The settlements cover over 42% of the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), not counting the Jordon valley, which they are taking over

Estimates of colonisation vary from the 42% reported by Chomsky and BT Salem to that of Human Rights Watch who, at 60%, set the figure even higher.

Around half a million ‘settlers’, more accurately, colonisers, now squat upon Palestinian soil, huddled within walled encampments upon stolen land, branded blue and white. Noisily perching upon hilltops, rooms with a view, or flourishing in verdant valleys, these settlements creep shamefully throughout the West Bank and the sacred city Jerusalem, East, West North South; The City of Peace.

Former President Jimmy Carter stated:

The occupation & confiscation of Palestinian land that doesn’t belong to Israel, the building of settlements on it, the colonisation of that land, and the connecting up of those isolated but multiple settlements, (there are some 200), with each other by high-ways on which Palestinians can’t travel and where quite often cannot even cross. The persecution of the Palestinians under the occupation [by the Israelis] is one of the worst examples of human rights deprivation

Inside the West Bank, Outside the Law

The building of one single settlement is illegal. This is a fact, a fact well known, a fact Israel signs up to and a fact in International Law.

Article 49 of The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 to which Israel is a signatory (1949) and has ratified (1951) and Mother-ship USA is a High Contracting Party, which “aims at protecting the civilian persons in enemy hands, notably those residing in occupied territories” and “explicitly prohibits an occupying power from transferring its civilian population into occupied territory” [Emphasis mine].

The Geneva conventions agreed and adopted after the Second World War are “one of the major sources of international humanitarian law and are binding [emphasis mine] upon [the] 189 signatory states”, meaning you can’t simply ignore them. As a party to the Geneva Conventions, the United States is obligated “to respect and to ensure respect for the present Convention in all circumstances.” [Emphasis mine] Israel and the USA, two of those bound – some feel gagged and bound would serve well — by the conventions, failed to attend a conference in December 2001 in Geneva, concerning the application of international humanitarian law in the occupied Palestinian territories; a scandalous absence by the two key ‘players’ or ‘builders’ – not of peace, but builders of conflict, separation walls and Israeli housing condos.

Notwithstanding this ban, almost half-a-million Jewish Israelis with Israeli government support have moved into settlements it has constructed in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), and formally annexed occupied territory in East Jerusalem, a move not recognized by any other government in the world.¹

The settlers are living illegally, often violently, supported by all manner of subsidies from the Knesset, “which entitles them to a number of benefits: in housing, by enabling settlers to purchase quality, inexpensive apartments, with an automatic grant of a subsidized mortgage; wide-ranging benefits in education, such as free education from age three, extended school days, free transportation to schools, and higher teachers’ salaries; for industry and agriculture, by grants and subsidies, and indemnification for the taxes imposed on their produce by the European Union; in taxation, by imposing taxes significantly lower than in communities inside the Green Line, and by providing larger balancing grants to the settlements, to aid in covering deficits.”

These subsidies are little more than bribes, all thanks to Mother Goose USA. Chomsky points out:

We’re [USA] paying for it [settlement building, subsidies, security], stop paying for it, stop supporting it, stop subsidising. Stop allowing the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) to remain in the territories. The setters are subsidized to stay there [the OPT], if the subsidies are withdrawn, they [settlers] will have to face the fact that they are not the ‘Lords of the Land’ they will then go back to Israel.

Israel, however, disregards, with impunity, the many and various binding agreements, such is the arrogance of the aggressor. Tzipi Livni, when serving as Israel’s foreign minister, declared:  “I’m a lawyer and I’m against the law, international law in particular”. Norman Finlkestein commenting ”She had good reason for saying that because under international law Israel loses, on Jerusalem, on the West Bank and Gaza, on settlements and right of return for refugees”  There is a rising light of freedom and unity throughout the World, Miss Livni.  It glints from the cleansing sword of justice, law, International, National.

Israel is supported, sustained and supplied, in words, arms and deed by the US. During 2011, the U.S. provided Israel with at least $8.2 million per day in “military aid” alone. The One who rides shotgun above any treatise, convention and/or nation, Big American Brother, allows [Israel] to dissent, encourages violation of international law, and leads by example. One has only to recall the International Court of Justice judgment against the USA in 1984, when the ICJ found in favour of Nicaragua. As Noam Chomsky puts it:

America was condemned by the World Court for, what they called unlawful use of force for political ends, another word for International terrorism. Tens of thousands of people [were] killed [and] the country ruined perhaps beyond recovery. The ICJ ordered the US to terminate their crimes and pay substantial reparations.²

The US ignored the court and continued unabated, in fact, escalating the terror.  It seems international laws apply to some but not to others, ‘Do unto others as ye would have others do unto you’. Good idea unless it’s Israel or their Godfather in, and of, arms, America.

In February 2011 the USA vetoed a proposed United Nations Security Council Resolution calling upon Israel ‘to end illegal policies that promote settlements in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem’ (HRW). In so doing they undermined international law and gave the green, or should we say the blue and white light, to their Middle East proxy, to continue committing criminal acts, by expanding the settlement building, the colonisation within, and of, the West Bank to include East Jerusalem.

In the UN report (UNSCIIPA), the concerns of the General Assembly are made plain.

Despite the repeated calls from the international community and the illegality of settlements, the State of Israel is continuing to expand settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, in violation of its international legal obligations [emphasis mine].

The report continues:

Israel is in violation of international humanitarian law, relevant United Nations resolutions, agreements reached between the parties and obligations under the Quartet road map.

The Clash

Clashes between settlers living illegally upon the West Bank, a line drawn in the 1967 sand – walled and fenced – and Palestinians in their homes, upon their land, inside their schools and mosques, are growing, intensifying and escalating. The UN report makes clear how serious the problem is “Many of these incidents have been overtly violent acts targeting Palestinian individuals and communities with live ammunition, destruction and denial of access to property, physical assault and the throwing of stones. Some incidents have led to the killing and injury of Palestinians”.

According to Defence for Children International (DCI) ‘there has been a sharp increase in settler violence incidents against children. As of May 2011, DCI documented 19 cases of violence against children involving settlers, two of them fatal’.

Two cases of murder, murder of two innocent children at the hands of the colonisers.

We find in the UN report (UNSCIIPA) the following:

From September 2010 to May 2011, 5 deaths (including three children) and more than 270 cases of injury of Palestinians by Israeli settlers were recorded, lack of accountability for Israeli settlers persists. The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) not only failed to protect Palestinians, there are documented instances of their direct involvement in violence perpetrated against Palestinians.

Noam Chomsky says:

“We [USA] now have in the OPT a neo-colonial army, the IDF, to control the population.”

The following shocking examples of settler violence as monitored by the Office of the High Commission for Human Rights (OHCHR) are given in the UN report.  They are illustrative of the violence that Palestinians suffer at the hands of Israeli settlers, and are simply some of the loudest in a crowd of screaming atrocities committed by Israeli colonists against Palestinian men, women and children, their places of worship and of education. So here they are, to the shame of the “settlers”.

On 7 March 2011, a group of at least 12 settlers from the “outpost” of Esh Kodesh in the northern West Bank attacked Palestinians from the adjacent village of Qusra. Three of the settlers were armed with a handgun and two rifles while the rest were carrying baseball bats and metal bars. One of the settlers had a dog. The settlers hurled stones at the Palestinians and fired guns in the air, before physically assaulting the Palestinians. Israel Defence Forces soldiers reached the scene 30 to 45 minutes later, but the Israel Defence Forces personnel acted only in support of the settlers. One of the Palestinians was shot in his left wrist by a settler. An Israel Defence Forces soldier shot another victim in the leg from a distance of some 30 metres. Once on the ground the same Israel Defence Forces soldier shot him again from close range in the other leg. While trying to flee, the victim was hit in the leg and kicked in the face by a settler with a wooden stick, in the presence of the Israel Defence Forces soldier who had just shot him. An Israel Defence Forces soldier hit another Palestinian in the head with the butt of his rifle. Once the victim fell on the ground, a settler and the Israel Defence Forces soldier started kicking him.

On 27 January 2011, an 18-year-old Palestinian grazing his goats on his land was shot dead at point blank range by a settler on Palestinian land south of the village of Iraq Burin. Footage of the killing captured by a security camera appeared in various media. On 15 February 2011, an 18-year-old Palestinian from the village of Jalud south of Nablus, which is surrounded by six Israeli settlements and “outposts”, was shot in his stomach

Settler violence [According to the UN is not random criminal activity; in most cases, it is ideology-driven, organized violence, the goal of which is to assert settler dominance over an area.

The Israeli methodology of suppression, control and terror is organised and systematic ‘policies and practices’ as the UN calls them, the settlement building, land theft (UN diplomatically, calls it ‘confiscation’), ‘zoning’ – a term invoking images of social, ethnic and racial manipulation, or cleansing. Add to this Eviction from their own land and the barbaric practice of house or home demolitions and you have a witches brew of control, victimisation and criminality, which has cast a toxic cloak over the lives of Palestinians and a shadow over history.

In their Sites

Sites for settlements, like everything else the occupying Israeli force undertakes, are chosen with care, on hilltops overlooking valleys, Palestinians, and Bedouins. A demographic dot to dot, one colony merges with another, the dots connected, a line is formed. The line, a triangle; the triangle, a star; six armed and driven hard into the freshly watered Palestinian earth, to flutter in full intimidation, as the settlers sit high above the valley and the law, eagle-eyeing the Palestinians upon their homeland. And from that height settlers establishing new lows “dump raw sewage down the hillside, contaminating the well[s] and making it unusable for agriculture and drinking”.³

Duel Lives

Two parallel ways of life exist within the West Bank, a controlled, unjust, frightening existence for Palestinians living behind walls of servitude upon their homeland, and a comfortable, flourishing life within their tree lined encampments for the settlers. Palm trees and gardens bursting with colour create a theme park image of artificial beauty upon a battleground of injustice and hate.  Defence for Children International states:

Over 90% of settler violence incidents that are investigated by Israeli authorities are closed without any charges being filed. There is a dual system of law operating in the West Bank. The settlers are subject to Israeli civil law, with all the rights of a democratic state guaranteed to them. Palestinians, on the other hand are governed by a series of military orders within a military system, which deprives them of the rights guaranteed to their Israeli settler neighbours. This dual system of law discriminates against Palestinians.

A ‘dual system’ indeed.

Human Rights Watch recently documented Israel’s two-tier system for the Palestinian and Israeli Jewish populations in the 60% of the West Bank area that Israel controls, and in East Jerusalem. Israeli policies deliberately withhold basic services from Palestinians, causing tremendous hardships by preventing, and punishing the construction of homes and infrastructure for their communities, while providing generous financial benefits and infrastructure for Jewish settlements. Such differential treatment lacks any security rationale, but is meted out on the prohibited basis of race, ethnicity, and national origin

A two tier system of injustice, cruelty and control, If they could, they would bottle sunlight and ration its use. They have turned day to night, and in the darkness of division, violence and hate they march, out of step with the men and women of goodwill that would bring peace and harmony to the land, out of pace with the winds of change that are sweeping humanity towards peace and unity, out of sync with the destiny of the nations to live safely side by side as enshrined in International Law.

A ‘dual system’, where a settler shoots and kills with impunity, an innocent Palestinian, as in the case of the 18-year-old Palestinian grazing his goats on his land was shot dead at point blank range by a settler on Palestinian land south of the village of Iraq Burin”; a system which allows a six year old child on his way to the neighbourhood shop for his grandfather to be ‘detained’ by the Israeli army, “they kept the child in detention for four hours at a nearby police station (to Al-Esawiyya town), and interrogated him in an attempt to intimidate him in to giving them names of youth who hurled stones at the soldiers”.  Said  Mohammad Ali Dirbas after the ‘kidnapping’: “The Police tried to terrify me, but they can’t scare me, they must leave our land.”

The UN concludes its comprehensive  report (UNSCIIPA) with six clearly articulated recommendations. All recommendations should be applied forthwith. The two most prescient measures are:

1. The Government of Israel should bring its policies and practices into compliance with its international legal obligations and its commitments in the Road Map, as well as the repeated calls of the international community to immediately cease the transfer of its civilian population into occupied territory and to completely freeze all settlement activities in the West Bank, including in East Jerusalem, and to immediately dismantle all “outposts”.

2. The Government of Israel should take all necessary measures to prevent attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinian civilians and their property in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

Enough! Enough of the injustice, violence and fear.  Let International Law be done and let the Palestinian people live in peace in a country that is rightly their home.

1. Human Rights Watch (HRW) February 2011
2. Noam Chomsky. 9-11 Seven Stories. Seven Stories Press, New York, 2002
3. Doris Norrito, Rebuilding a Wall, Stone by Stone, IMEMC,  20 December 2011

It’s best not to think about politics up there. Last time I went up, there were three black vultures preening on the serpent’s head not ten feet from where I sat. They were so quiet, it took minutes before I saw them looking at me. Makes a strong impression when you’re all alone up there.

What a great way to manifest yourself, if you’re the devil, as black vultures. Carrion birds won’t hurt you. They only eat what’s dead, like cast-off faith and trust and admiration. Nice touch, being triune, too, as father, son and who knows what, in the jokey way the devil has of parodying sacred absurdities.

This was no portentous sermon. The big one hissed and the little one screeched a bit. Demonic possession is great – no voices or intrusive thoughts, you just enjoy a brainstorm and take credit.

So, sitting there like Goodman Brown, when he calms down and thinks it through. Everybody comes here. What could all these humans have in common that’s so awful? What’s this unspeakable secret that everyone keeps?  I had one of those inspirations of horrid blasphemy: it’s rights and rule of law, universal to mankind yet utterly secret. Here in America, public life must never be defiled by universal law and rights. Law and rights show our patriotic exploits through the victims’ eyes. That takes our sacred things and makes them dirty, with all the power of the old oath, Bloody Mary.

The election was everywhere below, an inescapable miasma. It’s said to be important in America. It’s called democracy, the thing that makes us good, and it’s imaginary, just like god. How to desecrate that sacred thing? Just stop pretending. Hold our pointless choices to the standards of the outside world, with rights and rule of law. Obtrude the secrets that Americans aren’t allowed to know.

Let the sacrilege begin. To the candidates let’s apply the minimal standards of the civilized world. They fail spectacularly, bloviating in swinish contempt for the commitments America has made supreme in its own law. Most ordinary voters are less ignorant of presidential duties and commitments. Who cares which candidate is better, if none of them make the cut?

And what about the man who’s now doing the job, and wants to keep it? Job evaluation means a checklist, and none of this nonsense about character and greatness, only work rules. Does the incumbent president measure up? But perhaps it demeans the dignity of office to treat him like other any working stiff. Let’s hope so.

What happens when we vet a presidential candidate in the commonest, most fundamental ways? First, we make sure he’s not a criminal. Before they would let me play angel of mercy in Africa they took my fingerprints, to be sure that I was not the sort of person that would molest needy children or rape powerless women. Fair enough. We’ll do a background check on the incumbent. We’ll set the bar as low as we can, and look only at peremptory norms. Peremptory norms are the bedrock expectations of the civilized world, the law of intolerable, inexcusable transgressions.

Let’s begin our background check with the Convention Against Torture (CAT), supreme law of the land under Article VI of the Constitution, signed by President Reagan and ratified October 27, 1990. CAT Article 12 requires:

Each State Party shall ensure that its competent authorities proceed to a prompt and impartial investigation, wherever there is reasonable ground to believe that an act of torture has been committed in any territory under its jurisdiction.

On January 11, 2009, President Obama said, “We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” As a matter of policy, the incumbent president does not want his subordinates to “spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering.” Breaking Article 12 makes Obama Torturer in Chief.

Now in America we’re encouraged to pound our chests and cheer torture of helpless captives as a badge of patriotic courage. In our generally censorious culture, we’ve been inoculated with ambivalence to view torturers as athletes with chalk in their cleats, heroically toeing the line as they pitch out of bounds. You don’t see the sort of hysteria that attaches to, say, sex offenses, where some simpleton pees out of doors or gets a crush, and he’s judicially branded for life, hounded from place to place by mobs of frantic parents. Makes you wonder what it would take to make outrage trump cruelty. Which atavistic impulse would prevail if the President of the United States were presiding over sexual torture?

Well, we’re going to find out. It seems that something adverse has turned up in the incumbent’s background check.   A compromising photo.

Rape. We don’t tolerate that. That’s why we had to bomb Serbia and Libya. Under Article 1 of the Torture Convention, official acquiescence to torture is an essential element of the crime. Executive acquiescence goes beyond obstruction of justice: it makes the president an outlaw everywhere, subject to universal-jurisdiction law with no statute of limitations. President Obama is Rapist in Chief, ensuring impunity for the rank-and-file of torture, who hold the captive women down and squeeze their breasts and fuck them. And not only women but boys.  President Obama oversees the gingerly don’t-ask-don’t-tell for soldiers whose orientation is to anal rape.

In extenuation it is said that President Obama is afraid of his subordinates. Dean Christopher Edley of U.C. Berkeley Law School recounted a meeting that ruled out prosecution for fear of a revolt by the government’s torture bureaus.

However, that cuts no ice under Torture Convention Article 2, paragraph 2:

No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.

The US government wished this clause away in its 2006 report to the UN Committee against Torture – all’s fair in war, America maintained – but the Committee affirmed the consensus of the world that nothing can justify torture.

The Committee pointedly cited sexual humiliation as a breach of US obligations under the CAT. The world knows what our government did. The world has seen the photographic fact of that woman bent over for rape. The world has seen the photographic fact of a naked shackled captive with an object thrust up his anus.

The Committee wrote:

The State party should ensure, in accordance with the Convention, that mechanisms to obtain full redress, compensation and rehabilitation are accessible to all victims of acts of torture or abuse, including sexual violence, perpetrated by its officials.

The Committee remarked that the US is hiding from the Special Rapporteur on Torture. Our state has kept the Special Rapporteur at bay, but the Committee against Torture was not so easy to escape – we agreed to its oversight in signing the Convention Against Torture. The international experts confronted the United States with the chapter and verse of its obligations, in stark contrast with its conduct. Merely reading our commitments aloud to us paints a mortifying picture of the United States as a barbarous throwback state.

The United States of America is an enclave where jus cogens, the essential rudiment of civilization, does not apply. The United States signed the CAT with reservations that unlawfully undermine its purpose, and with meaningless declarations meant to hedge its restrictions on the state. Americans lack federal torture statutes that afford us the protections of the Convention. Our laws hem torture round with qualifiers that make much torment officially OK. We don’t enforce the laws on torture when we delegate it to servile satellite states or secret dungeons. We illegally exempt our high officials from the law.

The better to torture its victims in peace, the United States government refused to sign the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance – but the Committee pointed out that every prisoner we disappeared is a per se breach of the Torture Convention.

In breach of Article 10, America ensures that its troops and police wallow in brutish ignorance of the universal law on torture. In defiance of Article 14, America denies redress to torture victims: our state refuses torture victims’ recourse to the Committee against Torture, and drowns their appeals in bureaucratic mire at home.

America institutionalizes torture in Supermax isolation. For the public at large, in insouciant contempt of the historic horrors of electrical torture – the archetypal symbol of totalitarian crime – our state issues instruments of electrical torture to civilian police nationwide, who use them with impunity for punishment and restraint.

The US government has not yet released its fifth Periodic Report to the United Nations Committee Against Torture, due November 19, 2011. It promises lively controversy on the campaign trail as the US reports to the Committee, answers its questions, and publishes the conclusions of the independent international experts.¹ Or so one would think. Surely voters will be anxious to learn if their most urgent concern has been addressed: at the outset of the Obama administration, the question voted highest on change.gov was,

Will you appoint a special prosecutor ideally Patrick Fitzgerald to independently investigate the greatest crimes of the Bush administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping.

Clearly the answer is no. We shall see if the electorate takes no for an answer.

President Obama is self-evidently in violation of Torture Convention Article 12. But at least he stopped the torture, right?

Ask Gulet Mohamed,  tortured in Kuwait on President Obama’s watch, with US officials on the spot to take away his rights, under threat of worse to come.

It’s only getting worse. With the knowledge and approval of the President’s federal security bureaucracy, local police departments are institutionalizing Israeli techniques for CAT-illegal torture and degradation with a nationwide program of “law enforcement education.”  The non-violent dissenters of the occupy movement have already been subjected to the signature abuses of Zionist repression: nerve damage from hours in tight restraints; the arbitrary violence of Shamir’s infamous “force, might, beatings;” use of tear gas canisters as lethal projectiles.

All right, then. Inarguably, President Obama is a criminal: hostis humani generis, enemy of all mankind. But perhaps we ought to look at the whole person. Maybe he behaves a little better with respect to aggression. After all, aggression is the highest of all high crimes, and a hanging offense, for the Nazis we caught – America hallowed the principle at Nuremberg. As UN General Assembly Resolution 3314 (XXIX) stated:

No consideration of whatever nature, whether political, economic, military or otherwise, may serve as a justification for aggression. A war of aggression is a crime against international peace.

Oh dear, tsk, tsk. Our little background check turns up a problem here too. President Obama waged illegal war in Afghanistan and Iraq. His continuing war in Afghanistan was not authorized by the relevant UNSC Resolution, 1368 (2001). Use of force in this case breaches Articles 46, 48 and 51 of the United Nations Charter, supreme law of the land under Article VI of the Constitution. The now-covert war he commands in Iraq similarly flouts UNSC Resolution 1441, which authorized no use of force. The UN Secretary General termed our war on Iraq illegal.

The wars Obama started are no better. US use of force in Yemen and Somalia is undertaken without UN supervision, in direct breach of UN Charter Chapter VII. Pakistan publicly denounced the US for a ‘deliberate act of aggression’ when President Obama commanded an armed attack on defense forces inside Pakistan.

In Libya, President Obama overstepped the objectives of UNSCR 1973 (2011). The objectives are crucial because use of force is illegal when not under UN supervision. Disregarding the scope of the no-fly zone, President Obama destroyed civilian infrastructure and defensive emplacements in Sirte and elsewhere in support of one combatant faction, interfering with national self-determination in breach of UN Charter Article 2.4. In using, force President Obama aborted African Union efforts at pacific settlement of disputes, required by the supreme law of our land: the Kellogg-Briand Pact and UN Charter Chapter VI.

Illegal use of force against Iran will be laid to President Obama’s account as well. His common plan or conspiracy to commit crimes against peace, the precedent of Count 1 at Nuremberg, is deniable for now, plausibly or not, but evident in partial execution, and complete.

The last time the United States went to war with Iran, in the largest naval battle since World War II, our leaders ran afoul of the law. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) called the US attack disproportionate and unjustified by necessity. We ran to the UN and cried self-defense, but the ICJ rejected that claim.  Our first war on Iran has been ruled an act of aggression. Our new war, with its unsolved murders and mysterious explosions, raises sticky issues in the evolving doctrine of state responsibility for intentionally wrongful acts. President Obama has put the poisoned chalice to his lips. We’ll see if he drinks.

