William Fisher
The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, the military’s most senior leaders, are asking Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to approve new guidelines that will formalize the Bush Administration’s policy of imprisoning ‘enemy combatants’ without the protections of the Geneva Conventions and enable the Pentagon to hold ‘ghost detainees’, a human rights group is charging.
In a letter to Rumsfeld, advocacy group Human Rights Watch (HRW) said, “Denying the protections of the Geneva Conventions to persons apprehended in the global war on terror is unsupported as a matter of law, represents a radical deviation from the standards that have traditionally guided U.S. military operations, and places U.S. service members and civilians detained by enemy forces at greater risk of mistreatment.”
The new memorandum, now in final draft, is known as the “Joint Doctrine for Detainee Operations: Joint Publication 3-63”, March 23, 2005.
The letter to Rumsfeld, signed by HRW Executive Director Kenneth Roth, says if the Defense Department (DOD) acts on the new guidelines “U.S. military personnel may be committing grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions and placing themselves at risk of prosecution for war crimes.”
The organization is critical of the U.S. government’s “decision in January 2002 to disavow the applicability of the Geneva Conventions in the global war on terror and the effective creation of a ‘new category of detainee’ has been at the root of the widespread and serious mistreatment of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay.”
HRW says the new rules “will send a message to the world that the Geneva Conventions are not law, but mere policies that can be changed according to tastes of a particular government. Disregarding fundamental principles will in particular suggest that all provisions of the Conventions are subject to unilateral modification. Whether or not this would affect the behavior of terrorist organizations, it will have a profound impact on future armed conflicts between states and the soldiers and civilians affected by them, including Americans.”
The group urges that the draft to “be modified to conform in full to the requirements of the Geneva Conventions.” It says that “among the most troubling features” are provisions creating a category of detainee, “enemy combatant,” that is denied the protections of the Geneva Conventions; overly broad criteria for designating an ‘enemy combatant’ as anyone who appears on a government list that “contains generalized names and aliases (for instance, ‘Mohammad Zia’ and ‘Abdullah Ahmed) that are shared by tens of thousands of persons worldwide” and including “individuals that may not be affiliated with the listed organizations; the claim that enemy combatants “are still entitled to be treated humanely, subject to military necessity”, while the Geneva Conventions offer no exception for military necessity; and provides a basis for denying access to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to all detainees in contravention of the Geneva Conventions. “
The new policies ”include a directive that would allow the military to hold enemy combatants as “ghost detainees,” by denying access to them by the International Committee of the Red Cross,” HRW says.
The letter to Rumsfeld charges that “instead of returning to the legal framework that would have ensured that detainees in U.S. custody would not have been abused, the Department of Defense (DOD) is simply changing the manuals.”
“The Pentagon document has not yet been publicly released, and is set to be submitted to Secretary Rumsfeld for approval on April 16,” HRW says.
On June 28, 2004, the US Supreme Court handed down two decisions related to the detention of 'enemy combatants' at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In the first one, 03-6696: Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, the US Supreme Court, held that "although Congress authorized the detention of combatants in the narrow circumstances alleged here, due process demands that a citizen held in the United States as an enemy combatant be given a meaningful opportunity to contest the factual basis for that detention before a neutral decision maker."
In the second case, 03-334: Rasul v. Bush, the Supreme Court held, among other things, that "United States courts have jurisdiction to consider challenges to the legality of the detention of foreign nationals captured abroad in connection with hostilities and incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay." The US Administration had, prior to the decision, held that, though Guantanamo Bay was leased, run, administered, and controlled by the United States, the land was still effectively Cuban, and that therefore U.S. courts should not have jurisdiction over that tract of Cuban territory.
The DOD then created ‘military tribunals’ to determine which Guantanamo prisoners posed threats to the U.S. These bodies were criticized for denying detainees the most basic due process, including attorney-client confidentiality.
Little information about those held at Guantánamo has been released through official government channels. But stories of 60 or more are spelled out in detail in thousands of pages of transcripts filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, where detainees have filed lawsuits challenging their detentions.
Court documents reviewed by The Associated Press last week are giving dozens of Guantánamo detainees what the Bush administration had sought to keep from public view: identities and voices. The government is holding about 550 terrorist suspects at the U.S. Navy base in Cuba. An additional 214 have been released since the facility opened in January 2002 - some into the custody of their home governments, others freed outright.
In the transcripts, the previously anonymous detainees provide accounts of their imprisonment and impressions of U.S. justice. Some express defiance, others stoic acceptance of their fate.
The detainees appeared last year before military tribunals that, after quick reviews, confirmed their status as "enemy combatants" who could be held indefinitely.
A federal has ruled that the Bush administration must allow prisoners at Guantanamo to contest their detention in U.S. courts, and that concluding that special military reviews established by the Pentagon as an alternative are illegal. She said the approximately 550 men held as "enemy combatants" are entitled to the advice of lawyers and to confront the evidence against them in those proceedings. She ruled that the DOD has largely denied them these "most basic fundamental rights" during the reviews conducted at Guantanamo.
Green's ruling directly conflicts with one issued by another federal court judge, who heard the case of a smaller group of detainees. He wrote that their bid for freedom is supported by "no viable legal theory." The conflict underscored the confusion about how to implement a Supreme Court ruling last summer that gave the detainees the right to contest U.S. accusations and challenge their indefinite detentions. The case will now be heard by higher courts.
Monday, April 11, 2005
Thursday, April 07, 2005
American Media Blitz
Baghdad Burning is my favorite Iraqi blog. It is the creation of an Iraqi computer scientist who calls herself 'Riverbend'. This is one of her recent entries.
BAGHDAD, April 3, 2005 -- You wake up in the morning. Brush your teeth. Splash the sleep out of your eyes and head for the kitchen for a cup of coffee or tea and whatever is available for breakfast.
You wander to the living room and search for the remote control. It is in its usual place -- stuck inexplicably between the sofa cushions. You turn on the television and stand there flipping from one channel to the other, looking for a news brief or something that will sum up what happened during those six hours you slept. You finally settle on the pleasant face on the screen -- the big hair, bright power suit, capped teeth and colorful talons -- blandly reading the news. The anchoress is Julie Chan. The program is CBS's The Early Show (Live from Fifth Avenue!).
Guess the nationality of the viewer above. Three guesses. American? No. Canadian? No. British? Japanese? Australian? No, no and no. The viewer is Iraqi… or Jordanian… or Lebanese… or Syrian… or Saudi… or Kuwaiti… or… but you get the picture.
Two years ago, the major part of the war in Iraq was all about bombarding us with smart bombs and high-tech missiles. Now there's a different sort of war -- or perhaps it's just another phase of the same war. Now we're being assailed with American media. It's everywhere all at once.
It began with radio stations like Voice of America which we could access even before the war. After the war, there were other radio stations -- ones with mechanical voices that told us to put down our weapons and remain inside our homes, ones that fed us American news in an Iraqi dialect and ones that just played music. With satellite access we are constantly listening to American music and watching American sitcoms and movies. To be fair -- it's not just Iraq that is being targeted -- it's the whole region and it's all being done very cleverly.
Al-Hurra, the purported channel of freedom, is the American gift to the Arab world. What they do is show us translated documentaries about certain historical events (American documentaries) or about movie stars (American stars) or vacation spots. Throughout this, there are Arab anchors giving us the news (which is like watching Fox in Arabic). It's news about the Arab world with the American twist.
Our new "national" channels are a joke. One of the most amusing, in a gruesome sort of way, is Al-Iraqiya. It's said to be American sponsored but the attitude is decidedly pro-Iran, anti-Sunni. There's a program where they parade 'terrorists' on screen for us to see in an attempt to show us that our National Guard are not only good at raiding homes and harassing people in the streets. The funny thing about the terrorists is that the majority of them have "Sunni" names like Omar and Othman, etc. They admit to doing things such as having sexual intercourse in mosques and raping women and the whole show is disgusting. Iraqis don't believe it because it's so obviously produced to support the American definition of the Iraqi, Sunni, Islamic fanatic that it is embarrassing. Couldn't the PSYOPS people come up with anything more subtle?
Then you have the whole MBC collection. MBC is actually financed by Saudi Arabia, but based in Dubai, as far as I know. They have several different channels. It started out with the original MBC which was a mainly Arabic channel that was harmless enough. It showed some talk shows, debates and Egyptian movies with an occasional program on music or style.
Then we were introduced to MBC's Al-Arabia -- a news channel which was meant to be the Saudi antidote to Al-Jazeera. Simultaneously, we were accessing MBC's Channel 2, which is a channel that shows only English movies and programs. The programs varied from talk shows like Oprah, to sitcoms like Friends, Third Rock from the Sun and Seinfeld. Earlier this year, the MBC did a mystifying thing. They announced that Channel 2 was going to be made a 24-hour movie channel which would show all sorts of movies -- old Clint Eastwood cowboy movies, and newer movies like "A Beautiful Mind", etc. The programs and sitcoms would be transferred to the new MBC Channel 4.
