Riding the atheist bus

December 13, 2008

Thanks to the inspiration of our friends in Britain, we’ve started our own atheist bus ad campaign in Washington DC

American Humanist Association)

An advertisement from the American Humanist Association on a bus in Washington DC. (Photograph: American Humanist Association)

It’s a simple question: “Why not try Jesus?” Equally simple is an opposite: “Why believe in a god?” Yet in the United States the first question is widely viewed as positive, or at least ordinary, while the second can be perceived as offensive and even hate speech.

This difference in reaction can’t result from the structure of the statements. They’re the same. Nor can it be the tone. Nope, it’s just the message. Americans think it’s good to believe in a god and bad not to. Furthermore, it’s good to tell everyone about your belief but bad to be just as open about nonbelief or doubt – especially during the winter holiday season.

Clearly, American nontheists can’t get a break.

We in the American Humanist Association found this out first hand when we launched our Washington DC advertising campaign on November 11 with the slogan “Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness’ sake.” The venue was the sides, rears and insides of 230 of the city’s buses. News coverage of the campaign generated an outpouring of phone calls and e-mails, mostly negative. The largest number came directly to us but hundreds of complaints also came to Metro, the government entity that handles the city’s buses and subways. One of the complainers expressed a wish (or perhaps a prayer): “May all your atheist buses break down!”

The sudden high volume of visitors to our special campaign website www.whybelieveinagod.org crashed our server twice. Soon, the conservative talkshow hosts were clamouring to give us air time so they could argue against us and further rouse their audience. And conservative Christian organisations not only denounced our efforts but encouraged their flocks to come bleat in our ears. All this before our bus ads actually started to appear one week later. By the beginning of December we’d received 37,742 hits on our campaign website, logged 638 new members and received over $6,000 in new contributions.

American Humanist Association) An ad from the American Humanist Association inside a bus in Washington DC. (Photograph: American Humanist Association) Now, it seems, we have a couple of competitors. The primary one, a local Catholic stay-at-home mother of four, decided to launch a counter campaign: same types of bus advertisements, same number of buses, same topic. Her slogan? “Why believe? Because I created you and I love you, for goodness’ sake.” The sentiment is signed, “God”. The second competitor, Pennsylvania Friends of Christ, announced an ad on 10 buses that will read, “Believe in God. Christ is Christmas for goodness sake.”

This led to more newspaper stories and interviews on radio and television. So much so that the company that handles bus advertising for Metro asked us this week if we would be so kind as to quantify all our results for them so they can inform would-be clients just how effective bus ads can be!

If all this buzz sounds a little familiar, it’s because it is. Back in October a story in the Guardian went global about the Atheist Bus Campaign in London. The planned adverts, written by comedy writer and Guardian contributor Ariane Sherine, were designed to read: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” This was in reaction to a widely run Christian campaign threatening unbelievers with hellfire. The British Humanist Association agreed to handle the financial contributions for this effort and was able to raise a whopping £120,402 in the first month. Yet none of the adverts have actually appeared on buses, being slated to hit the streets in January.

Naturally, this excitement affected those of us planning promotional efforts for the American Humanist Association. We’d been trying to work up a splashy advertising campaign for Washington DC buses since July but hadn’t figured out an ad slogan we really liked. So, when the news hit about the London plans, it became for us like an inspiration, a revelation – dare I say, a miracle?

We accelerated our work, experimenting with a range of slogans, until finally settling on the one. Then we contracted for the ad space, designed and printed the signs, bought display ads in the New York Times and Washington Post, and the rest followed.

The media is still heated up. There’s more to come. But we pause amid the flurry and fury to reach our hands across the pond in gratitude and solidarity with our likeminded friends in the UK. The work of each enhances that of the other as we both let millions of atheists, agnostics and humanists know there are others like them and organisations to serve their needs and advance their ideals.

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Understanding Imperialism

December 12, 2008
Sandra Bloodworth | Socialist Alternative

“I will never apologise for the United States.

I don’t care what the facts are.”

George Bush the First in 1988 when a US missile cruiser in the Persian Gulf shot down an Iranian passenger jet, killing 290 people.

“We think the price is worth it.”

Madeleine Albright, US Secretary of State, in December 1996 when it was reported that UN sanctions had killed 576,000 Iraqi children under the age of five.

Today, in the name of “freedom” and “democracy” – hope-laden words – as many as 250,000 Iraqis lie dead, Iraqis and Afghanis live with the brutality of military occupation by the US and it allies and over 20,000 US soldiers are dead or maimed.

In a world where facts are irrelevant, and language is used as if we are living in a never-ending mad hatter’s party, the protests of millions keep alive some sense of human sanity. However, if we are to not just protest, but begin to challenge the source of the barbarity, we need to understand what we are up against.

The idea that Bush is a homicidal maniac surrounded by greedy bastards is appealing. But it implies we just need well-intentioned politicians and business people. As the Indian writer and activist Arundati Roy  said: “It’s true that [George Bush the Second] is a dangerous, almost suicidal pilot, but the machine he handles is far more dangerous than the man himself.”

Understanding that machine provides us with the tools we need to disable it.

Capitalism breeds war

Two Russian revolutionaries – Lenin and Nikolai Bukharin – explained why war is an inevitable result of capitalism when they analysed the causes of World War I.

