to deal with the 240 prisoners and shut down the base by next January?" Abbas says they ask. "They're a little bit skeptical about it actually happening."
Ryan Grim is the author of the forthcoming book This Is Your Country On Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America
Chinese Muslims known as Uighurs, detained for more than six years and counting at the American prison at Guantanamo Bay, are firing back at Newt Gingrich, who has accused them of terrorist ties and says that releasing them into the United States would endanger the country.
The seventeen Uighurs told their translator, Rushan Abbas, how they felt when they heard Gingrich's remarks. Abbas has been working with them in Guantanamo since 2002, initially contracted by the Department of Defense. The Uighurs' rejoinder to Gingrich is the first quasi-interview with detainees still imprisoned in Guantanamo.
The Bush administration has cleared the Uighurs for release; five have already been released to third countries. If returned to China, there is a high probability they'd be tortured. A vibrant Uighur community in Northern Virginia has offered to take them in, but Gingrich and others are objecting.
"Why is that our problem?" Gingrich wondered in a recent TV interview. "Why are we protecting these guys? Why does it become an American problem?"
Gingrich pushed further in an op-ed, claiming that '[b]y their own admission, Uighurs being held at Guantanamo Bay are members of or associated with the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), an al Qaeda-affiliated group designated as a terrorist organization under U.S law."
No, they have never admitted that, says Abbas, adding that the Uighurs call the claim "baseless, factless slander against them." Abbas returned from Guantanamo Monday. She now works with the Uighurs' defense attorneys, but said that her comments to the Huffington Post were not intended as advocacy on their behalf.
The Uighurs call relatives in the United States and Europe often, she says, so stay up on the news. They were surprised to hear the accusation from the former Speaker of the House.
"Why does he hate us so much and say those kinds of things? He doesn't know us. He should talk to our attorneys if he's curious about our background," Abbas relates. "How could he speak in such major media with nothing based in fact? They were very disappointed how Newt Gingrich was linking them to ETIM which they never even heard of the name ETIM until they came to Guantanamo Bay."
Story continues below
The Uighurs are apparently under the misconception that American columnists are fact-checked for accuracy. "They just cannot understand," she says. "How come the media doesn't even verify the story? How could they just publish something like that without checking whether what he says is true or not?"
The Uighurs, before the outburst by Gingrich, were unfamiliar with the former speaker. "Whoever told them this news explained to them he was Speaker of the House and a very high profile person during the Clinton administration," says Abbas.
"Such a high profile person speaking such lies about us," she says they fretted. "They are concerned about their safety where ever they go."
A Gingrich spokesman did not return an e-mail requesting comment. The Uighurs were picked up by bounty hunters in Afghanistan who sold them to the U.S. military.
"China suppresses all the Uighur peaceful movement and labels all the movement terrorist," says Rebiya Kadeer, author of Dragon Fighter: One Woman's Epic Struggle for Peace with China and hailed by President Bush as a human rights champion.
"I hope that some of them will be released to the United States," says Kadeer, who now lives in Northern Virginia, through a separate translator.
Gingrich has been joined by Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) and Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) in objecting to the Uighurs' relocation to the United States. Those objections are weighing on the administration.
Wolf spokesman Dan Scandling noted that Wolf is a champion of the Uighur cause and fought for the release of Kadeer from a Chinese prison. But he isn't convinced of their innocence. "We have had several conversations with people in the intelligence community who have told us otherwise," said Scandling. Wolf represents Langley, Va., where the CIA is headquartered.
Wolf "has not said they should not be released, just that they should not be released into the United States," said Scandling.
Wolf, in objecting to the Uighurs, said that they are fundamentalist Muslims and once smashed a TV because a woman on the screen was baring her arms.
Abbas, however, says that the detainee who went off on the TV has already been released to Albania and that it had nothing to do with any bare arms. Rather, he had repeatedly requested to speak to camp supervisors and had been ignored, so he chose to cause a scene. Scandling said Wolf's account of the TV smashing came from a story in the L.A. Times.
The coming of the Obama administration brought the Uighurs hope. They were "extremely happy" about his election and had "huge faith in President Obama," Abbas says.
They began counting the days after inauguration. They still have hope, she says, but its wearing thin. "Here we are approaching June now. When is this going to happen?" she says they wonder.
Obama has pledged to close the prison by January 2010. The Uighurs don't see how that's possible.
"If we are the innocent ones from day one -- and for the past six years, and the government knew we were innocent -- if we are still here, how he is going to deal with the 240 prisoners and shut down the base by next January?" Abbas says they ask. "They're a little bit skeptical about it actually happening."
Ryan Grim is the author of the forthcoming book This Is Your Country On Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America
More About the Long War
The Centre for American Progress wants to be in Affy for ten years? And here are some of the voices that want to stop them.
Understanding the Long War
The concept of the "Long War" is attributed to former CENTCOM Commander Gen. John Abizaid, speaking in 2004. Leading counterinsurgency theorist John Nagl, an Iraq combat veteran and now the head of the Center for a New American Security, writes that "there is a growing realization that the most likely conflicts of the next fifty years will be irregular warfare in an 'Arc of Instability' that encompasses much of the greater Middle East and parts of Africa and Central and South Asia." The Pentagon's official Quadrennial Defense Review (2005) commits the United States to a greater emphasis on fighting terrorism and insurgencies in this "arc of instability." The Center for American Progress repeats the formulation in arguing for a troop escalation and ten-year commitment in Afghanistan, saying that the "infrastructure of jihad" must be destroyed in "the center of an 'arc of instability' through South and Central Asia and the greater Middle East."
The implications of this doctrine are staggering. The very notion of a fifty-year war assumes the consent of the American people, who have yet to hear of the plan, for the next six national elections. The weight of a fifty-year burden will surprise and dismay many in the antiwar movement. Most Americans living today will die before the fifty-year war ends, if it does. Youngsters born and raised today will reach middle age. Unborn generations will bear the tax burden or fight and die in this "irregular warfare." There is a chance, of course, that the Long War can be prevented. It may be unsustainable, a product of imperial hubris. Public opinion may tire of the quagmires and costs--but only if there is a commitment to a fifty-year peace movement.
In this perspective, Iraq is only an immediate front, with Afghanistan and Pakistan the expanding fronts, in a single larger war from the Middle East to South Asia. Instead of thinking of Iraq like Vietnam, a war that was definitively ended, it is better to think of Iraq as a setback, or better a stalemate, on a larger battlefield where victory or defeat are painfully hard to define over a timespan of five decades.
I propose to begin by examining the military doctrines that give rise to notions of the Long War. The peace movement often adopts the biblical commitment to "study war no more," but in this case it may prove useful to become students of military strategies and tactics. (Those wishing to become students of Long War theory should consult the bibliography at the end of this essay.)
1. The New Counterinsurgency Is a Return to the Indian Wars.
In a September 24, 2007 article in The Nation, "The New Counterinsurgency," I wrote that the Petraeus plan for Iraq was as old as our nation's long Indian wars. That thesis was confirmed in the writings of the neo-conservative Robert Kaplan, in his September 21, 2004, article in the Wall Street Journal, "Indian Country."
Kaplan is obsessed with the anarchy loosed on the world by post-colonial, tribal-based societies, and emphasizes the need for small wars carried on "off camera," so to speak. Kaplan approvingly quotes one US officer as opining that "you want to whack bad guys quietly and cover your tracks with humanitarian aid projects." The comparison Kaplan makes between today's Long War and our previous Indian wars is that the "enemies" were highly decentralized tribal nations who had to be defeated in one campaign after another. He realizes that conventional war against the Plains and western tribes was an unsustainable strategy and that the native people were overwhelmed by an inexhaustible supply of white settlers and superior technology like the railroad. Fighting the new Indian wars today, he advises, means "the smaller the American footprint and the less notice it draws from the international media, the more effective is the operation." In this sense, Iraq is a strategic setback for Kaplan, "a mess that no one wants to repeat."
2. Strategic Military Framework: The Fifty-Year Long War.
Like the Indian wars, winning the Long War will require taking advantage of the deep divisions that exist in tribal societies, along lines of religion, ethnicity, race and geography. The efforts of many Indian leaders to form effective confederations against US expansion never succeeded. On the other hand, US army strategies to pay tribes to deploy "scouts" who would inform on and fight other tribes were successful. The main strategy of the Long War is to attract one tribal or ethnic group to fight their rivals on behalf of the foreign occupier. Nagl accurately predicted that "winning the Iraqi people's willingness to turn in their terrorist neighbors will mark the tipping point in defeating the insurgency."
Counterinsurgency is portrayed to the public as a more civilized, even intellectual, form of war directed by Ivy League professionals, with a proper emphasis on human rights, political persuasion and protection of the innocents. Every civilian insulted by a door knocked down, it is said, is lost to the cause, thus creating a military motive to be respectful to local populations. The new Marine-Army counterinsurgency manual is filled with such suggestions.
But this "hearts and minds" approach downplays what Vice President Dick Cheney called the use of "the dark side." Before a local population will turn in its neighbors, to use Nagl's image, the occupying army must be seen as defeating those "neighbors," killing and wounding the alleged insurgents in significant numbers; weakening or destroying the infrastructure in their villages, and creating an exodus of refugees (in Vietnam, this was known as "forced urbanization," a term of the late Harvard professor Samuel Huntington). In the meantime, the population considered "friendly" is tightly guarded in what used to be called strategic hamlets and, in Iraq, became known as "gated communities": behind concertina wire, blast walls and watch towers, and with everyone subject to eye scanners. The lines between enemy, friendly and neutral in this context are fluid, guaranteeing that many people will be targeted inaccurately as "irreconcilable" sympathizers with the insurgents. Profiling and rounding up people who "look the type" will lead to detention camps filled individuals lacking any usable evidence against them. As one Taliban operative told the New York Times, perhaps over-confidently:
I know of the Petraeus experiment out there. But we know our Afghans. They will take the money from Petraeus, but they will not be on his side. There are so many people working with the Afghans and the Americans who are on their payroll, but they inform us, sell us weapons. (May 5, 2009) The truth is that conventional warfare by US troops against Muslim nations is politically impossible, for two reasons that suggest an inherent weakness. First, the local people become inflamed against the foreigners, creating better conditions for the insurgency. Second, the American people are skeptical of ground wars involving huge casualties, costs, and possibly the military draft. Counterinsurgency becomes the fallback military option of the unwelcome occupier. Counterinsurgency is low-visibility of necessity, depending on stealth, psychological and information warfare, both abroad and at home.
3. What Happened on the Dark Side in Iraq
In Iraq, the dark side first involved the 2003-2004 American-sponsored round-ups and torture, only leaked to the American public and media by a US guard in Abu Ghraib. In addition, as many as 50,000 young Iraqis, mostly Sunnis, have been held in extreme conditions in detention centers across the country (some of them now being released under the pact negotiated between Baghdad and Washington). Then there were the unreported, top-secret extrajudicial killings described chillingly in Bob Woodward's The War Within, which were so effective that they reportedly gave "orgasms" to Gen. Petraeus's top adviser, Derek Harvey. Woodward writes that these killings, in which the Pentagon was the judge, jury and executioner, based heavily on local informants, were "very possibly the biggest factor in reducing" Iraq's violence in 2007. It is likely that death squads were carrying out the revived version of a "global Phoenix program," as advocated by Gen. Petraeus's leading counterinsurgency adviser, David Kilcullen, in the Small Wars Journal (November 30, 2004). Jane Mayer, in The Dark Side, confirms that Phoenix became a model after 9/11, despite the fact that military historians called it massive, state-sanctioned murder, and clear evidence that 97 percent of its Vietcong victims were of "negligible importance."
It is far more widely known that Gen. Petraeus reduced the Sunni insurgency by hiring some 100,000 Sunnis, mostly former insurgents, to protect their communities and battle Al Qaeda in Iraq. This was in accord with the strategy proposed by another top Petraeus adviser, Steven Biddle, in 2006:
Use the prospect of a US-trained and US-supported Shiite-Kurdish force to compel the Sunnis to come to the negotiating table [and] in order to get the Shiites and the Kurds to negotiate too, it should threaten to either withdraw prematurely, a move that would throw the country into disarray, or to back the Sunnis. (Foreign Affairs, March-April 2006) Now those so-called "Sons of Iraq," first known as the "Kit Carson Scouts," are increasingly frustrated by the refusal of the US-supported al-Maliki government to integrate them into the state structure and pay them living wages. It is unclear what the future holds for Iraq as US troops begin to withdraw. Elements of the military, perhaps including Gen. Raymond Odierno, are known to be unhappy with the pace of withdrawal, and already are negotiating with the Iraqi government to delay the six-month deadline for redeploying American troops to barracks outside Iraqi cities. It is apparent that neither conventional warfare (2003-2006) nor counterinsurgency (2006-2009) have solved the fundamental problem of pacifying an insurgent nationalism which was mobilized by the 2003 invasion itself.
In Iraq, the US strategy was to speed up the Iraqi clock while slowing down the American one, Petraeus was fond of saying. That meant accelerating a political compromise between Shi'a, Sunnis and Kurds in Iraq, along the lines of the 2007 Baker-Hamilton Report, while cooling American voter impatience with promises that peace was just around the corner of the 2008 elections. It was around this time that the Center for a New American Security was formed among Democratic national security advocates deeply worried that a voter mandate could end the war "prematurely."
The key operative in CNAS was Michelle Flournoy, who went on to vet Pentagon appointments for the Obama transition team and now serves as an assistant secretary of defense. Contrary to the views of many in the antiwar movement and Democratic Party, Petraeus's 2007-08 troop surge was successful in its political mission of sharply reducing both US and Iraqi casualties. However, the US military surge included the massive wave of extrajudicial terror chronicled by Woodward, as well as paying tens of thousands of Sunni insurgents not to shoot at American troops. Neither approach could be counted on to stabilize Iraq for long.
At the end of 2008, the Bush administration was forced to accept what the al-Maliki government described as "the withdrawal pact," according to which the United States would gradually withdraw all troops by late 2011. Since the US forces have not "won" the war militarily, there is little evidence that Iraq will become the stable pro-Western model some seek for their Long War. Even if another insurgency or civil war is averted, Iraq will be aligned with Iran's regional interests for some time to come. President Obama will be under serious pressure from US military officials in Iraq and their allies among the neo-conservatives in Washington, to delay his promised withdrawal or be accused of "losing" Iraq.
The Iraqi security forces now consist of 600,000 soldiers, including 340,000 members of a largely-Shi'a force often described as sectarian or dysfunctional. At present, the US continues to face the dilemma described by James Fallows in 2005:
The crucial need to improve security and order in Iraq puts the United States in an impossible position. It can't honorably leave Iraq--as opposed to simply evacuating Saigon-style--so long as its military must provide most of the manpower, weaponry, intelligence systems and strategies being used against the insurgency. But it can't sensibly stay when the very presence of its troops is a worsening irritant to the Iraqi public and a rallying point for nationalist opponents--to say nothing of the growing pressure in the United States for withdrawal." 4. The Long War Moves from Iraq to Afghanistan and Pakistan
The same counterinsurgency strategies are being transferred to Afghanistan and Pakistan, with US troop levels destined to reach 70,000 this year, bringing the overall Western force level closer and closer to the declining total in Iraq. In Afghanistan, the expanded American forces will concentrate on destroying the poppy fields and villages dominated by the Taliban in southern Kandahar and Helmund provinces, a resource-denial strategy from the Indian wars. Many Americans are expected to be killed or wounded in this effort to secure and inoculate the rural population against the Taliban. Many Taliban are likely to be killed along with along with local civilians, while the core cadre may retreat to redeploy elsewhere.
The Bagram prison is being massively expanded as a detention facility where President Obama's Guantanamo orders do not apply. Bagram now holds an estimated 650 prisoners who, unlike those in Guantanamo, have "almost no rights," including access to lawyers. "Human rights campaigners and journalists are strictly forbidden there," according to a January 28, 2009, report by Der Spiegel International.
According to a RAND report using World Bank data, Afghanistan has perhaps the lowest-ranking justice system in the world. "In comparison to other countries in the region--such as Iran, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Ukbekistan--Afghanistan's justice system was one of the least effective." Bagram is only one of many detention facilities that will be filled across the country; the Taliban "liberated" over 1,000 inmates, including 400 of their cadre, from a Kandahar prison just last year.
Counterinsurgency theory, based on the British experience in Malaysia, requires a period of ten to twelve years to impose enough suffering and exhaustion to force the population into accepting the peace terms of the dominant power. This is precisely the timetable laid out by Kilcullen before Sen. John Kerry's Senate Armed Services Committee on February 5:
[It will take] ten to fifteen years, including at least two years of significant combat up front.... thirty thousand extra troops in Afghanistan will cost around 2 billion dollars per month beyond the roughly 20 billion we already spend; additional governance and development efforts will cost even more.... [but] If we fail to stabilize Afghanistan this year, there will be no future. Kilcullen and others support the current plan to expand the total Afghanistan security forces from 80,000 to a total of 400,000 overall, costing $20 billion over six to seven years.
In Pakistan, where torture and extrajudicial abuse also are prevalent, the US spent $12 billion during the past decade on a [Musharraf] military dictatorship, compared with one-tenth that amount on development schemes. These policies only deepened the Muslim nation's anti-Americanism, alienated the middle-class opposition, and left the poor in festering poverty. In addition to these self-imposed problems, the Pentagon is engaged in a frantic uphill effort to change Pakistan's strategic military doctrine from preparation for another conventional (or even nuclear) war against India to a counterinsurgency war against the Taliban embedded amid its own domestic population, especially in the extremely impoverished federally administered tribal areas that border Afghanistan.
The likelihood of the United States' convincing Pakistan to view the domestic threat as greater than that from India is doubtful. Pakistan has fought three wars with India, and views the US as supporting the expansion of India's interests in Afghanistan, where the Pakistan military has supported the Taliban as a proxy against India. The Northern Alliance forces of Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks were strongly supported by India in 2001 against Pakistan's Taliban's allies, and the fall of Kabul to the Northern Alliance was a "catastrophe" for Pakistan, according to Juan Cole. Since 2001, India has sent hundreds of millons in assistance to Afghanistan, including funds for Afghan political candidates in 2004, assistance to sitting legislators, Indian consulates in Jalalabad, Heart and Kandahar, and road construction designed, according to the Indian government, to help their countries' armed forces "meet their strategic needs."
Polls show that a vast majority of Pakistanis view the United States and India as far greater threats than the Taliban, despite the Taliban's unpopularity with much of Pakistan's public. While it is unlikely that the Taliban could seize power in Pakistan, it may be impossible for anyone to militarily prevent Taliban control of the tribal areas and a growing base among the Pashtun tribes (28 million in Afghanistan, 12 million in Pakistan).
The remaining options begin to make the United States look like Gulliver tied down among the Lilliputians.
The US will demand that Pakistan's armed forces fight the Taliban, which the American military has driven into Pakistan. Pakistan will demand billions in US aid without giving guarantees that they will shift their security deployments in accord with Washington's will. The US will make clear that it will go to extreme lengths to prevent a scenario in which Pakistan's nuclear arsenal falls into the Taliban's hands. No one on the US side acknowledges that this spiraling disaster was triggered by US policies over the past decade.
5. The Quagmire of Crises
To summarize, the "arc of crisis" is turning into a "quagmire of crises." The current US military strategy in Pakistan is contradictory mix of an air war by Predators combined with US special forces trying to organize a tribal war in search of Al Qaeda. US policies already have driven Al Qaeda out of Afghanistan, partly with covert support from Pakistan's army. As a result, both Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters have taken up havens in the remote wilderness of Pakistan's tribal areas. So far the US has budgeted $450 million for the tribal-based "Frontier Corps" in the frontier region. This strategy has not only failed to prevent the Taliban from taking virtual control of the tribal region, but the effort has killed hundreds of civilians, provoked deeper public opposition, and driven the Taliban insurgency further east into Pakistan.
The US faces a military crisis which Secretary Hillary Clinton recently called "a mortal threat" to America's security, the possibility of Taliban or Al Qaeda's access to Pakistan's nuclear stockpile in the eventuality that the situation deteriorates further. This will trigger an intense political campaign to "do something" about the very threat that US policies have created.
The US and NATO can barely invade Afghanistan, which has 32 million people spread over 250,000 square miles, larger than Iraq. Pakistan, with 172 million people living over 310, 000 square miles, simply cannot be invaded. But in a crisis, it is conceivable that American advisers, even ground troops, might be sent to occupy the 10,000 square miles on Pakistan's side of the border. That might result in an anti-American revolution in the streets across Pakistan.
So what has counterinsurgency achieved thus far? At most, a stalemate of sorts in Iraq after six years of combat on top of a brutal decade of sanctions. Nothing much in Afghanistan, where conventional warfare pushed Al Qaeda over the border into Pakistan. Nothing much in Pakistan, where the Pakistan army is resistant to shift its primary focus away from India.
Kilcullen's war plan for Afghanistan covers ten to twelve years, starting in 2009. The war on the Pakistan front is only beginning, meaning that the Obama administration is managing three wars within the Long War, not including secret battlegrounds like the Philippines or what may happen in Iran or Israel-Palestine, nor the controversial expansion of NATO to the borders of Russia, Iran, China and other hotspots along the Arc of Instability. Some in the intelligence community would even like to expand the "terrorist" threat to include the immigrant and drug routes through Central and Latin America as well.
Even if President Obama wishes to carry out a strategic retreat from "the sorrows of empire," he will be faced with significant pressure from elements of the military-industrial complex, and the lack of an informed public. The path of least resistance, it may appear to Obama in the short run, is incremental escalation (sending 20,000 additional Americans) while stepping up the search for a patchwork diplomatic fix. But incremental escalation can be like another drink for an alcoholic, and even that strategy would require a stepping back from the doctrine of the Long War. Hawks at the American Enterprise Institute and their allies like John McCain and Joe Lieberman are pushing for victory instead of face-saving diplomacy.
The deeper sources of this crisis certainly involve the American and Western quest for oil, the historic inequalities between the global North and South, the West and the Muslim world. But it is important to emphasis the strategic military dimension, particularly the guiding strategic vision of a fifty-year war. The Long War now has a momentum of its own. The impact of the Long War on other American priorities, like healthcare and civil liberties, is likely to be devastating. Since most Americans, especially those supportive of peace and justice campaigns, are well aware of domestic issues and general issues of war and peace, it is important to begin concentrating on the great deficit in popular understanding, that the Long War is already here, building from the previous the cold war dynamic and the Bush era's nomenclature about the "global war on terrorism."
To be continued... thoughts on The Long Peace Movement.
BIBILIOGRAPHY AND READINGS.
The older classics. For those with serious time, I would recommend Sun-Tzu and Carl Von Clausewitz for an introduction to opposing doctrines, still studied widely.
For the classic Western take on the Arab world, T.E. Lawrence's The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
The recent classics include Che Guevara and Mao Tse-Tung. On the Western side, I suggest the writings of Sir Robert Thompson on Defeating Communist Insurgency; Frank Kitson, Low Insurgency Operations; David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare; Robert Taber, The War of the Flea; and the lengthy but brilliant study of Algeria by Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace (the cover of Horne's reissued book announces that it's "on the reading list of President Bush and the US military," and a blurb by the Washington Post's Thomas Ricks that it should be read "immediately"). For immediate works of importance: John Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife (the phrase is from Lawrence); and David Petraeus, Nagl et al., The US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (in collaboration with Harvard's Carr Center). A brilliant counterpoint to these works is William R. Polk's Violent Politics (see also his Sorrows of Empire).
Important books on Al Qaeda and Islam include Robert Dreyfuss's The Devil's Game; Jason Burke's Al Qaeda, Michael Scheuer's Marching to Hell; Bruce Lawrence, ed., Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden; and Ahmed Rashid, The Taliban.
Other critical books include Rashid Khalidi, Resurrecting Empire and Sowing Crisis; Juan Cole, Engaging the Muslim World; Ahmed Hashim, Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Iraq; Mamood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim; Tariq Ali, The Duel; and Rashid's Descent into Chaos.
To follow the counterinsurgency discussions among US security strategists, go to the smallwarsjournal.com blog or the Center for American Progress.
Tom Hayden is the author of The Other Side (1966, with Staughton Lynd), The Love of Possession Is a Disease With Them (1972), Ending the War in Iraq (2007) and Writings for a Democratic Society: The Tom Hayden Reader (2008).
Understanding the Long War
The concept of the "Long War" is attributed to former CENTCOM Commander Gen. John Abizaid, speaking in 2004. Leading counterinsurgency theorist John Nagl, an Iraq combat veteran and now the head of the Center for a New American Security, writes that "there is a growing realization that the most likely conflicts of the next fifty years will be irregular warfare in an 'Arc of Instability' that encompasses much of the greater Middle East and parts of Africa and Central and South Asia." The Pentagon's official Quadrennial Defense Review (2005) commits the United States to a greater emphasis on fighting terrorism and insurgencies in this "arc of instability." The Center for American Progress repeats the formulation in arguing for a troop escalation and ten-year commitment in Afghanistan, saying that the "infrastructure of jihad" must be destroyed in "the center of an 'arc of instability' through South and Central Asia and the greater Middle East."
The implications of this doctrine are staggering. The very notion of a fifty-year war assumes the consent of the American people, who have yet to hear of the plan, for the next six national elections. The weight of a fifty-year burden will surprise and dismay many in the antiwar movement. Most Americans living today will die before the fifty-year war ends, if it does. Youngsters born and raised today will reach middle age. Unborn generations will bear the tax burden or fight and die in this "irregular warfare." There is a chance, of course, that the Long War can be prevented. It may be unsustainable, a product of imperial hubris. Public opinion may tire of the quagmires and costs--but only if there is a commitment to a fifty-year peace movement.
In this perspective, Iraq is only an immediate front, with Afghanistan and Pakistan the expanding fronts, in a single larger war from the Middle East to South Asia. Instead of thinking of Iraq like Vietnam, a war that was definitively ended, it is better to think of Iraq as a setback, or better a stalemate, on a larger battlefield where victory or defeat are painfully hard to define over a timespan of five decades.
I propose to begin by examining the military doctrines that give rise to notions of the Long War. The peace movement often adopts the biblical commitment to "study war no more," but in this case it may prove useful to become students of military strategies and tactics. (Those wishing to become students of Long War theory should consult the bibliography at the end of this essay.)
1. The New Counterinsurgency Is a Return to the Indian Wars.
In a September 24, 2007 article in The Nation, "The New Counterinsurgency," I wrote that the Petraeus plan for Iraq was as old as our nation's long Indian wars. That thesis was confirmed in the writings of the neo-conservative Robert Kaplan, in his September 21, 2004, article in the Wall Street Journal, "Indian Country."
Kaplan is obsessed with the anarchy loosed on the world by post-colonial, tribal-based societies, and emphasizes the need for small wars carried on "off camera," so to speak. Kaplan approvingly quotes one US officer as opining that "you want to whack bad guys quietly and cover your tracks with humanitarian aid projects." The comparison Kaplan makes between today's Long War and our previous Indian wars is that the "enemies" were highly decentralized tribal nations who had to be defeated in one campaign after another. He realizes that conventional war against the Plains and western tribes was an unsustainable strategy and that the native people were overwhelmed by an inexhaustible supply of white settlers and superior technology like the railroad. Fighting the new Indian wars today, he advises, means "the smaller the American footprint and the less notice it draws from the international media, the more effective is the operation." In this sense, Iraq is a strategic setback for Kaplan, "a mess that no one wants to repeat."
2. Strategic Military Framework: The Fifty-Year Long War.
Like the Indian wars, winning the Long War will require taking advantage of the deep divisions that exist in tribal societies, along lines of religion, ethnicity, race and geography. The efforts of many Indian leaders to form effective confederations against US expansion never succeeded. On the other hand, US army strategies to pay tribes to deploy "scouts" who would inform on and fight other tribes were successful. The main strategy of the Long War is to attract one tribal or ethnic group to fight their rivals on behalf of the foreign occupier. Nagl accurately predicted that "winning the Iraqi people's willingness to turn in their terrorist neighbors will mark the tipping point in defeating the insurgency."
Counterinsurgency is portrayed to the public as a more civilized, even intellectual, form of war directed by Ivy League professionals, with a proper emphasis on human rights, political persuasion and protection of the innocents. Every civilian insulted by a door knocked down, it is said, is lost to the cause, thus creating a military motive to be respectful to local populations. The new Marine-Army counterinsurgency manual is filled with such suggestions.
But this "hearts and minds" approach downplays what Vice President Dick Cheney called the use of "the dark side." Before a local population will turn in its neighbors, to use Nagl's image, the occupying army must be seen as defeating those "neighbors," killing and wounding the alleged insurgents in significant numbers; weakening or destroying the infrastructure in their villages, and creating an exodus of refugees (in Vietnam, this was known as "forced urbanization," a term of the late Harvard professor Samuel Huntington). In the meantime, the population considered "friendly" is tightly guarded in what used to be called strategic hamlets and, in Iraq, became known as "gated communities": behind concertina wire, blast walls and watch towers, and with everyone subject to eye scanners. The lines between enemy, friendly and neutral in this context are fluid, guaranteeing that many people will be targeted inaccurately as "irreconcilable" sympathizers with the insurgents. Profiling and rounding up people who "look the type" will lead to detention camps filled individuals lacking any usable evidence against them. As one Taliban operative told the New York Times, perhaps over-confidently:
I know of the Petraeus experiment out there. But we know our Afghans. They will take the money from Petraeus, but they will not be on his side. There are so many people working with the Afghans and the Americans who are on their payroll, but they inform us, sell us weapons. (May 5, 2009) The truth is that conventional warfare by US troops against Muslim nations is politically impossible, for two reasons that suggest an inherent weakness. First, the local people become inflamed against the foreigners, creating better conditions for the insurgency. Second, the American people are skeptical of ground wars involving huge casualties, costs, and possibly the military draft. Counterinsurgency becomes the fallback military option of the unwelcome occupier. Counterinsurgency is low-visibility of necessity, depending on stealth, psychological and information warfare, both abroad and at home.
3. What Happened on the Dark Side in Iraq
In Iraq, the dark side first involved the 2003-2004 American-sponsored round-ups and torture, only leaked to the American public and media by a US guard in Abu Ghraib. In addition, as many as 50,000 young Iraqis, mostly Sunnis, have been held in extreme conditions in detention centers across the country (some of them now being released under the pact negotiated between Baghdad and Washington). Then there were the unreported, top-secret extrajudicial killings described chillingly in Bob Woodward's The War Within, which were so effective that they reportedly gave "orgasms" to Gen. Petraeus's top adviser, Derek Harvey. Woodward writes that these killings, in which the Pentagon was the judge, jury and executioner, based heavily on local informants, were "very possibly the biggest factor in reducing" Iraq's violence in 2007. It is likely that death squads were carrying out the revived version of a "global Phoenix program," as advocated by Gen. Petraeus's leading counterinsurgency adviser, David Kilcullen, in the Small Wars Journal (November 30, 2004). Jane Mayer, in The Dark Side, confirms that Phoenix became a model after 9/11, despite the fact that military historians called it massive, state-sanctioned murder, and clear evidence that 97 percent of its Vietcong victims were of "negligible importance."
It is far more widely known that Gen. Petraeus reduced the Sunni insurgency by hiring some 100,000 Sunnis, mostly former insurgents, to protect their communities and battle Al Qaeda in Iraq. This was in accord with the strategy proposed by another top Petraeus adviser, Steven Biddle, in 2006:
Use the prospect of a US-trained and US-supported Shiite-Kurdish force to compel the Sunnis to come to the negotiating table [and] in order to get the Shiites and the Kurds to negotiate too, it should threaten to either withdraw prematurely, a move that would throw the country into disarray, or to back the Sunnis. (Foreign Affairs, March-April 2006) Now those so-called "Sons of Iraq," first known as the "Kit Carson Scouts," are increasingly frustrated by the refusal of the US-supported al-Maliki government to integrate them into the state structure and pay them living wages. It is unclear what the future holds for Iraq as US troops begin to withdraw. Elements of the military, perhaps including Gen. Raymond Odierno, are known to be unhappy with the pace of withdrawal, and already are negotiating with the Iraqi government to delay the six-month deadline for redeploying American troops to barracks outside Iraqi cities. It is apparent that neither conventional warfare (2003-2006) nor counterinsurgency (2006-2009) have solved the fundamental problem of pacifying an insurgent nationalism which was mobilized by the 2003 invasion itself.
In Iraq, the US strategy was to speed up the Iraqi clock while slowing down the American one, Petraeus was fond of saying. That meant accelerating a political compromise between Shi'a, Sunnis and Kurds in Iraq, along the lines of the 2007 Baker-Hamilton Report, while cooling American voter impatience with promises that peace was just around the corner of the 2008 elections. It was around this time that the Center for a New American Security was formed among Democratic national security advocates deeply worried that a voter mandate could end the war "prematurely."
The key operative in CNAS was Michelle Flournoy, who went on to vet Pentagon appointments for the Obama transition team and now serves as an assistant secretary of defense. Contrary to the views of many in the antiwar movement and Democratic Party, Petraeus's 2007-08 troop surge was successful in its political mission of sharply reducing both US and Iraqi casualties. However, the US military surge included the massive wave of extrajudicial terror chronicled by Woodward, as well as paying tens of thousands of Sunni insurgents not to shoot at American troops. Neither approach could be counted on to stabilize Iraq for long.
At the end of 2008, the Bush administration was forced to accept what the al-Maliki government described as "the withdrawal pact," according to which the United States would gradually withdraw all troops by late 2011. Since the US forces have not "won" the war militarily, there is little evidence that Iraq will become the stable pro-Western model some seek for their Long War. Even if another insurgency or civil war is averted, Iraq will be aligned with Iran's regional interests for some time to come. President Obama will be under serious pressure from US military officials in Iraq and their allies among the neo-conservatives in Washington, to delay his promised withdrawal or be accused of "losing" Iraq.
The Iraqi security forces now consist of 600,000 soldiers, including 340,000 members of a largely-Shi'a force often described as sectarian or dysfunctional. At present, the US continues to face the dilemma described by James Fallows in 2005:
The crucial need to improve security and order in Iraq puts the United States in an impossible position. It can't honorably leave Iraq--as opposed to simply evacuating Saigon-style--so long as its military must provide most of the manpower, weaponry, intelligence systems and strategies being used against the insurgency. But it can't sensibly stay when the very presence of its troops is a worsening irritant to the Iraqi public and a rallying point for nationalist opponents--to say nothing of the growing pressure in the United States for withdrawal." 4. The Long War Moves from Iraq to Afghanistan and Pakistan
The same counterinsurgency strategies are being transferred to Afghanistan and Pakistan, with US troop levels destined to reach 70,000 this year, bringing the overall Western force level closer and closer to the declining total in Iraq. In Afghanistan, the expanded American forces will concentrate on destroying the poppy fields and villages dominated by the Taliban in southern Kandahar and Helmund provinces, a resource-denial strategy from the Indian wars. Many Americans are expected to be killed or wounded in this effort to secure and inoculate the rural population against the Taliban. Many Taliban are likely to be killed along with along with local civilians, while the core cadre may retreat to redeploy elsewhere.
The Bagram prison is being massively expanded as a detention facility where President Obama's Guantanamo orders do not apply. Bagram now holds an estimated 650 prisoners who, unlike those in Guantanamo, have "almost no rights," including access to lawyers. "Human rights campaigners and journalists are strictly forbidden there," according to a January 28, 2009, report by Der Spiegel International.
According to a RAND report using World Bank data, Afghanistan has perhaps the lowest-ranking justice system in the world. "In comparison to other countries in the region--such as Iran, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Ukbekistan--Afghanistan's justice system was one of the least effective." Bagram is only one of many detention facilities that will be filled across the country; the Taliban "liberated" over 1,000 inmates, including 400 of their cadre, from a Kandahar prison just last year.
Counterinsurgency theory, based on the British experience in Malaysia, requires a period of ten to twelve years to impose enough suffering and exhaustion to force the population into accepting the peace terms of the dominant power. This is precisely the timetable laid out by Kilcullen before Sen. John Kerry's Senate Armed Services Committee on February 5:
[It will take] ten to fifteen years, including at least two years of significant combat up front.... thirty thousand extra troops in Afghanistan will cost around 2 billion dollars per month beyond the roughly 20 billion we already spend; additional governance and development efforts will cost even more.... [but] If we fail to stabilize Afghanistan this year, there will be no future. Kilcullen and others support the current plan to expand the total Afghanistan security forces from 80,000 to a total of 400,000 overall, costing $20 billion over six to seven years.
In Pakistan, where torture and extrajudicial abuse also are prevalent, the US spent $12 billion during the past decade on a [Musharraf] military dictatorship, compared with one-tenth that amount on development schemes. These policies only deepened the Muslim nation's anti-Americanism, alienated the middle-class opposition, and left the poor in festering poverty. In addition to these self-imposed problems, the Pentagon is engaged in a frantic uphill effort to change Pakistan's strategic military doctrine from preparation for another conventional (or even nuclear) war against India to a counterinsurgency war against the Taliban embedded amid its own domestic population, especially in the extremely impoverished federally administered tribal areas that border Afghanistan.
The likelihood of the United States' convincing Pakistan to view the domestic threat as greater than that from India is doubtful. Pakistan has fought three wars with India, and views the US as supporting the expansion of India's interests in Afghanistan, where the Pakistan military has supported the Taliban as a proxy against India. The Northern Alliance forces of Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks were strongly supported by India in 2001 against Pakistan's Taliban's allies, and the fall of Kabul to the Northern Alliance was a "catastrophe" for Pakistan, according to Juan Cole. Since 2001, India has sent hundreds of millons in assistance to Afghanistan, including funds for Afghan political candidates in 2004, assistance to sitting legislators, Indian consulates in Jalalabad, Heart and Kandahar, and road construction designed, according to the Indian government, to help their countries' armed forces "meet their strategic needs."
Polls show that a vast majority of Pakistanis view the United States and India as far greater threats than the Taliban, despite the Taliban's unpopularity with much of Pakistan's public. While it is unlikely that the Taliban could seize power in Pakistan, it may be impossible for anyone to militarily prevent Taliban control of the tribal areas and a growing base among the Pashtun tribes (28 million in Afghanistan, 12 million in Pakistan).
The remaining options begin to make the United States look like Gulliver tied down among the Lilliputians.
The US will demand that Pakistan's armed forces fight the Taliban, which the American military has driven into Pakistan. Pakistan will demand billions in US aid without giving guarantees that they will shift their security deployments in accord with Washington's will. The US will make clear that it will go to extreme lengths to prevent a scenario in which Pakistan's nuclear arsenal falls into the Taliban's hands. No one on the US side acknowledges that this spiraling disaster was triggered by US policies over the past decade.
5. The Quagmire of Crises
To summarize, the "arc of crisis" is turning into a "quagmire of crises." The current US military strategy in Pakistan is contradictory mix of an air war by Predators combined with US special forces trying to organize a tribal war in search of Al Qaeda. US policies already have driven Al Qaeda out of Afghanistan, partly with covert support from Pakistan's army. As a result, both Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters have taken up havens in the remote wilderness of Pakistan's tribal areas. So far the US has budgeted $450 million for the tribal-based "Frontier Corps" in the frontier region. This strategy has not only failed to prevent the Taliban from taking virtual control of the tribal region, but the effort has killed hundreds of civilians, provoked deeper public opposition, and driven the Taliban insurgency further east into Pakistan.
The US faces a military crisis which Secretary Hillary Clinton recently called "a mortal threat" to America's security, the possibility of Taliban or Al Qaeda's access to Pakistan's nuclear stockpile in the eventuality that the situation deteriorates further. This will trigger an intense political campaign to "do something" about the very threat that US policies have created.
The US and NATO can barely invade Afghanistan, which has 32 million people spread over 250,000 square miles, larger than Iraq. Pakistan, with 172 million people living over 310, 000 square miles, simply cannot be invaded. But in a crisis, it is conceivable that American advisers, even ground troops, might be sent to occupy the 10,000 square miles on Pakistan's side of the border. That might result in an anti-American revolution in the streets across Pakistan.
So what has counterinsurgency achieved thus far? At most, a stalemate of sorts in Iraq after six years of combat on top of a brutal decade of sanctions. Nothing much in Afghanistan, where conventional warfare pushed Al Qaeda over the border into Pakistan. Nothing much in Pakistan, where the Pakistan army is resistant to shift its primary focus away from India.
Kilcullen's war plan for Afghanistan covers ten to twelve years, starting in 2009. The war on the Pakistan front is only beginning, meaning that the Obama administration is managing three wars within the Long War, not including secret battlegrounds like the Philippines or what may happen in Iran or Israel-Palestine, nor the controversial expansion of NATO to the borders of Russia, Iran, China and other hotspots along the Arc of Instability. Some in the intelligence community would even like to expand the "terrorist" threat to include the immigrant and drug routes through Central and Latin America as well.
Even if President Obama wishes to carry out a strategic retreat from "the sorrows of empire," he will be faced with significant pressure from elements of the military-industrial complex, and the lack of an informed public. The path of least resistance, it may appear to Obama in the short run, is incremental escalation (sending 20,000 additional Americans) while stepping up the search for a patchwork diplomatic fix. But incremental escalation can be like another drink for an alcoholic, and even that strategy would require a stepping back from the doctrine of the Long War. Hawks at the American Enterprise Institute and their allies like John McCain and Joe Lieberman are pushing for victory instead of face-saving diplomacy.
The deeper sources of this crisis certainly involve the American and Western quest for oil, the historic inequalities between the global North and South, the West and the Muslim world. But it is important to emphasis the strategic military dimension, particularly the guiding strategic vision of a fifty-year war. The Long War now has a momentum of its own. The impact of the Long War on other American priorities, like healthcare and civil liberties, is likely to be devastating. Since most Americans, especially those supportive of peace and justice campaigns, are well aware of domestic issues and general issues of war and peace, it is important to begin concentrating on the great deficit in popular understanding, that the Long War is already here, building from the previous the cold war dynamic and the Bush era's nomenclature about the "global war on terrorism."
To be continued... thoughts on The Long Peace Movement.
BIBILIOGRAPHY AND READINGS.
The older classics. For those with serious time, I would recommend Sun-Tzu and Carl Von Clausewitz for an introduction to opposing doctrines, still studied widely.
For the classic Western take on the Arab world, T.E. Lawrence's The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
The recent classics include Che Guevara and Mao Tse-Tung. On the Western side, I suggest the writings of Sir Robert Thompson on Defeating Communist Insurgency; Frank Kitson, Low Insurgency Operations; David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare; Robert Taber, The War of the Flea; and the lengthy but brilliant study of Algeria by Alistair Horne, A Savage War of Peace (the cover of Horne's reissued book announces that it's "on the reading list of President Bush and the US military," and a blurb by the Washington Post's Thomas Ricks that it should be read "immediately"). For immediate works of importance: John Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife (the phrase is from Lawrence); and David Petraeus, Nagl et al., The US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (in collaboration with Harvard's Carr Center). A brilliant counterpoint to these works is William R. Polk's Violent Politics (see also his Sorrows of Empire).
Important books on Al Qaeda and Islam include Robert Dreyfuss's The Devil's Game; Jason Burke's Al Qaeda, Michael Scheuer's Marching to Hell; Bruce Lawrence, ed., Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden; and Ahmed Rashid, The Taliban.
Other critical books include Rashid Khalidi, Resurrecting Empire and Sowing Crisis; Juan Cole, Engaging the Muslim World; Ahmed Hashim, Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Iraq; Mamood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim; Tariq Ali, The Duel; and Rashid's Descent into Chaos.
To follow the counterinsurgency discussions among US security strategists, go to the smallwarsjournal.com blog or the Center for American Progress.