So Obama’s an aggressor too. Well, perhaps he keeps his nose clean once he gets into an illegal war. Let’s apply humanitarian law. While America has run from the accountability of the Rome Statute, its provisions merely institutionalize universal-jurisdiction humanitarian law. So President Obama may get off scot-free on Rome Statute Article 8.2.c.iv, for the extra-judicial execution of Osama bin Laden when rendered hors de combat by detention. But he’s still on the hook for the equivalent crime under universal jurisdiction. The prohibitions come from the Geneva Conventions and the Hague Convention, to which our state is party. In fact, the Hague Convention relaxed American law a bit, as murder of prisoners was a capital offense under Military Order 100. In the case at hand the evidence is clear – we took that woozy mugshot of the captured invalid Osama right before we shot him. Then there’s Rome Statute Article 8.2.a.i, which criminalizes the willful killing of civilians Abdul-Rahman al-Awlaki, along with 90 per cent of our Pakistani drone-war casualties.

Crime goes to the applicant’s character, you might say. With a position of trust in a criminal state, crime is a purely notional embarrassment, and easy to suppress, in America’s cult of personality – but soon legal exposure may be more than an annoyance for elder statesmen craving society’s esteem. Late last year, in ICC-02/05-01/09, the pre-trial chamber of the International Criminal Court denied immunity to heads of state.  The decision leaves plenty of wiggle room for executive lips and shysters like Gonzales and Koh, but it reflects the world’s resolve to end impunity.

For peaceful little countries, it’s great sport to shoo our criminal elder statesmen with the law. Mischievous Swiss lawmaker Dominique Baettig chased George Bush away with public recognition of torture charges. Fortunately for our diminutive warlord, planned protests afforded a face-saving security pretext for his flight from justice.  Lawyers Against the War gave it a whirl in Canada.  Naturally the charges sank without a ripple in America’s servile snowbound hinterlands, but the meticulously documented charges promise lots more fun. They’ll throw the same book at ex-president Obama. CAT Article 12 makes it his crime, too.

When his turn comes, the charges are likely to be lurid. President Obama doesn’t merely fail to investigate torture, he has his diplomats obstruct independent efforts to redress it. When Spanish Judge Baltazar Garzon took up the case of one of Spain’s own torture victims, as the law requires, the US government “fought tooth and nail” to obstruct Garzon’s investigations. To keep official torturers out of reach of the law, the Obama administration disappears charges as well as human beings, perverting justice at home and abroad.

Torturer, aggressor, war criminal. Clearly, rule of law is not Obama’s strong suit. But, as legal wizard Johnny Cochran said, let’s not rush to judgment. What has he done for me lately? That is how we’re taught to think.

Let’s stick with what we are entitled to demand, that the candidate honor the commitments and obligations essential to a sovereign state: our universal human rights. Take minimal civil and political rights, as guaranteed by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (CCPR), supreme law of the land.

Patriotic brainwashing keeps that legal fact repressed deep in Americans’ subconscious. No one in America holds presidential aspirants to the standards of the civilized world. What does sometimes happen is wistful evocation of a less demanding standard, our quaint old long-gone Bill of Rights.

Still it’s easy to pile up annals of despotic overreach. Conor Friedersdorf reels off 14 outrages. Collectively they make a mockery of CCPR Articles 9, 6, 17, 19, 12, 14, 10, and 16. There are many hapless victims beyond Friedersdorf’s myopic view – Gulf States inhabitants, Occupy dissidents, debtors, and people of color – and they might add Articles 1, 7, 11, and 21 to the civil and political rights that have gone through President Obama’s shredder.

Partisan dead-enders maintain that despite the President’s high crimes and overt contempt for civil and political rights, the Democratic alternative offers certain social and material advantages. At this point it would be a waste of time to take the pathetic scraps on offer and systematically compare them to the minimal requirements of the Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (CESCR).  That test reveals the piteous and terrible failure of a puffed-up corporate puppet. He shrinks shyly from state duties to respect core rights, and fails utterly to protect our human rights from corporate depredations. But in search of some indicative examples, let’s measure the pleadings of a random Democratic loyalist against the relevant human rights standards.

Achievement: “Obama has overhauled the food safety system.”

Well, that is certainly worth doing. Article 11 of the Convention on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights states:

The States Parties to the present Covenant, recognizing the fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger, shall take, individually and through international co-operation, the measures, including specific programmes, which are needed:

(a) To improve methods of production, conservation and distribution of food by making full use of technical and scientific knowledge, by disseminating knowledge of the principles of nutrition and by developing or reforming agrarian systems in such a way as to achieve the most efficient development and utilization of natural resources.

Our ruling class won’t ratify that covenant, so technically, the President is not on the hook for his gross derelictions: lip service to government duties respecting freedom from hunger, and servile negligence that allows corporate interests to destroy fisheries and foodstocks. With America’s Gulf Coast fisheries poisoned by corporate malfeasance, the FDA underestimates the toxicity of Gulf Coast shrimp by four orders of magnitude.  The US government permits Monsanto to impose the “substantial equivalence” doctrine, muzzling scientific inquiry into food safety. To test the food that patent monopolists force-feed us, Americans have to depend on Chinese research. And in fact, the Chinese have found an insidious taint. The Obama administration is colluding with pesticide producers to forestall independent pesticide research. As the censorship continues, commercial interests exterminate bees and the plants that they pollinate worldwide.

Achievement:  “Advanced women’s rights in the work place. Ended Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in our military. Stopped defending DOMA in court. Passed the Hate Crimes bill. Appointed two pro-choice women to the Supreme Court.”

More insulting scraps of rights. At the outset of his term the president had the majority to sign and ratify the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), codifying comprehensive rights and impelling them with an international framework of independent review. He did not. The president shares the US Government’s provincial compulsion to reinvent all wheels and agonize over bad imitations of the world-standard protections accepted everywhere else. It’s more than stubborn ignorance – it’s fear of any world consensus that our rulers can’t control.

“Expanded access to medical care and provided subsidies for people who can’t afford it. Expanded the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Fixed the preexisting conditions travesty [and rescissions] in health insurance.”

Let’s look at what our president’s job is, if he claims to head a sovereign state: CESCR Article 12:

1. The States Parties to the present Covenant recognize the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.

2. The steps to be taken by the States Parties to the present Covenant to achieve the full realization of this right shall include those necessary for:

(a) The provision for the reduction of the stillbirth-rate and of infant mortality and for the healthy development of the child;

(b) The improvement of all aspects of environmental and industrial hygiene;

(c) The prevention, treatment and control of epidemic, endemic, occupational and other diseases;

(d) The creation of conditions which would assure to all medical service and medical attention in the event of sickness.

The President’s medical tinkering seems to be a feckless stab at paragraph 2(d). In the event, the President undermined the proven approach of monopsony health-care procurement and delivered a captive market to predatory corporate middlemen. Here again, we have lip service to government duties and utter failure to protect.

Achievement: “Invested in clean energy. Overhauled the credit card industry, making it much more consumer-friendly. While Dodd-Frank bill was weak in many respects, it was still an extremely worthwhile start at re-regulating the financial sector.  He created a Elizabeth Warren’s dream agency: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He’s done a lot for veterans. He got help for people whose health was injured during the clean-up after the 9/11 attacks.”

A motley ragbag that falls apart under cursory examination. Not a hint of the duties of the state. You can sell rubbish like this with a straight face if you can keep Americans ignorant of world standards. Civil law is historically more cognizant of state duties, and most other nations are attuned to evolving international norms, but Americans are educated as provincials. In terms of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the state has failed if you don’t know your rights. But to fanatical theocrat Gary North and his holy electoral vanguard, protecting humans from the overreaching powers of states is “giving equal time in society to the devil.” Americans’ backward ignorance is actually sacred.

What’s more, all that financial boasting invites review in light of the Convention Against Corruption (CAC), supreme law of the land.  CAC Articles 18 and 19 address trading in influence and abuse of functions. Our government has told international reviewers that existing federal law prohibits abuse of function and trading in influence. Our government admits that it has not reviewed the effectiveness of that law. So the blatant and ubiquitous sleaze of public life turns out to be a crime! But corruption is a vital institution here. The graft of contending lobbyists, that’s our sole remaining check and balance. It is all that’s left of our state. So when the sordid story of bank reform is told, President Obama may not even be able to say, with the hapless villain Richard Nixon, “I am not a crook.”

And they want me to go to the polls and vote for this. They actually expect my consent-of-the-governed seal of approval for a criminal despot who can’t even make the trains run on time, and for the failed state that horked him up. Let his party die off like the Whigs. No, I want what I’ve got coming: rights and rule of law. No party gives me that. Saying so desecrates everything that’s sacred to this purulent police state. It’s blasphemy to hold the state to any standards. That’s how you learn that every word they tell you is a filthy lie. It is Satan’s irresistible lure : Now are ye undeceived.

Come, devil, for to thee is this world given. Hail the New World Order. Blasphemy is powerful. Satan’s old and wise. He knows depraved institutions always have a sanctifying rite. Defile it – nothing happens, but the institution’s power is gone. The pedophile church has a solemn rite: you must eat cheap pulpy bread and make believe it’s flesh. The crucial rite of the United States is the election, a travesty of futile choice. You must make believe you’re choosing what you want. To profane it breaks the brittle spell. Stop taking the host, and the priests can’t rape your child. Stop casting your vote, and the troops can’t rape that terrified woman that they’re gripping by the hair.

1. N.B. Broken link: sometime after January 20, State took down this handy listing of recent torture and human rights reviews.

In spite of its claims to be concerned about the “protection” of civilians and the state of “human rights” in Syria, the Western press was more concerned with demonising the Syrian governmnent than the barbarians who carried out the savage terrorist attacks in Damascus.

Attacks of this kind have terrorized countries in the Middle East for decades and have generally been attributed to terrorist groups. Attacks targeting civilians tend to bear all the hallmarks of Al-Qaida, yet, in an act of obscene cynicism, the Western press attempted to lay the blame on the Syrian government for the attacks. Le Monde carried the headline: “Attentats a Damas. L’Opposition syrienne accusent le régime, qui accuse Al-Qaida.” The headline which translates as “Attacks in Damascus. The Syrian opposition accuses the regime, who accuses Al-Qaida.” Terrorist attacks in a given country normally imply an opposition to the government of that country, yet the ludicrous conspiracy theory of a government “inside-job” is given credence in the spin of the French daily’s headline, which prioritizes the claims of the Syrian opposition.

The terrorist attacks in Damascus massacred men, women and children. Bodies were ripped to pieces. Yet Western government and “human rights” organizations and the “independent” press refused to say what any decent human being would say: that these attacks were crimes against humanity and should be unequivocally condemned.

Conspiracy theory was also the order of the day in the editorial offices of Sky News, who gave much credence to the claims of the “opposition” that the Syrian government planted the bombs themselves.

Sky News was also convinced of a diabolical plot hatched by the Assad régime so as to discredit the “peaceful pro-democracy” groups who oppose the government. So, it seems conspiracy theory has finally invaded the pages of the mainstream media.

According to Wikipedia, the term conspiracy theory “is sometimes used to automatically dismiss claims that are deemed ridiculous, misconceived, paranoid, unfounded, outlandish or irrational.”

The idea that the Syrian government, which is facing all-out warfare from Western powers under the Orwellian “responsibility to protect” doctrine, is surely worthy of such adjectives as “ridiculous,” “misconceived,” “paranoid,” “unfounded,” “outlandish,” and “irrational.”

There is not a shred of evidence to support the paranoid and deranged conspiracy theory that claims the Syrian government was behind the attacks in Damascus. However, instead of sympathizing with the victims of these crimes against humanity, the Western media establishment prefers to promote wile conspiracy theories.

What has been proved, however, is that the so-called Syrian opposition are heavily armed; are targeting civilians and security forces and are backed by Western intelligence agencies.

While there is no evidence that the Syrian government is planting bombs on its own people, there is a plethora of evidence to show that the United States wants regime change in Damascus and is prepared to use all means necessary to achieve this.

Since the promulgation of the Syrian Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act of 2003 and the admission of general Wesley Clark to Amy Goodman on March 2, 2007 that Syria was to be one of seven countries slated for US-backed regime change, all the available evidence shows that Syria has long been an object of US military aggression.

In a time of year so often associated with peace and kindness, the Western political establishment and their public relations servants in the mass media and “human rights” organizations have shown yet again what scant regard they have for human lives.

The nefarious political agenda of the West’s most prestigious “human rights” organisations can be clearly seen from the deafening silence of the Human Rights Council in Geneva, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the International Federation of Human rights and their affiliates, as their dear peaceful “pro-democracy” activists blew Syrian citizens to pieces in Damascus.

Human rights discourse has provided a lethally effective camouflage for Western imperialist strategies in the Middle East since the outbreak of the US-backed people-power coups in Tunisia and Egypt this year.

Throughout nine months of incessant bombing of civilian targets in Libya, human rights groups such as the International Federation for Human Rights, inter alia, provided the justification for NATO’s mass terror campaign against the Libyan people.

Amnesty International only admitted a paucity of the crimes committed by the putschists of Benghazi, while maintaining a hysterical chorus of neo-colonial war-mongering against the legitimate Libyan Jamahirya, repeatedly pinning crimes committed by the NATO rebels on “Gaddafi’s forces”.

The unrelenting war-mongering of globalisation’s pious “human rights” groups over the past year should provide ample proof of François-Noël Babeuf’s prescient critique of the French revolution’s droit de l’homme doctrine and the subsequent critique of human rights ideology by Karl Marx.

In his famous essay “On the Jewish Question,” Marx argued that the doctrine of human rights was a creation of the property-owning class or the bourgeoisie. Abstract human rights, Marx predicted, would be used to further the interests of the capitalist class.

The callous silence of so-called human rights groups in the wake of the crimes against humanity committed in Damascus on December 23rd coupled with the paranoid conspiracy theories of the corporate media are a damning indictment of what Oscar Spengler described as Der Untergang des Abendlandes, the decline of the West.

The Syrian Human Rights Network have warned the Syrian people of “mass grave” fabrications by NATO’s proxy terrorists which will be blamed as the crimes of the mass media’s new bogey-man President Baschar al-Assad.

The recourse to car-bomb terrorism by the Western-backed jihadists shows that the colour revolution strategy has been a total failure in Syria. The destabilisation of Syria is now likely to require even higher levels of mass media mendacity.

Fabricated stories of mass graves, death camps and mass killings have garnered public support for imperialist adventures in the past.

In April 1993, James Harff of the American PR firm Ruder and Finn boasted on French TV about how they managed to fool American Jews into supporting US “humanitarian” bombing in Yugoslavia stating:

At the beginning of July 1992, New York Newsday came out with the article on Serb camps. We jumped at the opportunity immediately. We outwitted three big Jewish organizations…. That was a tremendous coup. When the Jewish organizations entered the game on the side of the [Muslim] Bosnians we could promptly equate the Serbs with the Nazis in the public mind. Nobody understood what was happening in Yugoslavia…. By a single move, we were able to present a simple story of good guys and bad guys which would hereafter play itself. We won by targeting the Jewish audience. Almost immediately there was a clear change of language in the press, with the use of words with high emotional content such as ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, etc, which evoke images of Nazi Germany and the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

The PR firms “tremendous coup” cost the lives of thousands of innocent civilians and tore a multi-ethnic and tolerant society apart.

The media reductio ad Hitlerum process of Syria’s president Bashar Al-Assad is likely to intensify in the new year as humanitarian warfare and human-rightism spreads from North Africa to the borders of Russia and China.

The thugs of the hills are only the icing on the cake. Most of the work is being done by thugs wearing kid gloves. Unlike the people who threw the stone at the deputy brigade commander, these are fan favorites in Israel. The flesh of our flesh. Officers and soldiers, military jurists, architects and contractors in the service of the army, Interior Ministry and National Insurance Institute clerks. The hands are their hands. The head is the head of the demos, the Israeli-Jewish people, who by the democratic process send governments to be the dictator over the Palestinians.

What is the Israeli dictatorship over the Palestinians? Not only control of their space and the creation of isolated enclaves; not only the 19-year-olds who are sent — masked and armed to the teeth — on military raids (560 last month, according to the monitoring group in the PLO’s negotiations department); not only daily arrests (257 arrests in November, including 15 Gazans) and the 758 temporary roadblocks that were placed on West Bank roads that month.

The dictatorship is not even just a ban on Palestinian construction in more than 60 percent of the West Bank, permission to invent a new law every day to disenfranchise and expel, and the demolition, during 2011, of 500 Palestinian dwellings, wells, cisterns, animal pens, toilets and other essential structures. The dictatorship is all that together, and much more.

The Israeli dictatorship is the art of the double standard (Palestinians cannot build on their agricultural land so as not to impair rural zoning, but the state can legalize a Jewish outpost on Palestinian agricultural land). It is the champion of self-righteousness and arrogance (“the only democracy”), and holds an advanced degree in hypocrisy (“ready to return to negotiations any time”). Instead of going crazy with rage, the Palestinians know that these characteristics will hurt the Israelis themselves.

Anyone who has been harmed by the Israeli dictatorship feels alone, weak, angry and desperate. But every family in its own way cultivates its humanity. In a curious and moving way — despite internal rivalries, an unfair distribution of the burden, manifestations of ignorance and opportunism and disappointing leadership — the ability to remain steadfast and social solidarity are the overall result.

That’s the summud that attorney Raja Shehadeh wrote about ages ago, when we still deluded ourselves that the Israeli-Jewish people can heal itself from the disease of lordship. This totality also typifies every individual and family: the ability to remain resilient and show wise restraint, which has become routine bravery and will be translated in due time into mass collective resistence.

The Palestinians are heroes, and that’s not simply a flowery journalistic phrase. It’s a fact not intended for the thugs, but rather for people who shut their eyes — and they are many. Those who shut their eyes do so because they seek normalcy. What they don’t see doesn’t exist and doesn’t bother them. Israeli normalcy longs for the Palestinians to disappear, or at least to remain silent and finally surrender. But Palestinian bravery will continue to thwart the longings of Israeli normalcy.

Unfortunately, this year the United States’ treatment of migrants has been dismal.  Nearly 400,000 people have been deported, often without adequate due process. Anti-immigrant and xenophobic laws have been passed in state legislatures of Alabama, Arizona, South Carolina, and Utah.  The US has increased fear and isolation in our migrant communities.

Last week the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division (DOJ), to its credit, made public the findings of its investigation, initiated in March 2009, into civil rights violations in Arizona by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MSCO) headed by the notorious Sheriff Joe Arpaio. The investigation uncovered what many local advocates have suspected for years: that Sheriff Arpaio and his subordinates engaged in a pattern and practice of racial profiling against Latinos and also unlawful retaliation against individuals critical of the Sheriff’s policies.

Shortly after the DOJ’s findings became public, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) ended its agreement allowing certain Maricopa County deputies to act as immigration agents on behalf of the federal government, a step community leaders have demanded for years.  These agreements with local law enforcement, called 287(g) agreements, are authorized by Congress under section 287(g) of the Immigration and Naturalization Act to allow local police to act as immigration officers.  In ending the agreement with Maricopa, DHS acknowledges that abuse of authority will occur when law enforcement agencies, especially those like Arpaio’s, get in the immigration business.

However, while DOJ’s investigation and DHS’ suspension of the 287(g) agreement with Maricopa are steps forward, a hugely problematic situation remains.  DHS continues to have a relationship with the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office through another program, Secure Communities, the federal deportation dragnet program, which will continue its legacy of mass deportations and destruction of communities.

Through Secure Communities, local law enforcement agencies automatically provide immigration authorities fingerprint information for every person arrested. After comparing the fingerprint information with its own databases, ICE can either try to deport the person or store the information in a massive database for future use. Secure Communities is already used in 1882 jurisdictions and 44 states, even in places where local officials and organizers have asked not to have any part in the program and in jurisdictions with human rights records as horrific as Maricopa County.

Think about the consequences of such a widespread program. With Secure Communities, immigration agencies automatically learn the identity of any non-citizen in the custody of local police and can initiate deportation. This is the case even if the arrest was illegal and even if the charges are dropped or never prosecuted.

Secure Communities Through a Human Rights Lens:

First, a central norm in human rights is proportionality: the punishment must fit the crime. With Secure Communities, we have witnessed record deportations and detentions, often for minor offenses where the criminal courts don’t even seek jail time.

Second, even though human rights standards require freedom from all forms of discrimination, Secure Communities is plagued with racial and ethnic profiling. Anti-immigrant jurisdictions use it to hide illegal and race-based arrests, and the federal government allows places like Maricopa County, Los Angeles, New York and New Orleans, places with well documented histories of racial profiling and abusive cops, to use Secure Communities without meaningful oversight.

Third, human rights principles require full and fair hearings and urge release from detention over incarceration, but in localities with Secure Communities, immigration holds prevent release of thousands of non-citizens at the expense of local jailers and with the consequence of coercing criminal pleas and deportation.

Fourth, human rights treaties provide special protections to women, children and victims of violence, but Secure Communities is criticized for placing trafficking and domestic violence survivors at risk of removal.

Fifth, a common thread in human rights is the idea of engagement. A government should listen and engage with the people it represents and allow us to have a real voice in setting policy. But Secure Communities, despite heavy resistance and requests by states and localities to end the program, has been forced on us.  Even though the people and officials of places like San Francisco, Santa Clara, and Arlington, and entire states such as New York, Illinois and Massachusetts have said they don’t want anything to do with Secure Communities, it’s being implemented anyway.

The Center for Constitutional Rights has the honor and privilege of representing one of the national leaders in the movement towards immigrant justice – the National Day Laborer Organizing Network – in a lawsuit against federal agencies for information about Secure Communities. Through this lawsuit we have uncovered literally thousands of pages of internal documents that expose a record of the federal government’s deceit and misrepresentation.  These documents have been used in a national campaign to uncover the truth behind police and ICE collaborations. Advocates around the country have questioned the government’s policy, educated local police and state officials and created a groundswell of resistance against merging the criminal and immigration systems.

Secure Communities is now a symbol of government dishonesty and deception. The Obama administration was not transparent with Congress about Secure Communities’ true purpose when it asked for over $2 billion for the program; it tricked state and local officials into believing they could limit or opt out of the program; and worst of all the government sold untruths to the public to get this program launched at any cost.

Kofi Annan, former Secretary-general of the United Nations, once said: “Human rights are what reason requires and conscience demands. They are us and we are them. Human rights are rights that any person has as a human being. We are all human beings; we are all deserving of human rights. One cannot be true without the other.”

The United States has failed to recognize the universality of human rights for migrants, rights we are all entitled to just because we are human.

As we begin a new year, let’s take a step forward toward recognizing the fundamental human rights of all people. The United States must change course. DHS should recognize the complete failure of programs like Secure Communities that put local police at the center of immigration enforcement.  Terminate them immediately, especially in cities with open DOJ investigations or historic records of police misconduct, and start to honor our commitment to human rights for migrants.

After Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Istanbul mayor from 1994 to 1998, established the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in the year 2001 and subsequently won a victory in the 2002 election, a new Turkey successfully emerged from a severe economic crisis and its runaway inflation. Since becoming Prime Minister in 2003, Erdogan has diverged from the post-Ottoman laicism (secular), authoritative, and nationalist philosophy of the Turkish Republic’s founder, Kemal Ataturk, and steered Turkey in a direction more consistent with western democratic philosophy.