Capitalism is a system of competition, but there is an inbuilt contradiction: successful companies buy up those that go broke, getting ever bigger. Lenin wrote: “Marx had proved that free competition gives rise to the concentration of production, which, in turn, at a certain stage of development, leads to monopoly.” Ever-bigger capitalist corporations combine in cartels to keep rivals out of the market. Just think of OPEC, the modern cartel of oil exporting states. Their website sums it up: “OPEC’s mission is to … ensure the stabilisation of oil prices in order to secure … a steady income to producers and a fair return on capital to those investing in the petroleum industry.”

By the twentieth century, giant corporations had developed interests extending beyond the borders of their national state. They struggle to out-compete each other in an increasingly integrated world market (called globalisation today). Microsoft, Shell, Nike, BHP-Billiton are typical.

However, contrary to many anti-globalisation theories today, we are not just confronted with marauding multinational corporations. National states have to control “spheres of influence” in order to maximise access to raw materials, markets for goods and investment, trade routes and the like for their multinational corporations. They may use economic and political means, but “the mutual relations of those states – [are] in the final analysis the relations between their military forces”.

Lenin and Bukharin concluded that imperialism – the competition between powerful nations to dominate areas of the globe – defines modern capitalism and this makes war inevitable.

Twentieth century imperialism

As Lenin and Bukharin predicted, World War I did not end the drive to war; it only laid the basis for a further re-division of the world between the major powers. World War II was an imperialist war, not a war for democracy. “War for democracy” – sounds eerily familiar doesn’t it? That’s because the machine was the same – only the drivers were different.

The war ended with a new re-partitioning of the world – by Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill. The Cold War after 1945 was a stand-off between two new superpowers, the Stalinist USSR and the US. The massive stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction by both sides were justified by the lies that capitalism was defending freedom from the tyranny of communism, and conversely, that the “workers’ states” – which were in reality state-run capitalist states – were a bastion against vile capitalism. It finally ended when this madness brought on the collapse of the USSR’s imperialist bloc between 1989 and 1991.

However, the inbuilt contradictions of capitalism gave rise to a new balance of power. The lunacy of wasting billions of dollars on more than enough nuclear weapons to blow the earth away sustained the longest economic boom ever. Germany and Japan, forbidden to re-arm, gained an economic advantage, riding on the back of the boom to modernise their economies without the burden of military spending. By the end of the long boom in the mid-1970s, the US was no longer the supreme economic power it had been.

The dominance of the US ruling class rested more on military than economic might. Increasingly they needed to send a message to other rising powers such as China, Japan or a united Europe that the US could and would take on any states that challenged its status as the world’s superpower. But the defeat in Vietnam undermined US confidence.

When Saddam Hussein, their former bully boy in the Middle East, looked too independent, they seized the opportunity, not to rid the world of the “new Hitler” as they proclaimed in 1991, but to strike a blow for their future. “Humanitarian” interventions in places such as the Balkans and Somalia were used to put the “Vietnam syndrome” behind them. And they bamboozled even some on the left into believing US might could be humane.

The War of Terror

The supposed “war on terror” is nothing more than the US ruling class’s drive to shore up their empire. Saddam and Al Qaeda are just a convenient pretext for US military bases in the strategic Middle East and Afghanistan, a corridor for supplies of natural gas and oil from Central Asia.

But much more than control of that strategic commodity is at stake. It is about an increasingly belligerent capitalist class who rely on military might to prevent a challenge to their power. Bases in Afghanistan complete the encirclement of China, a potential rival. And the wars demonstrate the barbarity the US is willing to unleash.

Nuclear war – the logic of imperialism

Bush’s drive towards a nuclear strike against Iran is, from the point of view of the US rulers, not madness, but the most reliable way to ensure they remain top imperialist dog.

Australia, as a middle-ranking power, allies itself with the US as a central part of its own imperialist drive to dominate the area regarded as “our own backyard”. Howard and Australia’s capitalists want to go down the nuclear road because it gives them an entry into the nuclear imperialist club. Even if Australian capitalists are only minor players, they’re increasingly flexing their muscles on “their” block. And they have enough uranium to make themselves indispensable to that club.

During the Cold War even many on the left argued that nuclear weapons threatened all of humanity, so at least some capitalists could be anti-war allies. But capitalists take risks all the time. Short term gain far outweighs long term risks, and certainly wins out over humanitarianism.

How can we stop war?

Once we recognise that wars are inevitable in capitalist society, it follows that we can’t rely on parliamentary parties that want to run this system. The US Democrats, in the midst of a massive anti-war campaign, ran a pro-war candidate for President in 2004. The ALP government enthusiastically sent troops to the Persian Gulf in 1991. Even the Greens, who use anti-war rhetoric, don’t consistently campaign to mobilise demonstrations against war, and they actually support the use of imperialist Australian troops to interfere in states in “our neighbourhood”. The German Greens campaigned for years against war and the nuclear industry. Once in government, they attacked anti-nuke campaigners and sent troops to bomb the Balkans in the mid 1990s.

To end the wars we will have to build a movement that mobilises the strength of the mass of people to demonstrate, strike and organise so that governments and bosses know they will have no peace while they occupy, bomb or exploit other countries. That movement needs to be implacably opposed to imperialism, fighting every deployment of imperialist troops, whatever the “justification”.

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Britain leaves Iraq in shame. The US won’t go so quietly

December 12, 2008

Obama was elected on the back of revulsion at Bush’s war, but greater pressure will be needed to force a full withdrawal

If British troops are indeed withdrawn from Iraq by next June, it will signal the end of the most shameful and disastrous episode in modern British history. Branded only last month by Lord Bingham, until recently Britain’s most senior law lord, as a “serious violation of international law”, the aggression against Iraq has not only devastated an entire country and left hundreds of thousands dead – it has also been a political and military humiliation for the invading powers.

