Peace and Justice Post

Canadian Dimension

By John Wright

Counterpunch 2007

The U.S. occupation of Iraq has spawned the re-emergence of the word imperialism into the lexicon of everyday language, after an absence of five decades stretching back to the end of Second World War. U.S. military adventures since then–particularly in Korea, Vietnam and Central America–were dressed up as defensive operations against the spread and threat posed by Communism and all its evil manifestations, namely, national liberation, self determination, and social and economic justice.

The truth is, however, that imperialism has remained as constant and ever present as the changing of the seasons. The only thing which has changed is its packaging, which could be described, to paraphrase James Connolly, as old wine in a new bottle.

The U.S. ruling class emerged from the Second World War as the new imperial masters of the world. As such, they quickly recognized that the plethora of national liberation movements which had sprung up across the globe after the war, determined to shake off the yoke of colonialism, demanded new methods of control than the ones which had been utilized previously by the European powers.

The World Bank and International Monetary Fund’s stated aim, when formed by a small coterie of international financiers and bankers (mainly British and American, with the British by now accepting their role as junior partners in the new order of things) at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire in 1944, was to rebuild Europe and stabilize the world’s financial markets after the turmoil of the Second World War.

In line with those aims, the newly independent former colonies in the Third World, which had gradually won their freedom, had to be brought to heel and controlled–for they possessed the natural and human resources necessary for expansion under this new global empire.

After suffering the ravages of colonialism, and after the hard struggle for liberation, nations of the African continent in particular were left with devastated and moribund economies which placed them at the mercy of vultures in the shape of the big international banks and financial institutions.

These banks and institutions loaned enormous sums at predatory interest rates, making it impossible for the Third World to rebuild, develop and repay their loans at the same time.

It had to be one or the other.

Things reached a crisis in the mid 1980s when, to stave off the prospect of a world depression due to the bad debts incurred by Third World countries, the IMF and WB stepped in and took over responsibility for those debts from the big private banks like Barclays, Credit Lyons, Chase Manhattan, etc., which were threatened with collapse.

It was a move which put the IMF and WB into an unassailable position of power which they have never relinquished since.

Since that time nearly 70 countries in the world have been forced to adopt Structural Adjustment Programs (SAP’s) designed and developed by the IMF and WB. These SAPs are intended to restructure the economies of said nations in order to best meet the repayment needs of aid or loans provided by the First World, represented by the IMF and WB.

This requires them to impose severe austerity programs on their already beleaguered economies, which translates into the eradication of much needed public spending on social programs in health, education, transport, agriculture, and so on.

These austerity programs pave the way for transnational corporations, always looking to reduce costs and access cheap sources of raw materials, to come in and set up their manufacturing operations, driving people, including children in many cases, from the land into factories, where they are forced to labour long hours under horrendous conditions for starvation wages.

This serves two purposes: it destroys the agro-economies of the Third World, which are now required to import their food from the First World, and ensures the outward flow of wealth to First World transnational corporations and their international investors.

The case of Nigeria is typical. Today, life expectancy in this oil-rich, aid-dependent nation is 47 years for males and 52 years for females. Of a population of 120 million, 89 million people live on less than a dollar a day, this despite the fact that the Niger Delta region contains large deposits of oil.

One IMF loan of $12 billion has become a continuous unpaid debt of $27 billion.

The people of Nigeria do not see a dollar of the wealth produced by their oil, which flows unchecked out of their country into the pockets of a consortium of British, Dutch and U.S. oil companies. Theirs are lives reduced to a daily struggle for survival.

Six million children under the age of 5 die each year in the Third World as a whole due to hunger and preventable disease.

This year by year genocide against the children of the poor is the net result of the IMF and World Bank’s rape and theft of the Third World’s natural and human resources on behalf of the ruling classes in the First World.

It is imperialism by any other name, soft imperialism which arrives disguised as aid but with its real aim indistinguishable to that of the hard imperialism we see now in Iraq with military occupation.

Both are embarked upon in order to feed the insatiable appetite of the free market capitalist powers.

Both spell misery and death for millions.

Both constitute an evil which is inimical to human progress.

