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June 30, 2005
Scoop! Tribunal had Its Very Own Paper!
By the way, one of the best ideas to come out of the Tribunal was a daily newspaper for the event, pulbished by the the volunteer staff in English and in Turkish. It was informative, hilarious, and thoughtful. I think all such events should think of having one.
Volunteers stayed up each night to put the latest edition out, and all 500 copies disappeared as soon as they were brought out.
The copies are online for anyone interested. Here is day one, day two, and day three. They are best read by printing and folding in half -- or pretending to, if you don't want to waste paper.
And who can forget the last day when the volunteers burst into the courtroom yelling, "Flash News! Scoop! We Obtained the Decision! Before it was Made Public!" and distributed this special evening edition. I'm glad to say sense of humor was not one of the victims of all the horrific testimony we heard day after day.
Posted by zeynep at 06:29 PM | Comments (0)
At Least a Footnote to History
So, as mentioned before in UtSS comments, here's an excerpt of the primary charges brought against the US, UK, and also against UN, governments of the "coalition of the willing," the media, and war profiteers:
On the basis of the preceding findings and recalling the Charter of the United Nations and other legal documents, the jury has established the following charges against the Governments of the US and the UK:• Planning, preparing, and waging the supreme crime of a war of aggression in contravention of the United Nations Charter and the Nuremberg Principles.
• Targeting the civilian population of Iraq and civilian infrastructure
• Using disproportionate force and indiscriminate weapon systems
• Failing to safeguard the lives of civilians during military activities and during the occupation period thereafter
• Using deadly violence against peaceful protestors
• Imposing punishments without charge or trial, including collective punishment
• Subjecting Iraqi soldiers and civilians to torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment
• Re-writing the laws of a country that has been illegally invaded and occupied
• Willfully devastating the environment
• Actively creating conditions under which the status of Iraqi women has seriously been degraded
• Failing to protect humanity’s rich archaeological and cultural heritage in Iraq
• Obstructing the right to information, including the censoring of Iraqi media
• Redefining torture in violation of international law, to allow use of torture and illegal detentions
The Jury also established charges against the Security Council of United Nations for failing to stop war crimes and crimes against humanity among other failures, against the Governments of the Coalition of the Willing for collaborating in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, against the Governments of Other Countries for allowing the use of military bases and air space and providing other logistical support, against Private Corporations for profiting from the war, against the Major Corporate Media for disseminating deliberate falsehoods and failing to report atrocities.
Frankly, I don't know how far global citizenry will be able to go this round in terms of holding war-criminals accountable for their decisions and actions. But it would be quite shameful if such a document had not been produced. The saddest part is that, even with the godawful media we have, all of it is already in the public record. It's there! I want to scream, sometimes, it's all there.
Btw, Arundhati Roy mentioned New York Times reporter Judith Miller by name in the press conference where they read the statement of the jury and took questions. Miller was named for repeatedly publishing obviously false Pentagon propaganda, and inciting war. Isn't it amazing she still has a job?
In any case, I am glad we have at least added this footnote to history, and perhaps even the basis for a future indictment when and if gears of justice can be made to turn with real powers and jurisdiction.
Posted by zeynep at 05:56 PM | Comments (0)
June 29, 2005
The Parting of Ways
So, the jury has released a statement, and much remains to be discussed and shared with UtSS readers about this remarkable event.
For now, though, I want to remark on something that was fairly striking to all of us who had arrived from the U.S.: pervasive the press coverage. Granted, a good chunk of it was driven by Arundhati Roy's presence, but it was way more than that. Every major paper ran stories about the proceedings, everyday. And is it not like the the press here is particularly good. In fact, except for Acik Radyo, an independent radio station, it is particularly bad.
What we are witnessing, I think, is more a disjunction between the United States and the rest of the world. In most places I visited last year, there is nothing remarkable about chatting about U.S. aggression in Iraq, torture, war crimes, all those things the press in the United States cannot and will not discuss as legitimate issues. While U.S. foreign policy and U.S. imperialism were always relatively unpopular, it seems that it has become almost impossible to find politicians or pundits openly defending what U.S. is doing in Iraq. In some sense, this Tribunal was mainstream in its topic, even if most of the participants and the organizers were prominent dissidents.
This was not always so. One would always encounter, especially among the elite, people who defended U.S. foreign policy at least as inevitable choices for a bad world. No more, it seems. It all seems so obvious to everyone.
Perhaps that is one of the most important tasks facing us: to reverse this process which is placing more and more distance between the American people and the global citizenry which had reached a closeness not seen in a long time on February 15, 2003.
Here are some pictures of the press coverage that were posted around the WTI café. Everday, a 6 by 2 foot board would be covered with photocopies of articles for that day.
Posted by zeynep at 04:50 PM | Comments (0)
Updated Link to Video
The previous entry had a non-working link to the short video I had shot of the banner made by the Iraqi delegation being circled around the courtroom. Here is the working link.
Posted by zeynep at 04:40 PM | Comments (0)
June 28, 2005
Only the Grief of the Children
Under the Same Sun reader Pesic asked for pictures of the banner that was unfurled inside the courtroom. It was not composed of, as it was sometimes reported, pictures only of Fallujah, but a compilation from around Iraq. I have some pictures of it, as well as a video of it being circled around the room. It's pretty hard stuff to look at, but there it is:
It was later placed on the street right outside the courtroom:
And the video can be found here. (It may be a bit slow in loading.)
Brendan Smith and I co-wrote a piece for Truthout about the Tribunal which can be found here. Here's how we described the moment the banner was brought in, as well as testimonies from that same panel:
Former US Air Force combat veteran Tim Goodrich stunned the jury by revealing his role in the "softening up" of Iraq months before the US declaration of war. "We were dropping bombs then, and I saw bombing intensify," Goodrich explained to a hushed room. "All the documents coming out now, the Downing Street memo and others, confirm what I had witnessed in Iraq. The war had already begun while our leaders were telling us that they were going to try all diplomatic options first."...
