Peace and Justice Post

The Independent online

Leonard Doyle reports

Published June 21, 2007

The publication of an anthology of works, composed on paper cups by detainees, provides a harrowing insight into the torments and fading hopes of prisoners.

The words of the celebrated Pakistani poet were scratched on the sides of a Styrofoam cup with a pebble. Then, under the eyes of Guantanamo Bay’s prison guards, they were secretly passed from cell to cell. When the guards discovered what was going on, they smashed the containers and threw them away, fearing that it was a way of passing coded messages.

Fragments of these “cup poems” survived, however, and are included in an 84-page anthology entitled Poems from Guantanamo: the Detainees Speak, to be published later this year by the University of Iowa Press.

The verses provide a harrowing insight into the torments and fading hopes of the prisoners. Only two Guantanamo inmates have been charged with a crime.

They were brought to light by Marc Falkoff, a US professor of law with a doctorate in American literature. He represents 17 Yemeni inmates and has made 10 visits to Guantanamo. He dedicates the book to “my friends inside the wire”.

In the summer of 2005 Professor Falkoff was sent two poems from his clients. Written in Arabic, they were included in letters they could legally send. Because all communication with the detainees is deemed a potential threat to national security, everything – letters, interview notes, legal documents – must be sealed and sent to a US intelligence facility for review. The two poems were deemed a potential risk and remain classified to this day.

Professor Falkoff contacted other lawyers and discovered that several had received poems from their clients. Other detainees, like the two released Britons, Moazzam Begg and Martin Mubanga, wrote poetry while in prison and brought them with them on their release.

Censorship remains absolute at the camp however. As far as the US military is concerned: “poetry … presents a special risk, and DoD [Department of Defence] standards are not to approve the release of any poetry in its original form or language”. The fear, officers say, is that allegorical imagery in poetry may be used to convey coded messages to militants outside.

That is scoffed at by Professor Falkoff. “These are the same military censors who in 2004 tried to stop me receiving allegations of abusive treatment of my clients who were being subjected to intense heat and cold and forced to remain standing.” He added: “If the inmates were writing words like ‘the Eagle flies at dawn,’ the censors might have a case, but they are not. I fully accept their right to stop any coded messages to militants outside. But what the military fears is not so much the possibility of secret messages being communicated, but the power of words to make people outside realise that these are human beings who have not had their day in court.”

The thoughts of the inmates are considered so potentially dangerous by the US military that they are not even trusted with pen and paper. The only exception is an occasional 10-minute period when they are allowed to write to their families via the International Red Cross. Even then the words they write are heavily censored.

The 380 or so inmates of Guantanamo include some avowed Islamic militants and al-Qa’ida fighters. But the majority are there because they were swept up by the police and intelligence services of other countries working on behalf of the US. In their despair many of these detainees have turned to verse to express their innermost feelings.

Others have attempted or committed suicide. One of the poets is a Bahraini man who has been held in solitary confinement since the end of 2003. He has tried to kill himself 12 times while in the prison. On one occasion, he was found by his lawyer, hanging by his neck and bleeding from a gash to his arm.

There are other tragic tales behind the verses. The “cup poems” of Guantanamo speak of the strange absence of flowers in spring, the bangles worn by young women and handcuffs on the militants.

Fragments survived in the memory of the poet Shaikh Abdurraheem Muslim Dost after his eventual release, but thousands of lines of poetry he wrote in prison have disappeared.

Dost, a respected religious scholar, poet, and journalist – and author of nearly 20 books – until his arrest in 2001, spent nearly three years in Guantanamo with his brother. Sent home two years ago, the brothers were picked up by Pakistani intelligence and they too disappeared. Nothing has been heard of them since.

Aami al Haj, a Sudanese national, was a journalist covering the war in Afghanistan for al-Jazeera television, when, in 2001, he was arrested stripped of his passport and press card and handed over to US forces. He was tortured at both Bagram air base and Kandahar before being transferred to Guantanamo Bay. The US military says he was a financial courier for Chechen rebels and that he assisted al-Qa’ida but has offered no evidence to support the claims.

“When I heard pigeons cooing in the trees, Hot tears covered my face,” he wrote from his prison cell. “They have monuments to liberty And freedom of opinion, which is well and good. But I explained to them, that Architecture is not justice.”

THE POEMS

Humiliated In The Shackles

By Sami al Hajj

When I heard pigeons cooing in the trees,

Hot tears covered my face.

When the lark chirped, my thoughts composed

A message for my son.

Mohammad, I am afflicted.

In my despair, I have no one but Allah for comfort.

The oppressors are playing with me,

As they move freely around the world.

They ask me to spy on my countrymen,

Claiming it would be a good deed.

They offer me money and land,

And freedom to go where I please.

Their temptations seize

My attention like lightning in the sky.

But their gift is an empty snake,

Carrying hypocrisy in its mouth like venom,

They have monuments to liberty

And freedom of opinion, which is well and good.

But I explained to them that

Architecture is not justice.

America, you ride on the backs of orphans,

And terrorize them daily.

Bush, beware.

The world recognizes an arrogant liar.

To Allah I direct my grievance and my tears.

I am homesick and oppressed.

Mohammad, do not forget me.

Support the cause of your father, a God-fearing man.

I was humiliated in the shackles.

How can I now compose verses? How can I now write?

After the shackles and the nights and the suffering and the tears,

How can I write poetry?

My soul is like a roiling sea, stirred by anguish,

Violent with passion.

I am a captive, but the crimes are my captors’.

I am overwhelmed with apprehension.

Lord, unite me with my son Mohammad.

Lord, grant success to the righteous.

An Al-Jazeera cameraman, Sami al Hajj, a Sudanese, was visiting his brother in Damascus after the 11 September attacks when he got a call asking him to go to Pakistan to cover the impending war in Afghanistan. Instead, he ended up in Guantanamo where he claims he has been severely and regularly beaten, scarring his face.