Personally, I was pleased with the change at first. I'm not big on movies and it was nice to know our favorite sitcoms and programs would all be accessible on one channel without the annoyance of two-hour movies. I could turn on Channel 4 at any time and expect to find something interesting or humorous that would end within 30-60 minutes.
The first time I saw 60 Minutes on MBC 4, it didn't occur to me that something was wrong. I can't remember what the discussion was, but I remember being vaguely interested and somewhat mystified at why we were getting 60 Minutes. I soon found out that it wasn't just 60 Minutes at night: It was Good Morning, America in the morning, 20/20 in the evening, 60 Minutes, 48-Hours, Inside Edition, The Early Show… it was a constant barrage of American media. The chipper voice in Arabic tells us, "So you can watch what *they* watch!" *They* apparently being millions of Americans.
The schedule on MBC's Channel 4 goes something like this:
9 am - CBS Evening News 9:30 am - CBS The Early Show 10:45 am - The Days of Our Lives 11:20 am - Wheel of Fortune 11:45 am - Jeopardy 12:05 pm - A re-run of whatever was on the night before - 20/20, Inside Edition, etc.
And the programming continues…
I've been enchanted with the shows these last few weeks. The thing that strikes me most is the fact that the news is so… clean. It's like hospital food. It's all organized and disinfected. Everything is partitioned and you can feel how it has been doled out carefully with extreme attention to the portions -- 2 minutes on women's rights in Afghanistan, 1 minute on training troops in Iraq and 20 minutes on Terri Schiavo! All the reportages are upbeat and somewhat cheerful, and the anchor person manages to look properly concerned and completely uncaring all at once.
About a month ago, we were treated to an interview on 20/20 with Sabrina Harman -- the witch in some of the Abu Ghraib pictures. You know -- the one smiling over faceless, naked Iraqis piled up to make a human pyramid. Elizabeth Vargus was doing the interview and the whole show was revolting. They were trying to portray Sabrina as an innocent who was caught up in military orders and fear of higher-ranking officers. The show went on and on about how American troops never really got seminars on Geneva Conventions (like one needs to be taught humanity) and how poor Sabrina was being made a scapegoat. They showed the restaurant where she worked before the war and how everyone thought she was "such a nice person" who couldn't hurt a fly!
We sat there watching like we were a part of another world, in another galaxy. I've always sensed from the various websites that American mainstream news is far-removed from reality -- I just didn't know how far. Everything is so tame and simplified. Everyone is so sincere.
Furthermore, I don't understand the world's fascination with reality shows. Survivor, The Bachelor, Murder in Small Town X, Faking It, The Contender… it's endless. Is life so boring that people need to watch the conjured up lives of others?
I have a suggestion of my own for a reality show. Take 15 Bush supporters and throw them in a house in the suburbs of, say, Falloojeh for at least 14 days. We could watch them cope with the water problems, the lack of electricity, the check points, the raids, the Iraqi National Guard, the bombings, and -- oh yeah -- the 'insurgents'. We could watch their house bombed to the ground and their few belongings crushed under the weight of cement and brick or simply burned or riddled with bullets. We could see them try to rebuild their life with their bare hands (and the equivalent of $150)…
I'd not only watch *that* reality show, I'd tape every episode.
BAGHDAD, April 3, 2005 -- You wake up in the morning. Brush your teeth. Splash the sleep out of your eyes and head for the kitchen for a cup of coffee or tea and whatever is available for breakfast.
You wander to the living room and search for the remote control. It is in its usual place -- stuck inexplicably between the sofa cushions. You turn on the television and stand there flipping from one channel to the other, looking for a news brief or something that will sum up what happened during those six hours you slept. You finally settle on the pleasant face on the screen -- the big hair, bright power suit, capped teeth and colorful talons -- blandly reading the news. The anchoress is Julie Chan. The program is CBS's The Early Show (Live from Fifth Avenue!).
Guess the nationality of the viewer above. Three guesses. American? No. Canadian? No. British? Japanese? Australian? No, no and no. The viewer is Iraqi… or Jordanian… or Lebanese… or Syrian… or Saudi… or Kuwaiti… or… but you get the picture.
Two years ago, the major part of the war in Iraq was all about bombarding us with smart bombs and high-tech missiles. Now there's a different sort of war -- or perhaps it's just another phase of the same war. Now we're being assailed with American media. It's everywhere all at once.
It began with radio stations like Voice of America which we could access even before the war. After the war, there were other radio stations -- ones with mechanical voices that told us to put down our weapons and remain inside our homes, ones that fed us American news in an Iraqi dialect and ones that just played music. With satellite access we are constantly listening to American music and watching American sitcoms and movies. To be fair -- it's not just Iraq that is being targeted -- it's the whole region and it's all being done very cleverly.
Al-Hurra, the purported channel of freedom, is the American gift to the Arab world. What they do is show us translated documentaries about certain historical events (American documentaries) or about movie stars (American stars) or vacation spots. Throughout this, there are Arab anchors giving us the news (which is like watching Fox in Arabic). It's news about the Arab world with the American twist.
Our new "national" channels are a joke. One of the most amusing, in a gruesome sort of way, is Al-Iraqiya. It's said to be American sponsored but the attitude is decidedly pro-Iran, anti-Sunni. There's a program where they parade 'terrorists' on screen for us to see in an attempt to show us that our National Guard are not only good at raiding homes and harassing people in the streets. The funny thing about the terrorists is that the majority of them have "Sunni" names like Omar and Othman, etc. They admit to doing things such as having sexual intercourse in mosques and raping women and the whole show is disgusting. Iraqis don't believe it because it's so obviously produced to support the American definition of the Iraqi, Sunni, Islamic fanatic that it is embarrassing. Couldn't the PSYOPS people come up with anything more subtle?
Then you have the whole MBC collection. MBC is actually financed by Saudi Arabia, but based in Dubai, as far as I know. They have several different channels. It started out with the original MBC which was a mainly Arabic channel that was harmless enough. It showed some talk shows, debates and Egyptian movies with an occasional program on music or style.
Then we were introduced to MBC's Al-Arabia -- a news channel which was meant to be the Saudi antidote to Al-Jazeera. Simultaneously, we were accessing MBC's Channel 2, which is a channel that shows only English movies and programs. The programs varied from talk shows like Oprah, to sitcoms like Friends, Third Rock from the Sun and Seinfeld. Earlier this year, the MBC did a mystifying thing. They announced that Channel 2 was going to be made a 24-hour movie channel which would show all sorts of movies -- old Clint Eastwood cowboy movies, and newer movies like "A Beautiful Mind", etc. The programs and sitcoms would be transferred to the new MBC Channel 4.
Personally, I was pleased with the change at first. I'm not big on movies and it was nice to know our favorite sitcoms and programs would all be accessible on one channel without the annoyance of two-hour movies. I could turn on Channel 4 at any time and expect to find something interesting or humorous that would end within 30-60 minutes.
The first time I saw 60 Minutes on MBC 4, it didn't occur to me that something was wrong. I can't remember what the discussion was, but I remember being vaguely interested and somewhat mystified at why we were getting 60 Minutes. I soon found out that it wasn't just 60 Minutes at night: It was Good Morning, America in the morning, 20/20 in the evening, 60 Minutes, 48-Hours, Inside Edition, The Early Show… it was a constant barrage of American media. The chipper voice in Arabic tells us, "So you can watch what *they* watch!" *They* apparently being millions of Americans.
The schedule on MBC's Channel 4 goes something like this:
9 am - CBS Evening News 9:30 am - CBS The Early Show 10:45 am - The Days of Our Lives 11:20 am - Wheel of Fortune 11:45 am - Jeopardy 12:05 pm - A re-run of whatever was on the night before - 20/20, Inside Edition, etc.
And the programming continues…
I've been enchanted with the shows these last few weeks. The thing that strikes me most is the fact that the news is so… clean. It's like hospital food. It's all organized and disinfected. Everything is partitioned and you can feel how it has been doled out carefully with extreme attention to the portions -- 2 minutes on women's rights in Afghanistan, 1 minute on training troops in Iraq and 20 minutes on Terri Schiavo! All the reportages are upbeat and somewhat cheerful, and the anchor person manages to look properly concerned and completely uncaring all at once.
About a month ago, we were treated to an interview on 20/20 with Sabrina Harman -- the witch in some of the Abu Ghraib pictures. You know -- the one smiling over faceless, naked Iraqis piled up to make a human pyramid. Elizabeth Vargus was doing the interview and the whole show was revolting. They were trying to portray Sabrina as an innocent who was caught up in military orders and fear of higher-ranking officers. The show went on and on about how American troops never really got seminars on Geneva Conventions (like one needs to be taught humanity) and how poor Sabrina was being made a scapegoat. They showed the restaurant where she worked before the war and how everyone thought she was "such a nice person" who couldn't hurt a fly!
