Source: GEORGE BARNSBY DAILY BLOG NO.160 MONDAY 21ST JUNE 2007

http://www.gbpeopleslibrary.co.uk

ARREST BLAIR, WAR CRIMINAL, SERIAL KILLER AND VANDAL NOW.
Simon Jenkins in the Guardian 8 June has been the first to record that British and American collusion in the pillaging of Iraq’s heritage is a scandal that will outlive the illegal and racist war. Under Saddam you were likely to be arrested and shot if you stole an antiquity. Under the US and Britain you are liable to be shot if you don’t steal one. Iraq is the site of some of the irreplaceable Wonders of the World. For instance Ur is reputedly the oldest city on earth, but the great zigguratt is pock marked with shrapnel and its national Museum in Baghdad has been looted not only by permission of the American but with their active participation.

Blair’s crimes are those of war criminal, serial killer and cultural vandal and it is no longer fanciful to point the example of the Nazi war criminals in 1945. They were charged at a newly invented War Crimes Tribunal in the heart of a ruined Germany at Nurenberg in a specially built prison and court premises with mass murder and crimes against humanity.

Blair’s trial will take place under different circumstances. For instance he might be Impeached, as recently suggested by General Michael Rose. This has not been done since Cromwellian times and might remind us of the time when Englishmen led the world by cutting off the head of a king and existing for some years as a Republic. At the moment Parliament is too craven for Impeachment to succeed, but times change fast and this could be Blair’s fate.

Other ways are possible in our more sophisticated world. For instance Blair might be tried at the Court that he himself set up in 2000, namely the Court of Human Rights. This would be poetic justice. Another possibility is the European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg in France. Finally Blair could be arraigned before the International Criminal Court dealing with the most serious crimes such as genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

But it is not only Blair that we are concerned with but those who have aided and abetted him. Chief of these is Gordon Brown who seems not only eager to pick up the bloody mantle of Blair but to add war crimes of his own. Then there is the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith who not only criminally declared the war in Iraq legal and thus gave Blair his excuse to support the war, but has supported Blair in every other illegal act that Blair has performed.
Next we should mention several of those currently competing for the post of Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, a post Brown, assuming that he becomes Prime Minister, could abolish with a snap of his fingers. I am thinking particularly of Peter Hain, Harriet Harman, Alan Johnson and even Hilary Benn if he doesn’t back track soon, all of whom have been ministers in the Blair government and thus a party to his crimes. Also Hazel Blears so devoted to Tony Blair that it seems she is willing to go down with the sinking ship. To those can be added Labour MPs who continue to support the war in Iraq. Also civil servants and Heads of Departments often guilty of giving wrong advice and bludgeoning Ministers into decisions they would not have taken on their own. When Blair stands trial, there will be many who share his guilt.

I would mention only one other category of people. That is journalists and newscaster who today have unprecedented power and are virtually the sole means of our being given truthful news. I pick out Jeremy Paxman, Andrew Marr, Jon Snow, Kirsty Wark and Martha Kierney, all members of the ruling class through their education at public schools and Oxbridge who have protected Blair by never challenging him on the war in Iraq and in their arrogance and conceit have for 37 times ignored the urging of a plebeian like myself to explain their actions.

PATRIOTISM AND LOCAL HISTORY .
British Day, I am told has just come and gone . I have expressed myself before on this question but it bears repeating. I see no reason at all to be proud of a gynaecological accident which saw me dropped on a slice of land called England where the people are much the same as those elsewhere, some good, some not so good and others so awful I wouldn’t touch them with a barge pole let alone a flag pole. Of those who want to wrap the Union Jack around themselves and me I recall the words, ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel’. often attributed to Winston Churchill, but actually said by another great patriotic Englishman Dr.Samuel Johnson, whose biographer, James Boswell, amends this to read, not the last, ‘but the first’ refuge of a scoundrel.

In my search for a definition of my Englishness I recall the famous statement, ‘I am a citizen of the world my aim is to do good’. This occurs in various forms including Baden Powel, but I prefer the version of Pablo Casels, ‘Love of one’s country is a splendid thing, but why should love stop at the borders’.

My next exemplar in the search for my Englishness is that great patriot, and scourge of all hypocrites and humbugs, W.S.Gilbert. You may remember that in the comic opera HMS Pinafore, Gilbert had a character with a choice of nationality. ‘He might have been a Roosian, A Frenchman or a Proosian, or perhaps I’tal-ien’. However after mature reflection, ‘In spite of all temptations to belong to other nations he remained an Hinglishman, he rem-aaaaained an Hinglishman’. And if that is good enough for Gilbert and Sullivan it is good enough for me. I am an HINGLISHMAN.

But my best definition was that of Karl Marx, ‘Workers of the World Unite, You have nothing to lose but your Chains’. This was certainly true of me when in 1939 I was conscripted to fight for ‘my country’ and possessed nothing but two suits and a bicycle. Clearly some people had much more of this country than I had and some were enlisting me to fight against my fellow working men in a war waged, like the 1st World War to re-divide the world among capitalists.

Whether Marx’s definition remains true I am still not quite sure, but I know that Gordon Brown, who wants to burden me with a British identity that I don’t want and even Tristram Hunt a true English born aristocrat who writes eruditely on this question cannot separate my Englishness of what I am from the Britishness that I don’t want to be saddled with.