What enables this nation to operate independently and grow in a dependent and declining western world? Can it sustain its growth? Can it reject Kemalism without military interference? These are only three of many questions concerning Turkey’s foreign, economic and social policies, all of which contain contradictions, doubts, and problems. Problems? Turkey excels in problems. There is the Kurdish problem, Cyprus problem, Islamic influence problem, writing a new Constitution problem, relations with adjacent nations problem, entry to the European Union problem and of course, problems with Israel and the United States

A trip through Turkey, sponsored by the Washington based Rumi Forum, an interfaith and peace organization, featured meetings with parliamentarians, journalists, academics and businessmen, and provided insight into Turkey’s (1) ability to confront its problems, (2) strength to continue an independent path, and (3) role as a model for the Arab nations that are struggling from a revolutionary spring into a bright and peaceful future. Istanbul revealed the ‘think tanks that define the present.” Ankara provided the parliamentarians that shape the future. In Sanliurfa and Gaziantep, one learns of an ancient past and gains insight into Turkey’s nationwide progress and the role of its Kurdish community.

A discussion of Turkey starts with its youth.

A modern country

New airports, new super highways, massive construction of modern buildings in expanding cities that now contain 75% of the population with a median age of 28.5 years, highlight the growing Turkey.

A western oriented nation reflects a Mediterranean appearance. Buildings, offices, restaurants, hotels and institutions use warm colors; brown, beige, orange, together with neutral white, black and lilac; colors associated with steadfastness, simplicity, friendliness, and dependability. The warm colors made large rooms look cozier, while the orange proved mentally stimulating as well as sociable.

A subjective appraisal notes a nation of hard working purposeful and dedicated people, well organized and progressive. Turkey reflects vision and mission. Youthful representatives satisfied the vision.

Faik Tunay, at 30 years, is the youngest parliamentarian for the The Republican People’s Party (CHP). The CHP is the oldest political party of Turkey and is currently the main opposition in the Grand National Assembly. Best described as a modern social-democratic party, it is faithful to the principles of Kemal Ataturk, the Party’s founder.

The deputy for Istanbul, member of the Foreign Affairs committee, speaks five languages, and has been invited by the Eisenhower Institute to visit America, In addition to being an elected member of the Grand National Assembly, he is involved in several family businesses and some of his own – construction, agriculture, advertising. His ambition – although born as a White Turk, a member of a privileged class, he wants to leave as a Black Turk, as a member of the masses.

The youngest member of the Turkish Grand National Assembly is only 27 years old, one of three members under 32 years of age. Bilal Macit represents an Istanbul district for the AKP, but insists he represents the state and not the civil authority, does not represent youth nor will limit his activities to youth policies. He has traveled widely, matured in a global world and learned to think independently. Cognizant that his Party’s leader changed politics, Parliamentarian Macit won’t allow his independent attitude to harm the Party. Surprisingly, he offered the opinion that youth does not represent the Arab revolutionary movements, suggesting the movements are more complex and widely distributed. The youthful parliamentarian attributes some of his success to his previous association with the Young Civilians, a movement he helped to found.

Young Civilians

Fatih Demirci, who graduated with a manufacturing system engineering degree and is now an Istanbul entrepreneur, is another 27 year-old founder of the Young Civilians and still an active member. At a dinner meeting, he explained the operations of the organization whose name indicates its thrust — contrasts to Kemal Ataturk’s Young Turks who led the 1908 revolution and the Young Officers who won Turkey’s independence.

Organization? The Young Civilians have no formal organization. Corresponding by Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, they gather compatriots at demonstrations. Their symbol is the sneaker, a sharp difference from the military boot that shaped the nation. Similar to America’s flower children of the 1960′s with a dash of France’s 1968 rebel Cohen-Bendit’s “Ask for the impossible,” the Young Civilians “demand the possible but perfect.”

They grimace at any military or nationalist demonstrations, such as the May 19 Youth and Sports Day national holiday. On that day, in 2003, the group organized its first gathering at Parliament to protest the style of the festivities and become known. They became well known, even internationally, with coverage by the New York Times. Reducing military appearance in social and political life, gaining equal rights for all forty-two ethnicities, and no-holds barred allowance for religious and national expressions dominate their thinking. Removing visa requirements and opening the border between Armenia and Turkey would please them.

Will the Young Civilians (who are growing older) be only a humorous irritant to Turkey’s elite or will it become a serious movement that contributes to all Turks embracing one another with equal expression, regardless of religion or ethnicity? Does the answer lie with the flowering of the flower children of the American 60′s, who became more conservative as they moved on in years?

The Young Civilians might already be superfluous. The Kemalism they want defeated and the military coup they fear are quickly being subdued with no appearance of immediate revival.

Kemalism

After Kemal Ataturk died in 1938, almost any government that threatened the principal tenets, the six arrows of Kemalism, triggered a military coup.

Republicanism–a broadly based republican system.
Nationalism–a distinctly Turkish identity
Populism–a more classless society
Revolutionism–wholesale, rather than gradual, change
Laicism-cancellation of the power of religion in the state, and
Statism–state-led development of the economy and society

were inviolate until the AKP gained power.

Prime Minister Erdogan’s instant and bold challenge in 2003 to the tenets of Kemalism did not provoke a military coup. Nevertheless, the military and allied Kemalists have been accused of preparing a conspiratorial response in 2007 that was uncovered in 2009.

Why did Erdogan proceed so boldly and why was it difficult for the military to instantly respond to the AKP’s removal of several of the six arrows of Kemalism from its quiver? AKP parliamentarian Bilal Macit explained; “Before 2002, the military exercised control of most facets of society except for the economic system. Their political and social control promoted economic stagnation and decline.” Erdogan’s deft handling of the economy apparently impressed much of the military to favor his administration.

Markar Esayan, editor of the independent Taraf newspaper, suggested that the Prime Minister correctly gauged a change in society and recognized he had wide support. The year 2002 is now a milestone in Turkish history – the year the military was no longer the principal authority.

Mesut Ulker, a former army colonel, presently a strategist for a think tank and a well-known television personality, added a simple comment: ‘The army has rapidly changed.”

Professor Dr. Yasin Aktay, Director of the Institute of Strategic Thinking, summarized the situation in a strategic context: “The shift of the population to urban areas created an expanding middle class with new social demands. The population requested an allocation of resources, a new identity and a new constitution. The ideological state (Kemalism) with its stress on Turkic identity and secularism created problems.”

Yusuf Acar, Zaman newspaper journalist and world news editor for magazine Aksiyon, echoed the decline of Kemalism and military domination. “Power has shifted to president office #1, Parliament as #2, and then the military. Nevertheless, the state still comes before the citizen.”

A journalist for Zaman, which has become one of Turkey’s principal newspapers, with a circulation of about one million, might be prejudiced in its observations. Yusuf Acar admits Zaman is often accused of being a government supporter and receiving assistance. However, except for sharing a state run television station and agency with the government, he denies the state has any involvement with the newspaper.

Ozcan Yeniceri, previously a university professor, and presently a parliamentarian for MHP (The Nationalist Movement Party) speaks passionately and in great length on all topics. By gaining 53 seats in the 2011 general elections, his Party remained the third largest parliamentary group. Previously characterized as an ultra-nationalist party, which has recommended martial law in Kurdish territory, the MHP has tempered its extremist views.

In Ozcan Yeniceri’s opinion, nationalism has ontological meaning, a striving for security, and struggle for independence. It unites the country against invading forces. He considers his Party is less nationalistic than that of President Obama and would not resort to the killing of leaders that Obama has done. (Evidently referring to the assassination of Osama bin Laden and NATO attempts on Moammar Gadaffi’s life.) “Liberal criticisms about the establishment of the Republic are wrong in the claim that Ataturk did not introduce democracy. Ataturk was a pragmatic and not actually a Kemalist. He understood the times and adapted. Turkey’s divisions have been between left and right with left defined as communist and right defined as capitalist. Now there is a rapid change in democracy in all areas with an increase in human rights.”

Kemal Ataturk’s framed portraits still adorn the walls of public sector rooms and halls. Gigantic banners and posters of his image are noticeable. Prime Minister Erdogan has wisely retained the reverence to Turkey’s George Washington but abruptly replaced Ataturk’s nationalist and statist policies with an agenda more compatible with the global system and more in harmony with democratic dictates.

Nevertheless, the AKP, despite its widespread support, still has severe antagonists. The charge of an ongoing coup against the government has resulted in mass arrests of well known public figures, has divided the National Assembly and disturbed leaders from several sectors of society. In mid-November 2011, after several judicial reviews and hearings, a 264-page indictment accuses 143 suspects, 66 of them in pre-trial detention, with an attempt to overthrow the government.

The indictments have provoked a question: Is Erdogan using tactics similar to those of the military forces, exaggerating threats to squash opposition? Will the trial of civilians and officers associated with Operation Sledgehammer destabilize the stable nation?

Operation Sledgehammer

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan insists that nobody has been jailed in Turkey because of their profession as a journalist; only due to their membership in an illegal organization. Others are skeptical.

Markar Esayan and his independent Taraf newspaper received credit and fame for exposing the proposed 2007 coup, which had as objectives: undermine the stability of the AKP and create chaos. Esayan would not expose those who presented his newspaper with the documents, but insisted they were authentic and with signatures of known generals. He said plans had been made to bomb two major mosques in Istanbul, assault a military museum by people disguised as fundamentalists, and increase tension with Greece by instigating dogfights between the fighter planes of the two countries over the Aegean Sea. The allegations included shooting down a Turkish plane and blaming it on Greece. Subsequently, he said, prosecutors found supporting documents at military headquarters.

Faik Tunay senses that the revelations spurred citizens to support Erdogan and harmed opposition Parties. Although he believes the alleged coup plotters should be punished, he senses some plotters, especially journalists, have been accused only because of personal association with alleged plotters — guilt by association.

Zaman’s Yusuf Acar said that the “society did not accept reports of military intervention,” but after “armaments in a military home were found to match some terrorist activities, belief became widespread. Changes became apparent when the Prime Minister chaired the Military Council and the General Chief of Staff no longer stood at his side.”

Professor Dr. Yasin Altai claimed that the military often created problems to justify its existence. He has been spied upon and a file prepared on him. Now the civil can try the military.

All top generals, one of whom died, resigned. Some interpreted the resignations as an attempt to create anarchy, others as a protest to the arrests.

What seems to many as an obvious and serious plot against the government, which must be dealt with in a legal manner, is viewed by others as a bumbling proposal by a few who drew others in with arguments and not with definite alliances. All words and no action. So where is the plot?

The decline of Kemal Ataturk’s political course and weakening of the military dictates a new direction. Can that direction continue without a new constitution? What constitution? The subject is being vigorously debated.

The Constitution

A commission, composed of representatives from the three major Parties and a pro-Kurdish group, has been appointed to prepare a Draft Constitution. One limiting factor: each article must be approved unanimously, an impossible task. Without a new constitution, Kemalism cannot be entirely decomposed. Without a new Constitution, it is doubtful Turkey can gain admittance to the European Union.

The Young Civilians want a total change and absolutely new constitution. Bilal Macit noted that it is difficult to change the first three articles of the constitution; secular, socialist, modern. Article 4 of the present Constitution declares the immovability of the founding principles of the Republic defined in the first three Articles and bans any proposals for their modification. Regardless, Macit claims that no division exists between secularists and Islamists. Both want a pluralist society.

If the Constitution is modified, will it contain some references to Sharia Law? The Kemalists and western world have one question in common: To what extent is the AKP an Islamic Party?

The Islamic Party

A consensus rejects the AKP as an Islamist party. Nothing in its agendas, in its cabinet, and in its operations suggests a relation with an Islamic movement.

Nasuhi Güngör, columnist for the Star newspaper, said that the AKP “no longer represents Islamic identity,” and he should know. He admits that the Star, which has a moderate circulation of 130K daily, is owned by businessmen aligned with the government and, although critical at times, still close to the AKP. “Many AKP members practice Islam and believe that forward movement requires affiliation with Islam. However, they don’t go beyond believing that the Islamic religion can play a satisfactory role in society and wanting its adherents to be able to practice the religion in accord with their own rules.” One clue, Güngör noted, is that the AKP has not brought the wearing of the scarf issue to the table, perceiving it as human rights rather than religious issue. If the AKP raised the issue then it would be marked as an Islamic Party.

Although Turkey might not be considered an Islamic run nation, will its identification with the Islamic religion serve as a model for the newly liberated Arab nations?

Turkey as role model

The world expects the Turks to guide the Arab revolutions in the same direction as Erdagon’s movement. Consensus does not adhere to that theme and has Turkey envisioning itself only as another European a nation. Rather than being a role model, Turkey wants absolute friendship with Arab neighbors, a lack of which distracted the Ottoman Empire and impeded progress of the Kemalist programs.

Star Daily journalist Güngör, who is the newspaper’s expert on the Middle East, believes the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt has close similarities to the incipient AKP, but has never governed and is 30 years behind the AKP operations. He declared that if any of the Islamic parties gain control in the Arab nations, and they have already in Tunisia and Morocco (whose Islamic Party is also named Justice and Development), that country will make a big mistake.

His views on Hamas and Hezbollah are sanguine. Both, he claims, are maneuvered by Iran and are too militaristic. Nevertheless, he recommends that Turkey continue its relationship with Hamas.

Zero problems with neighbors

As others have said: “Turkey’s pursuit of zero problems with neighbors has morphed into zero neighbors without problems.”

All commentators agreed that Turkey has failed in this pursuit. Turkey has problems with neighbors and this is partly due to its own initiatives and independent policies. PM Erdogan’s commendable moral imperative, which identifies friendship with moral agendas rather than with what one nation can do for the other, creates misperceptions and misconceptions.

Misperception of the moral imperative solicits charges of arbitrary judgment of others and intention to establish a neo-Ottoman agenda. Erdogan has a misconception that these policies can succeed in a world of mistrust and self-interest.

Trespassing on Iraq sovereignty by engaging in military attacks on Kurds in Northern Iraq, requesting the resignation of Syria’s President Bashar Assad, demanding Israel apologize for the killing of Turkish citizens during an attempt to break Israel’s blockade of Gaza, installing NATO missile radar detection equipment to deter Iran, and refusing to pay compensation to Bulgaria for Ottoman eviction of Bulgarians in eastern Thrace, are only a few examples of Turkey’s conflicts with neighbors.

MHP Parliamentarian Özcan Yeniceri described the policy. “Turkey previously consulted the Pentagon for regulating its relations with Iran, Russia and others. After the fall of the Soviet Union, everything changed, and this allowed Turkey to reach potential. Still, its relations with the U.S. hindered relations with neighboring nations.”

And a host of other problems: resolution of the Kurdish question, entry into the European Union, and engagement with Israel and its principal supporter.

The Kurdish

Strategists outside of Turkey consider the Kurdish insurgency as Turkey’s number one problem. Despite continuous attacks by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), punishing government counterattacks, and arrests of suspected PKK associates, correspondents considered the Kurdish question to be a declining problem. They noted that the Kurdish population is no longer demanding separation, feel more Turkic and sense the government is addressing their grievances. Turkey’s minority of 20 million does not maintain a unique Kurdish language and many dialects are prevalent. As for the Kurds being an organized ethnicity with direct relations in several nations, the Turkish Kurds don’t directly relate to the Kurdish populations in the other nations of Syria, Iraq and Iran. Kurdish irredentism is irrelevant to Turkey’s Kurds.

No longer considered to be a military problem, the Kurdish situation is defined as a civil and human rights problem. Former army colonel Mesut Ulker expressed the opinion succinctly: “It is a civic problem that will be resolved in 2-3 years.”

MHP Parliamentarian Ozcan Yeniceri presented a more rigorous analysis: “One third of the population has Kurdish relatives, intermarriage between ethnicities is high, and Kurds are well integrated. The Kurdish independence problem appeared after the fall of the Soviet Union, when new states formed. Nationalist Kurds asked: ‘Why not a Kurd state?’

“The PKK thought that after reforms, the government would become weak, eventually collapse and the country would divide into several divisions. Demands for democracy and freedom are not essential for the Kurds. They are only a Trojan horse. Nevertheless, the government should acknowledge rightful claims, and the conditions of the Kurds are showing improvement. Demand for a separate Kurdish language to be used in all facets of everyday public life comes from the PKK movement. In response the government has granted a Kurdish language television station, which broadcasts cultural programs.” Dunya TV has a satellite channel, and a footprint that reaches to Kurdish speaking peoples in all adjacent countries.

Ozcan Yemceri believes in equal rights for all ethnicities and private courses for Kurds, in their own language, which the government now allows. He closed with a wry remark: “America might face similar problems with its own minorities,” evidently referring to the multicultural and multilingual aspirations of Hispanic groups.

Apparently, the Turks believe that as their democracy develops it will encompass all minorities and diminish ethnic demands for separation. Developments in the Balkans, Iraq and Spain have not substantiated that belief.

European Union

As a member of the European Customs Union, Turkey has common tariffs in trade with EU nations. Petitioning the European Union for complete admission has faltered. Now, observers note that due to the contrast between Turkey’s growth and strength and a weakening Europe, it might no longer be favorable to Turkey to become a EU member.

Parliamentarian Bilal Macit agreed: “It is not important.”

Dr. Burak Erdenir, Deputy Undersecretary at Ministry for EU affairs, disagreed.
Three reasons for his intransigence:

(1) As a member of the Customs Union, Turkey is part of the decision taking but not part of the decision making.
(2) The European Union has been incorrect in its behavior towards Turkey and that behavior must be corrected.
(3) The EU process is supported by all political Parties

Dr. Erdenir spoke frankly. “EU refusal to grant admission to Turkey is entirely due to prejudice. To achieve candidate status, 35 articles must be approved. Seventeen are constantly blocked. Although Bulgaria and Romania have been given admission, Turkey is refused. The EU believes Turkey is too big, too poor, and too Muslim. The Austrians in particular have a mindset that that equates today’s Turkey with that of the Ottoman Empire 18th century attack on Vienna.

“However, things have changed. Turkey has the sixth largest economy in Europe, 159 universities, and the most stable economy. The EU has lost credibility and behaves dishonestly.”

Israel and America

Commentators condemned Israel for its policies towards the Palestinians and criticized the United States for its support of Israel and for its other Middle East policies. From observations, Israel has little support in Turkey, regardless of Party affiliation.

CHP Parliamentarian Faik Tunay included discussions of U.S. foreign policy as one factor in his Party’s quarrelsome manner. Despite Erdogan’s angry attitude towards Israel, which he supports, he claims the U.S. supports the AKP. His validation – Due to the AKP government, demonstrations against U.S. involvement in Iraq were limited.

MHP Parliamentarian Özcan Yeniceri established Israel and its support by the United States as the prime foreign policy issues. “The American image is deteriorating internationally and includes instability within NATO, in which the US has played a key role. The direction of its fight with Radical Islam and Al Qaeda will soon include all Islam. The U.S. shouldn’t be a military empire, but should base policies on values. U.S. mentors have become the Evangelists and Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations.

The U.S. interfered in Iraq and now tries to restrict Iran in its developments. Unlike Iran, the U.S. has the nuclear weapon and has used it, signs of hypocrisy and loss of credibility. The same can apply to Israel. If the U.S. changed its policy in regard to Israel, the region will change drastically. The effort would be a game changer.”

Two industrialists, who manufacture food containers for export to European nations, posed a simple question: ‘Why can’t Israel be satisfied with its nation to the Green Line? Why is it constantly expanding?”

Economy

Officials from TUSKON, the Turkish Confederation of Businessmen and Industrialists Worldwide, which has offices in major cities worldwide, highlighted Turkey’s economic progress. Since the AKP achieved governance, GDP and exports have tripled, while the inflation rate has fallen from 30 percent to 7.5 percent. Unemployment, which had been 14 percent in 2010, has dropped to 9.5 percent. A GDP of 735 billion dollars places Turkey 17th in the world and 7th in Europe, excluding the Russian federation. An export driven economy has increased exports to 135 billion dollars.

All the statistics are moving in proper directions, and although the inflation rate, interest rate (6%) and unemployment are high by western standards, they are acceptable by Turkish standards. Actually, the real interest rate (interest rate minus inflation) is negative, a deflationary anomaly that was not explained, and could hinder investment. Another major concern is the monotonically increasing negative trade balance, which was 42 billion dollars (2010).

If a fall in the European economy intensifies the negative trade balance, negative real interest rate, and relatively high unemployment rate, Turkey’s growth could come to a screeching halt. The vigorous economy has fragile elements.

Conclusion

Few, if any world leaders, have received as much admiration from the domestic and international public as has Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. His open manner, sincerity and moral challenges contrast with the covert, duplicitous and self subscribing attitudes of most world leaders. If his policies are out of step with most nations, they might prove that in the present global environment an independent course is a route to success.

• Europe’s and America’s economies falter. Turkey continues with rapid growth.
• Nations split apart from nationalism. Turkey enhances national identities.
• Western nations sanction Iran. Turkey increases trade with the Islamic state.
• Military control increases in most nations. Military control is constrained in Turkey.
• China and other fast growing nations pursue statist polices. Turkey eschews statism.

As in most nations, continued governing by the AKP depends upon the continued success of its economic policies. With Europe being the primary source for Turkey’s exports, a forecasted faltering of the European Market could drastically affect Turkey. Or will it? Is it possible that Erdogan’s pragmatism will lead Turkey to realign allegiances and markets and shift them to Iran and Russia, trading finished products for energy supplies? Turkey seems to be in the driver’s seat.

But not entirely. The AKP needs prosperity to advance democracy, which will enhance civil and human rights and prevent the electorate from considering Kemalism as an antidote for Turkey’s problems.

Kemalism will soon be proved as either past history or a spoke in the cycles of history. As the wheel turns, will Kemal Ataturk’s visions and policies return and challenge another Turkish Republic? The verdict is still not rendered.

I know. I lived through it on the Patriot Act. When Congress decided to squelch the truth about the CIA’s advance warnings about 9/11 and the existence of a comprehensive peace option with Iraq, as the CIA’s chief Asset covering Iraq, I became an overnight threat. To protect their cover-up scheme, I got locked in federal prison inside Carswell Air Force Base, while the Justice Department battled to detain me “indefinitely” up to 10 years, without a hearing or guilty plea. Worst yet, they demanded the right to forcibly drug me with Haldol, Ativan and Prozac, in a violent effort to chemically lobotomize the truth about 9/11 and Iraqi Pre-War Intelligence.

Critically, because my legal case was controlled by civilian Courts, my Defense had a forum to fight back. The Judge was an independent arbiter. And that made all the difference. If this law on military detentions had been active, my situation would have been hopeless. The Patriot Act was bad enough. Mercifully, Chief Justice Michael B. Mukasey is a preeminent legal scholar who recognized the greater impact of my case. Even so, he faced a terrible choice —declaring me “incompetent to stand trial,” so my case could be killed—or creating dangerous legal precedents tied to secret charges, secret evidence, secret grand jury testimony and indefinite detention—from the Patriot Act’s arsenal of weapons against truth tellers—that would impact all defendants in the U.S. Courts.

It was a hideous choice—The judicial farce was more ugly because it stamped me a “religious maniac” for believing in God—a ludicrous argument. It lined up beautifully, however, with Congress’ desire to bastardize the “incompetence” of Assets engaged in Pre-War Intelligence. Anything to escape responsibility for their own poor decision making.

To this day, it scorches my heart with rage and betrayal. It was unforgivable on so many levels.

And it had nothing to do with fighting terrorism. This was about fighting truth—and protecting powerful leaders in Washington determined to glorify themselves with phony patriotism and media fireworks in the War on Terrorism—a fantasy if there was one.