In the case of Britain, which marched into a sovereign state at the bidding of an extreme and reckless US administration, the war has been a national disgrace which has damaged the country’s international standing. Britain’s armed forces will withdraw from Iraq with dishonour. Not only were they driven from Basra city last summer under cover of darkness by determined resistance, just as British colonial troops were forced out of Aden 40 years ago – and Iraq and Afghanistan, among other places, before that. But they leave behind them an accumulation of evidence of prisoner beatings, torture and killings, for which only one low-ranking soldier, Corporal Payne, has so far been singled out for punishment.

It’s necessary to spell out this brutal reality as a corrective to the official tendency to minimise or normalise the horror of what has evidently been a criminal enterprise – enthusiastically supported by David Cameron and William Hague, it should be remembered, as well as Tony Blair and his government – and a reminder of the dangers of escalating the war that can’t be won in Afghanistan. It was probably just as well that the timetable for British withdrawal from Iraq was given in a background military briefing, after Gordon Brown’s earlier schedule for troop reductions was vetoed by George Bush.

But in any case, in the wake of Barack Obama’s election on a partial withdrawal ticket, the latest plans look a good deal more credible. They are also welcome, of course, even if several hundred troops are to stay behind to train Iraqis. It would be far better both for Britain and Iraq if there were a clean break and a full withdrawal of all British forces in preparation for a comprehensive public inquiry into the Iraq catastrophe. Instead, and in a pointer to the shape of things to come, British troops at Basra airport are being replaced by US forces.

Meanwhile, the real meaning of last month’s security agreement between the US and Iraqi governments is becoming clearer, as Obama’s administration-in-waiting briefs the press and officials highlight the small print. This “status of forces agreement”, which replaces the UN’s shotgun mandate for the occupation forces at the end of this month, had been hailed by some as an unequivocal deal to end the occupation within three years.

There’s no doubt that Iraq’s Green Zone government, under heavy pressure from its own people and neighbours such as Iran, extracted significant concessions from US negotiators to the blanket occupation licence in the original text. The final agreement does indeed stipulate that US forces will withdraw by the end of 2011, that combat troops will leave urban areas by July next year, contractors and off-duty US soldiers will be subject to Iraqi law and that Iraqi territory cannot be used to attack other countries.

The fact that the US was forced to make such commitments reflects the intensity of both Iraqi and American public opposition to the occupation, the continuing Iraqi resistance war of attrition against US forces, and Obama’s tumultuous election on a commitment to pull out all combat troops in 16 months. Even so, the deal was denounced as treason – for legitimising foreign occupation and bases – by the supporters of the popular Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr, resistance groups and the influential Association of Muslim Scholars.

And since his November triumph, Obama has gone out of his way to emphasise his commitment to maintaining a “residual force” for fighting “terrorism”, training and protection of US civilians – which his security adviser Richard Danzig estimated could amount to between 30,000 and 55,000 troops.

Briefings by Pentagon officials have also made clear this residual force could remain long after 2011. It turns out that the new security agreement can be ditched by either side, while the Iraqi government is fully entitled to invite US troops to remain, as explained in the accompanying “strategic framework agreement”, so long as its bases or presence are not defined as “permanent”. And given that the current Iraqi government would be unlikely to survive a week without US protection, such a request is a fair bet. Combat troops can also be “re-missioned” as “support units”, it transpires, and even the last-minute concession of a referendum on the agreement next year will not, the Iraqi government now says, be binding.

None of this means there won’t be a substantial withdrawal of troops from Iraq after Obama takes over the White House next month. But how far that withdrawal goes will depend on the kind of pressure he faces both at home and in Iraq. The US establishment clearly remains committed to a long-term stewardship of Iraq. The Iraqi government is at this moment negotiating secret 20-year contracts with US and British oil majors to manage 90% of the country’s oil production. The struggle to end US occupation and control of the country is far from won.

The same goes for the wider shadow of the war on terror, of which Iraq has been the grisly centrepiece. Its legacy has been strategic overreach and failure for the US: from the rise of Iran as a regional power, the deepening imbroglio of the Afghan war, the advance of Hamas and Hizbullah and threat of implosion in Pakistan – quite apart from the advance of the nationalist left in Latin America and the growing challenge from Russia and China. But at its heart has been the demonstration of American weakness in Iraq, the three trillion-dollar war that helped drive the US economy into crisis.

No wonder the US elite has wanted a complete change of direction and Bush was last week reduced to mumbling his regrets about the “intelligence failure in Iraq”. For Obama, the immediate foreign policy tests are clear: if he delivers on Iraq, negotiates in Afghanistan and engages with Iran, he will start to justify the global hopes that have been invested in him. If not, he will lay the ground for a new phase of conflict with the rest of the world.

s.milne@guardian.co.uk

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El Khoudary calls on bringing Israeli leaders to Courts of Justice

December 12, 2008

Popular Committee Against Siege (PCAS)

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Gaza Strip, 11, December, 2008-PCAS- Chairman of Popular Committee Against Siege, Independent Mp Jamal El Khoudary, called on bringing Israeli leaders for courts in accountancy for their human rights violation and the siege on Gaza strip.

El Khoudary welcomed the report issued by United Nation’s expert in human rights, Richard Falk in regard of human rights conditions in Gaza. The report criticized the Israeli policies against Palestinians considering them as equal to war crimes against humanity.

He also welcomed Richard’s call to implement the humanitarian laws and charters in Palestine to protect the civilians being exposed to a policy of collective punishment equals war crimes.