Death Poem

By Jumah al Dossari

Take my blood.

Take my death shroud and

The remnants of my body.

Take photographs of my corpse at the grave, lonely.

Send them to the world,

To the judges and

To the people of conscience,

Send them to the principled men and the fair-minded.

And let them bear the guilty burden, before the world,

Of this innocent soul.

Let them bear the burden, before their children and before history,

Of this wasted, sinless soul,

Of this soul which has suffered at the hands of the “protectors of peace”.

Arrested in Pakistan and held in solitary confinement since 2003, Jumah al Dossari’s mental wellbeing is worrying his lawyers. The 33-year old Bahraini national has tried to kill himself 12 times since his incarceration in Guantanamo. On one visit, his lawyer found him hanging in a bedsheet noose, with a deep gash in one wrist. In a letter Mr Dossari wrote in 2005, he said: “The purpose of Guantanamo is to destroy people and I have been destroyed.”

Is It True?

By Osama Abu Kadir

Is it true that the grass grows again after rain?

Is it true that the flowers will rise up again in the Spring?

Is it true that birds will migrate home again?

Is it true that the salmon swim back up their streams?

It is true. This is true. These are all miracles.

But is it true that one day we’ll leave Guantanamo Bay?

Is it true that one day we’ll go back to our homes?

I sail in my dreams. I am dreaming of home.

To be with my children, each one part of me;

To be with my wife and the ones that I love;

To be with my parents, my world’s tenderest hearts.

I dream to be home, to be free from this cage.

But do you hear me, oh Judge, do you hear me at all?

We are innocent, here, we’ve committed no crime.

Set me free, set us free, if anywhere still

Justice and compassion remain in this world!

Shortly after 11 September, Osama Abu Kadir travelled to Pakistan to perform charity work in Afghanistan with the Islamic missionary group Tablighi Jamat. The US claims Tablighi was providing fighters for jihad in Afghanistan and arrested Mr Kadir near Jalalabad in November 2001. In his native Jordan, he was known as a dedicated family man who worked as a truck driver. In Guantanamo, he is known as prisoner number 651.

CounterBias.com

May 29 2007

by Michael Boldin

10. The U.S. military has absolutely no right, whether legal or moral, to be killing people who live in Iraq. It has no right to even be in Iraq. Why is this? Because neither the Iraqi government nor the Iraqi people ever attacked the United States. This fact makes the war in Iraq an optional one, not a necessary one.

To reiterate what should be obvious, the fact that the U.S. was attacked in 2001 does not give this country the right to attack and kill people who had nothing to do with those crimes. It is morally acceptable to go after criminals, but it is a crime to kill their families, their friends, their neighbors, or anyone else not criminally complicit.

9. Both political parties have pursued a foreign policy of aggression for decades, and where has that gotten us?

Our military is based in over 120 countries around the world. The U.S. government has spent billions and billions of dollars of our tax money to prop up dictators and despotic regimes. It has armed people such as Osama bin Laden and the “freedom fighters” in Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein, and Manuel Noriega, only to use military force to oust them later on. This type of foreign policy has driven people all over the world to hate us. Don’t we have enough enemies yet? Isn’t it time to say enough is enough?

8. Since this war began back in 1991, millions of people have been driven from their homes, injured, or killed. Considering this fact, I cannot be convinced that the Iraqi people are better off in any way.

7. In a free country, aggressive war should never be used as a tool of foreign policy. Using force to impose what American politicians consider to be a proper government for Iraq violates every principle of freedom which this country is supposed to stand for. This is not freedom for Iraqis

6. No one can convince me that kindness and charity are the primary motives in a war where hundreds of billions of dollars are forcibly redistributed from American citizens to the military-industrial complex; especially the weapons-manufacturers. Maybe something else motivates the war-makers. Could it be greed?

5. Like virtually every war, this war is being funded through the coercive method of taxation. The wealth of the American people is being forcibly transferred to the government and their corporate partners; the merchants of death. Just considering this one point, the war in Iraq is just as immoral and illegal as stealing from one person to give to another.

On top of this, taxation, deficit-spending, and the printing of money gives the government an almost unlimited source of funding. Thus, there is no incentive for the government to spend the money wisely, because it can always get more – from us. Conversely, the access to such vast wealth is actually an incentive to continue the war perpetually. The ability to grow in wealth and power is something that not many politicians have had the strength to resist throughout history. American politicians are no different.

4. The Iraq War is the polar opposite of any proper concept of self-defense. The United States is the aggressor and Iraq is the defender; plain and simple. This fact brings up some very difficult moral and legal issues for everyone involved. Thomas Paine may have summed it up best:

“Not all the treasures of the world, so far as I believe, could have induced me to support an offensive war, for I think it murder.”

3. We fought in Vietnam to stop the “domino effect” of communism, but when the communists took over, the world didn’t come to an end. We “saved” Kuwait from an evil dictator, but it’s still run by a family dynasty that has no interest in liberty for the people. We waged war on Afghanistan to capture Osama bin Laden. Oddly, rights violations are still rampant and Afghani opium production has soared since the invasion. And then, of course, we have all the “good” done in Iraq.

This foreign policy of aggression and intervention, which we have seen grow in preeminence over the last century, just doesn’t work. The politicians promise us peace; they promise us security; they promise us anything to get us to go along with their policies, but what happens? In virtually every situation, the intervention totally fails, or the “enemy” is replaced by another despotic regime. The U.S. government has caused chaos in Iraq, and the time for that to come to an end is now.

2. You don’t bring freedom to people by waging war on their cities and towns, and you don’t protect innocent people by killing innocent people. It is a crime to aggressively take the life of another person. There is no murder of innocent people that can be justified by claiming that it was necessary for the “greater good.”

If you consider that to be the right way of handling the problems in Iraq, you more closely resemble Joseph Stalin’s way of thinking than that of liberty-lovers like Patrick Henry and Thomas Paine.