In the meantime, I have lived a long life, been round the world and have been not only a history teacher who teaches history from a text book written and researched by some one else, but a historian who has researched history for himself. And many strange thin g s have I discovered.

For instance, I was brought up in the town the Romans built on the banks of the Thames and called Londinium. Except that the Romans didn’t build it. Few of the invading army were Romans, most being Celtic tribesman from Western or Eastern Europe who had been trained to do the skilled work while the unskilled work was done by ‘ancient Britons’ of many tribes.

The same is true of Roman roads built throughout Britain. But particular to my studies, the Roman road which branched off from Watling Street and went through Wolverhampton which I was the first to excavate with a party of school children from Etheridge Secondary Modern School along the line of the road at Barnhurst Farm. This was built by labourers whose descendents were to become Mercians and who were probably too few to be able to resist the alien invaders of their land.

This Mercian ‘nationality’ has recently been in the news from revived interest in the Battle of Tettenhall fought either in Tettenhall or Wednesfield and where possibly in Henwood Road where I live Anglo-Saxon tribesman charged down the steep slope to defeat the Viking invaders who fled to their ships moored on Smestow Brook and thence down the Severn and back to Scandinavia with their ill-gotten loot. To excavate in Tettenhall or Wednesfield and turn up remains of tribesman or their weapons is the exciting prospect for children and adults in this neck of the woods. History does mean something to us here.

Finally I want to deal with another feature of local history. Just before Wolverhampton’s millennial year in 1985 which is dated to the time of the discovery of the first written document of the charter to Wulfruna of the ‘gift’ of Wolverhampton, I discovered that Lady Wulfruna was not the gracious benefactress beloved of all, but the Mrs.Thatcher of her age who received a gift she was not entitled to accept from a person who was not entitled to give it, namely the King of Wessex, of what was virtually the whole of Wolverhampton.

Inspired by my fellow midlander, Williiam Shakespeare who was disparagingly said to know little Latin and even less Greek, but became one of the world’s enduring history writers, I who had no Greek or Latin or even Anglo-Saxon was inspired to research what was, and remains the only history of Wolverhampton adopting a Marxist outlook of class struggle. The booklet ‘The Origins of Wolverhampton to 85 0 AD’ was published by Wolverhampton Borough Council to celebrate the town’s millennium. The booklet argued that although the Charter of King Ethelred to Wulfrun in 985 was the first written document of the town’s history, it was the final act of assigning land to private persons land which had formerly been the property of the whole community. So from the time the Romans landed bringing with them a class society we have had ever since, in Anglo-Saxon times an unholy alliance of Church and State whereby the state punished all those who wished to return to a classless society and the Church threatened everlasting damnation to those who refused to accept the new religion.

So history is made by the common people and should be written by them, not as an academic exercise, but to illuminate the history of the Multicultural world which is emerging in the 21st century.

Source: redpepper.org

Robtel Neajai Pailey
June 2007

Slavery isn’t dead, writes Robtel Neajai Pailey. Its modern-day variant is just found on a different kind of plantation

Emmanuel B is 30, a slender five foot three, and a labourer whose piercing brown eyes tell unspeakable truths. He’s not the kind of slave-labourer we’re familiar with from 19th-century plantations in the Deep South of the United States. Instead, Emmanuel is a modern-day plantation labourer in 21st-century, post-conflict Liberia, and the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company is his unyielding master. Like many workers on Firestone’s largest rubber plantation, Emmanuel was born in Harbel, has lived in Harbel all his life, and will most likely waste away in Harbel.

As westerners drive around in their heavy-duty SUVs, propelled along on the black gold of Firestone tires, Emmanuel wakes up at the crack of dawn to tap raw latex from 800 rubber trees daily. His clothes are tattered and his shoulders covered in red puss-infected blisters from carrying buckets full of raw latex suspended from an iron pole to the Firestone processing plant two miles from his tapping site.

Emmanuel was gracious enough to demonstrate what a tapper does from sun-up to midmorning. With a pitchfork suspended in the air, he extended his long wiry arms to ease the raw latex out of the trees and into the small red cups that catch it. The drip-drip-drip of the whitecoated liquid was almost as laborious to witness as Emmanuel’s daily task – another 799 trees still to go after this one. For Emmanuel and his fellow tappers, a 5am start is the only means of meeting their daily quotas; their wages are reduced by half if they fail to do so. Some have begun to use their children to complete the Herculean task.

I visited the Firestone rubber plantation for the first time in December 2006 while on a research fact-finding mission. I decided to take a break from high browed academic work, and visit the sprawling modern day encampment I had heard so many horror stories about. It’s what I imagined the South to look like during the century or so of chattel slavery in the United States, with the hustle bustle activity of plantation life and the accompanying strokes of exploitation.

As my brother-in-law, Christopher Pabai, and I pulled into the one million acre – and constantly expanding – plantation, we were welcomed by an ungodly stench, a stench I can only compare to the smell of rotten cheese. Not just ordinary rotten cheese, but the kind that has been drenched in burning oil, steamrolled on a conveyor belt, and neatly packaged for nonhuman consumption. That’s what raw latex smells like when it’s being processed.