John Wright lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. He can be reached at: Jscotlive@aol.com

Source: Al Bawaba

Hamas official: Abbas can’t serve as Palestinian president

A Hamas official vowed on Thursday to foil early general elections favored by Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas in his standoff with the Islamic movement. “Early elections are an attempt to bypass the will of the Palestinian people and this attempt is bound to failure. It will fail. We, the Palestinian people, will scupper it,” Mahmud Zahar told a press conference in Gaza, according to AFP. The former foreign minister in a Hamas cabinet lashed out against Abbas, accusing him of conspiring with Israel against his people and saying he was not worthy of being president. “He conspires with the enemy to assassinate Hamas chiefs by affirming that they have dug their own grave,” Zahar said. “There is an Israeli plan for a Gaza incursion with the agreement of Abu Mazen (Abbas),” he said. “Can a man who allies with the enemy against his people remain the president of these people,” Zahar asked. He also accused Abbas of being directly responsible for the closure of the Rafah border crossing and the suffering of the estimated 6,000 Palestinians stuck there. © 2007 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)

Green Left, July14, 2007

By Doug Lorimer

“Nearly five months into a security strategy that involves thousands of additional US and Iraqi troops patrolling Baghdad, the number of unidentified bodies found on the streets of the capital was 41% higher in June than in January, according to unofficial health ministry statistics”, the July 4 Washington Post reported.

During June, “453 unidentified corpses, some bound, blindfolded, and bearing signs of torture, were found in Baghdad, according to morgue data provided by a health ministry official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to release the information”, the Post reported.

June also capped the deadliest three-month period for the US armed forces since they invaded Iraq in March 2003. In the first quarter of this year, 244 US troops were killed — an average of 2.7 per day. But in the second quarter, 331 US soldiers were killed — an average rate of 3.6 per day.

By the end of June, the Pentagon had reported that a total of 3578 US troops had been killed in Iraq since the start of the war. In addition, the May 18 New York Times reported, based on examination of insurance claims recorded by the US Labor Department, almost 1000 US civilians employed on contracts for the US government had been killed in Iraq between March 2003 and the end of March this year.

Full article

Overcoming the conspiracy against Palestine
Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 18 July 2007

Mohammed Dahlan’s 13 July 2003 letter to then Israeli defense minister Shaul Mofaz.

“Be certain that Yasser Arafat’s final days are numbered, but allow us to finish him off our way, not yours. And be sure as well that … the promises I made in front of President Bush, I will give my life to keep.” Those words were written by the Fatah warlord Mohammed Dahlan, whose US- and Israeli-backed forces were routed by Hamas in the Gaza Strip last month, in a 13 July 2003 letter to then Israeli defense minister Shaul Mofaz and published on Hamas’ website on 4 July this year.

Dahlan, who despite his failure to hold Gaza, remains a senior advisor to Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas, outlines his conspiracy to overthrow Arafat, destroy Palestinian institutions and replace them with a quisling leadership subservient to Israel. Dahlan writes of his fear that Arafat would convene the Palestinian legislative council and ask it to withdraw confidence from then prime minister Mahmoud Abbas, who had been appointed earlier in 2003 at Bush’s insistence in order to curb Arafat’s influence. Dahlan wrote that “complete coordination and cooperation by all” was needed to prevent this, as well as “subjecting [Arafat] to pressure so that he cannot carry out this step.” Dahlan reveals that “we have already begun attempts to polarize the views of many legislative council members by intimidation and temptation so that they will be on our side and not his [Arafat’s].”

Dahlan closes his letter to Mofaz saying, “it remains only for me to convey my gratitude to you and the prime minister [Ariel Sharon] for your continued confidence in us, and to you all respect.”

This letter is a small but vivid piece of evidence to add to the existing mountain, of the conspiracy in which the Abbas leadership is involved. In the month since Abbas’ appointment of a Vichy-style “emergency government” headed by Salam Fayad, historic Fatah leaders, such as Farouq Qaddumi and Hani al-Hassan have signalled their opposition to Abbas’ actions, specifically rejecting his order that Palestinian resistance fighters disarm while Israeli occupation continues unchallenged.

Full article

LewRockwell.com , July 17, 2007

By Eric Margolis

As Americans turn increasingly against President George Bush’s calamitous war in Iraq, and revolt spreads through Republican ranks, the White House is again resorting to its tried-and-true ploy of fanning grossly inflated fears of terrorism.