Goodrich's testimony had just begun when a 75-foot banner prepared by the Iraqi delegation and composed of harrowing pictures of Iraqi child victims of the war was carried into the courtroom. In the presence of the father of one of the victims shown on the banner, Goodrich and others stood and a moment of silence spread through the room while the banner was carried through the hall. The teeming press contingent rushed to photograph the scene as some members of the audience cried.
While the first day of the trial had concentrated on moral and political issues, emotional testimony from Iraqi witnesses dominated the second day of proceedings. Fadil al Bedrani, an Iraqi journalist who survived the siege of Fallujah, told the audience that he watched as "20-25 persons were running barefoot when an American warplane bombed, killing and wounding them; only one elderly woman and 2 children stayed safe ... the doctors and the staff of the Fallujah hospital were detained; the warplanes bombed the alternative hospital in downtown ... and bombed the medicine warehouses in Nazzal area, killing 4 doctors, and 8 medical workers."
Dahr Jamail, an unembedded journalist who had been reporting from Iraq during the past year, narrated the story told to him by Ali Shalal Abbas from Baghdad. While detained at Abu Ghraib and tortured, Abbas was approached by two men, "one a foreigner and one a translator," who asked him who he was. "I said I'm a human being. They told me, 'We are going to cut your head off and send you to hell, we will take you to Guantánamo.'" Abbas questioned why only Saddam Hussein, who also had people tortured, was put on trial while the Americans were not.
Richard Falk gave what I thought was an extremely important closing speech about the right and the obligation of global civil society to protect, enforce and expand moral law. I will write more when I get full text of it in order to be able to write about it. I thought it was very important, especially the way it formulated a sense of the law apart from the state but not in a pre-legal sense. For now, however, the title this post comes from a poem he read at the end of what I thought was brilliant legal analysis, which ended with the line "nothing matters except the grief of the children."
The closing press conference drew 200+ journalists in a standing-room only hall, with many cameras and live feeds. More on all that later.
Posted by zeynep at 06:51 PM | Comments (0)
June 27, 2005
Convergence
Here's an example the kind of expectation and stereotype-challenging environment here. Below is a participant in the WTI, sporting a pink Islamic headscarf and a "Free Mehmet" sticker. Mehmet refers to Mehmet Tarhan, a gay-rights activist and a conscientious-objector, who was supposed to be on the jury of conscience but could not attend because he was forcibly conscripted. He is currently under military detention, his hair and beard shaved off, because he continues to refuse obeying orders.
The bottom half of the sticker says "Mehmet Loves Baris" -- Baris both means peace and is a man's name, highlighting both his conscientious objection and sexual orientation in a clever pun.
Remember this is all happening in an Islamic country where homosexuality is not at all acceptable and where the military service is mandatory and celebrated, at least according to official ideology.
And here is a picture of the "Free Mehmet" banner that was unfurled before the mural put up by the Korean delegation. As you can see, the organic constituency supporting conscientious objection is very similar to people the youth from the Global Justice movement. (In fact, during their protest, this group of youngsters broke into a drumming circle).
Last, but not least, here is Denis Halliday, former assistant to the secretary general of the U.N., whom I have never seen without a tie, ever, wearing the latest current fashion: a "WTI Istanbul" t-shirt!
Posted by zeynep at 03:10 AM | Comments (0)
June 26, 2005
Protectors of "the Innocent and of Memory"
[From the World Tribunal on Iraq in Istanbul]
Something extraordinary is happening here.
Many different strains of people from around the world have converged here, in this meeting held among ancient stone walls, to reclaim a voice for what is right and just, and it is a wonder. In fact, it is breathtaking that we are all here, now, together.
Here, there are people who were well-integrated into structures of power when they found themselves put in positions that their conscience could no longer carry, such as Denis Halliday and Hans Von Sponeck, both former assistant secretary generals at the UN. There are people whose hearts carried them to become voices against injustice and cruelty even though a life of comfort and the glitter was theirs for the taking, such as Arundhati Roy. An young American veteran with California surfer-boy looks and mannerisms sits on a panel, moderated by an Iraqi anti-war and democracy activist who was imprisoned in Abu Ghraib and tortured by the Baathist regime, with participants ranging from an Iraqi secular feminist, to an Iraqi lawyer, who wears the headscarf, representing detainees and torture victims, to Iraq's Al Jazeera correspondent who was in Fallujah during the assault.
Many here have been thrust into a situation not of their own making but nevertheless took it on with courage and dignity, and their hearts now embrace the world, such as the jury member representing the mothers of the disappeared from Argentina, Plaza de Mayo, who starts many of her questions by saying "as a mother..." and often asks about the children. I avoid her at all times; I don't think I could bear learning what was torn from her. "Are there enough medicines from them, even if it is at the blackmarket?" she asked Dahr Jamail, who has single-handedly shown that if you only you have heart, the rest --experience, money, visibility-- may well become irrelevant.
Making this all possible are people of conscience from around the world, who never number that many but whom you will always find buzzing around like busy bees if you just look closely at most such gatherings, and dozens of young volunteers from Istanbul who wear woven skirts and nose-rings and don't sleep, yet mingle effortlessly among the U.N. bureaucrats, lawyers and academics many of whom sport crisply-pressed shirts, suits --and ties!-- even as the nicest of summer days envelopes this beautiful city.
And this is very concrete and imminently human. Who could but forget what this is all about? Yesterday, just as Tim Goodrich of Iraq Veterans Against War was about to speak, a long banner with a montage of pictures of maimed, mutilated, broken, sick, dead, dying, torn apart, shot, crushed, bleeding children, women and men was carried in. A minute of silence happened, I don't know if anyone had called for it. Some just cried. Then, Tim spoke about how human beings can be trained to do just that (and was mobbed for interviews after the panel, all of which he patiently and willingly sat through for hours and hours.)