Rather than wearing masks to protect their noses from the assault, the plantation workers ingest the foul stench day in and day out. It took all my willpower not to retch all over Firestone’s perfectly manicured lawn or lush green golf course that senior management frequents while on hiatus from their back-breaking overseeing.

But the foul stench is the least of the workers’ worries.

While England celebrates its 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade, plantation workers in Liberia are trapped in a time warp of monumental proportions. They exist in the parallel universe of multinational corporate checkmate, where the prize goes to the highest exploiter. Firestone has been playing the chess pieces of Liberia’s rubber pawns since the company signed a concession agreement with the Liberian government in 1926 to lease one million acres of land for six cents per acre – an abominable exchange given the astronomical dividends garnered from rubber sales then and now.

In 2005, Liberia’s transitional government signed another concession agreement for an extra 37 years of rubber slavery. Rubber is Liberia’s largest export, and Firestone its largest international corporate exploiter, I mean employer, to date. The country and its people have paid a high price for the asymmetrical relationship.

History challenges us to stay on a forward moving dialectic of change. The Firestone example shows us that an ironic distortion of that dialectic is taking place right under our noses. Slavery isn’t dead, it’s manufactured in the rubber we use daily. We owe it to Emmanuel and his comrades on the Firestone Rubber Plantation to change the course of history, to make a clean break from modernday slavery and its peculiar 21stcentury manifestations. We owe it to ourselves.

For more information on the struggle against Firestone, visit the Stop Firestone Campaign website at www.stopfirestone.org. Liberian native Robtel Neajai Pailey is a graduate student at the University of Oxford and a multi-media producer for Fahamu/ Pambazuka News (www.pambazuka.org), which has published a longer version of this article

Source: Opednews

June 11, 2007

By Stephen Soldz

Late last week the Council of Europe released a report on the CIA’s secret prisons in Eastern Europe. The report concluded that, contrary to those government’s claims, that prisons existed in both Poland and Romania. Perhaps most importantly for opponents of torture, the report gives a detailed account inside one of these torture facilities. In this description we can see the results of decades of CIA study, aided by many psychologists and psychiatrists, of how to destroy human beings, the fruits of its MKULTRA program and the detailed implementation of the in the KUBARK and other torture manuals.

One of the problems the CIA faced in conducting their research on soul-destruction was the lack of available research subjects who could be subject to the full panoply of techniques or what they called “terminal experiments.” It is thus likely that the CIA’s psychologists, like Scott Shumate (who, according to his biographical statement “has been with several of the key apprehended terrorists”), were not involved solely in the construction of this hell, but also in studying its effects so as to better refine the techniques.

Since most will not read the entire report, I have extracted key Sections from the Report on life inside these American Torture Centers. Now, for a vision of life in hell:

ii. Reconstructing the conditions in a CIA secret detention cell

38. We must try to visualise the ordeal of secret detention in order to be able to appreciate fully the physical and psychological plight of its victims. For this purpose, I am attempting in this section to reconstruct as many aspects as possible of the conditions in a CIA secret detention cell.

239. A reconstruction of this nature is the first step towards regaining respect for fundamental human rights, because it forces us to ask ourselves the question: “what if the tables were turned?” This is the root of the Geneva Conventions and the military’s traditional reluctance to mistreat prisoners of war.

240. In this context, the policy debate in the United States around detainee treatment has given rise to interesting contributions, many of which rightly assert that “issues of detainee treatment raise profound questions of American values”.212 In the US political sphere, the McCain Amendment213 to he Detainee Treatment Act seems to offer us a threshold for the specific acts that we should and should not allow with regard to the detention, transfer and interrogation of foreign captives. This threshold can be summarised as follows: If even one single American captive were to be held under these conditions or treated in this manner, and the American population would find it abhorrent or unacceptable, then America should not be practising the acts in question against detainees whom it holds from other countries

241. The fact of being detained outside any judicial or ICRC control in an unknown location is already a form of torture, as Louise Arbour, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has said. All the member states of the Council of Europe have a duty not to tolerate such treatment either on their territory or elsewhere.

242. In the following paragraphs I seek to convey the most intimate, always undeniably human experiences of being held and interrogated in such conditions. I have grouped these conditions under the following five thematic headings: confinement, isolation and insufficient provision; careful physical
conditioning of detainee and cell; permanent surveillance; mondane routine becomes unforgettable memories; and exertion of physical and psychological stress.

243. The descriptive testimonies on which the text is based have been kept strictly anonymous – largely upon the request of those who provided them – in order to protect the sources from which they emanate. These sources are mostly former or current detainees, human rights advocates, or people who have worked in the establishment or operations of CIA secret prisons.

244. The persons who endured these ordeals have also been granted anonymity. The following conditions and characteristics applied to several persons in every case, not specifically to any one individual.

iii. Confinement, isolation and insufficient provision

245. Detainees were taken to their cells by strong people who wore black outfits, masks that covered their whole faces, and dark visors over their eyes. Clothes were cut up and torn off; many detainees were then kept naked for several weeks.

246. Detainees were only a bucket to urinate into, a bowl from which to eat breakfast and dinner (delivered at intervals, in silence) and a blanket.