The president just made two preposterous claims last week that insult the intelligence of his listeners. First, Bush insisted US forces in Iraq are fighting “the same people who staged 9/11.”

Second, withdrawing US forces from Iraq, as the Democratic-controlled Congress is urging, means “surrendering Iraq to al-Qaida.”

These canards mark the latest steps in the Bush administration’s evolving efforts to mislead Americans into believing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are all part of a global fight against al-Qaida.

When marketers want to change the name of an existing product, they first place a new name in small type below the existing one. They gradually shrink the old name, and enlarge the new one until the original name vanishes.

That’s what’s been happening in Iraq. When the US invaded, Iraqis who resisted were initially branded “Saddam loyalists,” “die-hard Ba’athists,” or, in Don Rumsfeld’s colorful terminology, “dead-enders.” Next, the Pentagon and US media called the Iraqi resistance, “terrorists” or “insurgents.” The reason for invading Iraq, the White House insisted, was all about removing the tyrant Saddam, seizing weapons of mass destruction, defending humans rights and implanting democracy.

Then, a tiny, previously unknown Iraqi group that had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden appropriated the name, “al-Qaida in Mesopotamia.”

This was such a breathtakingly convenient gift to the Bush Administration, many cynics suspected a false-flag operation created by CIA and Britain’s wily MI6. Soon after, the White House and Pentagon began calling most of Iraq’s 22 plus resistance groups, “al-Qaida.”

The US media eagerly joined this deception, even though 95% of Iraq’s resistance groups had no sympathy for bin Laden’s movement. Watch any US network TV news report on Iraq and you will inevitably hear reporters parroting Pentagon handouts about US forces “launching a new offensive against al-Qaida.”

Al-Qaida in Mesopotamia didn’t even exist before 9/11, but that didn’t stop President Bush from trying to gull credulous voters. He simply ignored the 2006 National Intelligence Estimate that found US-occupied Iraq had become an “incubator” for violent anti-American groups.

If the US were to withdraw from Iraq tomorrow, the nation would be split between warring Shia, Sunni and Kurdish parties. The fake Al-Qaida in Iraq would end up at the bottom of the totem pole, or be wiped out by other Iraqis. Even Osama bin Laden and his number two, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, have blasted the phony al-Qaida in Iraq and called for an end to its attacks on Iraqi civilians.

Polls show that in spite of a mountain of evidence to the contrary, White House disinformation strategy has worked. Today, an amazing 60% of Americans still believe Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks.

At least that’s down from the 80% who originally believed this Orwellian big lie in 2003. The White House continues to blur the facts and make Americans believe Iraq and Afghanistan are “central fronts in the global war on terror.”

The fact recent polls found 60% of Americans – and 90% of US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan – still believe Saddam and bin Laden had colluded to launch 9/11 is shocking, but not surprising. Ignorance of foreign affairs and mindless flag waving are as American as apple pie.

Tens of millions of Americans are fed a steady diet of political or religious ideology disguised as news from the administration’s house organ, Fox News; from evangelical Christian TV and radio; or from the neoconservative’s version of Pravda, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages. The rest are too busy watching brain-deadening TV pap to pay the least attention to events overseas.

They remain unaware the faux “war against global terror” is now costing a mind-boggling US $12 billion monthly, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service. That’s the cost of 3 nuclear-powered “Nimitz” class 97,000-ton aircraft carriers every month.

The Bush Administration has spent $610 billion dollars since 2001 on its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, making them the second most expensive conflict in US history after World War II.

Last week, US Homeland Security Czar Michael Chertoff allowed he had a “gut feeling” that an al-Qaida attack on America was imminent this summer. At the same time, Washington was abuzz with a leaked US intelligence report that al-Qaida – the objective of the so-called war on terror – had reconstituted and was as strong as prior to 9/11, 2001.

America’s sixteen intelligence agencies spend $40 billion annually, with another $15–20 billion in their hidden “black budgets.” Homeland Security spends $44.6 billion. In spite of these gargantuan expenditures of a trillion dollars – that’s $1,000,000,000,000 – the best intelligence Czar Chertoff can come up with is “gut feeling?”