Yet, at the same time, this is about international law and Geneva conventions and the U.N. and the nation-state, and the ICC and all those things that are negotiated among the rulers behind closed doors. This is the people of the world, letting the powerful and the cruel who want to dictate all the rules, all the norms, all the consequences that they do not have our consent, and we will not forget. That we will not abandon norms of civilization and decency. That we will not be cowed, nor will we stop holding the responsible, the culpable and the guilty accountable for their crimes.
And that is the source of the power of this Tribunal, not the police who will be sent out to arrest the war criminals, not the fines that will be levied, not the sentences that will be meted out. Here you feel the the power of perhaps the only thing that can stand up to the warheads, the tanks and the helicopter gunships; the power of things that cannot be bought and will not be sold; the power of simple yet miraculous things as stubborn memory, resolute sense of justice and an unrelenting insistence on human decency.
Hana Ibrahim, Tim Goodrich, Amal Sawadi, Fadhil Al Bedrani in a panel moderated by Haifa Zangana.
Taty Almeida of Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, being interviewed by CNN Turkey.
Tim Goodrich of Iraq Veterans against War demonstrating one of the techniques the military uses to train people to obey without thinking: making them "perform the most ridiculous tasks without questioning, like folding tshirts into tiny squares."
Posted by zeynep at 07:24 AM | Comments (0)
June 25, 2005
What Did the American People Know and When Did They Know It?
[From the World Tribunal on Iraq in Istanbul]
[This is a piece I wrote, based on not the tribunal itself but the barrage of questions I've been facing since I arrived.]
A profound sense of disappointment with the American people greeted me here in Istanbul where the final session of the World Tribunal on Iraq, investigating and documenting war crimes in Iraq, modeled on the Bertrand Russell Vietnam War Tribunal of 1967, is convening. The mood is the opposite of what I encountered here and elsewhere after the anti-war demonstrations of 2002 and 2003. Back then, enormous sympathy for victims of 9/11, and respect for a people who took to the streets to try to stop their government from committing acts of aggression before the invasion had even begun, had generated admiration and warmth toward Americans, if not their government. After all, people said, Bush stole the 2000 election. And, look, they would point out, Americans are trying to stop him. Americans are good people with a bad government -- just like everywhere else -- they would declare, and curse Bin Laden and Bush in one swift, contemptuous breath.
Now, however, I get confused looks, pained questions, and heads shaking quietly in disbelief and disappointment. Don’t the American people know, I am asked, again and again. Explain please, they persist, how, after the publication of pictures from Abu Ghraib, Bush got re-elected? Don’t the American people watch the news from Iraq? Where did the protests, the outrage, the uproar go?
This is not just a sad turn of events; it is a profoundly dangerous situation for the American people. Mass murder of civilians is rarely the work of lonesome nuts operating totally outside of societal norms and beliefs. On the contrary, scratch the surface of most of the horrors of the twentieth century, and you will find a cold, cruel belief that the victims brought it upon themselves. Everyone shakes their head and loudly condemns the atrocity once the bodies are cold and deep under the earth; however, a close examination of the events as they occurred often reveals that there was an implicit and explicit turning of hearts and faces away from the people who ended up slaughtered. The perception of indifference and complicity of the American people to the crimes committed by their government is obviously not a good development.
Let me try to be even more blunt: if there had been another attack on American soil around or after the February 15, 2003 protests, I believe that Islamist terrorism would take a nosedive in legitimacy in the Middle East. Let alone being able to recruit would-be militants willing to kill civilians, such groups would find it difficult to try to defend themselves from the people of the region who would want to tear them from limb to limb. But now, I fear, many people would shrug, with sadness for sure, if America were to be attacked again. Of course, most people do not wish such catastrophe upon the American people, but there seems to be a growing level of indifference and dislike towards Americans because they are perceived to have turned away from the crimes of their government. And this is a made-in-heaven environment for recruitment for terrorist groups. Just as our recruiters find it harder and harder to find volunteers for the U.S. military, their recruiters, I sense, are finding it easier and easier. It is, after all, a connected situation, a see-saw of legitimacy.
At first I tried explain my questioners about the corporate control of media and the lack of grassroots organizations, but, honestly, it all rings a bit hollow. In the shops, on the buses and the ferries, and among the participants of the Tribunal, everywhere, people persist: don’t they have Internet; don’t they have alternative media; is nothing reported about Iraq at all? What on earth is up? I also tried to tell people about the stubborn remains of the anti-war movement, of the many people who oppose the war and find it hard to find a way to register their opposition, of the disregard for public opinion this administration has shown, the attempts at alternative media, organizing, congressional hearings… It was clear from the way my comments were received that it all sounded like I was making excuses for a people who have indeed, at least for the moment, seem to have shut out the systematic torture and the brutal occupation out of their minds and hearts.
I realized I needed to do something else. I needed to talk about things apart from the general positive things you can say about most any country -- that there are people who remain committed to justice and peace, even during the hardest of times. I needed to explain that are almost-singularly and deeply American challenges to the shameful acts of this administration. That what we are witnessing is also a struggle between different American values, and the results are far from certain.
I started telling people about Navy Lt. Commander Charles Swift.
Lieutenant Commander Swift, a military lawyer, you see, was assigned to defend Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni who served as a driver for Osama bin Ladin. Hamdan was charged before the kangaroo military commissions set up by the Pentagon to try to provide a sense of legitimacy to the detentions in Guantanamo and elsewhere. People like Mr. Hamdan were charged first with the hopes that, finding it impossible to mount a plausible defense, they would plead guilty, in return for reduced time. Their participation, it was hoped, would make the process appear somewhat acceptable, if not perfect.