247. Detainees went through months of solitary confinement and extreme sensory deprivation in cramped cells, shackled and handcuffed at all times.

248. Detainees were given old, black blankets that were too small to lie upon at the same time as attempting to cover oneself.

249. Detainees received unfamiliar food, like canned beef and rice, many only ate in order to give some warmth against cruel cold weather.

250. Food was raw, tasteless and was often tipped out carelessly on a shallow dish so part of it would waste. Apart from a thin foam mattress to lie on or rest against, many cells had a bare floor and blank walls.

251. At one point in 2004, eight persons were being kept together in one CIA facility in Europe, but were administered according to a strict regime of isolation. Contact between them through sight or sound was forbidden… and prevented unless it was expressly decided to create limited conditions where they could see or come into contact with one another because it would serve [the CIA’s] intelligence-gathering objectives to allow it.

252. A common feature for many detainees was the four-month isolation regime. During this period of over 120 days, absolutely no human contact was granted with anyone but masked, silent guards. There’s not meant to be anything to hold onto. No familiarity, no comfort, nobody to talk to, no way out. It’s a long time to be all alone with your thoughts.

a. Careful physical conditioning of detainee and cell

253. In the process of being transferred into secret detention, all detainees are physically screened in order to assess their health and conditioning, identify any injuries or scars they may bear, and get a complete picture to compare them against once they are in detention. These screenings, for which the subject is stripped naked, used a body chart, similar to the inventory diagrams provided by rent-a-car companies upon leasing a vehicle, on which specific marks are noted. In every case, the subject is videotaped or at least photographed naked before transfer.

254. The air in many cells emanated from a ventilation hole in the ceiling, which was often controlled to produce extremes of temperature: sometimes so hot one would gasp for breath,sometimes freezing cold.

255. Many detainees described air conditioning for deliberate discomfort.

256. Detainees were exposed at times to over-heating in the cell; at other times drafts of freezing breeze.

257. Detainees never experienced natural light or natural darkness, although most were blindfolded many times so they could see nothing.

b. Permanent surveillance

258. Detainees speak hatefully about the surveillance cameras, positioned so that in every inch of the cell they would be observed.

259. Detainees were also listened to by interrogators, over hidden microphones in the walls.

260. Notwithstanding the presence of video cameras inside the cells, masked prison guards regularly looked in and knocked on the door of the cell, demanding detainees to raise their hands to show that they are alive.

c. Mundane routines become unforgettable memories

261. Breakfast was delivered in the morning, followed by lunch in the early afternoon. The morning food was typically two or three triangles of cheese with no foil, two slices of tomato, some boiled potatoes, bread and olives. The afternoon food was typically boiled white rice with sliced luncheon meat.

262. On some special occasions, including certain religious holidays, special foods including cooked meat with sauce, nuts and dates, fresh fruit and vegetables, or pieces of chocolate were delivered to the cells. There was even provision for treats like unwrapped candy bars and dessert cakes.

263. Special routines developed around the delivery of food. The light bulb, which was always on, would be briefly turned off; the food would be delivered; and then the light bulb would be turned back on again. There was a hatch in the door of the cell for delivery of food but it was completelyunpredictable whether the guards would use the hatch, or open the doors and bring the food in.

264. Detainees had a bucket for a toilet, which was about a foot deep and ten inches in diameter.

265. At time the electricity supply went dead. The music stopped and the light went out. For a brief period one could heard different voices shouting, some more distant than others but all incoherent.

d. Exertion of physical and psychological stress

266. There was a shackling ring in the wall of the cell, about half a metre up off the floor. Detainees’ hands and feet were clamped in handcuffs and leg irons. Bodies were regularly forced into contorted shapes and chained to this ring for long, painful periods.

267. Most persons in CIA custody attempted sooner or later to resist or protest their treatment and interrogation. Yet their efforts would largely be in vain. According to one source involved in CIA interrogation: “you know they are starting to crack when they come back at you; when they get really vocal or they try to challenge your authority. So you hold out… you push them over the edge”.

268. The sound most commonly heard in cells was a constant, low-level hum of white noise from loudspeakers. Other recollections speak of an external humming noise, like aircraft, engines or a generator. The constant noise was punctuated by blasts of loud Western music – rock music, rap music and thumping beats, or distorted verses from the Koran, or irritating noises – thunder, planes taking off, cackling laughter, the screams of women and children.

269. Detainees were subjected to relentless noise and disturbance were deprived of the chance to sleep.

270. The torture music was turned on, or at least made much louder, as punishment for perceived infractions like raising one’s voice, calling out, or not waving quickly enough when guards demanded a response from you.

271. The gradual escalation of applied physical and psychological exertion, combined in some cases with more concentrated pressure periods for the purposes of interrogation, is said to have caused many of those held by the CIA to develop enduring psychiatric and mental problems.

