By William Fisher
While the US Congress is busy doing nothing, the nothing they’re not doing contains stuff that’s really important.
Yes, even more important than naming middle schools and post offices (which they seem to have mastered).
For example, if there’s anyone left in Washington who doesn’t believe that the Republican Party’s opposition to everything is exactly that – even being against non-partisan measures that not long ago drew significant Republican enthusiasm – well just consider the brick wall Senator Jim Webb is crashing into just now.
Last year, Senator Jim Webb, Democrat of Virginia, introduced legislation to establish a bipartisan National Criminal Justice Commission, with support from more than 100 organizations, including the National Sheriffs’ Association, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the U.S. Conference of Mayors and the Innocence Project.
Webb’s National Criminal Justice Commission Act would create a blue-ribbon, bipartisan commission of experts charged with undertaking an 18-month top-to-bottom review of the nation’s criminal unfair, cruel and dysfunctional justice system and offer concrete recommendations for reform.
While blue-ribbon commissions are often seen in Washington as ways to sweep serious issues under the rug, we believe this one might have been different simply because of the guy leading the charge.
Jim Webb is no flaming liberal. He is a thoughtful Democrat, refreshingly undoctrinaire on a host of issues. He is as tenacious as a pitbull. He has a good eye for serous problems crying out for serious solutions.
Well, our justice/prison system has no trouble qualifying for that definition. In what much of the civilized world regards as a catastrophic failure of imagination, we have nurtured a love affair with locking people up. At this moment, according to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), 2,292,133 adults are incarcerated in US federal and state prisons, and county jails; thousands of alleged illegal immigrants being held in detention for deportation; and more thousands of young offenders being held in a range of juvenile facilities. The World Prison Brief puts the The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world.
During the past decade, our prison population has grown exponentially. Private for-profit prisons have experienced a windfall, since their revenue comes from the numbers of prison beds they fill. Judges using Federal minimum guidelines impose wildly different sentences for similar crimes.
We have more prisoners than China, North Korea, and Iran, and our rates of recidivism are the highest in the world.
In its first time out of the box, Senate Republicans blocked the passage of Webb’s initiative. In media coverage following the vote, writers from across the political spectrum condemned the Republican filibuster. Why? Just because. Were there substantive changes the Senate GOP wanted to make? If there were we never got to hear about them. Instead, there was the usual vote to bring the bill to the floor. It needed 60 votes to pass. It didn’t even come close.
Conservative columnist Reihan Salam called the vote against the creation of a Criminal Justice Commission an "absolute scandal” in the National Review.
The Virginian Pilot said in an editorial that the vote represented “Senate negligence” and the Roanoke Times said the vote “snuffs out the last fumes of hope that the legislative body can accomplish anything remotely useful.”
Sen. Webb says he is not deterred. He said: “We will keep fighting for a comprehensive review of the justice system, with the help of the thousands of sheriffs, police, mayors and justice advocates who have joined us in pressing for reform.”
Well. Good luck with that Senator. It still takes 60 votes to pass and, for the foreseeable future, all those law-and-order Republicans aren’t likely to do anything to disrupt the Wild West ambience they have come to love. They’ll be the first to tell you: “Inmates Don’t Vote.”
And while we are on the subject of Congress keeping busy doing nothing, The Washington Post reminds us that this week, the Senate is likely to take up a defense reauthorization bill that effectively – and unnecessarily – ties the hands of the President to deal with terrorism cases.
One is a requirement that terrorism suspects who are not U.S. nationals be held in military custody. We agree with the Post, which says, “Military detention should be an option available to the president, but requiring it in all cases prevents him from taking full advantage of some of the country’s most powerful counterterrorism tools.”
The Post reasons, “Law enforcement officials and national security specialists, for example, could be forced to hand over a suspect even if they were making headway in gathering intelligence. This could also thwart the FBI’s ability to surveil a suspected terror ring and gather information for fear that identifying suspects could force it to prematurely capture and hand over these individuals to the military.”
Makes sense to us!
Congress has also constructed yet another hog-tie for the President. Republicans have proposed that the executive branch be forbidden from using Defense Department funds to construct a U.S. facility or adapt an existing one to hold detainees now at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
“This provision,” says the Post, “is little more than fear-mongering and ignores the country’s long track record of imprisoning convicted terrorists, including “shoe bomber” Richard Reid, without incident. Lawmakers should also eliminate onerous restrictions on the president’s ability to transfer detainees to their home or third countries.”
We could not agree more.
Any Senate action would have to be reconciled with the House version of the bill, which Mr. Obama has rightly threatened to veto. A filibuster in the Senate, or any other reason to fail to reach agreement, would dump the whole issue in the lap of the Courts, thus ignoring the traditional role of the other two branches in matters of this kind.
The Post concludes: “The country needs a sensible antiterrorism policy to combat an unconventional and unrelenting enemy. The president and lawmakers should be the architects of such a plan.”
Amen, but don’t hold your breath.
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Bahrain: All the King’s Men
By William Fisher
With conflict wracking larger and more influential countries like Egypt and Syria, last week’s developments in Bahrain might well get pushed to the bottom of the world’s news budget or ignored altogether.
But that would be shameful and shortsighted.
Because what happened in the tiny Gulf kingdom last week is truly remarkable. A reigning monarch commissioned a report that was devastating in its condemnation of his regime – and the King accepted it and vowed to implement its recommendations.
Skeptics are saying talk is cheap – follow the feet. And where the Middle East is concerned, a healthy dollop of skepticism is always welcome.
Especially because the report to King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa left no room for doubt as to who was responsible for widespread death and destruction: All the King’s Men. All the King’s Men are Sunni Muslims. The vast majority of Bahrain’s people are Shia Muslims. The Royal Commission found this situation to be central to the conflict. (The King disagreed.)
The commission, headed by Egyptian judge Mahmoud Cherif Bassiouni, also found "systemic use" of “physical and psychological mistreatment, which in many cases amounted to torture, with respect to a large number of detainees" held in detention by the authorities.
The Guardian newspaper reports that the commission also demolished a key government claim, stating baldly that it found no "discernible link" between specific incidents in Bahrain and Iran — a charge heard repeatedly.
Bassiouni's team also found that some mosques and prayer houses that were destroyed by the government had no building permits. However, the report says, "The government should have realized that … the timing [and] the manner in which demolitions were conducted and the fact that these were primarily Shia … would be perceived as a collective punishment and … inflame the tension between the government and the Shia population".
The report also confirmed that hundreds of students were dismissed from university after being photographed demonstrating. And more than 1,600 people say they were dismissed or suspended from their jobs. It added that Shia employees were often treated differently from non-Shia, "creating a reasonable presumption that many were subjected to discrimination."
Maybe, in accepting the report and promising reforms, the Royal Family is simply trying to mollify its subjects. But window dressing is not going to impress the opposition. Just a whiff of insincerity in the dialogue the King says he wants and the people will be out in the street once more.
Correcting the abuses committed by the security forces will not be easy, but it is not impossible. The King needs to replace the people in charge of the security services. He must resist appointing someone who is a member of the Royal Family. The entire culture of the security forces must be changed. It must be fair. It must respect the rule of law. It must abandon torture. And it must be inclusive of Bahrain’s Shia majority. And King Hamad and his people need to recognize his people’s inherent right to peacefully protest. That’s a very tall order, but it is doable over time.