PCAS Chairman touched upon the need of implementing the call of Mr. Falk on the ground saying, ” the situation in the Gaza strip is direful and there has to be a quick and prompt implementation of all humanitarian laws as Mr. falk requested.”

The statement of Mr. Falk is the following:

9 December 2008

The Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights on Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Richard Falk, issued the following statement:

GENEVA — In recent days the desperate plight of the civilian population of Gaza has been acknowledged by such respected international figures as the Secretary General of the United Nations, the President of the General Assembly, and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Last week, Karen AbyZayd, who heads the UN relief effort in Gaza , offered first-hand confirmation of the desperate urgency and unacceptable conditions facing the civilian population of Gaza . Although many leaders have commented on the cruelty and unlawfulness of the Gaza blockade imposed by Israel , such a flurry of denunciations by normally cautious UN officials has not occurred on a global level since the heyday of South African apartheid.

And still Israel maintains its Gaza siege in its full fury, allowing only barely enough food and fuel to enter to stave off mass famine and disease. Such a policy of collective punishment, initiated by Israel to punish Gazans for political developments within the Gaza strip, constitutes a continuing flagrant and massive violation of international humanitarian law as laid down in Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

It is long past the time when talk suffices. As AbuZayd has written, “the chasm between word and deed” with respect to upholding human rights in occupied Palestine creates a situation where “radicalism and extremism easily take root.” The UN is obligated to respond under these conditions. Some governments of the world are complicit by continuing their support politically and economically for Israel ‘s punitive approach.

Protective action must be taken immediately to offset the persisting and wide-ranging violations of the fundamental human right to life, and in view of the emergency situation that is producing a humanitarian catastrophe that is unfolding day by day. However difficult politically, it is time to act. At the very least, an urgent effort should be made at the United Nations to implement the agreed norm of a ‘responsibility to protect’ a civilian population being collectively punished by policies that amount to a Crime Against Humanity.

In a similar vein, it would seem mandatory for the International Criminal Court to investigate the situation, and determine whether the Israeli civilian leaders and military commanders responsible for the Gaza siege should be indicted and prosecuted for violations of international criminal law. As AbuZayd has declared, “This is a humanitarian crisis deliberately imposed by political actors.”

It should be noted that the situation worsened in recent days due to the breakdown of a truce between Hamas and Israel that had been observed for several months by both sides. The truce was maintained by Hamas despite the failure of Israel to fulfill its obligation under the agreement to improve the living conditions of the people of Gaza .

The recent upsurge of violence occurred after an Israeli incursion that killed several alleged Palestinian militants within Gaza . It is a criminal violation of international law for elements of Hamas or anyone else to fire rockets at Israeli towns regardless of provocation, but such Palestinian behavior does not legalize Israel’s imposition of a collective punishment of a life- and health-threatening character on the people of Gaza, and should not distract the UN or international society from discharging their fundamental moral and legal duty to render protection to the Palestinian people.

ENDS

For further information on the Occupied Palestinian Territories , and work and mandate of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights on Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, visit the following website: http://www.ohchr. org/EN/countries /MENARegion/ Pages/PSIndex. aspx

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US Drone Strike Kill Seven in South Waziristan

December 12, 2008

Missile Hit a House Near a Madrasa

Antiwar.com, December 11, 2008

A US drone struck a South Waziristan village today, killing seven militants according to Pakistani officials. Most of those killed were reportedly Punjabis, but the officials speculated that foreigners may also be among the dead.

The details of the attack, the second US drone attack this month, are difficult to ascertain as local militants have surrounded the destroyed house and are not letting officials get close to it. The US has launched over 30 such attacks in North and South Waziristan over the past few months as part of its “gloves have come off” strategy.

Pakistan’s government has condemned the strikes publicly, but is reported to have privately reached a “tacit agreement” with the United States regarding them. Pakistan has also claimed it is considering shooting down the drones, but once again there is no indication that they made any effort to do so.

compiled by Jason Ditz [email the author]

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U.S. Keeps Silent as Afghan Ally Removes War Crime Evidence

December 12, 2008

RINF.COM, Friday, December 12th, 2008

McClatchy Newspapers|

DASHT-E LEILI, Afghanistan – Seven years ago, a convoy of container trucks rumbled across northern Afghanistan loaded with a human cargo of suspected Taliban and al Qaida members who’d surrendered to Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Afghan warlord and a key U.S. ally in ousting the Taliban regime.

When the trucks arrived at a prison in the town of Sheberghan, near Dostum’s headquarters, they were filled with corpses.. Most of the prisoners had suffocated, and others had been killed by bullets that Dostum’s militiamen had fired into the metal containers.

Dostum’s men hauled the bodies into the nearby desert and buried them in mass graves, according to Afghan human rights officials. By some estimates, 2,000 men were buried there.

Earlier this year, bulldozers and backhoes returned to the scene, reportedly exhumed the bones of many of the dead men and removed evidence of the atrocity to sites unknown. In the area where the mass graves once were, there now are gaping pits in the sands of the Dasht-e-Leili desert.

A U.N.-sponsored team of experts first spotted two large excavations on a visit in June, one of them about 100 feet long and more than 9 feet deep in places. A McClatchy reporter visited the site last month and found three additional smaller pits, which apparently had been dug since June.

Faqir Mohammed Jowzjani, a former Dostum ally and the deputy governor of Jowzjan province, where the graves were located, told McClatchy that it’s common knowledge that Dostum sent in the bulldozers.