The report also describes why these details matter, why it is crucial for us, the free, to undrestand the prisoners and the conditions they are subject to:

i. Re-humanising the people held in secret detention

232. The policy of secret detentions and renditions pursued by the current US administration has created a dangerous precedent of dehumanisation. Many of the people caught up in the CIA’s global spider’s web208 are rightly described as “ghost prisoners”209 because they have been made invisible for many years

233. Meanwhile the US Government’s descriptions of its captives in the “war on terror” can only serve to exacerbate this dehumanising effect. The Administration routinely speaks of “aliens”, “deadly enemies” and “faceless terrorists,” with the clear intention of dehumanising its detainees in the eyes of the American population. The NGO community, for its part, calls them “ghost prisoners”.

234. By characterising the people held in secret detention as “different” from us – not as humans, but as ghosts, aliens or terrorists – the US Government tries to lead us into the trap of thinking they are not like us, they are not subjects of the law, therefore their human rights do not deserve protection.

235. President Bush has laid this trap on multiple occasions as a means of diverting attention from the abusive conditions in which certain detainees in US custody are being held.211 Our team heard first-hand how distinctions are drawn in the mind of guards and interrogators: in an interview with one of our CIA sources who has extensive knowledge of detainee treatment, we asked whether a known form of detainee treatment should be considered as abusive. “Here’s my question,” replied our source. “Was the guy a terrorist? ‘Cause if he’s a terrorist then I figure he got what was coming to him. I’ve met a lot of them and one thing I know for sure is that they ain’t human – they ain’t like you and me.”

236. Yet what has struck me most often as I have examined the cases of scores of people held in secret detention – some of whom I have met – is precisely the opposite: these detainees’ ordeals have affected me profoundly as I have always thought of them as fellow human beings. The worst criminals, even those who deserve the harshest punishment, must be given humane treatment and a fair trial. This, moreover, is what makes us a civilised society.

237. It is for these reasons that we must combat their being seen as “ghost prisoners” by repeatedly pointing out that persons detained in the course of counter-terrorist operations are and remain human beings whose human rights must be protected and who are entitled to humane treatment as laid down in the ECHR. In this section of my report I have set out expressly to place the emphasis on the human aspects of these people held in secret detention.

We can be sure that the American Psychological Association, fond of issuing resolutions against torture as it is, will have not one word to utter about the existence of these torture centers or about the systematic use of psychological torture techniques in them. After all, the misuse of psychological knowledge for evil is no concern of the APA, if that evil is done by the United States government, with the aid of United States psychologists. The APA, after all, puts such psychologists on its decision-making panels rather than censure them.

Authors Website: http://soldzresearch.com/stephensoldz

Authors Bio: Stephen Soldz is psychoanalyst, psychologist, public health researcher, and faculty member at the Institute for the Study of Violence of the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. He is a member of Roslindale Neighbors for Peace and Justice. He maintains the Psyche, Science, and Society blog.

Source: The Christian Science Monitor

Commentary > Daniel Schorr

from the June 8, 2007 edition

New White House Plan: Keep US troops in Iraq permanently.

Permanent bases will damage America’s image in the Middle East.

Washington – President Bush used to be fond of saying that American troops would stay in Iraq as long as needed and not a day longer. He isn’t saying that anymore.

The new word from the White House is that American troops would be stationed in Iraq permanently on the “Korean model.” The analogy is a little strained. The United States has helped to mend the rift between North and South Korea since 1953. But South Korea has had no internal insurgency to worry about.

The plan for permanent bases in Iraq must have been long in the making. The president ignored a recommendation of the Baker-Hamilton Commission that he state that America seeks no permanent bases in Iraq. At one point last year, the Senate and House passed an amendment to the military-spending bill banning the establishment of permanent bases in Iraq. The bill went to conference and then the ban on bases, adopted by both chambers, mysteriously disappeared.

The building of four bases along with a gigantic new American embassy in the Green Zone on the Tigris River has been moving along rapidly. The bases will have runways two miles long to accommodate the largest American planes. The Balad base north of Baghdad covers 14 square miles. Another base is planned for the area that was ancient Babylon.

The new embassy, which will be the largest American mission in the world, will be complete with swimming pool and commissary. Retired General Anthony Zinni has said that permanent bases are “a stupid idea.” He said that they will damage America’s image in the whole region.

These huge installations must be intended for more than Iraqi stabilization. Former President Jimmy Carter said in a speech in February of last year that “the reason we went into Iraq was to establish a permanent military base in the Gulf region.” And few are missing the point that bases in Iraq will keep American might on Iran’s doorstep.

• Daniel Schorr is a senior news analyst at National Public Radio.

Source: Z Net

The Two-Party System

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India’s ruling think gurus are forever on the lookout for a smart panacea for what they perceive the country’s ills. In arguing for a two-party political system, the idea seems to be to subdue the proliferation of organic discontent among the lower orders of the polity by imposing a mechanical structural arrangement from the top.

The line that is sought to be pushed here is that the multiplicity of political formations in India bears no significant relation to felt grievances on the ground, or to any respectable ideological persuasions that diverge from the “mainlines” of India’s party-political apparatus as reflected in the careers of the two “national” parties.

Since such multiplicity is viewed as merely a capricious nuisance issuing from the limited purposes of individual satraps in the “peripheries,” a managerial answer is sought to be floated to bind these caprices into two oceanic organizations into which all the haywire streams can be assimilated. The problem of political waste, as it were, can then be resolved.