We sat there watching like we were a part of another world, in another galaxy. I've always sensed from the various websites that American mainstream news is far-removed from reality -- I just didn't know how far. Everything is so tame and simplified. Everyone is so sincere.
Furthermore, I don't understand the world's fascination with reality shows. Survivor, The Bachelor, Murder in Small Town X, Faking It, The Contender… it's endless. Is life so boring that people need to watch the conjured up lives of others?
I have a suggestion of my own for a reality show. Take 15 Bush supporters and throw them in a house in the suburbs of, say, Falloojeh for at least 14 days. We could watch them cope with the water problems, the lack of electricity, the check points, the raids, the Iraqi National Guard, the bombings, and -- oh yeah -- the 'insurgents'. We could watch their house bombed to the ground and their few belongings crushed under the weight of cement and brick or simply burned or riddled with bullets. We could see them try to rebuild their life with their bare hands (and the equivalent of $150)…
I'd not only watch *that* reality show, I'd tape every episode.
LISTEN UP, KAREN HUGHES
By William Fisher
As Karen Hughes prepares for her Senate confirmation hearing to be the czarina of America’s effort to repair its tarnished image abroad, she would do well to heed the advice of Rami G. Khouri.
Rami Khouri is a world-class thinker. He is the former Executive Editor of The Daily Star newspaper in Beirut, and now a syndicated columnist. Khouri advises eight guideposts to the soon-to-be Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy: Style, credibility, consistency, motive, context, legitimacy, militarism, and relevance.
Here’s what he means.
Style: "Washington's manner is often aggressive and threatening. It uses sanctions and the military and unilaterally lays down the law that others must follow or else they will be considered enemies and thus liable to regime change. People don't like to be bullied or threatened, even if change would be for their own good.”
Credibility: “The U.S. track record has hurt, angered or offended most people in the Middle East. By primarily backing Arab dictators and autocrats or supporting the Israeli position on key issues of Arab-Israeli peacemaking, credibility has been lost. The priority issue for most Arabs -- whether Palestinians, Iraqis or others -- is freedom from foreign occupation and subjugation. If Washington uses war and pressure tactics to implement United Nations resolutions in Lebanon and Iraq but does nothing parallel to implement U.N. resolutions calling for the freedom of Palestinians from Israeli occupation, it will continue to be greeted with disdainful guffaws in most of the Middle East.”
Consistency: “The United States could have promoted freedom and democracy in Iraq without waging war and spending $300 billion, getting more than 1,500 Americans killed and 10,000 injured (and perhaps 100,000 Iraqis killed) and creating a massive anti-American backlash throughout the world. It could better promote democracy and rally Arab democrats by telling Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Tunisian President Zine el Abidine ben Ali that being president without any meaningful legal opposition for more than 20 years is long enough. The U.S. could support term limits for Arab presidents.”
Motive: “Perpetually changing the motive for the war in Iraq hurts American credibility. We've been told that invading Iraq was about weapons of mass destruction, links with Al Qaeda, imminent threats to the United States, homegrown brutality against the Iraqi people, stopping threats to neighbors and, now, spreading freedom and democracy throughout the Middle East. Some of these rationales may one day prove to be correct. In the meantime, the collection of half a dozen is crippling to placing any trust in Washington.”
Context: “The Arab states suffer massive internal pressures from issues of population, identity, demography, economy, environment, ideology, crises of citizenship rights versus statehood obligations and secularism versus religiosity, and the perpetual pressure from foreign armies. In this wider context, the issues of freedom and democracy are dwarfed by the more pressing imperatives of stable statehood, liberation from foreign occupation, meeting basic human needs, and stopping foreign armies.”
Legitimacy: “There is no global consensus that the United States is mandated to promote freedom and democracy, or that this is the divinely ordained destiny of the United States. There is such a mandate, though, in the charter of the United Nations, in Security Council resolutions to end foreign occupations and international legal conventions — most of which the U.S. resists, ignores or applies very selectively. No surprise then that virtually the whole world resists the United States.”
Militarism: “The American use of preemptive war for regime change creates more problems than it solves. Promoting freedom and democracy through the guns of the Marines doesn't work for many people outside of Republican and neoconservative Washington circles.
Relevance: “The value of individual freedom as defined in American culture runs counter to how freedom is understood in most of the Middle East and the developing world. There, people sacrifice individual liberties for the protection and the communal expression of belonging to a bigger group — the family, tribe, religion or ethnic or national group.”
These concerns, Khouri says, “act as the primary constraint to any meaningful Arab cooperation with the U.S.” But, he adds, “The good news is that they all can be overcome through better communications between Arabs and Americans and more consistent, lawful policies by everyone concerned.”
Hopefully, Ms. Hughes will be persuaded that these are sound principles and should be followed. But the devil, of course, is in the details: Execution. How can Khouri’s principles be translated into programs and projects? Surely not with yet more slick TV channels like Al Hurra, which is viewed with skepticism throughout the Arab world as nothing more than propaganda.
Karen Hughes will find no shortage of ideas to consider. One of the most promising of them comes from a bipartisan task force led by former Defense Secretary William Cohen, including several dozen former U.S. Middle East ambassadors, and organized by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a respected Washington-based think tank.
Under the rubric of “Investing in the Next Generation of Arab Leaders”, the CSIS panel proposes the creation of an Arab Partnership Foundation (APF) to foster education, entrepreneurship, and reform among the next generation of Arab leaders.
APF would be a private not-for-profit corporation jointly funded by the U.S. government, foundations, and the private sector. The reason for distancing this entity from the government control, CSIS says, is that “the U.S. government lacks credibility in Arab countries at the moment, sometimes making it difficult even for sympathetic organizations and individuals to work with us.” It also notes that “our government, by its very design, is often unable to go beyond daily diplomatic pressures and adequately invest in the future.”
“We are currently reaping the rewards of investments we made in Arab people and institutions during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s; the costs of today’s alienation may not be felt fully for decades. There is no one quick or easy solution. Fully reversing these trends will require using all the facets of public diplomacy—from exchanges to support for civil society—to make a serious long-term investment in reaching the next generation of Arab leaders and citizens”, the Report says.
“If we are going to create sustained Arab-U.S. partnerships—leader to leader, citizen to citizen—we will need an organization viewed as separate from the U.S. government, with a deep understanding of the Arab people”, the report concludes.
Well worth considering, Ms. Hughes.
As Karen Hughes prepares for her Senate confirmation hearing to be the czarina of America’s effort to repair its tarnished image abroad, she would do well to heed the advice of Rami G. Khouri.
Rami Khouri is a world-class thinker. He is the former Executive Editor of The Daily Star newspaper in Beirut, and now a syndicated columnist. Khouri advises eight guideposts to the soon-to-be Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy: Style, credibility, consistency, motive, context, legitimacy, militarism, and relevance.
Here’s what he means.
Style: "Washington's manner is often aggressive and threatening. It uses sanctions and the military and unilaterally lays down the law that others must follow or else they will be considered enemies and thus liable to regime change. People don't like to be bullied or threatened, even if change would be for their own good.”
Credibility: “The U.S. track record has hurt, angered or offended most people in the Middle East. By primarily backing Arab dictators and autocrats or supporting the Israeli position on key issues of Arab-Israeli peacemaking, credibility has been lost. The priority issue for most Arabs -- whether Palestinians, Iraqis or others -- is freedom from foreign occupation and subjugation. If Washington uses war and pressure tactics to implement United Nations resolutions in Lebanon and Iraq but does nothing parallel to implement U.N. resolutions calling for the freedom of Palestinians from Israeli occupation, it will continue to be greeted with disdainful guffaws in most of the Middle East.”
Consistency: “The United States could have promoted freedom and democracy in Iraq without waging war and spending $300 billion, getting more than 1,500 Americans killed and 10,000 injured (and perhaps 100,000 Iraqis killed) and creating a massive anti-American backlash throughout the world. It could better promote democracy and rally Arab democrats by telling Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Tunisian President Zine el Abidine ben Ali that being president without any meaningful legal opposition for more than 20 years is long enough. The U.S. could support term limits for Arab presidents.”
Motive: “Perpetually changing the motive for the war in Iraq hurts American credibility. We've been told that invading Iraq was about weapons of mass destruction, links with Al Qaeda, imminent threats to the United States, homegrown brutality against the Iraqi people, stopping threats to neighbors and, now, spreading freedom and democracy throughout the Middle East. Some of these rationales may one day prove to be correct. In the meantime, the collection of half a dozen is crippling to placing any trust in Washington.”
Context: “The Arab states suffer massive internal pressures from issues of population, identity, demography, economy, environment, ideology, crises of citizenship rights versus statehood obligations and secularism versus religiosity, and the perpetual pressure from foreign armies. In this wider context, the issues of freedom and democracy are dwarfed by the more pressing imperatives of stable statehood, liberation from foreign occupation, meeting basic human needs, and stopping foreign armies.”