And the No. 1 reason to get the U.S. out of Iraq…

1. The warfare state is, hands down, the greatest threat to liberty. In war, the government always claims the need for massive power, and it uses war as an excuse to expand its control over our lives in every way possible.

War, the politicians claim, “changes everything.” They tap our phones, read our emails, monitor our bank accounts, and give us “free speech zones.” They consider torture acceptable and imprison people indefinitely. They take our property, waste our resources, and threaten to spend our economy into oblivion.

Throughout history, even kings and queens have often failed to survive such disastrous governance.

And, just in case that’s not enough, here’s one more “bonus” reason to get out Iraq now:

The Constitution does not give the president the power to wage war without first getting a declaration of war from Congress. Although some try to claim that the 2002 Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF) fulfilled this requirement, it did not. All it did was transfer a Constitutional power – the power to declare war – from congress to the president. This transfer of power is a violation of the Constitution in and of itself.

Thus, the president violated the Constitution by waging war on Iraq without a declaration of war from congress. And, possibly even more important, everyone in congress who voted for the AUMF in 2002 violated the Constitution as well by illegally transferring their power to declare war to the president.

This is how the U.S. government has handled every war since World War II. By allowing the government to wage undeclared wars, politicians from both political parties have violated their Constitutional oaths repeatedly.

Whether you like it or not, the Constitution is not just a set of loose guidelines, it’s the law. Now is the time to demand that our representatives in government abide by the law. We must stop allowing Presidents to drag us into wars, which they later claim we have to continue for years and years until the “job is done.”

National Defense, Not Offense

If government should be playing any role at all in foreign affairs, it should be only to keep us out of wars. Their sole job is to ensure that this country will not be attacked so you and your family can live in peace.

I’d actually like to see some national defense for once in this country; all we have now is a national offense. Such things as staging coups, backing dictators with billions in foreign aid, basing our military in over 120 nations, and attacking other countries does nothing to keep this country safe. In fact, it does just the opposite, and almost guarantees more war in the future.

To make this country safer, we don’t need to increase the power of the politicians, and we definitely don’t need more national offense. We don’t need more weapons, a larger military, or wars in more countries.

We need the exact opposite of this. We need to focus on defending the country rather than aggressing against the rest of the world.

The only reason to have a military force at all is to deter and discourage potential invaders; it’s not to be used as a pre-emptive strike force. If the attackers come anyway, it’s the military’s job to repel them at our borders. Nothing more, nothing less. If they’re unable to do that job, maybe we should consider something different.

What Now?

The path this country is on right now, the path of empire and militarism, will only guarantee us more violence, death, and loss of liberty.

This state of affairs is intolerable.

The right plan, in the short term, is the immediate withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Iraq. Now. Not when the violence “subsides.” Not when Iraq has a stable government. Not when more Iraqi forces are trained. Not when the Democrats tell us the war is over, not when the Republicans tell us the war is over, and not when we have a new president.

The time to leave Iraq is now. Not in the fall. Not next year. Not next month or next week. Today, not tomorrow – right now.

Could the entire U.S. Military machine and its associated contractors leave Iraq this very moment? Obviously not. But, we could easily announce an immediate cessation of aggressive hostilities, and start mobilizing all of our resources to transport the troops out right away. It didn’t take all that long to march into Iraq, and it won’t take that long to march right on out.

For The Future

A long-term solution requires a return to our nation’s founding principles of individual liberty. This is quite contrary to America’s current policies of militarism, endless foreign aid, massive standing armies, assassinations, coups, deadly sanctions, and wars.

As a nation, we cannot solve all the problems of the world. We cannot bring peace to the world. And, as the historical record shows, we cannot trust our politicians to do so either. Such has been the arrogance of many of the most murderous tyrants in world history, and such has been the path to their destruction.

We may not be able to stop war and bloodshed in places like Darfur, and we may not be able to bring liberty to places like North Korea. But, by standing up for what we believe in, our voices can make a real difference in what our own government is allowed to do.

When a government that rules in our name engages in torture, killing, and war, the number one question that will be asked of us someday is this: did you rise in opposition to it? Did you speak out against it? Or, did you approve of it by remaining silent?

I, for one, rise in opposition, and will continue to speak out.

==

Michael Boldin is a gun-toting, thirty-something technology-inclined city-dweller, who is an avid hiker of the San Gabriel Mountains. Raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin by a politically active family, he developed a distaste for big government early on. Michael welcomes feedback at mboldin@populistamerica.com.

ZNet

June 20, 2007

By Adel Safty

Printer Friendly Version
EMail Article to a Friend

Israel has been in conflict with the Palestinians and the Arabs since its establishment in 1948. Conflict was inherent in the Zionist project of conquest and colonization of Palestine. Indeed conflict was recognized by Zionist leaders as necessary for the implementation of the Zionist project, for nobody expected the Palestinians to peacefully acquiesce in the loss of their country.

Almost sixty years after the launch of Jewish offensive operations designed to take over all of Palestine, and forty years after the occupation of the rest of Palestine in 1967, and in the face of Israeli intransigence that is dividing the Palestinians and deterring peace, it is imperative to ask: What does Israel want?

Traditional interpretations of the Zionist doctrine suggest that the conquest and colonization of land for the purpose of establishing a Jewish state was the urgent priority of the founding fathers of political Zionism. The rational given by Jewish nationalists was that anti-Semitism was ineradicable, and conflict with the gentile world permanent, and therefore only a Jewish state could offer protection for the world’s Jews.

The Jewish state was forcibly established, and in the process inflicted gross injustice on the Palestinians and came into violent conflict with its neighbors. The Jews of the world did not come to live in Israel, and the question became: Should Israel continue to favor conquest and occupation for the unrealistic project of gathering the Jews of the world in greater Israel, or should it live in peace with its neighbors and allow the Palestinians it victimized to rebuild their shattered society on the remaining 22% of Palestine(Gaza and the West Bank)?