Much less certain is whether the pervasive discrimination felt by the Shia population can be reversed. The Shia majority complains of being zeroed out of competition for top jobs in both the public and private sectors and discriminated against in housing, finance and the country’s social life. They say this discrimination has existed for many years and has become firmly embedded in Bahraini culture, thus even more difficult to correct.
But unless the majority begins to see concrete signs that the King is at least trying to effect this transformation, we can expect more divisiveness and conflict, death and destruction.
King Hamad has a tough job ahead. But he has also an enormous opportunity. Pray that he takes it.
With conflict wracking larger and more influential countries like Egypt and Syria, last week’s developments in Bahrain might well get pushed to the bottom of the world’s news budget or ignored altogether.
But that would be shameful and shortsighted.
Because what happened in the tiny Gulf kingdom last week is truly remarkable. A reigning monarch commissioned a report that was devastating in its condemnation of his regime – and the King accepted it and vowed to implement its recommendations.
Skeptics are saying talk is cheap – follow the feet. And where the Middle East is concerned, a healthy dollop of skepticism is always welcome.
Especially because the report to King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa left no room for doubt as to who was responsible for widespread death and destruction: All the King’s Men. All the King’s Men are Sunni Muslims. The vast majority of Bahrain’s people are Shia Muslims. The Royal Commission found this situation to be central to the conflict. (The King disagreed.)
The commission, headed by Egyptian judge Mahmoud Cherif Bassiouni, also found "systemic use" of “physical and psychological mistreatment, which in many cases amounted to torture, with respect to a large number of detainees" held in detention by the authorities.
The Guardian newspaper reports that the commission also demolished a key government claim, stating baldly that it found no "discernible link" between specific incidents in Bahrain and Iran — a charge heard repeatedly.
Bassiouni's team also found that some mosques and prayer houses that were destroyed by the government had no building permits. However, the report says, "The government should have realized that … the timing [and] the manner in which demolitions were conducted and the fact that these were primarily Shia … would be perceived as a collective punishment and … inflame the tension between the government and the Shia population".
The report also confirmed that hundreds of students were dismissed from university after being photographed demonstrating. And more than 1,600 people say they were dismissed or suspended from their jobs. It added that Shia employees were often treated differently from non-Shia, "creating a reasonable presumption that many were subjected to discrimination."
Maybe, in accepting the report and promising reforms, the Royal Family is simply trying to mollify its subjects. But window dressing is not going to impress the opposition. Just a whiff of insincerity in the dialogue the King says he wants and the people will be out in the street once more.
Correcting the abuses committed by the security forces will not be easy, but it is not impossible. The King needs to replace the people in charge of the security services. He must resist appointing someone who is a member of the Royal Family. The entire culture of the security forces must be changed. It must be fair. It must respect the rule of law. It must abandon torture. And it must be inclusive of Bahrain’s Shia majority. And King Hamad and his people need to recognize his people’s inherent right to peacefully protest. That’s a very tall order, but it is doable over time.
Much less certain is whether the pervasive discrimination felt by the Shia population can be reversed. The Shia majority complains of being zeroed out of competition for top jobs in both the public and private sectors and discriminated against in housing, finance and the country’s social life. They say this discrimination has existed for many years and has become firmly embedded in Bahraini culture, thus even more difficult to correct.
But unless the majority begins to see concrete signs that the King is at least trying to effect this transformation, we can expect more divisiveness and conflict, death and destruction.
King Hamad has a tough job ahead. But he has also an enormous opportunity. Pray that he takes it.
WITHER OCCUPY?
By William Fisher
Whenever I can, I try to watch David Brooks and Mark Shields in their weekly conversations with Newshour host Jim Lehrer. The reason is that this is one of the few, very few, opportunities we get these days to hear the views of a conservative who is not frothing at the mouth and threatening to abolish three (or was it two?) Cabinet departments.
But every once in a while something David says brings me up short and last Friday was one of those whiles. He and Mark were talking about the Occupy movement. David was wondering what the end game was. He was saying there is no leadership and with no leadership Occupy’s objectives could never be translated into permanent political change. That kind of change happens only when there are people lobbying hard for it in Washington, and the Occupy folks have no lobbyists – in fact the very idea is anathema to them.
Shields took a different view. He said the Occupy movement had changed the national conversation about income distribution. That was a subject, said Shields, that hasn’t been seriously discussed among ordinary citizens forever.
Brooks looked surprised. He said he couldn’t remember any other subject that has been discussed more, by more people, with more solutions.
That got a big rise out of Shields. He had a look on his face that said, “This is preposterous.” It was clear they were bringing news from their respective parallel universes!
And, truth to tell, maybe there’s some “right” in both positions. Maybe, in David’s world of think tanks and policy wonks, income redistribution is on the agendas of most reputable economists. I would expect these guys to be reading The New York Times.
But, out in the hinterlands, where a good deal of Shields’s constituency is, this is not exactly the sexiest subject on the agenda. In fact, it is not unfair to say that it is a subject that causes people’s eyes to glaze over in rapid order.
This disconnect between the nation’s capitol and the nation’s heartland extends far beyond who’s getting how much of the national wealth pie. For that subject is subsumed by larger issues such as the “appropriate” roles and size of government.
The “Tea Party” embraced that question, but by and large their answers were un-constructive, motivated by pandering and based on ideology rather than fact. They looked wild-eyed and ill-informed.
When the Occupy Movement ends up in the corridors of power in our nation’s capitol – and, one way or another, it will -- it can’t afford to look ill-informed.
It must come with ideas the average voter can understand. These ideas would begin to right the wrongs of income concentration, without destroying our wealthy citizens or fomenting revolution.
The ideas are out there. Eventually, what Occupy will need is an audience of legislative champions who understand our Tax Code. And the importance of incrementalism.
Whenever I can, I try to watch David Brooks and Mark Shields in their weekly conversations with Newshour host Jim Lehrer. The reason is that this is one of the few, very few, opportunities we get these days to hear the views of a conservative who is not frothing at the mouth and threatening to abolish three (or was it two?) Cabinet departments.
But every once in a while something David says brings me up short and last Friday was one of those whiles. He and Mark were talking about the Occupy movement. David was wondering what the end game was. He was saying there is no leadership and with no leadership Occupy’s objectives could never be translated into permanent political change. That kind of change happens only when there are people lobbying hard for it in Washington, and the Occupy folks have no lobbyists – in fact the very idea is anathema to them.
Shields took a different view. He said the Occupy movement had changed the national conversation about income distribution. That was a subject, said Shields, that hasn’t been seriously discussed among ordinary citizens forever.
Brooks looked surprised. He said he couldn’t remember any other subject that has been discussed more, by more people, with more solutions.
That got a big rise out of Shields. He had a look on his face that said, “This is preposterous.” It was clear they were bringing news from their respective parallel universes!
And, truth to tell, maybe there’s some “right” in both positions. Maybe, in David’s world of think tanks and policy wonks, income redistribution is on the agendas of most reputable economists. I would expect these guys to be reading The New York Times.
But, out in the hinterlands, where a good deal of Shields’s constituency is, this is not exactly the sexiest subject on the agenda. In fact, it is not unfair to say that it is a subject that causes people’s eyes to glaze over in rapid order.
This disconnect between the nation’s capitol and the nation’s heartland extends far beyond who’s getting how much of the national wealth pie. For that subject is subsumed by larger issues such as the “appropriate” roles and size of government.