One suspects Chertoff’s worried stomach has far more to do with the growing Republican Party revolt against the president’s Iraq war than nebulous threats from Osama bin Laden’s loud but tiny group.

Polls show the only area where Republicans still command popular support is the “war on terror.”

So Bush/Cheney & Co. are trying to use al-Qaida to scare Americans to vote Republican, just as they did prior to 2004 elections. It worked well last time and got Bush reelected.

But Americans are increasingly leery of the White House’s crying wolf. Many are also asking how Bush could claim “steady progress” was being made in his wars when it appears the al-Qaida movement is back to pre-2001 strength, anti-American groups are popping up across Asia and Africa, and Iraq is a bloody mess.

After six years of conflict, 3,600 dead and 25,000 wounded American soldiers, expenditure of $610 billion, tens of thousands of dead Iraqis and Afghans, collapse of Mideast peace efforts, and a Muslim World enraged against the US, nothing positive seems to have been accomplished by a leader who likes to style himself, “the war president.”

As the White House now ponders an attack on Iran, we would do well to recall the famed words of King Pyrrhus of Epirus, “one more such victory and we are ruined.”

Eric Margolis [send him mail], contributing foreign editor for Sun National Media Canada, is the author of War at the Top of the World. See his website.

CommonDreams.org
Published on Saturday, July 14, 2007
By Ralph Nader

Thursday, July 12, 2007’s Washington Post was another day of well-supported headlines chronicling the lawless, incompetent, wasteful, negligent, bumbling and multiple perils to our nation’s security and safety caused by the Bush-Cheney regime.

One headline reads: “U.S. Warns of Stronger Al-Qaeda.” The report by the Bush Administration’s National Counterterrorism Center was titled “Al-Qaida Better Positioned to Strike the West.” Safe havens are being established in remote tribal areas of western Pakistan.

In recent days, George W. Bush has told audiences of the growing menace of Al-Qaeda inside Iraq.

There was no Al-Qaeda in Iraq before Bush’s invasion.

Five hundred billion dollars (and vast bloodshed) later and we are left with the Bush government’s own assessment of Al-Qaeda’s resurgence and spread!

Officials inside and retired generals, diplomats and intelligence specialists outside the Bush government have warned before and after the Iraq invasion of the disastrous consequences of this maneuver. Inside the Pentagon, the U.S. Army personnel, up to four-star Generals, have warned against the invasion but have been muzzled.

Bush’s own CIA director-Porter J. Goss-, General William Casey and others declared that the U.S. military presence was fueling the insurgency in Iraq and Goss added that our presence in Iraq is a magnet attracting more people from other countries to learn the skills of sabotage and terror.

Bush’s own counter-terrorism advisor in the White House, Richard Clarke, wrote in his book, Against All Enemies, that Osama bin Laden must be beseeching Bush to invade Iraq to inflame the Muslim world and generate new recruits.

Nothing-facts, judgment, the destruction of Iraq, the U.S. casualties, the massive drain on the taxpayers, the distraction from the needs of the American people affect this obsessively-compulsed duo in the White House.

Another headline in the Post that day was an assessment by Bush’s CIA chief, Michael V. Hayden that the U.S. installed Iraqi government was unable to govern and that the situation seems irreversible. He added that he could not “point to any milestone or checkpoint where we can turn this thing around.” Those words were conveyed to the Iraq study group on the same day (November 13, 2006) that the Group heard Mr. Bush give an upbeat assessment of that same government.

Bush has been chronically detached from the reality of his own advisors.

Also on page one was this stunner of a sting: “Undercover congressional investigators posing as West Virginia businessmen obtained a license with almost no scrutiny from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission that enabled them to buy enough radioactive material from U.S. suppliers to build a “dirty bomb,” a new government [GAO] report says.”

How about that for the Bush’s agency that is supposed to keep the atom in safe hands!

Inside on the Business Page is “Armored Vehicles Chronically Late.” This latest chapter in the Bush’s management by criminal negligence leaving soldiers without adequate body armor for many, many months of preventable fatalities.