Commander Swift and other military lawyers, however, put a stop to that charade. They launched a vigorous defense, going all the way up to the Supreme Court -- even filing lawsuits in civilian courts in their own names on behalf of their clients who have no such access. They challenged every aspect of the process, from the judges, to the rules of evidence, to the tribunals themselves. They maintained that their clients had the right to presumption of innocence, just like everyone else, and that the charges against them would have to proven, not assumed. (In fact, Mr. Hamdan maintains he was just a driver for hire trying to make a living.)
Cmdr. Swift and others persisted, and remarkably, they have torn apart the whole sham -- very deservedly so. Hamdan v. Rumsfeld produced a stunning loss to the administration as Judge James Robertson of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that President Bush “had both overstepped his constitutional bounds and improperly brushed aside the Geneva Conventions in establishing military commissions to try detainees at the United States naval base here as war criminals.” Cmdr. Swift and other military lawyers have been traveling at home and abroad, openly and loudly denouncing the military commission system as illegitimate, unfair and unacceptable.
People gasp with disbelief as they ponder these American career military lawyers, randomly assigned to defend people their government has designated as terrorists and locked up without charges, during a process clearly designed to provide not justice but a fig-leaf show-trial, taking on the executive branch so boldly and openly. How many countries, I ask, produce men of such integrity in their armed forces who would actually defend Osama Bin Ladin’s driver as a client innocent until proven guilty? Would you, I ask? Yes, there is a very ugly, cruel side to U.S. foreign policy and imperialism, but there is also this.
I also remind people about the Taguba report, produced by Filipino-American Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba, son of Sgt. Tomas Taguba, who had escaped from Japanese custody in the Bataan Death March during World War II, but was retired from the U.S. army without recognition -- receiving a Bronze star and a Prisoner of War medal only at the age of eighty. I tell people that it seemed as if this son had remembered the racism, cruelty and discrimination his father had encountered in his military career --and from the Japanese forces during the war-- when writing that bold expose of the wrongs in Abu Ghraip. And this man, I remind people, is a general in the U.S. army. He chose not to produce a cover-up that would surely please some of his superiors, and brush the moral wrongs he discovered back under the carpet. This too is America, I say.
Lastly, I remind people of the many Americans who have traveled to this Tribunal to join the world in holding their government accountable. From lawyers here from Center for Constitutional Rights and other groups, to women of CodePink who showed up in hot pink skirts and t-shirts with anti-war slogans, to folks from Deep Dish TV who have arrived here with their equipment in order to provide a global broadcast, to renowned academics like Richard Falk who gave a deeply moving opening speech, to the many alternative media journalists struggling to carry these voices back home, Americans are a well-represented contingent. This too is a face of America, I say. I hope that face perseveres, people respond. I do too, I say, I do too.
I also hope we can do more than hope.
[P.S. People ask me for permission to repost. Please repost as you wish, with source identification, of course.]
Posted by zeynep at 01:13 AM | Comments (0)
June 24, 2005
The Tribunal of Global Conscience
As I type this, Dee Dee Haleck from Deep Dish TV and David Barsamian are chatting in front of me about how to organize an interview with perhaps the only unembedded journalist in Iraq, Dahr Jamail. Deep Dish has made daily broadcasts available for free to all media outlets in the United States. The opening session featured Arundhati Roy, Richard Falk, Hans Von Sponeck and Phil Shiner, among others, each of whom gave a hard-hitting speech in their own way: the British attorney, the long-time UN diplomat, the university professor, the eloquent activist author... On my left, Samir Amin is being interviewed by a fairly mainstream newspaper in Turkey.
This does provide for a hopeful environment, seeing so many good, smart people trying to do so much. But the truths they speak of are hard and depressing. Phil Shiner, a British human-rights attorney, read testimony from a torture survivor who testified on behalf of one of Shiner's clients who had been tortured to death. I have a few such "clients," he sadly informed us, and described how some died, his voice shaking. It is quite depressing but I must admit it is uplifting in a sad sort of way, all at the same time, because this affirms we will not forget, and hopefully, we will find a way to make it stop.
Many participants have been asserting that they, as citizens of the world, feel that they must step up and fill the void of accountability that the failing international and national institutitions around us have left. This is how Richard Falk stated it:
The tribunal stands against outrageous claims of exception, and operates beneath the jurisprudential principle that no government or leader is above the law, and that every government and leader is criminally accountable for failures to uphold international law. If governments and the UN are unwilling to pass judgement, it is up to initiatives by citizens of world to perform this sacred duty.
And, also, Arundhati Roy, from this morning:
We recognize that the judgement of the World Tribunal on Iraq is not binding in international law. However, our ambitions far surpass that. The World Tribunal o nIraq places its faith in the consciences of millionsof people across the world who do not wish to stand by and watch while the people of Iraq are being slaughtered, subjugated, and humiliated.
As such, the Tribunal is an expression of a global conscience, a conscience of a global citizenry that refuses to shrug and turn away just because every institution that should be confronting these crimes --the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, which has jurisdiction in Iraq over at least United Kingdom's actions, national parliamentary bodies, you name it-- has already capitulated, or got decimated.
There is power here, the power not of prisons and police like a traditional court, but power that comes from truth, justice and moral legitimacy. This is our world, this Tribunal says, and we will not abandon it to the warmongers, the torturers, the greedy, the cruel.
And for the now, I leave you with this picture of the street on which the Tribunal is being held. On the left is John Ross, that amazing monument to the enduring human conscience, entering the press room.
CORRECTED: Arundhati Roy's quote was same as Richard Falk's. Sorry, copy and paste error. Neither plaigrized each other, in case you were wondering.
Posted by zeynep at 06:48 AM | Comments (0)
June 23, 2005
From the World Tribunal on Iraq in Istanbul
This week I'm going to be blogging from the World Tribunal on Iraq taking place in Istanbul. It will start tomorrow morning; more information can be found here.
But for now, here's the view from inside the small offices on the top floor of an old building where dozens of volunteers have been working almost literally around the clock organizing an event of this scale --welcoming speakers, delegations, witnesses and experts from around the world and especially from Iraq.