Tom Hayden is the author of The Other Side (1966, with Staughton Lynd), The Love of Possession Is a Disease With Them (1972), Ending the War in Iraq (2007) and Writings for a Democratic Society: The Tom Hayden Reader (2008).
"There is little difference between Guantanamo and Bagram."
The task of returning to the values enshrined in the US Constitution and regaining lost moral authority necessitates the recognition that the rule of law and the requirements of justice transcend territoriality
On his third day in office, President Barack Obama signed three executive orders. These executive orders, which required the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and an end to coercive interrogation techniques in the name of fighting terror marked a substantial break from the policies of the Bush administration.
The executive order, signed on January 22, 2009, entitled “Review and Disposition of Individuals Detained at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base and Closure of Detention Facilities”, directed the closure of the notorious prison facility as “soon as practicable and no later than a year after the passage of that order”.
Nearly two months after the passage of the executive order, on May 20, 2009 the United States Senate voted 90-6 against the closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison. The fear guiding the Senate’s vote was that if the prison, which has been in operation since January 11, 2002, was shut down, then dangerous terrorists now held at Guantanamo would be brought on to US soil.
If they were given civilian trials that did not result in convictions, the argument alleged, these dangerous terrorists would then be released among the general population, thus posing an incredible threat to the US population.
On May 21, President Obama, in the footsteps of the Senate’s decision, took to the airwaves to defend his administration’s decision to order the closure of Guantanamo. In his speech, President Obama laid out his indictment against the Bush administration, describing its policies as an abandonment of America’s Constitutional values and principles:
“Instead of strategically applying our power and our principles, we too often set those principles aside as luxuries that we could no longer afford. And in this season of fear, too many of us — Democrats and Republicans; politicians, journalists and citizens — fell silent. In other words, we went off course”. The closure of the prison, he said, was an imperative if America was to return to its values and regain its moral authority in the world.
Rebutting the arguments that motivated the Senate vote, he cited how there had been only two terror convictions in the seven years of Guantanamo’s existence. He recounted the fact that many dangerous criminals, including convicted terrorists such as Ramzi Yusuf and Zacarias Mossaoui remain imprisoned on US soil.
But after these assurances to his most loyal constituency on the Left, President Obama then went on to address another part of his administration’s policy on detainees that has been criticised by human rights groups.
He insisted that his decision to continue military trials for some detainees was not a reversal of his previous position but rather a conscious move to reform a flawed process. In other words, under the Obama administration military trials were being invested with those requirements of due process whose absence had been the basis of their reprehensibility.
Statements obtained under torture would not be permitted as evidence, detainees would have greater latitude in selecting their own counsel and there would be a presumption against the use of hearsay evidence. If this second part of President Obama’s speech made an otherwise clear opposition of the Bush administration’s policies murkier; the last portion went even further.
At the end of the speech, President Obama admitted that there was indeed no concrete response as to what would be done with those detainees who could not be convicted but who still posed a danger to US citizens and thus could not be released. These people, Obama admitted, “remain at war” with the United States and thus could not be released.
This last section of President Obama’s speech betrayed the ultimate conundrum facing his administration. Ultimately, deciding where the American Constitution applies also implies determining the boundaries between law enforcement and war, and concomitantly those between the individual culpability of a criminal and the collective culpability of a prisoner of war fighting for an army.
Beneath these considerations lies the thorny philosophical conundrum of the universal or territorial applicability of principles, which necessitate that true justice must include fair process, the ability to evaluate and examine evidence against the accused, the right to legal counsel and other such procedural provisions available under habeas corpus.
This legal reality was echoed by a US District Court this April, when it ruled that three detainees held by the United States at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan, could also challenge their detention in US courts because “other than the fact that they were held at Bagram, they were no different from Guantanamo detainees”.
While the ruling in the lower court was limited and left many questions unanswered, it did highlight the core issue facing the division of prisoners into law enforcement and military categories.
If the applicability and availability of US Constitutional rights is predicated on the fact that the United States exercises sovereignty over a particular region, then undoubtedly there is little difference between Bagram and Guantanamo. Indeed, the applicability of due process and procedural justice are not circumscribed by geographic proximity to the US mainland and US courts would be strained to find legal arguments to assert as such.
However, what these distinctions do highlight are the complexities inherent in simultaneously construing US national security as a hybrid of law enforcement as well as military initiatives.
Much has been said by President Obama as well as by others regarding the need to revamp institutions in response to the challenges posed by a newfangled non-state enemy, but precious little attention is being devoted to the intrinsically convoluted project of trying to paint an enemy both as a military foe fighting an organised battle and a criminal individually culpable.
While the Obama administration may have made a credible and commendable effort to reverse some of the most reprehensible policies of the Bush administration, its continuation and even expansion of military initiatives creates an inherent challenge to recasting the war on terror as law enforcement rather than a military challenge.
There may be many miles between Guantanamo and Bagram, but the task of returning to the values enshrined in the US Constitution and regaining lost moral authority necessitates the recognition that the rule of law and the requirements of justice transcend territoriality.
Rafia Zakaria is an attorney living in the United States where she teaches courses on Constitutional Law and Political Philosophy. She can be contacted at rafia.zakaria@gmail.com
On his third day in office, President Barack Obama signed three executive orders. These executive orders, which required the closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and an end to coercive interrogation techniques in the name of fighting terror marked a substantial break from the policies of the Bush administration.
The executive order, signed on January 22, 2009, entitled “Review and Disposition of Individuals Detained at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base and Closure of Detention Facilities”, directed the closure of the notorious prison facility as “soon as practicable and no later than a year after the passage of that order”.
Nearly two months after the passage of the executive order, on May 20, 2009 the United States Senate voted 90-6 against the closure of the Guantanamo Bay prison. The fear guiding the Senate’s vote was that if the prison, which has been in operation since January 11, 2002, was shut down, then dangerous terrorists now held at Guantanamo would be brought on to US soil.
If they were given civilian trials that did not result in convictions, the argument alleged, these dangerous terrorists would then be released among the general population, thus posing an incredible threat to the US population.
On May 21, President Obama, in the footsteps of the Senate’s decision, took to the airwaves to defend his administration’s decision to order the closure of Guantanamo. In his speech, President Obama laid out his indictment against the Bush administration, describing its policies as an abandonment of America’s Constitutional values and principles:
“Instead of strategically applying our power and our principles, we too often set those principles aside as luxuries that we could no longer afford. And in this season of fear, too many of us — Democrats and Republicans; politicians, journalists and citizens — fell silent. In other words, we went off course”. The closure of the prison, he said, was an imperative if America was to return to its values and regain its moral authority in the world.
Rebutting the arguments that motivated the Senate vote, he cited how there had been only two terror convictions in the seven years of Guantanamo’s existence. He recounted the fact that many dangerous criminals, including convicted terrorists such as Ramzi Yusuf and Zacarias Mossaoui remain imprisoned on US soil.
But after these assurances to his most loyal constituency on the Left, President Obama then went on to address another part of his administration’s policy on detainees that has been criticised by human rights groups.
He insisted that his decision to continue military trials for some detainees was not a reversal of his previous position but rather a conscious move to reform a flawed process. In other words, under the Obama administration military trials were being invested with those requirements of due process whose absence had been the basis of their reprehensibility.
Statements obtained under torture would not be permitted as evidence, detainees would have greater latitude in selecting their own counsel and there would be a presumption against the use of hearsay evidence. If this second part of President Obama’s speech made an otherwise clear opposition of the Bush administration’s policies murkier; the last portion went even further.
At the end of the speech, President Obama admitted that there was indeed no concrete response as to what would be done with those detainees who could not be convicted but who still posed a danger to US citizens and thus could not be released. These people, Obama admitted, “remain at war” with the United States and thus could not be released.
This last section of President Obama’s speech betrayed the ultimate conundrum facing his administration. Ultimately, deciding where the American Constitution applies also implies determining the boundaries between law enforcement and war, and concomitantly those between the individual culpability of a criminal and the collective culpability of a prisoner of war fighting for an army.
Beneath these considerations lies the thorny philosophical conundrum of the universal or territorial applicability of principles, which necessitate that true justice must include fair process, the ability to evaluate and examine evidence against the accused, the right to legal counsel and other such procedural provisions available under habeas corpus.
This legal reality was echoed by a US District Court this April, when it ruled that three detainees held by the United States at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan, could also challenge their detention in US courts because “other than the fact that they were held at Bagram, they were no different from Guantanamo detainees”.
While the ruling in the lower court was limited and left many questions unanswered, it did highlight the core issue facing the division of prisoners into law enforcement and military categories.
If the applicability and availability of US Constitutional rights is predicated on the fact that the United States exercises sovereignty over a particular region, then undoubtedly there is little difference between Bagram and Guantanamo. Indeed, the applicability of due process and procedural justice are not circumscribed by geographic proximity to the US mainland and US courts would be strained to find legal arguments to assert as such.
However, what these distinctions do highlight are the complexities inherent in simultaneously construing US national security as a hybrid of law enforcement as well as military initiatives.
Much has been said by President Obama as well as by others regarding the need to revamp institutions in response to the challenges posed by a newfangled non-state enemy, but precious little attention is being devoted to the intrinsically convoluted project of trying to paint an enemy both as a military foe fighting an organised battle and a criminal individually culpable.
While the Obama administration may have made a credible and commendable effort to reverse some of the most reprehensible policies of the Bush administration, its continuation and even expansion of military initiatives creates an inherent challenge to recasting the war on terror as law enforcement rather than a military challenge.
There may be many miles between Guantanamo and Bagram, but the task of returning to the values enshrined in the US Constitution and regaining lost moral authority necessitates the recognition that the rule of law and the requirements of justice transcend territoriality.
Rafia Zakaria is an attorney living in the United States where she teaches courses on Constitutional Law and Political Philosophy. She can be contacted at rafia.zakaria@gmail.com
From the Canberra Times
Torture protocol to open our doors
BY LOUIS ANDREWS
23/05/2009 10:01:00 AM
The Australian Government will seek to shine a light into prisons, detention centres, psychiatric wards and secure aged-care facilities after signing up to international inspections.
Attorney-General Robert McClelland announced yesterday the Government had signed an optional United Nations protocol mandating international inspections of places of detention.
The Government will also introduce legislation making torture a Commonwealth offence.
Human Rights Commissioner Graeme Innes said the decision to open up places of detention to UN inspections was a necessary one.
He said transparency at facilities was good, rather than perfect, and the Government's obligations under the protocol would crack open the closed doors of prisons, detention centres and more importantly psychiatric wards and secure aged-care facilities.
''Both of those last two are areas where I think there has been a need for independent assessment,'' Mr Innes said.
Mr McClelland said in a speech to the Lowy Institute for International Policy there was more that could be done now to harden Australia's stance on torture.
''Nothing justifies torture, and nothing justifies a state's use of it,'' the Attorney-General said.
A federal torture offence would work concurrently with the laws in other jurisdictions.
BY LOUIS ANDREWS
23/05/2009 10:01:00 AM
The Australian Government will seek to shine a light into prisons, detention centres, psychiatric wards and secure aged-care facilities after signing up to international inspections.
Attorney-General Robert McClelland announced yesterday the Government had signed an optional United Nations protocol mandating international inspections of places of detention.
The Government will also introduce legislation making torture a Commonwealth offence.
Human Rights Commissioner Graeme Innes said the decision to open up places of detention to UN inspections was a necessary one.
He said transparency at facilities was good, rather than perfect, and the Government's obligations under the protocol would crack open the closed doors of prisons, detention centres and more importantly psychiatric wards and secure aged-care facilities.
''Both of those last two are areas where I think there has been a need for independent assessment,'' Mr Innes said.
Mr McClelland said in a speech to the Lowy Institute for International Policy there was more that could be done now to harden Australia's stance on torture.
''Nothing justifies torture, and nothing justifies a state's use of it,'' the Attorney-General said.
A federal torture offence would work concurrently with the laws in other jurisdictions.
The New Face of An Old Evil
Obama's the new face of the war party
May 19, 2009 04:30 AM
Re: Obama to resume Guantanamo trials, May 15
Barack Obama's dithering on prosecution of Bush-era war criminals, suppression of photographs of American soldiers' abuse of terror suspects, and resumption of Guantanamo trials is a betrayal to all liberal thinking people.
Obama's cynical reversals represent the triumph of the most impressive, seductively skin-thin repackaging of the old military industrial complex and its hateful imperatives, reflected in his broken promise to pull troops out of Iraq, his push for war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and his continued use of drone attacks. Political change is now rebranding; liberal discourse is now idiocracy.
It is time for a national dialogue in Canada on our relationship with a country that is in effect a military dictatorship of the most insidious kind, for it comes packaged in dark skin, hot abs and liberal platitudes. We are dealing with a country whose right loathes us and whose centre-left wishes to exploit our resources and spread disinformation about us – witness U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano's remarks on terrorists crossing the border – in order to achieve its warmongering, mega-corporate goals. Is this an ally?
What future can exist for our left, our distinctiveness, our autonomy, in the face of this utterly compromised behemoth?
Ryan Whyte, Toronto
May 19, 2009 04:30 AM
Re: Obama to resume Guantanamo trials, May 15
Barack Obama's dithering on prosecution of Bush-era war criminals, suppression of photographs of American soldiers' abuse of terror suspects, and resumption of Guantanamo trials is a betrayal to all liberal thinking people.
Obama's cynical reversals represent the triumph of the most impressive, seductively skin-thin repackaging of the old military industrial complex and its hateful imperatives, reflected in his broken promise to pull troops out of Iraq, his push for war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and his continued use of drone attacks. Political change is now rebranding; liberal discourse is now idiocracy.
It is time for a national dialogue in Canada on our relationship with a country that is in effect a military dictatorship of the most insidious kind, for it comes packaged in dark skin, hot abs and liberal platitudes. We are dealing with a country whose right loathes us and whose centre-left wishes to exploit our resources and spread disinformation about us – witness U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano's remarks on terrorists crossing the border – in order to achieve its warmongering, mega-corporate goals. Is this an ally?
What future can exist for our left, our distinctiveness, our autonomy, in the face of this utterly compromised behemoth?
Ryan Whyte, Toronto
Revenge of the Killer Bees
And to think I used to like honey..
CIA’s war in Pakistan
LAHORE: Along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, the US has deployed some of the most sophisticated killing machines ever created. Al Qaeda and the Taliban, which could not be eliminated by tanks, gunships and missiles, will they be stamped out by CIA-operated unmanned aircraft? That was the bet former US president George W Bush placed during his final months in office. The attacks have been stepped up under President Barack Obama. The hum of the drones is a familiar sound in Waziristan today. Tribesmen call them machay, or red bees. The main objectives of the campaign is to kill Al Qaeda’s top-tier leadership and deny sanctuary to the fighters who routinely slip across the border to attack US forces in Afghanistan. But is the drone war winnable? The White House routinely dodges questions on the subject, and neither the CIA nor the State Department would talk about it on the record. CIA officials say at least nine of the top 20 high-value Al Qaeda targets identified last fall have been killed by the drone strikes besides some lesser figures. daily times monitor
CIA’s war in Pakistan
LAHORE: Along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, the US has deployed some of the most sophisticated killing machines ever created. Al Qaeda and the Taliban, which could not be eliminated by tanks, gunships and missiles, will they be stamped out by CIA-operated unmanned aircraft? That was the bet former US president George W Bush placed during his final months in office. The attacks have been stepped up under President Barack Obama. The hum of the drones is a familiar sound in Waziristan today. Tribesmen call them machay, or red bees. The main objectives of the campaign is to kill Al Qaeda’s top-tier leadership and deny sanctuary to the fighters who routinely slip across the border to attack US forces in Afghanistan. But is the drone war winnable? The White House routinely dodges questions on the subject, and neither the CIA nor the State Department would talk about it on the record. CIA officials say at least nine of the top 20 high-value Al Qaeda targets identified last fall have been killed by the drone strikes besides some lesser figures. daily times monitor
Film Review: Waltz With Bashir
From the Winnipeg Sun:
Bashir is one haunting Waltz
Anti-war film a fascinating mix of live action and animation
By LIZ BRAUN
Last Updated: 22nd May 2009, 3:28am
Email Story Print Size A A A Report Typo Share with:
Facebook Digg Del.icio.us Google Stumble Upon Newsvine Reddit Technorati Feed Me Yahoo Simpy Squidoo Spurl Blogmarks Netvouz Scuttle Sitejot + What are these? Waltz With Bashir is a strange and wonderful hybrid.
The anti-war film is both an animated movie and a documentary, mixing fact and fantasy one minute, and real war events and dream sequences the next. But it's not a pretty picture. Waltz With Bashir is a disturbing look at atrocities committed in the early 1980s at Palestinian refugee camps during the war in Lebanon.
Waltz With Bashir begins with images of a pack of wild dogs running wild. The frightening animals are part of a recurring dream told to filmmaker Ari Folman by a friend he sits with in a bar. The dream, says the friend, is related to what he did during the war in Lebanon, when he and Folman were just kids of 18 or 19.
Folman says he never thinks about those days of more than 20 years ago. He's surprised to realize he actually remembers almost nothing of that military service.
And so he sets out to visit old friends and ask them and other people what they remember of that period in their lives. So begins a strange, dream-filled journey of trying to fill in the blanks of memory and time.
At first, the war is something far away, just a collection of events in the past that somehow changed the future. Here is Folman's friend Carmi, for example, a man everyone had predicted would one day win a Nobel Prize for nuclear physics. But, "By the time I was 20, that future was over," says Carmi. And then the story gets more specific.
Slowly but surely, Waltz With Bashir moves toward the detailed recall of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre. Folman and his colleagues remember exploding tanks and sniper fire, car bombs, dumping the bodies of the dead, the trashed airport at Beirut, children with weapons, dead animals at the Hippodrome. (The title is taken from a scene in which people watch as one man shoots wildly and dodges sniper fire, as if dancing, in a spot where posters of Bashir Gemayel hang over the streets.)
The weird thing about Waltz With Bashir is that the use of animation intensifies the events, when you might assume it would do the opposite. The storytelling is superb, layering detail upon detail of visuals and events; it is a mesmerizing (and vaguely hallucinogenic) picture to look at. Waltz With Bashir, which has English subtitles, won best film and five other awards of the Israeli Film Academy. It was Israel's submission for best foreign language film at the 2009 Academy Awards.
liz.braun@sunmedia.ca
Bashir is one haunting Waltz
Anti-war film a fascinating mix of live action and animation
By LIZ BRAUN
Last Updated: 22nd May 2009, 3:28am
Email Story Print Size A A A Report Typo Share with:
Facebook Digg Del.icio.us Google Stumble Upon Newsvine Reddit Technorati Feed Me Yahoo Simpy Squidoo Spurl Blogmarks Netvouz Scuttle Sitejot + What are these? Waltz With Bashir is a strange and wonderful hybrid.
The anti-war film is both an animated movie and a documentary, mixing fact and fantasy one minute, and real war events and dream sequences the next. But it's not a pretty picture. Waltz With Bashir is a disturbing look at atrocities committed in the early 1980s at Palestinian refugee camps during the war in Lebanon.
Waltz With Bashir begins with images of a pack of wild dogs running wild. The frightening animals are part of a recurring dream told to filmmaker Ari Folman by a friend he sits with in a bar. The dream, says the friend, is related to what he did during the war in Lebanon, when he and Folman were just kids of 18 or 19.
Folman says he never thinks about those days of more than 20 years ago. He's surprised to realize he actually remembers almost nothing of that military service.
And so he sets out to visit old friends and ask them and other people what they remember of that period in their lives. So begins a strange, dream-filled journey of trying to fill in the blanks of memory and time.
At first, the war is something far away, just a collection of events in the past that somehow changed the future. Here is Folman's friend Carmi, for example, a man everyone had predicted would one day win a Nobel Prize for nuclear physics. But, "By the time I was 20, that future was over," says Carmi. And then the story gets more specific.
Slowly but surely, Waltz With Bashir moves toward the detailed recall of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre. Folman and his colleagues remember exploding tanks and sniper fire, car bombs, dumping the bodies of the dead, the trashed airport at Beirut, children with weapons, dead animals at the Hippodrome. (The title is taken from a scene in which people watch as one man shoots wildly and dodges sniper fire, as if dancing, in a spot where posters of Bashir Gemayel hang over the streets.)
The weird thing about Waltz With Bashir is that the use of animation intensifies the events, when you might assume it would do the opposite. The storytelling is superb, layering detail upon detail of visuals and events; it is a mesmerizing (and vaguely hallucinogenic) picture to look at. Waltz With Bashir, which has English subtitles, won best film and five other awards of the Israeli Film Academy. It was Israel's submission for best foreign language film at the 2009 Academy Awards.
liz.braun@sunmedia.ca
Avec MSF :)
This piece made my day. In the New York Times.
By CHRIS HEDGES
Published: May 20, 2009
It is impossible to know war if you do not stand with the mass of the powerless caught in its maw. All narratives of war told through the lens of the combatants carry with them the seduction of violence. But once you cross to the other side, to stand in fear with the helpless and the weak, you confront the moral depravity of industrial slaughter and the scourge that is war itself. Few books achieve this clarity. “The Photographer” is one.
Skip to next paragraph
THE PHOTOGRAPHER
Into War-Torn Afghanistan With Doctors Without Borders.
By Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefèvre and Frédéric Lemercier.Translated by Alexis Siegel
Illustrated. 267 pp. First Second. Paper, $29.95
Related
Times Topics: Afghanistan
Excerpt From ‘The Photographer’ (firstsecondbooks.com)A strange book, part photojournalism and part graphic memoir, “The Photographer” tells the story of a small mission of mostly French doctors and nurses who traveled into northern Afghanistan by horse and donkey train in 1986, at the height of the Soviet occupation. The book shows the damage done to bodies and souls by shells, bullets and iron fragments, and the frantic struggle to mend the broken.
The narrator and photographer is Didier Lefèvre. His black-and-white photographs — many reprinted directly from his uncropped contact sheets — are interwoven with drawings by Emmanuel Guibert. The small sequential frames of the contact sheets merge seamlessly into the panels of artwork. The book, at 267 pages, is long. But its length is an asset, allowing the story to build in power and momentum as it recounts the arduous trip into mountain villages, the confrontation with the devastation of war, the struggle to save lives and Lefèvre’s foolish and nearly fatal attempt to return to Pakistan ahead of the team.
The three-month mission was led by Dr. Juliette Fournot, who spoke Dari, dressed as a man and commanded the respect of the French and Afghans, including the village chiefs and local warlords. Her role, and her immersion in the Afghan society where she spent her teenage years, repeatedly shatters easy stereotypes about Afghan and Muslim culture.
Lefèvre (who died of heart failure in 2007) tells his story with a mixture of beguiling innocence and sensitivity. He retreats in tears to a secluded corner after seeing a wounded 10-year-old girl who will never walk again and will die of septic shock six months later. Photographs of the child are juxtaposed with Guibert’s drawing of Lefèvre, silhouetted and hunched over in grief.
“In a corner, a woman with a white head scarf is watching over two of her children,” one panel reads, “a teenage girl and a baby, both bloodied. The little boy is maybe 2 or 3. He hardly moves but from time to time lets out a little wail of ‘Aoh.’ ”
This panel is followed by a yellow frame with the word “Aoh” in the upper left corner, a black-and-white photo of the wounded child, another frame with the word “Aoh,” a picture of anxious relatives huddled outside the door and then a half-page photograph of the bewildered boy and his sister, her face covered with blood as she gazes at her doomed brother.
The book has the feel of a film, attesting to the skill of Guibert and Frédéric Lemercier, the graphic designer. But there is nothing romantic about Afghanistan or the Afghans, who can be at once courageous and generous as well as heartless and menacing. Lefèvre, on the way back, is abandoned by his feckless guides; his horse collapses and eventually dies; and the photographer nearly succumbs in the snowy mountain passes. “I take out one of my cameras. I choose a 20-millimeter lens, a very wide angle, and shoot from the ground,” he says — “to let people know where I died.” The next page shows his exhausted pack horse amid snowy boulders, followed by a bleak spread of the gloomy mountain pass. Lefèvre is saved by a band of brigands, who shake him down for much of his money but get him out. The physical toll of his trip left him suffering from chronic boils. He lost 14 teeth. But before he died he returned to Afghanistan seven more times in an attempt to tell the stories of those he first met in 1986, whom he could not abandon or forget.
The disparity between what we are told or what we believe about war and war itself is so vast that those who come back, like Lefèvre, are often rendered speechless. What do you say to those who advocate war as an instrument to liberate the women of Afghanistan or bring democracy to Iraq? How do you tell them what war is like? How do you explain that the very proposition of war as an instrument of virtue is absurd? How do you cope with memories of children bleeding to death with bits of iron fragments peppered throughout their small bodies? How do you speak of war without tears?
The book concludes with contact sheets showing Lefèvre walking with his mother on the beach in Blonville with Bienchen, her small dog. A postscript notes that she did not learn the details of her son’s travels until the publication of this story, two decades after his first trip.
The power of “The Photographer” is that it bridges this silence. There is no fighting in this book. No great warriors are exalted. The story is about those who live on the fringes of war and care for its human detritus. By the end of the book the image or picture of a weapon is distasteful. And if you can achieve this, you have gone a long way to imparting the truth about warfare.
Chris Hedges, a former war correspondent for The Times, is a senior fellow at the Nation Institute and author of the forthcoming “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.”
By CHRIS HEDGES
Published: May 20, 2009
It is impossible to know war if you do not stand with the mass of the powerless caught in its maw. All narratives of war told through the lens of the combatants carry with them the seduction of violence. But once you cross to the other side, to stand in fear with the helpless and the weak, you confront the moral depravity of industrial slaughter and the scourge that is war itself. Few books achieve this clarity. “The Photographer” is one.
Skip to next paragraph
THE PHOTOGRAPHER
Into War-Torn Afghanistan With Doctors Without Borders.
By Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefèvre and Frédéric Lemercier.Translated by Alexis Siegel
Illustrated. 267 pp. First Second. Paper, $29.95
Related
Times Topics: Afghanistan
Excerpt From ‘The Photographer’ (firstsecondbooks.com)A strange book, part photojournalism and part graphic memoir, “The Photographer” tells the story of a small mission of mostly French doctors and nurses who traveled into northern Afghanistan by horse and donkey train in 1986, at the height of the Soviet occupation. The book shows the damage done to bodies and souls by shells, bullets and iron fragments, and the frantic struggle to mend the broken.
The narrator and photographer is Didier Lefèvre. His black-and-white photographs — many reprinted directly from his uncropped contact sheets — are interwoven with drawings by Emmanuel Guibert. The small sequential frames of the contact sheets merge seamlessly into the panels of artwork. The book, at 267 pages, is long. But its length is an asset, allowing the story to build in power and momentum as it recounts the arduous trip into mountain villages, the confrontation with the devastation of war, the struggle to save lives and Lefèvre’s foolish and nearly fatal attempt to return to Pakistan ahead of the team.
The three-month mission was led by Dr. Juliette Fournot, who spoke Dari, dressed as a man and commanded the respect of the French and Afghans, including the village chiefs and local warlords. Her role, and her immersion in the Afghan society where she spent her teenage years, repeatedly shatters easy stereotypes about Afghan and Muslim culture.
Lefèvre (who died of heart failure in 2007) tells his story with a mixture of beguiling innocence and sensitivity. He retreats in tears to a secluded corner after seeing a wounded 10-year-old girl who will never walk again and will die of septic shock six months later. Photographs of the child are juxtaposed with Guibert’s drawing of Lefèvre, silhouetted and hunched over in grief.
“In a corner, a woman with a white head scarf is watching over two of her children,” one panel reads, “a teenage girl and a baby, both bloodied. The little boy is maybe 2 or 3. He hardly moves but from time to time lets out a little wail of ‘Aoh.’ ”
This panel is followed by a yellow frame with the word “Aoh” in the upper left corner, a black-and-white photo of the wounded child, another frame with the word “Aoh,” a picture of anxious relatives huddled outside the door and then a half-page photograph of the bewildered boy and his sister, her face covered with blood as she gazes at her doomed brother.
The book has the feel of a film, attesting to the skill of Guibert and Frédéric Lemercier, the graphic designer. But there is nothing romantic about Afghanistan or the Afghans, who can be at once courageous and generous as well as heartless and menacing. Lefèvre, on the way back, is abandoned by his feckless guides; his horse collapses and eventually dies; and the photographer nearly succumbs in the snowy mountain passes. “I take out one of my cameras. I choose a 20-millimeter lens, a very wide angle, and shoot from the ground,” he says — “to let people know where I died.” The next page shows his exhausted pack horse amid snowy boulders, followed by a bleak spread of the gloomy mountain pass. Lefèvre is saved by a band of brigands, who shake him down for much of his money but get him out. The physical toll of his trip left him suffering from chronic boils. He lost 14 teeth. But before he died he returned to Afghanistan seven more times in an attempt to tell the stories of those he first met in 1986, whom he could not abandon or forget.
The disparity between what we are told or what we believe about war and war itself is so vast that those who come back, like Lefèvre, are often rendered speechless. What do you say to those who advocate war as an instrument to liberate the women of Afghanistan or bring democracy to Iraq? How do you tell them what war is like? How do you explain that the very proposition of war as an instrument of virtue is absurd? How do you cope with memories of children bleeding to death with bits of iron fragments peppered throughout their small bodies? How do you speak of war without tears?
The book concludes with contact sheets showing Lefèvre walking with his mother on the beach in Blonville with Bienchen, her small dog. A postscript notes that she did not learn the details of her son’s travels until the publication of this story, two decades after his first trip.
The power of “The Photographer” is that it bridges this silence. There is no fighting in this book. No great warriors are exalted. The story is about those who live on the fringes of war and care for its human detritus. By the end of the book the image or picture of a weapon is distasteful. And if you can achieve this, you have gone a long way to imparting the truth about warfare.
Chris Hedges, a former war correspondent for The Times, is a senior fellow at the Nation Institute and author of the forthcoming “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.”
Friday, May 22, 2009
Comments Galore
This wasn't all by a long shot, but its all I have room for. You can track down today's New York Times editorial for more.
Only the release of the records of what was obtained using "enhanced interrogation techniques" can resolve this dispute.
If the records show that we did not obtain even one piece of actionable information, then it is clear that waterboarding and the other horrors were not only illegal and immoral but also ineffective. Case closed.
However, what if we did get, among the false information, some accurate leads? Then we need to have a full debate on whether the Bush/Chaney policy could be justified on military necessary grounds.
It cannot be justified on legal or moral grounds, but sometimes in war we are required to do things that would otherwise be entirely reprehensible. The consensus appears to be that the atomic bombs dropped on Japan actually saved lives, both American and Japanese, while, in contrast, the fire bombing of Dresden did nothing (except, as some claim, demonstrate our air power to the Soviets).
But, if we do not know whether these methods were ever effective (and personally I believe that they were not), we have to condemn them absolutely. The burden is on Chaney, et al. to show that they did save even one life. Absent that proof, then we should call our practices what they were - torture. And we then should punish that torture, wherever the road may lead us.
— John G., NYC
Of course Mr. O. is right,
Cheney, the Prince of the Night,
Can hear the bells chime
That herald Hard Time,
So he spews out Terror and Fright!
— Larry Eisenberg, New York City
This forum helps remind one that there are plenty of Americans, like Mike above from Appleton, who are ready and willing to toss the Constitution away on the slightest provocation. 9/11 isn't the worst thing America has ever faced folks. With a few exceptions (like the Japanese internments) we've weathered (real) war and depression and famine and assassination AND kept true to what our nation stands for. The whole debate about whether the torture worked or not is only a debate for those who don't understand American values at all. You don't avoid torture because it doesn't work; you avoid torture because that's not who we are.
— nesralr, San Francisco
Leigh Pullman (#1):
Many thanks for your incisive comments.
Your letter should be required reading for Mr. Obama, who I fear has been morphing from a seemingly highly principled leader and supporter of our Constitution into a Bush act-alike. He should immediately push the Justice Department to initiate legal action against the Bush administration henchpersons, from the top down.. Otherwise, the shabby remnants, personified by Dick Cheney, will continue to erode the foundations of our democracy.
President Obama rightly admires Lincoln. He should read Lincoln's immortal words and take them to heart:
"You can fool some of the people all the time, and all the people some of the time, but you can not fool all the people all the time".
Perhaps President Obama should be equally mindful of William E. Gladstone's prescient observation: "Justice delayed is justice denied".
— Nat Solomon, Bronx, NY
I agree with your editorial but please will someone hold Cheney accountable for stating yesterday that we went to Iraq because we were targeting regimes that were CAPABLE of producing wmd's. Thousands of dead Americans and Iraquis demand it. If the former V.P. of America is allowed to rewrite his deeds and not be held accountable for one of the most significant events in our country-wow-This man is unhinged and his own words in 2003-Irag definitely has wmd's demonstate the pathology that is continuing.
— elaine price, massachusetts
Benjamin Franklin said it best,"Those who are willing to give up a little freedom for a little more security deserve neither & will lose both!"
— Frank E., Odessa,Tx.
John D., you forgot the journalist being held in Iran and about to be released. Two journalists being held in North Korea, while lamentable, does not make Americans less safe. Kim Il Jong "stuck" it too us when Bush was President as well.
While Cheney conveniently ignores over 4,000 American military deaths and, by some reports, over 100,000 civilian ones, in Iraq, President Obama cites our heritage, our Constitution and our values. Would you trust someone who got us into a war causing the above casualties with the biggest lie in American History since Nixon uttered "I am not a crook"? Tell us about those "WMD's" again, Dick!
Dick Cheney more and more resembles the aging actor who just will not get off stage and finds a constant need to justify himself. He may be the ultimate "Frank Skeffington" of Edwin O'Connor's "The Last Hurrah". Adept for so long at playing individuals off against each other, serving his own self-interest and now fast becoming that annoying uncle who keeps telling the same story at Thanksgiving. Dick, it's over! Go back to Wyoming, go hunting and spare us!
— Joe M, Manchester, VT
We know that the Right has lost perspective on torture and privacy rights, but I do wish a more pragmatic approach would be taken by the left.
"Mr. Obama was exactly right when he said Americans do not have to choose between security and their democratic values."
While this may be true against Mr. Cheney's extremism, and is good rhetoric, there are many exceptions that we must learn to deal with and expect. Democracy and freedom are messy and there is a price to pay for them. In our own courts we often must let a criminal go for lack of a good case or even due to prosecutorial malfeasance. We should be prepared for the same in war and in fighting terrorism. The price for exacting a perfect cleansing is simply too high, in civilian lives, in the torture of detainees but also in the blowback that comes in the form of resistance and hatred for American brutality.
Unless you demand perfect safety (something Cheney-Bush played upon) you will expect to set free some who perhaps should not be free. There is imperfection in the system. Justice is not perfect. It is this imperfection or restraint that protects us from extremist disproportionality that destroys civilization. And we would do well to examine our own domestic expectations for perfect justice at a time when we maintain the largest proportion of prison population in the world.
— St Paul, Minnesota
What Obama must do first is heed his own precept, not to let fear counsel him! For a panicky fear is what we clearly see in Cheney's following speech, in his mistaken history that 9/11 was "the most devastating strike...against Americans...," as he omits Pearl Harbor and the bombing of the USS Maine. For Cheney also shows us how much panic and fear guided the Bush administration response to 9/11, when he describes his state of mind: "... watching a coordinated, devastating attack on our country from an underground bunker at the White House can affect how you view your responsibilities." His and Bush's fear caused them to mix Al Qaeda, A.Q. Khan's nuclear efforts for export, anthrax attackers, Libya's nuclear bomb program, and unnamed "regimes that had the capacity to build weapons of mass destruction, and might transfer such weapons to terrorists" all as targets of retaliation, and in Cheney's admission, he starkly reveals, unwittingly, what terrible soldiers that he and President Bush would have made had either man ever enlisted to fight for our country. Now we see why they did not make good military commanders-in-chiefs, because neither Bush nor Cheney knew who committed 9/11. When they ordered our military attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan, they were like reckless hunters who fire their shotguns before they see where they are aiming. Neither man emulated British WW II leader Winston Churchill, touring the rubble of London streets following a devastating Luftwaffe bombing raid on civilians, serenely cool because he knew his intelligence services were cracking the Nazi military codes, and he was bringing into military service a new and secret air defense, radar. Churchill also knew, in Britain's darkest moments of war, that his agents would soon identify the source of German rocket launches, and munitions factories. Churchill was no reckless quail hunter shooting blindly at his quarry, nor was he someone who spooked it to seek cover with loud, drunken behavior under the influence of a "couple of martinis" before brunch that morning. And Bush was no FDR either who had identified secretly the location of German U-boats sinking our merchant marine fleets, but who would not act until he had them all clearly mapped. Fear drove Cheney and Bush, two of our history's most unseasoned military and conflict political leaders, to shoot in the dark after 9/11 at any likely target that appeared in their intelligence reports as hostile to the USA. They messed up, firing everywhere but at the right culprits, who escaped while they were diverted into disarming Libya, shutting down A.Q. Khan's nuke operations, overthrowing Saddam Hussein and the Taliban Afghan government. Someone please remind Cheney that none of those "successful targets of his retaliation for 9/11" were directly involved in the 9/11 attack by Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda. And that is why we are still occupying Iraq and Afghanistan years after overthrowing the leaders there, afraid of what the Iraqi and Afghan peoples might do to their US puppet governments should we suddenly leave, in retaliation for all the unjustified deaths we caused to thousands of innocent people there.
— Bayou Houma, Boston
Did you listen to the same speech that I did? "Prolonged Detention"? I voted for Obama. I sent him money. It was the first campaign I ever supported financially in my 40 plus years of voting. Yet, I must admit (as you should if you desire to be honest) that this speech was a disappointment. He has been "touched". Someone has "gotten" to him. He is "falling in line". I am beginning to believe that the conspiracy theorists were right after all. Office holders are merely figure heads. Elections are efforts in futility. There is indeed an "unseen hand" that pulls the strings. This is what Italian anarchists have for over a century referred to as the "Pezzonavonte". It is obvious that even my beloved N.Y. Times, although faithful and true in social issues like health care, has been touched by the "hand" in foreign policy issues, especially those involving Arabs, Muslims, and other Middle Easterners who are not Israeli.
— Fizzy, Philadelphia
The contrast between diametrically opposed views could not be sharper than what we heard yesterday.
Ideology is important! A country must live its values, not just leave them on a piece of sheepskin.
The rationalizations I heard from Mr. Cheney and his daughter yesterday, not only amounted to an apoligist view of events, but also consisted of many lies aimed at deflecting from the real issues.
How convenient for certain Republicans to disregard several rulings by the Bush Supreme Court that negated many of his government's practices; to disregard the linkages of outrages comitted at many locations to the justifications for torture as reported by the Schlesinger inquiry; to disregard that their methods of interrogation were public during the Bush/Cheney years as they were the subject of more than one news report; and to disregard the Valerie Plaine affair while purporting to support the CIA, an agency whose analysis in the buildup to the stupidly and unjustifiably conducted invasion of Iraq has been harshly criticized.
I also do not want anyone to forget that the self-riteous Cheney, the former ceo of Haliburton, was able to keep his stock in that company while sitting as vice president, a position from which he managed to influence the awarding of multi-billions of dollars of contracts for various poorly performed and over-billed services in Iraq, many of which were awarded without a competitivew bidding process.
No wonder many view Cheney as a Satanic figure. I just view him as a crook.
— R H, Toronto
I see that Cheney is lying about the Iraq/al Qaeda link again. He was also ignoring the testimony of his own interrogators that foreign fighters who later came to Iraq repeatedly cited Abu Ghraib as their motivation. Cheney also continues to lie about the effectiveness of waterboarding when we now have the interrogator's testimony that torture shut down a cooperative KSM, and produced a bunch of garbage intel instead.
But, I can see from some of these comments why Cheney is still lying: there are still people out there who are stupid enough to fall for it. Again.
This is the difference between us and the torture party, now. We have values. They don't. They threw their principles away and all they have to show for it is groveling at the feet of Dick Cheney, a loser and a liar.
— John, Texas
I applaud the President's effort to stand his ground against the defiant Pentagon and corporate-owned Congress. The commentators who want national security over the rule of law will not be very happy when the same national security apparatus is turned against them. Once you abandon the moral values you stand for (the belief in due process being one of such values) you have no reason to argue against government authority when it's unjustly turned against you. Also, most of Gitmo prisoners were handed to the US by Musharraf who was playing a classic double game. Most of those individuals were randomly picked by Musharraf to satisfy the demand for Gitmo 'terrorists'. How many real terrorists did the US actually keep in Gitmo? Five? Ten? We won't know until and unless we have fair trials.
— Yasir, London, ON
pparently, the NYT ignored the part of the speech where President Obama laid out the details of his "prolonged" (read: "preventive and indefinite") detention of people only suspected of possibly committing terrorist acts in the future. The candidates for this indefinite detention are detainees against whom no charges were preferred, and without and evidence that they had already committed any crimes or participated in any attacks against the United States. And, recognizing that this is a violation of the Constitution, US statutory law and the Geneva Conventions, he promised that his administration would craft a brand new "legal framework" that would make this "legal."
No wonder Obama hasn't gone after Bush's "legal" experts John Yoo, Jay Bybee, Alberto Gonzales, William Haynes, and David Addington. He may need to call on their legal sophistry to create yet another warped fig leaf for patently unconstitutional practices.
Combined with the President's plan to resurrect the illegal Bush military tribunals, albeit, with a gloss of legal cover, such as representation for the defendents, we get a picture of a man who is wonderfully inspirational in his oratory, talking the talk as well as any president in history, but a very, very different man when it comes down to walking the walk.
Boys and girls, can you say "OBusha?" I knew you could..."
— Blue Sun, New Hope, PA
ome of the above comments display a shocking example of GOP brainwashing.
None mention that most of the original detainees who were tortured are innocent. None mention that many were rounded up by reward seekers and were merely in the wrong place at the wrong time. None mention that 100 of them died as a result of being tortured. None mention that interrogators who left their jobs because they were disgusted by the use of torture swear that traditional interrogation methods yielded far better results than did torture, and that Cheney & Co. are now trying to falsely credit torture with obtaining the info that was actually provided by using traditional interrogation techniques.
The Repub mantra seems to constitute a twist on a time-honored legal precept: "Let 10 innocents be tortured rather than let one who is guilty not be tortured."
— Captain Ronnel, L. A., CA
eneral Musharraf himself acknowledged that he sold terrorists to CIA where they 'confessed' under the enhanced techniques employed by Rumsfeld:
http://www.newstatesman.com/200610090029
— Yasir, London, ON
Dick Cheney and Joe McCarthy are parallel figures that used fear to try to manipulate the constitution, and will both go down in history as despots that the people of the United States purged when their ideals came under attack.
— Don, Winona MN
Dick Cheney is still trying to run the show, even when isn't in office. He is a strange & often frightening man. My guess is that he probably to force President Obama to do what he thinks should be done. This country embraced by the world after 9/11 & disgraced by our own actions in the aftermath, and these actions were orchestrated by Dick Cheney pulling the strings above a weak president. This cannot become a major distraction from what Obama is trying to achieve this first year of his presidency - that's what Cheney really wants - to stop the momentum of President Obama by distracting him from his vigorous & forward moving agenda, but he should tread lightly or it could backfire on him - and he could become the target of a criminal investigation - he should have laid low, so whatever happens now, he asked for it. He should back off.
— Vic, New York
Words matter. They matter deeply because they provide a precedent for subsequent action and a legitimating mark for those actions. Obama can refer back to this major national-security address and say, Look I stated my policy clearly and distinctly, and therefore what I am about should not surprise anyone. Given his engaging manner, adeptness at nuance, and high degree of intelligence, it becomes imperative that we listen closely and well.