Legitimacy: “There is no global consensus that the United States is mandated to promote freedom and democracy, or that this is the divinely ordained destiny of the United States. There is such a mandate, though, in the charter of the United Nations, in Security Council resolutions to end foreign occupations and international legal conventions — most of which the U.S. resists, ignores or applies very selectively. No surprise then that virtually the whole world resists the United States.”
Militarism: “The American use of preemptive war for regime change creates more problems than it solves. Promoting freedom and democracy through the guns of the Marines doesn't work for many people outside of Republican and neoconservative Washington circles.
Relevance: “The value of individual freedom as defined in American culture runs counter to how freedom is understood in most of the Middle East and the developing world. There, people sacrifice individual liberties for the protection and the communal expression of belonging to a bigger group — the family, tribe, religion or ethnic or national group.”
These concerns, Khouri says, “act as the primary constraint to any meaningful Arab cooperation with the U.S.” But, he adds, “The good news is that they all can be overcome through better communications between Arabs and Americans and more consistent, lawful policies by everyone concerned.”
Hopefully, Ms. Hughes will be persuaded that these are sound principles and should be followed. But the devil, of course, is in the details: Execution. How can Khouri’s principles be translated into programs and projects? Surely not with yet more slick TV channels like Al Hurra, which is viewed with skepticism throughout the Arab world as nothing more than propaganda.
Karen Hughes will find no shortage of ideas to consider. One of the most promising of them comes from a bipartisan task force led by former Defense Secretary William Cohen, including several dozen former U.S. Middle East ambassadors, and organized by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a respected Washington-based think tank.
Under the rubric of “Investing in the Next Generation of Arab Leaders”, the CSIS panel proposes the creation of an Arab Partnership Foundation (APF) to foster education, entrepreneurship, and reform among the next generation of Arab leaders.
APF would be a private not-for-profit corporation jointly funded by the U.S. government, foundations, and the private sector. The reason for distancing this entity from the government control, CSIS says, is that “the U.S. government lacks credibility in Arab countries at the moment, sometimes making it difficult even for sympathetic organizations and individuals to work with us.” It also notes that “our government, by its very design, is often unable to go beyond daily diplomatic pressures and adequately invest in the future.”
“We are currently reaping the rewards of investments we made in Arab people and institutions during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s; the costs of today’s alienation may not be felt fully for decades. There is no one quick or easy solution. Fully reversing these trends will require using all the facets of public diplomacy—from exchanges to support for civil society—to make a serious long-term investment in reaching the next generation of Arab leaders and citizens”, the Report says.
“If we are going to create sustained Arab-U.S. partnerships—leader to leader, citizen to citizen—we will need an organization viewed as separate from the U.S. government, with a deep understanding of the Arab people”, the report concludes.
Well worth considering, Ms. Hughes.
Saturday, April 02, 2005
ANOTHER ‘GHOST PRISONER’ RENDERED
By William Fisher
A major advocacy group is charging that a Yemeni businessman captured in Egypt was handed over to U.S. authorities and "disappeared" for more than a year and a half before being sent to Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba.
Human Rights Watch has released details of the previously unreported “reverse rendition” case of `Abd al-Salam `Ali al-Hila, a Yemeni terror suspect.
John Sifton, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, told IPS that "Al-Hila was essentially kidnapped on the streets of Cairo and then 'disappeared' in U.S. custody. Whatever the allegations against him, he should have been charged and given the opportunity to challenge his detention."
“Until this man was able to get a letter out of Guantanamo, he was one of the ‘ghost prisoners’. One of the most troubling aspects of his case is that he was arrested in a civilian setting, held without charge or access to counsel – or any rights at all – and then shipped off, not to Guantanamo Bay but to Bagram airbase in Afghanistan. For a year and a half, there was no record of him anywhere.”
The Human Rights Watch briefing details how Al-Hila, a Yemeni intelligence colonel and businessman who had been involved in helping Arab Islamists in the 1990s, was first picked up by Egyptian authorities while on a business trip to Cairo in September 2002. Within ten days he was taken to Baku, Azerbaijan, then on to the Bagram air base in Afghanistan, and, finally, sometime in mid-2004, to the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Prior to detention in Cairo, Al-Hila, a father of three, had been in daily
contact with his family in Yemen. After his "disappearance" in September
2002, the family did not hear from him again until April 2004. Details of
his whereabouts were not known until he was able to smuggle a letter out of Afghanistan. The letter was released by Yemeni authorities in April 2004.
HRW’s briefing says that Al-Hila arrived in Cairo on an EgyptAir flight, September 19, 2002, checking into a five-star hotel. He disappeared within a week of his arrival in Egypt. He is believed to have been taken first to Baku, Azerbaijan, and he was then transferred to U.S. custody in Afghanistan. After being held for 16 months in Afghanistan, he was sent to Guantanamo Bay, where he is still being held.
HRW says that, in addition to his business interests, Al-Hila had been a Yemeni intelligence officer, and was in charge of transferring scores of Arab Islamists from Yemen to other countries, including Western Europe, to seek asylum. His position meant that he had a close relationship with Yemeni President `Ali `Abdullah Salih, as well as with a broad array with Arab and Western intelligence services.
Al-Hila’s trip to Cairo, however, was supposed to be strictly business. He was invited by the Arab Contractors’ head office in Cairo to settle some financial disagreements over his construction business commission.
Al-Hila had been in daily contact with his family, using both his Yemeni and Cairo cellular phones. On September 24, his family became worried when he did not answer their calls for an entire day.
Yemeni officials called their Egyptian counterparts to discover Al-Hila’s whereabouts. The Yemeni ministerial cabinet issued a statement on October 31, 2002, calling on Egyptian officials to disclose Al-Hila’s whereabouts.
The first Egyptian official response to the allegations came on November 3, 2002, in a report by the state-run Middle East News Agency, which quoted an “Egyptian official source” as stating that Al-Hila left Cairo on an American flight to Baku on September 28, 2002. The source also denied any involvement by the Egyptian authorities in his “disappearance.”
The family received no specific information from the Egyptian or Yemeni governments on his allegedly voluntary flight to Baku. They were told by the Yemeni foreign minister in November 2002 that Egyptian officials showed him the “departure card” each passenger fills out when flying out of Cairo Airport.
HRW says “Al-Hila’s fate was unknown for more than a year and a half. During that time, his family received no information. Finally, on April 14, 2004, Yemeni foreign minister Abu Bakr al-Qurbi announced that the Yemeni embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, had received a letter from Al-Hila smuggled out of Bagram Airbase in Kabul. Dated January 12, 2004, it stated that he had been detained by the CIA in Afghanistan for 16 months, after being kidnapped in Cairo by Egyptian intelligence.”
His brief letter was a plea for help for the president of Yemen. “I have been put in jail in Afghanistan by the Americans, after I was arrested in the Arab Republic of Egypt during a brief business trip. The CIA conspired with the Egyptian Mukhabarrat, making false allegations and threats against me, so as to justify their crime of kidnapping me from Egypt and locking me up in this Afghani prison. …I urge you to request my immediate release and my safe transfer home.”
In July 2004, Al-Hila’s family received a letter from Kabul via the Red Cross dated May 26, 2004 -- the first communication from him since he had been detained a year-and-a-half earlier. Two months later, they received another letter, dated July 19 — this time from Guantanamo.
In December 2004, the family received another two letters dated October 15 and October 30. Al-Hila wrote in the October 15 letter, “I was moved to the new prison, from Afghanistan to Cuba, Guantanamo….” The rest of the sentence was blacked out by the U.S. military censor.
As of this writing, there is no evidence that he has been released from Guantanamo, HRW says.
Asked whether the U.S. Defense Department (DOD) has been at all cooperative with HRW, Sifton told IPS “There are individual people there who really want to help; for example, people in the JAG Corps. But the civilian leadership of the Pentagon are merely stewards of damage control.”
"The Bush administration continues to believe that by invoking the word 'terror' it can detain anyone in any corner of the world without any oversight," he said. "Yet all these cases do is suggest that the United States has no commitment to legal principles. Turning your back on the law is not the way to stop terrorism."
A major advocacy group is charging that a Yemeni businessman captured in Egypt was handed over to U.S. authorities and "disappeared" for more than a year and a half before being sent to Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba.
Human Rights Watch has released details of the previously unreported “reverse rendition” case of `Abd al-Salam `Ali al-Hila, a Yemeni terror suspect.
John Sifton, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, told IPS that "Al-Hila was essentially kidnapped on the streets of Cairo and then 'disappeared' in U.S. custody. Whatever the allegations against him, he should have been charged and given the opportunity to challenge his detention."
“Until this man was able to get a letter out of Guantanamo, he was one of the ‘ghost prisoners’. One of the most troubling aspects of his case is that he was arrested in a civilian setting, held without charge or access to counsel – or any rights at all – and then shipped off, not to Guantanamo Bay but to Bagram airbase in Afghanistan. For a year and a half, there was no record of him anywhere.”