He speculated that Dostum wanted to destroy the evidence because of local political trouble that could have made him more prone to prosecution for the killings.

Last year, Dostum and the then-Jowzjan governor became embroiled in a feud that killed seven people and wounded more than 40. This year, Dostum and his men kidnapped and reportedly beat a rival Afghan leader.

“Maybe General Dostum did it because of a fear of prosecution in the future,” Jowzjani said.

Another local Afghan official said that Dostum had begun to worry that the 2001 killings could come back to haunt him. “Everyone in the city (Sheberghan) knows that the evidence has been removed,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of worries about being killed for talking about the subject.

“When the crime happened, (Dostum and his commanders) didn’t think they would ever be prosecuted,” the official said. “But later they began to worry . . . they have taken all the bones and thrown them into the river” that’s about half a mile from the graves.

NATO — which has command authority over a team of troops less than three miles from the grave site — the United Nations and the United States have been silent about the destruction of evidence of Dostum’s alleged war crimes.

“The truth is that General Dostum went out with bulldozers and dug up those graves,” Jowzjani charged. “I don’t know why UNAMA” — the U.N. mission in Afghanistan — “hasn’t said anything in this regard . . . maybe because of fears about his power, or maybe they made a deal.”

Gen. Ghulam Mujtaba Patang, the commander of Afghanistan’s national police in the north, said that he knew that the graves had been emptied. He noted that “the digging was done very professionally” and said that U.N. and NATO-led teams in the area were also aware. (While provincial reconstruction teams are led by individual nations, their military components are under NATO command.)

“I don’t understand why they didn’t secure the area,” Patang said in an interview. Perhaps, he said, Western officials “are nervous” about the power that Dostum has locally and don’t want to upset local security by pushing him on the matter.

Dostum was unavailable for comment, and one of his senior aides, Gen. Ghani Karim Zada, declined several interview requests.

The Bush administration, too, has remained silent. U.S. officials claimed that they had no knowledge of the deaths of the prisoners in the convoy until the news media revealed them in 2002, and now the administration has remained silent about Dostum’s reported effort to destroy the evidence of them, which also would be a major violation of international law.

American officials say that Dostum’s alleged war crimes are a matter for the Afghan authorities. But the U.S.-backed government of President Hamid Karzai is weak and depends on American and NATO troops to fight a growing Taliban insurgency that now operates in most of Afghanistan and all but surrounds Kabul, the capital.

However, the fact that U.S. special forces and CIA operatives were working closely with Dostum in late 2001, when the killings took place, has fueled suspicions that the warlord got a free pass.

The U.S. Defense Department has said that it found no evidence of American involvement or presence during the 2001 incident. If there was an investigation, however, its findings have never been made public.

“At the time, we had a handful of special forces and CIA, and there was no way we could have exercised any oversight” of the thousands of detainees under Afghan control, said Joseph Collins, who was then the deputy assistant secretary of defense for stability operations.

When he was asked about the detainees suffocating in metal shipping containers, Collins, who’s now a professor at the National War College, said that “I think most people just took for granted what he (Dostum) said: that it was a horrible accident.”

McClatchy interviewed eight Pakistani men last year who said that Dostum’s gunmen had stuffed them in the containers. The men, mostly low-level Taliban volunteers, said they’d had to climb over dozens of dead bodies to get out of the containers.

“We were all sitting on the dead bodies which were lying on the floor; they were lifeless,” said Abdul Haleem, who said that many of the approximately 200 men in his container died. “An arm was sticking up in the air here, a leg was sticking up in the air there.”

Another man who said he’d made the trip to Sheberghan in a container full of dead and dying men was Tariq Khan. He said that when Dostum’s men shot into the metal box, “some people were shot in the eye; some were shot in the neck.”

Dostum offered to take Pierre-Richard Prosper, who was then the U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, on a tour of the grave site in late 2002, but Prosper declined. He was pressing a reluctant Afghan government and the U.N. to take the lead in investigating the killings.

“We felt the Afghans needed to play a role,” Prosper said in a telephone interview. “If you’re a new government, and you want to move forward, you have to deal with the past.”

However, no investigation was likely without strong U.S. backing, and Prosper said that he couldn’t recall whether Washington ever gave funding for a probe.

Farid Mutaqi, a senior investigator for the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission in the nearby city of Mazar-e-Sharif, said that it was almost impossible to visit the site because of Dostum’s power in northern Afghanistan.

Mutaqi said there’d been threats on his life and those of his staff members from Dostum. There are rumors that the site was mined and that Dostum’s men would torture or kill people if they were caught researching in the area. At least three Afghans who witnessed the original digging of the mass grave or who investigated it later reportedly were killed, and a handful of others were beaten.

Mutaqi said that he told officials at the United Nations and the local provincial reconstruction team that Dostum’s men had disturbed the mass graves this year. They did nothing, he said.

Now, Mutaqi said, “You can see only a hole. In the area around it you can find a few bones or some clothes. The site is gone . . . as for evidence, there is nothing.”

A spokesman for the United Nations in Afghanistan, Adrian Edwards, acknowledged in an e-mail statement that the U.N. had known that the graves had been dug up but had kept quiet.

“You’re right that we don’t always make public statements, but that’s because we’re in a conflict environment and have to weigh up whether doing so will stall chances of progress against impunity in other areas or put lives at risk,” the statement said. “It’s a judgment call we constantly strive to get right, and this is not the only instance where the choices we have to make can be extraordinarily tough ones.” Edwards noted that the U.N. is awaiting a report about the site by a forensic specialist.