Those of us with the facts at our fingertips, who could expose leadership fraud and deceptions, had to be destroyed. I had three strikes against me. First off, I had personal knowledge of the CIA’s advance warnings about 9/11, and how Republican leaders thwarted efforts to preempt the attack. Secondly, I had direct knowledge of Iraq’s contributions to the 9/11 investigation, and how Republican leaders rejected financial documents on early Al Qaeda figures like Ramzi Youssef and Sheikh Abdul Rahmon of Egypt and Sheikh al Zawahiri—who replaced Osama bin Laden as Al Qaeda’s leader. That would have shut down the financial pipeline for terrorism, if Washington cared about results. Finally, my team had successfully negotiated a peace framework with Baghdad that would have achieved all objectives in Iraq without firing a shot.

Oh I was a threat to the Washington elite, no doubt. Without the Patriot Act, the Cover Ups of 9/11 and Iraq would have failed. Given normal due process, I would have shouted truth from the rooftops and exposed them all.

Let’s not mince words. Members of Congress who support laws like the Patriot Act and Military Detentions fear the American people deeply. They hate what America stands for. Above all they fear exposure of their mediocrity as our leaders. They are desperate to hide their leadership failures. And so they commit Treason against us— savaging the liberties enshrined in our Constitution to safeguard their access to power, weakening our ability to challenge them openly, building a society of fear.

They ply us with buzzwords—like “anti-terrorism” and “national security.” But they are the greatest threat facing our nation today. They are traitors among us.

Terrorism is a buzz-word to quiet outrage over this shredding of the Constitution. Most Americans don’t understand that the Patriot Act has expanded the scope of terrorism to cover any free political speech that challenges Institutions of Authority. Acts of violence are not necessary. The possibility that free speech could weaken public trust in leadership qualifies as the New Sedition. Any political speech that provokes the People to think and question authority can be squashed as a threat to political control.

I was no Traitor. My whole life was dedicated to non-violence. My bona fides in anti-terrorism were the best anywhere. I gave advance warning about the 9/11 attack, the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen, and the 1993 World Trade Center attack. When the FBI cracked open my computer, they found proof that my team had run one of the very first investigations of Osama bin Laden in 1998, before the Dar es Salaam/Nairobi bombings. I started negotiations for the Lockerbie Trial with Libya, and preliminary talks on resuming weapons inspections in Iraq.

I was a very real threat, however. I was guilty of possessing inconvenient knowledge powerful enough to persuade voters to throw a lot of deceptive politicians out of Congress.

Military detentions would push America farther into the abyss. First, it eliminates the need for charges against political defendants altogether. And secondly, it transfers decisions about a defendant’s fate away from the oversight of a civilian Judge to a military Sentry and base commander. It’s a complete negation of the Courts.

At a practical level, there are consequences that Americans would never dream possible:

• There’s no requirement for Military Officers to acknowledge that a prison exists inside a military base. Nor can Military officers be compelled to identify individuals who might be detained on the base.

• There’s no guarantee an attorney would be assigned to the accused. Indeed, the Sentry and Commanding Officer would have full authority, individually, to decide whether attorney visits shall be allowed at all. Access to an attorney would be a matter of military discretion, including frequency and duration. The Military Commander or sentry could decide to prohibit an attorney from entering the base altogether, without specifying a reason.

This must be underscored. Civilian Judges provide a fail-safe for defendants under military auspices. Under the proposed law, that protection would be removed. The Commanding Officer of the military base would assume full authority of the Court. The accused inmate would have nowhere to protest any aspect of the detention, or to move towards resolution.

• Since the military alone decides who enters the base, the Sentry would have the power to reject visits by Family or Journalists, if they so choose.

• In straight violation of the 8th Amendment of the Constitution, accused civilians would be denied the right to petition for bail

• Military prisoners might have limited rights to send letters or make phone calls to family or attorneys, at the discretion of the Commanding Officer. The military would have the right to keep a defendant totally incommunicado from the world.

• An accused person would have no automatic rights to recreation outside of the cell. Prisoners could be locked in a 10 X 12 room 24-7, and denied the rights to exercise for one hour in a prison yard. That would be “indefinite,” too.

• Like Bradley Manning, they could be forced to sleep almost naked with the lights on, under 24 hour surveillance, even in the absence of suicide threats.

Don’t bother arguing about it. One of the high points of my legal drama occurred when my fantastic and beloved Uncle Ted Lindauer—a family member— who happened to have 40 years of senior legal experience— jumped into my legal fray in a Herculean effort to restore my freedom.

Three Times Tenacious Uncle Ted Drove 700 Miles (1,000 kms) in Each Direction—from southern Illinois to Fort Worth, Texas. He carried proper identification and proof of his legal standing. He was registered on my visitor’s list, and prison authorities understood that he was functioning as Co-Counsel for my Defense.

On the first and second visits, Ted Lindauer arrived on the weekend during normal visiting hours. Nevertheless, the Sentry swore up and down that there was no prison inside Carswell Air Force Base, and I was not an inmate—

Horrified, Ted Lindauer requested to speak with the Commanding Officer on duty.

Confronted with letters mailed from the prison and Court documents signed by Judge Mukasey, nevertheless, the Sentry and Commanding Officer refused to back down. Both stubbornly denied that I was housed anywhere on their military base.

On the second visit, the Sentry and Commanding Officer had a new excuse. Yeah, there was a prison on Carswell Air Force Base. But there were no visiting hours on weekends. Other prison families stood close by. One after the other, the sentry granted them access to the base to visit their relatives detained at the prison. Yet when Ted Lindauer, a 70 year old man with silver hair, stepped forward, the sentry guard refused.

Ted was furious. He warned the Sentry that my family knows some Generals, too! He insisted on the sanctity of my rights to attorney access, and promised to file a complaint with Judge Mukasey to compel the military to allow this attorney visit to occur.

Ted swore that he would return with U.S. Marshals. And by God, he was coming onto that base.

Thankfully, there was a civilian Judge to back him up. Judge Mukasey raised hell. On the third visit, he did indeed order U.S. Marshals to flank Ted Lindauer at the front gates of Carswell Air Force Base.

Judge Mukasey waited in his Chambers in New York ready to give the order. Only when U.S. Marshals stood before them, ready to forcibly enter the base, did Carswell back down. They stopped pretending there was no prison, that I was not an inmate, and granted my Uncle—a family member and attorney—access to his client.

It’s a cautionary tale. The military is not equipped to handle this type of responsibility. It flies against all of their structure. And it illustrates poignantly why a Civilian Judge is critical to protecting a defendant’s rights when the military has physical jurisdiction.

All of this was occurring at a critical juncture. At that moment, citing the Patriot Act, the Justice Department was arguing that I should be detained “indefinitely” up to 10 years—with no right to a trial or hearing. More horribly still, the Justice Department was demanding the right to forcibly drug me with Haldol—a rhinoceros tranquilizer—until I could be “cured” of knowing the real facts about Iraq and 9/11 and serious leadership failures in the War on Terrorism.

Witness had already told the FBI about my work as an Asset—and my team’s all important advance warnings about 9/11. The Feds understood very precisely what they were hiding—and who would be the losers in Washington, if my story was told.

Because I was denied the right to a hearing, I was blocked from providing that validation to the Court–or the American public—something Republicans on Capitol Hill feared desperately. Without a hearing, the Feds had free rein to savage my reputation with fantastic embellishments, portraying me as a religious maniac. (I freely confess that I have rock solid faith in God. However, the Justice Department played fast and loose with descriptions of my spirituality).

By the end of it, all of my Constitutional rights had been savagely violated— My 1st Amendment rights to freedom of speech and religion; my 4th Amendment protections against illegal searches of my home; my 5th Amendment rights not to be forcibly interrogated by surrogates for the prosecution; my 6th Amendment rights to a speedy trial by a jury of my peers, with the rights to face my accusers and rebut accusations in a public Court of law. The Justice Department even violated my 8th Amendment protections against threats of torture, (forcibly drugging definitely qualifies).

To this day, I cannot believe such abuse could be possible in the United States. I’m a fighter, and I could not stop them. All the Constitutional protections that should have saved me were stripped away. It horrifies me.

No American really understands the preciousness of Liberty until more powerful individuals in the government fight to take away those rights. Then in a blinding flash, you are awed by the magnificence of the Founding Fathers’ vision. What they gave us was extraordinary. It must be protected from tyrants like those in Congress today. They are tyrants who fear and despise us. There is no ambiguity. They are against us.

President Obama must veto this bill or confess his hypocrisy as a champion of liberty. And members of Congress who support military detentions or the Patriot Act must be targeted for defeat in 2012.

They are the greatest threats facing this country today.

They are traitors to freedom. They are Enemies of the Constitution. And they deserve to be branded Enemies of the State.

When these bills move through the Congress, they are so enormous and yet so routine that almost all attention is drawn to one or more peculiarly putrid or pretentiously benevolent little attachments. Either the bill simply must be passed because it contains hurricane relief or veterans aid or unemployment insurance or because it finally allows GLBT Americans to join in our crusades of mass murder. Or, alternatively, the bill desperately needs amending because it sanctions torture or lawless imprisonment or expands an especially hated war or an especially transparent investment in unwanted weaponry manufactured by some campaign donor. But the underlying insanity of the bill itself never makes it into the corporate conversation.

In the case of this latest National Defense Authorization Act, there has been a toothless rhetorical amendment passed asking the president to end his warmaking in Afghanistan in something less than three years if it’s not too much trouble. But that positive measure has been absolutely overwhelmed in what little discussion of the bill exists by a section of the bill giving presidents and the military the power to lock you away without any of the process guaranteed you by the U.S. Constitution. Now, President Obama may veto the bill because he would prefer that section to be even worse than it is. He has expressed concern that it limits, rather than expands, his options. He should veto it because it rips out the heart of our Bill of Rights and grinds it into the dirt.

But a bill like this should not be passed simply because the latest erosion of our civil liberties is removed and the even worse un-codified understanding and practice is left to continue. A bill like this one should be rejected in its entirety. This bill kills human beings in large numbers, endangers us all through encouragement of foreign hostility, contributes to the development and proliferation of genocidal weaponry, creates massive environmental destruction, advances a foreign policy built around an unsurvivable energy policy, funds both sides of an unending Afghan occupation, funds prisons where we already hold many hundreds of men behind bars without charge or trial, and gives presidents de facto power to ignore our rights for the duration of a global war that has no end. And this bill destroys our economy through unfathomable wasteful spending in the midst of a manufactured deficit crisis and an actual humanitarian crisis at home and abroad.

Military spending is worse for job creation and retention than any other kind of spending or even tax cuts. Jobs is not the silver lining in militarism. There is a choice that confronts us between militarism or jobs, militarism or human services, militarism or a safety net for the ill and the elderly and the impoverished. We’re dumping over a trillion dollars a year into “security” spending in “defense” and other bills combined, well over half of discretionary spending. The deficit “crisis” is not the creation of sick people getting old and multiplying without having had the decency to bribe their way into major government contracts or bailouts from the Federal Reserve. Single-payer health coverage, not cuts to Medicare, is the solution there. The deficit is not purely the result of the Obama tax cuts (sorry, Bush is gone now) or of the bad economy. There is a way to improve the actual economy by spending existing public dollars in different ways.

In 1963, Senator George McGovern and House members F. Bradford Morse and William Fitts Ryan introduced a bill that gained significant support and hearings and would have begun a process of economic conversion from a war economy to a peace economy, retraining and re-employing anyone thrown out of work in the process. Meanwhile, the military was secretly beginning a war in Vietnam, and certain elements were plotting to blow President Kennedy’s brains out of the back of his head. We took a turn for the worse, and economic conversion has never seriously begun. Yet, for decades members of Congress had the decency to at least propose it.

Here’s a bill introduced 20 years ago, in 1991. Do some of the names on the bill look familiar? Waters, Pelosi, Schumer, Slaughter, McDermott, Markey, Panetta (yes, Panetta), Lewis, Pallone, Towns, Berman, Payne, Waxman, Boxer, Wyden, etc. Here’s a solution backed by these people 20 years ago, more desperately needed now, and not under consideration. That’s not their fault. They are cogs in a money-marinated machine. It’s our fault.

In the absence of an overall conversion-to-sanity-and-sustainability bill, there is a related bill that has been introduced in the current Congress: “The Nuclear Weapons Abolition and Economic and Energy Conversion Act of 2011″ introduced by Eleanor Holmes Norton. This bill is a concise thing of beauty which says:

(a) In General- The United States Government shall–

(1) by the date that is three years after the date of the enactment of this Act, provide leadership to negotiate a multilateral treaty or other international agreement that provides for –

(A) the dismantlement and elimination of all nuclear weapons in every country by not later than 2020; and

(B) strict and effective international control of such dismantlement and elimination;

(2) redirect resources that are being used for nuclear weapons programs to use–

(A) in converting all nuclear weapons industry employees, processes, plants, and programs smoothly to constructive, ecologically beneficial peacetime activities, including strict control of all fissile material and radioactive waste, during the period in which nuclear weapons must be dismantled and eliminated pursuant to the treaty or other international agreement described in paragraph (1); and

(B) in addressing human and infrastructure needs, including development and deployment of sustainable carbon-free and nuclear-free energy sources, health care, housing, education, agriculture, and environmental restoration, including long-term radioactive waste monitoring;

(3) undertake vigorous, good-faith efforts to eliminate war, armed conflict, and all military operations; and

(4) actively promote policies to induce all other countries to join in the commitments described in this subsection to create a more peaceful and secure world.

(b) Effective Date- Subsection (a)(2) shall take effect on the date on which the President certifies to Congress that all countries possessing nuclear weapons have–

(1) eliminated such weapons; or

(2) begun such elimination under established legal requirements comparable to those described in subsection (a).”

If you’re going to begin conversion with one sector, why not start with the worst? The answer does not ultimately lie in backing a particular bill so much as in educating, mobilizing, changing the public discourse, and applying nonviolent pressure. But there are bills that exist or could easily be made to exist that merit our unqualified support.

Either we will move the money from where it destroys to where is sustains life, or our civilization will meet the fate Kennedy met in Dallas.

It takes some chutzpah – or, at least, epic self-delusion – for Israel’s prime minister to be lecturing the Arab world on liberalism and democracy at this moment.

In recent weeks, a spate of anti-democratic measures have won support from Netanyahu’s right wing government, justified by a new security doctrine: see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil of Israel. If the legislative proposals pass, the Israeli courts, Israel’s human rights groups and media, and the international community will be transformed into the proverbial three monkeys.

Israel’s vigilant human rights community has been the chief target of this assault. Yesterday Netanyahu’s Likud faction and the Yisrael Beiteinu party of his far-right foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, proposed a new law that would snuff out much of the human rights community in Israel.

The bill effectively divides non-governmental organisations (NGOs) into two kinds: those defined by the right as pro-Israel and those seen as “political”, or anti-Israel. The favoured ones, such as ambulance services and universities, will continue to be lavishly funded from foreign sources, chiefly wealthy private Jewish donors from the United States and Europe.

The “political” ones – meaning those that criticise government policies, especially relating to the occupation – will be banned from receiving funds from foreign governments, their main source of income. Donations from private sources, whether Israeli or foreign, will be subject to a crippling 45 per cent tax.

The grounds for being defined as a “political” NGO are suitably vague: denying Israel’s right to exist or its Jewish and democratic character; inciting racism; supporting violence against Israel; supporting politicians or soldiers being put on trial in international courts; or backing boycotts of the state.

One human rights group warned that all groups assisting the UN’s 2009 report by Judge Richard Goldstone into war crimes committed during Israel’s attack on Gaza in winter 2008 would be vulnerable to such a law. Other organisations like Breaking the Silence, which publishes the testimonies of Israeli soldiers who have committed or witnessed war crimes, will be silenced themselves. And an Israeli Arab NGO said it feared that its work demanding equality for all Israeli citizens, including the fifth who are Palestinian, and an end to Jewish privilege would count as denying Israel’s Jewish character.

At the same time Netanyahu wants the Israeli media emasculated. Last week his government threw its weight behind a new defamation law that will leave few but millionaires in a position to criticise politicians and officials. Mr Netanyahu observed: “It may be called the Defamation Law, but I call it the ‘publication of truth law’.” The media and human rights groups fear the worst.

This monkey must speak no evil.

Another bill, backed by the justice minister, Yaacov Neeman, is designed to skew the make-up of a panel selecting judges for Israel’s supreme court. Several judicial posts are about to fall vacant, and the government hopes to stuff the court with apppointees who share its ideological world view and will not rescind its anti-democratic legislation, including its latest attack on the human rights community. Neeman’s favoured candidate is a settler who has a history of ruling against human rights organisations.

Senior legislators from Mr Netanyahu’s party are pushing another bill that would make it nigh impossible for human rights organisations to petition the supreme court against government actions.

The judicial monkey should see no evil.

At one level, these and a host of other measures – including increasing government intimidation of the Israeli media and academia, a crackdown on whistleblowers and the recently passed boycott law, which exposes critics of the settlements to expensive court actions for damages – are designed to strengthen the occupation by disarming its critics inside Israel.

But there is another, even more valued goal: making sure that in future the plentiful horror stories from the Palestinian territories – monitored by human rights organisations, reported by the media and heard in the courts – never reach the ears of the international community.

The third monkey is supposed to hear no evil.

The crackdown is justified in the Israeli right’s view on the grounds that criticism of the occupation represents not domestic concerns but unwelcome foreign interference in Israel’s affairs. The promotion of human rights – whether in Israel, the occupied territories or the Arab world – is considered by Netanyahu and his allies as inherently un-Israeli and anti-Israeli.

The hypocrisy is hard to stomach. Israel has long claimed special dispensation to interfere in the affairs of both the EU and the United States. Jewish Agency staff proselytise among European and American Jews to persuade them to emigrate to Israel. Uniquely, Israel’s security agencies are given free rein at airports around the world to harass and invade the privacy of non-Jews flying to Tel Aviv. And Israel’s political proxies abroad – sophisticated lobby groups like AIPAC in the US – act as foreign agents while not registering as such.

Of course, Israel’s qualms against foreign meddling are selective. No restrictions are planned for right wing Jews from abroad, such as US casino magnate Irving Moskowitz, who have pumped enormous sums into propping up illegal Jewish settlements built on Palestinian land.

There is a faulty logic too to Israel’s argument. As human rights activists point out, the areas where they do most of their work are located not in Israel but in the Palestinian territories, which Israel is occupying in violation of international law.

Privately, European embassies have been trying to drive home this point. The EU gives Israel preferential trading status, worth billions of dollars annually to the Israeli economy, on condition that it respects human rights in the occupied territories. Europe argues it is, therefore, entitled to fund the monitoring of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. More’s the pity that Europe fails to act on the information it receives.

Given the right’s strengthening hand, it can be expected to devise ever more creative ways to silence the human rights community and Israeli media and emasculate the courts as way to end the bad press.

Israelis are obssessed with their country’s image abroad and what they regard as a “delegitimisation” campaign that threatens not only the occupation’s continuation but also Israel’s long-term survival as an ethnic state. The leadership has been incensed by regular surveys of global opinion showing Israel ranked among the most unpopular countries in the world.

The Palestinians’ recent decision to turn to the international community for recognition of statehood has only amplified such grievances.

Israel has no intention of altering its policies, or of pursuing peace. Rather, Netanyahu’s government has been oscillating between a desperate desire to pass yet more anti-democratic legislation to stifle criticism and a modicum of restraint motivated by fear of the international backlash.

A cabinet debate last month on legislation against human rights groups focused barely at all on the proposal’s merits. Instead the head of the National Security Council, Yaakov Amidror, was called before ministers to explain whether Israel stood to lose more from passing such bills or from allowing human rights groups to carry on monitoring the occupation.

Deluded as it may seem, Netanyahu’s ultimate goal is to turn the clock back 40 years, to a “golden age” when foreign correspondents and western governments could refer, without blushing, to the occupation of the Palestinians as “benign”.

Donald Neff, Jerusalem correspondent for Time magazine in the 1970s, admitted years later that his and his colleagues’ performance was so feeble at the time in large part because there was little critical information available on the occupation. When he witnessed first-hand what was taking place, his editors in the US refused to believe him and he was eventually moved on.

Now, however, the genie is out the bottle. The international community understands full well – thanks to human rights activists – both that the occupation is brutal and that Israel has been peace-making in bad faith.

If Israel continues on its current course, another myth long accepted by western countries – that Israel is “the only democracy in the Middle East” – may finally be shattered.

• A version of this story was first published in the National, Abu Dhabi

On November 14th, two water wells were demolished in Baqa’a, east of Tammun, robbing hundreds of families of the ability to irrigate their land. On October 13, farmers received demolition orders on several water wells in Kufr al-Deek, a village in the town of Salfit near Nablus. In September, Israeli military forces demolished 6 water wells belonging to Palestinian Bedouin communities in the Jordan Valley, and have threatened to demolish six more. In all these cases, the unilateral IOF actions are explicitly illegal because these wells were built with full permission from the Palestinian Authority, in areas of the Valley supposedly under exclusive Palestinian civil and military control.

The injustice is especially pronounced in the Jordan Valley. On the 8th of September, 50 military jeeps, trucks and bulldozers sealed off Al Nasarayah as a closed military zone, and proceeded to illegally destroy 3 water wells and confiscate the attached water systems, the pumps of which cost $40,000 each to install. Five days later, the IOF returned to Al Nasarayah to demolish 2 more wells, stopping along the way to destroy another well east of Tamoun. The next day, IOF soldiers entered the village of Al- Fa’ara, near Nablus, to photograph and record the GPS coordinates of 6 more wells intended for demolition.

The IOF’s actions are illegal under Israeli, Palestinian and international law because these 6 water wells had permits from the Palestinian Authority, and operated in the 5% of the Jordan Valley designated after the 1994 Oslo Accords Area A, under full Palestinian civil and military control. The motives behind Israel’s actions on the ground, however, emerge into the light of day when seen in the context of other recent Israeli policy resolutions — a plan announced in September to uproot and transfer some 27,000 Bedouin out of Israel-controlled Area C in the West Bank (most Area C Bedouin live in the Jordan Valley), and a decision by the Settlement Division in early July to increase by 130% the land given to settlers for farming in the Jordan Valley, and to increase from 42 to 51 cubic meters per year the amount of water given to settlers to irrigate such farmland.

What do the destruction of Palestinian Bedouin water wells in the Jordan Valley, the transfer of Palestinian Bedouin citizens out of the Jordan Valley, and the expansion of land and water given to settlers in the Jordan Valley, all have in common? Together, they highlight the oppression and ethnic cleansing of the Jordan Valley that has typified Israeli policy since the Valley became occupied territory in 1967.

A focal point of this oppression — and a crucial locus of the Palestinian Bedouin struggle to resist the occupation and remain in their homeland — is the issue of water. For as Israel has seized absolute control over allocation and distribution of the resources of the 3 water aquifers under the West Bank for use on both sides of the Green Line, the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza, and especially the Bedouin population of the Jordan Valley, have seen the steady drying-up of the once-flowing springs around which they have built their villages, have found themselves unable to dig sufficient wells of their own because of crippling Israeli regulations, and have watched themselves become dependent on the exorbitant prices of their oppressor for access to so basic and indispensable a human right.

Far more than in the rest of the West Bank, the struggle over water for the Jordan Valley Bedouin is a struggle between life and death. The ‘draining away’ of Palestinian water rights in the Jordan Valley — to borrow the title of a 2010 report by Ma’an Development Center — has a long and tumultuous history. When the West Bank became occupied territory in 1967, the Israeli army established a military order to the effect that all West Bank water came under control of the state, and Israel’s national water carrier, Mekorot, seized water aquifers and developed wells throughout the West Bank to serve Israel and its newly expanding settlements. Between 1967 and the 1994 Oslo Accords, the Palestinian Bedouin in the Jordan Valley saw first their land, and then their water, disappear behind the heavily-guarded gates of settlements, where settlers were granted ample supplies of the latter in order to make the former bloom.