The “Tea Party” embraced that question, but by and large their answers were un-constructive, motivated by pandering and based on ideology rather than fact. They looked wild-eyed and ill-informed.
When the Occupy Movement ends up in the corridors of power in our nation’s capitol – and, one way or another, it will -- it can’t afford to look ill-informed.
It must come with ideas the average voter can understand. These ideas would begin to right the wrongs of income concentration, without destroying our wealthy citizens or fomenting revolution.
The ideas are out there. Eventually, what Occupy will need is an audience of legislative champions who understand our Tax Code. And the importance of incrementalism.
US Congress: Very Busy Doing Nothing at All
By William Fisher
While the US Congress is busy doing nothing, the nothing they’re not doing contains stuff that’s really important.
Yes, even more important than naming middle schools and post offices (which they seem to have mastered).
For example, if there’s anyone left in Washington who doesn’t believe that the Republican Party’s opposition to everything is exactly that – even being against non-partisan measures that not long ago drew significant Republican enthusiasm – well just consider the brick wall Senator Jim Webb is crashing into just now.
Last year, Senator Jim Webb, Democrat of Virginia, introduced legislation to establish a bipartisan National Criminal Justice Commission, with support from more than 100 organizations, including the National Sheriffs’ Association, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the U.S. Conference of Mayors and the Innocence Project.
Webb’s National Criminal Justice Commission Act would create a blue-ribbon, bipartisan commission of experts charged with undertaking an 18-month top-to-bottom review of the nation’s criminal unfair, cruel and dysfunctional justice system and offer concrete recommendations for reform.
While blue-ribbon commissions are often seen in Washington as ways to sweep serious issues under the rug, we believe this one might have been different simply because of the guy leading the charge.
Jim Webb is no flaming liberal. He is a thoughtful Democrat, refreshingly undoctrinaire on a host of issues. He is as tenacious as a pitbull. He has a good eye for serous problems crying out for serious solutions.
Well, our justice/prison system has no trouble qualifying for that definition. In what much of the civilized world regards as a catastrophic failure of imagination, we have nurtured a love affair with locking people up. At this moment, according to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), 2,292,133 adults are incarcerated in US federal and state prisons, and county jails; thousands of alleged illegal immigrants being held in detention for deportation; and more thousands of young offenders being held in a range of juvenile facilities. The World Prison Brief puts the The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world.
During the past decade, our prison population has grown exponentially. Private for-profit prisons have experienced a windfall, since their revenue comes from the numbers of prison beds they fill. Judges using Federal minimum guidelines impose wildly different sentences for similar crimes.
We have more prisoners than China, North Korea, and Iran, and our rates of recidivism are the highest in the world.
In its first time out of the box, Senate Republicans blocked the passage of Webb’s initiative. In media coverage following the vote, writers from across the political spectrum condemned the Republican filibuster. Why? Just because. Were there substantive changes the Senate GOP wanted to make? If there were we never got to hear about them. Instead, there was the usual vote to bring the bill to the floor. It needed 60 votes to pass. It didn’t even come close.
Conservative columnist Reihan Salam called the vote against the creation of a Criminal Justice Commission an "absolute scandal” in the National Review.
The Virginian Pilot said in an editorial that the vote represented “Senate negligence” and the Roanoke Times said the vote “snuffs out the last fumes of hope that the legislative body can accomplish anything remotely useful.”
Sen. Webb says he is not deterred. He said: “We will keep fighting for a comprehensive review of the justice system, with the help of the thousands of sheriffs, police, mayors and justice advocates who have joined us in pressing for reform.”
Well. Good luck with that Senator. It still takes 60 votes to pass and, for the foreseeable future, all those law-and-order Republicans aren’t likely to do anything to disrupt the Wild West ambience they have come to love. They’ll be the first to tell you: “Inmates Don’t Vote.”
And while we are on the subject of Congress keeping busy doing nothing, The Washington Post reminds us that this week, the Senate is likely to take up a defense reauthorization bill that effectively – and unnecessarily – ties the hands of the President to deal with terrorism cases.
One is a requirement that terrorism suspects who are not U.S. nationals be held in military custody. We agree with the Post, which says, “Military detention should be an option available to the president, but requiring it in all cases prevents him from taking full advantage of some of the country’s most powerful counterterrorism tools.”
The Post reasons, “Law enforcement officials and national security specialists, for example, could be forced to hand over a suspect even if they were making headway in gathering intelligence. This could also thwart the FBI’s ability to surveil a suspected terror ring and gather information for fear that identifying suspects could force it to prematurely capture and hand over these individuals to the military.”
Makes sense to us!
Congress has also constructed yet another hog-tie for the President. Republicans have proposed that the executive branch be forbidden from using Defense Department funds to construct a U.S. facility or adapt an existing one to hold detainees now at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
“This provision,” says the Post, “is little more than fear-mongering and ignores the country’s long track record of imprisoning convicted terrorists, including “shoe bomber” Richard Reid, without incident. Lawmakers should also eliminate onerous restrictions on the president’s ability to transfer detainees to their home or third countries.”
We could not agree more.
Any Senate action would have to be reconciled with the House version of the bill, which Mr. Obama has rightly threatened to veto. A filibuster in the Senate, or any other reason to fail to reach agreement, would dump the whole issue in the lap of the Courts, thus ignoring the traditional role of the other two branches in matters of this kind.
The Post concludes: “The country needs a sensible antiterrorism policy to combat an unconventional and unrelenting enemy. The president and lawmakers should be the architects of such a plan.”
Amen, but don’t hold your breath.
While the US Congress is busy doing nothing, the nothing they’re not doing contains stuff that’s really important.
Yes, even more important than naming middle schools and post offices (which they seem to have mastered).
For example, if there’s anyone left in Washington who doesn’t believe that the Republican Party’s opposition to everything is exactly that – even being against non-partisan measures that not long ago drew significant Republican enthusiasm – well just consider the brick wall Senator Jim Webb is crashing into just now.
Last year, Senator Jim Webb, Democrat of Virginia, introduced legislation to establish a bipartisan National Criminal Justice Commission, with support from more than 100 organizations, including the National Sheriffs’ Association, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the U.S. Conference of Mayors and the Innocence Project.
Webb’s National Criminal Justice Commission Act would create a blue-ribbon, bipartisan commission of experts charged with undertaking an 18-month top-to-bottom review of the nation’s criminal unfair, cruel and dysfunctional justice system and offer concrete recommendations for reform.
While blue-ribbon commissions are often seen in Washington as ways to sweep serious issues under the rug, we believe this one might have been different simply because of the guy leading the charge.
Jim Webb is no flaming liberal. He is a thoughtful Democrat, refreshingly undoctrinaire on a host of issues. He is as tenacious as a pitbull. He has a good eye for serous problems crying out for serious solutions.
Well, our justice/prison system has no trouble qualifying for that definition. In what much of the civilized world regards as a catastrophic failure of imagination, we have nurtured a love affair with locking people up. At this moment, according to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), 2,292,133 adults are incarcerated in US federal and state prisons, and county jails; thousands of alleged illegal immigrants being held in detention for deportation; and more thousands of young offenders being held in a range of juvenile facilities. The World Prison Brief puts the The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world.