Obama revealed he does not take criticism lightly. The Times did not cover his meeting with human rights and constitutionalist groups the day preceding his speech, in which the comment that he was continuing Bush's policies on detention and classification met with a chilly response. Contrary to popular myth, Obama is NOT receptive to all sides, as witness his practical exclusion of advocates for a single-payer health insurance program from his health care conferences and deliberations. On the equally important issue of adhering to Constitutional principles, he is equally adamant about furthering his own interpretation. Thus, The Times in this editorial was almost flippant in the way it passed over Obama's defense of the state secrets doctrine. Too, it did not stop to think that Obama's refusal to release photographs documenting torture--and the eerily flag-waving reasons for doing so--was a clear refutation of transparency, candor, and truth-telling, traits to which The Times generously accorded the president.
In his address, Obama did not once mention the word, "torture." The word play supports his determination NOT to promote, indeed, because of his powers to classify and/or prevent the release of documents, actually to prevent the investigation of the actions of the preceding administation. More important, he endorsed, in addition to military commissions (which legal critics see as inherently unjust, despite what they also find to be only cosmetic changes), the principle of indefinite detention, a concept so abhorrent to the American Constitution and Western jurisprudence as to be mind-boggling in its implications. THAT, of course, is where words qua precedents open the way to the eclipse of democracy.
One implication of indefinite detention is the contemplation of indefinite war--a course justified by another phrase Obama used more than once in his address. I found it strange to hear the phrase "al Quaeda and its affiliates," because it widened the horizons for permissible warfare to include any group, anywhere, and for any duration a president deems a threat to national security. (This, of course, regurgitates the Bush thinking about ties between Saddam and al Quaeda.) All in all, the address saddens one about the rapid deterioration in leadership now manifested by the president; not coincidentally, within hours of the address he can sign a bill on credit card reform that contains a provision for carrying loaded, concealed weapons into our national parks!
— Norman Pollack, East Lansing, Mich.
Once again, Cheney uses arguments that fail in the light of scrutiny:
He claims that "enhanced Interrogation" saved lives yet won't talk of false information that took resources to investigate and diluted our intelligence efforts.
He claims success based on the fact that there were no more attacks on American soil while ignoring the acts of terror in other countries and the massive amount of death in Iraq. Heck, there have been no nuclear strikes since I started dating several decades ago, yet I'm not so stupid to claim that my dating is what stopped nuclear strikes!
Obamas position isn't perfect either, but at least is seems to be based on something other than false logic and fear.
I'm very saddened that many that wanted Gitmo closed don't have the intestinal fortitude to actually do something about it. Once again, many of our elected "leaders" seem to be nothing more than so many leaves blowing in the wind.
And to those that correctly point out that in times of war, we have often played fast and loose with rights and privilages ignore a couple truths:
There is no claim that things like the internment of Japanese and Japanese decendants actually made us safer in WWII. Rather it seems univerally acknowledged as a black mark on the face of US history. More importantly, these reactionary events were much more limited in time than what we have now: an ill-defined "war on terror" with no national boundaries and no criteria for conclusion. Because of the nebulous nature, it, by definition, will never end and any suspension of basic rights or the rule of law just becomes and excuse for the excersize of extra-legal powers outside the scope of checks and balances.
We surely can do better than this.
— Matt R, Woodside, CA
"The Real Path to Security" is to just stop digging the hole that leads us and U.S. to the abyss and ineluctable death spiral of EMPIRE.
In the film "Jerry Maguire" Renée Zellweger says to Tom Cruse, "Shut up, just shut up. You had me at 'hello'".
Yesterday watching the beginning of Obama's speech I found myself wanting to shout, "Shut up, just shut up, you had me at 'EMPIRE'".
What had my hopes up was Obama's early history lesson in the speech when he said"
"Fidelity to our values is the reason why the United States of America grew from a small string of colonies under the writ of an empire to the strongest nation in the world."
I'll admit, with my older hearing, that I thought Obama had said "colonies under the (grip) of empire", rather than the "writ" of empire, but to my ear the wonderful and glorious word that Obama was about to use as his teaching example was that we were under an 'EMPIRE'.
My heart jumped, I perked up my old ears and got ready to listen to this most educated and educating president explain to his American students that the British Empire that had so oppressed and tyrannized our forefathers was, like all Empires, not merely a form of political oppression by the governmental monarchy of George III, but also was an indivisible economic tyranny of the British royally chartered East India Corporation, which caused the real Boston Tea Party against this combined political economic Empire.
I waited in rapt attention to Obama's every world waiting for him to speak truth to the oppressive power of Empire and explain, to we his students, how Empire is a pathology of both the political and economic (as well as social and military) spheres of our lives, and then to really lower the boom on Empire by explaining how one sphere of Empire (typically the economic) perverts all other spheres and actively seeks to take over all of the elements of a democratic society and 'democratic thinking' with the tyranny of an out-of-control ruling-elite that usurps 'democratic thinking' with their own private hierarchy of 'Empire thinking' --- just as Ben Franklin feared when he said, "We have our Republic if we can keep it" (protected from Empire).
Not only did Obama not fulfill my 'hope' in his ability to 'change' our maelstrom driven course from one headed toward Empire, back to the safe course of democracy, but he then broke my heart by lying the 'white lie of politics' which Bill Clinton's deadly 'triangulation' has already shown always turns as black as death in the hands of Empire.
Obama said, not once, but twice, in describing the measures taken by the Bush/Cheney regime after the 'shock' of 9/11, "I believe that many of these decisions were motivated by a sincere desire to protect the American people."
There are only two possibilities for Obama telling this massive lie about the real reason for the Bush regime taking the imperial control measures that it was able to force on American democracy with the 'shock doctrine' that it implemented for the guileful Empire it was controlled by; either Obama is very naive (which he is not), or he was giving this deadly ruling-elite 'corporate financial Empire' that controls our government behind the facade of its two-party, 'Vichy' sham of democracy, a Clintonian DLC accommodation and 'triangulation' rather than exposing, confronting, battling, and expunging this new and sophisticated Empire which has the U.S. under its grip, or as Obama himself preferred "writ".
As Obama continued to speak, he gave compelling encouragement to American's about how our country not only overcame that earlier "empire writ" that had tried to strangle our birth, but also how we overcame through strength of character and values the 20th century Empires (Nazi) of fascism, and (Soviet) of communism --- but the person most in need of such encouragement (and courage) from Obama, IS Obama.
Before this modern Hamlet walks off stage he will have to face the issue of whether to be, or not to be, for or against the Empire that he already knows in his heart and mind that he will have to confront.
Obama meeting this existential challange, with us helping him, is the only thing that will bring us (and U.S.) a "Real Path to Security".
Alan MacDonald
Sanford, Maine
Dick Cheney is still trying to run the show, even when isn't in office. He is a strange & often frightening man. My guess is that he is probably trying to force President Obama to do what he thinks should be done. This country was embraced by the world after 9/11 & disgraced by our own actions in the aftermath, and these actions were orchestrated by Dick Cheney pulling the strings above a weak president. This cannot become a major distraction from what Obama is trying to achieve this first year of his presidency - that's what Cheney really wants - to stop the momentum of President Obama by distracting him from his vigorous & forward moving agenda, but he should tread lightly or it could backfire on him - and he could become the target of a criminal investigation - he should have laid low, so whatever happens now, he asked for it. He should back off.
— Vic, New York
I address myself to commenters #3,10,22,34,39, and any others whose posts appear before this one. I am writing at 9:45 EDT. They should also read Bill Appledorf's comment, #29
The apologists and supporters of Cheney and those tolerant of torture to "keep us safe" are substituting fear for clear thinking and assuming that those in detention are all "Jihadists...[bent on] murder[ing] our innocents by the truckload, even with WMD's...."
(#39, DL13, San Rafael)
Wow. I suppose thousands of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan killed our bombs are just useless human beings, properly dismissed as "collateral damage" and not to be considered "innocent" because after all there are "jihadists" in those countries.
Among the many lies and omissions in Cheney's speech, not to be exhaustive, are 1) not owning up to President Bush's ignoring the warnings from the CIA (PDB, Aug 6, 2001) and Coleen Rowley and others of the FBI who tried to report suspicious activity of some of the hijackers, 2)the coerced-by-torture report by one detainee of WMD in Iraq that was used to justify what has turned out to be a disastrous invasion of Iraq (are we safer?) and 3) an outright lie about "taking down" the Pakistan nuclear network. Secy of Defense Gates said on 60 Minutes last Sunday that the nuclear threat from Pakistan keeps him awake at night.
We have a Constitution. We have laws. We will be safer by adhering to our fundamental principles than throwing them overboard in a panic.
— CJGC, Cambridge, MA
....."Mr. Obama flatly rejected Mr. Cheney’s claims that torture saved “hundreds of thousands” of lives and reminded Americans that those abuses were ineffective, recruited more terrorists than they brought to justice, destroyed the nation’s image and will make it much harder to try some of the most dangerous terrorists."
Apparently Obama decided that it's not necessary to try them. He'll just detain them indefinately without trial or charges.
The new American Gulag. Pathetic.
— J, X, New Haven, CT.
Bravo for President Obama for taking his oath of office seriously.
He is to protect and defend the constitution, and by closing Gitmo and by allowing the prisoners due process, he is doing just that.
Now, it is time for him to put some bite behind his words and stop letting congress run all over him (no funding for closing Gitmo).
“We the people” voted for Obama… the congress?...not so much.
— CPS, Malvern, PA
Fortunately, we now have a President who is knowledgeable, articulate and able to comprehend the legal and moral complexities of the mess he inherited. As he wisely pointed out, it is much more difficult to repair the damage of of a job poorly done than to begin from scratch and do the work properly from the beginning. He is able to see the larger implications for the future within each individual choice made today. Some would call that the virtue of prudence. He is systematically handling competing priorities.
Unfortunately, the Cheney/Bush administration subscribed to the Machiavellian notion of 'the end justifying the means'. In a democratic society that values justice under the rule of law and individual liberty, we cannot allow such a skewed and morally bankrupt precedent to stand unchallenged. Within our legal system, over time, even flawed judicial precedent will eventually carry the weight of codified legislation.
Bending the law into a pretzel, engaging in torture, establishing off-shore limbo prisons, parsing legal terminology to "re-designate" the legal status of those we fear — diminishes our national character and threatens the liberty of every American citizen. Continually gazing into that fear-driven abyss and trying to somehow rationalize what we have consented to as a nation, will cause us to become the very likeness of our enemies. What we rationalize as the 'just desserts' of a few will eventually become the rule of law for the many... including ordinary citizens.
I don't completely agree with some other positions taken by President Obama, but in this situation IMO, he is right on target. Thankfully, he is proving himself to be a reasonable man who is willing to listen to all points of opinion and thus avoid the perils of group-think. That's a good thing revealing a calm and confident temperament, not weakness.
Conversely, Mr. Cheney continues to appeal to the fear and lower nature of human beings to make his case. For our nation to continue on such a course, building our house on the shifting sand of emotions and gratification of baser human instinct, will cause our nation/house to fall. There is an irony in the fact that Mr. Cheney and his political party proclaim themselves to be the party of 'morality and family values' while simultaneously attempting to re-define the sadism of torture as merely "enhanced interrogation" and a "necessary" evil.
Mr. Cheney, we are better than that. We do not have to cave into our fear or lower nature in order to protect ourselves. We may be attacked again, but we refuse to be moral cowards. You are no longer an elected official and have become a distraction rather than being part of a moral solution.
— Abbi, Asheville
he Cheney/Dan argument is simply wrong. The experiment to see whether torture vs. skilled interrogation is "best" cannot be conducted ethically. The fundamental question is whether human decency outweighs putting ourselves in the same camp as the terrorists. The fear mentality is garbage. Yes 9-11 was bad. I was there. That said, twice that many people die EACH DAY from cardiovascular disease and stroke. Let's put terror in perspective please. Terror has always been there and always will be, home grown and otherwise. Our homeland security measures have proven effective to date. Let's get back to decent core values and the bigger problems confronting humanity.
— shared thoughts, New Haven, CT
Here are some of the pertinent provisions of the Covenant against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment:
"PART I
Article I
1. For the purposes of this Convention, the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.
....
Article 2
1. Each State Party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction.
2. No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.
3. An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.
Article 3
....
2. For the purpose of determining whether there are such grounds, the competent authorities shall take into account all relevant considerations including, where applicable, the existence in the State concerned of a consistent pattern of gross, flagrant or mass violations of human rights.
Article 4
1. Each State Party shall ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law. The same shall apply to an attempt to commit torture and to an act by any person which constitutes complicity or participation in torture.
2. Each State Party shall make these offences punishable by appropriate penalties which take into account their grave nature.
Article 5
1. Each State Party shall take such measures as may be necessary to establish its jurisdiction over the offences referred to in article 4 in the following cases:
(a) When the offences are committed in any territory under its jurisdiction or on board a ship or aircraft registered in that State;
(b) When the alleged offender is a national of that State;
(c) When the victim is a national of that State if that State considers it appropriate.
2. Each State Party shall likewise take such measures as may be necessary to establish its jurisdiction over such offences in cases where the alleged offender is present in any territory under its jurisdiction ....
....
Article 6
1. Upon being satisfied, after an examination of information available to it, that the circumstances so warrant, any State Party in whose territory a person alleged to have committed any offence referred to in article 4 is present shall take him into custody or take other legal measures to ensure his presence. The custody and other legal measures shall be as provided in the law of that State but may be continued only for such time as is necessary to enable any criminal or extradition proceedings to be instituted.
2. Such State shall immediately make a preliminary inquiry into the facts.
3. Any person in custody pursuant to paragraph 1 of this article shall be assisted in communicating immediately with the nearest appropriate representative of the State of which he is a national, or, if he is a stateless person, with the representative of the State where he usually resides.
4. When a State, pursuant to this article, has taken a person into custody, it shall immediately notify the States referred to in article 5, paragraph 1, of the fact that such person is in custody and of the circumstances which warrant his detention. The State which makes the preliminary inquiry contemplated in paragraph 2 of this article shall promptly report its findings to the said States and shall indicate whether it intends to exercise jurisdiction.
Article 7
1. The State Party in the territory under whose jurisdiction a person alleged to have committed any offence referred to in article 4 is found shall in the cases contemplated in article 5, if it does not extradite him, submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution."
The U.S. is a signatory of this convention, and it is part of the law of our land. Accordingly, top members of the Bush Admin. and, indeed, the entire nation are criminally liable for approving carrying out torture. President Obama is in the process of making himself an accessory after the fact in the torture committed by the preceeding administration. Likewise, the MSM who give V.P. Cheney and his daughter a platform to lie and obfuscate about his involvement in these crimes are complicit in condoning torture.
— Gwain52, Georgia
I think if george bush had any public speaking prowess we would have seen a similar speech 2 years ago regarding these issues. Obama does not know what to do with the detainees who cannot be tried and refers to 'prolonged detention' as the only option. His grace and eloquence never seem to fail in impressing the masses, but this speech was only slightly improved upon what Bush would have given us.
His inclusion of the judicial and congressional branches is a nice step, but creating a system within law to detain these 'terrorists' is not the right path. legalizing the illegal is not in the rule of law.
— irydebikes88, the minny apple
Thank you for this piece. One of the most telling points, for me, was the bold recognition that "I'm not the only one in this town who has sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution." Obama is the first in a long time to recognize the seriousness of that oath - and to take it seriously. That is what "putting country first" really means. Ex vice-president Cheney, speaking immediately after President Obama, only reminded me of how extremely, and how many times, he and President Bush had violated that oath.
— Sue, New York
so obama will try the terrorists as long as he knows they will be convicted? sounds more like iran or china than the u.s. appearnaces over substance as usual for obama.
— Chris, NY
ince our Revolution, hundreds of thousands of Americans have given their lives to defend our ideas of democracy and justice. In the light of this fact, the Bush/Cheney administration's activities in Guantanamo were treason.
— Joel A. Levitt, Ann Arbor, Michigan
Conservatives have a way of co-opting an idea that has great symbolism in our culture, then stripping it of value for use in their propaganda war. Christ’s Cross, the American Flag, a yellow ribbon, but maybe the best example of this is the word “freedom”. What do they mean by the word freedom, certainly not freedom of choice, nor freedom of association, the truth is they don’t mean anything by it, its just a word to them, a word that their ignorant masses can rally around, a word they have stolen out of our American historical vernacular that has power, and while they themselves have no moral authority the word freedom does.
Our new president says we need to look forward, he is wrong, we need to prosecute these war criminals, and break the associations they have established equating their way of thinking, as somehow more American, when in reality is truly anti-American.
I never want to hear The United States of America referred to as “the homeland” it is much too similar to the term “the fatherland”.
— tjtaraba9, 04256366
What about the many other illegal prisons in which the USA keeps prisoners?
They are spread all over the world...do the inmates of those prisons not deserve human rights?
— joseph parmetler, austria
2009 2:17 pm
Link
If Al Qaeda was capable of killing “hundreds of thousands” of people, as Mr. Cheney states, why in the world did they choose to arm themselves with box cutters and kill just a few thousand instead? One has the element of surprise only once, why did they waste it with a plan that no one could have predicted would be as effective and that killed only about 3000 people?
And if they really had been planning and ready to kill “hundreds of thousands” – which is a whole lot of people - why was our CIA and our military caught completely off guard in terms of the other plots? Are they that incompetent? It’s bad enough that the CIA missed the signs of ONE secret plan, but Mr. Cheney is saying that there were many, many plans. The only way to kill that many people is to have multiple, surprise attacks. That means years and years and planning and that mean that many al Qaeda agents would have to be in the country and ready to go with plots equally as improbable as the box cutter plot. Remember: there is no Al Qaeda army with tanks and planes and missiles, and whatever big weapons they have are on another side of the world - unless they have been sneaking things in for years. And their army is …uh….how many people? He is saying they were here and ready to go. YIKES!
Playing the devil’s advocate for a moment: if Mr. Cheney is correct. That means our government was clueless for years. He is, in effect, saying that our FBI, CIA and police are really and truly incompetent bunglers who not once, but repeatedly missed the signs that we were about to be attacked. Only after we tortured people did the truth come out.
If he is correct, then shouldn’t heads be rolling? Why isn’t he demanding that those incompetent men and women be fired or put on trial? Let’s have a trial, and let’s put Mr. Cheney under oath to explain how he uncovered something the CIA, FBI and the police missed.
— Mark W, watchung
It's mind boggling how a nation of 300 million people can be so frightened by 240 individuals. Surely we can cope with them on U.S. soil.
The entire military base at Guantanamo Bay should be closed and the land returned to the people of Cuba.
— Barbara B., Dallas, TX
The label "terrorist" today has degenerated to the point where it is now as accurate as "witch" was in Salem in 1692.
The accusations have similar accuracy and the process of "law" is equally biased.
Sure, there are lots of terrorists in the world, some international, many of them domestic. The average American is in greater danger from domestic terrorists (hate groups, etc) than from any international terrorist. Drunk drivers are a far greater danger to society, their actions just don't get banner headlines.
Someone please tell Cheney that he is no longer the President.
On a recent trip to Europe, people we met almost without exception said "thank god you (the US) voted in Obama". There is true relief around the world that we don't have the moral equivalent of a drunk with a gun running the US.
— John H, Santa Clara, CA
I don't understand why we have to listen to Cheney. I thought his agenda was thoroughly rejected in November, 2008.The people of the US have been embarrassed and betrayed, internationally, by his dogmatic leadership.The November vote was an expression of the deep understanding of this.
— ada mcelhenney, austin,texas
Thank you for this fair, clear column regarding this issue that continues to confound and confuse the legal body in this country. Because Mr Bush took the law into his own hands, mistreated prisoners, placed many in prison who never should have been there, and ran rough shod over the constitution, Mr Obama is left with a tangled mess to sort out and make right. It will take courage and intelligence to undo all the injustice that was done in the name of national security.
It is amazing to me that Cheney has become the mouth piece for the far right and more important, that anyone listens to him. He is sounding off like a noisy gong in the wind. It is time to retire him back to Wyoming, or where ever it is he shoots his friends in the face.
Thank you, Mr Obama for having the courage to face this terrible wrong that was done to our country and the world, and thank you New York Times for speaking the truth about this serious ongoing issue.
— wendyruth, boise ID
Given that this piece rightly places blame on the Bush administration for its recklessness, disregard for the rule of law and this nation's world standing, and ignorance of the increased danger it placed all Americans in due to its policies toward alleged terrorist detainees, it is curious that the editorial board did not go one step further by calling for President Obama to support the establishment of a commission that would completely investigate the individuals, and their decision-making process, responsible for detainee torture, even if it eventually led to the prosecution of certain of those individuals. The injurious nature of their misdeeds cries out for justice, not to mention that, without satisfactory punishment, the door is left open for a future administration to again engage in criminal behavior.
— Ken Pullen, Omaha, NE
Many comments deal with the notion that we are at war, so anything goes, including torture, preventive detention, secret prisons, etc. and invading other countries that did not attack us, occupying them and calling it war, all in the name of keeping us safe. The occupations/"wars" and the so-called "war on terror" are based on our fear of being "attacked" again. All real wars are fought between nations, not against the diffuse threat of criminals and terrorists. We continue to use the 9/11 terrorist/criminal action to justify flouting of international and US law. Who are we really warring against? Ourselves.
— NJahn, Seattle
Thank goodness we have a president who is not only educated and intelligent, but humane. It is, however, way past time for a commission or special prosecutor or some other legal device to find out what really happened during the Bush/Cheney years and if laws were broken, then someone must pay the penalty. Let the chips fall where they may. We have to put this behind us once and for all.
— spence, Bellingham, WA
I am a good old-fashioned bleeding heart liberal. I don't believe Obama has gone far enough. Can we all finally admit that we deserved the terrorists attacks that hit us? That we brought them on ourselves through years of self-serving foreign policy misadventures? Further, it's pristinely clear at this point that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are the real terrorists. I believe they should be water-boarded for their nationalistic and fear-mongering assertions that terrorists would seek to harm us without a good reason. It's time that we engage in a real dialogue with the terrorists and the other embittered peoples of the world about what steps can be taken to rectify America's numerous national sins, dating back to its very founding. This may involve a large-scale transferring of all of our ill-gotten gains--houses, cars, jewelry--to the less fortunate and those we have so grossly pilfered from. So be it. It's time to make things right.
— Mark Reed, Detroit, Michigan
As a college student just returned from 5 months in Europe, I have seen first hand how the Bush Administration ruined America's reputation. Instead of being a land of the free, we are seen as the land of the oppressive powerful. Obama is representing a refreshing and quite honestly, NORMAL viewpoint that human life should be valued at all costs; versus the previous theory that tortue on few would "save" the rest. Europeans in general do not respect America, and I can see why. This whole bit that Cheney is trying to pull, criticizing our new administration, is qualified (freedom of speech, big baby), however, frankly, it is unneccessary. Cheney, you had your 8 years to deliver well-written speeches and defend your criminal acts. Welcome to 2009 where we, the citizens, have had frankly too much of you.
Hello, President Obama. Keep it up.
— Amy, Los Angeles
What frightens me more than terrorism is Mr. Cheney spewing forth on a new fear based propaganda campaign against an administration that clearly discredited everything Cheney stands for by winning the 2008 elections. Cheney and the people who stand with him are a bigger threat to everything this country stands for than any two bit terrorist with a weapon. A terrorist or terrorist oraganiztion can only hurt us in small ways compared to the damage we can do to them when they give us a reason. By adovocating ideals that essentially ignore our constitution and our rule of law Cheney and his friends threaten the rights of American citizens as well as all human beings. Until Americans understand that we hold all of the cards against terrorism and understand that terrorists who choose not to respond positively to reasonable dialog will loose in time one way or another, Cheney will be able to use fear propaganda against his own people to achieve unwarrented power. I would say that Cheneys way is irrelavent and that terrorists have all the reasons to fear America and its allies.
— crazynlazy, Michigan
This back and forth between Cheney and Obama shows that Cheney was President of Vice for 8 years.
http://blogdredd.blogspot.com...
— Dredd, Texas
"There are Guantánamo prisoners who violated the laws of war and should be tried in military tribunals..."
_________________________________
What are the laws of war?
— willie227, Vancouver
Cheney sounds like a "good German."
Enough said.
— George, West Palm Beach, FL
Why does the media give a has been washed up private citizen dick cheney live television coverage. In November the country spoke clearly no more bush cheney lies disturtions. The man is obviously unhinged the media does him no favor by encouraging his dilussions he is a disgraced former politition let him go and quietly sink into insanity.
— Howard, New York,NY
Relief and optimism? I must be one of those lefties that cable analysts predicted would not be thrilled w/ Obama’s speech. I was not thrilled. It was better than Cheney’s, sure. But that’s not saying much, and much of what Obama had to say was not that different from what Cheney said.
The key for me is the notion of the primacy of law, the alternative to rule by raw power. By my lights, Bush-Cheney operated not just at the extreme outer edge of what is permissible by way of bending law to permit unbridled exercise of power, they were far off the scale: usurping power in numerous ways from a timid, fractious Congress, demanding and mostly getting carte blanche from the supine Supremes, invading foreign nations without restraint, ignoring laws of war, etc. Bush, pushed and abetted by Cheney, became The Decider, openly deciding to do whatever he wanted, without regard to US or international law. The Bush-Cheney view that a President’s obligation to protect national security trumps all other considerations was at the root of their reign of lawlessness on a scale never before seen.
Obama, the brilliant, principled Constitutional Law professor, was to be the anti-Bush, who would restore the rule of law. So far, he has made many decisions that I support (abolishing torture, for example), but mostly for the wrong reasons and in the wrong ways. It’s always about him being true to his values, not about him discharging his obligation to defend the Constitution. Yesterday’s speech was especially worrisome in echoing, rather than repudiating, many Bush-Cheney themes. Some examples:
- Obama asserted, with emphasis, that ‘it is MY job to defend the USofA,’ or words to that effect [no, that is everyone’s job, including Congress, the Court, about half the Federal workforce, and many others; your primary job is to uphold the Constitution].
- Regarding transparency vs. secrecy – use of State Secrets challenges, etc., Obama asserted that he will determine the appropriate balance [wrong remedy: propose a better standard, for review and adoption by Congress].
- Obama promised to invent legal procedures case by case, designed to ensure that the country wouldn’t ever be endangered by any Gitmo ‘terrorists,’ including ‘preventive detention’ whenever he can’t find any other way to ensure they won’t be released [wrong, six ways to Sunday, and indistinguishable from the Bush-Cheney approach; not kosher to select the judicial procedure that best guarantees a desired outcome; doubly not kosher to ‘preventively’ detain people with no procedure at all].
- Obama didn’t challenge Cheney’s oft-stated position that their differences concerning waterboarding and other forms of prisoner abuse are merely differences in policy: Obama’s administrative decision to halt torture is indeed nothing more than a change of policy and, therefore, easily reversible by himself or future Presidents whenever the impulse strikes.
- Obama appears to share Cheney’s view that prosecuting him or others for prisoner abuse would be inappropriate, criminalizing a policy difference (Cheney) or, equivalently, pointing fingers, recrimination (Obama). [wrong; whether or not Cheney, et al., should be prosecuted should hinge exclusively on whether or not there is reason to believe they violated US or international law, not whether or not we like the policies they selected]
- Obama reiterated his opposition to Congressional, Special Prosecutor, independent blue ribbon panel, or any other wide-ranging investigation of potential illegality in the way Bush-Cheney prosecuted their ‘war on terror’ because he doesn’t want to be distracted from his forward-looking agenda [wrong decision, doubly wrong reason; given credible allegations of widespread illegality – of which waterboarding may have been only a small part – a thorough, apolitical investigation is clearly needed as a basis for determining whether or not violations of law have occurred; that, in turn, is an essential precondition for determining whether or not prosecutions are warranted; preventing investigation is equivalent to abandonment of any possibility of rule of law; that’s about as wrong as a President can get].
So, I don’t share NYT’s sense of relief and optimism. My reaction was more one of disappointment and dread.
— Ken Burgdorf, Rockville, MD
There are two aspects to the debate: principles and practical consequences. On the matter of principle, I found it abhorrent that my country would adopt the tactics used by Communist regimes that my parents came here to avoid. On the matter of practical consequences, the evidence that people will say anything to make the pain stop is overwhelming. If they happen to say something true during the process, it may be impossible to separate it from the falsehoods surrounding it. Thus, the practical benefit of torture is small. Finally, the other practical consequence is to motivate the other side and provide recruitment tools. The fact that the recidivism rate of those released from Guantanamo is ONLY 14% actually surprises me.
Admiral Blair is alleged to have said that valuable intelligence resulted from use of the "alternative procedures". His view is contradicted by Lt. Gen. Kimmons, who led the release of the latest Army Field Manual for Human Intelligence Collector Operations that specifically forbids precisely the "alternative procedures" as being morally indefensible and nor useful. Blair's view is also contradicted by retired Col. Wilkerson who, as chief of staff to former Secretary of State Powell, had access to classified intelligence reports and who says that no significant, useful information came out of the "enhanced interrogations" during his tenure. Both Gen. Kimmons and Mr. Wilkerson are not wild-eyed liberals, but present or retired professional soldiers charged with defending this country.
Mark Danner's article on this subject is a most useful reference: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22614
— lisztian, San Diego, CA
n his speech at the National Archives yesterday the President was loud and clear when he said: "I categorically reject the proposition that waterboarding is an effective means of protecting the nation's security."
His delivery matched his conviction and passion for the law, more decisively than at any time since taking office. It was a moment the country and the world were waiting for. President Obama reminded us all that the Commander-in-Chief is on duty ("I see the intelligence!") and has fortitude enough to meet the challenges facing us as a country.
The challenges to this authority and responsibility come, it seems, as much from the drum-beat of scare rhetoric in Fox News and ex-Veep Cheney as it does from anything Al Qaeda and the Taliban are throwing at us in the field of battle.
My hope is that Obama will now go ahead and make the moves of detainees he contemplates, close the prison at GTMO as quickly as he can. Let Congress memorialize that empty shell of shame as it sees fit, but don't be deterred from doing what seems so right to this leader who is every day earning his stripes.
— KP, Nashville
Obama gave a very eloquent, honest speech on the dangers of believing the ends justify the means. I thought he hit all the valid points right on the nail.
— Julie D, palmdale
During the Presidential election, the constant talking point from the McCain camp was that Obama delivered a masterful speech but was short on substance. In many respects and much to my despair, this attack does hold some merit. While we may certainly laud the message given by Obama today that guaranteeing our safety need not infringe upon the Constitution, he leaves much to be desired in terms of action. We are still left with military commissions, "preventive detention," and war criminals who remain free from prosecution. These do not further democratic values. "Preventive detention" gives the President the authority to hold anyone who would "maybe" carry out an act of war. This "Minority Report" power has no place in a democracy. One is imprisoned after he has committed a crime, not beforehand. The fact that Dick Cheney is not in a prison cell is another example of the complete disregard for the rule of law. The central irony is that Obama's message had to compete with that of a self-confessed war criminal who Obama refuses to prosecute. He won't allow the Justice Department to adhere to the Rule of Law because he does not believe it is politically appropriate. This is yet another Bush-like intervention into an Agency's agenda that simply should not be Obama's call to make. A Democracy cannot survive if the Rule of Law is not its fundamental principle.
Doubtless, Obama has an enormous mess to clean up in all areas of our society. But adherence to our Constitution should be the central priority.
— Leigh Pullman, Tenafly, NJ
Listening today to Darth Cheney's gloomy, fearful pronouncements reminded me once again why I hated Bush and Co. so much, and how grateful we should all be that the they are gone. Cheney seems desperate to rescue the soiled reputation of Bush's failed administration, but the damage he and his cronies wrought was too lasting. We can only hope that Cheney retreats permanently back to his undisclosed location.
— Christopher Johnson, CA
Thank you for being the last bastion of freedom in America and helping to return us to peace in a small way. Your Editorial seems to be more of a compromise position or I am further to the left.
The concept of "Preventitive Detention" sounds like a military feel good phrase for a thousand years old tyrannical practice of locking people in the dundgeons on the orders of the kings.
Thank you to the New York Times for allowing us readers to post our comments on your website. I hope it is as great a source of information to you as it is for me.
The last Bastion of Democracy!
— Patrick, Mattituck NY
If as the NY Times says President Obama was totally correct when he "flatly rejected Mr. Cheney’s claims that torture saved “hundreds of thousands” of lives and reminded Americans that those abuses were ineffective ..." then why doesn't he take up Dick Cheney's dare and release what exactly was obtained as intelligence on al Qaeda? If he can authorize the release of the methods, why not the results? What is he afraid of? Why did the White House synopsis delete Admiral Blair's assertion that the information WAS vital? And let's see the transcripts of the Congressional briefings to see once and for all if Nancy Pelosi is telling the truth or full of you know what. The fact that most Congressional Democrats, after all the brave indignation, got cold feet when it really came time to close Guantanamo reminds me of the heroic struggle against segregation in the 60's and 70's -- lots of progressives standing firm for integration, as long as it wasn't in their own neighborhoods. How typical.
— JW, New York
Does the President still have the power to declare any American citizen an enemy combatant (or similar phrase) and detain that citizen indefinitely, or even send that citizen abroad to be tortured?
— Mark Lebow, Milwaukee, WI
Very happy to note the NYT is taking a very sensible and balanced approach to Obama's national security plan. Good editorial...one of your better ones. Upholding America's ideals in a dangerous world is not easy but we certainly do not want to continue the Bush/Cheney old way.
— dbg25, NM
President Obama's actions belie his words.
In normal, everyday life, when individuals act against the democratic foundations of our nation, they are supposed to answer for their actions.
Former President George W. Bush, his VP, his Attorney General, his Secretary of Defense, and so many, many others who deceived the American people, are free as birds. THEY DESERVE TO BE CAGED. Obama would restore America's confidence in itself and its future by the mere act of caging those vultures.
— Nat Solomon, Bronx, NY
Only the release of the records of what was obtained using "enhanced interrogation techniques" can resolve this dispute.
If the records show that we did not obtain even one piece of actionable information, then it is clear that waterboarding and the other horrors were not only illegal and immoral but also ineffective. Case closed.
However, what if we did get, among the false information, some accurate leads? Then we need to have a full debate on whether the Bush/Chaney policy could be justified on military necessary grounds.
It cannot be justified on legal or moral grounds, but sometimes in war we are required to do things that would otherwise be entirely reprehensible. The consensus appears to be that the atomic bombs dropped on Japan actually saved lives, both American and Japanese, while, in contrast, the fire bombing of Dresden did nothing (except, as some claim, demonstrate our air power to the Soviets).
But, if we do not know whether these methods were ever effective (and personally I believe that they were not), we have to condemn them absolutely. The burden is on Chaney, et al. to show that they did save even one life. Absent that proof, then we should call our practices what they were - torture. And we then should punish that torture, wherever the road may lead us.
— John G., NYC
Of course Mr. O. is right,
Cheney, the Prince of the Night,
Can hear the bells chime
That herald Hard Time,
So he spews out Terror and Fright!
— Larry Eisenberg, New York City
This forum helps remind one that there are plenty of Americans, like Mike above from Appleton, who are ready and willing to toss the Constitution away on the slightest provocation. 9/11 isn't the worst thing America has ever faced folks. With a few exceptions (like the Japanese internments) we've weathered (real) war and depression and famine and assassination AND kept true to what our nation stands for. The whole debate about whether the torture worked or not is only a debate for those who don't understand American values at all. You don't avoid torture because it doesn't work; you avoid torture because that's not who we are.
— nesralr, San Francisco
Leigh Pullman (#1):
Many thanks for your incisive comments.
Your letter should be required reading for Mr. Obama, who I fear has been morphing from a seemingly highly principled leader and supporter of our Constitution into a Bush act-alike. He should immediately push the Justice Department to initiate legal action against the Bush administration henchpersons, from the top down.. Otherwise, the shabby remnants, personified by Dick Cheney, will continue to erode the foundations of our democracy.
President Obama rightly admires Lincoln. He should read Lincoln's immortal words and take them to heart:
"You can fool some of the people all the time, and all the people some of the time, but you can not fool all the people all the time".
Perhaps President Obama should be equally mindful of William E. Gladstone's prescient observation: "Justice delayed is justice denied".
— Nat Solomon, Bronx, NY
I agree with your editorial but please will someone hold Cheney accountable for stating yesterday that we went to Iraq because we were targeting regimes that were CAPABLE of producing wmd's. Thousands of dead Americans and Iraquis demand it. If the former V.P. of America is allowed to rewrite his deeds and not be held accountable for one of the most significant events in our country-wow-This man is unhinged and his own words in 2003-Irag definitely has wmd's demonstate the pathology that is continuing.
— elaine price, massachusetts
Benjamin Franklin said it best,"Those who are willing to give up a little freedom for a little more security deserve neither & will lose both!"
— Frank E., Odessa,Tx.
John D., you forgot the journalist being held in Iran and about to be released. Two journalists being held in North Korea, while lamentable, does not make Americans less safe. Kim Il Jong "stuck" it too us when Bush was President as well.
While Cheney conveniently ignores over 4,000 American military deaths and, by some reports, over 100,000 civilian ones, in Iraq, President Obama cites our heritage, our Constitution and our values. Would you trust someone who got us into a war causing the above casualties with the biggest lie in American History since Nixon uttered "I am not a crook"? Tell us about those "WMD's" again, Dick!
Dick Cheney more and more resembles the aging actor who just will not get off stage and finds a constant need to justify himself. He may be the ultimate "Frank Skeffington" of Edwin O'Connor's "The Last Hurrah". Adept for so long at playing individuals off against each other, serving his own self-interest and now fast becoming that annoying uncle who keeps telling the same story at Thanksgiving. Dick, it's over! Go back to Wyoming, go hunting and spare us!
— Joe M, Manchester, VT
We know that the Right has lost perspective on torture and privacy rights, but I do wish a more pragmatic approach would be taken by the left.
"Mr. Obama was exactly right when he said Americans do not have to choose between security and their democratic values."
While this may be true against Mr. Cheney's extremism, and is good rhetoric, there are many exceptions that we must learn to deal with and expect. Democracy and freedom are messy and there is a price to pay for them. In our own courts we often must let a criminal go for lack of a good case or even due to prosecutorial malfeasance. We should be prepared for the same in war and in fighting terrorism. The price for exacting a perfect cleansing is simply too high, in civilian lives, in the torture of detainees but also in the blowback that comes in the form of resistance and hatred for American brutality.
Unless you demand perfect safety (something Cheney-Bush played upon) you will expect to set free some who perhaps should not be free. There is imperfection in the system. Justice is not perfect. It is this imperfection or restraint that protects us from extremist disproportionality that destroys civilization. And we would do well to examine our own domestic expectations for perfect justice at a time when we maintain the largest proportion of prison population in the world.
— St Paul, Minnesota
What Obama must do first is heed his own precept, not to let fear counsel him! For a panicky fear is what we clearly see in Cheney's following speech, in his mistaken history that 9/11 was "the most devastating strike...against Americans...," as he omits Pearl Harbor and the bombing of the USS Maine. For Cheney also shows us how much panic and fear guided the Bush administration response to 9/11, when he describes his state of mind: "... watching a coordinated, devastating attack on our country from an underground bunker at the White House can affect how you view your responsibilities." His and Bush's fear caused them to mix Al Qaeda, A.Q. Khan's nuclear efforts for export, anthrax attackers, Libya's nuclear bomb program, and unnamed "regimes that had the capacity to build weapons of mass destruction, and might transfer such weapons to terrorists" all as targets of retaliation, and in Cheney's admission, he starkly reveals, unwittingly, what terrible soldiers that he and President Bush would have made had either man ever enlisted to fight for our country. Now we see why they did not make good military commanders-in-chiefs, because neither Bush nor Cheney knew who committed 9/11. When they ordered our military attacks on Iraq and Afghanistan, they were like reckless hunters who fire their shotguns before they see where they are aiming. Neither man emulated British WW II leader Winston Churchill, touring the rubble of London streets following a devastating Luftwaffe bombing raid on civilians, serenely cool because he knew his intelligence services were cracking the Nazi military codes, and he was bringing into military service a new and secret air defense, radar. Churchill also knew, in Britain's darkest moments of war, that his agents would soon identify the source of German rocket launches, and munitions factories. Churchill was no reckless quail hunter shooting blindly at his quarry, nor was he someone who spooked it to seek cover with loud, drunken behavior under the influence of a "couple of martinis" before brunch that morning. And Bush was no FDR either who had identified secretly the location of German U-boats sinking our merchant marine fleets, but who would not act until he had them all clearly mapped. Fear drove Cheney and Bush, two of our history's most unseasoned military and conflict political leaders, to shoot in the dark after 9/11 at any likely target that appeared in their intelligence reports as hostile to the USA. They messed up, firing everywhere but at the right culprits, who escaped while they were diverted into disarming Libya, shutting down A.Q. Khan's nuke operations, overthrowing Saddam Hussein and the Taliban Afghan government. Someone please remind Cheney that none of those "successful targets of his retaliation for 9/11" were directly involved in the 9/11 attack by Osama Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda. And that is why we are still occupying Iraq and Afghanistan years after overthrowing the leaders there, afraid of what the Iraqi and Afghan peoples might do to their US puppet governments should we suddenly leave, in retaliation for all the unjustified deaths we caused to thousands of innocent people there.
— Bayou Houma, Boston
Did you listen to the same speech that I did? "Prolonged Detention"? I voted for Obama. I sent him money. It was the first campaign I ever supported financially in my 40 plus years of voting. Yet, I must admit (as you should if you desire to be honest) that this speech was a disappointment. He has been "touched". Someone has "gotten" to him. He is "falling in line". I am beginning to believe that the conspiracy theorists were right after all. Office holders are merely figure heads. Elections are efforts in futility. There is indeed an "unseen hand" that pulls the strings. This is what Italian anarchists have for over a century referred to as the "Pezzonavonte". It is obvious that even my beloved N.Y. Times, although faithful and true in social issues like health care, has been touched by the "hand" in foreign policy issues, especially those involving Arabs, Muslims, and other Middle Easterners who are not Israeli.
— Fizzy, Philadelphia
The contrast between diametrically opposed views could not be sharper than what we heard yesterday.
Ideology is important! A country must live its values, not just leave them on a piece of sheepskin.
The rationalizations I heard from Mr. Cheney and his daughter yesterday, not only amounted to an apoligist view of events, but also consisted of many lies aimed at deflecting from the real issues.
How convenient for certain Republicans to disregard several rulings by the Bush Supreme Court that negated many of his government's practices; to disregard the linkages of outrages comitted at many locations to the justifications for torture as reported by the Schlesinger inquiry; to disregard that their methods of interrogation were public during the Bush/Cheney years as they were the subject of more than one news report; and to disregard the Valerie Plaine affair while purporting to support the CIA, an agency whose analysis in the buildup to the stupidly and unjustifiably conducted invasion of Iraq has been harshly criticized.
I also do not want anyone to forget that the self-riteous Cheney, the former ceo of Haliburton, was able to keep his stock in that company while sitting as vice president, a position from which he managed to influence the awarding of multi-billions of dollars of contracts for various poorly performed and over-billed services in Iraq, many of which were awarded without a competitivew bidding process.
No wonder many view Cheney as a Satanic figure. I just view him as a crook.
— R H, Toronto
I see that Cheney is lying about the Iraq/al Qaeda link again. He was also ignoring the testimony of his own interrogators that foreign fighters who later came to Iraq repeatedly cited Abu Ghraib as their motivation. Cheney also continues to lie about the effectiveness of waterboarding when we now have the interrogator's testimony that torture shut down a cooperative KSM, and produced a bunch of garbage intel instead.