The reporter, Renae Merle, writes: “The Pentagon inspector general’s office has found that a program to deliver special armored vehicles to protect military personnel in Iraq from roadside bombs has been marred by delays and questionable contracting practices that may have endangered troops.” “May have”? When such vehicles are not shipped out, soldiers lose their lives and limbs.

If George W. Bush’s daughters, Jenna and Barbara were on those Iraqi roads, wanna bet how fast Laura Bush would get George to focus?

Day after day in the papers and on the television news, the endemic mismanagement of corrupt corporate contracts, flouting of civil liberties, due process of law and inability to get anything done, even in widespread post-Katrina emergencies, produces no accountability, no compelling changes from the Congress, no impeachment proceedings.

Poll after poll shows Bush-Cheney approval ratings below thirty percent. About 70 percent of the people want out of Iraq. And many polls show the public wants the Bush regime to end, believes that Bush does not care for the people like themselves, and that corporations have too much control over their lives.

And not only conservatives are appalled by the gigantic deficits Bush is piling up for future generations of Americans.

This government leaves Americans defenseless when it comes to occupational diseases, medical malpractice, air and water pollution. Bush can’t even police defective or contaminated products pouring into this country from communist China.

Because it has no quorum, his Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) is just about powerless to impose civil penalties or otherwise regulate or recall defective products, domestic or imported.

As reported in the useful Loyola Consumer Law Review, Bush has not filled the third Commissioner’s position for over a year which prevents the CPSC from exercising its authority over dangerous products. The agency is in limbo, while injuries mount.

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. His most recent book is The Seventeen Traditions.

Counterpunch.org, July 16, 2007

Impeach Now

Or Face the End of Constitutional Democracy

BY PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

Unless Congress immediately impeaches Bush and Cheney, a year from now the US could be a dictatorial police state at war with Iran.

Bush has put in place all the necessary measures for dictatorship in the form of “executive orders” that are triggered whenever Bush declares a national emergency. Recent statements by Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff, former Republican senator Rick Santorum and others suggest that Americans might expect a series of staged, or false flag, “terrorist” events in the near future.

Many attentive people believe that the reason the Bush administration will not bow to expert advice and public opinion and begin withdrawing US troops from Iraq is that the administration intends to rescue its unpopular position with false flag operations that can be used to expand the war to Iran.

Full article

Source: Huntington Post,

By Dave Johnson

Posted July 16, 2007

People say we should not impeach Bush because it will divert us from getting out of Iraq. I think that approach has things backwards. I think we can’t deal with the problems of Iraq until we deal with getting Bush out. With Bush in place we can’t have a rational debate about the best options for Iraq.

1) I believe that it’s wrong to just pull our forces out of Iraq. We invaded, we destabilized and we destroyed the existing institutions of order. We created the mess there. We created the civil war. We created the threat of regional conflict. So I think it is America’s legal and moral responsibility to provide security for the people of Iraq. And that’s also what international law says. Of course, providing security for the people of Iraq is not going to happen with Bush in office.

(Someone told me this idea is like being raped and then getting a ride to the hospital from the rapist. I can understand the sentiment, but the U.S. is not a person and Iraq is not a person. We and they are a bunch of people all with their own differing needs and interests. Countries have to deal with where things are on a given day, before they deal with where things were on a previous day. In other words, Bush did what he did — but where do we go from here that is best for us and best for them NOW?)

2) It is wrong to blame the Iraqis for what we have done and it would be wrong to abandon them to the mess we made. But the way our forces are being used by Bush just makes things worse. This must change but it will not change with Bush in charge of policy decisions.

3) Suppose we do vote to withdraw with Bush in office? How do you think a Bush administration will execute that withdrawal? Will they do it in a way that makes things better — or much worse? And will they just refuse, necessitating the impeachment I say has to happen first? In other words, we can’t deal with Iraq until we deal with Bush.

4) There is also a national security component. The current situation in Iraq really is making us less safe here. Leaving might only make that worse. This needs to be debated rationally – impossible with Bush in office spouting his focus-group-tested bullshit, designed to put up a smokescreen and distract us from reality.

5) Bush’s propaganda is causing us to doubt terror warnings that may be real. What if our intelligence agencies discovered that al Queda really is getting ready to use a nuke on an American city, for example? We simply can not trust our government right now to tell us the truth. The threat of a terrorist attack is too serious to allow this incompetent, lying gang of criminals to remain in office even one day longer than it takes to get them out.