During the past decade, our prison population has grown exponentially. Private for-profit prisons have experienced a windfall, since their revenue comes from the numbers of prison beds they fill. Judges using Federal minimum guidelines impose wildly different sentences for similar crimes.
We have more prisoners than China, North Korea, and Iran, and our rates of recidivism are the highest in the world.
In its first time out of the box, Senate Republicans blocked the passage of Webb’s initiative. In media coverage following the vote, writers from across the political spectrum condemned the Republican filibuster. Why? Just because. Were there substantive changes the Senate GOP wanted to make? If there were we never got to hear about them. Instead, there was the usual vote to bring the bill to the floor. It needed 60 votes to pass. It didn’t even come close.
Conservative columnist Reihan Salam called the vote against the creation of a Criminal Justice Commission an "absolute scandal” in the National Review.
The Virginian Pilot said in an editorial that the vote represented “Senate negligence” and the Roanoke Times said the vote “snuffs out the last fumes of hope that the legislative body can accomplish anything remotely useful.”
Sen. Webb says he is not deterred. He said: “We will keep fighting for a comprehensive review of the justice system, with the help of the thousands of sheriffs, police, mayors and justice advocates who have joined us in pressing for reform.”
Well. Good luck with that Senator. It still takes 60 votes to pass and, for the foreseeable future, all those law-and-order Republicans aren’t likely to do anything to disrupt the Wild West ambience they have come to love. They’ll be the first to tell you: “Inmates Don’t Vote.”
And while we are on the subject of Congress keeping busy doing nothing, The Washington Post reminds us that this week, the Senate is likely to take up a defense reauthorization bill that effectively – and unnecessarily – ties the hands of the President to deal with terrorism cases.
One is a requirement that terrorism suspects who are not U.S. nationals be held in military custody. We agree with the Post, which says, “Military detention should be an option available to the president, but requiring it in all cases prevents him from taking full advantage of some of the country’s most powerful counterterrorism tools.”
The Post reasons, “Law enforcement officials and national security specialists, for example, could be forced to hand over a suspect even if they were making headway in gathering intelligence. This could also thwart the FBI’s ability to surveil a suspected terror ring and gather information for fear that identifying suspects could force it to prematurely capture and hand over these individuals to the military.”
Makes sense to us!
Congress has also constructed yet another hog-tie for the President. Republicans have proposed that the executive branch be forbidden from using Defense Department funds to construct a U.S. facility or adapt an existing one to hold detainees now at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
“This provision,” says the Post, “is little more than fear-mongering and ignores the country’s long track record of imprisoning convicted terrorists, including “shoe bomber” Richard Reid, without incident. Lawmakers should also eliminate onerous restrictions on the president’s ability to transfer detainees to their home or third countries.”
We could not agree more.
Any Senate action would have to be reconciled with the House version of the bill, which Mr. Obama has rightly threatened to veto. A filibuster in the Senate, or any other reason to fail to reach agreement, would dump the whole issue in the lap of the Courts, thus ignoring the traditional role of the other two branches in matters of this kind.
The Post concludes: “The country needs a sensible antiterrorism policy to combat an unconventional and unrelenting enemy. The president and lawmakers should be the architects of such a plan.”
Amen, but don’t hold your breath.
Saturday, November 19, 2011
Arab Spring, Two Point 0
Egypt: Demonstrators Push to
Reverse Army’s Power Grab.
By William Fisher
As the date approaches for Egypt’s first “free” elections in thirty years, tens of thousands of protesters gathered in the iconic Tahrir Square Friday to demand that the Army back off its proposal to give itself perpetual veto power over a new constitution and continued freedom from public scrutiny.
Egyptians will go to the polls on November 28 for the first of three rounds of Parliamentary elections. These will be followed early next year by the nation’s first “free” presidential election. In the past, until 2005, under the Mubarak regime, both parliamentary and presidential elections were tightly restricted to candidates from only one political party – Mubarak’s National Democratic Party (NDP), and universally criticized for widespread fraud and voter intimidation.
In 2005, then US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice cancelled a trip to Egypt scheduled for the following week because of Egypt’s arrest and imprisonment of a leading candidate, Ayman Nour of the “Tomorrow” party. He was released in time to run for president in the election of 2005, where he gained slightly more than seven per cent of the vote. That was the first year that Egypt ever ran a multi-party election, after considerable pressure from the US and other countries. Nour was then not released from prison until 2009.
Since the fall of President Hosni Mubarak in February, Egypt has been ruled by the Army, through the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), a group of generals, plus a civilian government they appointed. The wide array of groups and parties that sparked the February revolution have been highly critical of the SCAF and its civilian puppets for a host of what they consider retrograde and anti-democratic actions.
These include dragging their feet on reforms such as lifting the so-called “emergency laws” that give the authorities license to arrest without cause, try civilians before military courts and convict and sentence defendants without lawyers or sufficient time to prepare adequate defenses. Some 12,000 people have been charged under military rules since the revolution began. The army’s military police have been criticized by most political actors for continuing the prisoner torture policies of the Mubarak regime.
Criticism of the armed forces is a crime under Egyptian law. It is being enforced by the SCAF and numerous journalists and bloggers have been tried before military courts and jailed for substantial prison terms under this Mubarak-era law.
Following the Parliamentary elections, a committee of Parliament will draft a new Constitution. Through its civilian government, the Army has recently proposed that a number of “supra-Constitutional” measures be adopted. SCAF wants the military's budget shielded from scrutiny by Parliament and the public and SCAF to have veto-power over all military-related matters in the Constitution.
According to Agence France Presse (AFP), the Muslim Brotherhood and numerous other groups of various political persuasions spearheaded Friday's Tahrir Square protests, united by the conviction that the military must transfer power to a civilian government as soon as possible.
The contested “extra Constitutional” document, presented by Deputy Prime Minister Ali Silmi, drew fire from virtually every quarter. He responded: "The army is the only guardian of Egypt at this difficult time. Even if we disagree with some of their actions, it can be resolved through discussions and not through pressuring and threatening the military. Egypt, in some cases, is no more than masses and crowds."
The Muslim Brotherhood, through its Freedom and Justice Party, may emerge as the largest bloc in the election, the first since the fall of Mubarak. In the 2005 election, the Brotherhood, though officially banned by the government as a political party, won about 20 per cent of the votes for parliament. Their candidates ran as “independents.”
The SCAF, which took charge after Mubarak's ouster and suspended the
Constitution and parliament, says it will hand over power once a new president is elected. Parliamentary elections will start on November 28 and are expected to end in March.
AFP reports that “chants were heard in Cairo and Alexandria comparing Chief Marshal Hussein Tantawi, the current head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), to ousted President Hosni Mubarak.”
In addition to the Muslim Brotherhood, the majority political parties are participating in criticism of the SCAF. These include the April 6 Youth Movement, Salafi parties and many liberal and pro-democratic groups.
Marches have also been held from Tahrir to the Maspero (government) television station demanding investigations into the killing over more than 25 Coptic demonstrators last month. Coptic Christians, who comprise about ten per cent of Egypt’s 80 million people, have long complained of being discriminated against by Egypt’s Sunni government and majority Sunni population.
Another contentious issue in this pre-election period is whether former members of Mubarak’s NDP party would be eligible to run for seats in Parliament. Last week, Egypt's Administrative court issued a verdict affirming their right to run.