The situation grew increasingly dire until a brief ray of hope in 1995, when Article 40 of the Oslo II agreements set an interim agreement, designed to be revised within five years (but still in effect to this day), whereby approximately one quarter of West Bank water resources would come under Palestinian Authority control, and a Joint Water Committee would be established, in the words of the 2009 World Bank report ‘Assessment of Restrictions on Palestinian Water Development: West Bank and Gaza’, “to oversee management of the aquifers, with decisions to be based on consensus between the two parties.”

However, Oslo brought with it new institutionalized systems of oppression. Since Oslo 1 in 1993 consigned 95% of the Jordan Valley to Area C status (under full Israeli and military control), neither the Area C Bedouin communities themselves, nor the Palestinian Authority, nor the constant swarm of international NGOs, can commence with unregulated construction of their own initiative, because, in the words of Jordan Valley Solidarity, a grassroots movement, “across Area C, access to basic services such as water is restricted through the debilitating permit system which is regulated by the Israeli Civil Administration. Obtaining a permit for any form of construction –even for water- is notoriously difficult, nay impossible. This prevents Palestinians from building new infrastructure, or from making improvements to existing facilities.”

Atop this blanket layer of oppression, which effectively and intentionally squelches all trace of community autonomy, the Palestinian Bedouin in the 95% of the Jordan Valley which is Area C are deprived of the ability to improve their access to water resources through three interlocking buereacratic systems of control — the Joint Water Committee, where a group of Israeli and Palestinian decision-makers permits or denies water access or rehabilitation projects proposed by the Palestinian Water Authority (for Areas A, B and C); the Israeli Civil Administration, which, if an Area C project is permitted by the Joint Water Committee, pulls that project through a thicket of bureaucratic, technical limitations and scrutinies, effectively crippling its implementation if not grinding it to a halt completely; and, last but not least, the Israeli army, which ceaselessly continues, as it sees fit and irregardless of law, to demolish water wells, tankers, and infrastructure on the ground in Bedouin communities across Areas A, B and C, even if the proper permits are possessed.

Thus, what was promised under Oslo II to be consensus decision-making regarding water resources is in reality institutionalized unilateral control of the oppressor over the oppressed, and due to this matrix of Israeli control, it becomes nearly impossible for the Palestinian Authority, as well as most NGOs, to commit themselves to meaningful, sustainable infrastructural development in Area C of the West Bank.

At the level of the Joint Water Committee, details Ma’an’s ‘Draining Away’, “the fact that decisions are arrived at through consensus effectively means that Israel can veto Palestinian projects… [also], the PWA is not consulted regarding extractions from the aquifer for Israeli use (settlers or otherwise), which is not in accordance with the governance rules under Article 40. Nor does the Palestinian Authority have the right to access data on Israeli use of water resources, whereas Israel reserves the right for continual access to water resource data in the West Bank… around 150 water and sanitation projects are still pending JWC approval for “technical and security reasons”, while only one new Palestinian well project for the Western aquifer has been approved since 1993. In contrast, Israel is able to construct pipelines to its illegal settlements without going through the mechanism of the JWC. Thus Israel effectively has full control of water resources in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.”

The World Bank’s 2009 report confirms the non-consensual reality of the Joint Water Committee’s supposed ‘consensus decision-making’ — “[the] JWC has not fulfilled its role of providing a supportive governance framework for joint resource management and investment… politics and policy issues have limited the number of project approvals…fundamental asymmetries — of power, of capacity, of information — put into question the role of JWC as a “joint” institution…Israel takes unilateral water-related actions outside the JWC… only one third (by value) of projects presented to the JWC 2001-8 have been implemented… (1) the process is in general slow; (2) the rate of rejection of PA projects is high; (3) the PWA has almost never sought to reject Israeli projects (only one has not been approved); and (4) well drilling projects and — until very recently -wastewater projects have had very low rates of approval… in order to solicit approvals on vital emergency water needs, the PA is forced into positions that compromise its basic policy principles. Such an asymmetrical power balance (one party, Israel, has virtually all the power and is not driven by emergencies), together with the observed track record of the JWC, have contributed to a loss of trust and confidence and to very poor outcomes (for Palestinians) that undermine the rationale for the committee as a de facto “joint” approach to water sector management.”

Deeb Abdelghafar, Director of Water Resources for the Palestinian Water Authority, relates how “we submitted our application two years ago to build two new production wells in the northern part of the Jordan Valley, [to supply] water for domestic and agricultural purposes, and we know that they have reviewed it, but up to now we have not gotten any response, and we are not optimistic… we have more than 80 agricultural wells that need to be rehabilitated in Jordan Valley, and we have had these wells in the JWC for more than 4 years, but unfortunately we could not get final approval from Joint Water Committee.”

Even if the Joint Water Committee approves a project, its effective implementation is crippled by the red tape of the Israeli Civil Administration. Abdelghafar continues: “the most difficult step in the process for us is the Civil Administration because there are more than 14 departments, and each department must approve on the project. So we can never get a project through the civil administration, because some departments approve and some do not.” Ayman Rabi, Assistant Director of the Palestinian Hydrology Group for Water and Environmental Resources Development, an NGO working to improve access to water and sanitation services in the Occupied Palestinian territories. echoes Abdelghafar’s frustrations that “there is a big problem now in implementing anything in Area C, and that is one of the major hindrances right now to our work in that area….we have to ask [for a] permit and this generally we do through Palestinian Authority, and then they are applying through the Joint Water Committee… [but] even if the Joint Water Committee approves any intervention or project, the Israeli Civil Administration requests more documentation procedures, the process is longer, they put more conditions for implementation in Area C, so you might end up not implementing any activity because of this long and complicated procedure.” The World Bank report quotes an anonymous donor who reports the same difficulties- “first thing we request is a letter from PWA approving the project. Then we go to the JWC. But then we have to go to the Civil Administration – and there delays of 2-3 years are normal. In fact, we have no positive outcomes for Area C.”

Since nearly every proposal for the construction of water infrastructure in Area C is shut down by the twin juggernauts of the Joint Water Committee and the Israeli Civil Administration, NGOs must focus their efforts, to quote Abdelghafar, on “civil emergency intervention — by delivering small water tankers, by supplying them with water tanks, by constructing rainwater cisterns — it’s emergency humanitarian relief.” While important, this small-scale aid is carried out in lieu of large-scale, long-term projects that would strike at the root of the problem, rather than merely seeking to alleviate its effects. Says the World Bank report, “in the light of the difficulty of implementing major projects, the reasonable response has been short term emergency projects, often small projects with NGOs, and these smaller projects have become a very large part of water sector development… however, the multiplicity of small donors and multiple projects are more difficult to fit within a planning framework… NGOs have a comparative advantage in a grass roots field presence and a certain demand-driven character…[they are] nimble… but are small scale and short term” (p.63).

In the village of Hamsa, near the Hamra checkpoint in the Jordan Valley, Abu Riyad, who has been living in Hamsa with his family for thirty years, must now travel long distances to get water for drinking and irrigation, after two huge water wells constructed for nearby settlements have dried up the springs upon which for generations the community of Hamsa has relied. Says Ma’an’s report ‘Draining Away’: “unconnected to the water network, Abu Riyad must now travel to Ein Shibleh for his water. Nor does the family know the quality of the water and if it has been treated. While he is fortunate not to have to pay for this supply, it costs 200 shekels to transport 10 cubic metres of water. As the water covers all of the family’s needs, from drinking, washing and drinking water for the animals, Abu Riyad must transport this amount every four days. With the price of fuel rising, this means that water represents an increasing financial drain for the family…the community receives little support. While several tanks and water coupons have been donated from local and international NGOs, this is only ever for limited amounts of time, and thus provides only temporary relief.”

Indeed, Abu Riyad is fortunate to receive water for free. Ayman Rabi of the Palestinian Hydrology Group laments that, regarding many of his organization’s aid initiatives, “[the recipients of water] are asked to contribute, unfortunately. Although we do not like this, it is something that has been agreed on by the [Palestinian] Water Authority. They have been asked to contribute by 10 shekels, though we are not happy with this arrangement, for each cubic meter. and then we refill them whenever they ask us to.”

Many organizations, instead of delivering water, deliver water tanks to imperiled communities, so that Bedouin may transport water from filling points. However, by delivering water tanks, instead of connecting communities to water networks, these NGOs, though well-intentioned, often compound the problem by forcing the Bedouin to drive long distances, through a myriad of checkpoints, to filling points in Areas A or B, in order to maintain a constant water supply. The World Bank report decries that “occupation checkpoints and curfews severely limit tanker access to communities… there are 36 fixed checkpoints across the West Bank, including the gates of the Separation Barrier, that seriously affect access of water tankers and maintenance teams to communities…. Given the risks faced by drivers for their physical safety coupled with the longer routes, the price of water through tankers has increased exponentially”.

The case of Abu Riyad illustrates how expensive this practice can become for Bedouin faced with no alternative. According to Fathy Khdirat of Jordan Valley Solidarity, “to use water tankers in this way costs the Bedouin 30 shekels per cubic meter of water, while their neighbors in Areas A or B pay on average between ½ and 3 shekels per cubic meter of water.” The perpetuation of this inequality works in the occupation’s favor, by encouraging Bedouin to move out of Area C into Areas A or B.

In addition, mobilizing short-term emergency relief is much more expensive for the NGOs than would be a project to install permanent pipelines linking the Bedouin to water sources. Fathy Khdirat estimates that a recent $700,000 initiative to accomplish the former could have achieved the latter with 10% of the budget. Between the Joint Water Committee, the Israeli Civil Administration and the IOF, however, the possibility of installing permanent water infrastructure for the Bedouin is practically foreclosed from the beginning, so that aid initiatives are forced to work within the restricting, oppressive parameters of Israeli law. Says the World Bank report, “at best, the PA role is reduced to improving water and sanitation services to Palestinian communities within the constraints laid down…stakeholders recognize the inefficiency and high costs of such fragmented and contingency development but see no alternative.”

The bueraucratic matrix of corruption and control, in which both Israeli and Palestinian political and civil organizations are enmeshed, causes on-the-ground human rights abuses in clear violation of The Right To Water, enshrined in General Comment no. 15 of articles 11 and 12 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights by the United Nations Economic and Social Council in Geneva, in November 2002. The document stipulates that “the right to water contains both freedoms and entitlements. The freedoms include the right to maintain access to existing water supplies necessary for the right to water, and the right to be free from interference… by contrast, the entitlements include the right to a system of water supply and management that provides equality of opportunity for people to enjoy the right to water.” The covenant goes on to list specific water entitlements — the right of “physical accessibility: water, and adequate water facilities and services, must be within safe physical reach for all sections of the population. Sufficient, safe and acceptable water must be accessible… within, or in the immediate vicinity, of each household, educational institution and workplace…”; the right of “economic accessibility: water, and water facilities and services, must be affordable for all. The direct and indirect costs and charges associated with securing water must be affordable…”; and the right of “non-discrimination: water and water facilities and services must be accessible to all, including the most vulnerable or marginalized sections of the population, in law and in fact, without discrimination”.

Ma’an’s report, ‘Draining Away’, clarifies that, in regards to the Right to Water enshrined in this document, that “while this right does not entitle people to unlimited use of free water or to household connection, it does mean that water and sanitation services should be affordable, that water and sanitation facilities should be in the immediate vicinity of the household, and that water should be used in a sustainable manner. This right exists irrespective of an individual’s ethnicity, gender, age, religious or political beliefs… it also stipulates that individuals and communities can participate in, and influence, decision making relating to water and sanitation services on national and local levels.”

Here are some quick facts taken from ‘Draining Away’, which should be measured against the UN-enshrined Right to Water-

In October 2009 Amnesty International noted that “180,000-200,000 Palestinians living in rural communities have no access to running water, and even in towns and villages which are connected to the water network, the taps often run dry.”

According to the WASH monitoring project, the cost of private tankered water in 290 communities in the West Bank has increased between 100-200% for one cubic meter since the start of the intifada.

40% of Palestinians in the Jordan Valley consume less water than the minimum global standard set by the World Health Organization, which is set at 100 liters cubed per day.

56,000 Palestinians in the Jordan Valley consume an average of 37 Million Cubic Meters (MCM) of water per year, as compared to an average of 41 MCM for only 9,400 settlers.

Palestinians are charged more than their counterparts in Israel for water: Mekorot charges Israelis NIS 1.8 per cubic metre, compared to an average of NIS 2.5 per cubic metre for Palestinians.

There is near-universal consensus that there exists in the Jordan Valley a systematic policy of oppression and ethnic cleansing, touching upon not only water but all aspects of life for the 15,000 Bedouin who are unconnected to any water network in the 95% of the Valley designated Area C. Says Deeb Abdelghafar of the Palestinian Water Authority, “the Jordan Valley is a unique area from the Israeli point of view. They are trying to [establish] control over this area, and they are trying to prevent any permanent water infrastructure in order to prevent the people to be there… they don’t want to support the existence of these people, they want to immigrate the people outside of this area.”

Advocates like Fathy Khdirat of Jordan Valley Solidarity, a grassroots movement that works to build infrastructure for the Bedouin of the Valley, are determined to encourage those under occupation to resist the oppression, and remain in their native land. “I spent all my life under the Occupation,” insists Fathy, “and I want to see a better future for my children. I am from there, and I will not shut up.”

As they examine the regional chessboard and the formidable array of forces aligned against them, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the military dictatorship of the mullahtariat in Tehran must face, simultaneously, superpower Washington, bomb-happy North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) members, nuclear power Israel, all Sunni Arab absolute monarchies, and even Sunni-majority, secular Turkey.

Meanwhile, on their side, the Islamic Republic can only count on Moscow. Not as bad a hand as it may seem.

Syria is Iran’s undisputed key ally in the Arab world — while Russia, alongside China, are the key geopolitical allies. China, for the moment, is making it clear that any solution for Syria must be negotiated.

Russia’s one and only naval base in the Mediterranean is at the Syrian port of Tartus. Not by accident, Russia has installed its S-300 air defense system — one of the best all-altitude surface-to-air missile systems in the world, comparable to the American Patriot — in Tartus. The update to the even more sophisticated S-400 system is imminent.

From Moscow’s — as well as Tehran’s — perspective, regime change in Damascus is a no-no. It will mean virtual expulsion of the Russian and Iranian navies from the Mediterranean.

Yet key lateral moves by the West are already on. Diplomats in Brussels confirmed to Asia Times Online that the former Libyan “rebels” — now trying to come up with a credible government — have already given the go-ahead for NATO to build a sprawling military base in Cyrenaica.

NATO has no final say in such matters. This is decided by the boss — the Pentagon — interested in emboldening Africom in coordination with NATO. As many as 20,000 boots are expected to be deployed on the ground in Libya — at least 12,000 of them Europeans. They will be responsible for Libya’s “internal security”, but also be on alert for possible, further military campaigns targeted at — who else — Syria and Iran.

Bring those Shi’ites down

As much as the latest “coalition of the willing” — which by the way repeats the Libya model — is against the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, it also represents a Christian/Sunni war against Shi’ites, be they the Alawite minority in Syria or the Shi’ite majorities in Iran, Iraq and Lebanon.

This is part and parcel of the “strategic opportunity” identified by the powerful Israel lobby in Washington; if we strike against the Damascus-Tehran link, we deal a mortal blow to Hezbollah in Lebanon. That, ideologues believe, can now be sold to world public opinion under the cover of the former Arab Spring — now “Arab Winter” after a metamorphosis, before “Arab Summer”, into the Arab counter-revolution).

As Tehran sees it, what’s really going on regarding Syria is a “humanitarian” cover for a complex anti-Shi’ite and anti-Iran operation.

The road map is already clear. A fractious, unrepresentative Syrian National Council — Libya-style — is already in place. Same for a heavily armed Sunni “insurgency” crisscrossing the borders in Lebanon and Turkey. Sanctions are already essentially hurting the Syrian middle class. A relentless, international campaign of vilification of the Assad regime has been deployed. And psy ops abound, with the aim of seducing sections of the Syrian army to defect (it’s not working).

A report¹ by a Qatar-based researcher for the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) even comes close to admitting that the self-described “Free Syria Army” is basically a bunch of hardcore Islamists, plus a few genuine army defectors, but mostly radicalized Muslim Brotherhood bought, paid for and weaponized by the US, Israel, the Gulf monarchies and Turkey. There’s nothing “pro-democracy” about this lot – as incessantly sold by Western corporate and Saudi-owned media.

As for the National Council, based in Washington and London and sprinkled with the usual dodgy exiles, its program calls for governing Syria alongside the same military that has been — a la the Egyptian military junta — shooting civilian protesters. Makes one think that the only sensible solution would be for the people in Syria to topple the police state Assad regime, while being vehemently against the dodgy Syrian National Council.

This year’s model (dictator)

Then there’s the usually misguided and misinformed West, which believes that the Arab League, now no more than a puppet of US foreign policy, is siding with the democratic aspirations of the Syrian people. Angry Arab blogger As’ad Abu Khalil is correct when he says that after the fall of president Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, “the League is now an extension of the Gulf Cooperation Council [GCC]“.

The GCC is in fact the Gulf Counter-revolution Club. Their favorite sport is to privilege “model” dictators — starting with themselves, but also including Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen and the little kings of Jordan and Morocco, who will be annexed to the GCC because they wish they were in the Persian Gulf (geography dictates they aren’t). On the other hand, the GCC abhors “bad” dictators — the snuffed-out Muammar Gaddafi and Assad, who not by accident are from secular republics.

The House of Saud, Jordan and rising Qatar are more than comfortable doing the US’s and Israel’s bidding. The House of Saud — the GCC’s top dog — invaded Bahrain with 1,500 troops to smash pro-democracy protests very much like the ones in Egypt and Syria. The House of Saud helped the ruling, Sunni al-Khalifa dynasty in 70% Shi’ite Bahrain to conduct widespread torture; Bahrainis confirm that everyone tortured was forced to confess direct links with “evil” Tehran.

In Egypt, the House of Saud supported Mubarak even after he was deposed. Now it supports — with over US$4 billion so far — a military junta that basically wants to keep power, unchecked, over a “democratic” facade.

The House of Saud couldn’t possibly coexist with a successful, democratic Egypt. Anyone believing the House of Saud’s claim to defend human rights and democracy in the Middle East should check into an asylum.

The Arab League — also a House of Saud extension — gave a green card to NATO to bomb a member state. It suspended Syria on November 12 — as it had done with Libya on February 22 — because, unlike in Libya, US and European designs in the United Nations Security Council were duly vetoed by Russia and China.

Welcome to a “new” Arab League where if you don’t prostrate in front of the GCC altar, you’re condemned to regime change.

Worshipping the GCC can’t compare to worshipping the Pentagon and NATO. Jordan and Morocco are members of NATO’s Mediterranean dialogue, and Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are members of NATO’s Istanbul Cooperation Initiative. In addition, Jordan and the UAE are the only Arabic Troop Contributing Nations for NATO in Afghanistan.

Ivo Daalder, the Obama administration’s ambassador to NATO, has already ordered Libya to enter the Mediterranean Dialogue, alongside Morocco, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria, Mauritania and Israel. And early this month he told the Atlantic Council what’s needed for an attack on Syria; an “urgent necessity” (such as giving the impression Assad is going to raze Homs to the ground); “regional support” (that will come in a flash from the GCC/Arab League); and a UN mandate (it won’t happen, as Russia and China had made it clear).

So one may expect exactly that from the “coalition of the willing”; some black ops blamed on the Assad regime; immediate support from GCC/Arab League; and probably unilateral action, because via the UN is a no-no.

The Greater Middle East dream

No wonder some sound minds in Damascus, watching the tea leaves, decided to take some action. Damascus did send secret couriers to sound out Washington’s mood. The price to be left alone; to cut all ties with Tehran, for good. The Assad regime was left wondering what would they get in return.

The Alawites, roughly 12% of the population and members of the ruling elite, won’t desert the Assad regime. Christians and Druze expect only the worst from a possible, hardcore, Muslim Brotherhood-dominated new order. Same for a crucial neighbor, the Nuri al-Maliki government in Baghdad.

Russia knows that if the current Libyan model is reproduced in Syria — and with Lebanon already under a de facto NATO blockade — the Mediterranean will indeed become that dream, a NATO lake, which is code for total US control.

Moscow also sees that in the US-conceived Greater Middle East — and talk about “great”, spanning from Mauritania to Kazakhstan — the only countries that are not linked with NATO through myriad “partnerships” are, apart from Syria: Lebanon, Eritrea, Sudan and Iran.

As for the Pentagon, the name of the game is “repositioning”. As in if you leave Iraq you go somewhere else in the “arc of instability”, preferably the Gulf. There are 40,000 US troops already in the Gulf — 23,000 of them in Kuwait. A secret army for the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency is being trained by former Blackwater, “repositioned” as Xe, in the UAE. A NATO of the Gulf is being born. NATOGCC, anyone?

When the US neo-conservatives ruled the universe — that was only a few years ago — the motto was “Real men go to Tehran”. An update is in order. Call it “Real men go to Tehran via Damascus only if they have the balls to stare down Moscow”.

1. See “Revolutionary road: Among the Syrian opposition.”

Andiko, Executive Director of the Indonesian community rights NGO, HuMa said: “Forced evictions at gun point and the destruction of the homes of men, women and children without warning or a court order constitute serious abuses of human rights and are contrary to police norms. The company must now make reparations but individual perpetrators should also be investigated and punished in accordance with the law.”

The operations occurred in the 20,000 hectare oil palm concession of PT Asiatic Persada, a 51%-owned subsidiary of the Wilmar Group. Singapore-based Wilmar is represented on the Executive Board of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) and as well as holding over 600,000 ha. of plantations in Malaysia and Indonesia, has expansion plans in other continents, is the world’s largest palm oil trader and has processing facilities in Sumatra and Europe.

Abetnego Tarigan, Executive Director of the Indonesian NGO, SawitWatch, which is also a board member of the RSPO, stated, “Frankly we are very disappointed. We expect leading members of the RSPO to scrupulously adhere to the agreed standard, which includes respecting peoples’ customary rights and resolving disputes. RSPO member companies should pro-actively reach out to communities and not resort to the heavy-handed tactics of past eras.”

As detailed in the report, underlying the present problems is a long-standing land conflict with the local communities whose lands were taken over by the oil palm plantation without recognising their rights, without compensation and without their consent. Wilmar, which took over the plantation in 2006, has declined to recognise the communities’ land claims or offer them smallholdings within its concession instead offering them shares in a 50/50 1000 ha joint venture further west. Some community members, who did join this scheme, have since repudiated it claiming it has brought them few benefits and further conflicts.

Marcus Colchester, who led the field team that investigated the situation and who is Director of the international human rights group, Forest Peoples Programme, noted that the NGOs have now filed a third complaint about Wilmar with the International Finance Corporation’s Compliance Advisory Ombudsman (CAO). The previous complaints had led to the suspension of all World Bank funding to the palm oil sector worldwide. Currently, the CAO still has an ongoing process to mediate the disputes between Wilmar subsidiaries and the communities. However, in Jambi, these efforts broke down in June this year.