But, I can see from some of these comments why Cheney is still lying: there are still people out there who are stupid enough to fall for it. Again.
This is the difference between us and the torture party, now. We have values. They don't. They threw their principles away and all they have to show for it is groveling at the feet of Dick Cheney, a loser and a liar.
— John, Texas
I applaud the President's effort to stand his ground against the defiant Pentagon and corporate-owned Congress. The commentators who want national security over the rule of law will not be very happy when the same national security apparatus is turned against them. Once you abandon the moral values you stand for (the belief in due process being one of such values) you have no reason to argue against government authority when it's unjustly turned against you. Also, most of Gitmo prisoners were handed to the US by Musharraf who was playing a classic double game. Most of those individuals were randomly picked by Musharraf to satisfy the demand for Gitmo 'terrorists'. How many real terrorists did the US actually keep in Gitmo? Five? Ten? We won't know until and unless we have fair trials.
— Yasir, London, ON
pparently, the NYT ignored the part of the speech where President Obama laid out the details of his "prolonged" (read: "preventive and indefinite") detention of people only suspected of possibly committing terrorist acts in the future. The candidates for this indefinite detention are detainees against whom no charges were preferred, and without and evidence that they had already committed any crimes or participated in any attacks against the United States. And, recognizing that this is a violation of the Constitution, US statutory law and the Geneva Conventions, he promised that his administration would craft a brand new "legal framework" that would make this "legal."
No wonder Obama hasn't gone after Bush's "legal" experts John Yoo, Jay Bybee, Alberto Gonzales, William Haynes, and David Addington. He may need to call on their legal sophistry to create yet another warped fig leaf for patently unconstitutional practices.
Combined with the President's plan to resurrect the illegal Bush military tribunals, albeit, with a gloss of legal cover, such as representation for the defendents, we get a picture of a man who is wonderfully inspirational in his oratory, talking the talk as well as any president in history, but a very, very different man when it comes down to walking the walk.
Boys and girls, can you say "OBusha?" I knew you could..."
— Blue Sun, New Hope, PA
ome of the above comments display a shocking example of GOP brainwashing.
None mention that most of the original detainees who were tortured are innocent. None mention that many were rounded up by reward seekers and were merely in the wrong place at the wrong time. None mention that 100 of them died as a result of being tortured. None mention that interrogators who left their jobs because they were disgusted by the use of torture swear that traditional interrogation methods yielded far better results than did torture, and that Cheney & Co. are now trying to falsely credit torture with obtaining the info that was actually provided by using traditional interrogation techniques.
The Repub mantra seems to constitute a twist on a time-honored legal precept: "Let 10 innocents be tortured rather than let one who is guilty not be tortured."
— Captain Ronnel, L. A., CA
eneral Musharraf himself acknowledged that he sold terrorists to CIA where they 'confessed' under the enhanced techniques employed by Rumsfeld:
http://www.newstatesman.com/200610090029
— Yasir, London, ON
Dick Cheney and Joe McCarthy are parallel figures that used fear to try to manipulate the constitution, and will both go down in history as despots that the people of the United States purged when their ideals came under attack.
— Don, Winona MN
Dick Cheney is still trying to run the show, even when isn't in office. He is a strange & often frightening man. My guess is that he probably to force President Obama to do what he thinks should be done. This country embraced by the world after 9/11 & disgraced by our own actions in the aftermath, and these actions were orchestrated by Dick Cheney pulling the strings above a weak president. This cannot become a major distraction from what Obama is trying to achieve this first year of his presidency - that's what Cheney really wants - to stop the momentum of President Obama by distracting him from his vigorous & forward moving agenda, but he should tread lightly or it could backfire on him - and he could become the target of a criminal investigation - he should have laid low, so whatever happens now, he asked for it. He should back off.
— Vic, New York
Words matter. They matter deeply because they provide a precedent for subsequent action and a legitimating mark for those actions. Obama can refer back to this major national-security address and say, Look I stated my policy clearly and distinctly, and therefore what I am about should not surprise anyone. Given his engaging manner, adeptness at nuance, and high degree of intelligence, it becomes imperative that we listen closely and well.
Obama revealed he does not take criticism lightly. The Times did not cover his meeting with human rights and constitutionalist groups the day preceding his speech, in which the comment that he was continuing Bush's policies on detention and classification met with a chilly response. Contrary to popular myth, Obama is NOT receptive to all sides, as witness his practical exclusion of advocates for a single-payer health insurance program from his health care conferences and deliberations. On the equally important issue of adhering to Constitutional principles, he is equally adamant about furthering his own interpretation. Thus, The Times in this editorial was almost flippant in the way it passed over Obama's defense of the state secrets doctrine. Too, it did not stop to think that Obama's refusal to release photographs documenting torture--and the eerily flag-waving reasons for doing so--was a clear refutation of transparency, candor, and truth-telling, traits to which The Times generously accorded the president.
In his address, Obama did not once mention the word, "torture." The word play supports his determination NOT to promote, indeed, because of his powers to classify and/or prevent the release of documents, actually to prevent the investigation of the actions of the preceding administation. More important, he endorsed, in addition to military commissions (which legal critics see as inherently unjust, despite what they also find to be only cosmetic changes), the principle of indefinite detention, a concept so abhorrent to the American Constitution and Western jurisprudence as to be mind-boggling in its implications. THAT, of course, is where words qua precedents open the way to the eclipse of democracy.
One implication of indefinite detention is the contemplation of indefinite war--a course justified by another phrase Obama used more than once in his address. I found it strange to hear the phrase "al Quaeda and its affiliates," because it widened the horizons for permissible warfare to include any group, anywhere, and for any duration a president deems a threat to national security. (This, of course, regurgitates the Bush thinking about ties between Saddam and al Quaeda.) All in all, the address saddens one about the rapid deterioration in leadership now manifested by the president; not coincidentally, within hours of the address he can sign a bill on credit card reform that contains a provision for carrying loaded, concealed weapons into our national parks!
— Norman Pollack, East Lansing, Mich.
Once again, Cheney uses arguments that fail in the light of scrutiny:
He claims that "enhanced Interrogation" saved lives yet won't talk of false information that took resources to investigate and diluted our intelligence efforts.
He claims success based on the fact that there were no more attacks on American soil while ignoring the acts of terror in other countries and the massive amount of death in Iraq. Heck, there have been no nuclear strikes since I started dating several decades ago, yet I'm not so stupid to claim that my dating is what stopped nuclear strikes!
Obamas position isn't perfect either, but at least is seems to be based on something other than false logic and fear.
I'm very saddened that many that wanted Gitmo closed don't have the intestinal fortitude to actually do something about it. Once again, many of our elected "leaders" seem to be nothing more than so many leaves blowing in the wind.
And to those that correctly point out that in times of war, we have often played fast and loose with rights and privilages ignore a couple truths:
There is no claim that things like the internment of Japanese and Japanese decendants actually made us safer in WWII. Rather it seems univerally acknowledged as a black mark on the face of US history. More importantly, these reactionary events were much more limited in time than what we have now: an ill-defined "war on terror" with no national boundaries and no criteria for conclusion. Because of the nebulous nature, it, by definition, will never end and any suspension of basic rights or the rule of law just becomes and excuse for the excersize of extra-legal powers outside the scope of checks and balances.
We surely can do better than this.
— Matt R, Woodside, CA
"The Real Path to Security" is to just stop digging the hole that leads us and U.S. to the abyss and ineluctable death spiral of EMPIRE.
In the film "Jerry Maguire" Renée Zellweger says to Tom Cruse, "Shut up, just shut up. You had me at 'hello'".
Yesterday watching the beginning of Obama's speech I found myself wanting to shout, "Shut up, just shut up, you had me at 'EMPIRE'".
What had my hopes up was Obama's early history lesson in the speech when he said"
"Fidelity to our values is the reason why the United States of America grew from a small string of colonies under the writ of an empire to the strongest nation in the world."
I'll admit, with my older hearing, that I thought Obama had said "colonies under the (grip) of empire", rather than the "writ" of empire, but to my ear the wonderful and glorious word that Obama was about to use as his teaching example was that we were under an 'EMPIRE'.
My heart jumped, I perked up my old ears and got ready to listen to this most educated and educating president explain to his American students that the British Empire that had so oppressed and tyrannized our forefathers was, like all Empires, not merely a form of political oppression by the governmental monarchy of George III, but also was an indivisible economic tyranny of the British royally chartered East India Corporation, which caused the real Boston Tea Party against this combined political economic Empire.
I waited in rapt attention to Obama's every world waiting for him to speak truth to the oppressive power of Empire and explain, to we his students, how Empire is a pathology of both the political and economic (as well as social and military) spheres of our lives, and then to really lower the boom on Empire by explaining how one sphere of Empire (typically the economic) perverts all other spheres and actively seeks to take over all of the elements of a democratic society and 'democratic thinking' with the tyranny of an out-of-control ruling-elite that usurps 'democratic thinking' with their own private hierarchy of 'Empire thinking' --- just as Ben Franklin feared when he said, "We have our Republic if we can keep it" (protected from Empire).
Not only did Obama not fulfill my 'hope' in his ability to 'change' our maelstrom driven course from one headed toward Empire, back to the safe course of democracy, but he then broke my heart by lying the 'white lie of politics' which Bill Clinton's deadly 'triangulation' has already shown always turns as black as death in the hands of Empire.
Obama said, not once, but twice, in describing the measures taken by the Bush/Cheney regime after the 'shock' of 9/11, "I believe that many of these decisions were motivated by a sincere desire to protect the American people."
There are only two possibilities for Obama telling this massive lie about the real reason for the Bush regime taking the imperial control measures that it was able to force on American democracy with the 'shock doctrine' that it implemented for the guileful Empire it was controlled by; either Obama is very naive (which he is not), or he was giving this deadly ruling-elite 'corporate financial Empire' that controls our government behind the facade of its two-party, 'Vichy' sham of democracy, a Clintonian DLC accommodation and 'triangulation' rather than exposing, confronting, battling, and expunging this new and sophisticated Empire which has the U.S. under its grip, or as Obama himself preferred "writ".
As Obama continued to speak, he gave compelling encouragement to American's about how our country not only overcame that earlier "empire writ" that had tried to strangle our birth, but also how we overcame through strength of character and values the 20th century Empires (Nazi) of fascism, and (Soviet) of communism --- but the person most in need of such encouragement (and courage) from Obama, IS Obama.
Before this modern Hamlet walks off stage he will have to face the issue of whether to be, or not to be, for or against the Empire that he already knows in his heart and mind that he will have to confront.
Obama meeting this existential challange, with us helping him, is the only thing that will bring us (and U.S.) a "Real Path to Security".
Alan MacDonald
Sanford, Maine
Dick Cheney is still trying to run the show, even when isn't in office. He is a strange & often frightening man. My guess is that he is probably trying to force President Obama to do what he thinks should be done. This country was embraced by the world after 9/11 & disgraced by our own actions in the aftermath, and these actions were orchestrated by Dick Cheney pulling the strings above a weak president. This cannot become a major distraction from what Obama is trying to achieve this first year of his presidency - that's what Cheney really wants - to stop the momentum of President Obama by distracting him from his vigorous & forward moving agenda, but he should tread lightly or it could backfire on him - and he could become the target of a criminal investigation - he should have laid low, so whatever happens now, he asked for it. He should back off.
— Vic, New York
I address myself to commenters #3,10,22,34,39, and any others whose posts appear before this one. I am writing at 9:45 EDT. They should also read Bill Appledorf's comment, #29
The apologists and supporters of Cheney and those tolerant of torture to "keep us safe" are substituting fear for clear thinking and assuming that those in detention are all "Jihadists...[bent on] murder[ing] our innocents by the truckload, even with WMD's...."
(#39, DL13, San Rafael)
Wow. I suppose thousands of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan killed our bombs are just useless human beings, properly dismissed as "collateral damage" and not to be considered "innocent" because after all there are "jihadists" in those countries.
Among the many lies and omissions in Cheney's speech, not to be exhaustive, are 1) not owning up to President Bush's ignoring the warnings from the CIA (PDB, Aug 6, 2001) and Coleen Rowley and others of the FBI who tried to report suspicious activity of some of the hijackers, 2)the coerced-by-torture report by one detainee of WMD in Iraq that was used to justify what has turned out to be a disastrous invasion of Iraq (are we safer?) and 3) an outright lie about "taking down" the Pakistan nuclear network. Secy of Defense Gates said on 60 Minutes last Sunday that the nuclear threat from Pakistan keeps him awake at night.
We have a Constitution. We have laws. We will be safer by adhering to our fundamental principles than throwing them overboard in a panic.
— CJGC, Cambridge, MA
....."Mr. Obama flatly rejected Mr. Cheney’s claims that torture saved “hundreds of thousands” of lives and reminded Americans that those abuses were ineffective, recruited more terrorists than they brought to justice, destroyed the nation’s image and will make it much harder to try some of the most dangerous terrorists."
Apparently Obama decided that it's not necessary to try them. He'll just detain them indefinately without trial or charges.
The new American Gulag. Pathetic.
— J, X, New Haven, CT.
Bravo for President Obama for taking his oath of office seriously.
He is to protect and defend the constitution, and by closing Gitmo and by allowing the prisoners due process, he is doing just that.
Now, it is time for him to put some bite behind his words and stop letting congress run all over him (no funding for closing Gitmo).
“We the people” voted for Obama… the congress?...not so much.
— CPS, Malvern, PA
Fortunately, we now have a President who is knowledgeable, articulate and able to comprehend the legal and moral complexities of the mess he inherited. As he wisely pointed out, it is much more difficult to repair the damage of of a job poorly done than to begin from scratch and do the work properly from the beginning. He is able to see the larger implications for the future within each individual choice made today. Some would call that the virtue of prudence. He is systematically handling competing priorities.
Unfortunately, the Cheney/Bush administration subscribed to the Machiavellian notion of 'the end justifying the means'. In a democratic society that values justice under the rule of law and individual liberty, we cannot allow such a skewed and morally bankrupt precedent to stand unchallenged. Within our legal system, over time, even flawed judicial precedent will eventually carry the weight of codified legislation.
Bending the law into a pretzel, engaging in torture, establishing off-shore limbo prisons, parsing legal terminology to "re-designate" the legal status of those we fear — diminishes our national character and threatens the liberty of every American citizen. Continually gazing into that fear-driven abyss and trying to somehow rationalize what we have consented to as a nation, will cause us to become the very likeness of our enemies. What we rationalize as the 'just desserts' of a few will eventually become the rule of law for the many... including ordinary citizens.
I don't completely agree with some other positions taken by President Obama, but in this situation IMO, he is right on target. Thankfully, he is proving himself to be a reasonable man who is willing to listen to all points of opinion and thus avoid the perils of group-think. That's a good thing revealing a calm and confident temperament, not weakness.
Conversely, Mr. Cheney continues to appeal to the fear and lower nature of human beings to make his case. For our nation to continue on such a course, building our house on the shifting sand of emotions and gratification of baser human instinct, will cause our nation/house to fall. There is an irony in the fact that Mr. Cheney and his political party proclaim themselves to be the party of 'morality and family values' while simultaneously attempting to re-define the sadism of torture as merely "enhanced interrogation" and a "necessary" evil.
Mr. Cheney, we are better than that. We do not have to cave into our fear or lower nature in order to protect ourselves. We may be attacked again, but we refuse to be moral cowards. You are no longer an elected official and have become a distraction rather than being part of a moral solution.
— Abbi, Asheville
he Cheney/Dan argument is simply wrong. The experiment to see whether torture vs. skilled interrogation is "best" cannot be conducted ethically. The fundamental question is whether human decency outweighs putting ourselves in the same camp as the terrorists. The fear mentality is garbage. Yes 9-11 was bad. I was there. That said, twice that many people die EACH DAY from cardiovascular disease and stroke. Let's put terror in perspective please. Terror has always been there and always will be, home grown and otherwise. Our homeland security measures have proven effective to date. Let's get back to decent core values and the bigger problems confronting humanity.
— shared thoughts, New Haven, CT
Here are some of the pertinent provisions of the Covenant against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment:
"PART I
Article I
1. For the purposes of this Convention, the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.
....
Article 2
1. Each State Party shall take effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction.
2. No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.
3. An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.
Article 3
....
2. For the purpose of determining whether there are such grounds, the competent authorities shall take into account all relevant considerations including, where applicable, the existence in the State concerned of a consistent pattern of gross, flagrant or mass violations of human rights.
Article 4
1. Each State Party shall ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law. The same shall apply to an attempt to commit torture and to an act by any person which constitutes complicity or participation in torture.
2. Each State Party shall make these offences punishable by appropriate penalties which take into account their grave nature.
Article 5
1. Each State Party shall take such measures as may be necessary to establish its jurisdiction over the offences referred to in article 4 in the following cases:
(a) When the offences are committed in any territory under its jurisdiction or on board a ship or aircraft registered in that State;
(b) When the alleged offender is a national of that State;
(c) When the victim is a national of that State if that State considers it appropriate.
2. Each State Party shall likewise take such measures as may be necessary to establish its jurisdiction over such offences in cases where the alleged offender is present in any territory under its jurisdiction ....
....
Article 6
1. Upon being satisfied, after an examination of information available to it, that the circumstances so warrant, any State Party in whose territory a person alleged to have committed any offence referred to in article 4 is present shall take him into custody or take other legal measures to ensure his presence. The custody and other legal measures shall be as provided in the law of that State but may be continued only for such time as is necessary to enable any criminal or extradition proceedings to be instituted.
2. Such State shall immediately make a preliminary inquiry into the facts.
3. Any person in custody pursuant to paragraph 1 of this article shall be assisted in communicating immediately with the nearest appropriate representative of the State of which he is a national, or, if he is a stateless person, with the representative of the State where he usually resides.
4. When a State, pursuant to this article, has taken a person into custody, it shall immediately notify the States referred to in article 5, paragraph 1, of the fact that such person is in custody and of the circumstances which warrant his detention. The State which makes the preliminary inquiry contemplated in paragraph 2 of this article shall promptly report its findings to the said States and shall indicate whether it intends to exercise jurisdiction.
Article 7
1. The State Party in the territory under whose jurisdiction a person alleged to have committed any offence referred to in article 4 is found shall in the cases contemplated in article 5, if it does not extradite him, submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution."
The U.S. is a signatory of this convention, and it is part of the law of our land. Accordingly, top members of the Bush Admin. and, indeed, the entire nation are criminally liable for approving carrying out torture. President Obama is in the process of making himself an accessory after the fact in the torture committed by the preceeding administration. Likewise, the MSM who give V.P. Cheney and his daughter a platform to lie and obfuscate about his involvement in these crimes are complicit in condoning torture.
— Gwain52, Georgia
I think if george bush had any public speaking prowess we would have seen a similar speech 2 years ago regarding these issues. Obama does not know what to do with the detainees who cannot be tried and refers to 'prolonged detention' as the only option. His grace and eloquence never seem to fail in impressing the masses, but this speech was only slightly improved upon what Bush would have given us.
His inclusion of the judicial and congressional branches is a nice step, but creating a system within law to detain these 'terrorists' is not the right path. legalizing the illegal is not in the rule of law.
— irydebikes88, the minny apple
Thank you for this piece. One of the most telling points, for me, was the bold recognition that "I'm not the only one in this town who has sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution." Obama is the first in a long time to recognize the seriousness of that oath - and to take it seriously. That is what "putting country first" really means. Ex vice-president Cheney, speaking immediately after President Obama, only reminded me of how extremely, and how many times, he and President Bush had violated that oath.
— Sue, New York
so obama will try the terrorists as long as he knows they will be convicted? sounds more like iran or china than the u.s. appearnaces over substance as usual for obama.
— Chris, NY
ince our Revolution, hundreds of thousands of Americans have given their lives to defend our ideas of democracy and justice. In the light of this fact, the Bush/Cheney administration's activities in Guantanamo were treason.
— Joel A. Levitt, Ann Arbor, Michigan
Conservatives have a way of co-opting an idea that has great symbolism in our culture, then stripping it of value for use in their propaganda war. Christ’s Cross, the American Flag, a yellow ribbon, but maybe the best example of this is the word “freedom”. What do they mean by the word freedom, certainly not freedom of choice, nor freedom of association, the truth is they don’t mean anything by it, its just a word to them, a word that their ignorant masses can rally around, a word they have stolen out of our American historical vernacular that has power, and while they themselves have no moral authority the word freedom does.
Our new president says we need to look forward, he is wrong, we need to prosecute these war criminals, and break the associations they have established equating their way of thinking, as somehow more American, when in reality is truly anti-American.
I never want to hear The United States of America referred to as “the homeland” it is much too similar to the term “the fatherland”.
— tjtaraba9, 04256366
What about the many other illegal prisons in which the USA keeps prisoners?
They are spread all over the world...do the inmates of those prisons not deserve human rights?
— joseph parmetler, austria
2009 2:17 pm
Link
If Al Qaeda was capable of killing “hundreds of thousands” of people, as Mr. Cheney states, why in the world did they choose to arm themselves with box cutters and kill just a few thousand instead? One has the element of surprise only once, why did they waste it with a plan that no one could have predicted would be as effective and that killed only about 3000 people?
And if they really had been planning and ready to kill “hundreds of thousands” – which is a whole lot of people - why was our CIA and our military caught completely off guard in terms of the other plots? Are they that incompetent? It’s bad enough that the CIA missed the signs of ONE secret plan, but Mr. Cheney is saying that there were many, many plans. The only way to kill that many people is to have multiple, surprise attacks. That means years and years and planning and that mean that many al Qaeda agents would have to be in the country and ready to go with plots equally as improbable as the box cutter plot. Remember: there is no Al Qaeda army with tanks and planes and missiles, and whatever big weapons they have are on another side of the world - unless they have been sneaking things in for years. And their army is …uh….how many people? He is saying they were here and ready to go. YIKES!
Playing the devil’s advocate for a moment: if Mr. Cheney is correct. That means our government was clueless for years. He is, in effect, saying that our FBI, CIA and police are really and truly incompetent bunglers who not once, but repeatedly missed the signs that we were about to be attacked. Only after we tortured people did the truth come out.
If he is correct, then shouldn’t heads be rolling? Why isn’t he demanding that those incompetent men and women be fired or put on trial? Let’s have a trial, and let’s put Mr. Cheney under oath to explain how he uncovered something the CIA, FBI and the police missed.
— Mark W, watchung
It's mind boggling how a nation of 300 million people can be so frightened by 240 individuals. Surely we can cope with them on U.S. soil.
The entire military base at Guantanamo Bay should be closed and the land returned to the people of Cuba.
— Barbara B., Dallas, TX
The label "terrorist" today has degenerated to the point where it is now as accurate as "witch" was in Salem in 1692.
The accusations have similar accuracy and the process of "law" is equally biased.
Sure, there are lots of terrorists in the world, some international, many of them domestic. The average American is in greater danger from domestic terrorists (hate groups, etc) than from any international terrorist. Drunk drivers are a far greater danger to society, their actions just don't get banner headlines.
Someone please tell Cheney that he is no longer the President.
On a recent trip to Europe, people we met almost without exception said "thank god you (the US) voted in Obama". There is true relief around the world that we don't have the moral equivalent of a drunk with a gun running the US.
— John H, Santa Clara, CA
I don't understand why we have to listen to Cheney. I thought his agenda was thoroughly rejected in November, 2008.The people of the US have been embarrassed and betrayed, internationally, by his dogmatic leadership.The November vote was an expression of the deep understanding of this.
— ada mcelhenney, austin,texas
Thank you for this fair, clear column regarding this issue that continues to confound and confuse the legal body in this country. Because Mr Bush took the law into his own hands, mistreated prisoners, placed many in prison who never should have been there, and ran rough shod over the constitution, Mr Obama is left with a tangled mess to sort out and make right. It will take courage and intelligence to undo all the injustice that was done in the name of national security.
It is amazing to me that Cheney has become the mouth piece for the far right and more important, that anyone listens to him. He is sounding off like a noisy gong in the wind. It is time to retire him back to Wyoming, or where ever it is he shoots his friends in the face.
Thank you, Mr Obama for having the courage to face this terrible wrong that was done to our country and the world, and thank you New York Times for speaking the truth about this serious ongoing issue.
— wendyruth, boise ID
Given that this piece rightly places blame on the Bush administration for its recklessness, disregard for the rule of law and this nation's world standing, and ignorance of the increased danger it placed all Americans in due to its policies toward alleged terrorist detainees, it is curious that the editorial board did not go one step further by calling for President Obama to support the establishment of a commission that would completely investigate the individuals, and their decision-making process, responsible for detainee torture, even if it eventually led to the prosecution of certain of those individuals. The injurious nature of their misdeeds cries out for justice, not to mention that, without satisfactory punishment, the door is left open for a future administration to again engage in criminal behavior.
— Ken Pullen, Omaha, NE
Many comments deal with the notion that we are at war, so anything goes, including torture, preventive detention, secret prisons, etc. and invading other countries that did not attack us, occupying them and calling it war, all in the name of keeping us safe. The occupations/"wars" and the so-called "war on terror" are based on our fear of being "attacked" again. All real wars are fought between nations, not against the diffuse threat of criminals and terrorists. We continue to use the 9/11 terrorist/criminal action to justify flouting of international and US law. Who are we really warring against? Ourselves.
— NJahn, Seattle
Thank goodness we have a president who is not only educated and intelligent, but humane. It is, however, way past time for a commission or special prosecutor or some other legal device to find out what really happened during the Bush/Cheney years and if laws were broken, then someone must pay the penalty. Let the chips fall where they may. We have to put this behind us once and for all.
— spence, Bellingham, WA
I am a good old-fashioned bleeding heart liberal. I don't believe Obama has gone far enough. Can we all finally admit that we deserved the terrorists attacks that hit us? That we brought them on ourselves through years of self-serving foreign policy misadventures? Further, it's pristinely clear at this point that Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are the real terrorists. I believe they should be water-boarded for their nationalistic and fear-mongering assertions that terrorists would seek to harm us without a good reason. It's time that we engage in a real dialogue with the terrorists and the other embittered peoples of the world about what steps can be taken to rectify America's numerous national sins, dating back to its very founding. This may involve a large-scale transferring of all of our ill-gotten gains--houses, cars, jewelry--to the less fortunate and those we have so grossly pilfered from. So be it. It's time to make things right.
— Mark Reed, Detroit, Michigan
As a college student just returned from 5 months in Europe, I have seen first hand how the Bush Administration ruined America's reputation. Instead of being a land of the free, we are seen as the land of the oppressive powerful. Obama is representing a refreshing and quite honestly, NORMAL viewpoint that human life should be valued at all costs; versus the previous theory that tortue on few would "save" the rest. Europeans in general do not respect America, and I can see why. This whole bit that Cheney is trying to pull, criticizing our new administration, is qualified (freedom of speech, big baby), however, frankly, it is unneccessary. Cheney, you had your 8 years to deliver well-written speeches and defend your criminal acts. Welcome to 2009 where we, the citizens, have had frankly too much of you.
Hello, President Obama. Keep it up.
— Amy, Los Angeles
What frightens me more than terrorism is Mr. Cheney spewing forth on a new fear based propaganda campaign against an administration that clearly discredited everything Cheney stands for by winning the 2008 elections. Cheney and the people who stand with him are a bigger threat to everything this country stands for than any two bit terrorist with a weapon. A terrorist or terrorist oraganiztion can only hurt us in small ways compared to the damage we can do to them when they give us a reason. By adovocating ideals that essentially ignore our constitution and our rule of law Cheney and his friends threaten the rights of American citizens as well as all human beings. Until Americans understand that we hold all of the cards against terrorism and understand that terrorists who choose not to respond positively to reasonable dialog will loose in time one way or another, Cheney will be able to use fear propaganda against his own people to achieve unwarrented power. I would say that Cheneys way is irrelavent and that terrorists have all the reasons to fear America and its allies.
— crazynlazy, Michigan
This back and forth between Cheney and Obama shows that Cheney was President of Vice for 8 years.
http://blogdredd.blogspot.com...
— Dredd, Texas
"There are Guantánamo prisoners who violated the laws of war and should be tried in military tribunals..."
_________________________________
What are the laws of war?
— willie227, Vancouver
Cheney sounds like a "good German."
Enough said.
— George, West Palm Beach, FL
Why does the media give a has been washed up private citizen dick cheney live television coverage. In November the country spoke clearly no more bush cheney lies disturtions. The man is obviously unhinged the media does him no favor by encouraging his dilussions he is a disgraced former politition let him go and quietly sink into insanity.
— Howard, New York,NY
Relief and optimism? I must be one of those lefties that cable analysts predicted would not be thrilled w/ Obama’s speech. I was not thrilled. It was better than Cheney’s, sure. But that’s not saying much, and much of what Obama had to say was not that different from what Cheney said.
The key for me is the notion of the primacy of law, the alternative to rule by raw power. By my lights, Bush-Cheney operated not just at the extreme outer edge of what is permissible by way of bending law to permit unbridled exercise of power, they were far off the scale: usurping power in numerous ways from a timid, fractious Congress, demanding and mostly getting carte blanche from the supine Supremes, invading foreign nations without restraint, ignoring laws of war, etc. Bush, pushed and abetted by Cheney, became The Decider, openly deciding to do whatever he wanted, without regard to US or international law. The Bush-Cheney view that a President’s obligation to protect national security trumps all other considerations was at the root of their reign of lawlessness on a scale never before seen.
Obama, the brilliant, principled Constitutional Law professor, was to be the anti-Bush, who would restore the rule of law. So far, he has made many decisions that I support (abolishing torture, for example), but mostly for the wrong reasons and in the wrong ways. It’s always about him being true to his values, not about him discharging his obligation to defend the Constitution. Yesterday’s speech was especially worrisome in echoing, rather than repudiating, many Bush-Cheney themes. Some examples:
- Obama asserted, with emphasis, that ‘it is MY job to defend the USofA,’ or words to that effect [no, that is everyone’s job, including Congress, the Court, about half the Federal workforce, and many others; your primary job is to uphold the Constitution].
- Regarding transparency vs. secrecy – use of State Secrets challenges, etc., Obama asserted that he will determine the appropriate balance [wrong remedy: propose a better standard, for review and adoption by Congress].
- Obama promised to invent legal procedures case by case, designed to ensure that the country wouldn’t ever be endangered by any Gitmo ‘terrorists,’ including ‘preventive detention’ whenever he can’t find any other way to ensure they won’t be released [wrong, six ways to Sunday, and indistinguishable from the Bush-Cheney approach; not kosher to select the judicial procedure that best guarantees a desired outcome; doubly not kosher to ‘preventively’ detain people with no procedure at all].
- Obama didn’t challenge Cheney’s oft-stated position that their differences concerning waterboarding and other forms of prisoner abuse are merely differences in policy: Obama’s administrative decision to halt torture is indeed nothing more than a change of policy and, therefore, easily reversible by himself or future Presidents whenever the impulse strikes.
- Obama appears to share Cheney’s view that prosecuting him or others for prisoner abuse would be inappropriate, criminalizing a policy difference (Cheney) or, equivalently, pointing fingers, recrimination (Obama). [wrong; whether or not Cheney, et al., should be prosecuted should hinge exclusively on whether or not there is reason to believe they violated US or international law, not whether or not we like the policies they selected]
- Obama reiterated his opposition to Congressional, Special Prosecutor, independent blue ribbon panel, or any other wide-ranging investigation of potential illegality in the way Bush-Cheney prosecuted their ‘war on terror’ because he doesn’t want to be distracted from his forward-looking agenda [wrong decision, doubly wrong reason; given credible allegations of widespread illegality – of which waterboarding may have been only a small part – a thorough, apolitical investigation is clearly needed as a basis for determining whether or not violations of law have occurred; that, in turn, is an essential precondition for determining whether or not prosecutions are warranted; preventing investigation is equivalent to abandonment of any possibility of rule of law; that’s about as wrong as a President can get].
So, I don’t share NYT’s sense of relief and optimism. My reaction was more one of disappointment and dread.
— Ken Burgdorf, Rockville, MD
There are two aspects to the debate: principles and practical consequences. On the matter of principle, I found it abhorrent that my country would adopt the tactics used by Communist regimes that my parents came here to avoid. On the matter of practical consequences, the evidence that people will say anything to make the pain stop is overwhelming. If they happen to say something true during the process, it may be impossible to separate it from the falsehoods surrounding it. Thus, the practical benefit of torture is small. Finally, the other practical consequence is to motivate the other side and provide recruitment tools. The fact that the recidivism rate of those released from Guantanamo is ONLY 14% actually surprises me.
Admiral Blair is alleged to have said that valuable intelligence resulted from use of the "alternative procedures". His view is contradicted by Lt. Gen. Kimmons, who led the release of the latest Army Field Manual for Human Intelligence Collector Operations that specifically forbids precisely the "alternative procedures" as being morally indefensible and nor useful. Blair's view is also contradicted by retired Col. Wilkerson who, as chief of staff to former Secretary of State Powell, had access to classified intelligence reports and who says that no significant, useful information came out of the "enhanced interrogations" during his tenure. Both Gen. Kimmons and Mr. Wilkerson are not wild-eyed liberals, but present or retired professional soldiers charged with defending this country.
Mark Danner's article on this subject is a most useful reference: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22614
— lisztian, San Diego, CA
n his speech at the National Archives yesterday the President was loud and clear when he said: "I categorically reject the proposition that waterboarding is an effective means of protecting the nation's security."
His delivery matched his conviction and passion for the law, more decisively than at any time since taking office. It was a moment the country and the world were waiting for. President Obama reminded us all that the Commander-in-Chief is on duty ("I see the intelligence!") and has fortitude enough to meet the challenges facing us as a country.
The challenges to this authority and responsibility come, it seems, as much from the drum-beat of scare rhetoric in Fox News and ex-Veep Cheney as it does from anything Al Qaeda and the Taliban are throwing at us in the field of battle.
My hope is that Obama will now go ahead and make the moves of detainees he contemplates, close the prison at GTMO as quickly as he can. Let Congress memorialize that empty shell of shame as it sees fit, but don't be deterred from doing what seems so right to this leader who is every day earning his stripes.
— KP, Nashville
Obama gave a very eloquent, honest speech on the dangers of believing the ends justify the means. I thought he hit all the valid points right on the nail.
— Julie D, palmdale
During the Presidential election, the constant talking point from the McCain camp was that Obama delivered a masterful speech but was short on substance. In many respects and much to my despair, this attack does hold some merit. While we may certainly laud the message given by Obama today that guaranteeing our safety need not infringe upon the Constitution, he leaves much to be desired in terms of action. We are still left with military commissions, "preventive detention," and war criminals who remain free from prosecution. These do not further democratic values. "Preventive detention" gives the President the authority to hold anyone who would "maybe" carry out an act of war. This "Minority Report" power has no place in a democracy. One is imprisoned after he has committed a crime, not beforehand. The fact that Dick Cheney is not in a prison cell is another example of the complete disregard for the rule of law. The central irony is that Obama's message had to compete with that of a self-confessed war criminal who Obama refuses to prosecute. He won't allow the Justice Department to adhere to the Rule of Law because he does not believe it is politically appropriate. This is yet another Bush-like intervention into an Agency's agenda that simply should not be Obama's call to make. A Democracy cannot survive if the Rule of Law is not its fundamental principle.
Doubtless, Obama has an enormous mess to clean up in all areas of our society. But adherence to our Constitution should be the central priority.
— Leigh Pullman, Tenafly, NJ
Listening today to Darth Cheney's gloomy, fearful pronouncements reminded me once again why I hated Bush and Co. so much, and how grateful we should all be that the they are gone. Cheney seems desperate to rescue the soiled reputation of Bush's failed administration, but the damage he and his cronies wrought was too lasting. We can only hope that Cheney retreats permanently back to his undisclosed location.
— Christopher Johnson, CA
Thank you for being the last bastion of freedom in America and helping to return us to peace in a small way. Your Editorial seems to be more of a compromise position or I am further to the left.
The concept of "Preventitive Detention" sounds like a military feel good phrase for a thousand years old tyrannical practice of locking people in the dundgeons on the orders of the kings.
Thank you to the New York Times for allowing us readers to post our comments on your website. I hope it is as great a source of information to you as it is for me.
The last Bastion of Democracy!
— Patrick, Mattituck NY
If as the NY Times says President Obama was totally correct when he "flatly rejected Mr. Cheney’s claims that torture saved “hundreds of thousands” of lives and reminded Americans that those abuses were ineffective ..." then why doesn't he take up Dick Cheney's dare and release what exactly was obtained as intelligence on al Qaeda? If he can authorize the release of the methods, why not the results? What is he afraid of? Why did the White House synopsis delete Admiral Blair's assertion that the information WAS vital? And let's see the transcripts of the Congressional briefings to see once and for all if Nancy Pelosi is telling the truth or full of you know what. The fact that most Congressional Democrats, after all the brave indignation, got cold feet when it really came time to close Guantanamo reminds me of the heroic struggle against segregation in the 60's and 70's -- lots of progressives standing firm for integration, as long as it wasn't in their own neighborhoods. How typical.
— JW, New York
Does the President still have the power to declare any American citizen an enemy combatant (or similar phrase) and detain that citizen indefinitely, or even send that citizen abroad to be tortured?
— Mark Lebow, Milwaukee, WI
Very happy to note the NYT is taking a very sensible and balanced approach to Obama's national security plan. Good editorial...one of your better ones. Upholding America's ideals in a dangerous world is not easy but we certainly do not want to continue the Bush/Cheney old way.
— dbg25, NM
President Obama's actions belie his words.
In normal, everyday life, when individuals act against the democratic foundations of our nation, they are supposed to answer for their actions.
Former President George W. Bush, his VP, his Attorney General, his Secretary of Defense, and so many, many others who deceived the American people, are free as birds. THEY DESERVE TO BE CAGED. Obama would restore America's confidence in itself and its future by the mere act of caging those vultures.
— Nat Solomon, Bronx, NY
Interesting
There are more, but this one intrigued me so much that I had to post it.
Editors, you must be given credit for this seminal editorial, in which you tackle a set of daunting conundrums. But you include a few weasel words, and take only a checked swing at the toughest issue: "preventive detention."
Why are we all so perplexed? You mention "the crime of terrorism," which you say the judicial system can normally handle. But we're not in normal times, and have a judiciary now loaded with judges like Roberts and Bybee whom we have no reason to trust. Another example is Abu Zubaydah, "an alleged top member of Al Qaeda" -- 'who seems to be a highly dangerous terrorist but was tortured.' It's not just because in America a person is innocent until proven guilty that you must say "alleged," but also because we all know that torture means that anything he said could be true or false but cannot be used against him. He's now a free man under our system of justice, but we don't dare let him go. This applies to Ahmed Ghailani also, for any confession he made is suspect, and any witnesses stemming from his, or any other, tortured confession quickly fails "due process" -- protection against self-incrimination and Miranda, to mention only two issues.
There is also the problem of using military law, for there was no formal declaration of war by Congress. Imagine if the British had used military tribunals to deal with Irish terrorists -- calling their decades-long struggle a "war." Rule-of-law nations would have condemned them outright. You say the course Mr. Obama "outlined was generally based on due process and democratic governance." Unfortunately "generally based" is a weak phrase and "democratic governance" is not a requirement for "due process."
No, face it Editors: Mr. Bush turned the rule of law upside down, twisted it around, and kicked it to the ground for good measure. We can revitalize and empower the rule of law and due process going forward, and I'm confident Mr. Obama will in general terms, but we can't put humpty-dumpty back together again as far as current detainees are concerned. And, by the way, not just in Guantanamo, but at Bagram in Afghanistan and I fear other sites we don't know about yet.
So, what could we do about "preventive detention," which you "are not convinced is needed"? Somewhat akin to the Hippocratic Oath -- first do no harm -- I suggest we discuss a "velvet prison" option. The decision to reside in such a facility would be the detainee's, with considerable effort made to assure that it's a freely and consciously made decision. We could acquire or build a modest resort-like facility in the U.S. or on an island somewhere. The U.S. would be cheaper, and probably preferable. How about a simple golf club in a temperate year-round clime, with surrounding homes and perhaps some barracks? Isolated and securely fenced, but not a punishment facility. I'm throwing out a concept, not a blueprint.
Of course there could be no free exchange of phone calls with "loved ones," but perhaps family members could move there if they choose, knowing that they cannot leave until the detainee is allowed to leave -- which may be never. It would be necessary to handle the "highly dangerous terrorists" more securely and separate them from the other few hundred. But since we've ruined any chance of a fair trial, we must try something else.
There would have to be multiple exit strategies for some or all of them. I have many other provisos, but the concept is all that counts. The idea is to let detainees see a dimension of America that they can't even imagine. We think, correctly, that America has a lot to offer, which would trump the propaganda and hatred that many detainees have learned -- either before or while detained at Gitmo or elsewhere. Perhaps time and education will make them more reasonable, accepting, and forgiving. If not, at least they'd have a measure of fair treatment after the torture they've experienced and our American conscience could be relieved of the extreme mistreatment of these presumed truly bad guys.
But if this is wrong, if these men are too hardened in their hatred to come around after prolonged exposure to the best we have to offer -- golf, education, fair treatment, and kindness -- then they'd have to stay in their green velvet prison. Mr. Obama said: "In our constitutional system, prolonged detention should not be the decision of any one man." But it's too late for that: they've already been long-detained by one man, Mr. Bush. Let's not force Mr. Obama to go it alone in dealing with this conundrum. Let's take the least-worst course of action, which also is humane. And please, don't liken this suggestion to how we mistreated Japanese-Americans during World War II. They had done nothing and were not suspected of doing anything. Our paranoid and old racist habits got the best of us. Today we're talking about a relative handful of mistreated people already in our custody, and many would opt for a velvet prison given the choice.
Editors, you must be given credit for this seminal editorial, in which you tackle a set of daunting conundrums. But you include a few weasel words, and take only a checked swing at the toughest issue: "preventive detention."
Why are we all so perplexed? You mention "the crime of terrorism," which you say the judicial system can normally handle. But we're not in normal times, and have a judiciary now loaded with judges like Roberts and Bybee whom we have no reason to trust. Another example is Abu Zubaydah, "an alleged top member of Al Qaeda" -- 'who seems to be a highly dangerous terrorist but was tortured.' It's not just because in America a person is innocent until proven guilty that you must say "alleged," but also because we all know that torture means that anything he said could be true or false but cannot be used against him. He's now a free man under our system of justice, but we don't dare let him go. This applies to Ahmed Ghailani also, for any confession he made is suspect, and any witnesses stemming from his, or any other, tortured confession quickly fails "due process" -- protection against self-incrimination and Miranda, to mention only two issues.
There is also the problem of using military law, for there was no formal declaration of war by Congress. Imagine if the British had used military tribunals to deal with Irish terrorists -- calling their decades-long struggle a "war." Rule-of-law nations would have condemned them outright. You say the course Mr. Obama "outlined was generally based on due process and democratic governance." Unfortunately "generally based" is a weak phrase and "democratic governance" is not a requirement for "due process."
No, face it Editors: Mr. Bush turned the rule of law upside down, twisted it around, and kicked it to the ground for good measure. We can revitalize and empower the rule of law and due process going forward, and I'm confident Mr. Obama will in general terms, but we can't put humpty-dumpty back together again as far as current detainees are concerned. And, by the way, not just in Guantanamo, but at Bagram in Afghanistan and I fear other sites we don't know about yet.