Israeli writer Gideon Levi indirectly answered this question with an article in April in the Israeli paper Haaretz entitled: Israel Does Not Want Peace.

Levy concluded that Israel did not want peace because Israeli leaders rejected the Arab League peace offer made in 2002 and again renewed by Arab leaders meeting in Saudi Arabia earlier this year. The Arab peace offer is based on the international consensus for a solution to the conflict, embodied in the 1967 UN Security Council Resolution 242 formula of land for peace and on a just resolution of the Palestinian refugee problem.

Israeli leaders showed no interest in the offer and Israeli Prime Minister Olmert categorically rejected the prospect of the return to Israel of even one Palestinian refugee.

Levy wrote that this was ‘the moment of truth’. He believes that the dismissal of the Arab League peace offer may have been the breakdown point, and “leaves no room for doubt that the tired refrain that “Israel supports peace” has been left shattered.”

Levy is right in concluding that Israel does not want peace. But he is wrong in thinking that this is a recent phenomenon Notwithstanding propaganda in Israel and in the West, Israeli leaders, with the possible exception of Moshe Sharrett, have not shown any serious interest in peace with the Arabs, while in fact Arab leaders have realistically demonstrated readiness to resolve the conflict peacefully.

This has now been extensively documented by the new Israeli historians. Israeli historian Avi Shlaim reported in his book “The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World” that Israeli archives showed that the claim that Israel had always wanted peace but there was nobody to talk to was groundless. “The Arabs have repeatedly outstretched a hand to peace,” he told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, “and Israel has always rejected it. Each time with a different excuse.” (August 13, 2005)

Shlaim found that Syrian leader Hosni Zam wanted a peace agreement with Israel. King Farouk of Egypt was ready to make peace with Israel. King Abdullah of Jordan also wanted an agreement. Israel turned them all down. Even Nasser, portrayed by Israeli and Western propaganda as war-bent, wrote a personal letter to then-prime minister Sharett, and sent emissaries. These included Abdel Rahman Sadek, the Egyptian press officer in Paris, who, in 1955, conveyed to the Israelis Nasser’s interest in reducing tension and lifting trade restrictions. Israeli leaders showed no interest.

This made sense from the point of view of Zionist leaders. As long as the Zionist project of conquest and colonization of Palestine was incomplete, and as long as Zionist ideology could be imposed by force, there was no reason to abandon the Zionist project for the sake of making peace with the Arabs.

Besides, Zionist leaders rationalized their rejection of peace offers by arguing that their forcible conquest and colonization of Palestine have alienated the Arabs so much that no Arab leader would really want to make peace with them.

In 1956 Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion told Nahum Goldman, President of the World Zionist Organization who was urging him to negotiate a peaceful settlement with the Arabs:

“I don’t understand your optimism. Why should the Arabs make peace? If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural. We have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to me, but what does it matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it is true, but two thousand years ago, and what is it to them? There have been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, and Auschwitz but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country.”

Conflict has therefore always been necessary, first to carry out by force the project of conquest and transformation of Palestine into a Jewish state and second, to justify Israeli rejections of peace offers that threatened to bring the Zionists project to a premature end. Short of completely displacing the rival claimants to the land-which was tried and failed in 1948- Israel cannot live in permanent conflict.

Prof. Adel Safty is author of From Camp David to the Gulf, Montreal, New York.

June 20, 2007
Op-Ed Contributory

AHMED YOUSEF

From Gaza City

THE events in Gaza over the last few days have been described in the West as a coup. In essence, they have been the opposite. Eighteen months ago, our Hamas Party won the Palestinian parliamentary elections and entered office under Prime Minister Ismail Haniya but never received the handover of real
power from Fatah, the losing party. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, has now tried to replace the winning Hamas government with one of his own, returning Fatah to power while many of our elected members of Parliament languish in Israeli jails. That is the real coup.

From the day Hamas won the general elections in 2006 it offered Fatah the chance of joining forces and forming a unity government. It tried to engage the international community to explain its platform for peace. It has consistently offered a 10-year cease-fire with the Israelis to try to create an atmosphere of calm in which we resolve our differences. Hamas even adhered to a unilateral cease-fire for 18 months in an effort to normalize the situation on the ground. None of these points appear to have been recognized in the press coverage of the last few days.

Nor has it been evident to many people in the West that the civil unrest in Gaza and the West Bank has been precipitated by the American and Israeli policy of arming elements of the Fatah opposition who want to attack Hamas and force us from office. For 18 months we have tried to find ways to coexist with Fatah, entering into a unity government, even conceding key positions in the cabinet to their and international demands, negotiating up
until the last moment to try to provide security for all of our people on the streets of Gaza.

Sadly, it became apparent that not all officials from Fatah were negotiating in good faith. There were attempts on Mr. Haniya’s life last week, and eventually we were forced into trying to take control of a very dangerous situation in order to provide political stability and establish law and order.

The streets of Gaza are now calm for the first time in a very long time. We have begun disarming some of the drug dealers and the armed gangs and we hope to restore a sense of security and safety to the citizens of Gaza. We want to get children back to school, get basic services functioning again, and provide long-term economic gains for our people.

Our stated aim when we won the election was to effect reform, end corruption and bring economic prosperity to our people. Our sole focus is Palestinian rights and good governance. We now hope to create a climate of peace and tranquillity within our community that will pave the way for an end to internal strife and bring about the release of the British journalist Alan Johnston, whose kidnapping in March by non-Hamas members is a stain on the reputation of the Palestinian people.

We reject attempts to divide Palestine into two parts and to pass Hamas off as an extreme and dangerous force. We continue to believe that there is still a chance to establish a long-term truce. But this will not happen unless the international community fully engages with Hamas.

Any further attempts to marginalize us, starve our people into submission or attack us militarily will prove that the United States and Israeli governments are not genuinely interested in seeing an end to the violence. Dispassionate observers over the next few weeks will be able to make up their own minds as to each side’s true intentions.