The spokesman for the U.N.’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Rupert Colville, said that while he didn’t know the details of the digging at the site, “there cannot be impunity for war crimes of this nature and scale . . . it’s a real shame.”

Spokesmen for NATO and the U.S. Embassy in Kabul denied knowing that the remains of hundreds of men had been removed from the site, and had no further comment.

“We have no information about bulldozers or digging at the site,” said Lt. Cmdr. James Gater, a spokesman for the NATO mission in Afghanistan. The U.S. general who heads NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, wouldn’t do an interview, Gater said.

U.S. Embassy spokesman Mark Stroh said that he’d checked with several officials at the embassy and “nobody seemed to have any visibility on this.” Stroh added that “We don’t necessarily monitor all of Dostum’s behavior.”

A McClatchy reporter, traveling without official escort, took GPS readings of the open pits last month, and a forensic investigator with Physicians for Human Rights, a group contracted by the U.N. to examine the site, confirmed that they were in the same area where the grave site was found in early 2002.

In May 2002, the U.N. announced that a Physicians for Human Rights team had dug a test trench in the area and found 15 bodies, three of which had been exhumed and found to have died recently of asphyxiation

In November 2002, amid the Physicians for Human Rights findings and news reports, a top-secret cable from the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research said that the number of people killed during transport to Sheberghan “may approach 2,000.”

The cable also said that while there was no security at Dasht-e Leili, U.N. personnel from Mazar-e-Sharif were monitoring the grave ” ‘every few days’ for signs of tampering.” There’d been plans for a detailed forensic investigation of the site in spring 2003.

“The hope had been to do a full exhumation in 2003,” said Nathaniel Raymond, a senior investigator at Physicians for Human Rights. “It didn’t happen.”

The U.N. monitoring of the site stopped. Edwards, the U.N. spokesman, said that he was still trying to reach officials who’d been present to get an explanation. The U.N., NATO, U.S. forces and the Afghan government never took any formal responsibility for patrolling the grave site.

Physicians for Human Rights made several requests to top U.S. officials to secure the mass graves, including an August 2002 letter to then-Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld asking that he “reconsider the position of the Defense Department and assure security at the grave site.” Four months later, the organization sent a letter to then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz saying that it was crucial to provide a small security detachment.

“From the time we discovered the site in January 2002, we had been advocating privately and publicly to the United Nations, the U.S. and the Afghan government to ensure consistent site protection and protection of forensic evidence,” Frank Donaghue, the chief executive officer of Physicians for Human Rights, said in a statement to McClatchy. “And clearly that did not happen.”

Dostum has long experience with mass graves being used in the Afghan political arena. In 1997, he revealed the discovery of mass graves of Taliban members killed by a former ally turned rival, Gen. Abdul Malik Pahlawan, in the Dasht-e Leili desert. The grave sites, which Dostum’s men brought in international journalists to document, helped cement Pahlawan’s exile from the area at the time.

Afghanistan’s attorney general, its top law enforcement official, said that given the bad security conditions in the country it was hard to think about investigating possible war crimes.

“So for the time being, we have put these issues off for the future,” Mohammed Ishaq Aloko said in an interview at his Kabul office.

Aloko, who’s seen as being very close to President Karzai, didn’t respond directly to repeated questions about Dostum.

“I believe that those who committed crimes against humanity will be prosecuted one day,” Aloko said. Just not anytime soon, he said.

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Senators accuse Rumsfeld over abuse of detainees

December 12, 2008

A US Senate committee has accused the former defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, of being directly responsible for the abusive interrogations of detainees at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay.

After an 18-month investigation, the Senate’s armed services committee concluded that Rumsfeld’s approval of aggressive interrogation methods in December 2002 was a direct cause of abuses that began in Guantánamo and spread to Afghanistan and Iraq. They culminated in the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2003, where Iraqi detainees were found to have been forced into naked pyramids, sexually humiliated and threatened by dogs.

The Bush administration insisted the abuses had been the result of a few “bad apples” and that those responsible would be held accountable. The committee found neither those statements to be true.

“The abuses at Abu Ghraib, Gitmo [Guantánamo] and elsewhere cannot be chalked up to the actions of a few bad apples,” said the Democratic chair of the committee, Carl Levin. “Attempts by senior officials to portray that to be the case while shrugging off any responsibility are both unconscionable and false.”

No other congressional report has pointed the finger of blame so squarely at Bush and his senior advisers.

In hearings in June and September, the committee heard testimony that allowed it to piece together the chronology of events leading up to the Abu Ghraib abuses. It focused its attentions on Sere, a training system used to prepare US soldiers for aggressive interrogations so that they might endure if captured overseas.

The techniques were never intended to be used by US interrogators against their detainees. But in February 2002, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Bush determined that the Geneva Conventions should not apply to terror suspects.

Following that ruling, techniques used in Sere training were applied against US detainees, and Rumsfeld gave his approval that December.

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Babylon’s History Swept Away in US Army Sandbags

December 11, 2008


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The US invasion of Iraq caused irreparable damage to historic sites in Babylon. (Photo: British Museum)

By: Agence France-Presse, December 10, 2008


Babylon, Iraq – Fragments of bricks, engraved with cuneiform characters thousands of years old, lie mixed with the rubble and sandbags left by the US military on the ancient site of Babylon in Iraq.

In this place, one of the cradles of civilisation, US troops in 2003-2004 built embankments, dug ditches and spread gravel to hold the fuel reservoirs needed to supply the heliport of Camp Alpha.