The Human Rights Watch briefing details how Al-Hila, a Yemeni intelligence colonel and businessman who had been involved in helping Arab Islamists in the 1990s, was first picked up by Egyptian authorities while on a business trip to Cairo in September 2002. Within ten days he was taken to Baku, Azerbaijan, then on to the Bagram air base in Afghanistan, and, finally, sometime in mid-2004, to the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Prior to detention in Cairo, Al-Hila, a father of three, had been in daily
contact with his family in Yemen. After his "disappearance" in September
2002, the family did not hear from him again until April 2004. Details of
his whereabouts were not known until he was able to smuggle a letter out of Afghanistan. The letter was released by Yemeni authorities in April 2004.
HRW’s briefing says that Al-Hila arrived in Cairo on an EgyptAir flight, September 19, 2002, checking into a five-star hotel. He disappeared within a week of his arrival in Egypt. He is believed to have been taken first to Baku, Azerbaijan, and he was then transferred to U.S. custody in Afghanistan. After being held for 16 months in Afghanistan, he was sent to Guantanamo Bay, where he is still being held.
HRW says that, in addition to his business interests, Al-Hila had been a Yemeni intelligence officer, and was in charge of transferring scores of Arab Islamists from Yemen to other countries, including Western Europe, to seek asylum. His position meant that he had a close relationship with Yemeni President `Ali `Abdullah Salih, as well as with a broad array with Arab and Western intelligence services.
Al-Hila’s trip to Cairo, however, was supposed to be strictly business. He was invited by the Arab Contractors’ head office in Cairo to settle some financial disagreements over his construction business commission.
Al-Hila had been in daily contact with his family, using both his Yemeni and Cairo cellular phones. On September 24, his family became worried when he did not answer their calls for an entire day.
Yemeni officials called their Egyptian counterparts to discover Al-Hila’s whereabouts. The Yemeni ministerial cabinet issued a statement on October 31, 2002, calling on Egyptian officials to disclose Al-Hila’s whereabouts.
The first Egyptian official response to the allegations came on November 3, 2002, in a report by the state-run Middle East News Agency, which quoted an “Egyptian official source” as stating that Al-Hila left Cairo on an American flight to Baku on September 28, 2002. The source also denied any involvement by the Egyptian authorities in his “disappearance.”
The family received no specific information from the Egyptian or Yemeni governments on his allegedly voluntary flight to Baku. They were told by the Yemeni foreign minister in November 2002 that Egyptian officials showed him the “departure card” each passenger fills out when flying out of Cairo Airport.
HRW says “Al-Hila’s fate was unknown for more than a year and a half. During that time, his family received no information. Finally, on April 14, 2004, Yemeni foreign minister Abu Bakr al-Qurbi announced that the Yemeni embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, had received a letter from Al-Hila smuggled out of Bagram Airbase in Kabul. Dated January 12, 2004, it stated that he had been detained by the CIA in Afghanistan for 16 months, after being kidnapped in Cairo by Egyptian intelligence.”
His brief letter was a plea for help for the president of Yemen. “I have been put in jail in Afghanistan by the Americans, after I was arrested in the Arab Republic of Egypt during a brief business trip. The CIA conspired with the Egyptian Mukhabarrat, making false allegations and threats against me, so as to justify their crime of kidnapping me from Egypt and locking me up in this Afghani prison. …I urge you to request my immediate release and my safe transfer home.”
In July 2004, Al-Hila’s family received a letter from Kabul via the Red Cross dated May 26, 2004 -- the first communication from him since he had been detained a year-and-a-half earlier. Two months later, they received another letter, dated July 19 — this time from Guantanamo.
In December 2004, the family received another two letters dated October 15 and October 30. Al-Hila wrote in the October 15 letter, “I was moved to the new prison, from Afghanistan to Cuba, Guantanamo….” The rest of the sentence was blacked out by the U.S. military censor.
As of this writing, there is no evidence that he has been released from Guantanamo, HRW says.
Asked whether the U.S. Defense Department (DOD) has been at all cooperative with HRW, Sifton told IPS “There are individual people there who really want to help; for example, people in the JAG Corps. But the civilian leadership of the Pentagon are merely stewards of damage control.”
"The Bush administration continues to believe that by invoking the word 'terror' it can detain anyone in any corner of the world without any oversight," he said. "Yet all these cases do is suggest that the United States has no commitment to legal principles. Turning your back on the law is not the way to stop terrorism."
LEFT AND RIGHT TOGETHER
The article below was written for InterPress News Service
By William Fisher
In a political environment more fractious than Washington has seen in more than a decade, there are at least a few signs that left and right can find common ground.
A current example is a coalition of conservative interest groups that has joined forces with the American Civil Liberties Union and similar organizations to press for changes in the USA patriot Act.
Under the leadership of former Congressman Bob Barr, a conservative Republican from Georgia, the new group, "Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances" (PCRB), will work to revise the most extreme provisions of the law that gave law enforcement and security agencies sweeping new powers in the wake of the September 11th 2001 terror attacks on the U.S.”
The new coalition includes Americans for Tax Reform, the American Conservative Union, the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons, the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Policy Center, the Citizens’ Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, the Eagle Forum, the Second Amendment Foundation, and Brad Jansen, adjunct scholar, Competitive Enterprise Institute.
In an online interview, Barr told IPS, “The provisions in the USA PATRIOT Act that keep me awake at night are those that undermine the basic notions of judicial review of Executive branch actions, and which undermine the notion embodied in the Fourth Amendment to the Bill of Rights that the government should not be allowed to gather evidence against a person without at least some reasonable suspicion that the person has violated a law. If these provisions are allowed to stand and be employed by the government, then the Fourth Amendment will have been rendered essentially meaningless, and with it, the basic notion of privacy in America.”
He elaborated: “A core principle on which the conservative philosophy of governing is based is limited government. This principle is important not only when determining the appropriate levels of government spending, regulation, and interference in the economy, for example, but also when deciding if federal criminal laws give the government too much power. Thus, in assessing the USA PATRIOT Act, many conservatives have determined the law gives the federal government too much power, in contravention of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, for instance.
“At the core”, he added, “liberals and conservatives alike share an interest in protecting individual liberties, especially those embodied in the Bill of Rights, against government efforts to take them away.”
The USA Patriot Act was hurriedly passed by Congress with little debate and signed by President Bush weeks after the terror attacks of September 11th 2001. It gave law enforcement and security agencies sweeping new powers. However, Congress agreed that since it was navigating in uncharted waters, it would allow several provisions of the law to “sunset”, or expire this year. These provisions would have to be reenacted for the law to stay on the books.
Regarding the conservative-liberal partnership, Barr told IPS, “For too many years, conservatives assumed that liberals, such as the ACLU, would be the People’s watchdog for civil liberties; and that when these liberties were threatened, we as conservatives could rely on the ACLU to go to court and to the legislature, to protect us. No longer can conservatives sit back and rely on liberals to protect our rights; we have to be involved, too. Conservatives, like liberals, must become actively enjoined in the fight to protect civil liberties in the wake of the government’s response to the attacks of 9-11. If we do not join together, we will lose the battle.”
At its maiden press conference in Washington, members of the coalition were sharply critical of the “absolutist” position of former Attorney General John Ashcroft. A spokesman said he hoped the current Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, would be more flexible.
“Anyone who takes the position that Americans who stand up and fight to retain our civil liberties, including the right to privacy, and who believe that we as Americans do not need to sacrifice our liberty in order to fight terrorists, are aiding and abetting terrorists, is rendering a disservice to our Founding Fathers, and to Americans through the ages who cherish and fight for our God-given liberties,” Barr said.
He declared that the PRCB is focusing its efforts on reforming federal laws, such as the USA PATRIOT Act, that “have given the government too much power in the fight against terrorists. We are not engaged in leveling personal attacks against the former Attorney General or anyone else”.
PRCB is urging Congress to modify several provisions of the law, including:
Section 215, which allows federal agents to secretly collect records about you, such as medical documents, library records, and even records of firearm purchases, without specific evidence linking you individually to a foreign agent.
Section 213, which allows federal agents to secretly search peoples’ homes and
businesses and snoop through their personal property without notice.
Section 802, which expands the definition of domestic terrorism so broadly that
ordinary people trying to exercise their First Amendment rights on issues across
the political spectrum might get charged as terrorists.
PRCB is a non-partisan organization,” Barr told IPS. “We will work with Democrats and Republicans alike in both House of the Congress, to bring balance back to the fight against terrorists. In the last Congress, efforts to bring that balance back to the USA PATRIOT Act, for example, as set forth in the SAFE Act, enjoyed bipartisan support; and we expect that Democrats and Republicans in both Houses will support our efforts in this 109th Congress, too.”