So, what could we do about "preventive detention," which you "are not convinced is needed"? Somewhat akin to the Hippocratic Oath -- first do no harm -- I suggest we discuss a "velvet prison" option. The decision to reside in such a facility would be the detainee's, with considerable effort made to assure that it's a freely and consciously made decision. We could acquire or build a modest resort-like facility in the U.S. or on an island somewhere. The U.S. would be cheaper, and probably preferable. How about a simple golf club in a temperate year-round clime, with surrounding homes and perhaps some barracks? Isolated and securely fenced, but not a punishment facility. I'm throwing out a concept, not a blueprint.
Of course there could be no free exchange of phone calls with "loved ones," but perhaps family members could move there if they choose, knowing that they cannot leave until the detainee is allowed to leave -- which may be never. It would be necessary to handle the "highly dangerous terrorists" more securely and separate them from the other few hundred. But since we've ruined any chance of a fair trial, we must try something else.
There would have to be multiple exit strategies for some or all of them. I have many other provisos, but the concept is all that counts. The idea is to let detainees see a dimension of America that they can't even imagine. We think, correctly, that America has a lot to offer, which would trump the propaganda and hatred that many detainees have learned -- either before or while detained at Gitmo or elsewhere. Perhaps time and education will make them more reasonable, accepting, and forgiving. If not, at least they'd have a measure of fair treatment after the torture they've experienced and our American conscience could be relieved of the extreme mistreatment of these presumed truly bad guys.
But if this is wrong, if these men are too hardened in their hatred to come around after prolonged exposure to the best we have to offer -- golf, education, fair treatment, and kindness -- then they'd have to stay in their green velvet prison. Mr. Obama said: "In our constitutional system, prolonged detention should not be the decision of any one man." But it's too late for that: they've already been long-detained by one man, Mr. Bush. Let's not force Mr. Obama to go it alone in dealing with this conundrum. Let's take the least-worst course of action, which also is humane. And please, don't liken this suggestion to how we mistreated Japanese-Americans during World War II. They had done nothing and were not suspected of doing anything. Our paranoid and old racist habits got the best of us. Today we're talking about a relative handful of mistreated people already in our custody, and many would opt for a velvet prison given the choice.
Crazy Stress
More and more American soldiers are killing themselves, or each other. Its a fact that cries out for attention:
Generals Find Suicide a Frustrating Enemy
As Numbers Continue to Climb, Top Officers Meet Monthly to Look for Answers
By Ann Scott Tyson and Greg Jaffe
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, May 23, 2009
It was just past midnight in Afghanistan when Brig. Gen. Mark Milley appeared on the video screen in the Pentagon conference room to brief some of the Army's top generals on a sobering development: his unit's most recent confirmed suicide.
A 19-year-old private, working a night shift at his base, had shot himself a few weeks earlier. "There was no indication that he would harm himself, he had not been seen by the chaplain, no intimate relationships," Milley said, running through warning signs.
In the Pentagon, Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the Army's vice chief of staff, homed in on one detail. The soldier worked a job that often entailed long, solitary hours. In scouring the Army's suicide statistics, Chiarelli had noticed a slight suicide increase among those who worked such positions. Milley said that going forward none of the 20,000 soldiers under his command would routinely work by themselves.
For more than two hours, Chiarelli, Army personnel chief Lt. Gen. Michael D. Rochelle and a roomful of other generals combed through the facts surrounding a dozen of the Army's latest suicides, with commanders from Afghanistan, Iraq, the Horn of Africa and bases throughout the United States participating in a video teleconference.
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Such meetings are one piece of a broader effort to arrest the Army's rising suicide rate, which has surged to record levels in the past year. In 2008, 140 soldiers on active duty took their own lives, continuing a trend in which the number of suicides has increased more than 60 percent since 2003, surpassing the rate for the general U.S. population.
To deal with the problem, the Army has added to the ranks of mental health and substance abuse counselors. The service also required all units to cease operations for two to four hours to talk about suicide prevention in February and March.
Chiarelli's monthly meetings are the Army's way of sleuthing out patterns and identifying new policies to deal with the trend. In the most recent meeting, conducted last week, commanders were brutally candid about what went wrong -- a mental health screener who missed signs of distress; the failure to take notice when a normally reliable infantryman with three combat tours didn't show up for an Army school; the dangerous interactions of drugs, dispensed to help soldiers deal with combat stress, with caffeine and alcohol.
"It's the most gut-wrenching meeting I go to," Chiarelli said.
After the Afghanistan commander gave his briefing, it was Iraq's turn. Maj. Gen. Daniel P. Bolger described the case of a young soldier who shot himself this year. One aberration in the case: The soldier had received a waiver so that he could take a prescription drug to treat his attention-deficit problem. The drug "when added to caffeine, could cause sleep disorders, and a lack of sleep could lead to impulsive actions," the Iraq commander noted.
"There are a lot of those high-energy drinks being used over there," said Chiarelli, who spent two years in Iraq. "What is that stuff that people drink in Iraq?"
"Rip It," came the chorus around the room, referring to the energy drink that has 100 milligrams of caffeine per eight-ounce can (25 percent more than a can of Red Bull and roughly three times as much as an equivalent amount of Diet Coke). Chiarelli asked an Army doctor attending the meeting to work with his staff to create a simple chart listing the most common drugs that soldiers take for combat stress and explaining how the drugs interact with other substances. "I want it to be something an average platoon sergeant can use," Chiarelli said.
At times Army leaders were frustrated by cases that defied simple explanation. In other instances soldiers simply fell through the cracks. One senior sergeant who had deployed multiple times to Iraq confessed to a fellow soldier that he had frequent nightmares from his first tour. He was binge-drinking. The friend took away his personal gun but never mentioned the sergeant's struggles to commanders. A couple of days later, the sergeant didn't show up for his slot in an Army school.
The normally reliable sergeant's absence should have triggered a red flag, said the senior commander where the soldier was based. It was the second suicide the command had when a soldier was between jobs, and the commander promised that his unit will now maintain contact with troops as they are moving.
As the meeting stretched into its second hour, commanders identified other problems that needed to be fixed. In one case, a U.S.-based soldier who was taking antidepressants returned from his second Iraq tour and checked a box on his post-deployment health survey that he was feeling depressed. The screener who reviewed the form didn't refer the young soldier to the base's mental health counselors for help. A few months later, he took his own life.
The screener erred in not referring the soldier for treatment, said the Army general who briefed the case. But he also complained that the form that the military uses to assess soldiers returning from deployments is outdated and that its questions are overly broad. The questionnaire was developed in the wake of the Persian Gulf war. Chiarelli said he had been promised that a new form would be issued later this summer. "You'd think we would have done it already after seven years of war," he said.
The Army's biggest challenge is that its volunteer force is in uncharted territory. Many soldiers are now in the midst of their third or fourth combat tour, and Army surveys show that mental health deteriorates with each one. Senior Army officials said they are focusing more resources, including extra mental health counselors, where troops are returning from multiple deployments. This year, Fort Campbell, Ky., which is home to the frequently deployed 101st Airborne Division, has had 14 suicides.
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"We probably don't know how many mental health care providers we need after eight years of war and three and four deployments," Chiarelli said.
Some of the best information the Army has comes from the individual case studies discussed at the monthly Pentagon conference. Before the meeting ended, Chiarelli pressed his field commanders and fellow Pentagon generals to make sure that the lessons from the 12 cases they had studied that day made their way out into the force.
"We can't just be players in a game of Clue here," he said. "We have to find a formalized way to get these lessons out."
Generals Find Suicide a Frustrating Enemy
As Numbers Continue to Climb, Top Officers Meet Monthly to Look for Answers
By Ann Scott Tyson and Greg Jaffe
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, May 23, 2009
It was just past midnight in Afghanistan when Brig. Gen. Mark Milley appeared on the video screen in the Pentagon conference room to brief some of the Army's top generals on a sobering development: his unit's most recent confirmed suicide.
A 19-year-old private, working a night shift at his base, had shot himself a few weeks earlier. "There was no indication that he would harm himself, he had not been seen by the chaplain, no intimate relationships," Milley said, running through warning signs.
In the Pentagon, Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the Army's vice chief of staff, homed in on one detail. The soldier worked a job that often entailed long, solitary hours. In scouring the Army's suicide statistics, Chiarelli had noticed a slight suicide increase among those who worked such positions. Milley said that going forward none of the 20,000 soldiers under his command would routinely work by themselves.
For more than two hours, Chiarelli, Army personnel chief Lt. Gen. Michael D. Rochelle and a roomful of other generals combed through the facts surrounding a dozen of the Army's latest suicides, with commanders from Afghanistan, Iraq, the Horn of Africa and bases throughout the United States participating in a video teleconference.
ad_icon
Such meetings are one piece of a broader effort to arrest the Army's rising suicide rate, which has surged to record levels in the past year. In 2008, 140 soldiers on active duty took their own lives, continuing a trend in which the number of suicides has increased more than 60 percent since 2003, surpassing the rate for the general U.S. population.
To deal with the problem, the Army has added to the ranks of mental health and substance abuse counselors. The service also required all units to cease operations for two to four hours to talk about suicide prevention in February and March.
Chiarelli's monthly meetings are the Army's way of sleuthing out patterns and identifying new policies to deal with the trend. In the most recent meeting, conducted last week, commanders were brutally candid about what went wrong -- a mental health screener who missed signs of distress; the failure to take notice when a normally reliable infantryman with three combat tours didn't show up for an Army school; the dangerous interactions of drugs, dispensed to help soldiers deal with combat stress, with caffeine and alcohol.
"It's the most gut-wrenching meeting I go to," Chiarelli said.
After the Afghanistan commander gave his briefing, it was Iraq's turn. Maj. Gen. Daniel P. Bolger described the case of a young soldier who shot himself this year. One aberration in the case: The soldier had received a waiver so that he could take a prescription drug to treat his attention-deficit problem. The drug "when added to caffeine, could cause sleep disorders, and a lack of sleep could lead to impulsive actions," the Iraq commander noted.
"There are a lot of those high-energy drinks being used over there," said Chiarelli, who spent two years in Iraq. "What is that stuff that people drink in Iraq?"
"Rip It," came the chorus around the room, referring to the energy drink that has 100 milligrams of caffeine per eight-ounce can (25 percent more than a can of Red Bull and roughly three times as much as an equivalent amount of Diet Coke). Chiarelli asked an Army doctor attending the meeting to work with his staff to create a simple chart listing the most common drugs that soldiers take for combat stress and explaining how the drugs interact with other substances. "I want it to be something an average platoon sergeant can use," Chiarelli said.
At times Army leaders were frustrated by cases that defied simple explanation. In other instances soldiers simply fell through the cracks. One senior sergeant who had deployed multiple times to Iraq confessed to a fellow soldier that he had frequent nightmares from his first tour. He was binge-drinking. The friend took away his personal gun but never mentioned the sergeant's struggles to commanders. A couple of days later, the sergeant didn't show up for his slot in an Army school.
The normally reliable sergeant's absence should have triggered a red flag, said the senior commander where the soldier was based. It was the second suicide the command had when a soldier was between jobs, and the commander promised that his unit will now maintain contact with troops as they are moving.
As the meeting stretched into its second hour, commanders identified other problems that needed to be fixed. In one case, a U.S.-based soldier who was taking antidepressants returned from his second Iraq tour and checked a box on his post-deployment health survey that he was feeling depressed. The screener who reviewed the form didn't refer the young soldier to the base's mental health counselors for help. A few months later, he took his own life.
The screener erred in not referring the soldier for treatment, said the Army general who briefed the case. But he also complained that the form that the military uses to assess soldiers returning from deployments is outdated and that its questions are overly broad. The questionnaire was developed in the wake of the Persian Gulf war. Chiarelli said he had been promised that a new form would be issued later this summer. "You'd think we would have done it already after seven years of war," he said.
The Army's biggest challenge is that its volunteer force is in uncharted territory. Many soldiers are now in the midst of their third or fourth combat tour, and Army surveys show that mental health deteriorates with each one. Senior Army officials said they are focusing more resources, including extra mental health counselors, where troops are returning from multiple deployments. This year, Fort Campbell, Ky., which is home to the frequently deployed 101st Airborne Division, has had 14 suicides.
ad_icon
"We probably don't know how many mental health care providers we need after eight years of war and three and four deployments," Chiarelli said.
Some of the best information the Army has comes from the individual case studies discussed at the monthly Pentagon conference. Before the meeting ended, Chiarelli pressed his field commanders and fellow Pentagon generals to make sure that the lessons from the 12 cases they had studied that day made their way out into the force.
"We can't just be players in a game of Clue here," he said. "We have to find a formalized way to get these lessons out."
Out of Afghanistan
Obama Lies to Navy Grads
May 22, 4:17 PM · Add a Comment
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"psst ...just kidding!"
Obama gave the commencement address to this year’s graduates at the Naval Academy today, and blatantly lied through his teeth:
"I will only send you into harm's way when it is absolutely necessary, and with the strategy, the well-defined goals, the equipment and the support that you need to get the job done," the president told more than 1,000 graduates during a sun-splashed ceremony at Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium.
…Starting when? Next year? His second term? Because he certainly is sending them into harm’s way right now, without strategy or well-defined goals. This statement would make sense were he not the commander-in-chief of the military, currently overseeing (and primarily responsible for the execution of) multiple unjustified and unnecessary wars as we speak. The campaign is over, the honeymoon is over, and you are the commander of the military right now. It’s time to put up or shut up, Mr. President.
Iraq may very well be Bush’s re-enactment of Vietnam. Afghanistan is poised to be Obama’s re-enactment of Iraq. Here’s Obama’s Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, via Bloomberg, on the Afghanistan situation:
U.S. goals in Afghanistan must be “modest, realistic,” and “above all, there must be an Afghan face on this war,” Gates said. “The Afghan people must believe this is their war and we are there to help them. If they think we are there for our own purposes, then we will go the way of every other foreign army that has been in Afghanistan.”
Hubris, anyone? We’ve just got to convince the Afghanis that we’re here for them, not for our own interests. Well that might be a little hard to do, considering our recent behavior around the globe. You don’t watch a bull wreak destruction on your neighbor’s china shop, and then invite him in to repair your finery. And then there is that other telling phrase ‘we will go the way of every other foreign army that has been in Afghanistan.’ That's right - our strategy has never, ever, in history, ever worked before. And Gates knows this:
Gates recalled that the Soviet Union failed in Afghanistan in the 1980s even with 120,000 troops and a “ruthless” method of operating there. “It’s not for nothing that Afghanistan’s known as the ‘graveyard of empires,’” he said.
So we’ll be the exception – or perhaps we’re just hoping for change when we know there won’t be any.
The part that really tickles is this: If we are ‘there to help them’ and not there for our own purposes, then this must be an act of pure altruism, utter selflessness on our part to help those poor Afghanis. If that is the case, then how on earth can it qualify as ‘absolutely necessary’ for American security to get our sons and daughters killed killing Afghanis over there?
The only answer is out.
May 22, 4:17 PM · Add a Comment
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"psst ...just kidding!"
Obama gave the commencement address to this year’s graduates at the Naval Academy today, and blatantly lied through his teeth:
"I will only send you into harm's way when it is absolutely necessary, and with the strategy, the well-defined goals, the equipment and the support that you need to get the job done," the president told more than 1,000 graduates during a sun-splashed ceremony at Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium.
…Starting when? Next year? His second term? Because he certainly is sending them into harm’s way right now, without strategy or well-defined goals. This statement would make sense were he not the commander-in-chief of the military, currently overseeing (and primarily responsible for the execution of) multiple unjustified and unnecessary wars as we speak. The campaign is over, the honeymoon is over, and you are the commander of the military right now. It’s time to put up or shut up, Mr. President.
Iraq may very well be Bush’s re-enactment of Vietnam. Afghanistan is poised to be Obama’s re-enactment of Iraq. Here’s Obama’s Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, via Bloomberg, on the Afghanistan situation:
U.S. goals in Afghanistan must be “modest, realistic,” and “above all, there must be an Afghan face on this war,” Gates said. “The Afghan people must believe this is their war and we are there to help them. If they think we are there for our own purposes, then we will go the way of every other foreign army that has been in Afghanistan.”
Hubris, anyone? We’ve just got to convince the Afghanis that we’re here for them, not for our own interests. Well that might be a little hard to do, considering our recent behavior around the globe. You don’t watch a bull wreak destruction on your neighbor’s china shop, and then invite him in to repair your finery. And then there is that other telling phrase ‘we will go the way of every other foreign army that has been in Afghanistan.’ That's right - our strategy has never, ever, in history, ever worked before. And Gates knows this:
Gates recalled that the Soviet Union failed in Afghanistan in the 1980s even with 120,000 troops and a “ruthless” method of operating there. “It’s not for nothing that Afghanistan’s known as the ‘graveyard of empires,’” he said.
So we’ll be the exception – or perhaps we’re just hoping for change when we know there won’t be any.
The part that really tickles is this: If we are ‘there to help them’ and not there for our own purposes, then this must be an act of pure altruism, utter selflessness on our part to help those poor Afghanis. If that is the case, then how on earth can it qualify as ‘absolutely necessary’ for American security to get our sons and daughters killed killing Afghanis over there?
The only answer is out.
Out
Obama Lies to Navy Grads
May 22, 4:17 PM · Add a Comment
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"psst ...just kidding!"
Obama gave the commencement address to this year’s graduates at the Naval Academy today, and blatantly lied through his teeth:
"I will only send you into harm's way when it is absolutely necessary, and with the strategy, the well-defined goals, the equipment and the support that you need to get the job done," the president told more than 1,000 graduates during a sun-splashed ceremony at Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium.
…Starting when? Next year? His second term? Because he certainly is sending them into harm’s way right now, without strategy or well-defined goals. This statement would make sense were he not the commander-in-chief of the military, currently overseeing (and primarily responsible for the execution of) multiple unjustified and unnecessary wars as we speak. The campaign is over, the honeymoon is over, and you are the commander of the military right now. It’s time to put up or shut up, Mr. President.
Iraq may very well be Bush’s re-enactment of Vietnam. Afghanistan is poised to be Obama’s re-enactment of Iraq. Here’s Obama’s Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, via Bloomberg, on the Afghanistan situation:
U.S. goals in Afghanistan must be “modest, realistic,” and “above all, there must be an Afghan face on this war,” Gates said. “The Afghan people must believe this is their war and we are there to help them. If they think we are there for our own purposes, then we will go the way of every other foreign army that has been in Afghanistan.”
Hubris, anyone? We’ve just got to convince the Afghanis that we’re here for them, not for our own interests. Well that might be a little hard to do, considering our recent behavior around the globe. You don’t watch a bull wreak destruction on your neighbor’s china shop, and then invite him in to repair your finery. And then there is that other telling phrase ‘we will go the way of every other foreign army that has been in Afghanistan.’ That's right - our strategy has never, ever, in history, ever worked before. And Gates knows this:
Gates recalled that the Soviet Union failed in Afghanistan in the 1980s even with 120,000 troops and a “ruthless” method of operating there. “It’s not for nothing that Afghanistan’s known as the ‘graveyard of empires,’” he said.
So we’ll be the exception – or perhaps we’re just hoping for change when we know there won’t be any.
The part that really tickles is this: If we are ‘there to help them’ and not there for our own purposes, then this must be an act of pure altruism, utter selflessness on our part to help those poor Afghanis. If that is the case, then how on earth can it qualify as ‘absolutely necessary’ for American security to get our sons and daughters killed killing Afghanis over there?
The only answer is out.
May 22, 4:17 PM · Add a Comment
Add a Comment
ShareThis
Feed
"psst ...just kidding!"
Obama gave the commencement address to this year’s graduates at the Naval Academy today, and blatantly lied through his teeth:
"I will only send you into harm's way when it is absolutely necessary, and with the strategy, the well-defined goals, the equipment and the support that you need to get the job done," the president told more than 1,000 graduates during a sun-splashed ceremony at Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium.
…Starting when? Next year? His second term? Because he certainly is sending them into harm’s way right now, without strategy or well-defined goals. This statement would make sense were he not the commander-in-chief of the military, currently overseeing (and primarily responsible for the execution of) multiple unjustified and unnecessary wars as we speak. The campaign is over, the honeymoon is over, and you are the commander of the military right now. It’s time to put up or shut up, Mr. President.
Iraq may very well be Bush’s re-enactment of Vietnam. Afghanistan is poised to be Obama’s re-enactment of Iraq. Here’s Obama’s Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, via Bloomberg, on the Afghanistan situation:
U.S. goals in Afghanistan must be “modest, realistic,” and “above all, there must be an Afghan face on this war,” Gates said. “The Afghan people must believe this is their war and we are there to help them. If they think we are there for our own purposes, then we will go the way of every other foreign army that has been in Afghanistan.”
Hubris, anyone? We’ve just got to convince the Afghanis that we’re here for them, not for our own interests. Well that might be a little hard to do, considering our recent behavior around the globe. You don’t watch a bull wreak destruction on your neighbor’s china shop, and then invite him in to repair your finery. And then there is that other telling phrase ‘we will go the way of every other foreign army that has been in Afghanistan.’ That's right - our strategy has never, ever, in history, ever worked before. And Gates knows this:
Gates recalled that the Soviet Union failed in Afghanistan in the 1980s even with 120,000 troops and a “ruthless” method of operating there. “It’s not for nothing that Afghanistan’s known as the ‘graveyard of empires,’” he said.
So we’ll be the exception – or perhaps we’re just hoping for change when we know there won’t be any.
The part that really tickles is this: If we are ‘there to help them’ and not there for our own purposes, then this must be an act of pure altruism, utter selflessness on our part to help those poor Afghanis. If that is the case, then how on earth can it qualify as ‘absolutely necessary’ for American security to get our sons and daughters killed killing Afghanis over there?
The only answer is out.
Out of Iraq
I know its tough, but I don't think that this G.I. should die, although its obviously not my decision. He's going to do a lot of hard time and never be free again, and that should be enough. Frankly, his death is immaterial- he'll never be able to hurt anyone that way again. And this way he has a chance to live the rest of his life differently.
Iraq Tribes Are Upset By Sentence Given to G.I.
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By MARC SANTORA and SUADAD N. AL-SALHY
Published: May 22, 2009
BAGHDAD — Iraqi tribal and political leaders complained bitterly on Friday after an American court spared the life of a United States soldier convicted of raping a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and then murdering her and members of her family in 2006.
The soldier, Steven D. Green, 24, was sentenced to life in prison without parole on Thursday after a jury failed to reach a consensus on whether he should be executed.
“There is no comparison between the crimes and the sentence,” said Sheik Fadhil al-Janabi, a Sunni tribal leader in Anbar Province. “That soldier entered an Iraqi house, raped their under-age daughter and burned her with her family, so this sentence is not enough, and it is insulting for Iraqis’ honor.”
On Iraq’s state-run television station, where the case received extensive coverage, the soldier was branded “the killer of innocence.”
The attack in 2006 in Mahmudiya, about 20 miles south of Baghdad, was so brutal that American commanders initially thought it was the work of insurgents. When it was revealed that American soldiers were involved, the attack became a rallying point for opponents of the occupation.
The immediate family of the victims had only a muted public reaction, in part because the sexual nature of the crime is viewed as a mark of deep shame. But leaders of the Janabi tribe, of which the girl, Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi, was a member, were joined by other tribal leaders in condemning the sentence.
“In the name of the Janabi tribe, I reject this sentence completely,” Sameer Sabri al-Janabi said. “This is a tribal issue, and we cannot accept any moderate sentence except death. His life is the only cost that we will accept.”
Like others interviewed in the town where the crime took place and in other parts of Iraq, the sheik said that Mr. Green should have faced Iraqi justice.
“According to our tribal traditions, this soldier should have been killed and crucified, and that is exactly what he deserves,” he said. “It is not just according to our traditions, but also according to the Ten Commandments of the Christians.”
While there was no official government response, Waleed al-Hilly, a high-ranking official in the Dawa Party of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and the head of a human rights group, appeared on state television to calm angry citizens.
He called the decision a “victory for human rights,” and he said that those who wanted to see Mr. Green executed needed to understand that in the American justice system there are conflicting laws governing the death penalty.
Sheik Amash al-Rubbaia, the head of Rubbaia tribe in Mahmudiya, said that there was no sentence short of death that would satisfy the people of Iraq.
“The Americans are not taking the Iraqis’ honor seriously,” he said. “This soldier is a dog. This soldier is an occupier, and he violated our honor. He should die to become an example for his colleagues, and that will only be a small part of what he deserves.”
In an address to the nation on Friday night, Mr. Maliki made no mention of the case but promised to make sweeping changes in his own government. In a speech that was largely seen as a preview of the themes he would run on for the national election scheduled for Jan. 30, Mr. Maliki listed the ways he said his leadership has been a success, focusing on improved security and issuing a new call to battle corruption.
He also seemed to suggest on Friday that there could soon be a major shake-up of the government. “I have suggested several times that there need to be ministerial changes, but those calls were not accepted by our partners in the political process,” he said. “Today, I find the circumstances are suitable to carry out change in my government, and I hope the other political parties will help these moves succeed.”
Iraq Tribes Are Upset By Sentence Given to G.I.
Article Tools Sponsored By
By MARC SANTORA and SUADAD N. AL-SALHY
Published: May 22, 2009
BAGHDAD — Iraqi tribal and political leaders complained bitterly on Friday after an American court spared the life of a United States soldier convicted of raping a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and then murdering her and members of her family in 2006.
The soldier, Steven D. Green, 24, was sentenced to life in prison without parole on Thursday after a jury failed to reach a consensus on whether he should be executed.
“There is no comparison between the crimes and the sentence,” said Sheik Fadhil al-Janabi, a Sunni tribal leader in Anbar Province. “That soldier entered an Iraqi house, raped their under-age daughter and burned her with her family, so this sentence is not enough, and it is insulting for Iraqis’ honor.”
On Iraq’s state-run television station, where the case received extensive coverage, the soldier was branded “the killer of innocence.”
The attack in 2006 in Mahmudiya, about 20 miles south of Baghdad, was so brutal that American commanders initially thought it was the work of insurgents. When it was revealed that American soldiers were involved, the attack became a rallying point for opponents of the occupation.
The immediate family of the victims had only a muted public reaction, in part because the sexual nature of the crime is viewed as a mark of deep shame. But leaders of the Janabi tribe, of which the girl, Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi, was a member, were joined by other tribal leaders in condemning the sentence.
“In the name of the Janabi tribe, I reject this sentence completely,” Sameer Sabri al-Janabi said. “This is a tribal issue, and we cannot accept any moderate sentence except death. His life is the only cost that we will accept.”
Like others interviewed in the town where the crime took place and in other parts of Iraq, the sheik said that Mr. Green should have faced Iraqi justice.
“According to our tribal traditions, this soldier should have been killed and crucified, and that is exactly what he deserves,” he said. “It is not just according to our traditions, but also according to the Ten Commandments of the Christians.”
While there was no official government response, Waleed al-Hilly, a high-ranking official in the Dawa Party of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and the head of a human rights group, appeared on state television to calm angry citizens.
He called the decision a “victory for human rights,” and he said that those who wanted to see Mr. Green executed needed to understand that in the American justice system there are conflicting laws governing the death penalty.
Sheik Amash al-Rubbaia, the head of Rubbaia tribe in Mahmudiya, said that there was no sentence short of death that would satisfy the people of Iraq.
“The Americans are not taking the Iraqis’ honor seriously,” he said. “This soldier is a dog. This soldier is an occupier, and he violated our honor. He should die to become an example for his colleagues, and that will only be a small part of what he deserves.”
In an address to the nation on Friday night, Mr. Maliki made no mention of the case but promised to make sweeping changes in his own government. In a speech that was largely seen as a preview of the themes he would run on for the national election scheduled for Jan. 30, Mr. Maliki listed the ways he said his leadership has been a success, focusing on improved security and issuing a new call to battle corruption.
He also seemed to suggest on Friday that there could soon be a major shake-up of the government. “I have suggested several times that there need to be ministerial changes, but those calls were not accepted by our partners in the political process,” he said. “Today, I find the circumstances are suitable to carry out change in my government, and I hope the other political parties will help these moves succeed.”
The Latest From the Comment Is Free Blogs
Obama's military conundrum
Only by switching spending from war to development can America hope to defeat al-Qaida and the Taliban
* Jeffrey Sachs
* The Guardian, Friday 22 May 2009 19.00 BST
American foreign policy has failed in recent years mainly because the US has relied on military force to address problems that demand development assistance and diplomacy. Young men become fighters in places such as Sudan, Somalia, Pakistan and Afghanistan because they lack gainful employment. Extreme ideologies influence people when they can't feed their families, and when lack of access to family planning leads to an unwanted population explosion. President Barack Obama has raised hopes for a new strategy, but so far the forces of continuity in US policy are dominating the forces of change.
The first rule in assessing a government's real strategy is to follow the money. America vastly overspends on the military compared with other areas of government. Obama's projected budgets do not change that. For the coming 2010 fiscal year, Obama's budget calls for $755bn in military spending, an amount that exceeds US budget spending in all other areas except so-called "mandatory" spending on social security, healthcare, interest payments on the national debt and a few other items.
Indeed, US military spending exceeds the sum of federal budgetary outlays for education, agriculture, climate change, environmental protection, ocean protection, energy systems, homeland security, low-income housing, national parks and national land management, the judicial system, international development, diplomatic operations, highways, public transport, veterans' affairs, space exploration and science, civilian research and development, civil engineering for waterways, dams, bridges, sewerage and waste treatment, community development and many other areas.
This preponderance of military spending applies to all 10 years of Obama's medium-term scenario. By 2019, total military spending is projected to be $8.2tn, exceeding by $2tn the budgeted outlays for all non-mandatory budget spending.
US military spending is equally remarkable when viewed from an international perspective. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, total military spending in constant 2005 dollars reached roughly $1.4tn in 2007. In other words, the US spends roughly the same amount spent by the rest of the world combined – a pattern that the Obama administration shows no signs of ending.
The policy decisions of recent months offer little more hope for a fundamental change in US foreign policy direction. While the US has signed an agreement with Iraq to leave by the end of 2011, there is talk in the Pentagon that US "non-combat" troops will remain in the country for years or decades to come.
It is easy to see how the persistence of instability in Iraq, Iranian influence, and al-Qaida's presence will lead American policymakers to take the "safe" route of continued military involvement. Some opponents of the Iraq war, including me, believe that a fundamental – and deeply misguided – objective of the war from the outset has been to create a long-term military base (or bases) in Iraq, ostensibly to protect oil routes and oil concessions. As the examples of Iran and Saudi Arabia show, however, such a long-term presence sooner or later creates an explosive backlash.
The worries are even worse in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Nato's war with the Taliban in Afghanistan is going badly, so much so that the commanding US general was sacked this month. The Taliban is also extending its reach into Pakistan.
Both Afghanistan and the neighbouring provinces of Pakistan are impoverished regions, with vast unemployment, bulging youth populations, prolonged droughts, widespread hunger and pervasive economic deprivation. It is easy for the Taliban and al-Qaida to mobilise fighters under such conditions.
The problem is that a US military response is essentially useless under these conditions, and can easily exacerbate the situation rather than resolve it. Among other problems, the US relies heavily on drones and bombers, leading to a high civilian death toll, which is inflaming public attitudes against the US. After one recent disaster, in which more than 100 civilians died, the Pentagon immediately insisted that such bombing operations would continue. A recent survey showed overwhelming Pakistani opposition to US military incursions into their country.
Obama is doubling down in Afghanistan, by raising the number of US troops from 38,000 to 68,000, and perhaps more later. There are also risks that the US will get involved much more heavily in the fighting in Pakistan. The new US commanding general in Afghanistan is reportedly a specialist in counter-insurgency, which could well involve surreptitious engagement by US operatives in Pakistan. If so, the results could prove catastrophic, leading to a spreading war in an unstable country of 180 million people.
What is disconcerting, however, is not only the relentless financing and spread of war, but also the lack of an alternative US strategy. Obama and his top advisers have spoken regularly about the need to address the underlying sources of conflict, including poverty and unemployment. A few billion dollars has been recommended to fund economic aid for Afghanistan and Pakistan. But this remains a small amount compared to military outlays, and an overarching framework to support economic development is missing.
Before investing hundreds of billions of dollars more in failing military operations, the Obama administration should rethink its policy and lay out a viable strategy to US citizens and the world. It's high time for a strategy of peace through sustainable development – including investments in health, education, livelihoods, water and sanitation and irrigation – in today's hotspots, starting with Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Such a strategy cannot simply emerge as a byproduct of US military campaigns. Rather, it will have to be developed proactively, with a sense of urgency and in close partnership with the affected countries and the communities within them. A shift in focus to economic development will save a vast number of lives and convert the unthinkably large economic costs of war into economic benefits through development. Obama must act before today's crisis explodes into an even larger disaster.Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2009
Only by switching spending from war to development can America hope to defeat al-Qaida and the Taliban
* Jeffrey Sachs
* The Guardian, Friday 22 May 2009 19.00 BST
American foreign policy has failed in recent years mainly because the US has relied on military force to address problems that demand development assistance and diplomacy. Young men become fighters in places such as Sudan, Somalia, Pakistan and Afghanistan because they lack gainful employment. Extreme ideologies influence people when they can't feed their families, and when lack of access to family planning leads to an unwanted population explosion. President Barack Obama has raised hopes for a new strategy, but so far the forces of continuity in US policy are dominating the forces of change.
The first rule in assessing a government's real strategy is to follow the money. America vastly overspends on the military compared with other areas of government. Obama's projected budgets do not change that. For the coming 2010 fiscal year, Obama's budget calls for $755bn in military spending, an amount that exceeds US budget spending in all other areas except so-called "mandatory" spending on social security, healthcare, interest payments on the national debt and a few other items.
Indeed, US military spending exceeds the sum of federal budgetary outlays for education, agriculture, climate change, environmental protection, ocean protection, energy systems, homeland security, low-income housing, national parks and national land management, the judicial system, international development, diplomatic operations, highways, public transport, veterans' affairs, space exploration and science, civilian research and development, civil engineering for waterways, dams, bridges, sewerage and waste treatment, community development and many other areas.
This preponderance of military spending applies to all 10 years of Obama's medium-term scenario. By 2019, total military spending is projected to be $8.2tn, exceeding by $2tn the budgeted outlays for all non-mandatory budget spending.
US military spending is equally remarkable when viewed from an international perspective. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, total military spending in constant 2005 dollars reached roughly $1.4tn in 2007. In other words, the US spends roughly the same amount spent by the rest of the world combined – a pattern that the Obama administration shows no signs of ending.
The policy decisions of recent months offer little more hope for a fundamental change in US foreign policy direction. While the US has signed an agreement with Iraq to leave by the end of 2011, there is talk in the Pentagon that US "non-combat" troops will remain in the country for years or decades to come.
It is easy to see how the persistence of instability in Iraq, Iranian influence, and al-Qaida's presence will lead American policymakers to take the "safe" route of continued military involvement. Some opponents of the Iraq war, including me, believe that a fundamental – and deeply misguided – objective of the war from the outset has been to create a long-term military base (or bases) in Iraq, ostensibly to protect oil routes and oil concessions. As the examples of Iran and Saudi Arabia show, however, such a long-term presence sooner or later creates an explosive backlash.
The worries are even worse in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Nato's war with the Taliban in Afghanistan is going badly, so much so that the commanding US general was sacked this month. The Taliban is also extending its reach into Pakistan.
Both Afghanistan and the neighbouring provinces of Pakistan are impoverished regions, with vast unemployment, bulging youth populations, prolonged droughts, widespread hunger and pervasive economic deprivation. It is easy for the Taliban and al-Qaida to mobilise fighters under such conditions.
The problem is that a US military response is essentially useless under these conditions, and can easily exacerbate the situation rather than resolve it. Among other problems, the US relies heavily on drones and bombers, leading to a high civilian death toll, which is inflaming public attitudes against the US. After one recent disaster, in which more than 100 civilians died, the Pentagon immediately insisted that such bombing operations would continue. A recent survey showed overwhelming Pakistani opposition to US military incursions into their country.
Obama is doubling down in Afghanistan, by raising the number of US troops from 38,000 to 68,000, and perhaps more later. There are also risks that the US will get involved much more heavily in the fighting in Pakistan. The new US commanding general in Afghanistan is reportedly a specialist in counter-insurgency, which could well involve surreptitious engagement by US operatives in Pakistan. If so, the results could prove catastrophic, leading to a spreading war in an unstable country of 180 million people.
What is disconcerting, however, is not only the relentless financing and spread of war, but also the lack of an alternative US strategy. Obama and his top advisers have spoken regularly about the need to address the underlying sources of conflict, including poverty and unemployment. A few billion dollars has been recommended to fund economic aid for Afghanistan and Pakistan. But this remains a small amount compared to military outlays, and an overarching framework to support economic development is missing.
Before investing hundreds of billions of dollars more in failing military operations, the Obama administration should rethink its policy and lay out a viable strategy to US citizens and the world. It's high time for a strategy of peace through sustainable development – including investments in health, education, livelihoods, water and sanitation and irrigation – in today's hotspots, starting with Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Such a strategy cannot simply emerge as a byproduct of US military campaigns. Rather, it will have to be developed proactively, with a sense of urgency and in close partnership with the affected countries and the communities within them. A shift in focus to economic development will save a vast number of lives and convert the unthinkably large economic costs of war into economic benefits through development. Obama must act before today's crisis explodes into an even larger disaster.Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2009
Peace on Belay
I just know climbers, and know what they're like, and I figured that there would be something like this out there. And lo and behold, there very much is. It took me only a few seconds to find it.
And Still We Do It. Still We Do It.
i went across the water to affy one day
and i'm gone and i'm gone
and my mother just prays
she cries and she prays
and her whole body shakes
but i'll only be back
wrapped up for the wake.
A memorial to war dead of Iraq and Afghanistan
By St. John Barned-Smith
Inquirer Staff Writer
Joseph Hagan knelt beneath the scorching sun, scanning the stenciled names before him. By the end of yesterday, he and his sons had carved 62 more names into the granite floor of Philadelphia's Korean War Memorial.
They were different from the others he had carved there. These were for more recent casualties - Philadelphia-area servicemen and women who died in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The names of the 62 battle deaths joined those of the 610 Philadelphia-area soldiers who died in Korea as well as other Korean War veterans who have since passed away.
Keepers of the Korean War Memorial at Penn's Landing say they were motivated to honor the losses of the current wars - honor they felt took too long to be given in previous conflicts. They also wanted to honor a shared experience of combat, service, and loss.
The additions will be dedicated Monday, Memorial Day.
"I went home and just went to work," Lou Giacomelli, 78, said of his return from Korea, where he had been wounded. It was as if "no one realized you were gone," he said. "It's the same as right now with Iraq and Afghanistan."
Over the last two years, Giacomelli and other members of the Friends of the Korean War Memorial at Penn's Landing began holding monthly gatherings. They took down the flag, played Taps, read the names of the dead, and recited prayers and benedictions at the memorial at Second and Dock Streets.
About a year ago, Giacomelli turned to William J. Kelly, president of the foundation, and said, "There's got to be more we can do."
The push to recognize the veterans in stone began. On Memorial Day, the names, inscribed in a corner of the memorial, will be unveiled in an 11 a.m. ceremony.
"This way, at least their names will be down for eternity," Giacomelli said.
The motivations for the supporters differ.
Kelly, the foundation's president, did not serve in the Korean War. Nevertheless, he said, it touched him deeply.
"I went to school with a lot of veterans who had just gotten out of the service," he said. "When we came out of high school, we were sort of footloose and fancy-free." The veterans soon taught him different.
"They told us, 'We almost had to sacrifice our lives to get what you're getting now,' referring to the education they received under the GI Bill. That really struck me."
Years later, Kelly became involved with soldiers like those he respected so highly in college. They and he pushed for a Korean War memorial in Philadelphia. It took years to achieve, and was built in 2002.
When the war in Iraq began, Kelly said, "many veterans felt that this was an unwelcome war" that the public would not support. "They felt that there wouldn't be a groundswell to create a memorial."
So they decided to take care of it themselves.
The group obtained a list of servicemen and women from Philadelphia, Bucks, Delaware, Chester, and Montgomery Counties from the Department of Defense.
Joseph Hagan worked throughout the day yesterday to finish the engravings on time for the ceremony.
The Philadelphia stoneworker, whose family has been in the trade since 1872, said, "Really, when you see the name on the stone, it's eye-opening what's happening over there."
One of the names he carved had special significance. It was the name of a firefighter from a station close to his own home in Bucks County.
"You see one or two names in the news," said Hagan, "but it doesn't really hit until you see the list of names from the five-county area."
Barbara Burgstahler lost her son Nicholas J. Zangara in July 2004 in Tikrit, Iraq. She said she was pleased by the efforts of the Friends of the Korean War Memorial to honor her son and others.
"I think it's a good thing," she said, adding that Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans deserve their own memorial. But she said of the work of the Korean memorial group, "I'm sure every parent who lost their son or daughter in these wars would appreciate them."
She said she understood why soldiers of a past war would add the names of new casualties to "their" memorial.
"The soldiers relate with each other," she said. "It doesn't matter when it was, Vietnam, Korea. . . . They're like brothers and sisters."
Some who attend the unveiling will be there to honor coworkers. John Haligan, a member of the Philadelphia Police Department honor guard, noticed the name of a fellow police officer on the list: Gennaro Pellegrini Jr.
"One-Punch" Pellegrini - so named for his pursuit and capture of an armed-robbery suspect in Philadelphia - died in an explosion in Beyji, Iraq, in August 2005.
"It chokes you up a little bit," Haligan said. "You've got these soldiers and sailors and Marines and airmen etched in stone. Now, years later, you still have to add more names. It hits home, especially when one of those names is a Philadelphia police officer like yourself."
and i'm gone and i'm gone
and my mother just prays
she cries and she prays
and her whole body shakes
but i'll only be back
wrapped up for the wake.
A memorial to war dead of Iraq and Afghanistan
By St. John Barned-Smith
Inquirer Staff Writer
Joseph Hagan knelt beneath the scorching sun, scanning the stenciled names before him. By the end of yesterday, he and his sons had carved 62 more names into the granite floor of Philadelphia's Korean War Memorial.
They were different from the others he had carved there. These were for more recent casualties - Philadelphia-area servicemen and women who died in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The names of the 62 battle deaths joined those of the 610 Philadelphia-area soldiers who died in Korea as well as other Korean War veterans who have since passed away.
Keepers of the Korean War Memorial at Penn's Landing say they were motivated to honor the losses of the current wars - honor they felt took too long to be given in previous conflicts. They also wanted to honor a shared experience of combat, service, and loss.
The additions will be dedicated Monday, Memorial Day.
"I went home and just went to work," Lou Giacomelli, 78, said of his return from Korea, where he had been wounded. It was as if "no one realized you were gone," he said. "It's the same as right now with Iraq and Afghanistan."
Over the last two years, Giacomelli and other members of the Friends of the Korean War Memorial at Penn's Landing began holding monthly gatherings. They took down the flag, played Taps, read the names of the dead, and recited prayers and benedictions at the memorial at Second and Dock Streets.
About a year ago, Giacomelli turned to William J. Kelly, president of the foundation, and said, "There's got to be more we can do."
The push to recognize the veterans in stone began. On Memorial Day, the names, inscribed in a corner of the memorial, will be unveiled in an 11 a.m. ceremony.
"This way, at least their names will be down for eternity," Giacomelli said.
The motivations for the supporters differ.
Kelly, the foundation's president, did not serve in the Korean War. Nevertheless, he said, it touched him deeply.
"I went to school with a lot of veterans who had just gotten out of the service," he said. "When we came out of high school, we were sort of footloose and fancy-free." The veterans soon taught him different.