Charmingly simple as the two-party formulation seems, the informing impetus behind the offer is far either from innocent or benign. Indeed, it is something of a disappointment that as astute a student of the issue as Paranjoy Guha Thakurta (author of A Time of Coalitions), and one who is usually alertly critical of most right-wing emphases in India’s political life, should have missed the calling to underline forthrightly the class-based design from which the two-party formulation, recommended most recently by the President of India himself, issues.

In a recent lead article in the Hindustan Times (May 18) he expends most of his text on indicating the unlikelihood of a two-party system consolidating any time soon in India rather than on critiquing the ideological source of the poser. Indeed, while stressing that something may be said “in favour of many parties and coalitions co-existing in a heterogeneous, plural, deeply divided and highly hierarchical society such as ours,” he is willing to concede “that a bipolar polity is better than a fragmented multi-party political system.” It is of course possible that writing for the HT such a critique may have been inadmissible.

II

To put the matter baldly, the proponents of the two-party thesis do not have in mind formations that are ideological polarities. As in all other matters (militarism, technological ascendance, great consumerist prowess, centralized mega-markets—all that with a dash of “values”), the idea is to emulate the political superstructure of the American system wherein the two parties are in fact one and the same—a Tweedledum and a Tweedledee that agree permanently on the nature and components of the base that is to be protected and furthered at all costs.

The substance of that base may be encapsulated briefly in the following unstated stipulations:

that Capitalism is provenly the only (and eternally) valid system of
economic organization;

that private ownership of the means of production and consequent
expropriation by the owning class benefit all citizens;

that all varieties of the socialist experiment must be understood to have “failed” once and for all;

that the ills that often accompany Capitalist democracy (poverty,
unemployment, malnutrition, waste, dearth of equitous health care,
gender discrimination, racism, bigotry, insensate corruption and crime,
and war, to name just a few) do not constitute “failure”;

that these consequences do not flow from the Capitalist system but, as Malthus, Darwin and others have so astutely pointed out, from “nature”;

that the free-market is not the expression of man-made preference but reflects the principle of liberty that is autonomous, ordained, and thus above and beyond “ideology”;

that the state must never interfere in the operations of the free market, but must at all times retain sufficient coercive apparatus to intervene whenever disgruntled sections of the polity seek to thwart those operations;

that the state, however secular, must retain a regard for “values” since, apart from their intrinsic worth, these come in handy as the cultural arm of control, discipline, and social punishment;

and that all challenges to the authority of the state thus constituted must be unequivocally dubbed at the least, malafide, and, at their worst, “terroristic”, deserving of the severest reprisal, even if for the time being the requirement of reprisal involves the Capitalist democratic state in contravening the noble principles of liberty from which it derives its legitimacy;

that the informing principles of equality and fraternity must not be
construed to mean that equality and fraternity can either be obtained or are even desirable of attainment.

Going down that table of substance, it should be obvious that the two major, “national” parties in the Indian political system share most of its meat. It may be argued that the one area in which the Congress party has consistently made protestations of divergence from the BJP is the one that concerns allegiance to secularism. Yet, it is curious that not once in the sixty years of India’s existence as an independent republic, especially during the dark moments of intense right-wing Hindu resurgence, has the Congress given a general call to the people to fill the streets in defence of secularism—a lack that is starkly underscored, for example, by recent events in Turkey (commonly perceived as an “Islamic” nation). Not a day passes when hundreds of thousands of Turkish citizens do not materialize from all corners to make explicit their preference for separation of state and religion. Despite every vicissitude, the Congress remains wedded to a notion of secularism that, rather than disregarding religion in the operations of the state (not to speak of coming down with any heavy hand on its nefarious attempts to usurp the state), looks upon all religions with a benign and equitous concern—a stance that repeatedly leads to a policy of catering. It is hardly a secret that many distinguished Cabinet ministers reserve a corner, not just at home (which would be fine) but in their offices for a holy idol or two.

III

It is understandable, therefore, why the two-party slogan should receive instant favour from India’s upwardly-mobile elites. Everyday contemptuous of politicians, their strongest desire is to evacuate Indian democracy of “politics” in toto. An ideal democracy is visualized as one wherein managers and technocrats take over the state, wherein “knowledge commissions” distribute enlightened and efficient governance to the hinterland, and wherein people at large are taught to keep their place and peace, if not through persuasion, then by the might of the regimented state.

Alas, sixty years of democratic practice, however guided, has brought home to the people of India the realization that the interests and predilections of the major parties do not necessarily reflect their felt needs and urges. Be it the issue of democratic rights and concrete equality in law, be it the matter of justice in relation to talent and opportunity, or of livelihood and stake in the environments which they traditionally populate, be it the matter of full and free cultural and political expression, or be it the question whether “we the people” truly possess the Constitution that operates in their name—Capitalist democracy, unbeknown to itself, teaches them that other and better things are desirable and possible.

And the agendas of those aspirations may not, as they patently do not, bear convergence with the hegemonic designs that inform the two-party slogan. Often they see in the major national parties a relay team that but carries further forward the same baton. And writ over that baton is often one and the same message as well.

It is just as well, then, to acknowledge (sooner the better) that India’s democratic career and agenda has not arrived at the finishing line. By no stretch of the imagination has history ended. And also to acknowledge, crucially, that the plethora of political expressions that obtain are not simply the evidence of some naughty, pointless mischief, directed crudely at the best interests of the state, but projections of dissent and divergence that issue from concrete historical need.