Despite being widely blamed for corruption during the years of Mubarak's rule, NDP members are still considered popular in some parts of Egypt and are considered difficult competitors.
AFP reports that the SCAF did not want suffer the consequences of excluding hundreds of thousands of Mubarak's ruling party members or stand against the thousands of Ex-NDP members intending to run. SCAF’s view is that it is now up to voters to determine if there is a place for the NDP in the next Parliament.
Egypt’s SCAF remains largely a mystery. It is totally opaque, as is its handpicked civilian “government.” All of its members were colleagues of Mubarak’s; some were protégés. These generals have become wealthy through property and other deals allegedly facilitated by the Mubarak regime.
Some see the SCAF scurrying to free itself of its governing job as soon as possible. It has no experience in governance. None of its generals have ever lived in a democratic society. Others see it as wanting to hang on to power even after the elections. Some believe SCAF sees itself as the only actor left capable of bringing peace and stability.
This perception is found throughout the developing world and is frequently true. Others contend that SCAF and its members have too much dirty laundry that would be hung out in public if real democracy ever came to Egypt. In a real democracy, the people would be free to criticize the armed forces and to question its budget in public.
The Egyptian military needs to be no more, no less, accountable than every other public asset. And its needs to be accountable to civilians, a concept understood by the country’s generals but never experienced in real life.
Accountability is among the lessons learned from Egypt’s continuing contact with the US military, which has been responsible for facilitating more than a billion dollars in military procurements annually. With that aid come other plums, such as visits to the US and accompanying senior US military officers as observers on field trips and war games.
But how well SCAF has learned the US lessons remains unclear. Everyday Egyptians aren’t much help here; they obviously can’t demand what they’ve never known. To get the generals to accept civilian rule and civilian rules will depend on those who were victorious in Tahrir Square rising to warn the country of the danger of continuing military rule or excessive military influence in the elected governments of the future.
That will be Arab Spring 2 point 0.
Reverse Army’s Power Grab.
By William Fisher
As the date approaches for Egypt’s first “free” elections in thirty years, tens of thousands of protesters gathered in the iconic Tahrir Square Friday to demand that the Army back off its proposal to give itself perpetual veto power over a new constitution and continued freedom from public scrutiny.
Egyptians will go to the polls on November 28 for the first of three rounds of Parliamentary elections. These will be followed early next year by the nation’s first “free” presidential election. In the past, until 2005, under the Mubarak regime, both parliamentary and presidential elections were tightly restricted to candidates from only one political party – Mubarak’s National Democratic Party (NDP), and universally criticized for widespread fraud and voter intimidation.
In 2005, then US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice cancelled a trip to Egypt scheduled for the following week because of Egypt’s arrest and imprisonment of a leading candidate, Ayman Nour of the “Tomorrow” party. He was released in time to run for president in the election of 2005, where he gained slightly more than seven per cent of the vote. That was the first year that Egypt ever ran a multi-party election, after considerable pressure from the US and other countries. Nour was then not released from prison until 2009.
Since the fall of President Hosni Mubarak in February, Egypt has been ruled by the Army, through the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), a group of generals, plus a civilian government they appointed. The wide array of groups and parties that sparked the February revolution have been highly critical of the SCAF and its civilian puppets for a host of what they consider retrograde and anti-democratic actions.
These include dragging their feet on reforms such as lifting the so-called “emergency laws” that give the authorities license to arrest without cause, try civilians before military courts and convict and sentence defendants without lawyers or sufficient time to prepare adequate defenses. Some 12,000 people have been charged under military rules since the revolution began. The army’s military police have been criticized by most political actors for continuing the prisoner torture policies of the Mubarak regime.
Criticism of the armed forces is a crime under Egyptian law. It is being enforced by the SCAF and numerous journalists and bloggers have been tried before military courts and jailed for substantial prison terms under this Mubarak-era law.
Following the Parliamentary elections, a committee of Parliament will draft a new Constitution. Through its civilian government, the Army has recently proposed that a number of “supra-Constitutional” measures be adopted. SCAF wants the military's budget shielded from scrutiny by Parliament and the public and SCAF to have veto-power over all military-related matters in the Constitution.
According to Agence France Presse (AFP), the Muslim Brotherhood and numerous other groups of various political persuasions spearheaded Friday's Tahrir Square protests, united by the conviction that the military must transfer power to a civilian government as soon as possible.
The contested “extra Constitutional” document, presented by Deputy Prime Minister Ali Silmi, drew fire from virtually every quarter. He responded: "The army is the only guardian of Egypt at this difficult time. Even if we disagree with some of their actions, it can be resolved through discussions and not through pressuring and threatening the military. Egypt, in some cases, is no more than masses and crowds."
The Muslim Brotherhood, through its Freedom and Justice Party, may emerge as the largest bloc in the election, the first since the fall of Mubarak. In the 2005 election, the Brotherhood, though officially banned by the government as a political party, won about 20 per cent of the votes for parliament. Their candidates ran as “independents.”
The SCAF, which took charge after Mubarak's ouster and suspended the
Constitution and parliament, says it will hand over power once a new president is elected. Parliamentary elections will start on November 28 and are expected to end in March.
AFP reports that “chants were heard in Cairo and Alexandria comparing Chief Marshal Hussein Tantawi, the current head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), to ousted President Hosni Mubarak.”
In addition to the Muslim Brotherhood, the majority political parties are participating in criticism of the SCAF. These include the April 6 Youth Movement, Salafi parties and many liberal and pro-democratic groups.
Marches have also been held from Tahrir to the Maspero (government) television station demanding investigations into the killing over more than 25 Coptic demonstrators last month. Coptic Christians, who comprise about ten per cent of Egypt’s 80 million people, have long complained of being discriminated against by Egypt’s Sunni government and majority Sunni population.
Another contentious issue in this pre-election period is whether former members of Mubarak’s NDP party would be eligible to run for seats in Parliament. Last week, Egypt's Administrative court issued a verdict affirming their right to run.
Despite being widely blamed for corruption during the years of Mubarak's rule, NDP members are still considered popular in some parts of Egypt and are considered difficult competitors.
AFP reports that the SCAF did not want suffer the consequences of excluding hundreds of thousands of Mubarak's ruling party members or stand against the thousands of Ex-NDP members intending to run. SCAF’s view is that it is now up to voters to determine if there is a place for the NDP in the next Parliament.
Egypt’s SCAF remains largely a mystery. It is totally opaque, as is its handpicked civilian “government.” All of its members were colleagues of Mubarak’s; some were protégés. These generals have become wealthy through property and other deals allegedly facilitated by the Mubarak regime.
Some see the SCAF scurrying to free itself of its governing job as soon as possible. It has no experience in governance. None of its generals have ever lived in a democratic society. Others see it as wanting to hang on to power even after the elections. Some believe SCAF sees itself as the only actor left capable of bringing peace and stability.
This perception is found throughout the developing world and is frequently true. Others contend that SCAF and its members have too much dirty laundry that would be hung out in public if real democracy ever came to Egypt. In a real democracy, the people would be free to criticize the armed forces and to question its budget in public.
The Egyptian military needs to be no more, no less, accountable than every other public asset. And its needs to be accountable to civilians, a concept understood by the country’s generals but never experienced in real life.
Accountability is among the lessons learned from Egypt’s continuing contact with the US military, which has been responsible for facilitating more than a billion dollars in military procurements annually. With that aid come other plums, such as visits to the US and accompanying senior US military officers as observers on field trips and war games.