Ahmed Yousef is the political adviser to Ismail Haniya, who became the Palestinian prime minister last year.

The Toronto Star

June 17, 2007

Developing a strategy to withdraw troops is the only real aid Bush can give Iraq, ex-Soviet leader says

By Mikhail Gorbachev

Clashes between U.S. troops and insurgents throughout Iraq, political manoeuvring in the United States over its presence there and the repercussions of that presence around the world leave no doubt that the Bush administration’s hopes for a turnaround have been frustrated.

The recent American troop “surge” has only increased the grim statistics of military casualties, civilian deaths and overall devastation. The U.S Congress reluctantly approved funding for the continued troop presence without requiring a date for withdrawal. But despite claims of victory, media reports suggest that the Bush team understands its current Iraq policies have run their course.

The administration is reportedly considering a 50 per cent reduction of troops in Iraq next year, as well as changing their mandate from combat missions to support and training. There’s renewed interest in the recommendations of the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group, brushed aside only a few months ago. The administration has begun consulting Iraq’s neighbours, Iran and Syria.

So even those who like to persist in their mistakes and illusions are being forced to rethink or, at least repackage, their policies. But is this a real change for the better? Is there a light at the end of the tunnel?

No.

The key to understanding the situation – as it appears today and as it appeared one, two or three years ago, indeed as it appeared from Day One of the invasion – is simple. Iraq is occupied by U.S. forces.

That fact hasn’t been changed by Iraq’s creation of a parliament, the election of a new government or the establishment of relative quiet in some parts of the country. Millions of Iraqis perceive the occupation as a national humiliation. That fuels sectarian conflicts, civil strife and continuing instability.

President Bush blames the terrorists (who, incidentally, had no foothold in Iraq before the invasion) and urges Iraq’s neighbours and the international community to co-operate in stabilizing the country. In fact, most of the United States’ international partners – not only members of the so-called “coalition of the willing,” but also those who condemned the invasion – are ready to co-operate.

A conference recently held in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, agreed to write off $30 billion of Iraqi debt. This decision was supported by China, Saudi Arabia, Spain and a number of other countries. Russia agreed to forgive much of Iraq’s debt even earlier. There is therefore no reason to accuse members of the world community of failing to understand the importance of a stable Iraq.

The Bush administration, however, seems to be using this apparently constructive attitude for self-serving ends. While asking its partners to help Iraq, it refuses to do the one thing that would really aid that country: develop a strategy for withdrawal.

Americans will put increasing pressure on the administration to do exactly that. Keeping a certain number of U.S. troops in Iraq for a reasonable period would be acceptable to most Iraqis, as well as to the international community. But only if it’s recognized that the occupation has ended. Such recognition can be achieved only if normalization of Iraq becomes a true international initiative, with the United States ceasing to only hand off certain aspects when it is in its own self-interest.

U.S. withdrawal from Iraq is inevitable. But is it not better to withdraw when the major players inside and outside of Iraq agree on key issues?

Those don’t merely include how to withdraw without too much pain, but also how to move toward national reconciliation and how to ensure peace and security in the region.

At first, to secure order it could conceivably be necessary to replace U.S. troops with soldiers from other countries whose presence would not be resented by most Iraqis. Any such troops would have to be approved by the UN Security Council. The international community’s help might also be needed to advance the political process in Iraq, which is currently stalled to the point of creating a real risk of the country breaking up. No one should fear internationalizing the Iraqi problem; in the end, it would benefit all parties.

In 1985, it took a change of leadership in the Soviet Union to recognize the mistake of entangling the USSR in the Afghan conflict. That new Soviet leadership – with me as its president – set the goal of withdrawing from Afghanistan while urging other countries to help in securing peace and stability.

Regrettably, the U.S. government chose to forget its own assurances, as it had on other occasions. Instead of co-operating with all responsible Afghan forces, including President Mohammad Najibullah, the United States favoured the proxies of certain elements in Pakistan.

We had warned our American partners about the long-term dangers of playing this game, but they seemed unaware of those consequences. Finally, when Russia backed out of Afghan affairs, the road to extremism was left wide open. The “blowback” from those fateful decisions came on a September morning in 2001, in New York and in Washington.

Some would object that historical analogies, whether with Vietnam or Afghanistan, only go so far. It is true that every conflict has some unique features. But many of their lessons are the same.

Think long and hard before trying to solve any problem militarily. Talk of all other peaceful means as exhausted is often baseless: An alternative is always available. If, however, a great power makes the mistake of entangling itself in an armed conflict, it shouldn’t make things worse by arrogantly refusing to heed warnings of dire consequences.

Finally, and most importantly, it should be understood from the start that ultimately there must be a political solution to these conflicts. Seek it honestly, thinking not just of your own self-interest, and look years, not just months, ahead.

---

Mikhail Gorbachev served as the leader of the former Soviet Union from 1985 until its collapse in 1991. Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990, he is currently president of the International Foundation for Socio-Economic and Political Studies (The Gorbachev Foundation).

Source: News.scotman.com

20 June 2007

IAN SWANSON SCOTTISH POLITICAL EDITOR

SCOTLAND’S Lord Advocate was today urged to prosecute Tony Blair as a war criminal for the invasion of Iraq.

Former MP Jim Sillars said he had written to Elish Angiolini with a 10,000-word document setting out a formal complaint against the Prime Minister.

 

And he said Scots law allowed Mr Blair to be put on trial despite such a move being ruled out south of the Border.

The move came as Westminster Tories called for an immediate inquiry into the war in Iraq in a move expected to cause a Labour backbench rebellion. Shadow foreign secretary William Hague was using a Commons debate to call for a hearing by senior politicians with powers to summon officials and military commanders.

Mr Sillars, who is married to independent Lothians MSP Margo MacDonald, claimed Mr Blair was guilty of conspiracy with others to wage aggressive war, and waging aggressive war against the state of Iraq in March 2003, contrary to international law and the law of Scotland.