The little rainbow flag says "We the People Say No to the Bush Agenda." In the background is the Topkapi palace, Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque; the Tribunal is being held right at the heart of historic old city, in buildings left from the Ottomon times.
Tonight there was a wonderful welcoming concert. The speaker from the organizing committee started her remarks by reminding us that we were meeting inside the old city walls of two former empires, the Ottoman and the Byzantine. Look at these walls and remember, she said, Empires fall, big and small.
Posted by zeynep at 03:57 PM | Comments (0)
June 20, 2005
I Regret I was Harmed
Does this sound like an apology to you? All I hear is "I regret I made a choice that has turned out to be embarassing to me."
Sen. Robert C. Byrd's new memoir reveals both his encyclopedic knowledge of political history and the unlikely inspiration that helped launch his own political career: A Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan."It has emerged throughout my life to haunt and embarrass me, and has taught me in a very graphic way what one major mistake can do to one's life, career and reputation," the West Virginia Democrat says in an autobiography being released Monday. "I displayed very bad judgment, due to immaturity and a lack of seasoned reasoning."
...
Byrd says he never resented blacks, Catholics or Jews, but he failed to "examine the full meaning and impact of the ugly prejudice behind the positive, pro-American veneer."
"My only explanation for the entire episode is that I was sorely afflicted with tunnel vision — a jejune and immature outlook — seeing only what I wanted to see because I thought the Klan could provide an outlet for my talents and ambitions."
Here's another excerpt from another piece on Byrd's newly-published memoirs:
In the early 1940s, a politically ambitious butcher from West Virginia named Bob Byrd recruited 150 of his friends and associates to form a chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. After Byrd had collected the $10 joining fee and $3 charge for a robe and hood from every applicant, the "Grand Dragon" for the mid-Atlantic states came down to tiny Crab Orchard, W.Va., to officially organize the chapter....
"It has emerged throughout my life to haunt and embarrass me and has taught me in a very graphic way what one major mistake can do to one's life, career, and reputation," Byrd wrote in a new memoir -- "Robert C. Byrd: Child of the Appalachian Coalfields" -- that will be published tomorrow by West Virginia University Press.
...
Byrd said in an interview last week that he never intended for his book to provide "finite details" of his Klan activities, but to show young people that there are serious consequences to one's choices and that "you can rise above your past."
But the only consequences Sen. Bryd seems to be concerned are the consequences for him.
Uncoincidentally, as the Post piece points out, he downplays his later racist activities, including his much later efforts against the integration of the military forces where he wrote that he would never fight in the armed forces "with a Negro by my side," and that "Rather I should die a thousand times, and see old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels." He also filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and voted against Thurgood Marshall.
All this is not to say a man should not be allowed to move on from having succumbed to the dominant ideology of his era. However, there is a difference between a sincere apology and a cover-up. Sen. Bryd standard line, which he repeated last week, saying that "I know now I was wrong. Intolerance had no place in America. I apologized a thousand times." would ring a lot more true if he started showing concern for the consequences of his actions on others, not just on him. Maybe then he could also stop downplaying the truth of the extent of his activities because he would then be confronting his past, rather than running from it.
Posted by zeynep at 07:40 AM | Comments (0)
WWII Unembedded Journalist's Papers Finally See The Light of Day
An American journalist who sneaked into Nagasaki soon after the Japanese city was leveled by a U.S. atomic bomb found a "wasteland of war" and victims moaning from the pain of radiation burns in downtown hospitals.Censored 60 years ago by the U.S. military, George Weller's stories from the atom bombed-city surfaced this month in a series of reports in the national Mainichi newspaper.
...
Though he skirted American authorities to get into Nagasaki, Weller submitted his reports the first was dated Sept. 6 to the censors. The stories infuriated MacArthur and he personally ordered them quashed. The originals were never returned to him.
...
[George Weller's son] Anthony Weller told Mainichi he thought wartime officials wanted to hush up stories about radiation sickness and feared that his father's reports would sway American public opinion against building an arsenal of nuclear bombs.
How many years will we have to wait for the truth from Iraq?
Posted by zeynep at 06:02 AM | Comments (0)
June 16, 2005
How to Recruit: Go For the Football Team Captain, the Homecoming Queen. And the Boy Scouts.
So, what's next, sponsoring the Teletubbies or Sesame Street? Here's excerpts from a recruiting handbook, from Bob Herbert's column today:
Recruiters trying to sign up high school students are urged to schmooze, schmooze, schmooze."The football team usually starts practicing in August," the handbook says. "Contact the coach and volunteer to assist in leading calisthenics or calling cadence during team runs."
"Homecoming normally happens in October," the handbook says. "Coordinate with the homecoming committee to get involved with the parade."
Recruiters are urged to deliver doughnuts and coffee to the faculty once a month, and to eat lunch in the school cafeteria several times a month. And the book recommends that they assiduously cultivate the students that other students admire: "Some influential students such as the student president or the captain of the football team may not enlist; however, they can and will provide you with referrals who will enlist."
...
"If you wait until they're seniors, it's probably too late," the book says. It also says, "Don't forget the administrative staff. ... Have something to give them (pen, calendar, cup, donuts, etc.) and always remember secretary's week, with a card or flowers."
The sense of desperation is palpable: "Get involved with local Boy Scout troops. Scoutmasters are typically happy to get any assistance you can offer. Many scouts are [high school] students and potential enlistees or student influencers."
So the law recognizes that you may be too young to make responsible decisions about consuming alcohol in your teen years, but we see nothing wrong with subjecting 17 an 18 year olds to this kind of pressure and, frankly, manipulation. It's grossly unfair to those kids, and it's deadly to the people who are facing the muzzle of the guns that will be held by them.