Today, archaeologists say a year of terracing work and 18 months of military presence, with tanks and helicopters, have caused irreparable damage. The Americans remained five months in Babylon and then handed over to the Poles who pulled out 16 months later.

Hands on hips, and wearing a seemingly permanent air of dismay, Maithem Hamza, director of the – totally empty – museum on the site, points to the soil: “Look at this land, it is packed with remnants. They filled their bags with them.”

He pushes with his foot a fragment of raw brick, with cuneiform inscriptions plainly visible. To one side of it, on soil filthy with fuel oil, lies the broken door of a Hummer, the US army’s light vehicle.

Undoubtedly the palace built on the site and on an artificial hill in 1993 by then-president Saddam Hussein drew the US military to Babylon during its invasion in March 2003.

The palace, like elsewhere in Iraq, was requisitioned as a military headquarters.

On one wall, near the door of the monumental entrance, a black stencil proclaims: “Building No.1”. Further on, adorning a warehouse wall, graffiti reads: “Miss you, Smoothy!.”

From April 2003 to June 2004, huge gravelled avenues were gouged out around the ruins of the palaces of Nebuchadnezzer in order to set up prefabricated buildings which became home to up to 2,000 troops.

The heliport is only some 300 metres (yards) from the remains of the north palace, and according to Maithem Hamza, vibration from the aircraft caused the base of the temple of Ninmah – rebuilt by Saddam in the 1980s – to collapse.

In a report published in 2005, experts from the British Museum confirmed that damage visible on nine of the dragon casts on the temple’s Door of Ishtar, and those on the cobbles of the processional way, were due to vibration caused by the passage of heavy machinery.

“That which is broken is broken… We will try to repair what we can,” said Maryam Omran Mussa, director of the site, speaking in her office near the entrance to the site which has been closed to the public since 2003.

“Many of the relics were buried near the surface. Vibration from tanks and lorries caused irreversible damage, that’s for real… From the start, we told the Americans (their actions) were a mistake. I wrote letters…

“They finally understood, and left, but it took time.”

British Museum curator John Curtis was one of the first to sound the alarm over the ancient site.

“They understood when photographs started to be published on the World Wide Web, particularly aerial photographs showing the extent of the military camp there,” he said.

“It’s only because of that that the military authorities of the coalition started to be very nervous and decided that they had to leave.”

In the face of the protests, terracing and building work was interrupted in June 2004, six months before the troops left.

In its defence, the US military argued that if its presence there certainly had caused damage, it had also protected the site from looters who were running riot during the first weeks of the occupation.

Questioned in 2006 in a programme on the BBC, Marine Colonel John Coleman accepted the principle of an apology to the director of the Iraqi antiquities department.

“If it makes him feel good, I can certainly give him one,” he said.

But he added: “Is there a price for the presence? Sure. I’ll just say that the price had the presence not been there would have been far greater.”

For Curtis, however, the price of the military presence was extremely high.

“A lot of the damage done is permanent. For example digging these long trenches: 170 metres long and more than two metres deep, this is not reversible, this is permanent damage that will last forever.”

Another problem arrived in the earth brought from outside the site to fill sandbags. “It contaminates the record of Babylon for the next generations of archeologists,” said Curtis.

“Moving the gravel can be done, but it’s a very long and very expensive job. And in the process, more damage would be done.”

Despite the damage to such an historic site, Curtis accepted that the US military believed that “building a base there wouldn’t actually cause any damage.”

He commented: “I don’t think it’s malicious: it comes from ignorance and stupidity, definitely.”

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Bush returns to West Point to defend doctrine of aggressive war

December 11, 2008
By Bill Van Auken  | World Socialist Web Site,  11 December 2008

President George W. Bush made a farewell appearance Tuesday at the US Military Academy at West Point, New York, delivering an unrepentant defense of the doctrine of preventive war that he unveiled there six-and-a-half years ago.

When Bush spoke to West Point’s graduating class of 2002, the World Socialist Web Site warned that his remarks signaled “a historic shift in US foreign policy that is pregnant with catastrophic implications for the people of the United States and the entire world.” The doctrine of “preemptive”—or, more accurately, aggressive—war that he outlined, the WSWS said, represented the “culmination of a protracted turn by the US ruling elite toward reliance on military force as the solution to all challenges it confronts on the world arena.” (See “Bush speaks at West Point: from containment to ‘rollback’“)

In the intervening years, these warnings have been fully confirmed. Since Bush spoke to the Army’s newly minted officers in 2002, at least 70 West Point graduates have been killed in the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan along with more than 4,750 other members of the US military.

For the countries where they were sent to fight, the doctrine produced catastrophes of historic proportions. In Iraq, the death toll has risen to well over a million. An estimated 2 million more have been wounded and at least 4 million have been forced to flee the country or turned into internal refugees. In short, nearly six years of war and occupation have left more than 20 percent of the nation’s pre-war population dead, maimed, expelled or homeless.

In Afghanistan, air strikes and ground operations, along with displacement, hunger and disease resulting from the war, have claimed the lives of tens of thousands of civilians while the disintegration of society under the impact of foreign occupation has left the country’s population facing a humanitarian catastrophe.

At home, Bush’s war policies have turned him into the most reviled president in US history with a popularity rating that has plumbed depths not even reached by Richard Nixon at the height of the Watergate crisis.

Yet, according to Bush’s speech Tuesday, the entire strategy has proved an immense success and constitutes his proud legacy.