Colchester said: “The good news is that Wilmar has apparently now agreed to the CAO returning to mediate in resolving this land conflict. Let’s hope this time both the CAO and the company invest enough to resolve these disputes in line with the IFC Performance Standards, the RSPO standard and international human rights norms. But we can’t help asking, why is it taking so long? The delays in achieving redress and justice for local communities are unacceptable.”

Europeans invaded the Americans and stole the lands and wealth held by native peoples for thousands of years. They enslaved black Africans who they held as slaves and even after slavery ended they kept them as second-class citizens.

Black people developed various forms of struggle including civil disobedience, sit-ins, pickets, mass rallies, propaganda, and voting for equality where possible. Another form of struggle was the Black Panther Party’s armed self-defence when attacked by Ku Klux Klan and the ruling class’ police. Another form was the Gravey Movement that called for separation from the United States, demanding territory in the south. Very much like the Tamils after the 1976 Vattukottai resolution.

In the United States millions of blacks and whites fought this racist discrimination for over a century and eventually won most basic rights but not before millions were arrested, imprisoned for long times, and many murdered. Many thousands of black people were lynched, burned alive, mutilated, tortured to death until the 1980s.

Fidel Castro: “Those who are exploited are our compatriots all over the world; and the exploiters all over the world are out enemies…Our country is really the whole world, and all the revolutionaries of the world are our brothers.” “To be internationalist is to settle our debt with humanity.”

Che Guevara from Socialism and Man: “The revolutionary is the ideological motor force of the revolution. If he forgets his proletarian internationalism, the revolution, which he heads will cease to be an inspiring force and he will sink into a comfortable lethargy, which imperialism, our irreconcilable enemy, will utilize well. Proletarian internationalism is a duty, but it is also a revolutionary necessity. So we educate our people.”

I believe that these principles apply to the Tamils of Sri Lanka. I believe Che would agree with your struggle for equality and when not possible to achieve within the Sri Lankan chauvinist context, he would understand your fight for your own nationhood.

I think this is also what Lenin meant in his 1916 thesis, “The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination”:

“Victorious socialism must necessarily establish a full democracy and, consequently, not only introduce full equality of nations but also realize the right of the oppressed nations to self-determination, that is, the right to free political separation.”

I am hurt and deeply disappointed that the government of Cuba—where I have lived and worked side by side with the people and government for eight years—as well as the socialist-progressive governments of Venezuela, Bolivia and other Latin American governments have not understood that those principles must apply to the Tamil people of Sri Lanka. I got involved in solidarity with your people’s struggle because you have been so brutally treated, and because of these righteous principles expressed by Lenin, Fidel and Che. I have written critically about these governments siding with the Sinhalese governments of Sri Lanka while it denies the Tamil people those basic principles and rights, and commits genocide.

Perhaps Cuba+ have not understood the history of struggle that Tamils have undergone to win full equal rights before taking up arms. For 30 years you fought peacefully but you were met with brutal force, with pogroms/massacres of hundreds and thousands of people—even worse than that used against blacks in the US, and against Palestinians by Israelis. And, unfortunately, it was not only the governments that have done this against Tamils but also misguided Buddhist monks who betray the peaceful, coexistence values of Buddhism.

Your people’s organizations must meet and discuss these realities with the communist and socialist parties and with people’s grass roots and indigenous organizations in Latin America and elsewhere. You must explain to them your history, why you had to take up arms and fight for separation, for an independent nation. They have to hear of your suffering, of your struggles, why Tamil Eelam is a NECESSITY. You must remind them what they say about international solidarity, about what Lenin meant about political separation when the ruling powers will not grant a people their basic democratic and equal rights.

The progressive governments have won majority votes for new constitutions in Bolivia, in Ecuador, in Venezuela that grant equal rights to their indigenous peoples. In Bolivia, for instance, under the new constitution there are four official national languages, three of them are indigenous ones as well as Spanish. The same equalitarian development is happening in several progressive, pro-socialist governments in Latin America. If these people could know you simply want these same rights, they would listen to you and stop backing Sri Lanka. But they have been misguided because when they hear the worst terrorist in the world—the United States of America government—raise a little finger of possible criticism that maybe the Sri Lanka government should investigate itself to find some official scapegoat for violating human rights, Cuba should react against this hypocrisy. But they must know that in this case the Sri Lanka government is a terrible violator of human rights, and not just against the Tamils, but also against Muslims, the indigenous tribes, and it also exploits Sinhalese workers and the poor, and castes.

We must understand that Cuba, and so many governments and peoples, has been victimized by the United States false accusation that it commits “human rights abuse”. Cuba has been blockaded by the US since its victory in 1959. The US tried to overthrow the new revolution in April 1961. It brought the entire world to the brink of a nuclear war in October 1962. The US has sabotaged Cuba, murdered and handicapped thousands of its citizens; it even infiltrated bacteriological diseases in its livestock, its grains and sugar cane.

What has Cuba done to “deserve” this murderous aggression? It has done what Big Capital does not do, what imperialists will not do. It has introduced full and free education and health care. It has assured every citizen food and shelter. No one starves. 80% of its people own their own homes after paying the state simply what it actually costs to build them.

It has organized an excellent system of disaster management in which people and their animals are evacuated before hurricanes hit the island nation. And more often than not no one is killed, and their livestock is saved. That is not what happens in the United States especially in the areas where blacks and poor people live and are struck by natural disasters.

Cuba came to the aid of Angola when attacked by apartheid South Africa. Cuba, alongside with the new Venezuela, comes to the aid of tens of millions of people in scores of land around the world with their medical care, curing even blindness, and educating people to read and write, offering sports and technical assistance. Cuba has more doctors serving the international arena than is offered by all the governments in the United Nations. Cuba does not export war and torture, disease and starvation. It exports “human capital”.

Tamils in Tamil Nadu, Sri Lanka Tamil refugees here and in the Diaspora should not rely on the greatest terrorist in the world to help them. The Yankees offer no help without humiliating costs. We must be aware that since World War 11, the US has invaded/intervened militarily 160 times in 66 countries. We must understand that now with a black-faced puppet president of Big Capital, the imperialists are at war in seven countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, Ethiopia and now Uganda. They kill tens of millions; they torture hundreds of thousands; they starve hundreds of millions.

US’s staunch ally, Zionist Israel commits genocide against the Palestinian people. It offered Mossad intelligence, great amounts of weaponry, killer aircraft and even pilots to Sri Lanka, in order to murder the Tamils. After the end of the war, May 2009, Sri Lanka sent its military chief-of-staff, Donald Perera, to Israel as its ambassador, a reward for Zionist assistance. He told the largest Zionist daily, Yedioth Abornoth: “I consider your country a partner in the war against terror,” thus coupling terrorism with the Palestinians’ struggle for their homeland and the Tamils’ simple right to exist in peace and equality.

Perera spoke proudly of having “a great relationship with your military industries and with Israel Aerospace industries.”

Perera spoke about the murder, on May 31, 2010, of nine Turkish solidarity activists bound for Gaza with survival supplies: “I can understand that Israel had to protect itself.”

Perhaps because of the complexity of geo-politics, the history of standing for sovereignty of the member nations of the Non-Alignment Movement (NAM), the leaders of Cuba and ALBA lands (Bolivarian Alliance of the Peoples of Latin America) cannot support the goal of a separate nation within Sri Lanka. But they could be convinced to chastise the Sri Lankan government for its atrocities against the Tamil people, and the other oppressed people under the chauvinist Sinhalese leadership. They could see within the context of their moral ideology that it is only right that Tamils must have equality and the basic right to exist without fear of murder and takeovers of their homes and lands. Your peoples’ organizations should remind these pro-Palestinian governments that it is only Israel that supports the US blockade against Cuba; that it is the US and Israel that lead the tiny opposition to Palestine’s right to be a member of the United Nations.

Regardless of whether Cuba has achieved socialism—it is a long process after all and there is so much destruction and subversion coming from the Yankee imperialists—the Cuban people and the government are still worthy of our love and support. They have conducted no wars or torture against any people and they have helped many millions. It is now time that they are approached by all your organizations and become convinced to come to the aid of their natural brothers and sisters in Sri Lanka—the oppressed Tamil people.

We have wandered over the deserts and the seas. We have been hungry and thirsty. We have been murdered and tortured. We are of the working class, of the castes; we are many races and nationalities. We share a common vision: freedom and equality; bread and water on the table; a shelter over our heads. We must fight together to live in peace and harmony.

We must unite around the world and struggle for an independent international investigation into war crimes and crimes against humanity against Sri Lanka government leaders.

We must call for a worldwide Boycott of Sri Lanka. Che Guevara would be on our side today!

There was an act of aggression and the national leaders, including Gaddafi, were killed. He was not killed on a battlefield. NATO security services helped abduct the national leader. He was tortured and shot and treated worse than the Nazi did in their time. Libya was destroyed as a sovereign state.

The Belarusian president went on to denounce the role of the UN in tolerating what he described as NATO’s vandalism in Libya:

We can view the situation extremely negatively only. How can we evaluate NATO actions in Libya? As a violation of the mandate of the UN Security Council. I am not exaggerating this mindless and mad Security Council. I am not exaggerating their role and the role of the United Nations Organizations. The latter has evolved into some kind of cover-up. See or yourself: Iraq, Afghanistan, an entire Arabic curve. Why has UN failed to prevent all of it?

President Lukashenko, whose government has long been on the list of US regime change targets, also told reporters that preparations were underway to strengthen the country’s defense, through the creation of new territorial military units drawn from the civilian population.

We have created the territorial units. This is cheaper than having a professional army, and we will be training our people. In a year they will make perfect troops.They are ordinary people who have civil professions and jobs. These troops are deployed only in wartime. In peacetime, they train.

They must protect their own property, in addition to the family and land. These people are very well-trained, among them there are a lot of military people.

The Belarusian government has announced the creation of a new citizen army of up to 120 thousand people. President Lukashenko told reporters in Grodno: “If we ever have to be at war, we are men, we have to protect our homes, families, our land. It is our duty.”

This is the first time since the Second World War that the people of Belarus have experienced a threat to their security and the threat is coming once again from the West.

Belarus is perhaps more qualified than any other country to make allusions to Nazism. The worst atrocities of the Second World War were carried out in Belarus by the German Wehrmacht. In fact, the resistance of the Belarusian people against their Nazi hoards was so heroic, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR voted in favour of a proposal to include the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic as a separate seat in the General Assembly of the United Nations after the Second World War.

The Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic became the showpiece of the USSR, becoming the strongest and most prosperous of all the socialist republics in the Soviet Union.

The country’s leader Alexander Lukashenko, has been described by some as a typical ‘Homo sovieticus.’ A former state farm director, Lukashenko was the only member of the BBSR to vote against the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Lukashenko came to power in 1994 after gaining the people’s trust through his performance at the head of a national anti-corruption committee.

The past 16 years of Lukashenko’s presidency have seen steady economic growth, rising wages and full employment. The socially-oriented economy of Belarus maintains close links with other countries resisting the dictates of the New World Order such as Cuba, Venezuela, Syria and, until recently, Libya.

Belarus has one of the lowest rates of inequality in the world, spends up to 6 percent of GDP on education and scientific research. Education and health care are free.

Needless to say, Lukashenko’s determination to serve the interests of his own people over the interests of Western finance capitalists has resulted in a sustained and unrelenting campaign of lies, calumny and defamation from the global corporate media empires.

The United States, Belarus and “human rights”

Lukashenko’s popularity in Belarus has long been the target of a heavily funded opposition from within the country, composed of so-called ‘civil society’ activists and ‘journalists’ funded by the National Endowment for Democracy in the United States, an organisation which works closely with the CIA to overthrow foreign governments who are not subservient to US interests.

The United States and the European Union have spent millions of tax-payer’s money on installing a subservient leader in Minsk compliant with their economic interests in the country. As a European official was once reported to have said, “Belarus is the one country left where there is still something to grab.”

After the Al Qaeda attacks in New York 2001, the meaning of those events quickly became apparent to the government of Belarus. At a conference entitled ‘Axis of Evil: Belarus-the missing link’ November 2002 Senator John McCain, referring to Belarusian trade agreements with Iraq, declared: “Alexander Lukashenko’s Belarus cannot long survive in a world where the United States and Russia enjoy a strategic partnership and the United States is serious about its commitment to end outlaw regimes whose conduct threatens us.” McCain went on to say, “September 11th opened our eyes to the status of Belarus as a national security threat.”

In 2004 the United States passed the Belarus Democracy Act which mandated direct US interference in the internal affairs of Belarus in order to promote ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’. This imperialist legislation was followed by a resolution presented to the UN condemning Belarus for ‘human rights’ violations.

However, the Belarusian government responded promptly through the United Nations. In the 59th session of the UN General Assembly in New York, Belarusian permanent representative to the UN Andre Dapkiunas presented a resolution entitled: ‘Situation of Democracy and Human Rights in the United States of America.’ The Belarusian draft resolution condemned the fraudulent US elections of 2000, the fact that residents of Washington cannot elect representatives to the US congress, the death penalty for juveniles and the mentally ill, unlawful detention of terrorism suspects and widespread torture.

This resolution by Belarus was particularly embarrassing for the US government as it forced the world’s leaders to face up to US hypocrisy concerning crimes against humanity. The United States passed legislation one year later, finally putting an end to the death penalty for teenagers under 18. The other human rights violations documented in the Belarusian UN draft resolution continue to be committed by the United States.¹

The Great Conspiracy against the Republic of Belarus

On December 19th 2010, youth groups trained and funded by the US, Germany and Poland attempted to enter parliament buildings in Minsk, after Western backed candidates failed to make any significant impact among Belarusian voters.

In January 2011 the Belarusian state security agency( KGB), released documents seized from the protestors, which revealed the extent wholescale interference by German and Polish intelligence officials in the internal affairs of Belarus. The report ‘Background of a Conspiracy’ published in the Minsk Times, proved that many of the youths used by Western intelligence in the riots had been trained in far-right training camps in the Ukraine.

Others youths had been brought across the border from Russia. The declassified documents showed how Western intelligence agents, working through various NGOS, smuggled money in suitcases across the Belarus border to opposition activists.

Western intelligence agencies had two strategic plans to overthrow the Belarusian government.

1) Get as many as 100,000 people out on to the streets of Minsk in a mass rally and storm the parliament.
2) If they failed to get the desired numbers to join the rally, the parliament buildings would be attacked with iron bars in order to provoke the police. The media would then blame the police for the ‘violent crackdown’ and the EU would be given an excuse to condemn the ‘rigged elections’ and impose sanctions.

The report points out that the international press reporters at the December riots did not make any attempt to cover the elections. They simply arrived to join the pre-planned rally in October Square.

The Western backed putschists were to give their backing to the poet Vladimir Nekliaev. The declassified KGB documents reveals the reasons behind the West’s endorsement of Nekliaev:

V.Nekliaev is a representative of the so-called intelligensia. He possesses a certain charisma, has not been participating in the domestic political affairs for a long time. The public does not associate him with the image of a radical opposition member, he is better known as a poet.

His weaknesses can also be of use to us. In his past he was virtually an alcoholic (the illness of many artists). Our experts conclude that it creates conditions for forming a super idea in him of being superior, of being destined for a higher mission. We also possess essential incriminatory evidence against him, which enables us to give him additional stimulation at any stage of the project.

We believe it expedient to use the proposed candidature as the major one to represent the campaign. The earlier proposed candidate can be promoted along as a backup plan.

This document gives us a unique insight into the operational methodologies of Western intelligence agencies. Nekliaev was to become a Belarusian Vaclav Havel or Boris Yeltsin. His weaknesses as a leader would be useful to the West as it would be far easier to control him. Nekliaev was to be the Belararusian version of Mahmoud Jabril, a weak and feckless puppet of Western interests.

Nekliaev’s Western puppet masters also had ‘incriminatory evidence’ against him, which would enable them to blackmail him should he decide to favour the interests of his country over those of Western capital.

The declassified documents also reveal a sophisticated campaign of defamation and lies against the president of Belarus. Rumours and outrageous lies were to be spread and leaked to the Western press. Lies concerning the health of the president, lies about his private life, lies about foreign bank accounts, lies about the imminent resignation of the president, etc.

The section concerning the rumour campaign against the Belarusian president makes for interesting reading and is worth reproducing in full as it reveals the highly co-ordinated activities of Western intelligence-funded colour revolutionaries:

One of the components of the support campaign for the candidate of national confidence should be deliberate production of stimuli for the dissemination of rumours. Rumours are to be regarded as information passed on by means of informal communication and having a virus-like dissemination pattern. The ideal platform for such campaign is the Internet, especially various social networks, blogs, Twitter (Internet social network).

A well-run rumour campaign forces the authorities to continually look for excuses, which helps create the so-called presumption of guilt and evokes greater mistrust towards the government in the general public.

One of the basic rumours to be supported throughout the campaign should be the rumour of Lukashenko’s possible resignation. Its purpose to assure the general public and the elite of the very possibility of such resignation.

Suggested rumour cycles:

The personality of Lukashenko and his family, the rumors about the president undermine his personal position and destroy the image of a strong, brave and resolute man.

Here are the main directions and goals of the “background campaign”:

- The poor health of Lukashenko and members of his family.
- Lukashenko gets treatment abroad and spends a lot of money on it.
- Lukashenko’s money is deposited in foreign banks. This fact should be emphasised, and sums should be constantly increased.
Economy. Rumors of economic problems must countervail the information that the country has been barely affected by the crisis.

The following rumors are also effective:

- Every day brings more and more unemployed, new unemployed people are expected.
- The country is being sold out on the cheap, clandestine privatization of enterprises is going on at full speed. Officials sell state property to the Arabs and the Chinese for bribes.
- The government has not fulfilled the IMF requirements, and credits should be repaid ahead of schedule.
The safety of large public projects is questioned.
- The nuclear power plant to be constructed will use a Chinese reactor that can be prone to explosion.
- The nuclear reactor at the nuclear power plant is, in fact, future missiles, and a platform for nuclear blackmail …

The rumour mongering about Libya perpetrated by the corporate media shows striking similiarities to colour revolution methodologies used against Belarus. After the outbreak of violence in Bengazi, we were told by the mass media that Gadhafi had left Libya for Venezuela. To quote again from the document seized from the Belarusian opposition.

One of the basic rumours to be supported throughout the campaign should be the rumour of Lukashenko’s possible resignation. Its purpose to assure the general public and the elite of the very possibility of such resignation.

The false reports of Gaddafi’s resignation in Libya were intended to encourage the uprising by making the protestors believe that they had already won the battle for power. These lies were soon followed by reports that Gadhafi had given orders to bomb protestors. However, the Russian military, who were monitoring Libya from space, subsequently confirmed that no bombing of civilians took place.

In the lead up to the Libyan war the Associated press spread more rumours and lies about Belarus.

Hugh Griffiths of the Stockholm International Peace and Research Institute has claimed, “An Ilyushin Il-76 (plane) flew to Libya on February 15 from Baranovichi, a huge former Soviet weapon storage (area) now controlled by the Belarus government.”

The accusations were vehemently denied by the Belarusian government. Speaking to the Belarusian Telegraph Agency. Belarusian foreign ministry spokesman Andrei Savinykh told reporters:

It has been established that the UN official [Jose del Prado] told the American journalist that he had no information and therefore could not confirm the presence of any Belarusian mercenaries in Libya. The fact can be deemed proof that The Associated Press is a hired propaganda outlet and tool.

Savinykh politely noted the propensity of Western journalists to “effortlessly step over the conventional democratic standards when it is convenient to them and in line with the interests of their sponsors.”

Given the fact that Belarus is a target of US-sponsored regime change, one can only suspect that the media rumours were intended to serve as a warning to Minsk of what it will face if it refuses to bow down before the empire.

Libya, Belarus and the mindless and mad Security Council

In his first speech to the United Nations General Assembly in 2009 Muammar Al Gadhafi pointed out that the Security Council of the United Nations is in violation of article 2 of the United Nations Charter. Article 2 of the UN charter states that all states are equal, yet how can that be the case when a hand full of the world’s powers can decide the fate of all the other nations through the UN Security Council?

Gaddafi went on to claim that the Security Council should only be empowered to implement decisions taken by the General Assembly.

Colonel Gaddafi also criticised the Iraq war, which was in flagrant violation of the UN charter. The Libyan leader reminded all present that the United Nations was supposed “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war,” yet there have been over 65 wars since the UN’s inception in 1945s, wars waged by the few member states of the Security Council.

Furthermore, Colonel Gaddafi pointed out that the UN charter stipulates that all members of the United Nations are obligated to come to the aid of any state that finds itself under attack.

The leaders of British and the United States left the UN chamber before Gaddafi’s speech.

Today, Libya lies in ruins. What was once a peaceful and prosperous country, the only economic, social and political success story in Africa, has been bombed into the stone age, thanks to NATO and , in particular, the phony leftists who supported the racist and fascist hoards from Benghazi as they slaughtered every man, woman and child in their midst.

Belarus knows that the North Atlantic Terrorist Organisation and the whores of the military industrial media complex will do their utmost to inflict the same punishment on their beloved country. A founding member of the United Nations, Belarus is keenly aware of the danger posed to humanity by the corruption of the United Nations organizations by Euro-Atlantic war-mongering criminals.

Former SS Oberstgrupperfuhrer Paul Hauser once revealed that the foreign units of the Nazi SS were the precursors of NATO.² NATO’s Bliztkrieg on Libya has certainly proved him right. Now a peaceful, prosperous and highly civilized nation in the East of Europe prepares to defend itself against whatever terrorism NATO has in store for it. A nation to whom we all owe a debt for its heroic defeat of Nazism during World War Two now faces its contemporary heirs. As in the past, the defense of Belarus will be the ultimate defense of all free citizens of the world.

1. Parker, Stewart (2007) The Last Soviet Republic, Trafford Publishing, p 141.
2. Barker, A.J (1982) Waffen SS at War Ian Allen Ltd, 24-25.

The vote to grant membership to Palestine in the United Nations cultural organization UNESCO was 107 votes in favor, 14 against, and 52 abstentions. The United States was one of the 14 votes against, demonstrating that it was only “leading” a small group of nations.

The reaction of the US was embarrassing. It announced cancellation of its $60 million payment due in November to the UN body. Membership dues paid by the U.S. account for about 20 percent of UNESCO’s annual budget. Canada also announced it would withholding “voluntary contributions” (are there involuntary contributions?) to UNESCO.

What does withholding funding of UNESCO mean? Irina Bokova, director general of UNESCO gives some examples:

… thousands of girls and women in Afghanistan, in Africa and around the world, who have learned to read and write, with the help of UNESCO… the Iraqi education satellite channel that supports learning to Iraqi girls and boys, including refugees and internally displaced persons… hundreds of journalists around the world who are at this very moment harassed, killed or imprisoned, because they stand by the truth … the stolen treasure of Benghazi, Libya, for which UNESCO was first to ring the alarm bell… the millions of lives that may be saved by the Tsunami warning system …¹

The sore loser reaction of the US, Canada, and Israel conjures up visions of children playing where one child threatens to take his ball home unless the others play by his rules. This seems an apt analogy for the behavior of the “leader of the free world.”

So much for respect for democratic values that the United States claims to be exporting (often through the barrel of a gun) to the – supposedly – unfree world. The US is violating again an expression of democracy by the world body.