6) Similarly, Bush’s lies about Iraq have forced us to doubt the claims about threats presented by Iran. But Iran is not Iraq, and their theocratic rulers are not our friends. We need to be able to trust what is being said to us and we can’t with Bush in office.

So I think that the right path lies in a different direction from working to get the troops out. Options beyond the simplistic choice of doing what we are doing now or just leaving need to be discussed. But we are not going to be able to do what is right until we change the national leadership here. We are not even going to be able to properly debate the issues.

Finding the answers to the problems of Iraq begins with solving the problem of Bush.

Source: CommonDreams.org, July 15, 2007

By Cindy Sheehan

Journey For Humanity and Accountability

Today our Journey took us to Ft. Benning, Ga, where the cancer of the School of Americas (WINSEC) is housed. I have written on torture before and I believe that BushCo’s policy of imprisoning people without their basic due process and torturing them is one of the grossest breeches of international and American law and one of the overriding reasons that they should be impeached.

The School of Torture has graduated many egregious violators of human rights like Panamanian drug lord, U.S. CIA employee, and Bush family friend (until he became an enemy), Manuel Noriega. If there is one issue that should unite Americans it should be against torture. Incredibly, we still have neighbors in our communities who believe that torture is correct, humane and valuable. However to say torture is “wrong” is like saying the sky is blue. Torture is inherently wrong. Torture is pure evil. Torture is an abomination. Torture is disordered and demented. Torture is sick, sick, sick!

Most significantly the people who are being tortured in such prison camps as Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib were mostly sold to the US Army by bounty hunters and the Northern Aliance. Criminal charges against the prisoners are as rare as the truth in the Bush Regime. Most reasonable people would agree that information gleaned from such awfully brutal means (water-boarding, stress positions, extreme noise and temperatures, sodomy and other sexual humiliation, electrodes on genitalia, etc) is never reliable. I can’t even fathom the sick, sadistic minds of the Bush Regime who not only have authorized and institutionalized this behavior but also refuse to end it and close the camps that have undermined any moral authority the US may have had.

Torture not only dehumanizes the tortured, but the torturer. It hurts my heart deeply to think of our young soldiers carrying out such ruthless acts on other humans who for the most part were in the wrong place at the wrong time and do not know where Osama bin Laden is hiding. Torture only compromises our soldiers’ lives in the field as the US cannot credibly claim any kind of moral high ground if one of our soldiers is tragically captured. The abomination of Abu Ghraib is one of the reasons that the insurgency began on the day Casey was killed in Sadr City, Baghdad. I personally know three men who were illegally and wrongly imprisoned in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib who can testify to the fact that, yes, America does torture and does so with extreme, callous and cold-hearted cruelty.

The Geneva Conventions are clear on prohibiting the use of torture and the 8th Amendment to our own Constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. When torture is official policy, where will it end? When George can pick and choose who receives the centuries old right to habeas corpus and who doesn’t, where will it end? Will it end with the “terrorists” in Guantanamo or will it be used here in the USA against those who stand up against tyranny and struggle for our Constitution, freedoms, peace and human rights?

Torture has tarnished the soul of our nation and Congress has done little to restrain BushCo’s Torquemadas and even when a bill is passed restricting the use of torture, George adds a signing statement saying that he is above the law. BushCo is no better than a crime cabal and they must be Consitutionally controlled.

Apparently impeachment is the only remedy for torture and will go a long way to elevating our country’s standing in the international community and to healing our broken nation. Impeachment is not an optional menu item that can be set on a table but a Constitutionally mandated requirement (See section II, Article IV).

Put it back on the table, Ms. Pelosi. We have over a million signatures on petitions demanding that Congress end the misery of our nation and world by impeaching George Bush and Dick Cheney.

Action items: Go to: www.impeachbush.org to sign the petition to impeach Bush.

Go to: www.thecampcaseyinstitute.org for more info on our Journey for Humanity and Accountability or to donate to defray our expenses.

Call Nancy Pelosi’s office (202-225-4965) to tell her to green light impeachment.

Join us in our walk from Arlington Cemetery to Congressman John Conyer’s office for a sit-in for impeachment on July 23rd or organize sit-ins in your Congress Rep’s local office.