In the years to come, it would be worthwhile to explore the possibility of gathering the chief contending features of that divergence into a broad coalition of right-wing, centrist, and left-wing forces. Perhaps such a process is already underway. But to hope or propagate that two parties, clones at best, may be trusted to answer the call of India’s incomparably diverse and complex polity is to live in a cloistered complacence of potentially dangerous consequence.

Let it be understood that consensus about the political superstructure can happen only when a consensus exists in regard to the base. In a situation where some seventy percent of the population remain unfulfilled by the character of the base, it is folly to wish that what “knowledge commissions” at the top believe to be knowledge is truly so.

Managers and technocrats but run the given; politics seeks to make the new. And in India there is a lot of making waiting to be done that would seem to lie beyond the will or ideological preference of the two major parties.

badri.raina@gmail.com

Source: The Guardian, London

British and American collusion in the pillaging of Iraq’s heritage is a scandal that will outlive any passing conflict

Simon Jenkins
Friday June 8, 2007

Fly into the American air base of Tallil outside Nasiriya in central Iraq and the flight path is over the great ziggurat of Ur, reputedly the earliest city on earth. Seen from the base in the desert haze or the sand-filled gloom of dusk, the structure is indistinguishable from the mounds of fuel dumps, stores and hangars. Ur is safe within the base compound. But its walls are pockmarked with wartime shrapnel and a blockhouse is being built over an adjacent archaeological site. When the head of Iraq’s supposedly sovereign board of antiquities and heritage, Abbas al-Hussaini, tried to inspect the site recently, the Americans refused him access to his own most important monument.

Yesterday Hussaini reported to the British Museum on his struggles to protect his work in a state of anarchy. It was a heart breaking presentation. Under Saddam you were likely to be tortured and shot if you let someone steal an antiquity; in today’s Iraq you are likely to be tortured and shot if you don’t. The tragic fate of the national museum in Baghdad in April 2003 was as if federal troops had invaded New York city, sacked the police and told the criminal community that the Metropolitan was at their disposal. The local tank commander was told specifically not to protect the museum for a full two weeks after the invasion. Even the Nazis protected the Louvre.

When I visited the museum six months later, its then director, Donny George, proudly showed me the best he was making of a bad job. He was about to reopen, albeit with half his most important objects stolen. The pro-war lobby had stopped pretending that the looting was nothing to do with the Americans, who were shamefacedly helping retrieve stolen objects under the dynamic US colonel, Michael Bogdanos (author of a book on the subject). The vigorous Italian cultural envoy to the coalition, Mario Bondioli-Osio, was giving generously for restoration.

The beautiful Warka vase, carved in 3000BC, was recovered though smashed into 14 pieces. The exquisite Lyre of Ur, the world’s most ancient musical instrument, was found badly damaged. Clerics in Sadr City were ingeniously asked to tell wives to refuse to sleep with their husbands if looted objects were not returned, with some success. Nothing could be done about the fire-gutted national library and the loss of five centuries of Ottoman records (and works by Piccasso and Miro). But the message of winning hearts and minds seemed to have got through.

Today the picture is transformed. Donny George fled for his life last August after death threats. The national museum is not open but shut. Nor is it just shut. Its doors are bricked up, it is surrounded by concrete walls and its exhibits are sandbagged. Even the staff cannot get inside. There is no prospect of reopening.

Hussaini confirmed a report two years ago by John Curtis, of the British Museum, on America’s conversion of Nebuchadnezzar’s great city of Babylon into the hanging gardens of Halliburton. This meant a 150-hectare camp for 2,000 troops. In the process the 2,500-year-old brick pavement to the Ishtar Gate was smashed by tanks and the gate itself damaged. The archaeology-rich subsoil was bulldozed to fill sandbags, and large areas covered in compacted gravel for helipads and car parks. Babylon is being rendered archaeologically barren.

Meanwhile the courtyard of the 10th-century caravanserai of Khan al-Raba was used by the Americans for exploding captured insurgent weapons. One blast demolished the ancient roofs and felled many of the walls. The place is now a ruin.

Outside the capital some 10,000 sites of incomparable importance to the history of western civilisation, barely 20% yet excavated, are being looted as systematically as was the museum in 2003. When George tried to remove vulnerable carvings from the ancient city of Umma to Baghdad, he found gangs of looters already in place with bulldozers, dump trucks and AK47s.

Hussaini showed one site after another lost to archaeology in a four-year “looting frenzy”. The remains of the 2000BC cities of Isin and Shurnpak appear to have vanished: pictures show them replaced by a desert of badger holes created by an army of some 300 looters. Castles, ziggurats, deserted cities, ancient minarets and mosques have gone or are going. Hussaini has 11 teams combing the country engaged in rescue work, mostly collecting detritus left by looters. His small force of site guards is no match for heavily armed looters, able to shift objects to eager European and American dealers in days.