"They told us, 'We almost had to sacrifice our lives to get what you're getting now,' referring to the education they received under the GI Bill. That really struck me."
Years later, Kelly became involved with soldiers like those he respected so highly in college. They and he pushed for a Korean War memorial in Philadelphia. It took years to achieve, and was built in 2002.
When the war in Iraq began, Kelly said, "many veterans felt that this was an unwelcome war" that the public would not support. "They felt that there wouldn't be a groundswell to create a memorial."
So they decided to take care of it themselves.
The group obtained a list of servicemen and women from Philadelphia, Bucks, Delaware, Chester, and Montgomery Counties from the Department of Defense.
Joseph Hagan worked throughout the day yesterday to finish the engravings on time for the ceremony.
The Philadelphia stoneworker, whose family has been in the trade since 1872, said, "Really, when you see the name on the stone, it's eye-opening what's happening over there."
One of the names he carved had special significance. It was the name of a firefighter from a station close to his own home in Bucks County.
"You see one or two names in the news," said Hagan, "but it doesn't really hit until you see the list of names from the five-county area."
Barbara Burgstahler lost her son Nicholas J. Zangara in July 2004 in Tikrit, Iraq. She said she was pleased by the efforts of the Friends of the Korean War Memorial to honor her son and others.
"I think it's a good thing," she said, adding that Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans deserve their own memorial. But she said of the work of the Korean memorial group, "I'm sure every parent who lost their son or daughter in these wars would appreciate them."
She said she understood why soldiers of a past war would add the names of new casualties to "their" memorial.
"The soldiers relate with each other," she said. "It doesn't matter when it was, Vietnam, Korea. . . . They're like brothers and sisters."
Some who attend the unveiling will be there to honor coworkers. John Haligan, a member of the Philadelphia Police Department honor guard, noticed the name of a fellow police officer on the list: Gennaro Pellegrini Jr.
"One-Punch" Pellegrini - so named for his pursuit and capture of an armed-robbery suspect in Philadelphia - died in an explosion in Beyji, Iraq, in August 2005.
"It chokes you up a little bit," Haligan said. "You've got these soldiers and sailors and Marines and airmen etched in stone. Now, years later, you still have to add more names. It hits home, especially when one of those names is a Philadelphia police officer like yourself."
At Great Personal Risk: the Trials of Ehren Watada
"Yet many people did in fact take a stand, often at personal risk, to oppose those crimes. Some, like Watada, took a public stand. Some went underground or escaped the country. As the secret history of the Iraq War is revealed memo by memo, we also learn more about the internal whistle-blowers, even within the highest circles of the Bush administration and the military, who fought against the torture policy. As Rhode Island Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse put it in last week's torture hearings, Americans were not told "how furiously government and military lawyers rejected" the legal opinions justifying torture."
The Trials of Ehren Watada
By Jeremy Brecher & Brendan Smith
May 19, 2009
AP Images
Watada, center, speaks to reporters and supporters, Wednesday, June 7, 2006, in Tacoma, Wash.
As Americans are inundated with revelations about the lies, torture and other crimes that accompanied the US-led war in Iraq, many who resisted continue to be punished for refusing to participate in those crimes. First Lt. Ehren Watada, the first commissioned military officer to refuse deployment to Iraq, won a significant legal victory last week when the US Department of Justice dropped efforts to retry him after a bungled court-martial. But his legal problems continue.
Editor's Note: This article has been corrected regarding the military record of Mike Wong and Gerry Condon. They are not Vietnam War veterans, but Vietnam war resistors.
Tom Hayden: Obama's pick to be the top US commander in Afghanistan directed a screening center in Iraq in 2003 that held terror suspects in secret facilities to which the Red Cross did not have access.
Jeremy Brecher & Brendan Smith: The government drops efforts to prosecute an officer who refused to fight in Iraq. But the Army continues its campaign against him.
Global Justice Movement
Tim Costello & Brendan Smith: At a time of economic, climatic and political crisis, advocates of social justice gathered for the annual World Social Forum to contemplate a new vision for a better world.
As America struggles with how to hold its homegrown war criminals accountable, those who resisted provide lessons for how to prevent war crimes in the future. Releasing Watada from the Army, and providing amnesty for all those who have been punished for resisting the Iraq War, must be a central part of America's coming to terms with Bush administration policies. Indeed, their arguments and actions should be studied by every civics class and everyone who aspires to high public office.
Watada's stand
In 2006, Watada, an infantry officer based at Fort Lewis, Washington, refused to be deployed to Iraq on grounds that the war was illegal and immoral and that to participate in it would make him complicit in war crimes. The Army court-martialed him, but at the last minute Military Judge John Head declared a mistrial. The Army attempted to retry him, but civilian US District Court Judge Benjamin Settle barred the retrial as a violation of the Constitution's ban on double jeopardy. The Army then appealed the decision, but last week Solicitor General Elena Kagan ordered the appeal withdrawn. Yet the Army is still considering further action against Watada. Now that most Americans, including President Obama, understand the truth of Lt. Watada's assertion that the Iraq War was based on a lie, it is time to let Ehren Watada go.
Watada's stand was not the conventional conscientious objection to all wars; it was based on his belief that this particular war was illegal. He maintained that it violated the Constitution and the War Powers Act, which "limits the President in his role as commander in chief from using the armed forces in any way he sees fit." It was illegal under the UN Charter, the Geneva Convention and the Nuremberg principles, which "all bar wars of aggression." He claimed the conduct of the occupation violated the Army Field Manual; "The wholesale slaughter and mistreatment of the Iraqi people" is "a contradiction to the Army's own law of land warfare."
These are the real issues about the Iraq War that Americans must grapple with in the future.
Military injustice
The Army's behavior toward Watada has been disgraceful from the start. The entire controversy could have been forestalled if the Army had not refused his initial request to resign. The Army charged Watada not only with "missing movement" but with "conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman" for speaking critically of government policy and President George W. Bush in ways that the military's own courts had repeatedly established to be constitutionally protected. In an effort to intimidate Watada's supporters, Army prosecutors subpoenaed journalists and organizers of public meetings.
Judge Head conducted the court-martial without regard for basic principles of justice and fairness. He ruled Watada's motivation irrelevant and prohibited any testimony on whether the orders he was given were, in fact, legal. He declared a mistrial over the objections of the defense; the civilian judge who reviewed the case charged that "the military judge likely abused his discretion" in doing so.
Army prosecutors then initiated a second court-martial of Watada on the same charges, which a civilian judge declared to be a violation of the Constitution's protection against double jeopardy. The Army then announced that it would appeal the case, but took no action for eighteen months, all the while refusing to allow Watada's long overdue discharge from the Army.
In late April, Mike Wong and Gerry Condon, Vietnam war resisters and members of Veterans for Peace, learned that the Army had referred the decision regarding its appeal of the federal court's double jeopardy ruling to the US solicitor general. They initiated an Internet-based "Ad Hoc Campaign to Free Ehren Watada." Their alert was reposted on over 300 blogs and websites, resulting in hundreds of phone calls, letters and e-mails to the Obama Justice Department officials. Nine days later, the Justice Department withdrew the appeal.
According to Kenneth Kagan, one of Watada's attorneys (and no relation to Elena Kagan), the Army could have drawn out its appeal until 2010 or 2011. But the new solicitor general sought to take a "leadership position" on the case. "It's obviously a bold decision to depart from past policies," he said.
Yet even after the Justice Department ordered the appeal withdrawn, the Army is still maintaining its option to punish Watada on two additional counts of "conduct unbecoming an officer" that were withdrawn during the original court-martial.
Fort Lewis spokesman Joe Piek was quoted in aHonolulu Advertiser report as saying that the leadership at Fort Lewis is considering "a full range of judicial and administrative options that are available, and those range from court-martial on those two remaining specifications, to nonjudicial punishment, to administrative separation from the Army."
When these charges were initially brought, they caused a firestorm that reached far beyond the peace movement. Civil liberties groups pointed out that Watada had followed all the Army's rules in making public statements--wearing civilian clothes, not his uniform; notifying his base commander; and making clear he was not speaking for the Army. Media organizations launched a campaign against the Army's subpoenaing of journalists, which was followed within a few days by the Army's withdrawal of the charges.
These remaining charges accuse Watada of making such "disgraceful statements" as "Bush had planned to invade Iraq before the 9/11 attacks." Today everyone from the president to the Senate Armed Services Committee down to the lowliest newspaper reader knows about what Watada called the "deception the Bush administration used to initiate and process this war." If the Army seriously intends to try Watada for saying that the Bush administration lied America into the Iraq war, the Justice Department will have a strong motive to again assert its "leadership position."
Apparently the Army is considering charging Watada for such statements as a backdoor way to punish him for his refusal to go to Iraq--exactly what it is forbidden to do under the constitutional principle of double jeopardy. What other conclusion could one draw from Piek's statement that "The one element that concerns us the most is that this case has always been and will forever be about a soldier--in this case, a lieutenant, a commissioned officer--who refused orders to deploy."
Watada's term of service ended in December 2006, but the Army kept him on active duty while his case was pending. According to his attorney, Kagan, discussions continue with the Army "to see if we can find some common ground." He told KPFK radio, "The Army has to make a decision, and they have to make it soon, about whether they are really going to try to proceed against Lt. Watada on the two remaining criminal charges. There was actually a clock ticking on the speed with which they have to proceed. So we would urge them to make a decision quickly, and we're working on that quietly behind the scenes."
Watada support organizer Mike Wong told The Nation that resolving the 31-year-old officer's legal situation would be a healing act.
"The issue of the war has been settled--there is a broad consensus that the question now is how to get out of Iraq," he said in an interview. "The military, the resister soldiers and the Iraqis have all been traumatized and all need to heal from the war. It would be in the best interests of everyone--including the Army--to put the Watada case behind them."
If and when that happens, Ehren Watada plans to attend law school.
A positive spin on accountability
Ehren Watada's stand raises unsettling questions for government officials and ordinary Americans alike that go beyond punishing the bad guys. What is our duty in the face of evidence that our government is committing crimes?
It may be ludicrous for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to claim she didn't know about US torture (if the CIA didn't tell her she could have read about it in the Washington Post), but it is equally ludicrous for any American who can read a newspaper to claim that he or she was unaware of the Bush administration's lies about weapons of mass destruction, its legal denial of the Geneva Conventions, the mass killings of civilians in Fallujah and elsewhere, use of white phosphorous against civilians, prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib and other US war crimes in Iraq.
Yet many people did in fact take a stand, often at personal risk, to oppose those crimes. Some, like Watada, took a public stand. Some went underground or escaped the country. As the secret history of the Iraq War is revealed memo by memo, we also learn more about the internal whistle-blowers, even within the highest circles of the Bush administration and the military, who fought against the torture policy. As Rhode Island Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse put it in last week's torture hearings, Americans were not told "how furiously government and military lawyers rejected" the legal opinions justifying torture.
If we are truly to draw the lessons of Iraq, we need not only to hold criminals accountable; we need to hold up as role models the whistle-blowers and resisters who refused to go along with them. We need national reflection on the responsibilities of individuals and officeholders to prevent war crimes in the future. Future Congressional investigations and truth commissions should hold up those who opposed war crimes for admiration and emulation.
Many Iraq War resisters remain prisoners or fugitives. There are more than fifty public resisters in Canada and an estimated 250 more underground. While the Army just kicks most AWOL deserters out with an administrative discharge, it singles out those who have spoken publicly against the war for severe punishment. As recently as this April, the Army sentenced Clifford Cornell, a resister who was forced to leave his refuge in Canada, to twelve months in a military prison and a bad conduct discharge.
"President Jimmy Carter ran on a platform of granting unconditional pardon to draft resisters--and he not only did so as his first act in office but also established rapid administrative discharge for AWOL soldiers, Gerry Condon, whose Project Safe Haven supports American war resisters in Canada, told The Nation. "But that was four years after American troops left Vietnam and public opinion had turned strongly against the war. We need a similar revaluation today. The demand to free Ehren Watada and amnesty all war resisters will depend on the larger struggle to bring the troops home and end our illegal wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. It should be linked to investigating high level officials who are responsible for war crimes. It is shameful that those responsible for the war and its crimes remain at large while war resisters are persecuted and GIs are stop-lossed and denied adequate medical and psychological care and stop-lossed. And it should be combined with honoring the soldiers who were the victims of their crimes by providing them with adequate care and benefits."
As America debates what to do with its accused war criminals, isn't it time to exonerate Ehren Watada and all those who those who stood up against their war crimes?
The Trials of Ehren Watada
By Jeremy Brecher & Brendan Smith
May 19, 2009
AP Images
Watada, center, speaks to reporters and supporters, Wednesday, June 7, 2006, in Tacoma, Wash.
As Americans are inundated with revelations about the lies, torture and other crimes that accompanied the US-led war in Iraq, many who resisted continue to be punished for refusing to participate in those crimes. First Lt. Ehren Watada, the first commissioned military officer to refuse deployment to Iraq, won a significant legal victory last week when the US Department of Justice dropped efforts to retry him after a bungled court-martial. But his legal problems continue.
Editor's Note: This article has been corrected regarding the military record of Mike Wong and Gerry Condon. They are not Vietnam War veterans, but Vietnam war resistors.
Tom Hayden: Obama's pick to be the top US commander in Afghanistan directed a screening center in Iraq in 2003 that held terror suspects in secret facilities to which the Red Cross did not have access.
Jeremy Brecher & Brendan Smith: The government drops efforts to prosecute an officer who refused to fight in Iraq. But the Army continues its campaign against him.
Global Justice Movement
Tim Costello & Brendan Smith: At a time of economic, climatic and political crisis, advocates of social justice gathered for the annual World Social Forum to contemplate a new vision for a better world.
As America struggles with how to hold its homegrown war criminals accountable, those who resisted provide lessons for how to prevent war crimes in the future. Releasing Watada from the Army, and providing amnesty for all those who have been punished for resisting the Iraq War, must be a central part of America's coming to terms with Bush administration policies. Indeed, their arguments and actions should be studied by every civics class and everyone who aspires to high public office.
Watada's stand
In 2006, Watada, an infantry officer based at Fort Lewis, Washington, refused to be deployed to Iraq on grounds that the war was illegal and immoral and that to participate in it would make him complicit in war crimes. The Army court-martialed him, but at the last minute Military Judge John Head declared a mistrial. The Army attempted to retry him, but civilian US District Court Judge Benjamin Settle barred the retrial as a violation of the Constitution's ban on double jeopardy. The Army then appealed the decision, but last week Solicitor General Elena Kagan ordered the appeal withdrawn. Yet the Army is still considering further action against Watada. Now that most Americans, including President Obama, understand the truth of Lt. Watada's assertion that the Iraq War was based on a lie, it is time to let Ehren Watada go.
Watada's stand was not the conventional conscientious objection to all wars; it was based on his belief that this particular war was illegal. He maintained that it violated the Constitution and the War Powers Act, which "limits the President in his role as commander in chief from using the armed forces in any way he sees fit." It was illegal under the UN Charter, the Geneva Convention and the Nuremberg principles, which "all bar wars of aggression." He claimed the conduct of the occupation violated the Army Field Manual; "The wholesale slaughter and mistreatment of the Iraqi people" is "a contradiction to the Army's own law of land warfare."
These are the real issues about the Iraq War that Americans must grapple with in the future.
Military injustice
The Army's behavior toward Watada has been disgraceful from the start. The entire controversy could have been forestalled if the Army had not refused his initial request to resign. The Army charged Watada not only with "missing movement" but with "conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman" for speaking critically of government policy and President George W. Bush in ways that the military's own courts had repeatedly established to be constitutionally protected. In an effort to intimidate Watada's supporters, Army prosecutors subpoenaed journalists and organizers of public meetings.
Judge Head conducted the court-martial without regard for basic principles of justice and fairness. He ruled Watada's motivation irrelevant and prohibited any testimony on whether the orders he was given were, in fact, legal. He declared a mistrial over the objections of the defense; the civilian judge who reviewed the case charged that "the military judge likely abused his discretion" in doing so.
Army prosecutors then initiated a second court-martial of Watada on the same charges, which a civilian judge declared to be a violation of the Constitution's protection against double jeopardy. The Army then announced that it would appeal the case, but took no action for eighteen months, all the while refusing to allow Watada's long overdue discharge from the Army.
In late April, Mike Wong and Gerry Condon, Vietnam war resisters and members of Veterans for Peace, learned that the Army had referred the decision regarding its appeal of the federal court's double jeopardy ruling to the US solicitor general. They initiated an Internet-based "Ad Hoc Campaign to Free Ehren Watada." Their alert was reposted on over 300 blogs and websites, resulting in hundreds of phone calls, letters and e-mails to the Obama Justice Department officials. Nine days later, the Justice Department withdrew the appeal.
According to Kenneth Kagan, one of Watada's attorneys (and no relation to Elena Kagan), the Army could have drawn out its appeal until 2010 or 2011. But the new solicitor general sought to take a "leadership position" on the case. "It's obviously a bold decision to depart from past policies," he said.
Yet even after the Justice Department ordered the appeal withdrawn, the Army is still maintaining its option to punish Watada on two additional counts of "conduct unbecoming an officer" that were withdrawn during the original court-martial.
Fort Lewis spokesman Joe Piek was quoted in aHonolulu Advertiser report as saying that the leadership at Fort Lewis is considering "a full range of judicial and administrative options that are available, and those range from court-martial on those two remaining specifications, to nonjudicial punishment, to administrative separation from the Army."
When these charges were initially brought, they caused a firestorm that reached far beyond the peace movement. Civil liberties groups pointed out that Watada had followed all the Army's rules in making public statements--wearing civilian clothes, not his uniform; notifying his base commander; and making clear he was not speaking for the Army. Media organizations launched a campaign against the Army's subpoenaing of journalists, which was followed within a few days by the Army's withdrawal of the charges.
These remaining charges accuse Watada of making such "disgraceful statements" as "Bush had planned to invade Iraq before the 9/11 attacks." Today everyone from the president to the Senate Armed Services Committee down to the lowliest newspaper reader knows about what Watada called the "deception the Bush administration used to initiate and process this war." If the Army seriously intends to try Watada for saying that the Bush administration lied America into the Iraq war, the Justice Department will have a strong motive to again assert its "leadership position."
Apparently the Army is considering charging Watada for such statements as a backdoor way to punish him for his refusal to go to Iraq--exactly what it is forbidden to do under the constitutional principle of double jeopardy. What other conclusion could one draw from Piek's statement that "The one element that concerns us the most is that this case has always been and will forever be about a soldier--in this case, a lieutenant, a commissioned officer--who refused orders to deploy."
Watada's term of service ended in December 2006, but the Army kept him on active duty while his case was pending. According to his attorney, Kagan, discussions continue with the Army "to see if we can find some common ground." He told KPFK radio, "The Army has to make a decision, and they have to make it soon, about whether they are really going to try to proceed against Lt. Watada on the two remaining criminal charges. There was actually a clock ticking on the speed with which they have to proceed. So we would urge them to make a decision quickly, and we're working on that quietly behind the scenes."
Watada support organizer Mike Wong told The Nation that resolving the 31-year-old officer's legal situation would be a healing act.
"The issue of the war has been settled--there is a broad consensus that the question now is how to get out of Iraq," he said in an interview. "The military, the resister soldiers and the Iraqis have all been traumatized and all need to heal from the war. It would be in the best interests of everyone--including the Army--to put the Watada case behind them."
If and when that happens, Ehren Watada plans to attend law school.
A positive spin on accountability
Ehren Watada's stand raises unsettling questions for government officials and ordinary Americans alike that go beyond punishing the bad guys. What is our duty in the face of evidence that our government is committing crimes?
It may be ludicrous for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to claim she didn't know about US torture (if the CIA didn't tell her she could have read about it in the Washington Post), but it is equally ludicrous for any American who can read a newspaper to claim that he or she was unaware of the Bush administration's lies about weapons of mass destruction, its legal denial of the Geneva Conventions, the mass killings of civilians in Fallujah and elsewhere, use of white phosphorous against civilians, prisoner abuse in Abu Ghraib and other US war crimes in Iraq.
Yet many people did in fact take a stand, often at personal risk, to oppose those crimes. Some, like Watada, took a public stand. Some went underground or escaped the country. As the secret history of the Iraq War is revealed memo by memo, we also learn more about the internal whistle-blowers, even within the highest circles of the Bush administration and the military, who fought against the torture policy. As Rhode Island Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse put it in last week's torture hearings, Americans were not told "how furiously government and military lawyers rejected" the legal opinions justifying torture.
If we are truly to draw the lessons of Iraq, we need not only to hold criminals accountable; we need to hold up as role models the whistle-blowers and resisters who refused to go along with them. We need national reflection on the responsibilities of individuals and officeholders to prevent war crimes in the future. Future Congressional investigations and truth commissions should hold up those who opposed war crimes for admiration and emulation.
Many Iraq War resisters remain prisoners or fugitives. There are more than fifty public resisters in Canada and an estimated 250 more underground. While the Army just kicks most AWOL deserters out with an administrative discharge, it singles out those who have spoken publicly against the war for severe punishment. As recently as this April, the Army sentenced Clifford Cornell, a resister who was forced to leave his refuge in Canada, to twelve months in a military prison and a bad conduct discharge.
"President Jimmy Carter ran on a platform of granting unconditional pardon to draft resisters--and he not only did so as his first act in office but also established rapid administrative discharge for AWOL soldiers, Gerry Condon, whose Project Safe Haven supports American war resisters in Canada, told The Nation. "But that was four years after American troops left Vietnam and public opinion had turned strongly against the war. We need a similar revaluation today. The demand to free Ehren Watada and amnesty all war resisters will depend on the larger struggle to bring the troops home and end our illegal wars and occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan. It should be linked to investigating high level officials who are responsible for war crimes. It is shameful that those responsible for the war and its crimes remain at large while war resisters are persecuted and GIs are stop-lossed and denied adequate medical and psychological care and stop-lossed. And it should be combined with honoring the soldiers who were the victims of their crimes by providing them with adequate care and benefits."
As America debates what to do with its accused war criminals, isn't it time to exonerate Ehren Watada and all those who those who stood up against their war crimes?
Obama's decision reveals policy, not judgment
Torture photos
Posted by Letters editor
Obama's decision reveals policy, not judgment
The Times' lead editorial on Monday approved of President Obama's judgment in the "kerfuffle" over the release of photos showing abuse of prisoners. But Obama is not exercising judgment; he is formulating policy. It is the same policy that has been pushed in the administration's decision to oppose private lawsuits on the basis that state secrets might be exposed, and in its decision to argue that Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan should replace "Gitmo" as a place where people can be shipped in from other countries and stripped of all opportunity to claim that they are being held by mistake.
What The Times characterizes as an exercise in judgment is in fact an assertion of a legal argument that would apply not only to these photos, but to all information sought now and in the future under the Freedom of Information Act. Obama is ordering his government to appeal a Court of Appeals decision stating that the government cannot withhold information about what it is doing just because it says it can, in the court's words, "point to a group composed of millions of people and establish that it could reasonably be expected that someone in that group will be endangered."
If The Seattle Times wants to join the government in arguing against the Court of Appeals decision, perhaps it should remove from its pages anything that might reasonably be expected to endanger someone. The Times could start by eliminating its editorial, which refers to abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. Doesn't this editorial present and amplify information that could endanger our troops? The most likely reason is that The Times does not seriously think that the troops are being needlessly endangered.
More likely, the troops are being used as a straw man in a struggle over the power of the federal executive. But even if that is not the case, would The Seattle Times please explain why we should put our troops in danger to protect our freedom and then put our freedom in danger to protect our troops?
-- Lynn Petersen, Coupeville
Posted by Letters editor
Obama's decision reveals policy, not judgment
The Times' lead editorial on Monday approved of President Obama's judgment in the "kerfuffle" over the release of photos showing abuse of prisoners. But Obama is not exercising judgment; he is formulating policy. It is the same policy that has been pushed in the administration's decision to oppose private lawsuits on the basis that state secrets might be exposed, and in its decision to argue that Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan should replace "Gitmo" as a place where people can be shipped in from other countries and stripped of all opportunity to claim that they are being held by mistake.
What The Times characterizes as an exercise in judgment is in fact an assertion of a legal argument that would apply not only to these photos, but to all information sought now and in the future under the Freedom of Information Act. Obama is ordering his government to appeal a Court of Appeals decision stating that the government cannot withhold information about what it is doing just because it says it can, in the court's words, "point to a group composed of millions of people and establish that it could reasonably be expected that someone in that group will be endangered."
If The Seattle Times wants to join the government in arguing against the Court of Appeals decision, perhaps it should remove from its pages anything that might reasonably be expected to endanger someone. The Times could start by eliminating its editorial, which refers to abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. Doesn't this editorial present and amplify information that could endanger our troops? The most likely reason is that The Times does not seriously think that the troops are being needlessly endangered.
More likely, the troops are being used as a straw man in a struggle over the power of the federal executive. But even if that is not the case, would The Seattle Times please explain why we should put our troops in danger to protect our freedom and then put our freedom in danger to protect our troops?
-- Lynn Petersen, Coupeville
Obama opposes release of torture photos
Obama opposes release of torture photos
This is available in:
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(RSF/IFEX) - Reporters Without Borders expressed disappointment that President Barack Obama intends to try to block the court-ordered release of photos depicting the abuse of prisoners by US military personnel in Afghanistan and Iraq.
"Given the administration's pledge last month not to fight the court ruling, as well as President Obama's emphasis on promoting transparency and open government when he took office, the decision is very disappointing," stated the international press freedom organization.
In a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a federal appeal court panel concluded that it was insufficient to claim the documents would endanger US troops and coalition forces and ordered the Defense Department to release the photographs by May 28th 2009.
In April, the Obama administration told a judge it would not oppose an order to release the photos in response to the ACLU's lawsuit. However, President Obama took back his promise on May 13th and claimed that publication of these photos would not add any additional benefit to the public's understanding of the story.
"This is a complete contradiction of President Obama's January 21st memorandum on the Freedom of Information Act, in which he stated that 'speculative' or 'abstract fears' were not sufficient reasons to justify excessive confidentiality and classification," added the international press freedom organization. "The government cannot dictate to the public what is news-worthy and what is not. This is a blow to press freedom and to democracy's system of checks and balance. We urge the president to respect the court's decision and stand by his earlier commitment to transparency and accountability."
This is available in:
English Français Español
(RSF/IFEX) - Reporters Without Borders expressed disappointment that President Barack Obama intends to try to block the court-ordered release of photos depicting the abuse of prisoners by US military personnel in Afghanistan and Iraq.
"Given the administration's pledge last month not to fight the court ruling, as well as President Obama's emphasis on promoting transparency and open government when he took office, the decision is very disappointing," stated the international press freedom organization.
In a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a federal appeal court panel concluded that it was insufficient to claim the documents would endanger US troops and coalition forces and ordered the Defense Department to release the photographs by May 28th 2009.
In April, the Obama administration told a judge it would not oppose an order to release the photos in response to the ACLU's lawsuit. However, President Obama took back his promise on May 13th and claimed that publication of these photos would not add any additional benefit to the public's understanding of the story.
"This is a complete contradiction of President Obama's January 21st memorandum on the Freedom of Information Act, in which he stated that 'speculative' or 'abstract fears' were not sufficient reasons to justify excessive confidentiality and classification," added the international press freedom organization. "The government cannot dictate to the public what is news-worthy and what is not. This is a blow to press freedom and to democracy's system of checks and balance. We urge the president to respect the court's decision and stand by his earlier commitment to transparency and accountability."
Stan McChrystal’s Free Pass to Afghanistan
It looks like people are busy digging up some l'histoire. And with good reason, too.
Stan McChrystal is not going to be bound by any nicety. This is brass knuckle, gloves off time. The more I read, the more I realize that there are disasters waiting to happen in Affy, over and over. And I fear for us all.
Stan McChrystal’s Free Pass to Afghanistan
By Spencer Ackerman 5/22/09 2:58 PM
Want a sure sign that Army Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal isn’t going to face a difficult confirmation hearing to command U.S. forces in Afghanistan? The Senate Armed Services Committee just announced that McChrystal’s going before it on June 2. But it’s not his confirmation alone. He’s triple-booked alongside Adm. James Stavridis, the Southern Command chief who’s going to be NATO Supreme Allied Commander, and Air Force Lt. Gen. Douglas Fraser, who’s going to take Stavridis’ place at Southern Command.
This is Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chairman of the committee, pushing McChrystal through the process. While the counterinsurgency crowd loves McChrystal — he’s considered one of the finest, smartest and most capable officers the Army has produced in this current generation of general officers — the general faces serious questions about what he knew and didn’t know about a facility called Camp Nama operated by a task force under his command in Iraq, which became known for particularly grisly torture of Iraqi detainees. Andrew Sullivan’s blog has been diligently compiling accounts of Nama and Task Force 6-26 (the unit in question) in advance of McChrystal’s hearing. There are also concerns over McChrystal’s role in the cover-up of Pat Tillman’s death by friendly fire in Afghanistan, but there it appears more straightforwardly that McChrystal was telling his chain of command that the circumstances claimed publicly for Tillman’s death were untrue.
All of this would normally make for a rocky confirmation hearing. And that’s evidently what Levin is trying to avoid. You can see a circumstance where the committee could argue that it needs to hear both the NATO commander nomination and the Afghanistan commander nomination at once, because Afghanistan is a NATO mission as well as a U.S. mission, but even then that’s a thin pretext for not giving McChrystal, who’s about to get the most important command assignment in the military, his own hearing. (The foreign relations committee didn’t double-book Karl Eikenberry’s confirmation hearing for the Afghanistan ambassadorship with Ivo Daalder’s confirmation hearing for his NATO ambassadorship, for instance.) Adding the Southern Command hearing is just egregious. Will committee members get sufficient time to question McChrystal — or to let McChrystal answer the charges against him?
Stan McChrystal is not going to be bound by any nicety. This is brass knuckle, gloves off time. The more I read, the more I realize that there are disasters waiting to happen in Affy, over and over. And I fear for us all.
Stan McChrystal’s Free Pass to Afghanistan
By Spencer Ackerman 5/22/09 2:58 PM
Want a sure sign that Army Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal isn’t going to face a difficult confirmation hearing to command U.S. forces in Afghanistan? The Senate Armed Services Committee just announced that McChrystal’s going before it on June 2. But it’s not his confirmation alone. He’s triple-booked alongside Adm. James Stavridis, the Southern Command chief who’s going to be NATO Supreme Allied Commander, and Air Force Lt. Gen. Douglas Fraser, who’s going to take Stavridis’ place at Southern Command.
This is Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chairman of the committee, pushing McChrystal through the process. While the counterinsurgency crowd loves McChrystal — he’s considered one of the finest, smartest and most capable officers the Army has produced in this current generation of general officers — the general faces serious questions about what he knew and didn’t know about a facility called Camp Nama operated by a task force under his command in Iraq, which became known for particularly grisly torture of Iraqi detainees. Andrew Sullivan’s blog has been diligently compiling accounts of Nama and Task Force 6-26 (the unit in question) in advance of McChrystal’s hearing. There are also concerns over McChrystal’s role in the cover-up of Pat Tillman’s death by friendly fire in Afghanistan, but there it appears more straightforwardly that McChrystal was telling his chain of command that the circumstances claimed publicly for Tillman’s death were untrue.
All of this would normally make for a rocky confirmation hearing. And that’s evidently what Levin is trying to avoid. You can see a circumstance where the committee could argue that it needs to hear both the NATO commander nomination and the Afghanistan commander nomination at once, because Afghanistan is a NATO mission as well as a U.S. mission, but even then that’s a thin pretext for not giving McChrystal, who’s about to get the most important command assignment in the military, his own hearing. (The foreign relations committee didn’t double-book Karl Eikenberry’s confirmation hearing for the Afghanistan ambassadorship with Ivo Daalder’s confirmation hearing for his NATO ambassadorship, for instance.) Adding the Southern Command hearing is just egregious. Will committee members get sufficient time to question McChrystal — or to let McChrystal answer the charges against him?
A is for Affy, B is for but, C is for couldn't we or caution or cripes! D is for death on so many sides E for exit, do we have a plan?
This piece was interesting, rather representative of a frenzy of caution on the left. But very worthwhile. Does the average American have a clue, or will ever have a clue, about what is going on, or supposed to go on, in Affy?
Are we winning or losing in Afghanistan?
Until Washington gets serious about performance metrics that gauge both success and failure, we won't really know.
By David Peck
from the May 22, 2009 edition
Palm Springs, Calif. - American men and women have been fighting – and dying – in Afghanistan for more than seven years now.
Throughout history, Afghanistan has repeatedly proven itself a most daunting battlefield. If history is our teacher, it's no leap at all to conclude that our goals there – vague though they seem – are no more likely to succeed than fail.
Are our brave soldiers making progress or losing ground? Should they stay or go? President Obama has said the US won't "blindly stay the course" as it tries to secure Afghanistan from Al Qaeda. He's promised "clear metrics to measure progress and hold ourselves accountable."
That's good news. Who doesn't want a yardstick for success? But when the stakes and the human costs are so high, don't we also need clear standards for stalemate and failure?
As an executive coach, I work often with CEO clients. I've found that their effectiveness depends on their discernment. Do they really know if their project is up, down, or sideways? Many don't, because while they often set benchmarks for success, they rarely ask the right questions to establish markers for failure.
I recently worked with a CEO who had added a new service. She admitted it was facing stiff competition, and the outcomes were far from assured. Although the service was launched 18 months before our first conversation about it and the results were unremarkable, she continued to be optimistic, saying that it "should be a success." I asked a series of questions designed to help her develop specific, measurable endpoints for success, failure, and mediocrity. She was taken aback by the questions around failure and mediocrity, yet, by the end of several discussions, she realized that the service line was indeed already at a failure endpoint.
It was time to cut her losses, which she did. She told me later that if she hadn't been asked those questions, she'd still be holding out hope for a victory celebration.
Leaders who set and stick with clear standards for win, lose, or draw are more likely to use resources wisely. The alternative is to confuse what should happen with what is happening, much as a losing gambler throws good money after bad, hoping this time will be different.
Until up, down, and sideways are delineated for Afghanistan, we are hiking without a compass: We won't understand how we are doing there, or even if our heading is correct, if we only define metrics for success.
When defining outcomes, I ask my clients many questions to help them be as specific as possible. I believe they know the answers, but it's helpful because no one's asking them to brainstorm about mediocrity and failure. What measurements will give us the clearest picture of performance? How will we know if we are headed in the direction of failure? Under what conditions might we defy dismal marks and press on? And so on.
There's no evidence or reports I can see that negative boundary questions have been asked and fully answered for our efforts in Afghanistan.
The administration, under pressure from Congress, is reportedly developing metrics for Afghanistan. "We're going to be measuring from every perspective," said Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. But she wants to keep those metrics classified.
Therein lies a dilemma. War is not the same as business, and US officials are rightly concerned that broadcasting benchmarks (especially ones related to failure) could aid the enemy. Indeed, many lawmakers piled on Congressman David Obey (D) of Wisconsin when he called for a "fish or cut bait" assessment in Afghanistan.
But in a democracy, don't ordinary Americans have a right to know that measurable standards for guiding war decisions have been developed by the leaders who serve them?
Meanwhile, our strategy seems to be in flux. That Defense Secretary Robert Gates fired the US commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, this month intensifies the argument for clear benchmarks for the war there – up, down, and sideways. Without them, this administration, like my CEO client, may be operating without the necessary clarity to make great decisions.
I respectfully challenge this administration to ask itself tougher questions about measurable outcomes in Afghanistan – win, lose, and draw – and, for extra credit, to do that in all future wars and conflicts before one boot ever hits the ground.
• David Peck is president of Leadership Unleashed, an executive coaching firm and author of "Beyond Effective: Practices in Self-aware Leadership.
p.s here's the rest, from the beginning: A is for Affy, B is for but, C is for couldn't we or caution or cripes! D is for death on so many sides E for exit, do we have a plan? F is for fired, we need a new man, G is for gosh, he's not Stanley McChrystal, H is for help, he took out a pistol! I is for IED, there are many, and J is for Jojo, the fixer who died, K is for children killed while they cried L is for the lost and lonely bereft, M is for mother, who died and who left. N is for naqba, we swore a vow, O is for oil, America's new flow. P is for Pakistan, poor country we said sinned, Q is for al Qaeda, the phantom djinn. R is for radar that are used by the drones, S is structures smashed as people moan. T is for Talib are they still in the picture, U is for US who said yes and who lectured V is for vermin, but really they're innocent people, W is for war and how its a slow creeper X is for secrets, we don't know what we're doing and Y is for yikes what's this ship that we're crewing. Z is for zamin, that's all that Afghans want.. and there it is, folks, the whole Affy jaunt.
Are we winning or losing in Afghanistan?
Until Washington gets serious about performance metrics that gauge both success and failure, we won't really know.
By David Peck
from the May 22, 2009 edition
Palm Springs, Calif. - American men and women have been fighting – and dying – in Afghanistan for more than seven years now.
Throughout history, Afghanistan has repeatedly proven itself a most daunting battlefield. If history is our teacher, it's no leap at all to conclude that our goals there – vague though they seem – are no more likely to succeed than fail.
Are our brave soldiers making progress or losing ground? Should they stay or go? President Obama has said the US won't "blindly stay the course" as it tries to secure Afghanistan from Al Qaeda. He's promised "clear metrics to measure progress and hold ourselves accountable."
That's good news. Who doesn't want a yardstick for success? But when the stakes and the human costs are so high, don't we also need clear standards for stalemate and failure?
As an executive coach, I work often with CEO clients. I've found that their effectiveness depends on their discernment. Do they really know if their project is up, down, or sideways? Many don't, because while they often set benchmarks for success, they rarely ask the right questions to establish markers for failure.
I recently worked with a CEO who had added a new service. She admitted it was facing stiff competition, and the outcomes were far from assured. Although the service was launched 18 months before our first conversation about it and the results were unremarkable, she continued to be optimistic, saying that it "should be a success." I asked a series of questions designed to help her develop specific, measurable endpoints for success, failure, and mediocrity. She was taken aback by the questions around failure and mediocrity, yet, by the end of several discussions, she realized that the service line was indeed already at a failure endpoint.
It was time to cut her losses, which she did. She told me later that if she hadn't been asked those questions, she'd still be holding out hope for a victory celebration.
Leaders who set and stick with clear standards for win, lose, or draw are more likely to use resources wisely. The alternative is to confuse what should happen with what is happening, much as a losing gambler throws good money after bad, hoping this time will be different.
Until up, down, and sideways are delineated for Afghanistan, we are hiking without a compass: We won't understand how we are doing there, or even if our heading is correct, if we only define metrics for success.
When defining outcomes, I ask my clients many questions to help them be as specific as possible. I believe they know the answers, but it's helpful because no one's asking them to brainstorm about mediocrity and failure. What measurements will give us the clearest picture of performance? How will we know if we are headed in the direction of failure? Under what conditions might we defy dismal marks and press on? And so on.
There's no evidence or reports I can see that negative boundary questions have been asked and fully answered for our efforts in Afghanistan.
The administration, under pressure from Congress, is reportedly developing metrics for Afghanistan. "We're going to be measuring from every perspective," said Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. But she wants to keep those metrics classified.
Therein lies a dilemma. War is not the same as business, and US officials are rightly concerned that broadcasting benchmarks (especially ones related to failure) could aid the enemy. Indeed, many lawmakers piled on Congressman David Obey (D) of Wisconsin when he called for a "fish or cut bait" assessment in Afghanistan.
But in a democracy, don't ordinary Americans have a right to know that measurable standards for guiding war decisions have been developed by the leaders who serve them?
Meanwhile, our strategy seems to be in flux. That Defense Secretary Robert Gates fired the US commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, this month intensifies the argument for clear benchmarks for the war there – up, down, and sideways. Without them, this administration, like my CEO client, may be operating without the necessary clarity to make great decisions.
I respectfully challenge this administration to ask itself tougher questions about measurable outcomes in Afghanistan – win, lose, and draw – and, for extra credit, to do that in all future wars and conflicts before one boot ever hits the ground.
• David Peck is president of Leadership Unleashed, an executive coaching firm and author of "Beyond Effective: Practices in Self-aware Leadership.
p.s here's the rest, from the beginning: A is for Affy, B is for but, C is for couldn't we or caution or cripes! D is for death on so many sides E for exit, do we have a plan? F is for fired, we need a new man, G is for gosh, he's not Stanley McChrystal, H is for help, he took out a pistol! I is for IED, there are many, and J is for Jojo, the fixer who died, K is for children killed while they cried L is for the lost and lonely bereft, M is for mother, who died and who left. N is for naqba, we swore a vow, O is for oil, America's new flow. P is for Pakistan, poor country we said sinned, Q is for al Qaeda, the phantom djinn. R is for radar that are used by the drones, S is structures smashed as people moan. T is for Talib are they still in the picture, U is for US who said yes and who lectured V is for vermin, but really they're innocent people, W is for war and how its a slow creeper X is for secrets, we don't know what we're doing and Y is for yikes what's this ship that we're crewing. Z is for zamin, that's all that Afghans want.. and there it is, folks, the whole Affy jaunt.
Images of the Dead
Some of the people injured in the airstrike in Afghanistan on May 5, 2009, that killed 190 people.
The Burden
When you see so many brutalized, it sometimes catches up with you. I feel very sorry for Kim Ruocco.
Military is battling alarming suicide rate
Failed relationships, tangled finances and legal problems add to stress of war
By SIG CHRISTENSON SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS
May 17, 2009, 9:46PM
HANDOUT PHOTO SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS
Marine Maj. John Ruocco is seen in this 2004 photograph relaxing in his quarters in Anbar Province in Iraq.
Resources
GET HELP
The VAs suicide hot line launched is (800) 273-TALK.
RESOURCES FOR TROUBLED SOLDIERS, FAMILIES
• Veterans experiencing emotional and suicidal crisis, as well as their concerned family members or friends, have immediate access to emergency counseling services 24 hours a day, seven days a week by calling 800-273-TALK (8255).
• For information on suicide warning signs visit www.behavioralhealth.army.mil.
• The Army's Battlemind Training System is a mental health awareness and education program that helps prepare soldiers and their families for the stresses of war and assists with the detection of possible mental health issues before and after deployment. Visit www.battlemind.org.
• Soldiers in crisis should talk to their chaplain, chain of command or a fellow soldier immediately. They may also call Military OneSource at 800-342-9647 or the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-SUICIDE.
• Call the Wounded Soldier and Family Hotline at 800-984-8523 or e-mail wsfsupport@conus.army.mil.
Annual number of suicides of active-duty soldiers since 2000
The Army's rising suicide rate
Marine Maj. John Ruocco was an AH-1W Super Cobra gunship pilot who seemed to have it all when he learned to fly Air Force jets in San Antonio, but behind the dark brown eyes of a charismatic Elvis impersonator and playful dad was a troubled soul.
That man returned home after 75 Iraq combat missions in 2004.
He struggled with a failed bid to land a civilian job, a desire to do right by his family and memories of fallen comrades before hitting rock bottom in January 2005.
“He couldn’t eat. He couldn’t sleep. He felt very down and that’s when I asked him if he felt like killing himself,” his wife Kim recalled.
“He said, ‘I would never do that to you and the boys.’”
A group of Marines came to his hotel room the next day and found Ruocco, 40, hanging by a belt.
He was one 225 U.S. troops, including 28 Marines, to kill himself in 2005.
Suicide numbers soar
At least 109 GIs, including two in the Coast Guard, killed themselves in the first four months of 2009. That’s almost as many members of the military who died during the same period in Iraq and Afghanistan, 128.
Sixty-four of those who committed suicide were in the Army, which is on track to break last year’s record, 143.