He declared, “For as long as I have been involved in matters involving the federal government – going back to the early 1970s – I have observed that Administrations of both major parties seek more secrecy in what they do, than the People should consent to.”
Asked whether the Bush Administration’s position favoring secrecy, and viewing the debate over the USA PATRIOT Act as black and white, with no room for amendment, makes the coalition’s job more difficult, Barr said, “Yes, but I believe that when all is said and done in this debate this year in which the Congress will address the USA PATRIOT Act, we will witness some compromises by the Administration.”
By William Fisher
In a political environment more fractious than Washington has seen in more than a decade, there are at least a few signs that left and right can find common ground.
A current example is a coalition of conservative interest groups that has joined forces with the American Civil Liberties Union and similar organizations to press for changes in the USA patriot Act.
Under the leadership of former Congressman Bob Barr, a conservative Republican from Georgia, the new group, "Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances" (PCRB), will work to revise the most extreme provisions of the law that gave law enforcement and security agencies sweeping new powers in the wake of the September 11th 2001 terror attacks on the U.S.”
The new coalition includes Americans for Tax Reform, the American Conservative Union, the American Association of Physicians and Surgeons, the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Policy Center, the Citizens’ Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, the Eagle Forum, the Second Amendment Foundation, and Brad Jansen, adjunct scholar, Competitive Enterprise Institute.
In an online interview, Barr told IPS, “The provisions in the USA PATRIOT Act that keep me awake at night are those that undermine the basic notions of judicial review of Executive branch actions, and which undermine the notion embodied in the Fourth Amendment to the Bill of Rights that the government should not be allowed to gather evidence against a person without at least some reasonable suspicion that the person has violated a law. If these provisions are allowed to stand and be employed by the government, then the Fourth Amendment will have been rendered essentially meaningless, and with it, the basic notion of privacy in America.”
He elaborated: “A core principle on which the conservative philosophy of governing is based is limited government. This principle is important not only when determining the appropriate levels of government spending, regulation, and interference in the economy, for example, but also when deciding if federal criminal laws give the government too much power. Thus, in assessing the USA PATRIOT Act, many conservatives have determined the law gives the federal government too much power, in contravention of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, for instance.
“At the core”, he added, “liberals and conservatives alike share an interest in protecting individual liberties, especially those embodied in the Bill of Rights, against government efforts to take them away.”
The USA Patriot Act was hurriedly passed by Congress with little debate and signed by President Bush weeks after the terror attacks of September 11th 2001. It gave law enforcement and security agencies sweeping new powers. However, Congress agreed that since it was navigating in uncharted waters, it would allow several provisions of the law to “sunset”, or expire this year. These provisions would have to be reenacted for the law to stay on the books.
Regarding the conservative-liberal partnership, Barr told IPS, “For too many years, conservatives assumed that liberals, such as the ACLU, would be the People’s watchdog for civil liberties; and that when these liberties were threatened, we as conservatives could rely on the ACLU to go to court and to the legislature, to protect us. No longer can conservatives sit back and rely on liberals to protect our rights; we have to be involved, too. Conservatives, like liberals, must become actively enjoined in the fight to protect civil liberties in the wake of the government’s response to the attacks of 9-11. If we do not join together, we will lose the battle.”
At its maiden press conference in Washington, members of the coalition were sharply critical of the “absolutist” position of former Attorney General John Ashcroft. A spokesman said he hoped the current Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, would be more flexible.
“Anyone who takes the position that Americans who stand up and fight to retain our civil liberties, including the right to privacy, and who believe that we as Americans do not need to sacrifice our liberty in order to fight terrorists, are aiding and abetting terrorists, is rendering a disservice to our Founding Fathers, and to Americans through the ages who cherish and fight for our God-given liberties,” Barr said.
He declared that the PRCB is focusing its efforts on reforming federal laws, such as the USA PATRIOT Act, that “have given the government too much power in the fight against terrorists. We are not engaged in leveling personal attacks against the former Attorney General or anyone else”.
PRCB is urging Congress to modify several provisions of the law, including:
Section 215, which allows federal agents to secretly collect records about you, such as medical documents, library records, and even records of firearm purchases, without specific evidence linking you individually to a foreign agent.
Section 213, which allows federal agents to secretly search peoples’ homes and
businesses and snoop through their personal property without notice.
Section 802, which expands the definition of domestic terrorism so broadly that
ordinary people trying to exercise their First Amendment rights on issues across
the political spectrum might get charged as terrorists.
PRCB is a non-partisan organization,” Barr told IPS. “We will work with Democrats and Republicans alike in both House of the Congress, to bring balance back to the fight against terrorists. In the last Congress, efforts to bring that balance back to the USA PATRIOT Act, for example, as set forth in the SAFE Act, enjoyed bipartisan support; and we expect that Democrats and Republicans in both Houses will support our efforts in this 109th Congress, too.”
He declared, “For as long as I have been involved in matters involving the federal government – going back to the early 1970s – I have observed that Administrations of both major parties seek more secrecy in what they do, than the People should consent to.”
Asked whether the Bush Administration’s position favoring secrecy, and viewing the debate over the USA PATRIOT Act as black and white, with no room for amendment, makes the coalition’s job more difficult, Barr said, “Yes, but I believe that when all is said and done in this debate this year in which the Congress will address the USA PATRIOT Act, we will witness some compromises by the Administration.”
TERRI’S CIRCUS
By William Fisher
Terri Schiavo is dead. But while her feuding husband and parents continue to bicker about her final resting place, she has already moved onto a much larger – and even more acrimonious – stage. She has become the poster child for the religious right.
Motivated by a variety of reasons – from heartfelt religious conviction to demagogic political opportunism – politicians, clergymen and others who opposed the removal of her feeding tubes, are expected to move the focus to the U.S. Congress.
Their goals are nothing less than redefining ‘life’ and the independence of the judiciary. As many right-to-life advocates trumpeted during the media circus accompanying Terri’s tragic death watch, they believe that life begins at the moment of conception and should end by natural means, unless the victims have unequivocally made their end-of-life preferences known. Thus the end-of-life issue will be inextricably linked with abortion. Proponents hope this will present a backdoor means of reversing Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal.
The belief of right-to-life advocates about the judiciary is that it is in the hands of “arrogant, runaway, judicial activists”.
The political debate started even before Terri Schiavo died. With this unfortunate woman very much still alive as an icon, it is unlikely to go away any time soon.
What is likely to follow in the Congress this summer probably will not qualify as a ‘debate’; it promises to be a political carnival. It will be rancorous, filled with political posturing, ironies and hypocracies, and undeterred by transparent contradictions.
The outlines of the Republican strategy were unambiguously laid out by the House of Representatives Majority Leader, Tom DeLay of Texas – who served as the tip of the spear in the battle to save Terri’s life. “The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior… the courts "thumbed their nose at Congress and the president,” he said, suggesting that Congress was already exploring responses, including Congressional impeachment of the judges involved.
DeLay’s position was echoed by many other spokesmen for the religious right, including Randall Terry, often-jailed anti-abortion founder of Operation Rescue. Addressing doctors who perform abortions, he said, "When I or people like me are running the country, you'd better flee because we will find you, we will try you and we'll execute you. I mean every word of it. I will make it part of my mission to see to it that you are tried and executed."
And Dr. James C. Dobson, founder of the evangelical group Focus on the Family, said the judges who would not stop the removal of Ms. Schiavo's feeding tube were "guilty not only of judicial malfeasance but of the cold-blooded, cold-hearted extermination of an innocent human life."
The political fall-out from the Schiavo case will likely manifest itself early in Congress on the issue of judicial nominations, especially if President Bush has to nominate a candidate for the Supreme Court.
Regarding judicial nominations to lower courts, the Democrats in the Senate have blocked a dozen or so of the names President Bush has sent up for confirmation. For the most part, their reason has been that the nominees are too conservative and too doctrinaire.
The Democrats’ position was laid out by the Center for American Progress (CAP), a left-leaning Washington think-tank. “Congress has no place intervening in the private medical decisions of any American. The shameless 11th hour intervention in the Schiavo case by right-wing leaders is a disgrace to all Americans. The case had been fully vetted by state and local courts in Florida for years, yet at the last minute, Congress decides it knows better than the judgment of Ms. Schiavo's husband and Florida state courts. Conservatives, once the self-proclaimed protectors of individual privacy and federalism, have morphed into the party of personal violation and ham-fisted federal intervention,“ the left-leaning Center said.
The CAP was referring to a law hurriedly passed by Congress giving Federal Courts jurisdiction to review State Court decisions in the Schiavo case de novo, from the beginning. The Florida courts declined to conduct such a review, and their decision was upheld by Federal appellate courts and ultimately by the U.S. Supreme Court. President Bush flew back from his Easter vacation in Texas to sign the new law. All the courts that reviewed the case ruled that Terri was in a ‘persistent vegetative state’ from which recovery was not possible, and all affirmed that Terri’s husband, Michael, was her legal guardian and able to make life-or-death decisions on her behalf.