He boasted of having “reshaped our approach to national security,” declaring that his administration had given “our national security professionals vital new tools like the Patriot Act and the ability to monitor terrorist communications.” These “tools” include torture, extraordinary rendition and secret prisons, the loathsome practices that turned the US into an international pariah. They also encompassed wholesale and illegal domestic spying and other methods associated with a police state.

Praising the results of his wars of aggression, Bush claimed to have “liberated 25 million Afghans,” but was forced to admit that more than seven years after the US invasion that “the battle is difficult.” This is an understatement, given reports that insurgents control up to 70 percent of the country.

Continued >>

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RIGHTS: Politics Still Reign Over Principles at U.N.

December 11, 2008

By Thalif Deen | Inter Press Service

UNITED NATIONS, Dec 10 (IPS) – The United Nations Wednesday commemorated the 60th anniversary of the landmark Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) against the backdrop of widespread political repression — most notably in Zimbabwe, Sudan, Burma (Myanmar), Iraq, Afghanistan and in the Israeli-occupied territories of West Bank and Gaza.

But a sharply divided Security Council has remained politically impotent against continued atrocities worldwide, in violation of humanitarian law and international conventions, including the UDHR.

Andrew Hudson, a senior associate with the Human Rights Defenders Programme at Human Rights First, singled out U.N. member states, primarily Security Council members, “who have frequently failed to prevent or address gross violations of the UDHR.”

The United Nations, he said, should redouble its efforts to demonstrate that the human rights contained in the UDHR are universal and allow for translation into specific local contexts.

“The new Universal Periodic Review mechanism at the Human Rights Council demonstrates that the UDHR applies universally to all states,” he stressed.

The U.N. human rights system should engage in objective, impartial and universal evaluation of the human rights records of all states, Hudson told IPS.

More recently, at a political level, the Security Council has remained deadlocked because of the partisan role of the five veto-wielding permanent members.

The United States, France and Britain have continued to protect Israel, Iraq and Afghanistan while Russia and China continue to shield Zimbabwe, Sudan and Burma (Myanmar) against any strictures or sanctions for human rights violations.

Article 1 of the UDHR, which was adopted by the General Assembly on Dec. 10, 1948, states that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”

But in reality human rights abuses are increasingly becoming the norm in most developing nations. And in developed countries, including the United States and Britain, violations are being justified in the name of fighting terrorism.

Speaking at a ceremony to mark the 60th anniversary of the UDHR on Wednesday, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said: “We see human trafficking, the exploitation of children, and a host of other ills plaguing millions of people,” he added.

The “host of other ills”, according to human rights organisations, includes torture, disappearances, extra-judicial killings, arbitrary detention, surveillance, defamation and administrative and judicial harassment. The victims also include journalists and human rights defenders.

Navi Pillay, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, told reporters that tens of millions of people around the world are still unaware that they have rights that they can demand, and that their governments are accountable to them, to a wide-ranging body of rights-based national and international law.

“Despite all our efforts over the past 60 years, this anniversary will pass many people by, and it is essential that we keep up the momentum, thereby enabling more and more people to stand up and claim their rights,” she added.

Anuradha Mittal, executive director of the San Francisco-based Oakland Institute, pointed out the failure of nation states and governments in fulfilling their obligation to ensure human rights for all.

For instance, she said, in the United States, where homelessness, hunger and poverty — particularly among children and seniors — abound, it is the failure of the government to fulfill its obligation to its people.

“The United Nations could have done more in terms of emphasising the relevance of human rights treaties, insisting on these treaties taking precedence over, say, trade agreements or other social economic policies that might conflict with human rights of people,” Mittal told IPS.

Asked where the United Nations has succeeded or failed in helping implement the UDHR, Julie Gromellon of the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) told IPS the objective of the founders of the U.N. to add a human dimension to international law through the UDHR has become a reality.

She said international law, and especially the UDHR, has become an important tool to promote respect for and observance of human rights.

The Universal Declaration has also served as a starting point for further standard-setting activities through eight core human rights conventions, whose implementation is monitored by so-called treaty bodies, a more advanced system of supervision.

In this framework, the United Nations has contributed to the recognition of the accountability of all states for compliance with their human rights obligations as laid down in the UDHR, she added.

But important lacunae need to be filled to implement the UDHR. States should be continuously urged by the U.N. to ratify all relevant international human rights treaties and to accept and implement the supervisory procedures.

In particular, they should be urged to ratify the relevant individual complaint procedures, Gromellon added.

She also said the crucial role of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) should be recognised by the U.N. “They have contributed in a most significant way to the development and enforcement of the international human rights system,” she noted.

And such organisations should also be given a consultative status with other organisations, including the international financial institutions and the World Trade Organisation.

Rob Wheeler of the World Alliance for Transforming the U.N. said the United Nations, in failing to ensure that all people’s rights are met, is actually violating several articles of its own founding Charter.

“We thus urge the United Nations to organise and hold a U.N. Charter Review Conference, under Article 109 of the Charter, in order to determine what can and must be done to ensure that the charter is upheld and that all people’s most basic human rights are indeed provided and met,” he said.

Unfortunately, he said, most of the provisions included in the Universal Declaration have still not been met even after 60 years — 830 million people still do not have enough food to eat, 1.1 billion lack access to clean water, 2.6 billion to basic sanitation, and 2.0 billion to essential drugs.

Hudson of Human Rights First said that the United Nations, especially the High Commissioner for Human Rights, has played a critical role in education, outreach and awareness-raising about the universality of the UDHR.

“However, U.N. member states fail to implement aspects of the UDHR by suggesting that human rights do not acknowledge cultural difference — a specious argument used to avoid human rights scrutiny,” Hudson told IPS.

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