In his letter to the Lord Advocate, he said: “I am requesting you to investigate this complaint and prosecute in a Scottish court.”

Mr Sillars emphasised that despite his political past – first as a Labour MP and then as SNP MP and deputy leader – the complaint against Mr Blair was based on legal principles and case law and was not a political initiative.

He told Ms Angiolini in the letter: “You will find that the research is sound, and that the case against Tony Blair is a strong one. You, of course, will be able to dig wider and deeper than I can as an ordinary citizen, and I am sure that when you do you will reach the same conclusion as contained in the complaint.”

Mr Sillars said it was generally believed that Mr Blair could not be indicted for war crimes over Iraq.

But Mr Sillars claimed Scotland’s High Court had “declaratory powers” which enabled it to embrace international crimes in Scots law.

He said: “I have spent since January of this year, with a break for the election, researching the case against Blair and whether he could be indicted through the Scottish criminal justice system. The complaint lodged with the Lord Advocate shows the conclusion to that effort. Blair can, in my opinion, be tried in a Scottish court; and the evidence of his conspiracy through deception, lies and misinformation, and his intention of committing the illegal act of regime change through aggressive war, is quite clear. ”

Mr Sillars said the Prime Minister had carried on because he felt immune from prosecution.

Mr Hague said today that the presence of UK soldiers in Iraq could not be used as an excuse to “indefinitely postpone” the inquiry. He wants an investigation along the lines of the wide-ranging inquiry into the Falklands War chaired by philosopher Oliver Franks.

Downing Street has said it will hold a probe into the war and the faulty intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, but not while UK troops are in the country.

And Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett is expected to dismiss the call, arguing there have already been four inquiries into various aspects of the war and that another one would distract from the efforts of troops on the ground.

The Independent, 19 June 2007

By David Usborne in New York

The two-star Army General who led the first military investigation into human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq has bluntly questioned the integrity of former US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, suggesting he misled the US Congress by downplaying his own prior knowledge of what had happened.

Major General Antonio Taguba also claimed in an interview with The New Yorker magazine published yesterday that President George Bush also “had to be aware” of the atrocities despite saying at the time of the scandal that he had been out of the loop until he saw images in the US media.

The White House issued a response denying the claim, however. “The President said over three years ago that he first saw the pictures of the abuse on the television,” Scott Stanzel, a spokesman, said.

In the extensive interview, Maj-Gen Taguba insisted that at the very least Mr Rumsfeld “was in denial” at a congressional hearing in May 2004, when he said he had only become aware of the extent of the abuse – and seen some of the shocking photographic evidence – one day before. The Secretary told members of Congress that the images published in the media were “not yet in the Pentagon”.

Mr Rumsfeld had summoned Maj-Gen Taguba to the Pentagon on the eve of the hearing, which took place one week after first US media reports of the abuse surfaced in The New Yorker and on CBS News. Yet the General had begun his investigation several months earlier, in January 2004, and had circulated his finished report to Pentagon managers – with pictures and a video – several weeks before seeing Mr Rumsfeld. “The photographs were available to him – if he wanted to see them,” Maj-Gen Taguba said.

As for the Secretary’s congressional appearance, he claimed: “Rumsfeld is very perceptive and has a mind like a steel trap. There’s no way he’s suffering from CRS – Can’t Remember Shit. He’s trying to acquit himself.”

Mr Bush has since conceded that the abuse at Abu Ghraib is the one thing he regrets about the war in Iraq. The photographs that became public at the time – and sparked worldwide condemnation – showed US jailers humiliating inmates who were naked, hooded, on leashes or piled into a human pyramid.

Maj-Gen Taguba said that other material not yet publicly disclosed or mentioned in subsequent trials included a video showing “a male American soldier in uniform sodomising a female detainee”. The first wave of images he received also included images of sexual humiliation between a father and his son.

The General said he was ordered to limit his inquiry into the conduct of military police at the jail even as he became convinced they had a green light from higher up. “Somebody was giving them guidance but I was legally prevented from further investigation into higher authority. I was limited to a box.” He adds: “Even today … those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable.”

The General also tells the New Yorker that he became a victim of his own dedication to finding the truth when he was subsequently forced to retire early. In early 2006, he said, he received a phone call from a higher-ranking colleague telling him he was expected to retire by January this year, after more than 30 years of service. His conclusion: he was being punished for that first investigation.

“They always shoot the messenger,” Maj-Gen Taguba told Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker. “To be accused of being overzealous and disloyal – that cuts deep into me. I was being ostracised for doing what I was asked to do.”

The Gulf Times, June 17, 2007

UN declares Gandhi’s Birthday as Day of Non-Violence

by Gulf Times staff

NEW DELHI: The UN will observe Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday as the International Day of Non-Violence every year, it said in a statement yesterday.
The UN called upon all member nations and individuals to commemorate October 2 in “an appropriate manner and to disseminate the message of non-violence.”

The resolution was introduced by India.

Gandhi’s descendants hailed the move, but said the gesture should not only be symbolic.

“It’s welcome but not enough. If they have declared it as non-violence day, they should ensure that it is observed as one among member countries,” said the leader’s great grandson Tushar Gandhi.

“The conflicts should come to an end and it should be a step towards creating a world without violence.”

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh also welcomed the move in a statement describing it as “a great tribute to Mahatma Gandhi and a proud moment for India.”

“I am extremely happy that the United Nations will henceforth observe Gandhi Jayanti, October 2 as International Day of Non-Violence each year, following a unanimous decision by the General Assembly of the United Nations yesterday,” Singh said.

“This is a tribute by the world community to the Father of our Nation,” the prime minister said.

“The universal relevance of Gandhiji’s message of non-violence is more important today than ever before since nations across the world continue to grapple with the threat of conflict, violence and terrorism,” he said.

Singh also exhorted the people of India “to re-dedicate ourselves to the ideals and values of Mahatma Gandhi, which shall continue to be our guiding light.”