The decision to cut funding to UNESCO was difficult for the US to defend. AP reporter Matthew Lee had US State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland scrambling – unsuccessfully – to offer credible responses for the US line.²

“Leader of the free world” … whatever free world means. Certainly many wage slaves do not feel free, and neither do migrants forever evading Homeland security feel free. So what is the “free world”? The 13 other nations that voted along with the US on the UNESCO vote? And who are the free peoples?

Then US President Harry Truman said, “The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms. If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world—and we shall surely endanger the welfare of our own Nation.”³

There is no greater warmongering nation than the United States.⁴

Are the 99% free? If one observes the police state repression against them in such places as Oakland, one can only conclude that they are not even free “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” as is constitutionally guaranteed by the First Amendment in the US.

All this is transpiring because the Palestinians are asking for what the Israelis always demand for themselves (backed by the US): recognition of statehood. The hypocrisy could not be much starker.

Despite all the pandering of the US on behalf of the Zionist state, the hawkish (and mawkish) Washington Times is declaring a new “leader of the free world”: Israel.⁵

Israel – cited serially for violations of international law, peace, human rights, war crimes, crimes against humanity – is no friend of an uncontrolled United Nations. Israel routinely requires the US to wield its undemocratic veto to protect itself against world censure.

The US rarely fails in this regard. But at what price? Apparently at the price of the “leadership” that it claims for itself.

1. Irina Bokova, “à l’occasion de l’examen du point relatif à l’admission de la Palestine comme Etat membre de l’UNESCO,” UNESCO, 31 October 2011.
2. View the exchange at “U.S. Pulls All Funding for UNESCO After Sweeping Vote to Support Palestinian Membership,” Democracy Now! 1 November 2011.
3. “The leader of the free world – Exceptionalism,” Encyclopedia of the New American Nation.
4. See William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2000).
5. Editorial, “Leader of the Free World no more,” Washington Times, 28 November 2009.

Aristine Maharry is 29 years old and now lives in Freedom Plaza. She grew up in a very military family, with members of her family having participated in every major U.S. war going back to the war for independence, and with members of every generation having joined the military.

Maharry’s family did not encourage her to aspire to a military career, but — as in many such stories I’ve heard — actions spoke more loudly than words. Maharry was proud of her father’s military experience. She hoped from a very young age to join the U.S. Army. She grew up playing at army with her half-brothers. They would flip the couch on its side and toss pretend grenades. She loved the board game Risk. The biggest holiday in Aristine’s family was the Fourth of July. She doesn’t say she bled red white and blue. She says she bled green, Army green. She wanted to serve her country and other people. She was willing to die for her country. She was proud of her country.

Aristine was a good student and a good athlete. At age 7 she tested with an IQ of 185. She was placed in gifted and talented classes in all of the many public schools she attended. She got good grades, ran track, and was president of the Future Business Leaders of America at West Potomac High School in Northern Virginia, where at 16 she dual enrolled at George Mason University. She graduated from high school at 18 in the year 2000, was married the next January and pregnant in February.

Aristine knew that the military would be reluctant to enlist a mother of a child under 1 year of age. She hoped to take part in the Green to Gold program, enlisting and eventually becoming an officer. Her own father had dropped out of college to enlist and fight in Vietnam. She admired that history. However, when her first son was nine months old, Aristine became pregnant again. She headed to the recruiter’s office when her second son turned one in May 2004. She had a family and a good job in management training new personnel in the pharmacy department of Liberty Medical Supply in Florida. But recruiters’ job is to recruit, and Maharry didn’t require any persuading.

She arranged to train at the same camp her father had trained at, Fort Leonardwood in Missouri. She headed there in December 2004, leaving behind a husband and two little boys for the holidays. Aristine says it was a very sad time for her, very difficult, and also very cold in Missouri. But, she thought to herself: “All the other soldiers have families too. They do it. I’m not different. I can serve too. I want to do my part as an American.” She signed up to become a combat medic, hoping to care for injured soldiers.

The first few weeks of training in January were extremely hard, she says: lots of pushups, not a lot of sleep, but a great deal of hostility from drill sergeants conditioning recruits to face hostility in battle, struggling with their own post-traumatic stress, or simply acting out their sadism. Aristine characterized it as “ten times worse than in the movies.” She was in Charlie Company, Third Battalion, 10th Unit, 4th Platoon. Her platoon had four drill sergeants, three of them male named Davis, Harris, and something like Fontana (she doesn’t remember this name clearly), and one female drill sergeant named Gilliard.

The woman sergeant was not what you would call gentle and loving. Aristine witnessed Gilliard yank a male soldier across a desk and injure him. His offense had been to request a pen. Fontana (or whatever his exact name was) made Gilliard look sweet and delicate by comparison. He was shorter and meaner than the others, according to Maharry. She saw him slam a female private named Barr up against a wall.

Aristine is amazingly understanding of this abuse. The sergeants, she says, had just done tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. The training was their rest period between tours of combat. They were all, she believes, dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Aristine’s understanding this is even more amazing considering what happened next.

Aristine was doing pushups along with the other privates. It was dark. Fontana came up behind her and kicked her hard repeatedly in the pelvis. The next morning, with her 50-pound rucksack, Aristine was not able to keep up on the run in her usual way. One of the drill sergeants, Harris, told her she would have to report to “sick call.”

That night, Private Barr came and got Maharry. The two of them went to the military police (MP) and told their stories of abuse. The MPs sent them right back without indicating that they would do anything at all. The reports that the MPs took down may or may not still exist among their records.

The next morning Aristine reported to sick call. Before she did, Gilliard whispered in her ear that she needed to say she had slipped on ice, which was a complete fabrication. An X-ray showed a fractured pelvis. Aristine was put in the Army hospital on the base from January 8, 2005 to February 1st or 2nd, immobilized in bed with a morphine drug for pain. She was then sent on 30-day convalescent leave with heavy pain killers. If she did not return after the 30 days, she was told, the Army would come and find her. Through the course of her initial processing and training, she had already been advised repeatedly that going AWOL (absent without official leave) was punishable by anything up to death.

Aristine says she was “terrified” and “scared to death.” She didn’t tell her husband what had happened, as she was afraid that if he raised the issue she would be punished when she returned to the Army. When she did return, she pleaded with a physical therapist not to send her back to the same unit. It turned out that it was standard practice not to do that. Aristine worked hard, she says, to recover fast in the Physical Therapy Rehabilitation Program (PTRP) because those who did not, the “hold-overs,” would be kept in separate rooms in barracks with their units’ drill sergeants and would often be raped. Aristine did not use the word “rape” but indicated sex that was unwanted. “Rape” or “command rape” is an accurate term.

Unfortunately, the First Sergeant for the same Company she had been in before came and requested that Aristine return to the same unit. She passed a test and was returned. Once back, she was kept in a separate room, but resisted the drill sergeants’ attempts at sex, she says. A couple of female holdovers, she says, were also kept in private rooms. They would be taken out at night, and would cry endlessly when they were returned.

Aristine was now in the fourth week of training, with the same company, platoon, and drill sergeants (except for Fontana who was no longer there), but all new privates, her original group having long since graduated. Aristine was miserable, terrified, and “crying, crying, crying.” “How,” she asked herself, “could they send me back here?” The First Sergeant told her: “You’d better not open your mouth about what happened last time.” Maharry was still on lots of pain medicine and suffering mental pain as well.

Privates are all assigned “battle buddies,” and Aristine’s was a man named Principe. Privates objected that she couldn’t have a male battle buddy. The sergeants said that she could and that it happens in war. Luckily, Principe was a decent person, or — perhaps more to the point — a person who had not been in combat and was not placed in a command position. But Principe left early, during the eighth week. There was one more week to go.

During these later weeks of training, the drill sergeants were not as hard on the privates, and focused more on building camaraderie within the unit. They also brought the privates into the way the Army thinks. Drill Sergeant Davis said to whole platoon, as Aristine recalls: “It does not matter what happens in a room as long as two or more of you have the same story. That’s the party line.”

Aristine, like every private, slept with her weapon, knew its parts and how to assemble it, and gave it a name. Her gun was called “Blue.” Among the chants used in training were “We are Charlie Company and we like to party: drink blood drink blood all night long,” and another that began “Sharpen our machetes!”

Aristine was treated to particular abuse through these weeks. She was frequently awakened during the night and deprived of sleep. For weeks, she resisted the advances of the First Sergeant, Drill Sergeant Davis, and Drill Sergeant Kitchen. Aristine learned to sleep sitting straight up in the daytime.

During the final week, the First Sergeant called for her at night and said “We know what you did with your battle buddy” and “We know you’re selling pain killers.” He claimed that Principe had accused her of selling her pain killers. She knew that Principe would not have said that. She had no use for money in basic training, she desperately needed the pain killers, and the accusation named no party she’d sold to or any other details. There were no witnesses, and the accusation was false. There was never any trial or finding, just an accusation. The Army threatened to bring Aristine up on charges under Article 15 of the Universal Code of Military Justice. She refused to sign their forms, and they dropped the matter.

Aristine says that frequently she would cry as her Army superiors threatened her, repeatedly, for weeks. They would point out that she never received any letters in the mail. They claimed that nobody would know if they “took care of her.” Remarks included “We know how to make people shut up” and “We can make you be quiet forever.” Aristine says she took these as clear threats to kill her or imprison her, and that these threats were offered on multiple occasions.

Aristine injured her arm, and a doctor agreed not to treat her so that she could ship out, which was what she wanted: to escape Missouri.

Aristine’s birth mother showed up out of the blue. She had been an Army Captain. She had also been a model for ROTC posters and “Babes of the Military” calendars. Aristine was reluctant to tell her mother the true story, terrified that the Army would find out she’d talked and kill her or lock her away in prison. So Aristine told her mother the things she’d seen done to other female privates. She told her mother the Army was trumping up charges to keep her quiet. Aristine’s mother said she knew how it worked, and she kept quiet.

When I spoke with Aristine this week she said that she was still scared to be speaking about it. This is even more understandable considering the rest of the story.

After graduating, and being denied permission to walk in the graduation ceremony as punishment for the baseless accusation of selling drugs, Aristine shipped out to Fort Sam Houston near San Antonio, Texas. She was treated for her arm injury. She could not be sent on convalescent leave again so soon. Instead, she was sent to wait for a review by a medical board. Many she spoke with had been waiting two or more years for the medical board to review them. They could not leave for holidays or visit families. Aristine sank into depression. She felt unable to sit and do nothing, not to mention being constantly made fun of for not going to war.

She tried to switch from combat medic to a paperwork job that she could handle. She was told she was not fit for any duty until the medical board reviewed her case.

She tried to quit the Army with no benefits. They told her, she recounts: “Because we broke you, we have to fix you.”

I asked “Like Iraq?”

Aristine: “Yeah, like Iraq.”

A chaplain declined to help.

A physical therapist declined to help.

A woman, possibly named Rodriguez, told Aristine that if she “pulled the same s— here as in basic” she would “personally hunt you down and take care of you.”

Aristine went to a psychiatric clinic and said she was considering suicide. She really was. The clinic made her sign a statement that she would not kill herself. Then they sent her right back to hurry up and wait for the medical board.

Aristine left most of her possessions behind and went AWOL.

She was afraid to return to her family. She still does not want to face her father. She is deeply ashamed of having failed to succeed in the military. People had warned her she would fail. And she failed, or at least viewed it that way, even knowing that what was done to her was not her fault. She wished she’d listened to her colleagues at work who had told her “You’re too pretty,” and “Girls like you shouldn’t join the military.” She had taken those comments as insults to her pride. She now says they were right but didn’t go far enough. “It’s no place for anybody,” she now concludes.

Before joining up, Aristine had contacted both of her parents. Her father had never spoken about Vietnam. He now said “I saw things in the Army that no one should ever be exposed to.” He told her not to do it. She took that as fatherly protection and thought to herself “I’m stronger than he thinks.” He had received medals in Vietnam, she points out, but he’d also returned with “shell shock” or PTSD. Loud sounds would cause him to throw something or hit someone. He suffered tunnel vision in crowded places, and Aristine says she had the same symptom for a while.

Aristine went AWOL on July 5th (“my independence day”). She went to Florida and picked up three jobs, and then a job in New York. But in New York in November 2006, she had a checkbook stolen and reported it to the police. She did not face prosecution for going AWOL. But she was required to report to Fort Knox in Kentucky and sign out, along with many others in her same position — many women and men too, all suffering injuries, many from training and some from combat. They were made to put on Army uniforms and ordered about. She had to write out her story for a judge. She was told she could not speak with a judge. She was not told she could hire a lawyer. The Army may still have the report she wrote out. She was given a less than honorable discharge.

Aristine tried to reconcile with her husband. They tried counseling. She did not believe she could become pregnant anymore. But she did, and the pregnancy was very hard on her, her third son being born a month early. Doctors told her insurance would not cover problems related to military injuries. So Aristine went to the Dept. of Veterans Affairs (VA) and asked to change her discharge to honorable and to obtain health coverage. She again had to write down her whole story, and this time she left a copy with her birth mother. She was now advised that she could have had a lawyer at Fort Knox.

Aristine is now on her own, but has joined together with a growing crowd of activists opposing the entire direction in which our war economy is dragging our nation and the world. Many people are finding the strength to tell their stories, and finding power in joining them together with others.

Aristine Maharry thinks the military should release injured people to their families and treat them through the VA. She’s seen a woman forced to stay in a hotel, forbidden to see her family, while her family lived an hour and a half away. For what purpose?

Aristine thinks the Army should allow stretching during training to avoid countless shin injuries in women and men.

She thinks her story is similar to a great many others. She’s found the strength to talk after six years and in the midst of a nonviolent occupation. “The Army is keeping people quiet,” she says, “many, many people. Victims are sent to their attackers to ask for help.”

In school, Aristine says, she learned that America is always the hero, there to fix things and to help the rest of the world. “If it weren’t for us, the world would be lost!” But, she adds, you don’t learn the effects that wars have on people.

It could take some time to change the political system of a country; it could take some time to draft a new constitution, elect a new parliament, even a new president … but it will definitely take so many years to get rid of the culture of fear when you have been living for so long in a police state.

It is understandable that criminals usually need rehabilitation, but what is not conceivable is when you find a situation where police officers need to be rehabilitated and retrained to properly serve and protect the people according to a code of ethics that is universally agreed upon.

Torture was the only department the regimes of the Arab dictators excelled at. When the clueless Mr. Bush launched his stupid crusade, better known as the war on terror, he used to send abducted suspects of the so called al-Qaeda over to Morocco, Egypt and Jordan for innovative techniques of questioning that made waterboarding looked benign.

The Egyptians revolted not against Mubarak, per se; rather they protested against living in a police state that acted, not according to the order of law, but under the emergency law, where every suspect is guilty until proven otherwise. And in the meantime he is most likely to be humiliated like never before in his life and stripped of his dignity and pride. And if he was to get out of his imprisonment again, he will likely to walk out as a human wreck.

Of course, there were social and economic grievances behind the Egyptian revolution, but there was much more to this unique Tahrir Square phenomenon than just bread and butter. There were popular demands to restore a lost dignity.

The honeymoon between the Egyptian military and the protesters did not last long. Tahrir Square, which had been the scene of jubilant celebrations, soon turned into a battlefield, as the army moved to violently disperse activists, beating them with clubs and electric rods – even firing live ammunition – leading to many casualties.

Hundreds were dragged away to trucks and thrown in prison. Between January 28 and August 29, almost 12,000 civilians were tried in military tribunals, far more than Mubarak managed in 30 years of dictatorship. Torture by police and military personnel remains widespread with hundreds of cases involving beatings, electrocution, and sexual assault reported.

A video was released lately revealing army and police officers torturing citizens in Kurdi police station in the governorate of Dakahlia (lying north east of Cairo).

The video showed three half-naked, bound and blindfolded citizens with officers stepping on them with their shoes. The video then shows an officer from the Special Forces electrocuting the citizens behind on their ears with taser guns, making them scream while being interrogated.

The video showed some familiar officers who appeared during the Egyptian January 25 Revolution, from the army, police and the Special Forces.

It is worth mentioning that the two suspects being tortured in the video were caught red-handed robbing and looting, but I don’t think this fact could make this whole mockery of human rights and legal procedures less reprehensible.

The Egyptian police/military forces might as well have saved themselves the trouble and bombarded the two men at the crime scene by some drone attacks as Obama did Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen.

However, the Awlaki case is no comparison to the Egyptian police misconduct. I mean, the suspects were at least brought in for questioning. We have to give the Egyptian police credit for that.

A positive sign of recognition for Tamil rights is the dramatic Channel 4 UK documentary, Sri Lanka Killing Fields, shown first at a June Human Rights Council session and then worldwide.

Rudrakumaran is Prime Minister of the Transnational Government of Tamil Eelam (TGTE), and a prominent activist in the Diaspora. He earned law degrees from the University of Colombo and Southern Methodist University. He later studied and wrote articles about self-determination at Harvard Law School

Upon the end of the long civil war in Sri Lanka, May 2009, Rudrakumaran saw the need for international representation of Tamils’ right to sovereignty. He and other Tamil professionals held meetings in Malaysia and Switzerland to initiate the TGTE on the basis of nationhood, a homeland and the right to self-determination.

As these Tamil leaders in exile were gathering forces, they were surprised and disconcerted that Cuba and other new progressive governments in Latin America sided with Sri Lanka at the May 2009 sessions of the Human Rights Council, and not only against the guerrilla movement but also against the Tamil population interests

“Tamils always looked upon Fidel and Che as heroes,” the PM said. “Our people are shocked by Cuba’s position since May 2009. Perhaps it is due to poor communication. We want to send a delegation to Cuba, to Venezuela and other ALBA [Bolivarian Alliance of the Peoples of Latin America] governments to explain our position and to engage in dialogue.”

PM Rudrakumaran maintains that his Transnational Government is not tied to any government or international power. “We are not at the mercy of any power, but will accept support for our cause from whoever cooperates with us.”
The TGTE stresses democratic forms of decision making. In the spring of 2010, elections for delegates to the TGTE were held in 12 countries. In some cases, the proposed candidate met no competition and so there was no election. Tens of thousands participated.

Fifty-six elected delegates gathered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (USA) to officially form the Transnational Constituent Assembly on May 17-19, 2010. Thirty more delegates participated via video conference from London and Geneva. On November 3, the TGTE announced its first cabinet. Of the 10 ministers and 10 deputy ministers, five are women.
The TGTE is not to be confused with a “government in exile”, as there had been no independent state with a government that later sought relocation. It is a transnational government in transition and campaigns for nationhood through diplomacy and education. The real government will be established in the homeland when that is physically possible.
TGTE strategy is to work with all existing local, national and international Tamil organizations in the Diaspora, and to create a power centre for diplomacy with all governments possible. It also seeks to work in partnership with Tamil leadership inside Sri Lanka but has not been able to establish ties, at least not officially, given the belligerent nature of the S.L. government.
Getting to this point started following independence from Britain, in 1947-8. “Our people were conservative in many ways,” PM Rudrakumaran explained.
“We were nationalistic, not revolutionary. We had castes and women were not treated equally. We sought equal rights with the majority Sinhalese by using peaceful, non-violent means. But the Sinhalese governments and racist monks and other extremists beat and killed us. They conducted several pogroms in which thousands of Tamils were killed in terrible ways.
“Finally, in 1976, all the Tamil political parties in and out of parliament, from conservative to the most radical and revolutionary decided to struggle for an independent nation in the North East homeland,” Rudra, as he is known, continued.
“When the liberation struggle took up arms, all the barriers were broken. In fact, women played an important role in the armed struggle.

“The Tigers [Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam] gave us the dignity and strength to fight. Today, however, the struggle is on the diplomatic plane. We look forward. We are not mired in the past or in speculation about whether the Tigers committed terrorism.”

TGTE Guiding Principles

1. Commitment to achieve Eelam, an independent, sovereign State—nationhood, homeland and right to self-determination.
2. Tamil Eelam will be a secular state.
3. TGTE shall assist in establishing health facilities in the homeland, homes and refuges for those affected by the war; promote cultural activities stressing Eelam Tamil distinctiveness. Much of this work will have to be done indirectly as the TGTE cannot be in Sri Lanka.
4. Promote education in the homeland.
5. Promote economic welfare.
6. Conduct foreign relations through lobbying.
7. Seek prosecution of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide.
8. Protect the equality of women and all Tamils.
9. Provide welfare of families of martyrs, former combatants and families affected by the war. One practical project is to establish monuments for martyrs in the Diaspora since their memorials and graves have been destroyed by the Sri Lankan government.

PM Rudrakumaran said that the TGTE has good relations with the two other international organizations fighting for Tamil sovereignty: Global Tamil Eelam and the Council of Eelam Tamil in Europe.

“We all agree to the same goals and our means are the same—not armed struggle but peaceful protests and diplomacy. We are different in that the TGTE has elected representation in the form of a transnational government, a rather special breed of government,” Rudra said.

“We are encouraged about our future prospects. We see it favorable for us that a referendum was held for South Sudan [in 2005], in which 98.3% voted for secession. The TGTE attended the inauguration ceremony in Juba, July 10, as government guests of the new nation.”

TGTE deputy foreign minister Kanaganthram Manickavasagar and PM spokesperson Jeyaprakash Jeyalingam were among the guests when Salva Kiir signed the new constitution and was sworn in as president.

World leaders were present, including Sudan President Omar al-Bashir and UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon. Sri Lanka sent a minor envoy, Tissa Vitharana, senior minister of scientific affairs.

Prime Minister Rudrakumaran’s message to the newest nation, number 193 recognized by the UN, read: “We salute [you] for [your] sacrifices to become free and admire [your] courage and determination.”

“Our strategy is similar to that of the Republic of South Sudan,” the PM said. “We want the international community to press for and supervise a referendum on Eelam as occurred in South Sudan. Our peoples have undergone similar fates: genocide, followed by struggles for independence met by war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

Tamil guerrillas had called for ceasefires and a peace deal leading to a referendum for independence. Finally, in 2001, a ceasefire was achieved but only after the guerrillas had decimated much of Sri Lanka’s military might. However, when Mahinda Rajapaksa won the presidency, in 2004, he established a family fiefdom bent on annihilating all Tamil opposition. He smashed the ceasefire and took warring advice and technical-surveillance aid from the US Bush regime; massive weapons, communication infrastructure, boats and fighter aircraft from China; fighter aircraft, intelligence agents and technology from Israel; boats, missiles and moneys from India; moneys for oil and weapons from Iran; weapons from Pakistan; arms and patrol boats from UK and France; and technology and loans from Japan.

Rudrakumaran has no illusions about the interests of major governments representing former and current colonialists and empires. “How does one play the game and not allow a big power to decide? Our skills and our dedication to our united goal of sovereignty determine how we act. We won’t compromise sovereignty. Ours is a struggle for nationality and not one based on ideological or economic grounds.”

Rudrakumaran hopes that India will change its pro-Sri Lanka attitude towards one of support for Tamils. He sees the geo-political wind turning toward both China and India’s interests. As China’s influence grows in Sri Lanka, India is confused about how to act. He does not believe that India is currently acting in its long term interests by sidling up to the Rajapaksa government and thinks that India will soon realize that.

The Tamil leader is also encouraged by recent developments in the 18th session of the Human Rights Council just completed (September 12-30). It appears that the report by an expert panel appointed by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on “accountability in Sri Lanka” now has a chance to be discussed by the HRC at its 19th session. At least that is proposed by Ki-moon and the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay.