Posted by zeynep at 09:03 PM | Comments (0)
June 15, 2005
Pro-Base, Anti-Despot
Remember our ally, Uzbekistan, where they boil prisoners to death and shoot demonstrators by the hundreds? Well, here's our most recent gift to that regime:
Defense officials from Russia and the United States last week helped block a new demand for an international probe into the Uzbekistan government's shooting of hundreds of protesters last month, according to U.S. and diplomatic officials.British and other European officials had pushed to include language calling for an independent investigation in a communique issued by defense ministers of NATO countries and Russia after a daylong meeting in Brussels on Thursday. But the joint communique merely stated that "issues of security and stability in Central Asia, including Uzbekistan," had been discussed.
...
The communique's wording was worked out after what several knowledgeable sources called a vigorous debate in Brussels between U.S. defense officials, who emphasized the importance of the base, and others, including State Department representatives at NATO headquarters, who favored language calling for a transparent, independent and international probe into the killings of Uzbekistan civilians by police and soldiers.
In other developments, the same paper the above article was published, the Washington Post, has another piece today titled "Bush Takes Aim at Despotism." Bush is apparently meeting with dissidents from various strategically-important countries, including Uzbekistan. Well, I guess a toothless photo-op almost never hurt anyone.
Posted by zeynep at 12:02 AM | Comments (0)
June 14, 2005
Bolivia: Heard From
Something hopeful has been happenning in Bolivia. What is remarkable is not what is happenning, but how. Here's an excerpt from Empire Notes that captures the essence:
To understand these events fully requires terms that we were told history had forgotten – much as the indigenous were told history had forgotten them.Here's one: dual power. This is a situation in which popular movements, while not having overthrown a state, have removed the state's monopoly on control. Not only can the popular movements exercise direct political power (rather than merely attempting to influence elected representatives), the state is conversely highly constrained in the exertion of power.
This situation has existed in Bolivia for some weeks and continues, at least at the moment.
Miners, farm-workers, and coca-growers organized; the indigenous majority of Bolivia, Quechua, Aymara, Chiquitano, and Guarani, mobilized. Making clever use of Bolivia's geography, they paralyzed the country. The neighborhood association of El Alto mobilized to lay siege to La Paz much as the followers of Tupac Katari did over 200 years ago. Gas and oil fields around the country had been seized; and a variously estimated 70 to 120 roadblocks at strategic points had brought road traffic to a standstill. With that leverage, the government had to take these movements very seriously.
...
This incipient revolution has been no tea party. It has involved miners marching with sticks of dynamite and angry verbal battles between political organizations committed to the struggle and people tired of cooking with firewood and dramatically rising food prices. And yet, to the remarkable credit of all Bolivians, only one person has been killed during this evolving drama, killed, of course, by the state security forces.
After 500 years of massacre, genocide, rape, slavery, torture, and exploitation, that the indigenous of Bolivia should begin their reconquista so peacefully staggers the imagination – and, one hopes, stretches it as well.
Here are Bolivian indigenous leaders from El Alto, attending a meeting with new President Eduardo Rodriguez:
And I think this is the most important gain, right there, in that picture: the people who are ordinarily barely heard, rarely consulted, and almost never considered, meeting with the caretaker president, after having forced the previous one to get out of the way of their country.
However the struggle of the Bolivia ends, the one important result will be that, in the future, it will be harder for the ruling elite and the neo-liberal elites and the IMF bureaucracy --or should I say the theocracy, with their infallible "free market" doctrine that always ends up freeing the resources of a country to be usurped by the few-- to ignore the people of Bolivia. I suspect we are witnessing the beginnings of a new cycle of mass movements: popular, democratic, and consciously taking aim at the neo-liberal policies that have crippled so many for more than two decades.
Posted by zeynep at 10:36 AM | Comments (0)
June 12, 2005
One Billion a Year of This; Ten Million a Year of That
The newly announced plan to stop demanding payments from 18 of the poorest countries in Africa is certainly a welcome baby-step in the right direction.
While being very aware of how much more needs to be done, I find this development very encouraging. It is indeed a stunning victory for a "popular campaign which mobilized millions of people." The movement is much stronger in Europe than the United States and very important events are still to happen there -- from the live8 concert to the upcoming "human band" in Edinburgh, where tens of thousands of people of conscience will encircle the G8 summit, demanding justice.
This will not be the first human chain to encircle a G8 meeting. In 1998, 70,000 people joined hands in a seven mile long link around the G8 summit in Birmingham, UK, demanding that the debt --illegitimate, odious and murderous-- be dropped, now:
It took 7 more years of relentless campaigning to realize even the minimal goals. I'm still reading the fine print on the G8 agreement so I will blog more when I understand its implications better. What is not in dispute is that it will mean that those 18 countries will stop making about about one billion dollars a year in debt payments. It may seem like a large sum, and in one sense it certainly is, but it mostly highlights our cruelty. We made them wait 7 years for this amount of relief. Just think of the numbers: assuming a rounded 250 million people in the United States, that comes out to about $4 a year, per person. And that's just in the United States. What conceivable reason do we have for not dropping the remaning amount of the already paid and overpaid, odious debt?
Meanwhile most calculations indicate that about 30,000 children die a day due to extreme poverty. That's about 10,000,000 children a year or about 70,000,000 children since the original Birmingham March.
A lot of what happens vis-a-vis debt relief is controlled by the IMF, which is basically controlled by the U.S. department of Treasury. Even a small but well-targeted campaign in this country could accomplish a lot. While there are groups like Jubile USA that campaign on this issue, the truth is they are very small and undersupported. That's a shame.
Posted by zeynep at 10:06 PM | Comments (0)
June 10, 2005
"2,200 Journalists Await Jackson Verdict"
That's right: 2,200 "journalists" were credentialed for the trial.
Don't you feel better, with our media on the job?
Posted by zeynep at 03:48 PM | Comments (0)
June 09, 2005
Unacceptable, Bogged Down, Not Worth Fighting, New Vietnam, Not Made U.S. Safer.