Gandhi was a proponent of non-violent civil disobedience in India’s fight against the British colonial rule which ended in 1947.

He was shot dead by a Hindu nationalist in 1948.

Source: TruthDig.com

Digg Email Print

Posted on June 18, 2007

AP Photo / Karim Kadim

Mohammed Saleem, 18 months old, and four family members were killed when U.S. forces opened fire on their vehicle in Baghdad’s Sadr City neighborhood in June 2004 during fighting between Americans and followers of a radical cleric.

By Chris Hedges

All troops, when they occupy and battle insurgent forces, as in Iraq, or Gaza or Vietnam, are swiftly placed in what the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton terms “atrocity-producing situations.” In this environment, surrounded by a hostile population, simple acts such as going to a store to buy a can of Coke or driving down a street means you can be killed. This constant fear and stress leads troops to view everyone around them as the enemy. The hostility is compounded when the enemy, as in Iraq, is elusive, shadowy and hard to find. The rage that soldiers feel after a roadside bomb explodes, killing or maiming their comrades, is one that is easily directed over time to innocent civilians who are seen as supporting the insurgents. It is a short psychological leap, but a massive moral one. It is a leap from killing—the shooting of someone who has the capacity to do you harm—to murder—the deadly assault against someone who cannot harm you. The war in Iraq is now primarily about murder. There is very little killing. American Marines and soldiers have become, after four years of war, acclimated to atrocity.

The American killing project is not described in these terms to the distant public. The politicians still speak in the abstract of glory, honor and heroism, of the necessity of improving the world, in lofty phrases of political and spiritual renewal. The press, as in most wars, is slavishly compliant. The reality of the war—the fact that the occupation forces have become, along with the rampaging militias, a source of terror to most Iraqis—is not transmitted to the American public. The press chronicles the physical and emotional wounds visited on those who kill in our name. The Iraqis, those we kill, are largely nameless, faceless dead. Those who kill large numbers of people always claim it as a regrettable but necessary virtue.

The reality and the mythic narrative of war collide when embittered combat veterans return home. They find themselves estranged from the world around them, a world that still believes in the myth of war and the virtues of the nation.

Tina Susman in a June 12 article in the Los Angeles Times gave readers a rare glimpse into this side of the war. She wrote about a 17-year-old Iraqi boy killed by the wild, random fire unleashed by American soldiers in a Baghdad neighborhood following a bomb blast. These killings, which Iraqis say occur daily, are seldom confirmed, but in this case the boy was the son of a local Los Angeles Times employee.

Iraqi physicians, overseen by epidemiologists at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, published a study last year in the British medical journal The Lancet. The study estimated that 655,000 more people than normal have died in Iraq since coalition forces invaded the country in March 2003. This is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech last December.

Of the total 655,000 estimated “excess deaths,” 601,000 resulted from violence. The remaining deaths occurred from disease and other causes, according to the study. This is about 500 additional violent deaths per day throughout the country.

Lt. Col. Andrew J. Bacevich, a Vietnam veteran who is a professor of international relations at Boston University, estimated last year that U.S. troops had killed “tens of thousands” of innocent Iraqis through accidents or reckless fire.

Official figures have ceased to exist. The Iraqi government no longer releases the number of civilian casualties and the U.S. military does not usually give reports about civilians killed or wounded by U.S. forces.

“It’s a psychological thing. When one U.S. soldier gets killed or injured, they shoot in vengeance,” Alaa Safi told the Los Angeles Times. He said his brother, Ahmed, was killed April 4 when U.S. troops riddled the streets of their southwestern Baghdad neighborhood with bullets after a sniper attack.

War is the pornography of violence. It has a dark beauty, filled with the monstrous and the grotesque. The Bible calls it “the lust of the eye” and warns believers against it. War allows us to engage in primal impulses we keep hidden in the deepest, most private interiors of our fantasy life. It allows us to destroy not only things but human beings. In that moment of wholesale destruction, we wield the power of the divine, the power to give or annihilate life. Armed units become crazed by the frenzy of destruction. All things, including human beings, become objects—objects to either gratify or destroy or both. Almost no one is immune. The contagion of the crowd sees to that.

Human beings are machine-gunned and bombed from the air, automatic grenade launchers pepper hovels and neighborhoods with high-powered explosives, and convoys tear through Iraq, speeding freight trains of death. These soldiers and Marines have at their fingertips the heady ability to call in firepower that obliterates landscapes and villages. The moral universe is turned upside down. No one walks away uninfected. War thrusts us into a vortex of barbarity, pain and fleeting ecstasy. It thrusts us into a world where law is of little consequence.

It takes little in wartime to turn ordinary men and women into killers. Most give themselves willingly to the seduction of unlimited power to destroy. All feel the peer pressure to conform. Few, once in battle, find the strength to resist gratuitous slaughter. Physical courage is common on a battlefield. Moral courage is not.

Military machines and state bureaucracies, which seek to make us obey, seek also to silence those who return from war and speak the truth. Besides, the public has little desire to puncture the mythic, heroic narrative. The essence of war, which is death, is carefully masked from view. The few lone journalists who attempt to speak the truth about war, to describe the experience of constantly being on the receiving end of American firepower, soon become pariahs, no longer able to embed with the military, dine out with officials in the Green Zone or get press credentials. And so the vast majority of the press lies to us, although not overtly; it is the lie of omission, but it is a lie nonetheless.

The veterans who return, even if they do not speak about the atrocities they have committed or witnessed in Iraq, will spend the rest of their lives coping with what they have done. They will suffer delayed reactions to stress. They will endure, as have those who returned from Vietnam, a crisis of faith. The God they knew, or thought they knew, failed them. The high priests of our civic religion, from politicians to preachers to television pundits, who promised them glory and honor through war betrayed them.

War is always about betrayal, betrayal of the young by the old, of idealists by cynics and of troops by politicians. This bitter knowledge of betrayal is seeping into the ranks of the American military. It is bringing us a new wave of enraged and disenfranchised veterans who will never again trust the country that sent them to war.