But many Democrats, out of conviction or political expediency or fear of the religious right, voted with Republicans to pass the 11th hour legislation.
A wide majority of the American people appeared to disagree with the law. Opinion polls such as one conducted by CBS News, found that 82 percent opposed Bush and Congress involving themselves in the Schiavo matter. Three-quarters thought Congress got involved because of politics over principle, which could account for the 34 percent approval rating for Congress -- its lowest since 1997.
Republican lawmakers may also seek broader federal legislation on the rights of "incapacitated persons". "I think we are more likely to look at a general piece of legislation," said Senate Republican Conference Chairman Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, a staunch conservative who is often mentioned as a potential candidate for the presidency in 2008.
State governments have also been energized by the Schiavo case. Ten states have already introduced new end-of-life legislation.
Ironies abound in the Schiavo case. For one thing, Republicans have traditionally been the party that has opposed ‘activist judges, and fought to preserve and increase the power of the states over the Federal government. Their current position on the judiciary appears to reverse both positions.
There are others. For example, most of the 19 judges who reviewed the Schiavo case were conservatives appointed by Republican presidents. Having failed to obtain the rulings they sought, Republicans in Congress will now seek to limit the power of the judicial branch of government. There is even discussion of imposing term-limits on what have always been lifetime appointments to the bench. Those who wrote the U.S. Constitution insisted that the three branches of government – executive, legislative and judicial – be co-equal.
Then there’s the charge that Rep. DeLay led the very public campaign to save Schiavo’s life to divert attention from his current ethical and perhaps criminal activities associated with political fund-raising.
There is also the issue of his father, from whom he removed from life-support in the absence of a ‘living will’. He says the Schiavo case was different because she was not on life support, though most physicians believe that nutrition and hydration constitute life support because ending them ends life.
Yet another irony: When George W. Bush was governor of Texas, he signed a right-to-die law that lets a patient's surrogate make life-ending decisions on his or her behalf. The measure also allows Texas hospitals to disconnect patients from life-sustaining systems if a physician, in consultation with a hospital bioethics committee, concludes that the patient's condition is hopeless.
Terri Schiavo is dead. But while her feuding husband and parents continue to bicker about her final resting place, she has already moved onto a much larger – and even more acrimonious – stage. She has become the poster child for the religious right.
Motivated by a variety of reasons – from heartfelt religious conviction to demagogic political opportunism – politicians, clergymen and others who opposed the removal of her feeding tubes, are expected to move the focus to the U.S. Congress.
Their goals are nothing less than redefining ‘life’ and the independence of the judiciary. As many right-to-life advocates trumpeted during the media circus accompanying Terri’s tragic death watch, they believe that life begins at the moment of conception and should end by natural means, unless the victims have unequivocally made their end-of-life preferences known. Thus the end-of-life issue will be inextricably linked with abortion. Proponents hope this will present a backdoor means of reversing Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal.
The belief of right-to-life advocates about the judiciary is that it is in the hands of “arrogant, runaway, judicial activists”.
The political debate started even before Terri Schiavo died. With this unfortunate woman very much still alive as an icon, it is unlikely to go away any time soon.
What is likely to follow in the Congress this summer probably will not qualify as a ‘debate’; it promises to be a political carnival. It will be rancorous, filled with political posturing, ironies and hypocracies, and undeterred by transparent contradictions.
The outlines of the Republican strategy were unambiguously laid out by the House of Representatives Majority Leader, Tom DeLay of Texas – who served as the tip of the spear in the battle to save Terri’s life. “The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior… the courts "thumbed their nose at Congress and the president,” he said, suggesting that Congress was already exploring responses, including Congressional impeachment of the judges involved.
DeLay’s position was echoed by many other spokesmen for the religious right, including Randall Terry, often-jailed anti-abortion founder of Operation Rescue. Addressing doctors who perform abortions, he said, "When I or people like me are running the country, you'd better flee because we will find you, we will try you and we'll execute you. I mean every word of it. I will make it part of my mission to see to it that you are tried and executed."
And Dr. James C. Dobson, founder of the evangelical group Focus on the Family, said the judges who would not stop the removal of Ms. Schiavo's feeding tube were "guilty not only of judicial malfeasance but of the cold-blooded, cold-hearted extermination of an innocent human life."
The political fall-out from the Schiavo case will likely manifest itself early in Congress on the issue of judicial nominations, especially if President Bush has to nominate a candidate for the Supreme Court.
Regarding judicial nominations to lower courts, the Democrats in the Senate have blocked a dozen or so of the names President Bush has sent up for confirmation. For the most part, their reason has been that the nominees are too conservative and too doctrinaire.
The Democrats’ position was laid out by the Center for American Progress (CAP), a left-leaning Washington think-tank. “Congress has no place intervening in the private medical decisions of any American. The shameless 11th hour intervention in the Schiavo case by right-wing leaders is a disgrace to all Americans. The case had been fully vetted by state and local courts in Florida for years, yet at the last minute, Congress decides it knows better than the judgment of Ms. Schiavo's husband and Florida state courts. Conservatives, once the self-proclaimed protectors of individual privacy and federalism, have morphed into the party of personal violation and ham-fisted federal intervention,“ the left-leaning Center said.
The CAP was referring to a law hurriedly passed by Congress giving Federal Courts jurisdiction to review State Court decisions in the Schiavo case de novo, from the beginning. The Florida courts declined to conduct such a review, and their decision was upheld by Federal appellate courts and ultimately by the U.S. Supreme Court. President Bush flew back from his Easter vacation in Texas to sign the new law. All the courts that reviewed the case ruled that Terri was in a ‘persistent vegetative state’ from which recovery was not possible, and all affirmed that Terri’s husband, Michael, was her legal guardian and able to make life-or-death decisions on her behalf.
But many Democrats, out of conviction or political expediency or fear of the religious right, voted with Republicans to pass the 11th hour legislation.
A wide majority of the American people appeared to disagree with the law. Opinion polls such as one conducted by CBS News, found that 82 percent opposed Bush and Congress involving themselves in the Schiavo matter. Three-quarters thought Congress got involved because of politics over principle, which could account for the 34 percent approval rating for Congress -- its lowest since 1997.
Republican lawmakers may also seek broader federal legislation on the rights of "incapacitated persons". "I think we are more likely to look at a general piece of legislation," said Senate Republican Conference Chairman Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, a staunch conservative who is often mentioned as a potential candidate for the presidency in 2008.
State governments have also been energized by the Schiavo case. Ten states have already introduced new end-of-life legislation.
Ironies abound in the Schiavo case. For one thing, Republicans have traditionally been the party that has opposed ‘activist judges, and fought to preserve and increase the power of the states over the Federal government. Their current position on the judiciary appears to reverse both positions.
There are others. For example, most of the 19 judges who reviewed the Schiavo case were conservatives appointed by Republican presidents. Having failed to obtain the rulings they sought, Republicans in Congress will now seek to limit the power of the judicial branch of government. There is even discussion of imposing term-limits on what have always been lifetime appointments to the bench. Those who wrote the U.S. Constitution insisted that the three branches of government – executive, legislative and judicial – be co-equal.
Then there’s the charge that Rep. DeLay led the very public campaign to save Schiavo’s life to divert attention from his current ethical and perhaps criminal activities associated with political fund-raising.
There is also the issue of his father, from whom he removed from life-support in the absence of a ‘living will’. He says the Schiavo case was different because she was not on life support, though most physicians believe that nutrition and hydration constitute life support because ending them ends life.
Yet another irony: When George W. Bush was governor of Texas, he signed a right-to-die law that lets a patient's surrogate make life-ending decisions on his or her behalf. The measure also allows Texas hospitals to disconnect patients from life-sustaining systems if a physician, in consultation with a hospital bioethics committee, concludes that the patient's condition is hopeless.
THE ROSA PARKS OF WW II
By William Fisher
The Japanese-American who waited 40 years for justice is dead.
Fred Korematsu, hailed by many as the Rosa Parks of the Second World War,
passed away in the Northern California community of Larkspur. He was 86.
The beginning of Korematsu’s 40 years started in a jail cell in Oakland, California. It passed through defeat after defeat in U.S. courts all the way to the Supreme Court, and ended with his total exoneration – and the award of the Presidential Medal of Honor.
In between was one of the most egregious chapters in the history of American civil rights.
In February 1942, following Japan's Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the internment of 120,000 U.S. residents of Japanese ancestry. Citizens and non-citizens alike were shipped off to camps.
But Korematsu refused to surrender. While his parents were sent off to internment, he was arrested, tried, convicted and jailed. In 1944, Roosevelt’s order was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Enter Ernest Besig, a lawyer and executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. Bessig wanted to find a case that would test the constitutionality of internment. Bessig came up with the $5,000 required to free Korematsu on bail, but the military police refused to release him.