But how well SCAF has learned the US lessons remains unclear. Everyday Egyptians aren’t much help here; they obviously can’t demand what they’ve never known. To get the generals to accept civilian rule and civilian rules will depend on those who were victorious in Tahrir Square rising to warn the country of the danger of continuing military rule or excessive military influence in the elected governments of the future.
That will be Arab Spring 2 point 0.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
US Congress: Very Busy Doing Nothing at All
By William Fisher
While the US Congress is busy doing nothing, the nothing they’re not doing contains stuff that’s really important.
Yes, even more important than naming middle schools and post offices (which they seem to have mastered).
For example, if there’s anyone left in Washington who doesn’t believe that the Republican Party’s opposition to everything is exactly that – even being against non-partisan measures that not long ago drew significant Republican enthusiasm – well just consider the brick wall Senator Jim Webb is crashing into just now.
Last year, Senator Jim Webb, Democrat of Virginia, introduced legislation to establish a bipartisan National Criminal Justice Commission, with support from more than 100 organizations, including the National Sheriffs’ Association, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the U.S. Conference of Mayors and the Innocence Project.
Webb’s National Criminal Justice Commission Act would create a blue-ribbon, bipartisan commission of experts charged with undertaking an 18-month top-to-bottom review of the nation’s criminal unfair, cruel and dysfunctional justice system and offer concrete recommendations for reform.
While blue-ribbon commissions are often seen in Washington as ways to sweep serious issues under the rug, we believe this one might have been different simply because of the guy leading the charge.
Jim Webb is no flaming liberal. He is a thoughtful Democrat, refreshingly undoctrinaire on a host of issues. He is as tenacious as a pitbull. He has a good eye for serous problems crying out for serious solutions.
Well, our justice/prison system has no trouble qualifying for that definition. In what much of the civilized world regards as a catastrophic failure of imagination, we have nurtured a love affair with locking people up. At this moment, according to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), 2,292,133 adults are incarcerated in US federal and state prisons, and county jails; thousands of alleged illegal immigrants being held in detention for deportation; and more thousands of young offenders being held in a range of juvenile facilities. The World Prison Brief puts the The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world.
During the past decade, our prison population has grown exponentially. Private for-profit prisons have experienced a windfall, since their revenue comes from the numbers of prison beds they fill. Judges using Federal minimum guidelines impose wildly different sentences for similar crimes.
We have more prisoners than China, North Korea, and Iran, and our rates of recidivism are the highest in the world.
In its first time out of the box, Senate Republicans blocked the passage of Webb’s initiative. In media coverage following the vote, writers from across the political spectrum condemned the Republican filibuster. Why? Just because. Were there substantive changes the Senate GOP wanted to make? If there were we never got to hear about them. Instead, there was the usual vote to bring the bill to the floor. It needed 60 votes to pass. It didn’t even come close.
Conservative columnist Reihan Salam called the vote against the creation of a Criminal Justice Commission an "absolute scandal” in the National Review.
The Virginian Pilot said in an editorial that the vote represented “Senate negligence” and the Roanoke Times said the vote “snuffs out the last fumes of hope that the legislative body can accomplish anything remotely useful.”
Sen. Webb says he is not deterred. He said: “We will keep fighting for a comprehensive review of the justice system, with the help of the thousands of sheriffs, police, mayors and justice advocates who have joined us in pressing for reform.”
Well. Good luck with that Senator. It still takes 60 votes to pass and, for the foreseeable future, all those law-and-order Republicans aren’t likely to do anything to disrupt the Wild West ambience they have come to love. They’ll be the first to tell you: “Inmates Don’t Vote.”
And while we are on the subject of Congress keeping busy doing nothing, The Washington Post reminds us that this week, the Senate is likely to take up a defense reauthorization bill that effectively – and unnecessarily – ties the hands of the President to deal with terrorism cases.
One is a requirement that terrorism suspects who are not U.S. nationals be held in military custody. We agree with the Post, which says, “Military detention should be an option available to the president, but requiring it in all cases prevents him from taking full advantage of some of the country’s most powerful counterterrorism tools.”
The Post reasons, “Law enforcement officials and national security specialists, for example, could be forced to hand over a suspect even if they were making headway in gathering intelligence. This could also thwart the FBI’s ability to surveil a suspected terror ring and gather information for fear that identifying suspects could force it to prematurely capture and hand over these individuals to the military.”
Makes sense to us!
Congress has also constructed yet another hog-tie for the President. Republicans have proposed that the executive branch be forbidden from using Defense Department funds to construct a U.S. facility or adapt an existing one to hold detainees now at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
“This provision,” says the Post, “is little more than fear-mongering and ignores the country’s long track record of imprisoning convicted terrorists, including “shoe bomber” Richard Reid, without incident. Lawmakers should also eliminate onerous restrictions on the president’s ability to transfer detainees to their home or third countries.”
We could not agree more.
Any Senate action would have to be reconciled with the House version of the bill, which Mr. Obama has rightly threatened to veto. A filibuster in the Senate, or any other reason to fail to reach agreement, would dump the whole issue in the lap of the Courts, thus ignoring the traditional role of the other two branches in matters of this kind.
The Post concludes: “The country needs a sensible antiterrorism policy to combat an unconventional and unrelenting enemy. The president and lawmakers should be the architects of such a plan.”
Amen, but don’t hold your breath.
While the US Congress is busy doing nothing, the nothing they’re not doing contains stuff that’s really important.
Yes, even more important than naming middle schools and post offices (which they seem to have mastered).
For example, if there’s anyone left in Washington who doesn’t believe that the Republican Party’s opposition to everything is exactly that – even being against non-partisan measures that not long ago drew significant Republican enthusiasm – well just consider the brick wall Senator Jim Webb is crashing into just now.
Last year, Senator Jim Webb, Democrat of Virginia, introduced legislation to establish a bipartisan National Criminal Justice Commission, with support from more than 100 organizations, including the National Sheriffs’ Association, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the U.S. Conference of Mayors and the Innocence Project.
Webb’s National Criminal Justice Commission Act would create a blue-ribbon, bipartisan commission of experts charged with undertaking an 18-month top-to-bottom review of the nation’s criminal unfair, cruel and dysfunctional justice system and offer concrete recommendations for reform.
While blue-ribbon commissions are often seen in Washington as ways to sweep serious issues under the rug, we believe this one might have been different simply because of the guy leading the charge.
Jim Webb is no flaming liberal. He is a thoughtful Democrat, refreshingly undoctrinaire on a host of issues. He is as tenacious as a pitbull. He has a good eye for serous problems crying out for serious solutions.
Well, our justice/prison system has no trouble qualifying for that definition. In what much of the civilized world regards as a catastrophic failure of imagination, we have nurtured a love affair with locking people up. At this moment, according to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), 2,292,133 adults are incarcerated in US federal and state prisons, and county jails; thousands of alleged illegal immigrants being held in detention for deportation; and more thousands of young offenders being held in a range of juvenile facilities. The World Prison Brief puts the The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world.
During the past decade, our prison population has grown exponentially. Private for-profit prisons have experienced a windfall, since their revenue comes from the numbers of prison beds they fill. Judges using Federal minimum guidelines impose wildly different sentences for similar crimes.