Go to Amnesty International to learn more about the issue of torture.

Cindy Sheehan is the mother of Spc. Casey Austin Sheehan who was KIA in Iraq on 04/04/04. She is a co-founder and President of Gold Star Families for Peace and the author of two books: Not One More Mother’s Child and Dear President Bush.

Human Rights News

Government Should Open Central Highlands to Independent Observers

(Jakarta, July 5, 2007) – In the Central Highlands of remote Papua province, a region closed to outside observers, police appear to be routinely committing serious abuses, such as extrajudicial executions, torture and rape, with impunity, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today. Endemic police abuse is deepening mistrust of the national government in Jakarta and potentially inflaming separatist tensions.

The 81-page report, “Out of Sight: Endemic Abuse and Impunity in Papua’s Central Highlands,” is the product of more than a year of research. The report documents daily abuses by police officers and other security forces in the mountainous and isolated Central Highlands area of the Indonesian province of Papua, located on the western half of the island of New Guinea.

A key finding of the report is that the police, particularly BRIMOB officers (Mobile Brigade police, the elite paramilitary corps used for emergencies), are responsible for the most serious rights violations in the region today, although some reports of brutal treatment by Indonesian soldiers continue to emerge.

“Conditions in Papua’s Central Highlands are an important test of how Indonesia’s security forces perform when political tensions are high and regions are closed to outside observers,” said Joseph Saunders, deputy program director at Human Rights Watch. “The police are failing that test badly.”

The new report follows Human Rights Watch’s report in February, “Protest and Punishment: Political Prisoners in Papua,” which documented severe restrictions on freedom of expression, assembly and association in Papua.

Many of the police abuses documented in the report were particularly cruel. One man told Human Rights Watch what happened when 12 BRIMOB officers arrested him and some friends for a peaceful independence flag raising:

My teeth fell out. Blood flowed out. I was hit. I was kicked twice and then in the stomach twice again. I was kicked in the nose, the mouth and the teeth. More kicks were ordered and this was repeated. I could not count the number of times. I saw all my friends given the same treatment. Blood was flowing from them and they were forbidden from going to the toilet. They ordered us to swallow our blood. My nose was bleeding. They ordered us to swallow the blood again. I do not know the name of the officer in command. They all punched us, taking turns.

Another man reported being beaten by the police while witnessing the arrest of another person:

I was beaten with the end of a gun on my back, and with fists to my face. My mouth and eyes were smashed and bleeding. I felt dizzy and fell. Straight away I was kicked by five members of the police and BRIMOB. They were all wearing complete official uniforms with guns … I was barely conscious when five members of the police took me into the car. As they were taking me, they punched me to the back three times with rifle butts and then in the car I was beaten with a truncheon.

Human Rights Watch wrote to both the head of the police and the head of the military in Papua asking for information on all of the cases documented in the report, but received no response.

A lack of internal accountability and a poorly functioning justice system mean impunity for perpetrators of abuses is the norm in Papua.

“No one is being prosecuted for the crimes we documented,” said Saunders. “The police are acting as a law unto themselves.”

The Indonesian provinces of Papua and West Papua are closed to outside human rights observers. Journalists have extremely limited access. Many diplomats have told Human Rights Watch that they have little understanding of the situation in the provinces since there is not much independent reporting on conditions there. Reliable information on the remote Central Highlands region is even harder to come by.

Human Rights Watch called on the Indonesian government to open the provinces to independent observers in order to increase the amount and quality of information about conditions there and to allow independent and transparent investigations to take place.

“By keeping the region closed to outside scrutiny, officials in Jakarta are receiving biased and partial accounts of what is taking place,” said Saunders. “Reliable information is essential if officials are genuinely interested in identifying problems and finding lasting solutions.”

For years, the Central Highlands region has been the site of often tense confrontations between Indonesian police and military units and small cells of guerrillas from the separatist Free Papua Movement (Organisasi Papua Merdeka, or OPM). The pro-independence guerrillas have conducted repeated low-level armed attacks against Indonesian security forces, which continue to conduct “sweeping” operations in civilian areas, spreading fear and panic and leading many villagers to flee their homes.