Juan Cole summarizes the results from a latest Washington Post poll:
Proportion who said the rate of US casualties in Iraq is unacceptable: almost 75 percent
Proportion who said US military is bogged down in Iraq: 66 percent
Proportion who say Iraq war was not worth fighting: almost 60 percent
Proportion who say Iraq is becoming a new Vietnam: more than 40 percent
Proportion who say Iraq war has not made US safer: 52 percent.
Proportion who say that Bush is handling his job poorly: 52percent
I wonder if the respondents were also asked about the rate of Iraqi casualties. After all, if one were to pick the most striking change about the nature of occupied Iraq over the last year, that would probably be it. The rate of American casualties has been pretty steady, with a spike around elections, while the rate of Iraqi casualties has skyrocketed.
Of course, the way our democracy works means that all this relatively striking drop in public support for the war will probably not result in any substantive policy changes until the next election.
Posted by zeynep at 08:32 PM | Comments (0)
June 08, 2005
What Did You Do During The Great African Holocaust?
As predicted in the last post, Bush made a sham announcement, announcing money that was already announced, without agreeing to anything else substantive -- in spite of growing demand everywhere in the world to stop this cruel march of death, now. On every major issue on the table, U.S. blocking progress. This is beyond shameful.
This is the greatest crime of our generation.
The director of UNDP, Kevin Watkins, published an op-ed in today's International Herald Tribune. UNDP calculates that 500 children die each hour in Africa due to poverty --which we helped cause through past and current colonialism, and which we could greatly alleviate given our wealth, and given that the IMF --one of the biggest stumbling blocks at the moment-- is basically controlled by the U.S. Department of Treasury.
UNDP estimates that three million children will die each year --each year-- --three million-- -each year-- by 2015 in Sub-Saharan Africa unless we change course dramatically, now.
Currently, poverty-related diseases claim the lives of 500 African children each hour - and the numbers are going up. The United Nations Development Program has just completed a country-by-country assessment of progress in reducing child mortality in sub-Saharan Africa. The results are not for the faint-hearted.
If current trends continue over the next decade, the region will miss the millennium goals by an epic margin. On our estimates, there will be three million more child deaths in 2015 than there would be if the millennium target were met. By 2015 sub-Saharan Africa will account for two in every three child deaths in the world.
These trends are not destiny. It is difficult to think of any area in which so much could be done to improve human welfare for so little. Consider malaria, which claims the life of one child in Africa every minute. More than three-quarters of these deaths could be averted through a simple net treated with insecticide, costing $3-$5, or simple medicines.
Of course, getting sub-Saharan Africa back on track will take more than initiatives to tackle malaria, AIDS and other major killers. The underlying problem is endemic poverty. Poor households face a double burden: more vulnerable to disease because of malnutrition and inadequate access to clean water, they are also least able to afford treatment and least served by public health systems.
African governments have primary responsibility for developing national poverty reduction plans. But even the best national policies will fail unless Africa can close the chronic financing gaps that restrict opportunities for development.
...The United States, for its part, has increased aid by $8 billion since 2000. Yet the world's largest economy still spends only 0.16 percent of national income on official aid. Indeed, three G-8 countries - Japan, Italy and the United States - are among the nations who give the least aid in proportion to national income.
...
The G-8 summit could also free sub-Saharan Africa, for once and for all, from the shackles of unsustainable debt. All G-8 members agree that more needs to be done on debt. Unfortunately, that is where the consensus ends. There are disagreements over how to pay for World Bank and IMF debt reduction, over whether debt relief should come from existing aid budgets or new resources, and over how much debt relief should be provided. After almost two years of inertia, it is time for the G-8 to agree to a 100 percent debt cancellation.
The world's rich countries have a chance to put in place policies that could prevent three million additional child deaths. Africa's children do not have a voice at G-8 summits. But those avoidable deaths present three million reasons for the rich world to act now, before it is too late.
(Kevin Watkins is the director of the UN Human Development Report Office.)
Can you wrap your head around that? Five hundred children each and every hour. (In the space of four hours, more children will die today in Africa than all the Americans soldiers killed in Iraq since the beginning of the invasion more than two years ago. And this is just Africa. And just children. In four hours.)
A preventable, predictable, steady killing-machine that we helped construct, and that we could easily mute. The numbers are going up. Onward. Upward.
What will we say when future generations ask us what we did during the great African Holocaust?
Posted by zeynep at 10:20 AM | Comments (0)
June 07, 2005
Your Lying Lies
Pretty soon you will hear that Blair got Bush to promise $674 million for famine relief in Africa. Not everything Blair asked for, but a small step, you will be told:
Actually, that's money that was already appropriated as such by Congress.
But even the U.S. famine relief dollars were coming out of an already approved Agriculture Department food aid account and other money recently made available by Congress.
Quelle surprise, no?
Posted by zeynep at 03:54 PM | Comments (0)
June 05, 2005
Bolton Instrumental in Firing the Man Who Exposed True U.S. Motives for Iraq
So, this very important pre-invasion pre-emption of peace of was engineered by Bolton:
John R. Bolton flew to Europe in 2002 to confront the head of a global arms-control agency and demand he resign, then orchestrated the firing of the unwilling diplomat in a move a U.N. tribunal has since judged unlawful, according to officials involved.A former Bolton deputy says the U.S. undersecretary of state felt José Bustani ``had to go,'' particularly because the Brazilian was trying to send chemical weapons inspectors to Baghdad. That might have helped defuse the crisis over alleged Iraqi weapons and undermined a U.S. rationale for war.
What is worse is that this move to make sure the long-planned war could go ahead as planned without being undermined by actual progress on the question of WMD was exposed in real time, by George Monbiot and others. Let me quote a long passage from his piece from 2002, written five days before Bustani was illegally fired:
The US wants to depose the diplomat who could take away its pretext for war with IraqBy George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 16th April 2002
On Sunday, the US government will launch an international coup. It has been planned for a month. It will be executed quietly, and most of us won’t know what is happening until it’s too late. It is seeking to overthrow 60 years of multilateralism, in favour of a global regime built on force.