We have more prisoners than China, North Korea, and Iran, and our rates of recidivism are the highest in the world.
In its first time out of the box, Senate Republicans blocked the passage of Webb’s initiative. In media coverage following the vote, writers from across the political spectrum condemned the Republican filibuster. Why? Just because. Were there substantive changes the Senate GOP wanted to make? If there were we never got to hear about them. Instead, there was the usual vote to bring the bill to the floor. It needed 60 votes to pass. It didn’t even come close.
Conservative columnist Reihan Salam called the vote against the creation of a Criminal Justice Commission an "absolute scandal” in the National Review.
The Virginian Pilot said in an editorial that the vote represented “Senate negligence” and the Roanoke Times said the vote “snuffs out the last fumes of hope that the legislative body can accomplish anything remotely useful.”
Sen. Webb says he is not deterred. He said: “We will keep fighting for a comprehensive review of the justice system, with the help of the thousands of sheriffs, police, mayors and justice advocates who have joined us in pressing for reform.”
Well. Good luck with that Senator. It still takes 60 votes to pass and, for the foreseeable future, all those law-and-order Republicans aren’t likely to do anything to disrupt the Wild West ambience they have come to love. They’ll be the first to tell you: “Inmates Don’t Vote.”
And while we are on the subject of Congress keeping busy doing nothing, The Washington Post reminds us that this week, the Senate is likely to take up a defense reauthorization bill that effectively – and unnecessarily – ties the hands of the President to deal with terrorism cases.
One is a requirement that terrorism suspects who are not U.S. nationals be held in military custody. We agree with the Post, which says, “Military detention should be an option available to the president, but requiring it in all cases prevents him from taking full advantage of some of the country’s most powerful counterterrorism tools.”
The Post reasons, “Law enforcement officials and national security specialists, for example, could be forced to hand over a suspect even if they were making headway in gathering intelligence. This could also thwart the FBI’s ability to surveil a suspected terror ring and gather information for fear that identifying suspects could force it to prematurely capture and hand over these individuals to the military.”
Makes sense to us!
Congress has also constructed yet another hog-tie for the President. Republicans have proposed that the executive branch be forbidden from using Defense Department funds to construct a U.S. facility or adapt an existing one to hold detainees now at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
“This provision,” says the Post, “is little more than fear-mongering and ignores the country’s long track record of imprisoning convicted terrorists, including “shoe bomber” Richard Reid, without incident. Lawmakers should also eliminate onerous restrictions on the president’s ability to transfer detainees to their home or third countries.”
We could not agree more.
Any Senate action would have to be reconciled with the House version of the bill, which Mr. Obama has rightly threatened to veto. A filibuster in the Senate, or any other reason to fail to reach agreement, would dump the whole issue in the lap of the Courts, thus ignoring the traditional role of the other two branches in matters of this kind.
The Post concludes: “The country needs a sensible antiterrorism policy to combat an unconventional and unrelenting enemy. The president and lawmakers should be the architects of such a plan.”
Amen, but don’t hold your breath.
Friday, November 11, 2011
Egypt: Global day of solidarity against military junta's trials on Saturday
By William Fisher
Tomorrow, Saturday, November 12, will witness demonstrations in more than 20 capital cities around the world in support of an estimated 12,000 Egyptians who have been subjected to military trials by the country's pro tem leaders, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.
The Cairo Daily News reports that protestors will converge on Egyptian embassies and consulates in DC, New York, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Stockholm, Oakland, Melbourne, Montreal, Geneva, Manila and elsewhere.
The demonstrations come only weeks before the first round of Parliamentary elections since the fall of President Hosni Mubarak in February.
The generals who now run Egypt have failed to lift the so-called Emergency Laws that have put an iron straightjacket on Egyptian civil rights for thirty years. These laws were used by the now deposed Mubarak to grant the security services and police virtually unfettered freedom to arrest, detain, and often torture. In this respect, little has changed since Mubarak was driven from office.
In Cairo, a new video will be released, revealing the extreme brutality used by the Egyptian military against protestors during the Maspero massacre, the newspaper said.
The Global Day of Action was called by Egyptian movements concerned that the revolution is under attack and could be crushed by growing repression. On October 9th, 28 civilians - most of them Christian Copts -- were killed at Maspero in a continuation of previous violence aimed at silencing dissent. Now the military prosecutor is charging the victims of the Maspero with causing the attack.
Copts make up about five per cent of Egypt's population. They have complained for years that they are discriminated against by the government and some of the people in employment, housing and other issues. Tensions between Copts and Muslims have turned violent many times in the past.
Lobna Darwish, an activist who was present at the Maspero massacre, said "In October the junta ran us over with tanks and shot us down in the street while manipulating state media to incite sectarian violence. The military is trying to entrench its power while weakening the revolutionary forces that ousted Mubarak. But we are still fighting for our revolution."
The newspaper noted that, under the slogan "Defend the Revolution - end military trials in Egypt", "global protests will challenge the military junta's increasing repression and express solidarity with the 12,000 Egyptians subjected to court martials, unable to call witnesses and with limited access to lawyers. These include imprisoned blogger Alaa Abdel Fattah. Alaa refused to co-operate with the military prosecutor on Oct 30th, taking a principled stance against the illegitimacy of the process - a stance since taken up widely by Egyptian social movements."
Mona Seif, Alaa Abdel Fattah's sister and co-ordinator of the No Military Trials for Civilians campaign, said "Military trials are an illegitimate & desperate measure the military junta uses to attack the social movements it fears. They've dragged 12,000 civilians through these kangaroo courts in 9 months - six times the number Mubarak tried in 30 years. Minors are serving in adult prisons, death sentences handed down, torture runs rampant."
The solidarity protests are emerging particularly from the global Occupy/Decolonize movements, with the 99% gaining inspiration from each other's struggle. After the violent eviction in Oakland, Egyptians marched on the US Embassy, while Egyptian flags and Alaa's image were raised at occupations in the US and London. Meanwhile, governments in the US and Europe continue to ally themselves with a military junta intent on stifling real democracy and social justice.
Philip Rizk said "The US gives the Egyptian military $1.3 billion in aid every year. The bullets they kill us with are made in the US. Governments the world over continue their long-term support for the military rulers of Egypt. Force your governments to stop supporting the Egyptian junta. Stop the attacks on the revolution."
Imprisoned blogger Alaa's mother, maths professor and prominent political activist Dr. Laila Soueif, is about to enter her second week of an open-ended hunger strike to protest the illegal imprisonment of her son. Soueif, 55, is a founding member of the Kefaya movement.
Soueif said "I reject that civilians be subjected to court-martial under laws put in place by illegitimate authorities that have forcefully usurped the rule of our country for decades" and promises to "continue my hunger strike until the release of my son, no matter how long his detention lasts."
Alaa is now in Tora maximum security prison. His wife, Manal, is due to give birth to their first child, Khalid, on November 24th. In a tweet, shortly before his arrest, Alaa wrote: "Dear friends and comrades, the best way to help me is to raise a lot of noise about the injustice of civilians facing military trials in Egypt."
And to make matters even more confusing for ordinary Egyptians, the ruling generals have recently proposed a document of supra-constitutional principles
Islamists as well as other political parties have continued their fervent opposition to a proposal by Deputy Prime Minister Ali El Selmi earlier this month, and have promised to stage massive protests on Friday, November 18 if their demands are not met.
