Peace and Justice Post

Day of Reckoning for the Republic

To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
(Modi).

I

The Special Investigation Team  entrusted by the Supreme Court of India to enquire into the culpabilities (including those of the Home Minister of Gujarat at the time of the carnage of February, 2002, namely one Narendra Modi) with respect especially to the gruesome killings at the Gulbarg Society where a Congress Member of Parliament, Ehsan Jaffri, was also hacked to smithereens alongwith the rest  has now submitted its report to the honourable Court.

Within days, the redoubtable Tehelka magazine found access to the 600 page document, consistent with the  era of leaks. Contrary to the propaganda machine of the proto-fascist Sangh Parivar which had been busy spreading the unfounded lie that Modi had been given a “clean chit,” the findings scooped by Tehelka must seem all too damning to any objective and conscientious citizen of the Republic.  Caveat: assuming that the magazine has given us the authentic text of the SIT report, something we have no reason to doubt.

Hereunder a quick wrap in direct quote  from the Report as published by Tehelka:

–“inspite of the fact that ghastly and violent attacks had taken place on Muslims at Gulbarg Society and elsewhere, the reaction of the government was not the type that would have been expected by anyone.  The Chief Minister had tried to water down the seriousness of the situation at Gulbarg Society, Naroda Patiya. . .by saying that every action has an equal and opposite reaction” (p,69);

–that Modi’s statement “accusing some elements in Godhra {where a coach of the Sabarmati Express train bringing back Hindutva volunteers from Ayodhya had gone up in flames, leading to the deaths of some 59 people; the Justice Bannerjee Committee deputed  by the then Railway minister to enquire into the burning had concluded that there was no way that the coach could have been set on fire from the outside, and that most likely a spark from a stove or a cigarette butt within the compartment had reached the cushions, leading to the smouldering before the fire spread} . . .as possessing a criminal tendency was sweeping and offensive, coming as it did from a Chief Minister, that too at a critical time when Hindu-Muslim tempers were running high” (p.13);

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By Ahmed Amr, ZNet, Feb 9, 2011

Source: Informed Comment

The campaign against the Egyptian protest movement by Egyptian officialdom, has been two-pronged. One tactic has been to attempt to neuter the foreign press. This step then allowed a propaganda campaign by the organs of the State-owned media, which has been shameless in distorting the realities on the ground. The employees of Egyptian government newspapers and television stations are nothing more than ruling party hacks but they are not without their talents. While some of the rumors they were circulating were marginally plausible, others were off the wall.

The general theme of the government’s propaganda assault has revolved around foreign agents organizing and deceiving the naïve anti-regime protesters. One concocted report in Al-Akhbar had 300 foreign saboteurs caught red handed in Suez. In government media accounts, alien provocateurs were everywhere to be found. The source of the mischief all depended on which hallucination you were reading. The agitators are apparently Israeli spies sponsored by Americans and Hamas activists financed by Iranians on a joint mission to turn Egypt into a striptease club ruled by a Shiite theocracy.

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AP

President Barack Obama meets with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in the White House last September.

(updated below)

One of the most revealing journalistic genres is the effort by establishment media outlets to explain to their American audiences why Those Other Countries — usually in the Middle East — are so bad and awful and plagued by severe political and societal corruption (see here and here for examples).  This morning, The New York Times has a classic entry, as it unironically details how Egypt is a cesspool of oligarchical favoritism and self-dealing.  The article focuses on Ahmed Ezz, a close friend of Hosni Mubarak’s son who has exploited his political connections to corner much of the nation’s steel market, triggering growing resentment by the public.  Along the way, we learn several disturbing things about Egypt, including this:

For many years, Mr. Ezz has represented the intersection of money, politics and power . . . . Public resentment at the wealth acquired by the politically powerful helped propel the uprising already reshaping the contours of power along the Nile. . . . Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt has long functioned as a state where wealth bought political power and political power bought great wealth.

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UNITED NATIONS – Former U.S. President George W. Bush may have mostly vanished from the headlines since January 2009, but the alleged crimes committed by his administration are not forgotten.

The former US president’s visit would have been his first to Europe since his waterboarding disclosure in Decision Points. (Photograph: Anne McQuary/Bloomberg) On Monday, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) released the ‘Preliminary Bush Torture Indictment‘, a document outlining the core aspects of the case against Bush for torture, and his violations of the Convention Against Torture to which the United States is a signatory.

The move by the CCR, in conjunction with over 60 other human rights and legal advocacy groups, including the Berlin-based European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), coincides with the ninth anniversary of the day Bush decided that “enemy combatants” were no longer entitled to the fundamental protections granted to every human being by the Geneva Conventions.

