Here are two possibilities, neither of them flattering.
By Ben Ehrenreich, Slate, Jan. 21, 2010
U.S. troops in Haiti
By the weekend, it was clear that something perverse was going on in Haiti, something savage and bestial in its lack of concern for human life. I’m not talking about the earthquake, and certainly not about the so-called “looting,” which I prefer to think of as the autonomously organized distribution of unjustly hoarded goods. I’m talking about the U.S. relief effort.
Almost 200 prisoners remain in the former naval base on Cuba
Friday saw Barack Obama’s self-imposed deadline for the closure of the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp lapse.
The US administration pledged to shut the prison by January 22 at the latest but on Friday night almost 200 prisoners remained in the former naval base in the Caribbean amid new allegations of murder, torture and state cover-ups.
By Ron Jacobs, ZNet, January 21, 2010
Ron Jacobs’s ZSpace Page
In the first week of 2010, five US soldiers were killed in Afghanistan. The last week of 2009 saw the deaths of eight CIA agents there. Several more Afghan civilians were killed during this period, including the apparent executions of several young boys by persons either in the US military or working with them. In addition, insurgent forces targeted a Karzai government in official in eastern Khost and launched rockets at the site of a future US consulate in Herat. It was reported on January 6, 2010 that the Obama administration was sending 1,000 more US civilian experts to the country to help in so-called reconstruction projects. This news was greeted with skepticism from Afghans both in and out of the government. The Afghan ambassador to the United Nations noted that few Afghans trusted these so-called reconstruction endeavors and that the US might do better if they hired Afghans to do the rebuilding instead of shipping in US citizens to “create parallel structures that would ruin (the Afghan government’s) efforts.” The ambassador must be quite aware that the history of US reconstruction in either Afghanistan or Iraqis is a legacy of corruption, poor construction, and failed endeavors that benefited no one but the foreign companies that garnered the contracts.
It’s been one year since Obama signed his executive orders outlawing torture and to close the prison at Guantanamo. Former Rep. Tom Andrews writes about how this day is being marked in D.C.
A team of twenty combat veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are converging on the US Capitol today to meet with Members of Congress. They are representing two thousand of their fellow veterans who signed a letter to Members of Congress asking that they stop the politics of fear mongering and support our troops in harm’s way by closing the military prison on Guantanamo Bay:
Every day that the facility at Guantanamo Bay remains open and detainees are held without trial is another day that terror networks have an effective recruiting poster. Closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay is in the national security interest of America and the troops that we put into harm’s way. We urge you to do so without delay.
Ironically, the US Senate’s soon-to-be newest member from Massachusetts, Scott Brown, arrives on Capitol Hill today as well. Brown was elected the day before yesterday to the seat held by the late Senator Ted Kennedy.
Brown is bringing a distinctly different message on the subject. He argues that water boarding is not torture and that Gitmo should remain open for business.
The debate over whether the United States should routinely inflict on detainees the very same torture techniques that we hung Japanese officials for inflicting on US soldiers in WWII is far from over….
Today is a day for us all to be off Senator McConnell and Senator-elect Brown’s message. Support the troops being sent into harm’s way. Help two thousand combat veterans deliver their message to Congress: Close Gitmo NOW.
At the New York Times, one of today’s citizen/veteran-lobbyists, Matthew Alexander, assesses where we are, one year after.
Americans can now boast that they no longer “torture” detainees, but they cannot say that detainees are not abused, or even that their treatment meets the minimum standards of humane treatment mandated by the Geneva Conventions, the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (the so-called McCain amendment), United States and international law, or even Mr. Obama’s executive order.
If I were to return to one of the war zones today — as an Air Force officer, I was sent to Iraq to head an interrogation team in 2006 — I would still be allowed to abuse prisoners. This is true even though in my experience, torture or even harsh but legal treatment never got us useful information. Instead, such tactics invariably did just the opposite, convincing detainees to clam up.
The adoption last year of the Army Field Manual as the standard for interrogations across the government, including the C.I.A., was a considerable improvement. But we missed a unique opportunity for progress last August when the president’s task force on interrogations recommended no changes to the manual, which was hastily revised in 2006 in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal….
The greatest shame of the last year, perhaps, is that the argument over interrogations has shifted from debating what is legal to considering what is just “better than before.” The best way to change things is to update the field manual again to bring our treatment of detainees up to the minimum standard of humane treatment.
The next version of the manual should prohibit solitary confinement for more than, say, two weeks, all stress positions and forms of environmental manipulation, imprisonment in tight spaces and sleep deprivation. Unless we rewrite the book, we will only continue to give Al Qaeda a recruiting tool, to earn the contempt of our allies and to debase our most cherished ideals.
The horrendous story emerging this week about the murder of three Guantanamo detainees in 2006 and the subsequent Justice Department cover-up and stonewalling–which continues in the Obama administration–only adds impetus to this effort. Unanswered torture by Americans will only fuel the flame of hatred against us, as does the constant reminder of a still-open Guanatanamo.
The stain of torture and of Guantanamo becomes more indelible by the day, and it is now no longer just Bush’s and Cheney’s. It is Obama’s and Holder’s, too. And ours. Pretending otherwise won’t make it go away. It will just set it more firmly.
by Jeremy Scahill, Rebel Reports, Jan 21, 2010
In an interview with the Pakistani TV station Express TV, Defense Secretary Robert Gates confirmed that the private security firms Blackwater and DynCorp are operating inside Pakistan. “They’re operating as individual companies here in Pakistan,” Gates said, according to a DoD transcript of the interview. “There are rules concerning the contracting companies. If they’re contracting with us or with the State Department here in Pakistan, then there are very clear rules set forth by the State Department and by ourselves.”