Since 2001, 988 soldiers in the Army, Army Reserve and Army National Guard have killed themselves.
The majority were on active duty. Suicides of four recruiters at the Houston Recruiting Battalion prompted the Army to announce in March several steps to improve support networks and access to mental health care for soldiers assigned to high-pressure recruiting duty.
At least another 997 in the Navy, Navy Reserve, Air Force, Air Force Reserve, Marines and Coast Guard killed themselves in the same period. The total, 1,985, is nearly three times the number of all U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan since 2001, now at 683, and is approaching half of the entire military death toll of 4,296 in the Iraq war.
Failed relationships, tangled finances and legal problems, combined with a long war, play roles in suicides. Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Saturday that there are no easy answers.
“While factors contributing to this alarming rate are many, I cannot but believe that the pace and frequency of multiple deployments figure in somehow,” he said, adding that he and other military leaders were “alarmed with the increase in suicides, particularly in the Army.”
The concern comes as Army Sgt. John M. Russell, 44, of Sherman, was arrested in last Monday’s shooting deaths of five GIs at a combat stress clinic in Baghdad. Russell’s problems mirrored those of some suicide victims — financial woes, the humiliation of surrendering his rifle and fear of losing his career.
In late April, at Fort Sam Houston, Pfc. Jaynie May Askew, 43, of Scottsdale, Ariz., raised a .45-caliber handgun to her head and fired. She had failed the National Registry of Emergency Medical Technicians test, flunking out of school.
Askew wasn’t the typical Army victim — a 25- to 26-year-old white NCO — but her apparent use of a handgun was common, as was a fractured relationship. Her parents said she had endured a divorce and recurring child custody disputes. At 41, Askew joined the Army in hopes of finding a new purpose.
Rejection for a job
Ruocco brought his family to Randolph AFB’s T-37 instructor pilot program before the 9/11 attacks. Later, at Vance AFB, Okla., he re-qualified in attack helicopters and also applied to fly for Southwest Airlines. The rejection letter arrived while he fought in Iraq.
“He felt that would solve all of our problems,” Kim Ruocco said of the Southwest job. “He would be able to go to the reserves and take care of his Marines and fly Cobras and have his family in Boston where everybody wanted to be. He would take care of everybody, and that was the big thing.”
But, she added: “He couldn’t figure out how to do that without that job.”
Saving troops like Ruocco remains a vexing problem.
“I don’t want to sound like I know the answers, because we don’t know the answers,” said Army Secretary Pete Geren.
The armed services’ high operational tempo for the past decade definitely is part of the problem, said former VA psychiatrist Dr. Jonathon Shay. The military’s rapid training and deployment cycles short-change troops on the one critical ingredient to good physical and mental health: sleep, he said.
“I’ve been agitating for years the importance of getting truly realistic policy on sleep,” Shay said. “This is a slow slog because it is so contrary to the macho culture and so contrary to the self-sacrificial culture, which sees self-care like sleep as self-indulgence.”
Sleeping in the war zone can be difficult because of mortar and rocket attacks, coalition counterfire and simple nervousness. GIs returning home often complain of troubled sleep.
Every service branch has wrestled with suicides since 2001, but 2007 saw a sharp jump as President George W. Bush sent 28,000 more troops to Iraq to break an insurgency that had mushroomed into civil war. “We are not making any projections about what we think the total number of suicides for 2009 might be, but certainly we are concerned about the number of suicides we have seen in the first quarter of this year,” Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Chiarelli said.
The Army’s heavy burden of fighting two wars often requires sending its troops to Iraq and Afghanistan every other year for as long as 15 months.
While GIs say the deployment cycle strain marriages and spark substance abuse, officials said it doesn’t seem to contribute to suicide rates.
Looking for a pattern
“There is no statistical evidence of a greater risk with multiple deployments,” Chiarelli said. “In fact, there were fewer suicides by soldiers with multiple deployments than compared to soldiers with just one deployment.”
Two in every three Army cases were linked to relationship problems; about the same percentage of victims had also deployed to the war zone. Financial problems often were in play.
Army efforts to prevent suicides start with Chiarelli, a one-time Iraq war commander. Training programs have been crafted to help soldiers and their families cope with deployments, post traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury, substance abuse and anxiety issues.
But last week’s shooting incident at Camp Liberty in Baghdad underscores the fear that soldiers in a career-oriented, all-volunteer force have of psychological counseling. Ruocco, too, grappled with that problem, probably before leaving for Iraq in 2004.
He slept poorly, turned inward and wouldn’t talk about the war. “He said, ‘I can’t see any beauty or happiness in anything,’ ” his widow said.
sigc@express-news.net
Military is battling alarming suicide rate
Failed relationships, tangled finances and legal problems add to stress of war
By SIG CHRISTENSON SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS
May 17, 2009, 9:46PM
HANDOUT PHOTO SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS
Marine Maj. John Ruocco is seen in this 2004 photograph relaxing in his quarters in Anbar Province in Iraq.
Resources
GET HELP
The VAs suicide hot line launched is (800) 273-TALK.
RESOURCES FOR TROUBLED SOLDIERS, FAMILIES
• Veterans experiencing emotional and suicidal crisis, as well as their concerned family members or friends, have immediate access to emergency counseling services 24 hours a day, seven days a week by calling 800-273-TALK (8255).
• For information on suicide warning signs visit www.behavioralhealth.army.mil.
• The Army's Battlemind Training System is a mental health awareness and education program that helps prepare soldiers and their families for the stresses of war and assists with the detection of possible mental health issues before and after deployment. Visit www.battlemind.org.
• Soldiers in crisis should talk to their chaplain, chain of command or a fellow soldier immediately. They may also call Military OneSource at 800-342-9647 or the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-SUICIDE.
• Call the Wounded Soldier and Family Hotline at 800-984-8523 or e-mail wsfsupport@conus.army.mil.
Annual number of suicides of active-duty soldiers since 2000
The Army's rising suicide rate
Marine Maj. John Ruocco was an AH-1W Super Cobra gunship pilot who seemed to have it all when he learned to fly Air Force jets in San Antonio, but behind the dark brown eyes of a charismatic Elvis impersonator and playful dad was a troubled soul.
That man returned home after 75 Iraq combat missions in 2004.
He struggled with a failed bid to land a civilian job, a desire to do right by his family and memories of fallen comrades before hitting rock bottom in January 2005.
“He couldn’t eat. He couldn’t sleep. He felt very down and that’s when I asked him if he felt like killing himself,” his wife Kim recalled.
“He said, ‘I would never do that to you and the boys.’”
A group of Marines came to his hotel room the next day and found Ruocco, 40, hanging by a belt.
He was one 225 U.S. troops, including 28 Marines, to kill himself in 2005.
Suicide numbers soar
At least 109 GIs, including two in the Coast Guard, killed themselves in the first four months of 2009. That’s almost as many members of the military who died during the same period in Iraq and Afghanistan, 128.
Sixty-four of those who committed suicide were in the Army, which is on track to break last year’s record, 143.
Since 2001, 988 soldiers in the Army, Army Reserve and Army National Guard have killed themselves.
The majority were on active duty. Suicides of four recruiters at the Houston Recruiting Battalion prompted the Army to announce in March several steps to improve support networks and access to mental health care for soldiers assigned to high-pressure recruiting duty.
At least another 997 in the Navy, Navy Reserve, Air Force, Air Force Reserve, Marines and Coast Guard killed themselves in the same period. The total, 1,985, is nearly three times the number of all U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan since 2001, now at 683, and is approaching half of the entire military death toll of 4,296 in the Iraq war.
Failed relationships, tangled finances and legal problems, combined with a long war, play roles in suicides. Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Saturday that there are no easy answers.
“While factors contributing to this alarming rate are many, I cannot but believe that the pace and frequency of multiple deployments figure in somehow,” he said, adding that he and other military leaders were “alarmed with the increase in suicides, particularly in the Army.”
The concern comes as Army Sgt. John M. Russell, 44, of Sherman, was arrested in last Monday’s shooting deaths of five GIs at a combat stress clinic in Baghdad. Russell’s problems mirrored those of some suicide victims — financial woes, the humiliation of surrendering his rifle and fear of losing his career.
In late April, at Fort Sam Houston, Pfc. Jaynie May Askew, 43, of Scottsdale, Ariz., raised a .45-caliber handgun to her head and fired. She had failed the National Registry of Emergency Medical Technicians test, flunking out of school.
Askew wasn’t the typical Army victim — a 25- to 26-year-old white NCO — but her apparent use of a handgun was common, as was a fractured relationship. Her parents said she had endured a divorce and recurring child custody disputes. At 41, Askew joined the Army in hopes of finding a new purpose.
Rejection for a job
Ruocco brought his family to Randolph AFB’s T-37 instructor pilot program before the 9/11 attacks. Later, at Vance AFB, Okla., he re-qualified in attack helicopters and also applied to fly for Southwest Airlines. The rejection letter arrived while he fought in Iraq.
“He felt that would solve all of our problems,” Kim Ruocco said of the Southwest job. “He would be able to go to the reserves and take care of his Marines and fly Cobras and have his family in Boston where everybody wanted to be. He would take care of everybody, and that was the big thing.”
But, she added: “He couldn’t figure out how to do that without that job.”
Saving troops like Ruocco remains a vexing problem.
“I don’t want to sound like I know the answers, because we don’t know the answers,” said Army Secretary Pete Geren.
The armed services’ high operational tempo for the past decade definitely is part of the problem, said former VA psychiatrist Dr. Jonathon Shay. The military’s rapid training and deployment cycles short-change troops on the one critical ingredient to good physical and mental health: sleep, he said.
“I’ve been agitating for years the importance of getting truly realistic policy on sleep,” Shay said. “This is a slow slog because it is so contrary to the macho culture and so contrary to the self-sacrificial culture, which sees self-care like sleep as self-indulgence.”
Sleeping in the war zone can be difficult because of mortar and rocket attacks, coalition counterfire and simple nervousness. GIs returning home often complain of troubled sleep.
Every service branch has wrestled with suicides since 2001, but 2007 saw a sharp jump as President George W. Bush sent 28,000 more troops to Iraq to break an insurgency that had mushroomed into civil war. “We are not making any projections about what we think the total number of suicides for 2009 might be, but certainly we are concerned about the number of suicides we have seen in the first quarter of this year,” Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Chiarelli said.
The Army’s heavy burden of fighting two wars often requires sending its troops to Iraq and Afghanistan every other year for as long as 15 months.
While GIs say the deployment cycle strain marriages and spark substance abuse, officials said it doesn’t seem to contribute to suicide rates.
Looking for a pattern
“There is no statistical evidence of a greater risk with multiple deployments,” Chiarelli said. “In fact, there were fewer suicides by soldiers with multiple deployments than compared to soldiers with just one deployment.”
Two in every three Army cases were linked to relationship problems; about the same percentage of victims had also deployed to the war zone. Financial problems often were in play.
Army efforts to prevent suicides start with Chiarelli, a one-time Iraq war commander. Training programs have been crafted to help soldiers and their families cope with deployments, post traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury, substance abuse and anxiety issues.
But last week’s shooting incident at Camp Liberty in Baghdad underscores the fear that soldiers in a career-oriented, all-volunteer force have of psychological counseling. Ruocco, too, grappled with that problem, probably before leaving for Iraq in 2004.
He slept poorly, turned inward and wouldn’t talk about the war. “He said, ‘I can’t see any beauty or happiness in anything,’ ” his widow said.
sigc@express-news.net
Fragging Update
So here's some more about that soldier whose entire life was ruined when he participated in "fragging"- turning on members of your own army. Here's what the American Free Press had to say about the situation:
The war grew tragically worse on May 11 when Sgt. John M. Russell went berserk and killed five unarmed servicemen at the Camp Liberty stress clinic in Baghdad, while wounding three others. Events leading up to this meltdown had many around him fully aware that they had a ticking time bomb on their hands.
James Dao and Lizette Alvarez of The New York Times wrote on May 14 that Russell’s commanding officer “ordered him to turn in his gun and receive psychological counseling.”
Russell was infuriated and humiliated. Ed Lavandera of CNN reported, “His wife told us that he emailed her and said he’d had the worst two days of his life because some of his officers had threatened him.” PFC Michael Yates—one of those killed a day later—knew trouble was brewing, telling
his mother, “Man, this guy’s got issues.”
All hell broke loose the next day when, according to Luis Martinez of ABC News, Russell “was taken against his will for treatment at the combat stress center because of concerns about his mental health.”
Enraged at his two superiors who issued these orders, Russell’s hostilities reached a breaking point at the counseling center, where a messy altercation broke out. Escorted from the premises in an Army vehicle, Russell proceeded to pummel the driver; then wrested his weapon away from him. After stealing the Jeep, Russell sped back to the clinic, where he opened fire on staff and patients. Dao and Alvarez called this onslaught “the worst case of soldier-on-soldier violence among American forces in the six-year Iraq war.”
What happened to this career Army man who had also served in Serbia and Bosnia? One contributing factor may have been financially related to a $1,500 per month mortgage, whereas others blamed it on Russell’s job maintaining robots that detonated IEDs (improvised explosive devices).
In Sherman, Tex., Wilburn Russell, 73, father of the beleaguered soldier, acknowledged these traumas, but raised the rhetoric to an entirely new level. He said: The U.S. Army turned my son into a mass killer. . . . Two officers threatened and harassed him for two days straight. . . . When the military turned against him, he didn’t have any recourse. I guess he thought his life was over. He’s going to lose his house, everything, his retirement. I guess he just broke. . . . I’m furious. I know he was set up and they ruined him. . . . If a guy actually goes to the clinic and asks for help, they think of him as a wimp and he’s got something wrong with him and they try to get rid of him. . . . They set him up. They drove him out. They wanted to put as much pressure on him as they could to drum him out. I think they broke him.
Russell continued. “They ruined his life. They told him, ‘You’re an idiot. You don’t belong in here. We’re gonna break you.’ He took matters into his own hands. . . . They turned him loose with a guy with a gun. He beat the crap out of this guy and took his gun away from him. . . . He couldn’t handle it. It overwhelmed him. They told my son, ‘You don’t have enough brains and gumption to be a sergeant.’”
Speaking of our enlisted men and women in Iraq, Army Secretary Pete Geren admitted, “This is a very stressed force.” The Army confirmed that the number of suicides spiked to 143 in 2008, the highest total since the military began keeping such records. Gary Mitchell of Editor and Publisher predicted that this amount could skyrocket to 225 in 2009.
Ironically, despite lower overall violence in Iraq, soldiers still complain of post-traumatic stress disorder, multiple redeployments with too little time between them, depression, and financial hardships. As a result, Tina Kells commented on May 11 that “fragging incidents, as the deliberate killing of military allies is called, are becoming increasingly common in Iraq. The Camp Liberty incident is the sixth such fragging in the past four years.”
PBS adds that “attempted suicides and self-injuries have quadrupled over the past six years.”
With stress levels peaking as the war drags on, Greg Mitchell summarizes how enlisted men are forced to bear the brunt. “Commanders constantly pressure soldiers with health issues to deploy even when their medical records show physical problems.”
In response, soldiers from the Alaska Peace Center started a petition, stating, “As the shortage of troops has become more and more difficult to overcome, our commanders have become more and more aggressive in deploying soldiers with injuries and illnesses.”
It’s obvious that Sgt. John Russell was one of these “casualties” of war who was pushed too far; then finally snapped.
The war grew tragically worse on May 11 when Sgt. John M. Russell went berserk and killed five unarmed servicemen at the Camp Liberty stress clinic in Baghdad, while wounding three others. Events leading up to this meltdown had many around him fully aware that they had a ticking time bomb on their hands.
James Dao and Lizette Alvarez of The New York Times wrote on May 14 that Russell’s commanding officer “ordered him to turn in his gun and receive psychological counseling.”
Russell was infuriated and humiliated. Ed Lavandera of CNN reported, “His wife told us that he emailed her and said he’d had the worst two days of his life because some of his officers had threatened him.” PFC Michael Yates—one of those killed a day later—knew trouble was brewing, telling
his mother, “Man, this guy’s got issues.”
All hell broke loose the next day when, according to Luis Martinez of ABC News, Russell “was taken against his will for treatment at the combat stress center because of concerns about his mental health.”
Enraged at his two superiors who issued these orders, Russell’s hostilities reached a breaking point at the counseling center, where a messy altercation broke out. Escorted from the premises in an Army vehicle, Russell proceeded to pummel the driver; then wrested his weapon away from him. After stealing the Jeep, Russell sped back to the clinic, where he opened fire on staff and patients. Dao and Alvarez called this onslaught “the worst case of soldier-on-soldier violence among American forces in the six-year Iraq war.”
What happened to this career Army man who had also served in Serbia and Bosnia? One contributing factor may have been financially related to a $1,500 per month mortgage, whereas others blamed it on Russell’s job maintaining robots that detonated IEDs (improvised explosive devices).
In Sherman, Tex., Wilburn Russell, 73, father of the beleaguered soldier, acknowledged these traumas, but raised the rhetoric to an entirely new level. He said: The U.S. Army turned my son into a mass killer. . . . Two officers threatened and harassed him for two days straight. . . . When the military turned against him, he didn’t have any recourse. I guess he thought his life was over. He’s going to lose his house, everything, his retirement. I guess he just broke. . . . I’m furious. I know he was set up and they ruined him. . . . If a guy actually goes to the clinic and asks for help, they think of him as a wimp and he’s got something wrong with him and they try to get rid of him. . . . They set him up. They drove him out. They wanted to put as much pressure on him as they could to drum him out. I think they broke him.
Russell continued. “They ruined his life. They told him, ‘You’re an idiot. You don’t belong in here. We’re gonna break you.’ He took matters into his own hands. . . . They turned him loose with a guy with a gun. He beat the crap out of this guy and took his gun away from him. . . . He couldn’t handle it. It overwhelmed him. They told my son, ‘You don’t have enough brains and gumption to be a sergeant.’”
Speaking of our enlisted men and women in Iraq, Army Secretary Pete Geren admitted, “This is a very stressed force.” The Army confirmed that the number of suicides spiked to 143 in 2008, the highest total since the military began keeping such records. Gary Mitchell of Editor and Publisher predicted that this amount could skyrocket to 225 in 2009.
Ironically, despite lower overall violence in Iraq, soldiers still complain of post-traumatic stress disorder, multiple redeployments with too little time between them, depression, and financial hardships. As a result, Tina Kells commented on May 11 that “fragging incidents, as the deliberate killing of military allies is called, are becoming increasingly common in Iraq. The Camp Liberty incident is the sixth such fragging in the past four years.”
PBS adds that “attempted suicides and self-injuries have quadrupled over the past six years.”
With stress levels peaking as the war drags on, Greg Mitchell summarizes how enlisted men are forced to bear the brunt. “Commanders constantly pressure soldiers with health issues to deploy even when their medical records show physical problems.”
In response, soldiers from the Alaska Peace Center started a petition, stating, “As the shortage of troops has become more and more difficult to overcome, our commanders have become more and more aggressive in deploying soldiers with injuries and illnesses.”
It’s obvious that Sgt. John Russell was one of these “casualties” of war who was pushed too far; then finally snapped.
Oz Against Torture
From wikipedia, I found out which countries supported the UN Optional Protocol Against Torture, and would be subject to international inspections as a result, to go along with the news story below.
As of December 2008, 40 states have ratified the protocol:[1] Albania, Argentina, Armenia, Benin, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Cambodia, Chile, Costa Rica, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Georgia, Germany, Guatemala, Honduras, Kazakhstan, Liberia, Liechtenstein, Maldives, Mali, Malta, Mauritius, Mexico, Moldova, New Zealand, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Senegal, Serbia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Ukraine, United Kingdom, and Uruguay.
A further 29 countries have signed but not ratified the protocol:[1] Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Burkina Faso, Republic of the Congo, Cyprus, Ecuador, Finland, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Madagascar, Montenegro, Netherlands, Nicaragua, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Switzerland, Timor-Leste, Togo and Turkey.
The Australian government has said it intends to ratify the protocol.
Australia signs anti-torture protocol
May 22, 2009 - 3:39PM
Australia's prisons and immigration detention centres could soon be subject to international torture inspections, the federal government says.
Federal Attorney-General Robert McClelland says the government signed the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture this week.
The protocol obliges parties to allow international inspections of its places of detention, such as jails, to ensure people are being properly treated.
By signing the protocol Australia has taken a huge step towards ratification, something Mr McClelland says he's confident will occur with the support of states and territories.
Once ratified, Australia would join countries such as the UK, Germany, France and New Zealand as parties to the protocol.
"We should not be afraid of international accountability in this regard," Mr McClelland said during a speech about human rights, on Friday.
"The Rudd government believes as part of our commitment to re-engagement with the international human rights community, it is important that Australia also demonstrates its leadership on this issue."
The Joint Standing Committee on Treaties would examine the protocol, and would most likely take evidence from states, territories and various detention facilities, he said.
Mr McClelland expected all parties would back the protocol.
He said he was pleased with initial support shown by the states and territories responsible for the majority of Australia's detention facilities.
"I hope we can build on this support as we take the necessary steps to become a party," he said.
"In consultation with the states and territories, mechanisms will be established, as required under the protocol, to regularly examine at the domestic level the treatment of persons in places of detention.
"This will include ensuring that all of our prisons and detention facilities are subject to the monitoring and reporting regimes under the protocol."
The previous coalition government had refused to sign the protocol, something the Labor government promised to rectify when it came to power.
Apart from signing the protocol, the government would also introduce federal legislation making torture an offence, Mr McClelland said.
"Australia's domestic criminal laws already contain provisions which, collectively, outlaw all acts that could constitute torture," he said.
"However, currently there is no single comprehensive commonwealth offence that criminalises torture."
He said the government was considering giving the legislation extraterritorial powers, "to make torture an offence with respect to acts both within and outside Australia".
"By enacting a specific offence of torture, the government will ensure that torture is prohibited under commonwealth law," he said.
© 2009 AAP
As of December 2008, 40 states have ratified the protocol:[1] Albania, Argentina, Armenia, Benin, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Cambodia, Chile, Costa Rica, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, France, Georgia, Germany, Guatemala, Honduras, Kazakhstan, Liberia, Liechtenstein, Maldives, Mali, Malta, Mauritius, Mexico, Moldova, New Zealand, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Senegal, Serbia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Ukraine, United Kingdom, and Uruguay.
A further 29 countries have signed but not ratified the protocol:[1] Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Burkina Faso, Republic of the Congo, Cyprus, Ecuador, Finland, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Madagascar, Montenegro, Netherlands, Nicaragua, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Switzerland, Timor-Leste, Togo and Turkey.
The Australian government has said it intends to ratify the protocol.
Australia signs anti-torture protocol
May 22, 2009 - 3:39PM
Australia's prisons and immigration detention centres could soon be subject to international torture inspections, the federal government says.
Federal Attorney-General Robert McClelland says the government signed the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture this week.
The protocol obliges parties to allow international inspections of its places of detention, such as jails, to ensure people are being properly treated.
By signing the protocol Australia has taken a huge step towards ratification, something Mr McClelland says he's confident will occur with the support of states and territories.
Once ratified, Australia would join countries such as the UK, Germany, France and New Zealand as parties to the protocol.
"We should not be afraid of international accountability in this regard," Mr McClelland said during a speech about human rights, on Friday.
"The Rudd government believes as part of our commitment to re-engagement with the international human rights community, it is important that Australia also demonstrates its leadership on this issue."
The Joint Standing Committee on Treaties would examine the protocol, and would most likely take evidence from states, territories and various detention facilities, he said.
Mr McClelland expected all parties would back the protocol.
He said he was pleased with initial support shown by the states and territories responsible for the majority of Australia's detention facilities.
"I hope we can build on this support as we take the necessary steps to become a party," he said.
"In consultation with the states and territories, mechanisms will be established, as required under the protocol, to regularly examine at the domestic level the treatment of persons in places of detention.
"This will include ensuring that all of our prisons and detention facilities are subject to the monitoring and reporting regimes under the protocol."
The previous coalition government had refused to sign the protocol, something the Labor government promised to rectify when it came to power.
Apart from signing the protocol, the government would also introduce federal legislation making torture an offence, Mr McClelland said.
"Australia's domestic criminal laws already contain provisions which, collectively, outlaw all acts that could constitute torture," he said.
"However, currently there is no single comprehensive commonwealth offence that criminalises torture."
He said the government was considering giving the legislation extraterritorial powers, "to make torture an offence with respect to acts both within and outside Australia".
"By enacting a specific offence of torture, the government will ensure that torture is prohibited under commonwealth law," he said.
© 2009 AAP
Blood on the White Sand
22,000 people were killed.
With the death of the Tamil resistance, the world has changed, and not for the better.
Sri Lanka army toll shows scale of war
By Joe Leahy in Mumbai
Published: May 22 2009 18:14 | Last updated: May 22 2009 18:14
The Sri Lankan army has for the first time given an indication of the scale of the fighting in the civil war that ended this week, saying that more than 6,000 soldiers were killed and nearly 30,000 wounded in the final three years of conflict.
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam fought for 25 years for an independent homeland for the country’s Tamil minority in the island’s north and east but were finally crushed by the overwhelming military force of the government led by Mahinda Rajapaksa, the nationalist president.
EDITOR’S CHOICE
Sri Lanka leader savours victory high point - May-19
Sri Lanka confirms Tamil leader dead - May-19
Analysis: Tigers’ harsh taming - May-15
Clinton questions timing of Sri Lankan loan - May-15
Editorial Comment: Bloody Sri Lanka - May-14
UN voices deep concern over Sri Lanka - May-15
The military estimates that up to 22,000 Tamil Tiger rebels were killed in the final three years of the conflict.
The release of the casualty figures came as Sri Lanka was on Friday night preparing to receive Ban Ki-Moon, United Nations secretary-general. Mr Ban was expected to call on the government to give international aid groups full access to its refugee camps.
Nearly 300,000 people who were displaced by the conflict have ended up in camps in Vavuniya, in the north of the island, and are in desperate need of medicine and supplies.
Western governments and the UN’s most senior human rights official have called for an independent inquiry into possible war crimes in the conflict, amid accusations that the government had shelled civilians and the rebels had held refugees at gunpoint for use as human shields.
However, Vijay Nambiar, Mr Ban’s chief of staff, who has been in Sri Lanka since last week, said the priority was the refugees’ welfare.
“I don’t think we need to be straight away rushing into all kinds of allegations,” Mr Nambiar said. “The idea is to say that in the conduct of all these things, we have to tell them there are norms.”
The UN this week said the conflict had killed between 80,000 and 100,000 people since it erupted into full-scale civil war in 1983 – including unofficial and unverified tallies showing 7,000 civilian deaths since January, Reuters reported.
The release of the government figures followed the killing of Velupillai Prabhakaran, the LTTE’s leader, this week as government security forces overran the last pocket of resistance.
“Since [July 2006], 6,261 soldiers have laid down their lives for the unitary status of the motherland and 29,551 were wounded,” Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, defence secretary, told the state-run Independent Television Network.
The casualty figures compare with 4,600 soldiers from the US, the UK and other countries who have died in Iraq since 2003 and is a grim illustration of the cost of Colombo’s strategy of pursuing a military solution to the island’s conflict.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
With the death of the Tamil resistance, the world has changed, and not for the better.
Sri Lanka army toll shows scale of war
By Joe Leahy in Mumbai
Published: May 22 2009 18:14 | Last updated: May 22 2009 18:14
The Sri Lankan army has for the first time given an indication of the scale of the fighting in the civil war that ended this week, saying that more than 6,000 soldiers were killed and nearly 30,000 wounded in the final three years of conflict.
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam fought for 25 years for an independent homeland for the country’s Tamil minority in the island’s north and east but were finally crushed by the overwhelming military force of the government led by Mahinda Rajapaksa, the nationalist president.
EDITOR’S CHOICE
Sri Lanka leader savours victory high point - May-19
Sri Lanka confirms Tamil leader dead - May-19
Analysis: Tigers’ harsh taming - May-15
Clinton questions timing of Sri Lankan loan - May-15
Editorial Comment: Bloody Sri Lanka - May-14
UN voices deep concern over Sri Lanka - May-15
The military estimates that up to 22,000 Tamil Tiger rebels were killed in the final three years of the conflict.
The release of the casualty figures came as Sri Lanka was on Friday night preparing to receive Ban Ki-Moon, United Nations secretary-general. Mr Ban was expected to call on the government to give international aid groups full access to its refugee camps.
Nearly 300,000 people who were displaced by the conflict have ended up in camps in Vavuniya, in the north of the island, and are in desperate need of medicine and supplies.
Western governments and the UN’s most senior human rights official have called for an independent inquiry into possible war crimes in the conflict, amid accusations that the government had shelled civilians and the rebels had held refugees at gunpoint for use as human shields.
However, Vijay Nambiar, Mr Ban’s chief of staff, who has been in Sri Lanka since last week, said the priority was the refugees’ welfare.
“I don’t think we need to be straight away rushing into all kinds of allegations,” Mr Nambiar said. “The idea is to say that in the conduct of all these things, we have to tell them there are norms.”
The UN this week said the conflict had killed between 80,000 and 100,000 people since it erupted into full-scale civil war in 1983 – including unofficial and unverified tallies showing 7,000 civilian deaths since January, Reuters reported.
The release of the government figures followed the killing of Velupillai Prabhakaran, the LTTE’s leader, this week as government security forces overran the last pocket of resistance.
“Since [July 2006], 6,261 soldiers have laid down their lives for the unitary status of the motherland and 29,551 were wounded,” Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, defence secretary, told the state-run Independent Television Network.
The casualty figures compare with 4,600 soldiers from the US, the UK and other countries who have died in Iraq since 2003 and is a grim illustration of the cost of Colombo’s strategy of pursuing a military solution to the island’s conflict.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009
And We Said Nothing
Civil war over as Sri Lanka crushes rebels
May 21, 2009 1:41 pm admin frontpage, news
by Keith Richmond
THE 26-year-long civil war in Sri Lanka is over after government troops flushed out and killed the remaining Tamil Tiger rebels trapped in a small strip of jungle in the north of the country.
Tigers leader Velupillai Prabhakaran was one of those killed, along with two of his closest aides.
Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa declared victory in a war – which has left more than 70,000 people dead – the day after Sri Lankan television broadcast pictures of a body said to be that of Prabhakaran.
He said: “We have been able to liberate the entire country from the clutches of terrorism. We have been able to defeat one of the most heinous terrorist groups in the world.”
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam have been fighting since 1983 to set up an independent Tamil state arguing that, since Ceylon became independent in 1948, the Tamils had been discriminated against by successive majority Sinhalese governments.
They enjoyed initial success, and popular local support, but when the 2002 ceasefire broke down at the beginning of last year, the government decided to seek a military solution.
More than 50,000 troops, with the support of heavy artillery and helicopter gunships, steadily pushed the rebels back and captured Kilinochchi, the Tigers’ capital, in January.
Although Tamil spokesmen have denied that the Tigers’ leader is dead, that appears extremely unlikely.
The big question now is what the government will offer the Tamils to convince them they have a part to play in Sri Lanka.
May 21, 2009 1:41 pm admin frontpage, news
by Keith Richmond
THE 26-year-long civil war in Sri Lanka is over after government troops flushed out and killed the remaining Tamil Tiger rebels trapped in a small strip of jungle in the north of the country.
Tigers leader Velupillai Prabhakaran was one of those killed, along with two of his closest aides.
Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa declared victory in a war – which has left more than 70,000 people dead – the day after Sri Lankan television broadcast pictures of a body said to be that of Prabhakaran.
He said: “We have been able to liberate the entire country from the clutches of terrorism. We have been able to defeat one of the most heinous terrorist groups in the world.”
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam have been fighting since 1983 to set up an independent Tamil state arguing that, since Ceylon became independent in 1948, the Tamils had been discriminated against by successive majority Sinhalese governments.
They enjoyed initial success, and popular local support, but when the 2002 ceasefire broke down at the beginning of last year, the government decided to seek a military solution.
More than 50,000 troops, with the support of heavy artillery and helicopter gunships, steadily pushed the rebels back and captured Kilinochchi, the Tigers’ capital, in January.
Although Tamil spokesmen have denied that the Tigers’ leader is dead, that appears extremely unlikely.
The big question now is what the government will offer the Tamils to convince them they have a part to play in Sri Lanka.
Pictures of Refugees in SWAT
Here are some pictures of refugees from the past couple of weeks:
One and a half million people have left their homes.
And there was a peace deal.
Itsuka.
One and a half million people have left their homes.
And there was a peace deal.
Itsuka.
In the Guardian
Swat valley could be worst refugee crisis since Rwanda, UN warns
* Declan Walsh in Islamabad
* guardian.co.uk, Monday 18 May 2009 20.18 BST
The human exodus from the war-torn Swat valley in northern Pakistan is turning into the world's most dramatic displacement crisis since the Rwandan genocide of 1994, the UN refugee agency warned.
Almost 1.5 million people have registered for assistance since fighting erupted three weeks ago, the UNHCR said, bringing the total number of war displaced in North West Frontier province to more than 2 million, not including 300,000 the provincial government believes have not registered. "It's been a long time since there has been a displacement this big," the UNHCR's spokesman Ron Redmond said in Geneva, trying to recall the last time so many people had been uprooted so quickly. "It could go back to Rwanda."
The army reported fierce clashes across Swat, a tourist haven turned Taliban stronghold. After a week of intense aerial bombardment with fighter jets and helicopter gunships the army has launched a ground offensive to drive out the militants to rout the militants from the valley. Commandos pushed through the remote Piochar valley, seizing a training centre and killing a dozen Taliban, a military spokesman, Major General Athar Abbas, said. Gun battles erupted in several villages surrounding Mingora, Swat's main town. Abbas said the military had killed 27 militants, including three commanders, and lost three members of the security forces. The figures could not be verified, as Swat has been largely cut off since the operation started.
The Taliban leader in Swat, Maulana Fazlullah, remains at large. His spokesman vowed the rebels would fight until their "last breath".
The operation continues to enjoy broad public support. Opposition parties endorsed the action at a conference called by the government, dispelling the notion that the army was fighting "America's war".
But that fragile unity could be threatened by heavy civilian casualties or a further deterioration in the conditions of the 2 million displaced. Returning from a three-day trip to Pakistan, the UNHCR head António Guterres termed the displacement crisis as "one of the most dramatic of recent times". Relief workers were "struggling to keep up with the size and speed of the displacement," a statement said.
The main difference with African refugee crises such as Rwanda, however, is that a minority of people are being housed in tented camps. According to the UN just 130,000 people are being accommodated in the sprawling, hot camps in Mardan and Swabi districts, while most are squeezed into the homes of friends or relatives, with as many as 85 people in one house.
Nevertheless aid workers and political analysts warn that if international aid to ease the crisis is not urgently delivered, the strain on the displaced and those helping them could lead to political destablisation. Acknowledging the scale of the crisis, the prime minister of Pakistan, Yousaf Raza Gilani, said: "The displaced men, women and children should not feel alone. We won't leave any stone unturned in providing them help and protection."
The UN is expected to launch an international appeal for aid running into hundreds of millions of dollars in the coming days.
* Declan Walsh in Islamabad
* guardian.co.uk, Monday 18 May 2009 20.18 BST
The human exodus from the war-torn Swat valley in northern Pakistan is turning into the world's most dramatic displacement crisis since the Rwandan genocide of 1994, the UN refugee agency warned.
Almost 1.5 million people have registered for assistance since fighting erupted three weeks ago, the UNHCR said, bringing the total number of war displaced in North West Frontier province to more than 2 million, not including 300,000 the provincial government believes have not registered. "It's been a long time since there has been a displacement this big," the UNHCR's spokesman Ron Redmond said in Geneva, trying to recall the last time so many people had been uprooted so quickly. "It could go back to Rwanda."
The army reported fierce clashes across Swat, a tourist haven turned Taliban stronghold. After a week of intense aerial bombardment with fighter jets and helicopter gunships the army has launched a ground offensive to drive out the militants to rout the militants from the valley. Commandos pushed through the remote Piochar valley, seizing a training centre and killing a dozen Taliban, a military spokesman, Major General Athar Abbas, said. Gun battles erupted in several villages surrounding Mingora, Swat's main town. Abbas said the military had killed 27 militants, including three commanders, and lost three members of the security forces. The figures could not be verified, as Swat has been largely cut off since the operation started.
The Taliban leader in Swat, Maulana Fazlullah, remains at large. His spokesman vowed the rebels would fight until their "last breath".
The operation continues to enjoy broad public support. Opposition parties endorsed the action at a conference called by the government, dispelling the notion that the army was fighting "America's war".
But that fragile unity could be threatened by heavy civilian casualties or a further deterioration in the conditions of the 2 million displaced. Returning from a three-day trip to Pakistan, the UNHCR head António Guterres termed the displacement crisis as "one of the most dramatic of recent times". Relief workers were "struggling to keep up with the size and speed of the displacement," a statement said.
The main difference with African refugee crises such as Rwanda, however, is that a minority of people are being housed in tented camps. According to the UN just 130,000 people are being accommodated in the sprawling, hot camps in Mardan and Swabi districts, while most are squeezed into the homes of friends or relatives, with as many as 85 people in one house.
Nevertheless aid workers and political analysts warn that if international aid to ease the crisis is not urgently delivered, the strain on the displaced and those helping them could lead to political destablisation. Acknowledging the scale of the crisis, the prime minister of Pakistan, Yousaf Raza Gilani, said: "The displaced men, women and children should not feel alone. We won't leave any stone unturned in providing them help and protection."
The UN is expected to launch an international appeal for aid running into hundreds of millions of dollars in the coming days.
The Sadness of Swat
This was quite incisive.
Behind the nightmare in Swat
May 22, 2009
More than 1 million people have fled the Swat region of Pakistan in one of the worst humanitarian crises since the slaughter in Rwanda during the mid-1990s.
The refugees from Swat--in the north of Pakistan, near the Afghanistan border--are victims of a Pakistani Army offensive, backed by the U.S., against forces of the Taliban, which operate in both countries. Under pressure from the U.S., the Pakistani military broke a ceasefire arrangement with the Taliban and is carrying out a scorched-earth assault--with the excuse that this is the only way to flush out Taliban fighters. But the civilian population is paying a terrible price.
The nightmarish scene in Swat and other areas in the north marks the latest stage of Pakistan's crisis, brought to a boil by the U.S. escalation of its war in Afghanistan, which is spilling across the border. But it also a sign of the deepening contradictions of Pakistani politics following the downfall of the U.S.-backed strongman, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, last year amid growing unrest.
Musharraf was replaced by Asif Ali Zardari, the husband of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party. But Zardari, who has a long record of corruption, has quickly lost credibility. He only reinstated Pakistan's Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry--whose ouster by Musharraf spurred a mass movement spearheaded by lawyers--after huge protests in March forced his hand. Now, with the attacks in Swat, the Pakistani military is regaining the initiative.
Saadia Toor, an assistant professor of Anthropology and Social Work at Staten Island College and part of the group Action for a Progressive Pakistan, talked to Ashley Smith about the situation in Pakistan today.
Flieeing the Swat Valley during the Pakistani military's offensive (Aamir Qureshi | AFP)Flieeing the Swat Valley during the Pakistani military's offensive (Aamir Qureshi | AFP)
FOR THE last few weeks, the media have been filled with reports of the "imminent threat of the Taliban," and then coverage of Pakistani military assault on the Taliban in Swat. Why has the Pakistani military abandoned the former peace and launched this attack?
FINALLY, WE'RE beginning to see a lot of good analysis coming out of the left media. Earlier, the U.S. government's rhetoric was being picked up uncritically. We've seen scaremongering in the media over the imminent takeover of Pakistani nukes by the Taliban.
The U.S. has created this bizarre new moniker "Af/Pak" as a way to cover over their expansion of the war from Afghanistan into Pakistan. Building consent for this expansion has been what all the State Department, Pentagon and media propaganda has been about in the last few weeks.
To address your question about why the Pakistani Army abandoned the peace, we have to step back and understand the relationship between the Army and the Taliban. The Pakistani military has not been interested in dealing with the Taliban because the Taliban don't appear as a threat to them. The military's primary and existential obsession is with India, and that's where the majority of the Pakistani Army is deployed. The Pakistani Army knows that the Taliban is, in part, its own creation, and it can deal with them.
Moreover, the military knows very well that the Taliban are not in any sense an existential or military threat to the country. The army therefore allowed the Taliban to enter Swat. They accepted that Swat and some of the other border provinces are incompletely integrated into the country, and allowed the Taliban to exert its control.
The army has been under massive pressure from the U.S. to deal with the "Taliban problem," and the fact that the Taliban broke the peace deal allowed the army to prove to its American masters that it's a reliable ally. So now the military has driven back the Taliban quite easily from Buner and pummeled them in Swat.
The Pakistani Army isn't concerned about what their attack on the Taliban would do to the civilian population in Swat, so what we have now is a humanitarian nightmare, with over a million internally displaced civilians.
WHY DID the Obama administration push Pakistan to abandon the peace deal?
THE U.S. doesn't respect any Pakistani rules or laws. It has its own imperial ambitions and priorities in the region. So it pressured Pakistan to essentially rip up the peace deal, and go on this brutal offensive.
The peace deal with the Taliban that was struck by the ruling party in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) was pragmatic. The Taliban had been upping its threat in NWFP. It had killed ruling politicians and threatened their families. The civilian ANP government in the province also got no support from the army, and so was backed into a corner and had to accept the peace deal.
But the U.S. told the Pakistani government to ignore that deal after the Taliban attack on Buner.
Still, that's only the superficial cause for the U.S. to back the assault on the Taliban. Tom Hayden has a fabulous piece in The Nation entitled "Understanding the long war" that goes a long way to explaining what U.S. ambitions are.
To understand those, you have to step back and examine the whole "war on terror." It's in reality a renewal of the "Great Game" of rivalries in the region over who's going to control the oil and natural gas resources. Beyond that geopolitical battle, the military industrial complex has a material interest in perpetual warfare.
The U.S. wants to wind down its occupation in Iraq, which it sees as a distraction, and push ahead with a much larger scenario--what the U.S. State Department calls the arc of instability, from North Africa to the Middle East to South and Central Asia. The U.S. is gearing up for, in the shocking words of one official, 50 years of warfare in this area.
The question of resources is central. This is the new Great Game--between the U.S., Russia, China, India, Pakistan and Iran, to name a few--that we have been observing since the beginning of the war in 2001. The U.S. had planned a pipeline to go from Central Asia through the Pakistani province of Balochistan. It saw Afghanistan as strategically important in these designs.
Balochistan, in particular, is under the radar right now, but it's going to be a key region in the imperial competition. The Chinese have already been active in Balochistan; they helped build one of the ports. To counter this Chinese presence, the CIA has overrun Balochistan. With the help of the Pakistani military, it's also also been training forces for black ops in Iran.
YOU SAID that the Pakistani Army is primarily focused not on the Taliban, but India. How has the recent tilt by the U.S. toward India affected this?
THE U.S. has cultivated India, which has been happy with this new relationship, and shifted toward a much greater alignment with the U.S. India has made a huge break with its traditional non-alignment posture of the past.
We saw that come together dramatically right after 9/11, when India, the U.S. and Israel formed a block of so-called democracies against terror. We saw the reactivation of this alignment after the terror attacks in Mumbai. Sadly and tragically, the attack in Mumbai gave India the boost it needed to convince the U.S. to pay attention to India's strategic needs in relationship to Pakistan.
So in the State Department's Af/Pak policy document, you see that India isn't considered one of the regional players that needs to sit together and be told what to do. India has bought itself out of this trap. It's not going to be asked to do anything.