The coup begins with its attempt, in five days’ time, to unseat the man in charge of ridding the world of chemical weapons. If it succeeds, this will be the first time that the head of a multilateral agency will have been deposed in this manner. Every other international body will then become vulnerable to attack. The coup will also shut down the peaceful options for dealing with the chemical weapons Iraq may possess, helping to ensure that war then becomes the only means of destroying them.
The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) enforces the Chemical Weapons Convention. It inspects labs and factories and arsenals and oversees the destruction of the weapons they contain. Its director-general is a workaholic Brazilian diplomat called Jose Bustani. He has, arguably, done more in the past five years to promote world peace than anyone else on earth. His inspectors have overseen the destruction of two million chemical weapons and two-thirds of the world’s chemical weapon facilities. He has so successfully cajoled reluctant nations that the number of signatories has risen from 87 to 145 in the past five years: the fastest growth rate of any multilateral body in recent times.
In May 2000, as a tribute to his extraordinary record, Bustani was re-elected unanimously by the member states for a second five-year term, even though he had yet to complete his first one. Last year Colin Powell wrote to him to thank him for his “very impressive” work. But now everything has changed. The man celebrated for his remarkable achievements has been denounced as an enemy of the people.
In January, with no prior warning or explanation, the US State Department asked the Brazilian government to recall him, on the grounds that it did not like his “management style”. This request directly contravenes the Chemical Weapons Convention, which states “the Director-General … shall not seek or receive instructions from any government.” Brazil refused. In March, the US government accused Bustani of “financial mismanagement”, “demoralization” of his staff, “bias” and “ill-considered initiatives”. It warned that if he wanted to avoid damage to his reputation, he must resign.
Again, the US was trampling the convention, which insists that member states shall “not seek to influence” the staff. He refused to go. On March 19th, the US proposed a vote of no-confidence in Mr Bustani. It lost. So it then did something unprecedented in the history of multilateral diplomacy. It called a “special session” of the member states to oust him. The session begins on Sunday. And this time the US is likely to get what it wants.
...
Bustani has suggested that if the Security Council were to support the OPCW’s bid to persuade Iraq to sign, this would provide the US with an alternative to war. It is hard to see why Saddam Hussein would accept weapons inspectors from UNMOVIC —the organisation backed by the Security Council—after its predecessor UNSCOM was found to be stuffed with spies planted by the US government. It is much easier to see why he might accept inspectors from an organisation which has remained scrupulously even-handed. Indeed, when UNSCOM was thrown out of Iraq in 1998, the OPCW was allowed in to complete the destruction of the weapons it had found. Bustani has to go because he has proposed the solution to a problem the US does not want solved.
These are the things to keep in mind everytime the administration says, oops, sorry, "intelligence failures." On the contrary, they knew exactly what they were doing.
Posted by zeynep at 03:18 PM | Comments (0)
June 02, 2005
Liberating the Environment
Sanctions, depleted uranium, our lack of interest in guarding nuclear and chemical plants after the war have all taken a major toll on the environment in Iraq:
AMMAN (Reuters) - Iraq's environmental problems - among world's worst - range from a looted nuclear site which needs cleaning up to sabotaged oil pipelines, a U.N. official said on Thursday."An improvement is almost impossible in these security conditions. Chemicals are seeping into groundwater and the situation is becoming worse and creating additional health problems," said Pekka Haavisto, Iraq task force chairman at the United Nations Environmental Programme.
"Iraq is the worst case we have assessed and is difficult to compare. After the Balkan War we could immediately intervene for protection, such as the river Danube, but not in Iraq," Haavisto, a former Finnish environment minister, said on a visit to Jordan to meet with Iraqi officials.
Lack of spare parts and Iraq's inability to maintain pollution standards during two previous wars and more than a decade of crushing sanctions have damaged the environment, including the Tigris and Euphrates rivers where most of Iraq's sewage flows untreated.
The situation became worse after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, in which depleted uranium munitions were used against Iraq for the second time and postwar looting and burning of the once formidable infrastructure caused massive spills and toxic plumes, Haavisto said.
"The bombing and war carried a cost but the looting cost the environment more, such as in the Dora refinery or Tuwaitha nuclear storage," Haavisto said.
"There has not been proper cleanup and only assessment work at some of these sites. Very little has changed and Iraqi teams are in the process of getting in some of these locations."
The U.N. official was referring to the 56 square km (22 sq mile) Tuwaitha complex south of Baghdad where 3,000 barrels that stored nuclear compounds were looted.
In the Dora depot on the edge of Baghdad, 5,000 barrels of chemicals, including tetra ethylene lead, were spilled burned or stolen, a U.N. survey showed.
Contaminated sites near the water supply also include a 200 square km (77 sq mile) military industrial complex, torched or looted cement factories and fertilizer plants, of which Iraq was one of the world's largest producers, and oil spills.
This is the kind of damage generations of Iraqi children will suffer from long after this is all over.
I guess I should say if this is ever over.
But, oh, wait. This is all Saddam Hussein's fault. Nothing to do with us.
Posted by zeynep at 07:52 PM | Comments (0)
June 01, 2005
The Onion Takes Over the Wire Services
I came back from travelling and apparently, comedy mag The Onion has taken over all major news outlets. Very funny guys.
Rumsfeld Decries Amnesty Rights Report.Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld today described as "reprehensible" and "outlandish" a human rights group's comparison of U.S. military detention facilities to a Soviet-style gulag, and he said the military goes to great lengths to accommodate the religious practices of detainees
But come on, it's not as funny the second time:
Cheney Offended by Amnesty International ReportWASHINGTON -- Vice President Dick Cheney says he's offended by a human rights group's report criticizing conditions at the prison camp for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay.
What's next, that Bush said the same thing? Gotta know where to stop the joke, no?
Posted by zeynep at 05:45 PM | Comments (0)