The report was delivered last March and is quite critical of the Sri Lanka government for possible human rights abuse of Tamil civilians and combatants in the last months of the war, which ended May 2009. The report calls for an independent investigation into credible allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

In this HRC session, unlike in that of other sessions, neither India nor any of the Latin American countries expressed verbal approval of the Sri Lanka government when it denied any wrong doing.

See TGTE’s website: http://govtamileelam.org/gov/.

Thus, on the ten-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, an editorial in the Independent on Sunday gushed about ‘Bush’s desire to spread democracy as an end in itself’. It was, the paper said, ‘the germ of a noble idea’. There was  ‘an idealism’ about Blair’s support for Bush. The drawback was that the execution of the righteous vision had been ‘naive, arrogant and morally compromised by torture and the abrogation of the very values for which the US-led coalition claimed to fight’.

But now we have Nato’s ‘successful’ mission in Libya to help wipe the slate clean. The paper writes that ‘the deserts of North Africa … turned out to be more fertile soil for democracy than could have been imagined.’ Libya is the great cause ‘where the idea of liberal intervention could be rescued and to an extent redeemed from the terrible mistake of Iraq.’

Note that the invasion-occupation of Iraq is described as a ‘mistake’, not the supreme international crime as judged by the standards of the post-WW2 Nuremberg Trials.

The horrendous murder of Baha Mousa, an Iraqi civilian, by British soldiers ‘was a reminder of how much the Iraq war tarnished Britain’s reputation abroad.’ The implication is that Britain’s ‘reputation’ is fundamentally decent, only occasionally ‘tarnished’.

The paper concludes:

There is a hope that Britain, with a more realistic understanding of its capability, could regain some of the ethical role in the world that it lost after its mistaken response to 9/11.

In the wake of all that has happened in the past ten years (and more), it takes a committed form of self-deception to cling to the shredded image of Britain’s ‘ethical role in the world’.

In several powerful books, based on careful research of formerly secret UK government documents, historian Mark Curtis has laid bare the motivations and realpolitik of British foreign policy. Ethics and morality are notable in these internal state records by their absence. Curtis observes:

A basic principle is that humanitarian concerns do not figure at all in the rationale behind British foreign policy. In the thousands of government files I have looked through for this and other books, I have barely seen any reference to human rights at all. Where such concerns are evoked, they are only for public-relations purposes. ¹

But the myth of benevolence must be maintained, even to the extent of active deception of the British public:

In every case I have ever researched on past British foreign policy, the files show that ministers and officials have systematically misled the public. The culture of lying to and misleading the electorate is deeply embedded in British policy-making.  (Ibid., p. 3)

In his political work, Noam Chomsky often cites a definition of terrorism from a US army manual as:

The calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or ideological in nature. This is done through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear.

By this definition, Chomsky points out, the major source of international terrorism is the West, notably the United States.

As for Britain, Curtis says:

The idea that Britain is a supporter of terrorism is an oxymoron in the mainstream political culture, as ridiculous as suggesting that Tony Blair should be indicted for war crimes. Yet state-sponsored terrorism is by far the most serious category of terrorism in the world today, responsible for far more deaths in many more countries than the “private” terrorism of groups like Al Qaida. Many of the worst offenders are key British allies. Indeed, by any rational consideration, Britain is one of the leading supporters of terrorism in the world today. But this simple fact is never mentioned in the mainstream political culture.  ²

In Unpeople, Curtis estimates the number of deaths in the post-WW2 period for which Britain bears significant responsibility, whether directly or indirectly. He tabulates mortality estimates for all the wars and conflicts in which Britain participated or otherwise played a significant role, for example in covert operations or diplomatic support for other governments’ violence. The examples include: war in Malaya (1948-1960), war in Kenya (1952-1960), the Shah’s regime in Iran (1953-1979), Indonesian army slaughters (1965-1966), the Indonesian invasion of East Timor (1975), US aggression in Latin America (1980s), the Falklands War (1982), the bombing of Yugoslavia (1999), the bombing of Afghanistan (2001) and the invasion of Iraq (2003).

As Curtis acknowledges, estimates of deaths in any conflict often vary widely and he does not pretend to be offering a ‘fully scientific analysis’. But erring on the side of caution, he arrives at a figure of around ten million deaths in the post-war period for which Britain bears ‘significant responsibility.’ Of these, Britain has ‘direct responsibility’ for between four and six million deaths. These are shocking figures, and essentially unmentionable in corporate news and debate.

The Doublespeak Of Terror/Counterterror

One of the golden rules propping up the required self-deception of the West’s fundamental goodness is that whenever violence is inflicted by the state it is only in retaliation for violence perpetrated by our enemies. This is straight out of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Edward Herman explains:

[An] important doublespeak device for rationalizing one’s own and friendly terrorism is to describe it as “retaliation” and “counter-terror.” The trick here is arbitrary word assignment: that is, any violence engaged in by ourselves or our friends is ipso facto retaliation and counter-terrorism; whatever the enemy does is terrorism, irrespective of facts. ³

The notion is so pervasive in news reporting that it is virtually invisible, like the oxygen breathed by the journalist; it is simply taken for granted. Even raising the topic for discussion in mainstream circles is beyond the pale.

Consider a recent report on the BBC News at Ten. On September 7, 2011, BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner reported from outside the Houses of Parliament:

When these anti-terrorist crash barriers went up outside Parliament back in 2003, a lot of people were shocked at the time. But we’ve got used to them. They’re a part of the world we live in.

Gardner continued:

There is no clear answer as to whether we’re safer now in Britain from terrorism than we were ten years ago. We know more about the threat we’re facing but those threats have multiplied and diversified.

The mass hostage-taking and murder in Mumbai three years ago has led to joint police-SAS training and a major boost in police firepower.

Gardner granted that ‘counterterrorism is also about foreign policy’, pointing out the obvious fact that ‘Britain’s part in the Iraq invasion helped recruit countless young men to al-Qaeda’s cause, increasing the danger to Britain.’ Indeed, this was a known risk before the invasion: Blair was warned by the Joint Intelligence Committee that al-Qaeda and associated groups were ‘by far the greatest terrorist threat’ to this country and that the risk would be ‘heightened by military action against Iraq’. Gardner’s report neglected to mention this.

His news item, and an accompanying article the next day at BBC News online, was framed in the necessary traditional convention: that terrorism is what they do, while ‘we’ undertake counterterrorism.

On September 8, 2011, we wrote to the BBC’s security correspondent:

Dear Frank Gardner,

I hope you’re doing well. Thank you for your report on last night’s BBC News at Ten. You rightly referred to the attacks on Bali, Madrid, London, Mumbai and Oslo as examples of terrorism. But you neglected to mention any examples involving US killings of civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan or Pakistan. Here is but one example from 2006 in the Iraqi town of Ishaqi. At least ten civilians – including four women and five children – were bound and executed with shots to the head.

Nor did you mention the Israeli offensive against Gaza in Operation Cast Lead, with the deaths of around 1,400 civilians (including 300 children), or the attack on a peaceful convoy led by the Mavi Marmara.

Why do you follow a script that says that violence conducted by officially-decreed enemies is ‘terrorism’, while violence inflicted by Western states or our allies is ‘counter-terrorism’?

I hope to hear from you, please.

Regards

David Cromwell

Not hearing anything back, we nudged Frank Gardner gently on September 12 via email and again two days later.  We then received an email from someone at the BBC called Paul Rasmussen:

Hello David

I understand you have been in touch about some BBC News reporting.  If you wish to make a complaint – you will need use the BBC complaints procedure – if you are not familiar with how to do this please let me know.

Yours,  Paul Rasmussen
(Email, September 14, 2011)

We responded the same day:

Hello Paul,

Many thanks for your email. Has Frank Gardner been in touch with you?

I asked Mr Gardner to respond to a perfectly fair challenge about a report he made on last Wednesday’s BBC News at Ten, and I hope he’ll feel able to do so.

Best wishes,

David

We received no reply. The following day, still not having heard from Gardner, we emailed the BBC correspondent again:

Dear Frank Gardner,

I know how busy you must be. But it’s now one week on, and it’s disappointing that you are seemingly reluctant to reply to a serious, polite and reasonable email from a member of the public. I’m not seeking to make an official BBC complaint about your report; I’m simply asking you to respond to a straightforward query.

If you would rather remain silent, it lends credence to the point that your reporting does have an ideological stance: namely, that the UK state and its allies cannot be charged with terrorism, only counter-terrorism.

I’d be grateful if you would at least try to respond to this charge directly, rather than meet it with silence or any attempt to divert it into the BBC complaints system [see here and here].

Regards,

David Cromwell (Email, September 15, 2011)

This was clearly too much for any self-respecting journalist to resist. A reply duly arrived that day from ‘Frank Gardner OBE’:

Dear Mr Cromwell

You rightly guess that I am too busy to answer the many people who write in with interesting and often excellent questions. The online version of my 9/11 report is attached. I believe it is fair, accurate and balanced but if you disagree then do please feel free to file a complaint to the BBC, backing it up with evidence. Im afraid that as with other members of the public I am not in a position to enter into a correspondence.

Yours sincerely

Frank Gardner OBE
BBC Security Correspondent

Gardner’s dismissive response, seemingly squeezed out of him, is poor fare indeed. There is no meaningful attempt to debate the serious point we put before him. If we were to respond in the same offhand way to polite challengers, and tried to shepherd them towards a Media Lens complaints department, we would be justly ridiculed.

Recall that the BBC – which is state-funded, managed by state-approved appointees, and overseen by a cosy club of establishment worthies – is always declaring itself to be scrupulously ‘impartial’. Fundamental criticism of the state is protected by this shield of  ‘impartiality’. How?  By taking for granted that ‘we’ in the West are, by definition, the ‘good guys’.

As we said at the start of this alert, the prevailing ideology holds that the West may be guilty of occasional ‘lapses’, but that it endeavours with a good heart to export democracy, uphold human rights and keep the global peace. This false and poisonous propaganda image – carefully cultivated and assiduously pushed by powerful interests – can never be seriously challenged by the state broadcaster and the corporate media generally. And certainly not when the state broadcaster’s ‘security correspondent’ has had an honour bestowed upon him by the same state.

If this was the old Soviet Union, or perhaps present-day Iran, there would be howls of mirth and outrage from respectable commentators in Britain. That it is happening right here, in this ‘beacon of democracy and free speech’, is apparently no cause for concern or even comment in ‘mainstream’ circles.

1. Unpeople, Vintage, 2004, p. 3
2. Web of Deceit, Vintage, 2003, p. 94
3. Beyond Hypocrisy: Decoding the News in an Age of Propaganda, South End Press, 1992, p. 44

A secret State Department cable published by the whistleblowing web site WikiLeaks, 06TUNIS2424, “Microsoft Inks Agreement with GOT,” 22 September 2006, noted that “during the Microsoft Government Leaders Forum in South Africa July 11-12, the GOT and the Microsoft Corporation signed a partnership agreement that provides for Microsoft investment in training, research, and development, but also commits the GOT to using licensed Microsoft software.”

The export of high-tech products, included software suites employed for spying on political dissidents, are said to be closely regulated under U.S. law to prevent abuse by repressive governments.

However, as Amnesty International disclosed nearly a decade ago, “There are almost no legal or regulatory requirements amongst the G8 states for the inclusion of international human rights or humanitarian law content in the various military, security, and police force training services that they provide to states in all world regions.”

According to investigators, “Even where human rights criteria are referred to in laws governing arms export and foreign military and security aid, they are often loosely interpreted.”

“Instead,” analysts averred, “it is short term profit making and political advantage that guide the bulk of the international arms trade,” and as noted above in the Bahraini example, the transfer of dual-use surveillance kit figured prominently in the suppression of of pro-democracy protests. (emphasis added)

Not much has changed since 2003 when that report was issued. Indeed, sweetheart deals which hand over source code in exclusive arrangements with human rights abusers are the norm, not the exception, especially where it concerns America’s “War on Terror” allies.

In January, during the opening round of the Arab Spring, a pro-democracy uprising by Tunisian citizens overturned the U.S.-allied dictatorship of President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali who was forced to flee to Saudi Arabia.

With high unemployment, staggering state corruption, repression and police violence, the long-simmering revolt was kick-started when an unemployed university graduate, Mohammed Bouazizi, an itinerant vegetable seller, set himself on fire in front of a government office to protest the confiscation of his stock by local police. Bouazizi died January 4. Authorities later claimed he did not have a “permit” to sell vegetables.

Initially caught off guard by events, the U.S. government had been fully apprised of this state of affairs by diplomats. A 17 July 2009 cable, 09TUNIS492, “Troubled Tunisia: What Should We Do?,” informed us that “many Tunisians are frustrated by the lack of political freedom and angered by First Family corruption, high unemployment and regional inequities.”

An autocratic though nominally “secular” regime, “the GOT brooks no advice or criticism, whether domestic or international. Instead, it seeks to impose ever greater control, often using the police.”

“Despite Tunisia’s economic and social progress,” the State Department cheekily observed, “its record on political freedoms is poor. Tunisia is a police state, with little freedom of expression or association, and serious human rights problems.”

A “police state” tailor made for CIA “War on Terror” operations.

As Amnesty International pointed out in 2008, “Abdellah al-Hajji and Lotfi Lagha, two of 12 Tunisians held by the US authorities in Guantánamo Bay, were returned to Tunisia in June. They were arrested on arrival and detained at the State Security Department of the Interior Ministry, where they alleged they were ill-treated and forced to sign statements” claiming they belonged to a “terrorist organization.”

Al-Hajji told human rights’ investigators that “he was deprived of sleep, slapped in the face and threatened that his wife and daughters would be raped.” This of course, is standard operating procedure for close U.S. allies.

While claiming the Tunisian government “can point to some progress … for every step forward there has been another back, for example the recent takeover of important private media outlets by individuals close to President Ben Ali.”

Despite misgivings, the Obama administration, like the Bush government before it, recommended “a more pragmatic approach … whereby we would speak to the Tunisians very clearly and at a very high level about our concerns regarding Tunisia’s democracy and human rights practices, but dial back the public criticism.”

Noting the set-up in Tunis and the dim prospects for democratic transformation, “of greatest interest to the GOT would be increased engagement on economic issues, i.e., on increasing bilateral trade and investment, as well as the provision of technical assistance, especially involving technology transfer.”

Bingo! Nothing like advancing U.S. interests by fattening the bottom line of American corporations eager to sell high-tech spy gear, and provide the requisite training to spooks–just as they do here in the heimat.

And if said U.S. corps, like their European counterparts (can you say BAE) need to sweeten the deal with generous dollops of cash to officials from special, i.e., untraceable accounts on Gibraltar, Latvia or Malta, well, there’s an app for that too!

A 06 June 2008 cable, 08TUNIS679, “Corruption in Tunisia: What’s Yours Is Mine,” informed us: “According to Transparency International’s annual survey and Embassy contacts’ observations, corruption in Tunisia is getting worse. Whether it’s cash, services, land, property, or yes, even your yacht, President Ben Ali’s family is rumored to covet it and reportedly gets what it wants. Beyond the stories of the First Family’s shady dealings, Tunisians report encountering low-level corruption as well in interactions with the police, customs, and a variety of government ministries.”

Continuing, the secret cable averred that “President Ben Ali’s extended family is often cited as the nexus of Tunisian corruption.” As with other close U.S. regional allies, including rulers of the former president’s new “home,” Saudi Arabia, the Ben Ali entourage was “often referred to as a quasi-mafia.”

“An oblique mention of ‘the Family’ is enough to indicate which family you mean. Seemingly half of the Tunisian business community can claim a Ben Ali connection through marriage, and many of these relations are reported to have made the most of their lineage.”

Apparently, so too did Microsoft; the 2006 cable noted that “the agreement is a win-win for Microsoft.”

As part of the deal, “Microsoft will help the GOT to upgrade and modernize its computers and networking capabilities. In turn, the GOT agreed to purchase twelve thousand licenses to update government computers with official Microsoft software, rather than the pirated versions that have been commonly used, according to one Microsoft employee.”

But the agreement did far more than “normalize” business relations between the Redmond, Washington software giant and the Tunisian government.

“The agreement also touches on internet security. Through a program on cyber criminality, Microsoft will train government officials in the Ministries of Justice and Interior on how to use computers and the internet to fight crime.”

But as Bloomberg Markets Magazine revealed in their Bahrain investigation, overt references to “cyber criminality” more often than not mean delivering political dissidents straight into the clutches of state security thought police.

“As part of this program,” the cable reads, “Microsoft will provide the GOT with original source codes for its programs.”

“When asked by EconOff whether Microsoft had any concerns about releasing its source codes, [Microsoft Tunisia Director General Salwa] Smaoui replied that the source codes would only be available to a small number of officials.”

Which ones? Why “Justice” and “Interior” ministry officials of course, securocrats charged with spying upon Tunisian citizens. Those deemed insufficiently “loyal” would face the grim prospect of detention and torture for having the temerity to cross swords with the country’s “quasi-mafia.”

Agreements such as those struck by Microsoft however, were neither “mistakes” nor a misguided strategy stitched together by an over-eager sales department. Rather, insider deals between giant corporations and authoritarian regimes are part and parcel of a business model which strives to increase all-important market share come hell or high water.

Examples abound. While Bloomberg Markets lifted the sheet on Siemens dirty deals with Bahrain, Narus (an Israeli firm founded by veterans of Israel’s secretive signals intelligence Unit 8200, and later bought by Boeing), sold highly-intrusive deep packet inspection tools to the state-owned Telecom Egypt.

Back in January, Free Press Campaign Director Timothy Carr disclosed that when the Mubarak regime pulled the plug on internet and cell phone service earlier this year, Egypt’s security services also had “the ability to spy on Internet and cell phone users, by opening their communication packets and reading their contents.”

“Narus,” Carr wrote, provided “Egypt Telecom with Deep Packet Inspection equipment (DPI), a content-filtering technology that allows network managers to inspect, track and target content from users of the Internet and mobile phones, as it passes through routers on the information superhighway.”

As civil liberties watchdogs, researchers and whistleblowers revealed, Narus is the same shadowy firm that sold it’s internet “Semantic Traffic Analyzer,” the Narus STA 6400, to the National Security Agency.

AT&T whistleblower Mark Kline first revealed in documents he handed over to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), that Narus equipment was installed in “secret rooms” co-managed by AT&T and the NSA across the United States and powered illegal driftnet spying programs by both the Bush and Obama administrations.

As James Bamford pointed out in The Shadow Factory, “at the heart of the Intercept Suite is the NarusInsight computer, an enormously powerful machine capable of scanning the fastest transmission lines of the Internet, OC-192 cables that carry 10 gigabytes per second–10 billion bits of information per second.”

“It can also carry,” Bamford wrote, almost 130,000 simultaneous telephone conversations.”

According to a sales pitch by the firm, “NarusInsight is the leading traffic intelligence system for capturing, analyzing and correlating IP traffic in real time.”

“In all cases and for all solutions,” we’re told that “Narus employs a four-phase approach to traffic intelligence: 1. Monitor traffic from the network through the application layer. 2. Create actionable knowledge. 3. Analyze at macro or micro level. 4. Take informed action based on business and operational policies.”

Indeed, “any number of links, at any speed, with any routing architecture, can be simultaneously monitored.”

Undeterred by charges of widespread corruption and police violence, Cablegate file 10TUNIS104, “Tunisia: Communication Technologies Minister,” penned 09 February 2010 by U.S. Ambassador Gordon Gray, tells us that “In a February 5 courtesy call by the Ambassador, Minister of Communication Technologies Mohamed Naceur Ammar explained the central role of information and communications technology (ICT) in Tunisia’s development strategy.”

“The Minister made a pitch,” Gray averred, “for greater U.S. investment in Tunisia’s ICT sector and was pleased to learn details of the imminent visit of a U.S. trade delegation to Tunisia that will include major U.S. ICT firm Motorola.”

“Tunisia intends to become an ICT platform for the Mediterranean region by attracting investment, boosting education, and liberalizing the sector,” Gray wrote. Critically, “Tunisia’s investment code, he said, provides incentives to potential investors, while its education system is linked to a growing number of techno-parks that match research to market needs.”

As readers are well aware, market “liberalization” is code for the sell-off of public assets, often at fire sale prices that enrich corrupt officials whilst gouging the public as prices for basic commodities, including telecommunication products, skyrocket.

“In response to the Ambassador’s question on how the United States and Tunisia could deepen ICT cooperation, Ammar highlighted the need for business investment in Tunisia’s ICT sector.”

Gray replied “that in addition to the U.S. companies already active in the sector, including Microsoft, Cisco, HP, and IBM, a U.S. trade delegation scheduled for February 15 would include representatives from Motorola.”

“On the internet,” the Ambassador wrote, “his appointment was greeted with some irony among Tunisian dissident bloggers: ‘Ammar’ is the nickname, analogous to ‘Big Brother,’ long used by bloggers in referring the Government of Tunisia’s wide-ranging internet censorship apparatus, headed by the Ministry of Communications Technologies.”

Nonetheless, Ambassador Gray said that “university exchanges and training programs for Tunisian officials … could fall under the 2004 U.S.-Tunisia Science and Technology Agreement.”

Similar exchanges and training programs at the U.S. Army’s School of the Americas (rebranded the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation in 2001), led to widespread human rights abuses across Latin America.

As SOA Watch points out, amongst those targeted by graduates schooled in the dark arts of “military intelligence and interrogation tactics” are the usual suspects: “educators, union organizers, religious workers, student leaders, and others who work for the rights of the poor.”

In the Middle East, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) disclosed that the International Military Education and Training (IMET) and the Joint Combined Exercises and Training (JCET) programs “may be improving the ability of a government or army to repress its own civilian population.”

Indeed, “training foreign militaries in lethal tactics in order to gain access to these countries, sometimes called buying influence, is presumably thought to be in the realm of ‘national security interests’.”

Today, such training entails the use of highly-intrusive technologies sold to repressive states by Western companies for the maintenance of the capitalist status quo, tasks eagerly sought by technology giants such as Microsoft.

Between 2000-2010, the Government Contracts Won web portal reported that Microsoft pulled down some 284 contracts worth a total of $230,656,233 from the Defense Department.

While small potatoes in comparison to Narus’s parent company, Boeing Corporation’s $8,400,115,000 in government contracts according to Washington Technology, the firm’s commercial products figure prominently in National Security State depredations.

As CNET News reported earlier this month, “Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 software can transmit your location without your explicit permission.”

“An analysis by Samy Kamkar says that the Camera application sends the device’s location–complete with latitude and longitude, a unique ID, and nearby Wi-Fi access points–to Microsoft even when the user has not given the app permission to do so.”

In July, CNET News disclosed that “Microsoft has collected the locations of millions of laptops, cell phones, and other Wi-Fi devices around the world and makes them available on the Web.”

According to researchers, “the vast database available through Live.com publishes the precise geographical location, which can point to a street address and sometimes even a corner of a building, of Android phones, Apple devices, and other Wi-Fi enabled gadgets.”

Moves by the secret state to compile geolocational directories of cell phone users, ready made databases perfect for hauling in political dissidents as was done in Bahrain, are not solely the province of repressive, Middle Eastern governments.

Is any wonder then, that Western high-tech firms do their part to “keep us safe” by throttling our privacy or fail to notice the screams of those victimized by the brutal efficiency of their products?