On Monday morning, two torture victims in Geneva had been planning to file criminal complaints against the former U.S. president, who was scheduled to arrive in Switzerland on Feb. 12 to speak at an event there.

Since Swiss law requires the presence of a torturer on Swiss soil before the investigation can proceed, rights activists say this would have been the perfect opportunity to hold Switzerland to its obligations as a signatory to the Convention Against Torture and send a strong message to the ex-president that he is not eligible for special exemption under the law, even as a former head of state.

Ultimately, Bush canceled his travel plans.

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Driving Through the Gates of Hell and Other American Pastimes in the Greater Middle East

As we’ve watched the dramatic events in the Middle East, you would hardly know that we had a thing to do with them.  Oh yes, in the name of its War on Terror, Washington had for years backed most of the thuggish governments now under siege or anxious that they may be next in line to hear from their people.  When it came to Egypt in particular, there was initially much polite (and hypocritical) discussion in the media about how our “interests” and our “values” were in conflict, about how far the U.S. should back off its support for the Mubarak regime, and about what a“tightrope” the Obama administration was walking.  While the president and his officials flailed, the mildest of questions were raised about how much we should chide our erstwhile allies, or encourage the massed protestors, and about whether we should “take sides” (as though we hadn’t done so decisively over the last decades).

With popular cries for “democracy” and “freedom” sweeping through the Middle East, it’s curious to note that the Bush-era’s now-infamous “democracy agenda” has been nowhere in sight.  In its brief and disastrous life, it was used as a battering ram for regimes Washington loathed and offered as a soft pillow of future possibility to those it loved.

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After 30 years of championing President Hosni Mubarak on all issues, one of the strongest voices in Egypt’s state-run media, the al-Ahram newspaper, has led its Monday issue with a front page editorial reversing that stance.

The editorial, written by editor-in-chief Osama Saraya, cheers the “nobility” of the growing protest movement against Mubarak and lambastes the dictator for refusing to make serious changes.

The article didn’t explicitly call for President Mubarak to resign but the demands for reform spark a major shift from the paper, Egypt’s largest and most respected, and Saraya’s history as an advocate who can spin anything Mubarak does as heroic appears over.

Indeed, the entire state media aparatus appears to have noticed that their effort to gloss over the uprising is dramatically damaging their credibility, and all are starting to reverse course and add at least some coverage of the only thing going on in Egypt that really matters to most.

By Robert Parry, Consortium News,  February 6, 2011

When you’re listening to the many tributes to President Ronald Reagan, often for his talent making Americans feel better about themselves, you might want to spend a minute thinking about the many atrocities in Latin America and elsewhere that Reagan aided, covered up or shrugged off in his inimitable “aw shucks” manner.

After all, the true measure of a president shouldn’t be his style or how he made us feel but rather what he did with his extraordinary power, what were the consequences for real people, either for good or ill.

Yet, even as the United States celebrates Reagan’s centennial birthday and lavishes praise on his supposed accomplishments, very little time has been spent reflecting on the unnecessary bloodbaths that Reagan enabled in many parts of the world.

Those grisly deaths and ugly tortures get whisked away as if they were just small necessities in Reagan’s larger success “winning the Cold War” – even though the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union was already winding down before Reagan arrived on the national scene. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Reagan’s ‘Tear Down This Wall’ Myth.”]

Yet, Reagan’s Cold War obsessions helped unleash right-wing “death squads” and murderous militaries on the common people in many parts of the Third World, but nowhere worse than in Latin America.

In the 1970s and 1980s, as Latin American security forces were sharpening themselves into finely honed killing machines, Reagan was there as an ardent defender, making excuses for the atrocities, and sending money and equipment to make the forces even more lethal.

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by Dennis Hans, CommonDreams.org, Feb 8, 2011

As the nation pays tribute to Ronald “Dutch” Reagan on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of his birth, media coverage is every bit as laudatory as when he turned 90.  I wrote in 2001 about PBS’s fawning tributes on the Charlie Rose show and the Jim Lehrer NewsHour.  Then, as now, one of the most glaring omissions was the human cost of his foreign policies.  In the interest of filling out the Reagan portrait, let us consider a few regions unfortunate enough to capture his attention, starting with Central America.

In January 1981, the newly inaugurated Reagan inherited Jimmy Carter’s policy of supporting a Salvadoran government controlled by a military that, along with the security forces and affiliated death squads, killed about 10,000 civilians in 1980.  In the first 27 months of the Reagan administration, perhaps another 20,000 civilians were killed.  El Salvador’s labor movement was decimated, the opposition press exterminated, opposition politicians murdered or driven into exile, the church martyred.

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