This appears to be a contradiction of previous statements made by the Defense Department, by Blackwater, by the Pakistani government and by the US embassy in Islamabad, all of whom claimed Blackwater was not in the country. In September, the US Ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson, denied Blackwater’s presence in the country, stating bluntly, “Blackwater is not operating in Pakistan.” In December in The Nation magazine, I reported on Blackwater’s work for JSOC in Pakistan and on a subcontract with a private Pakistani security company. The Pentagon did not issue any clear public denials, and instead tried to pass the buck to the State Department, which in turn passed it to the US embassy, which in turn issued an unsigned statement saying the story was false.
Pakistan’s Interior Minister Rehman Malik has said on numerous occasions that he would resign if it is proven that Blackwater is operating inside Pakistan.
Asked what the US response would be if the Pakistani parliament passed a law banning private security companies, Gates said, “If it’s Pakistani law, we will absolutely comply.”
Asked about Seymour Hersh’s recent report in The New Yorker that US special forces were inside Pakistan helping to secure the country’s nuclear weapons, Gates said, “Well, you know, we sometimes have journalistic reports in the United States that aren’t terribly accurate either. You can’t respond to all of them. I think that one was not true.”
Socialist Worker, January 19, 2010
Peter Hallward, one of the foremost experts on Haiti’s history, spoke to Socialist Worker in the UK.
The earthquake in Haiti caused, and continues to cause, such terrible destruction and loss of life because the country is so poor. There are three main reasons for that.
Firstly, it is the only place where slavery was overthrown solely by slaves. But it meant a war that lasted 12 years, killed a third of the population, destroyed virtually every city and town, and gutted every plantation.
David Swanson, Consortiumnews.com, Jan 18, 2010
Editor’s Note: As much as the U.S. government has touted its love of democracy, the affection often has been conditional, based not on the will of a nation’s population but on the elected leader’s acceptance of American economic and political dictates.
No place has that been more true than in Haiti where American-favored dictators like the Duvaliers were long tolerated while popularly chosen leaders, such as Jean-Bertrand Aristide, found American officials siding with anti-democratic thugs, as David Swanson notes regarding the 2004 coup:
If a group of dedicated scholars, attorneys, journalists, and activists had tried to generate a comprehensive list of impeachable offenses committed by George W. Bush as President, one of them might have read something like this:
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Limited Compassion for Haiti
January 25, 2010By Justin Podur , ZNet, January 25, 2010
Justin Podur’s ZSpace Page
Everyone agrees that the Haiti earthquake is a serious situation. Serious enough for the US to send thousands of Marines, to take over the airport, to suspend Haiti’s sovereignty and take over the operation. Serious enough to unify the bitter partisan divide and put Bush, Clinton, and Obama together to raise funds. Serious enough for benefit concerts and the invention of new forms of philanthropy, where people can donate through their cell phones. But the Haiti earthquake is apparently not all that serious:
1. It’s not serious enough to give undocumented Haitians a full amnesty. Yes, it was serious enough to give them Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which they’d been asking for for years, so that they can send back money legally and so they’re not in danger of being deported back to their re-devastated country. But they still have to pay $470 dollars for registering (every dollar of which could have gone to Haiti – which adds up to millions of dollars if more than a few thousand register and pay the fee), and after their 18 month grace period ends they will be in the system and easier to deport than they were before registering.
2. It’s not serious enough for public money. 200,000 people dead and millions homeless is a tragedy, but one approximately 30,000 times less serious than the Iraq war ($100 million for earthquake relief, $3 trillion for the Iraq war) and 40,000 less serious than the $4 trillion bank bailout. For those crises, the treasury magically opens, the money magically appears in the accounts, the public debt grows, and the taxpayers can pay later. For an earthquake or a tsunami, we rely on people’s generosity, and put together star teams to beg for money on behalf of the victims.
3. It’s not serious enough to let Aristide return. In times like these, playing politics is frowned upon, right? But playing politics to prevent a popular leader from returning to his own country after being forced into exile isn’t. Aristide’s kidnapping and the 2004 coup was a special humiliation inflicted on Haiti, his continuing exile a continued insult. This earthquake is not serious enough to stop that insult.
4. It’s not serious enough to pay Haiti back the $22 billion it’s been owed by France since the money was extorted by a blockade. The story is old and much repeated but deserves to be repeated again. When Haiti became independent in 1804 through a revolt of the slaves, France used a naval blockade to force the new country to pay its colonial master compensation for the property the Haitians “stole” – the property being the value of the slaves themselves. The indemnity, 150 million francs at the time, stopped the country from being able to rebuild after the devastation of the war of independence. When the international community was starving Haiti to death from 2001-2003, Aristide began a campaign to say – okay, if aid is blocked and loans are blocked, forget those, just give us our money back. 150 million francs in 1804 makes about $22 billion today. At that point, the machinations to overthrow Aristide began in earnest.
Before too long, as the security and looting stories rise in prominence, opinion pieces will appear about the ingratitude of Haitians. As donations level off, analyses will discuss compassion fatigue. These would be better informed by being a little less oblivious to the limits of governmental compassion for Haiti.
Justin Podur is a Toronto-based writer. He visited Haiti in 2005. His blog is http://www.killingtrain.com
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Tags:Aristide, Haiti, Haiti earthquake, Justin Podur, U.S. Marines, United States
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