Most ominous is a message reputedly put out from Moqtada al-Sadr’s office, that while Muslim heritage should be respected, pre-Muslim relics were up for grabs. As George said before his flight, his successors might be “only interested in Islamic sites and not Iraq’s earlier heritage”. While Hussaini is clearly devoted to all Iraq’s history, the Taliban’s destruction of Afghanistan’s pre-Muslim Bamiyan Buddhas is in every mind.

Despite Sadr’s apparent preference, sectarian militias are pursuing an orgy of destruction of Muslim sites. Apart from the high-profile bombings of some of the loveliest surviving mosques in the Arab world, radical groups opposed to all shrines have begun blasting 10th- and 11th-century structures, irrespective of Sunni or Shia origin. Eighteen ancient shrines have been lost, 10 in Kirkuk and the south in the past month alone. The great monument and souk at Kifel, north of Najaf – reputedly the tomb of Ezekiel and once guarded by Iraqi Jews (mostly driven into exile by the occupation) – have been all but destroyed.

It is abundantly clear that the Americans and British are not protecting Iraq’s historic sites. All foreign archaeologists have had to leave. Troops are doing nothing to prevent the “farming” of known antiquities. This is in direct contravention of the Geneva Convention that an occupying army should “use all means within its power” to guard the cultural heritage of a defeated state.

Shortly after the invasion, the British minister Tessa Jowell won plaudits for “pledging” £5m to protect Iraq’s antiquities. I can find no one who can tell me where, how or whether this money has been spent. It appears to have been pure spin. Only the British Museum and the British School of Archaeology in Iraq have kept the flag flying. The latter’s grant has just been cut, presumably to pay for the Olympics binge.

As long as Britain and America remain in denial over the anarchy they have created in Iraq, they clearly feel they must deny its devastating side-effects. Two million refugees now camping in Jordan and Syria are ignored, since life in Iraq is supposed to be “better than before”. Likewise dozens of Iraqis working for the British and thus facing death threats are denied asylum. To grant it would mean the former defence and now home secretary, the bullish John Reid, admitting he was wrong. They will die before he does that.

Though I opposed the invasion I assumed that its outcome would at least be a more civilised environment. Yet Iraq’s people are being murdered in droves for want of order. Authority has collapsed. That western civilisation should have been born in so benighted a country as Iraq may seem bad luck. But only now is that birth being refused all guardianship, in defiance of international law. If this is Tony Blair’s “values war”, then language has lost all meaning. British collusion in such destruction is a scandal that will outlive any passing conflict. And we had the cheek to call the Taliban vandals.

simon.jenkins@guardian.co.uk

Telegraph, London

Tim Shipman in Washington
June 11, 2007

A FORMER US Army torturer has described the traumatic effects of American interrogation techniques in Iraq – on their victims and on the perpetrators themselves.

Tony Lagouranis said he conducted mock executions, forced men and boys into agonising stress positions, kept suspects awake for weeks on end, used dogs to terrify prisoners and subjected others to hypothermia.

But he said he was deeply scarred by the realisation that what he did had contributed to the plight of US forces in Iraq.

Mr Lagouranis, 37, said he suffered nightmares and anxiety attacks after returning to Chicago, where he works as a pub doorman.

Between January 2004 and January 2005, first at Abu Ghraib prison and then in Mosul, in northern Babil province, he tortured suspects, most of whom he said were innocent. He realised he had entered a moral dungeon when he found himself reading a Holocaust memoir, hoping to pick up torture tips from the Nazis.

Mr Lagouranis told The Sunday Telegraph: “When I first got back I had a lot of anxiety. I had a personal crisis because I felt I had done immoral things and I didn’t see a way to cope with that.”

Disturbingly for the British military, which has distanced itself from the worst excesses of Abu Ghraib, Mr Lagouranis says the Americans learnt much of their uncompromising approach from British interrogators.

“We heard about interrogators in Northern Ireland who were successful. Some of our interrogators went on the British interrogation course, which was tough. People wanted to emulate that, but we went too far.”

Mr Lagouranis said he never beat a prisoner. “[But] these coercive techniques – isolation, dogs, sleep deprivation, stress positions, hypothermia – crossed a legal line because they violated the Geneva Conventions,” he said.

His story raises disturbing questions about the effectiveness of enhanced interrogation techniques. British intelligence has used information supplied under torture in Uzbekistan, and the Government has been accused of turning a blind eye to suspects being abducted and sent to secret prisons where they could be tortured.

Mr Lagouranis, who has written a recently published book about his experiences, said these techniques were developed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War because they are successful in breaking a person’s will and spirit. “That doesn’t mean they work in terms of extracting intelligence,” he said. “I didn’t get actionable intelligence using the harsher methods; I got it using manipulation and lying and by promising them things I didn’t deliver on.”

Mr Lagouranis is scathing about a system in which inexperienced young interrogators copied what they saw in Hollywood and on television programs such as 24, whose lead character Jack Bauer regularly uses torture on terrorists.

In the book, Fear Up Harsh – a term for intimidating a prisoner by shouting at him – he says torture has cost the US its moral authority in Iraq by detaining innocent people and treating them badly.

“I could blame [President George] Bush and [former defence secretary Donald] Rumsfeld, but I would always have to also blame myself,” he wrote.

The campaign group Human Rights Watch and two of Mr Lagouranis’s fellow interrogators confirmed details of his account.