We make our heroes out of clay. We laud their gallant deeds. We give them uniforms with colored ribbons for the acts of violence they committed or endured. They are our false repositories of glory and honor, of power, of self-righteousness, of patriotism and self-worship, all that we want to believe about ourselves. They are our plaster saints, the icons we cheer to defend us and make us and our nation great. They are the props of our demented civic religion, our love of power and force, our belief in our right as a chosen nation to wield this force against the weak. This is our nation’s idolatry of itself.

Prophets are not those who speak of piety and duty from pulpits—there are few people in pulpits worth listening to. The prophets are the battered wrecks of men and women who return from Iraq and find the courage to speak the halting words we do not want to hear, words that we must hear and digest in order to know ourselves. These veterans, the ones who dare to tell the truth, have seen and tasted how war plunges us into barbarity, perversion, pain and an unchecked orgy of death. And it is their testimonies, if we take the time to listen, which alone can save us.

History News Network,

Posted November 8, 2006

Mark A. Levine

Donald Rumsfeld is one of the half a dozen principal architects of the Iraq disaster. He should have been fired years ago, except that the disaster that unfolded before the eyes of the world was exactly what the Bush administration was hoping for–enough chaos to make sure no one in power in Iraq would ask us to leave.

Now that the American people have woken up to the ruse known as “Operation Iraqi Freedom” perpetrated by the Bush Administration for the last three and a half years it is imperative that progressive immediately push for a full investigation into the real reasons for the invasion of Iraq and the miserably and criminally managed occupation. And there is no greater symbol of everything that has gone wrong in Iraq than Donald Rumsfeld.

While in office, many of my friends and colleagues in the legal community believed that he was untouchable, although a legal brief sponsored by Code Pink that I helped research (see it at www.indictpresidentbush.org) argues compellingly that all the main planners of the war, including President Bush and Vice President Cheney, could at least be indicted, if not prosecuted, while in office. Now, thankfully this question is moot. Rumsfeld is or will very soon be a private citizen. As such, there is no problem for a US court–and as important, a foreign court such as Germany’s which still claims universal jurisdiction to prosecute for war crimes–to indict him as the mass murdering torturer that he is.

Rumsfeld is clearly guilty of innumerable war crimes. I first reported on them after my trip to Iraq in 2004, where I saw first hand evidence of them. The violations he’s responsible for include the failure to assure humane treatment for the civilian population (under Article 27 of the 4th Geneva Convention) and permit life in Iraq to continue as unaffected by its presence as possible; to ensure the public order, safety and welfare of the Iraqi people, including using all the means at its disposal to meet the basic food (Article 50), health (Articles 20, 50, 55, 56 and 59, among others), and education needs (Article 50) of the population; providing medical car (Articles 68 and 69 of Protocol 1 of the Geneva Conventions).

Crucially, even if people aren’t purposefully killed by US forces, if the violations listed above lead to their death, the violations become war crimes. Moreover, the purposeful targeting of ambulances, or the prevention of or delay in the receiving of medical care, as happened during the fighting in Falluja and on numerous other occasions (violations of Articles 55 and 147 of the 4th Geneva Convention), the U.S. crosses the line between “merely” violating international humanitarian law (specifically articles 17 through 19 of the 4th Geneva Convention) and the commission of actual war crimes. These are defined as grave breaches of the 4th Geneva Convention as described in article 147, including “willful killing, torture or inhuman treatment, including… willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement of a protected person… or willfully depriving a protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial …taking of hostages and extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly.”

And we know that US forces have engaged in these violations since the very first day of the war. A group of Belgian doctors who spent the last year in Baghdad explained that, whatever crimes might be committed by Iraqis, as the internationally recognized belligerent occupiers “the current humanitarian catastrophe is entirely and solely the responsibility of the US and British authorities.” Even that early into the occupation they documented violations of at least a dozen articles of the 4th Geneva Convention by coalition forces (including articles 10, 12, 15, 21, 35, 36, 41, 45, 47, 48, 51, and 55).

On top of all this, of course, there is also the issue of US torture, which is a violation of international and US Federal law, and military regulations as defined in the US Army Field Manual 27-10.

But there’s an even larger issue here. It could be argued that Rumsfeld is guilty of something far more serious than war crimes: crimes against humanity and even genocide.

Under international law, “crimes against humanity” includes many acts any of the following acts that the US military has committed systematically in Iraq against the civilian population: murder; imprisonment or other severe deprivation of physical liberty in violation of fundamental rules of international law; torture; the enforced disappearance of persons; and other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.

The crime of “genocide” is found in Articles II and III of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide. It includes a “mental element,” meaning “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”, and a physical element, which includes five acts, including killing or causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, and deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. One can be prosecuted for genocide not just for committing but also for merely conspiring, attempting or being complicit in an attempt or conspiracy to commit genocide. As important, the phrase “in whole or in part” is important because destruction of only part of a group (such as its educated members, or members living in one region), is also considered genocide.

Now, lets’ look at what Rumsfeld and Co. have accomplished in Iraq: upwards of 600,000 dead, much of the educated class has been forced into exile with no prospect of returning while many have been killed. Most important, the invasion and occupation of Iraq have led directly to a situation now in which many people are calling for a partition of the country. The partition of Iraq would mean the destruction of the Iraqi people as a nation, even if they survived as individuals in new countries. And the United States is the party directly responsible for this action by launching an illegal war and sewing chaos across the country, making some form of de facto if not de jure partition increasingly possible.

At the very least Rumsfeld and Co., and that includes President Bush, are guilty of politicide, defined by Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling in the context of Israel’s war against Palestinians, as a gradual but systematic attempt to cause their annihilation as an independent political and social entity.

For the sake of the integrity of the United States, and for all the harm we’ve done to Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld must be indicted and prosecuted as a war criminal as soon as possible.