For example, the U.S. isn't going to pressure India to do anything about Kashmir. Because extremist groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, as well as the Pakistani military, are so Kashmiri-focused, the logical thing would be to force India and Pakistan to sit down with the Kashmiris to work out a solution that respects the Kashmiri people's wishes.
Of course, if that were to happen, the Pakistani military wouldn't change, nor would Lashkar-e-Taiba or Jaish-e-Mohammed disband. But it would result in stability along the border with India.
Since India has managed to extricate itself from these regional talks, it has avoided getting pressured toward a solution in Kashmir. But this, in turn, guarantees an ongoing conflict between Pakistan and India over Kashmir, at the expense of the region, and especially the people of Kashmir.
COULDN'T U.S. plans backfire and cause of further destabilization not only of Afghanistan, but now Pakistan as well?
WE CAN'T underestimate the hubris of an imperialist state like the U.S. Despite eight years of war, occupation and counter-insurgency, and seeing that they aren't working and are, in fact, backfiring, U.S. thinking doesn't seem to be shifting at all.
In Pakistan, the U.S. policy could really destabilize the country. A military coup is a real possibility. The military is always happy to step in and overrule civilian democracy. The reason that it hasn't done so is because it suffered such a severe public relations crisis in the last few years of the Musharraf regime. It did not feel it could come back.
But given the way things are going--especially all the finger-wagging by Secretary of State Hilary Clinton against the civilian government for being fragile and incapable of handling things--it seems like the U.S. might support a return to military dictatorship.
The U.S. has always been happier dealing with the Army, whether it has been in power or not. And the Pakistani Army's most important backer is the U.S. state. The U.S. has fed the army, nurtured it and allowed it to become the monster it is. Certainly, the Pakistani military has had no support from below--that all comes from above, and from the U.S. in particular.
The army suffered this huge PR crisis under Musharraf because it was seen as doing the U.S.'s dirty work--which, to be honest, it has been doing for 50 years. So it retreated. Gen Ashfaq Kayani has been very happy to work behind the curtain of the civilian government, because the military ultimately knows that it's always in control. It will do whatever it has to, and let the blame fall at the feet of the civilian government.
But if events turn in such a direction and the army is successful in winning back moral authority, it could take power. Part of the hysterics about "the Taliban are coming; the Taliban are coming" was drummed out for the U.S., and part was for the domestic consumption of the Pakistani elite.
The liberal elite supported the Pakistani Army in attacking the Taliban. This is just after having pushed Musharraf out of power.
There's a constant vacillation among the liberal elite between democratic rule and the Pakistan Army. So knowing that the Pakistani military helped create and backed the Taliban in the first place, the liberal elite supported the attack. This is dangerous, since it is re-legitimizing one of the most reactionary forces in Pakistan--the military.
RECENT OPINION polls in Pakistan show the majority of Pakistanis are concerned about the economic mess, and not terrorism. What do you make of this?
WHAT YOU see in these polls is the split between the haves and have-nots.
The aim of the army has been to win back the liberal elite. Of course, the military would love the support of the masses. But the liberal elite is what matters to them. And on the ground, conditions are so dire for the masses of the people that nothing the Pakistani military is doing is going to shore up mass support for it.
For example, people in Swat say that before this current operation, the Pakistani military targeted the Taliban. In the U.S. and Pakistani media, military leaders played out a drama for our consumption--they pretended to attack the Taliban, when, in fact, they weren't.
The Pakistani state has always provided safe haven to the Taliban, as well as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, even when Musharraf declared them illegal. That was only done to please the U.S. It was obvious these groups were never repressed. When the military raided the offices, no one was there. When it arrested people, it wasn't the leadership. This was all a drama staged for American consumption.
In Swat, the Pakistani military was doing nothing but terrorizing civilians. On top of that, those who lived close to the border with Afghanistan have had to deal with the U.S. drone strikes. So the masses of people feel completely helpless and angry at all sides.
The Pakistani military will never be able to win over those people who actually experienced what is happening on the ground. And certainly those people are not Taliban supporters either, since they have experienced the terror of the Taliban.
But the elite sitting in the cities are really terrified of the Taliban. Now, if one could assume the Taliban could become a major force in those cities, there would be something to be afraid of. But that's not going to happen. My worry is that this whole fear of the Taliban will function to make that the Pakistani elite willing to accept anything else--from the former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, with all of his connections to the fundamentalists, to the military itself.
HOW HAS U.S. pressure for Pakistan to attack the Taliban affected the lawyers movement that developed in opposition to Musharraf after he got rid of Pakistan's chief justice? Now the movement has had to confront the new president, Asif Ali Zardari, the corrupt husband of assassinated political leader Benazir Bhutto who succeeded Musharraf. Does the lawyers' movement offer hope for progressive social change in Pakistan?
TO BEGIN with, some of leadership of the lawyers movement did come from the upper class, but the main section came from the middle class--the petty bourgeoisie--and extended on down from there.
So when the confrontation between the lawyers movement and Zardari came to a head, the liberal elite was against the Long March to demand that Zardari restore the chief justice. The elite's biggest fear is the Taliban--that is, this religious takeover of Pakistan.
Never mind that they have been fine with the general religiosity that has flooded Pakistan since General Zia-ul-Hak's dictatorship. They felt that it had no effect on their lives; they could go to their clubs and say, "So what if the rest of Pakistan is becoming more and more religious."
The liberal elite was thus complicit with this spread of Islamism. It failed to step up and make secularism mainstream the way it used to be. In the 1970s, the political discourse was so different than it is now. This liberal elite therefore supports Zardari uncritically because it sees him as the only secular force.
Musharraf made his whole political career by saying that if it weren't for him, the fundamentalists would take over. He sold this very effectively to the U.S., but also to the upper-class liberals. They very much saw him as their man until that was untenable.
This same kind of thinking is now behind the uncritical support for Zardari, because the elite wrongly believe that if it weren't for him, the whole country would be taken over by the Taliban. The upper-class liberals were therefore critical of the Long March because they thought it was attacking Zardari, and any action or criticism would therefore open the floodgates for the fundamentalists or the army.
HOW HAS the left in Pakistan responded to the military operation against the Taliban?
THE LEFT is very fragmented and small in Pakistan. That, of course, has its own history because of its complete decimation under the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Zia-ul-Haq. Among some elements of the left, there is tremendous confusion about the situation.
For example, I can speak about the Communist Party of Balochistan and its positions. It has been anti-Taliban and pro-secular, and trying to speak from the position of the Swati people. But the discussion for a long time on its e-mail list was that it should support the army going in and attacking the Taliban.
This is a disastrous position. It does not take a very sophisticated analysis to see that the army stands to gain from this whole operation. The action is designed to build up support for the army and show that it is an effective force that needs more money.
Of course, there are always small groups and individuals which have taken a principled stand.
There have also been a few altercations between the principled left and the liberal elite on this issue. The elite's position has been pro-army. The principled leftists have argued against army action because the army is deeply involved in creating this mess, isn't interested in addressing the main issue of the Taliban, and the whole action is window-dressing. So there were actual altercations at public meetings between these two positions.
WHAT SHOULD the principled left position be?
THE PRINCIPLED position is always to be anti-army--not just on an abstract level, but drawing on the actual history of the relation of the army to groups like the Taliban and the Pakistani people. If you've been paying any attention to these things, it boggles the mind that someone would call on and expect the army to protect the people. It shows the ideological confusion.
It's not so long ago that we were marching against the army for its cozy relationship with the US, the "war on terror," and the disappearances under Musharraf. I don't understand the basis on which the left would be calling on the Pakistani Army to solve the current problem.
I think a principled position would denounce the army for its disinterest in dealing with these groups, for actually cultivating these groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan, for its continuing extraction of money from the U.S., and for its ongoing mobilization against India.
Now with India's investment in Afghanistan growing, the Pakistani Army investment in the Taliban is even higher. The Pakistani Army supported the Taliban against the Northern Alliance, which they perceived to be supported by India.
With India giving aid to Afghanistan, establishing an embassy there, and supporting infrastructural projects, the Pakistani Army will have a greater stake in supporting forces like the Taliban as a counterweight. The Pakistani Army is locked in this conflict with India, which is increasingly a sub-imperial power in the region.
WHAT SHOULD the left say about the Taliban?
IT'S SAD and shocking to hear people talk about the Taliban as an expression of class anger. At one level, that analysis is really troubling because it presumes the Taliban has a vast amount of popular support. But if you talk with refugees coming from Swat, it's clear that the Taliban doesn't. We must oppose the Army, but clearly not because we support the Taliban. A principled left position is to oppose both.
A left position must talk about the disenfranchised and the federal issues in Pakistan, as well as expose the Pakistani military and the entire ruling elite's complete disinterest in its people. The Pakistani state has never honored the rights of its federated units. [In the war of 1971], the ruling West Pakistani establishment was happy to let go of East Pakistan [now Bangladesh], rather than give in to its demands for a more balanced relationship between the center and the provinces. And East Pakistan was not a small federated unit; it was the majority of the population at the time.
The West Pakistani establishment constructed an image of East Pakistan as a hotbed of Hindus and communists, and during the army action in 1971, the army brutalized the population of East Pakistan, for which the Pakistani state has never apologized. That's the real face of the army and its relation to the Pakistani people.
A left position should focus also on the developing class anger and struggles among the peasants, as well as among the proletariat across whole of the country, including in Punjab. These struggles must be reported and not ignored. The fact that they are ignored has a huge impact on the balance of power in the political sphere.
If you don't acknowledge that these struggles exist and that they matter, then it can seem as if the Islamists are the only opposition to injustice and imperialism. That's simply not the case, as the massive lawyers movement, as well as these many local class struggles, prove.
WHAT SHOULD the U.S. antiwar movement say about Obama's new surge in Afghanistan and his expansion of the war into Pakistan?
IN LIBERAL circles, Iraq is looked upon as the bad war, of course. That was Obama's main argument. He was never an antiwar candidate. He was against the war in Iraq to some extent as a distraction.
But now, after his election victory, we've seen the split in the antiwar movement between people who opposed the entire "war on terror" and those who just opposed the Iraq war. So there is no effective antiwar movement to counter Obama's escalation of the war into Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In this context, the American military is having a field day. It's obvious for anyone to see that Obama has carried over the personnel, the ideologies and the policies of the Bush Administration.
The Obama administration is certainly trying to repackage essential continuity with the Bush administration's policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But there isn't a whole lot of finessing that needs to be done to sell this to the American public, since there is a whole lot of agreement that the Afghan war is the moral war, and that Pakistan is thought of as an untrustworthy and reluctant ally that is crawling with militants.
In this context, the antiwar movement must educate people about the true situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It must demand that the drone attacks stop, and that the U.S. get out of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The rhetoric of the Obama administration is disingenuous; the concern is not about getting bin Laden if it ever was. They have had eight years to do this and haven't succeeded. Their real ambitions have little to do with bin Laden, and are actually much larger.
As Pepe Escobar, Tom Hayden and Gareth Porter have argued, the U.S. is planning a 50-year engagement, a new Great Game for control of the region--and that is not something that the U.S. antiwar movement should endorse. The antiwar movement should not let Obama continue this imperial policy of aggression into Afghanistan, Pakistan and potentially lots of other states.
Behind the nightmare in Swat
May 22, 2009
More than 1 million people have fled the Swat region of Pakistan in one of the worst humanitarian crises since the slaughter in Rwanda during the mid-1990s.
The refugees from Swat--in the north of Pakistan, near the Afghanistan border--are victims of a Pakistani Army offensive, backed by the U.S., against forces of the Taliban, which operate in both countries. Under pressure from the U.S., the Pakistani military broke a ceasefire arrangement with the Taliban and is carrying out a scorched-earth assault--with the excuse that this is the only way to flush out Taliban fighters. But the civilian population is paying a terrible price.
The nightmarish scene in Swat and other areas in the north marks the latest stage of Pakistan's crisis, brought to a boil by the U.S. escalation of its war in Afghanistan, which is spilling across the border. But it also a sign of the deepening contradictions of Pakistani politics following the downfall of the U.S.-backed strongman, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, last year amid growing unrest.
Musharraf was replaced by Asif Ali Zardari, the husband of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party. But Zardari, who has a long record of corruption, has quickly lost credibility. He only reinstated Pakistan's Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry--whose ouster by Musharraf spurred a mass movement spearheaded by lawyers--after huge protests in March forced his hand. Now, with the attacks in Swat, the Pakistani military is regaining the initiative.
Saadia Toor, an assistant professor of Anthropology and Social Work at Staten Island College and part of the group Action for a Progressive Pakistan, talked to Ashley Smith about the situation in Pakistan today.
Flieeing the Swat Valley during the Pakistani military's offensive (Aamir Qureshi | AFP)Flieeing the Swat Valley during the Pakistani military's offensive (Aamir Qureshi | AFP)
FOR THE last few weeks, the media have been filled with reports of the "imminent threat of the Taliban," and then coverage of Pakistani military assault on the Taliban in Swat. Why has the Pakistani military abandoned the former peace and launched this attack?
FINALLY, WE'RE beginning to see a lot of good analysis coming out of the left media. Earlier, the U.S. government's rhetoric was being picked up uncritically. We've seen scaremongering in the media over the imminent takeover of Pakistani nukes by the Taliban.
The U.S. has created this bizarre new moniker "Af/Pak" as a way to cover over their expansion of the war from Afghanistan into Pakistan. Building consent for this expansion has been what all the State Department, Pentagon and media propaganda has been about in the last few weeks.
To address your question about why the Pakistani Army abandoned the peace, we have to step back and understand the relationship between the Army and the Taliban. The Pakistani military has not been interested in dealing with the Taliban because the Taliban don't appear as a threat to them. The military's primary and existential obsession is with India, and that's where the majority of the Pakistani Army is deployed. The Pakistani Army knows that the Taliban is, in part, its own creation, and it can deal with them.
Moreover, the military knows very well that the Taliban are not in any sense an existential or military threat to the country. The army therefore allowed the Taliban to enter Swat. They accepted that Swat and some of the other border provinces are incompletely integrated into the country, and allowed the Taliban to exert its control.
The army has been under massive pressure from the U.S. to deal with the "Taliban problem," and the fact that the Taliban broke the peace deal allowed the army to prove to its American masters that it's a reliable ally. So now the military has driven back the Taliban quite easily from Buner and pummeled them in Swat.
The Pakistani Army isn't concerned about what their attack on the Taliban would do to the civilian population in Swat, so what we have now is a humanitarian nightmare, with over a million internally displaced civilians.
WHY DID the Obama administration push Pakistan to abandon the peace deal?
THE U.S. doesn't respect any Pakistani rules or laws. It has its own imperial ambitions and priorities in the region. So it pressured Pakistan to essentially rip up the peace deal, and go on this brutal offensive.
The peace deal with the Taliban that was struck by the ruling party in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) was pragmatic. The Taliban had been upping its threat in NWFP. It had killed ruling politicians and threatened their families. The civilian ANP government in the province also got no support from the army, and so was backed into a corner and had to accept the peace deal.
But the U.S. told the Pakistani government to ignore that deal after the Taliban attack on Buner.
Still, that's only the superficial cause for the U.S. to back the assault on the Taliban. Tom Hayden has a fabulous piece in The Nation entitled "Understanding the long war" that goes a long way to explaining what U.S. ambitions are.
To understand those, you have to step back and examine the whole "war on terror." It's in reality a renewal of the "Great Game" of rivalries in the region over who's going to control the oil and natural gas resources. Beyond that geopolitical battle, the military industrial complex has a material interest in perpetual warfare.
The U.S. wants to wind down its occupation in Iraq, which it sees as a distraction, and push ahead with a much larger scenario--what the U.S. State Department calls the arc of instability, from North Africa to the Middle East to South and Central Asia. The U.S. is gearing up for, in the shocking words of one official, 50 years of warfare in this area.
The question of resources is central. This is the new Great Game--between the U.S., Russia, China, India, Pakistan and Iran, to name a few--that we have been observing since the beginning of the war in 2001. The U.S. had planned a pipeline to go from Central Asia through the Pakistani province of Balochistan. It saw Afghanistan as strategically important in these designs.
Balochistan, in particular, is under the radar right now, but it's going to be a key region in the imperial competition. The Chinese have already been active in Balochistan; they helped build one of the ports. To counter this Chinese presence, the CIA has overrun Balochistan. With the help of the Pakistani military, it's also also been training forces for black ops in Iran.
YOU SAID that the Pakistani Army is primarily focused not on the Taliban, but India. How has the recent tilt by the U.S. toward India affected this?
THE U.S. has cultivated India, which has been happy with this new relationship, and shifted toward a much greater alignment with the U.S. India has made a huge break with its traditional non-alignment posture of the past.
We saw that come together dramatically right after 9/11, when India, the U.S. and Israel formed a block of so-called democracies against terror. We saw the reactivation of this alignment after the terror attacks in Mumbai. Sadly and tragically, the attack in Mumbai gave India the boost it needed to convince the U.S. to pay attention to India's strategic needs in relationship to Pakistan.
So in the State Department's Af/Pak policy document, you see that India isn't considered one of the regional players that needs to sit together and be told what to do. India has bought itself out of this trap. It's not going to be asked to do anything.
For example, the U.S. isn't going to pressure India to do anything about Kashmir. Because extremist groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, as well as the Pakistani military, are so Kashmiri-focused, the logical thing would be to force India and Pakistan to sit down with the Kashmiris to work out a solution that respects the Kashmiri people's wishes.
Of course, if that were to happen, the Pakistani military wouldn't change, nor would Lashkar-e-Taiba or Jaish-e-Mohammed disband. But it would result in stability along the border with India.
Since India has managed to extricate itself from these regional talks, it has avoided getting pressured toward a solution in Kashmir. But this, in turn, guarantees an ongoing conflict between Pakistan and India over Kashmir, at the expense of the region, and especially the people of Kashmir.
COULDN'T U.S. plans backfire and cause of further destabilization not only of Afghanistan, but now Pakistan as well?
WE CAN'T underestimate the hubris of an imperialist state like the U.S. Despite eight years of war, occupation and counter-insurgency, and seeing that they aren't working and are, in fact, backfiring, U.S. thinking doesn't seem to be shifting at all.
In Pakistan, the U.S. policy could really destabilize the country. A military coup is a real possibility. The military is always happy to step in and overrule civilian democracy. The reason that it hasn't done so is because it suffered such a severe public relations crisis in the last few years of the Musharraf regime. It did not feel it could come back.
But given the way things are going--especially all the finger-wagging by Secretary of State Hilary Clinton against the civilian government for being fragile and incapable of handling things--it seems like the U.S. might support a return to military dictatorship.
The U.S. has always been happier dealing with the Army, whether it has been in power or not. And the Pakistani Army's most important backer is the U.S. state. The U.S. has fed the army, nurtured it and allowed it to become the monster it is. Certainly, the Pakistani military has had no support from below--that all comes from above, and from the U.S. in particular.
The army suffered this huge PR crisis under Musharraf because it was seen as doing the U.S.'s dirty work--which, to be honest, it has been doing for 50 years. So it retreated. Gen Ashfaq Kayani has been very happy to work behind the curtain of the civilian government, because the military ultimately knows that it's always in control. It will do whatever it has to, and let the blame fall at the feet of the civilian government.
But if events turn in such a direction and the army is successful in winning back moral authority, it could take power. Part of the hysterics about "the Taliban are coming; the Taliban are coming" was drummed out for the U.S., and part was for the domestic consumption of the Pakistani elite.
The liberal elite supported the Pakistani Army in attacking the Taliban. This is just after having pushed Musharraf out of power.
There's a constant vacillation among the liberal elite between democratic rule and the Pakistan Army. So knowing that the Pakistani military helped create and backed the Taliban in the first place, the liberal elite supported the attack. This is dangerous, since it is re-legitimizing one of the most reactionary forces in Pakistan--the military.
RECENT OPINION polls in Pakistan show the majority of Pakistanis are concerned about the economic mess, and not terrorism. What do you make of this?
WHAT YOU see in these polls is the split between the haves and have-nots.
The aim of the army has been to win back the liberal elite. Of course, the military would love the support of the masses. But the liberal elite is what matters to them. And on the ground, conditions are so dire for the masses of the people that nothing the Pakistani military is doing is going to shore up mass support for it.
For example, people in Swat say that before this current operation, the Pakistani military targeted the Taliban. In the U.S. and Pakistani media, military leaders played out a drama for our consumption--they pretended to attack the Taliban, when, in fact, they weren't.
The Pakistani state has always provided safe haven to the Taliban, as well as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, even when Musharraf declared them illegal. That was only done to please the U.S. It was obvious these groups were never repressed. When the military raided the offices, no one was there. When it arrested people, it wasn't the leadership. This was all a drama staged for American consumption.
In Swat, the Pakistani military was doing nothing but terrorizing civilians. On top of that, those who lived close to the border with Afghanistan have had to deal with the U.S. drone strikes. So the masses of people feel completely helpless and angry at all sides.
The Pakistani military will never be able to win over those people who actually experienced what is happening on the ground. And certainly those people are not Taliban supporters either, since they have experienced the terror of the Taliban.
But the elite sitting in the cities are really terrified of the Taliban. Now, if one could assume the Taliban could become a major force in those cities, there would be something to be afraid of. But that's not going to happen. My worry is that this whole fear of the Taliban will function to make that the Pakistani elite willing to accept anything else--from the former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, with all of his connections to the fundamentalists, to the military itself.
HOW HAS U.S. pressure for Pakistan to attack the Taliban affected the lawyers movement that developed in opposition to Musharraf after he got rid of Pakistan's chief justice? Now the movement has had to confront the new president, Asif Ali Zardari, the corrupt husband of assassinated political leader Benazir Bhutto who succeeded Musharraf. Does the lawyers' movement offer hope for progressive social change in Pakistan?
TO BEGIN with, some of leadership of the lawyers movement did come from the upper class, but the main section came from the middle class--the petty bourgeoisie--and extended on down from there.
So when the confrontation between the lawyers movement and Zardari came to a head, the liberal elite was against the Long March to demand that Zardari restore the chief justice. The elite's biggest fear is the Taliban--that is, this religious takeover of Pakistan.
Never mind that they have been fine with the general religiosity that has flooded Pakistan since General Zia-ul-Hak's dictatorship. They felt that it had no effect on their lives; they could go to their clubs and say, "So what if the rest of Pakistan is becoming more and more religious."
The liberal elite was thus complicit with this spread of Islamism. It failed to step up and make secularism mainstream the way it used to be. In the 1970s, the political discourse was so different than it is now. This liberal elite therefore supports Zardari uncritically because it sees him as the only secular force.
Musharraf made his whole political career by saying that if it weren't for him, the fundamentalists would take over. He sold this very effectively to the U.S., but also to the upper-class liberals. They very much saw him as their man until that was untenable.
This same kind of thinking is now behind the uncritical support for Zardari, because the elite wrongly believe that if it weren't for him, the whole country would be taken over by the Taliban. The upper-class liberals were therefore critical of the Long March because they thought it was attacking Zardari, and any action or criticism would therefore open the floodgates for the fundamentalists or the army.
HOW HAS the left in Pakistan responded to the military operation against the Taliban?
THE LEFT is very fragmented and small in Pakistan. That, of course, has its own history because of its complete decimation under the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Zia-ul-Haq. Among some elements of the left, there is tremendous confusion about the situation.
For example, I can speak about the Communist Party of Balochistan and its positions. It has been anti-Taliban and pro-secular, and trying to speak from the position of the Swati people. But the discussion for a long time on its e-mail list was that it should support the army going in and attacking the Taliban.
This is a disastrous position. It does not take a very sophisticated analysis to see that the army stands to gain from this whole operation. The action is designed to build up support for the army and show that it is an effective force that needs more money.
Of course, there are always small groups and individuals which have taken a principled stand.
There have also been a few altercations between the principled left and the liberal elite on this issue. The elite's position has been pro-army. The principled leftists have argued against army action because the army is deeply involved in creating this mess, isn't interested in addressing the main issue of the Taliban, and the whole action is window-dressing. So there were actual altercations at public meetings between these two positions.
WHAT SHOULD the principled left position be?
THE PRINCIPLED position is always to be anti-army--not just on an abstract level, but drawing on the actual history of the relation of the army to groups like the Taliban and the Pakistani people. If you've been paying any attention to these things, it boggles the mind that someone would call on and expect the army to protect the people. It shows the ideological confusion.
It's not so long ago that we were marching against the army for its cozy relationship with the US, the "war on terror," and the disappearances under Musharraf. I don't understand the basis on which the left would be calling on the Pakistani Army to solve the current problem.
I think a principled position would denounce the army for its disinterest in dealing with these groups, for actually cultivating these groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan, for its continuing extraction of money from the U.S., and for its ongoing mobilization against India.
Now with India's investment in Afghanistan growing, the Pakistani Army investment in the Taliban is even higher. The Pakistani Army supported the Taliban against the Northern Alliance, which they perceived to be supported by India.
With India giving aid to Afghanistan, establishing an embassy there, and supporting infrastructural projects, the Pakistani Army will have a greater stake in supporting forces like the Taliban as a counterweight. The Pakistani Army is locked in this conflict with India, which is increasingly a sub-imperial power in the region.
WHAT SHOULD the left say about the Taliban?
IT'S SAD and shocking to hear people talk about the Taliban as an expression of class anger. At one level, that analysis is really troubling because it presumes the Taliban has a vast amount of popular support. But if you talk with refugees coming from Swat, it's clear that the Taliban doesn't. We must oppose the Army, but clearly not because we support the Taliban. A principled left position is to oppose both.
A left position must talk about the disenfranchised and the federal issues in Pakistan, as well as expose the Pakistani military and the entire ruling elite's complete disinterest in its people. The Pakistani state has never honored the rights of its federated units. [In the war of 1971], the ruling West Pakistani establishment was happy to let go of East Pakistan [now Bangladesh], rather than give in to its demands for a more balanced relationship between the center and the provinces. And East Pakistan was not a small federated unit; it was the majority of the population at the time.
The West Pakistani establishment constructed an image of East Pakistan as a hotbed of Hindus and communists, and during the army action in 1971, the army brutalized the population of East Pakistan, for which the Pakistani state has never apologized. That's the real face of the army and its relation to the Pakistani people.
A left position should focus also on the developing class anger and struggles among the peasants, as well as among the proletariat across whole of the country, including in Punjab. These struggles must be reported and not ignored. The fact that they are ignored has a huge impact on the balance of power in the political sphere.
If you don't acknowledge that these struggles exist and that they matter, then it can seem as if the Islamists are the only opposition to injustice and imperialism. That's simply not the case, as the massive lawyers movement, as well as these many local class struggles, prove.
WHAT SHOULD the U.S. antiwar movement say about Obama's new surge in Afghanistan and his expansion of the war into Pakistan?
IN LIBERAL circles, Iraq is looked upon as the bad war, of course. That was Obama's main argument. He was never an antiwar candidate. He was against the war in Iraq to some extent as a distraction.
But now, after his election victory, we've seen the split in the antiwar movement between people who opposed the entire "war on terror" and those who just opposed the Iraq war. So there is no effective antiwar movement to counter Obama's escalation of the war into Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In this context, the American military is having a field day. It's obvious for anyone to see that Obama has carried over the personnel, the ideologies and the policies of the Bush Administration.
The Obama administration is certainly trying to repackage essential continuity with the Bush administration's policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But there isn't a whole lot of finessing that needs to be done to sell this to the American public, since there is a whole lot of agreement that the Afghan war is the moral war, and that Pakistan is thought of as an untrustworthy and reluctant ally that is crawling with militants.
In this context, the antiwar movement must educate people about the true situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It must demand that the drone attacks stop, and that the U.S. get out of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
The rhetoric of the Obama administration is disingenuous; the concern is not about getting bin Laden if it ever was. They have had eight years to do this and haven't succeeded. Their real ambitions have little to do with bin Laden, and are actually much larger.
As Pepe Escobar, Tom Hayden and Gareth Porter have argued, the U.S. is planning a 50-year engagement, a new Great Game for control of the region--and that is not something that the U.S. antiwar movement should endorse. The antiwar movement should not let Obama continue this imperial policy of aggression into Afghanistan, Pakistan and potentially lots of other states.
Magical Mystery MiniBreak
This is a picture of the lake:
And here are some wildflowers:
A farm.
A llama.
Preserves.
Chickens.
Someone's little girl.
And here are some wildflowers:
A farm.
A llama.
Preserves.
Chickens.
Someone's little girl.
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Holy Dinah
Who put drugs in the Americans' coffee?
Going for Broke
Six Ways the Af-Pak War Is Expanding
By Tom Engelhardt
Yes, Stanley McChrystal is the general from the dark side (and proud of it). So the recent sacking of Afghan commander General David McKiernan after less than a year in the field and McChrystal's appointment as the man to run the Afghan War seems to signal that the Obama administration is going for broke. It's heading straight into what, in the Vietnam era, was known as "the big muddy."
General McChrystal comes from a world where killing by any means is the norm and a blanket of secrecy provides the necessary protection. For five years he commanded the Pentagon's super-secret Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which, among other things, ran what Seymour Hersh has described as an "executive assassination wing" out of Vice President Cheney's office. (Cheney just returned the favor by giving the newly appointed general a ringing endorsement: "I think you'd be hard put to find anyone better than Stan McChrystal.")
McChrystal gained a certain renown when President Bush outed him as the man responsible for tracking down and eliminating al-Qaeda-in-Mesopotamia leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The secret force of "manhunters" he commanded had its own secret detention and interrogation center near Baghdad, Camp Nama, where bad things happened regularly, and the unit there, Task Force 6-26, had its own slogan: "If you don't make them bleed, they can't prosecute for it." Since some of the task force's men were, in the end, prosecuted, the bleeding evidently wasn't avoided.
In the Bush years, McChrystal was reputedly extremely close to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The super-secret force he commanded was, in fact, part of Rumsfeld's effort to seize control of, and Pentagonize, the covert, on-the-ground activities that were once the purview of the CIA.
Behind McChrystal lies a string of targeted executions that may run into the hundreds, as well as accusations of torture and abuse by troops under his command (and a role in the cover-up of the circumstances surrounding the death of Army Ranger and former National Football League player Pat Tillman). The general has reportedly long thought of Afghanistan and Pakistan as a single battlefield, which means that he was a premature adherent to the idea of an Af-Pak—that is, expanded—war. While in Afghanistan in 2008, the New York Times reported, he was a "key advocate... of a plan, ultimately approved by President George W. Bush, to use American commandos to strike at Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan." This end-of-term Bush program provoked such anger and blowback in Pakistan that it was reportedly halted after two cross-border raids, one of which killed civilians.
All of this offers more than a hint of the sort of "new thinking and new approaches"—to use Secretary of Defense Robert Gates's words—that the Obama administration expects General McChrystal to bring to the devolving Af-Pak battlefield. He is, in a sense, both a legacy figure from the worst days of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld era and the first-born child of Obama-era Washington's growing desperation and hysteria over the wars it inherited.
Hagiography
And here's the good news: We luv the guy. Just luv him to death.
We loved him back in 2006, when Bush first outed him and Newsweek reporters Michael Hirsh and John Barry dubbed him "a rising star" in the Army and one of the "Jedi Knights who are fighting in what Cheney calls 'the shadows.'"
It's no different today in what's left of the mainstream news analysis business. In that mix of sports lingo, Hollywood-ese, and just plain hyperbole that makes armchair war strategizing just so darn much fun, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, for instance, claimed that Centcom commander General David Petraeus, who picked McChrystal as his man in Afghanistan, is "assembling an all-star team" and that McChrystal himself is "a rising superstar who, like Petraeus, has helped reinvent the U.S. Army." Is that all?
When it came to pure, instant hagiography, however, the prize went to Elisabeth Bumiller and Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times, who wrote a front-pager, "A General Steps from the Shadows," that painted a picture of McChrystal as a mutant cross between Superman and a saint.
Among other things, it described the general as "an ascetic who... usually eats just one meal a day, in the evening, to avoid sluggishness. He is known for operating on a few hours' sleep and for running to and from work while listening to audio books on an iPod... [He has] an encyclopedic, even obsessive, knowledge about the lives of terrorists... [He is] a warrior-scholar, comfortable with diplomats, politicians..." and so on. The quotes Bumiller and Mazzetti dug up from others were no less spectacular: "He's got all the Special Ops attributes, plus an intellect." "If you asked me the first thing that comes to mind about General McChrystal... I think of no body fat."
From the gush of good cheer about his appointment, you might almost conclude that the general was not human at all, but an advanced android (a good one, of course!) and the "elite" world (of murder and abuse) he emerged from an unbearably sexy one.
Above all, as we're told here and elsewhere, what's so good about the new appointment is that General McChrystal is "more aggressive" than his stick-in-the-mud predecessor. He will, as Bumiller and Thom Shanker report in another piece, bring "a more aggressive and innovative approach to a worsening seven-year war." The general, we're assured, likes operations without body fat, but with plenty of punch. And though no one quite says this, given his closeness to Rumsfeld and possibly Cheney, both desperately eager to "take the gloves off" on a planetary scale, his mentality is undoubtedly a global-war-on-terror one, which translates into no respect for boundaries, restraints, or the sovereignty of others. After all, as journalist Gareth Porter pointed out recently in a thoughtful Asia Times portrait of the new Afghan War commander, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld granted the parent of JSOC, the Special Operations Command (SOCOM), "the authority to carry out actions unilaterally anywhere on the globe."
Think of McChrystal's appointment, then, as a decision in Washington to dispatch the bull directly to the China shop with the most meager of hopes that the results won't not be smashed Afghans and Pakistanis. The Post's Ignatius even compares McChrystal's boss Petraeus and Obama's special envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, to "two headstrong bulls in a small paddock." He then concludes his paean to all of them with this passage—far more ominous than he means it to be:
"Obama knows the immense difficulty of trying to fix a broken Afghanistan and make it a functioning, modern country. But with his two bulls, Petraeus and Holbrooke, he's marching his presidency into the 'graveyard of empires' anyway."
McChrystal is evidently the third bull, the one slated to start knocking over the tombstones.
An Expanding Af-Pak War
Of course, there are now so many bulls in this particular China shop that smashing is increasingly the name of the game. At this point, the early moves of the Obama administration, when combined with the momentum of the situation it inherited, have resulted in the expansion of the Af-Pak War in at least six areas, which only presage further expansion in the months to come:
1. Expanding Troop Commitment: In February, President Obama ordered a "surge" of 17,000 extra troops into Afghanistan, increasing U.S. forces there by 50%. (Then-commander McKiernan had called for 30,000 new troops.) In March, another 4,000 American military advisors and trainers were promised. The first of the surge troops, reportedly ill-equipped, are already arriving. In March, it was announced that this troop surge would be accompanied by a "civilian surge" of diplomats, advisors, and the like; in April, it was reported that, because the requisite diplomats and advisors couldn't be found, the civilian surge would actually be made up largely of military personnel.
In preparation for this influx, there has been massive base and outpost building in the southern parts of that country, including the construction of 443-acre Camp Leatherneck in that region's "desert of death." When finished, it will support up to 8,000 U.S. troops, and a raft of helicopters and planes. Its airfield, which is under construction, has been described as the "largest such project in the world in a combat setting."
2. Expanding CIA Drone War: The CIA is running an escalating secret drone war in the skies over the Pakistani borderlands with Afghanistan, a "targeted" assassination program of the sort that McChrystal specialized in while in Iraq. Since last September, more than three dozen drone attacks—the Los Angeles Times put the number at 55—have been launched, as opposed to 10 in 2006-2007. The program has reportedly taken out a number of mid-level al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders, but also caused significant civilian casualties, destabilized the Pashtun border areas of Pakistan, and fostered support for the Islamic guerrillas in those regions. As Noah Shachtman wrote recently at his Danger Room website:
"According to the American press, a pair of missiles from the unmanned aircraft killed 'at least 25 militants.' In the local media, the dead were simply described as '29 tribesmen present there.' That simple difference in description underlies a serious problem in the campaign against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. To Americans, the drones over Pakistan are terrorist-killers. In Pakistan, the robotic planes are wiping out neighbors."
Going for Broke
Six Ways the Af-Pak War Is Expanding
By Tom Engelhardt
Yes, Stanley McChrystal is the general from the dark side (and proud of it). So the recent sacking of Afghan commander General David McKiernan after less than a year in the field and McChrystal's appointment as the man to run the Afghan War seems to signal that the Obama administration is going for broke. It's heading straight into what, in the Vietnam era, was known as "the big muddy."
General McChrystal comes from a world where killing by any means is the norm and a blanket of secrecy provides the necessary protection. For five years he commanded the Pentagon's super-secret Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which, among other things, ran what Seymour Hersh has described as an "executive assassination wing" out of Vice President Cheney's office. (Cheney just returned the favor by giving the newly appointed general a ringing endorsement: "I think you'd be hard put to find anyone better than Stan McChrystal.")
McChrystal gained a certain renown when President Bush outed him as the man responsible for tracking down and eliminating al-Qaeda-in-Mesopotamia leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The secret force of "manhunters" he commanded had its own secret detention and interrogation center near Baghdad, Camp Nama, where bad things happened regularly, and the unit there, Task Force 6-26, had its own slogan: "If you don't make them bleed, they can't prosecute for it." Since some of the task force's men were, in the end, prosecuted, the bleeding evidently wasn't avoided.
In the Bush years, McChrystal was reputedly extremely close to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The super-secret force he commanded was, in fact, part of Rumsfeld's effort to seize control of, and Pentagonize, the covert, on-the-ground activities that were once the purview of the CIA.
Behind McChrystal lies a string of targeted executions that may run into the hundreds, as well as accusations of torture and abuse by troops under his command (and a role in the cover-up of the circumstances surrounding the death of Army Ranger and former National Football League player Pat Tillman). The general has reportedly long thought of Afghanistan and Pakistan as a single battlefield, which means that he was a premature adherent to the idea of an Af-Pak—that is, expanded—war. While in Afghanistan in 2008, the New York Times reported, he was a "key advocate... of a plan, ultimately approved by President George W. Bush, to use American commandos to strike at Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan." This end-of-term Bush program provoked such anger and blowback in Pakistan that it was reportedly halted after two cross-border raids, one of which killed civilians.
All of this offers more than a hint of the sort of "new thinking and new approaches"—to use Secretary of Defense Robert Gates's words—that the Obama administration expects General McChrystal to bring to the devolving Af-Pak battlefield. He is, in a sense, both a legacy figure from the worst days of the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld era and the first-born child of Obama-era Washington's growing desperation and hysteria over the wars it inherited.
Hagiography
And here's the good news: We luv the guy. Just luv him to death.
We loved him back in 2006, when Bush first outed him and Newsweek reporters Michael Hirsh and John Barry dubbed him "a rising star" in the Army and one of the "Jedi Knights who are fighting in what Cheney calls 'the shadows.'"
It's no different today in what's left of the mainstream news analysis business. In that mix of sports lingo, Hollywood-ese, and just plain hyperbole that makes armchair war strategizing just so darn much fun, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, for instance, claimed that Centcom commander General David Petraeus, who picked McChrystal as his man in Afghanistan, is "assembling an all-star team" and that McChrystal himself is "a rising superstar who, like Petraeus, has helped reinvent the U.S. Army." Is that all?
When it came to pure, instant hagiography, however, the prize went to Elisabeth Bumiller and Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times, who wrote a front-pager, "A General Steps from the Shadows," that painted a picture of McChrystal as a mutant cross between Superman and a saint.
Among other things, it described the general as "an ascetic who... usually eats just one meal a day, in the evening, to avoid sluggishness. He is known for operating on a few hours' sleep and for running to and from work while listening to audio books on an iPod... [He has] an encyclopedic, even obsessive, knowledge about the lives of terrorists... [He is] a warrior-scholar, comfortable with diplomats, politicians..." and so on. The quotes Bumiller and Mazzetti dug up from others were no less spectacular: "He's got all the Special Ops attributes, plus an intellect." "If you asked me the first thing that comes to mind about General McChrystal... I think of no body fat."
From the gush of good cheer about his appointment, you might almost conclude that the general was not human at all, but an advanced android (a good one, of course!) and the "elite" world (of murder and abuse) he emerged from an unbearably sexy one.
Above all, as we're told here and elsewhere, what's so good about the new appointment is that General McChrystal is "more aggressive" than his stick-in-the-mud predecessor. He will, as Bumiller and Thom Shanker report in another piece, bring "a more aggressive and innovative approach to a worsening seven-year war." The general, we're assured, likes operations without body fat, but with plenty of punch. And though no one quite says this, given his closeness to Rumsfeld and possibly Cheney, both desperately eager to "take the gloves off" on a planetary scale, his mentality is undoubtedly a global-war-on-terror one, which translates into no respect for boundaries, restraints, or the sovereignty of others. After all, as journalist Gareth Porter pointed out recently in a thoughtful Asia Times portrait of the new Afghan War commander, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld granted the parent of JSOC, the Special Operations Command (SOCOM), "the authority to carry out actions unilaterally anywhere on the globe."
Think of McChrystal's appointment, then, as a decision in Washington to dispatch the bull directly to the China shop with the most meager of hopes that the results won't not be smashed Afghans and Pakistanis. The Post's Ignatius even compares McChrystal's boss Petraeus and Obama's special envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, to "two headstrong bulls in a small paddock." He then concludes his paean to all of them with this passage—far more ominous than he means it to be:
"Obama knows the immense difficulty of trying to fix a broken Afghanistan and make it a functioning, modern country. But with his two bulls, Petraeus and Holbrooke, he's marching his presidency into the 'graveyard of empires' anyway."
McChrystal is evidently the third bull, the one slated to start knocking over the tombstones.
An Expanding Af-Pak War
Of course, there are now so many bulls in this particular China shop that smashing is increasingly the name of the game. At this point, the early moves of the Obama administration, when combined with the momentum of the situation it inherited, have resulted in the expansion of the Af-Pak War in at least six areas, which only presage further expansion in the months to come:
1. Expanding Troop Commitment: In February, President Obama ordered a "surge" of 17,000 extra troops into Afghanistan, increasing U.S. forces there by 50%. (Then-commander McKiernan had called for 30,000 new troops.) In March, another 4,000 American military advisors and trainers were promised. The first of the surge troops, reportedly ill-equipped, are already arriving. In March, it was announced that this troop surge would be accompanied by a "civilian surge" of diplomats, advisors, and the like; in April, it was reported that, because the requisite diplomats and advisors couldn't be found, the civilian surge would actually be made up largely of military personnel.
In preparation for this influx, there has been massive base and outpost building in the southern parts of that country, including the construction of 443-acre Camp Leatherneck in that region's "desert of death." When finished, it will support up to 8,000 U.S. troops, and a raft of helicopters and planes. Its airfield, which is under construction, has been described as the "largest such project in the world in a combat setting."
2. Expanding CIA Drone War: The CIA is running an escalating secret drone war in the skies over the Pakistani borderlands with Afghanistan, a "targeted" assassination program of the sort that McChrystal specialized in while in Iraq. Since last September, more than three dozen drone attacks—the Los Angeles Times put the number at 55—have been launched, as opposed to 10 in 2006-2007. The program has reportedly taken out a number of mid-level al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders, but also caused significant civilian casualties, destabilized the Pashtun border areas of Pakistan, and fostered support for the Islamic guerrillas in those regions. As Noah Shachtman wrote recently at his Danger Room website:
"According to the American press, a pair of missiles from the unmanned aircraft killed 'at least 25 militants.' In the local media, the dead were simply described as '29 tribesmen present there.' That simple difference in description underlies a serious problem in the campaign against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. To Americans, the drones over Pakistan are terrorist-killers. In Pakistan, the robotic planes are wiping out neighbors."