El-Selmi's proposed charter of constitutional principles has triggered condemnation for the powers it gives the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), overriding an elected government.
According to the proposed charter, the new parliament will elect the 100-member constituent assembly, which will consist of 80 members from outside the parliament and 20 elected MPs reflecting the percentage of seats won by their parties.
However, SCAF has the power to veto any article it deems contradictory to the principles of previous constitutions and the interim constitutional declaration instated on March 30, 2011. SCAF would then refer the contentious article to the Supreme Constitutional Court for a final decision.
In case the assembly fails to draft the constitution within the set six-month timeframe, SCAF will have the power to dissolve it and appoint a new assembly.
Egypt's generals have ridden a rollercoaster journey through respect and affection during the Tahrir Square demonstrations to a state of suspicion and contempt now. The good will the army once enjoyed is virtually non-existent now; in the view of the demonstrators the military betrayed the Tahrir Revolution and reverted to the tactics of Egyptian strongmen dictators.
Meanwhile, the newspaper Ahram English Online has published a chronology of the SCAF's "brief history of injustice" during its tenure as the ruling power in Egypt. It outlines a number of "crimes against human rights" that the SCAF has vowed to investigate. At the top of the list is the violence in Maspero last month, in which the army has been implicated. The article also notes that despite the military's promise to investigate, there have yet to be any significant arrest over many of the abuses. The violations include torture, vandalism of churches, violence against protesters and corruption.
The army's position is that its actions have been necessary to maintain law and order and prevent the post-revolutionary euphoria from morphing into lawless chaos.
Tomorrow, Saturday, November 12, will witness demonstrations in more than 20 capital cities around the world in support of an estimated 12,000 Egyptians who have been subjected to military trials by the country's pro tem leaders, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces.
The Cairo Daily News reports that protestors will converge on Egyptian embassies and consulates in DC, New York, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Stockholm, Oakland, Melbourne, Montreal, Geneva, Manila and elsewhere.
The demonstrations come only weeks before the first round of Parliamentary elections since the fall of President Hosni Mubarak in February.
The generals who now run Egypt have failed to lift the so-called Emergency Laws that have put an iron straightjacket on Egyptian civil rights for thirty years. These laws were used by the now deposed Mubarak to grant the security services and police virtually unfettered freedom to arrest, detain, and often torture. In this respect, little has changed since Mubarak was driven from office.
In Cairo, a new video will be released, revealing the extreme brutality used by the Egyptian military against protestors during the Maspero massacre, the newspaper said.
The Global Day of Action was called by Egyptian movements concerned that the revolution is under attack and could be crushed by growing repression. On October 9th, 28 civilians - most of them Christian Copts -- were killed at Maspero in a continuation of previous violence aimed at silencing dissent. Now the military prosecutor is charging the victims of the Maspero with causing the attack.
Copts make up about five per cent of Egypt's population. They have complained for years that they are discriminated against by the government and some of the people in employment, housing and other issues. Tensions between Copts and Muslims have turned violent many times in the past.
Lobna Darwish, an activist who was present at the Maspero massacre, said "In October the junta ran us over with tanks and shot us down in the street while manipulating state media to incite sectarian violence. The military is trying to entrench its power while weakening the revolutionary forces that ousted Mubarak. But we are still fighting for our revolution."
The newspaper noted that, under the slogan "Defend the Revolution - end military trials in Egypt", "global protests will challenge the military junta's increasing repression and express solidarity with the 12,000 Egyptians subjected to court martials, unable to call witnesses and with limited access to lawyers. These include imprisoned blogger Alaa Abdel Fattah. Alaa refused to co-operate with the military prosecutor on Oct 30th, taking a principled stance against the illegitimacy of the process - a stance since taken up widely by Egyptian social movements."
Mona Seif, Alaa Abdel Fattah's sister and co-ordinator of the No Military Trials for Civilians campaign, said "Military trials are an illegitimate & desperate measure the military junta uses to attack the social movements it fears. They've dragged 12,000 civilians through these kangaroo courts in 9 months - six times the number Mubarak tried in 30 years. Minors are serving in adult prisons, death sentences handed down, torture runs rampant."
The solidarity protests are emerging particularly from the global Occupy/Decolonize movements, with the 99% gaining inspiration from each other's struggle. After the violent eviction in Oakland, Egyptians marched on the US Embassy, while Egyptian flags and Alaa's image were raised at occupations in the US and London. Meanwhile, governments in the US and Europe continue to ally themselves with a military junta intent on stifling real democracy and social justice.
Philip Rizk said "The US gives the Egyptian military $1.3 billion in aid every year. The bullets they kill us with are made in the US. Governments the world over continue their long-term support for the military rulers of Egypt. Force your governments to stop supporting the Egyptian junta. Stop the attacks on the revolution."
Imprisoned blogger Alaa's mother, maths professor and prominent political activist Dr. Laila Soueif, is about to enter her second week of an open-ended hunger strike to protest the illegal imprisonment of her son. Soueif, 55, is a founding member of the Kefaya movement.
Soueif said "I reject that civilians be subjected to court-martial under laws put in place by illegitimate authorities that have forcefully usurped the rule of our country for decades" and promises to "continue my hunger strike until the release of my son, no matter how long his detention lasts."
Alaa is now in Tora maximum security prison. His wife, Manal, is due to give birth to their first child, Khalid, on November 24th. In a tweet, shortly before his arrest, Alaa wrote: "Dear friends and comrades, the best way to help me is to raise a lot of noise about the injustice of civilians facing military trials in Egypt."
And to make matters even more confusing for ordinary Egyptians, the ruling generals have recently proposed a document of supra-constitutional principles
Islamists as well as other political parties have continued their fervent opposition to a proposal by Deputy Prime Minister Ali El Selmi earlier this month, and have promised to stage massive protests on Friday, November 18 if their demands are not met.
El-Selmi's proposed charter of constitutional principles has triggered condemnation for the powers it gives the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), overriding an elected government.
According to the proposed charter, the new parliament will elect the 100-member constituent assembly, which will consist of 80 members from outside the parliament and 20 elected MPs reflecting the percentage of seats won by their parties.
However, SCAF has the power to veto any article it deems contradictory to the principles of previous constitutions and the interim constitutional declaration instated on March 30, 2011. SCAF would then refer the contentious article to the Supreme Constitutional Court for a final decision.
In case the assembly fails to draft the constitution within the set six-month timeframe, SCAF will have the power to dissolve it and appoint a new assembly.
Egypt's generals have ridden a rollercoaster journey through respect and affection during the Tahrir Square demonstrations to a state of suspicion and contempt now. The good will the army once enjoyed is virtually non-existent now; in the view of the demonstrators the military betrayed the Tahrir Revolution and reverted to the tactics of Egyptian strongmen dictators.
Meanwhile, the newspaper Ahram English Online has published a chronology of the SCAF's "brief history of injustice" during its tenure as the ruling power in Egypt. It outlines a number of "crimes against human rights" that the SCAF has vowed to investigate. At the top of the list is the violence in Maspero last month, in which the army has been implicated. The article also notes that despite the military's promise to investigate, there have yet to be any significant arrest over many of the abuses. The violations include torture, vandalism of churches, violence against protesters and corruption.
The army's position is that its actions have been necessary to maintain law and order and prevent the post-revolutionary euphoria from morphing into lawless chaos.
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