Instead, he was taken to a racetrack, which was serving as a staging area for Japanese-Americans. He slept in a horse stall and later was sent to a camp in Topaz, Utah.
Meanwhile, his case was wending its way through the courts, and eventually all legal avenues had been exhausted. Internment ended in 1944, and Korematsu returned to San Francisco. He raised a family and worked as a draftsman. But his felony conviction kept him from getting a job at a large firm or with the government.
Then in 1981, a legal historian, Peter H. Irons, asked the Justice Department to show him the original documents in the case. There he discovered that the lawyer who had argued the Korematsu case for the government had lied to the Supreme Court.
Two years later, the case was reopened. Korematsu was offered a pardon, which he refused. He wanted a fair trial. Soon afterward, a federal court ruled that Korematsu had been tried based on flawed ‘evidence’ and his conviction was overturned.
Thus Korematsu ended a dark chapter in U.S. legal history.
Five years later, President Gerald R. Ford decried the internment as a "national mistake," and, in 1983, a unanimous federal commission found that the internment policies were not a matter of military necessity, and were based on "race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership".
Five years later, President Ronald Reagan called the internment a "grave injustice" authorized reparations of $20,000 each to thousands of surviving internees, including Korematsu. In 1999, President Clinton awarded Korematsu a presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.
President Clinton said, "In the long history of our country's constant search for justice, some names of ordinary citizens stand for millions of souls -- Plessy, Brown, Parks," Clinton said. "To that distinguished list today we add the name of Fred Korematsu”.
The ‘Plessy’ Clinton referred to was Homer Plessy, a 30-year old shoemaker, who was jailed in 1890 for sitting in the "White's" car of the East Louisiana Railroad. Plessy was a mix of seven-eighths white and one-eighths black. The Louisiana law still considered him black and, therefore, required him to sit in the "colored" car. He took his case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the law was unconstitutional. The court found against him, and it would not be until 1954 that the court would rule that "separate but equal" was no longer be the law of the land.
That decision, known as Brown v. Board of Education, involved a black third-grader named Linda Brown, who had to walk one mile in Topeka, Kansas, through a railroad switchyard to get to her black elementary school, even though a white elementary school was only seven blocks away. Linda's father, Oliver Brown, tried to enroll her in the white elementary school, but the principal of the school refused. With the help of Topeka's branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), in 1951 little Linda Brown sued the Topeka Board of Education. At the trial, the NAACP argued that segregated schools sent the message to black children that they were inferior to whites; therefore, the schools were inherently unequal. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which said in a unanimous 1954 ruling, “We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Leading Linda Brown’s legal team was Thurgood Marshall, who later became the first black Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Rosa Parks, who has been called the "mother of the civil rights movement", was a seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama when, in December of 1955, she refused to give up her seat on a city bus to a white passenger. The bus driver had her arrested. She was tried and convicted of violating a local ordinance. Her act sparked a citywide boycott of the bus system by blacks that lasted more than a year. The boycott raised an unknown clergyman named Martin Luther King, Jr., to national prominence and resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation on city buses.
For Fred Korematsu, however, the issue resurfaced in April 2004, when the question before the Supreme Court was whether U.S. courts could review challenges to the imprisonment of ‘enemy combatants’ held at Guantanamo Bay Naval Station in Cuba after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Korematsu, then 84, filed a friend-of-the-court brief saying, "The extreme nature of the government's position is all too familiar."
The result was a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the Bush administration's policy of detaining foreign nationals without legal process at Guantanamo Bay was unconstitutional.
“There are Arab Americans today who are going through what Japanese- Americans experienced years ago, and we can’t let that happen again,” said Korematsu.
Dorothy Ehrlich, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, told IPS, “"If it had not been for Fred Korematsu, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II -- this most shameful chapter in America's history -- would have been just a footnote in our history books. His actions have served to open the hearts and minds of an entire generation. In the aftermath of September 11, our ability to protect civil liberties has been strengthened immeasurably by the courageous actions of this one man, who some sixty years ago, quietly stood up for his constitutional rights."
The Japanese-American who waited 40 years for justice is dead.
Fred Korematsu, hailed by many as the Rosa Parks of the Second World War,
passed away in the Northern California community of Larkspur. He was 86.
The beginning of Korematsu’s 40 years started in a jail cell in Oakland, California. It passed through defeat after defeat in U.S. courts all the way to the Supreme Court, and ended with his total exoneration – and the award of the Presidential Medal of Honor.
In between was one of the most egregious chapters in the history of American civil rights.
In February 1942, following Japan's Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the internment of 120,000 U.S. residents of Japanese ancestry. Citizens and non-citizens alike were shipped off to camps.
But Korematsu refused to surrender. While his parents were sent off to internment, he was arrested, tried, convicted and jailed. In 1944, Roosevelt’s order was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Enter Ernest Besig, a lawyer and executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. Bessig wanted to find a case that would test the constitutionality of internment. Bessig came up with the $5,000 required to free Korematsu on bail, but the military police refused to release him.
Instead, he was taken to a racetrack, which was serving as a staging area for Japanese-Americans. He slept in a horse stall and later was sent to a camp in Topaz, Utah.
Meanwhile, his case was wending its way through the courts, and eventually all legal avenues had been exhausted. Internment ended in 1944, and Korematsu returned to San Francisco. He raised a family and worked as a draftsman. But his felony conviction kept him from getting a job at a large firm or with the government.
Then in 1981, a legal historian, Peter H. Irons, asked the Justice Department to show him the original documents in the case. There he discovered that the lawyer who had argued the Korematsu case for the government had lied to the Supreme Court.
Two years later, the case was reopened. Korematsu was offered a pardon, which he refused. He wanted a fair trial. Soon afterward, a federal court ruled that Korematsu had been tried based on flawed ‘evidence’ and his conviction was overturned.
Thus Korematsu ended a dark chapter in U.S. legal history.
Five years later, President Gerald R. Ford decried the internment as a "national mistake," and, in 1983, a unanimous federal commission found that the internment policies were not a matter of military necessity, and were based on "race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership".
Five years later, President Ronald Reagan called the internment a "grave injustice" authorized reparations of $20,000 each to thousands of surviving internees, including Korematsu. In 1999, President Clinton awarded Korematsu a presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.
President Clinton said, "In the long history of our country's constant search for justice, some names of ordinary citizens stand for millions of souls -- Plessy, Brown, Parks," Clinton said. "To that distinguished list today we add the name of Fred Korematsu”.
The ‘Plessy’ Clinton referred to was Homer Plessy, a 30-year old shoemaker, who was jailed in 1890 for sitting in the "White's" car of the East Louisiana Railroad. Plessy was a mix of seven-eighths white and one-eighths black. The Louisiana law still considered him black and, therefore, required him to sit in the "colored" car. He took his case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the law was unconstitutional. The court found against him, and it would not be until 1954 that the court would rule that "separate but equal" was no longer be the law of the land.
That decision, known as Brown v. Board of Education, involved a black third-grader named Linda Brown, who had to walk one mile in Topeka, Kansas, through a railroad switchyard to get to her black elementary school, even though a white elementary school was only seven blocks away. Linda's father, Oliver Brown, tried to enroll her in the white elementary school, but the principal of the school refused. With the help of Topeka's branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), in 1951 little Linda Brown sued the Topeka Board of Education. At the trial, the NAACP argued that segregated schools sent the message to black children that they were inferior to whites; therefore, the schools were inherently unequal. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which said in a unanimous 1954 ruling, “We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” Leading Linda Brown’s legal team was Thurgood Marshall, who later became the first black Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Rosa Parks, who has been called the "mother of the civil rights movement", was a seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama when, in December of 1955, she refused to give up her seat on a city bus to a white passenger. The bus driver had her arrested. She was tried and convicted of violating a local ordinance. Her act sparked a citywide boycott of the bus system by blacks that lasted more than a year. The boycott raised an unknown clergyman named Martin Luther King, Jr., to national prominence and resulted in the U.S. Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation on city buses.
For Fred Korematsu, however, the issue resurfaced in April 2004, when the question before the Supreme Court was whether U.S. courts could review challenges to the imprisonment of ‘enemy combatants’ held at Guantanamo Bay Naval Station in Cuba after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Korematsu, then 84, filed a friend-of-the-court brief saying, "The extreme nature of the government's position is all too familiar."
The result was a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the Bush administration's policy of detaining foreign nationals without legal process at Guantanamo Bay was unconstitutional.
“There are Arab Americans today who are going through what Japanese- Americans experienced years ago, and we can’t let that happen again,” said Korematsu.
Dorothy Ehrlich, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, told IPS, “"If it had not been for Fred Korematsu, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II -- this most shameful chapter in America's history -- would have been just a footnote in our history books. His actions have served to open the hearts and minds of an entire generation. In the aftermath of September 11, our ability to protect civil liberties has been strengthened immeasurably by the courageous actions of this one man, who some sixty years ago, quietly stood up for his constitutional rights."
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