I feel a little impotent sitting here 5,000 miles away from the US in the run-up to an election that is of major importance for the entire world community.
I have cast my vote. I've done what I can to persuade all my voting friends and relations to do the same.
Now I sit here and wait. And think.
I've dared to dream a little about what might be possible if Kerry's elected.... But I don't want to go too far down that road because (a) it might not happen and (b) he might not be nearly as much different from Bush as we would like.
What needs to happen now, it seems to me, is a total rollback of the concept and practice of the US global empire. An equal voice and equal stake for each of God's children. An end to this whole arrogant nonsense about "manifest destiny."
100,000 Iraqi deaths. Let's inscribe that number on our hearts.
(Update: read Scott Ritter's excellent column, The war on Iraq has made moral cowards of us all.)
Maybe the sheer criminal folly of the venture in Iraq will be enough to persuade Americans of the craziness of the idea of our country trying to dictate everything to everyone else in the world?
I realize this persuasion campaign is not going to succeed overnight. But if Kerry gets elected, at least we can start the conversation.
If Bush gets "re-"elected, the conversation probably won't start right away... But maybe when it does start, it'll be even more serious... Because without a doubt if Bush is elected he's going to create many, many more criminal blunders before we can think about starting rollback.
If the election is close, and long-drawn-out a la 2000, then I guess Bush will continue acting as though he's the boss till it's finally decided.
I have a question. If Kerry gets elected, how can we expect Bush to behave throughout his remaining 10 weeks in office? "Helpfully", from the point of view of easing Kerry's transition into office and easing the move toward a less arrogant, more multilateral stance in world affairs? Or "snittishly", like a little boy who realizes he'll soon lose his chance to play with all those lovely toy weapons, so decides he's going to fire as many of them as he can before the adults come back and take them away from him?
... Just asking...
Things have gotten fairly busy for me here in Beirut. One project I've been pursuing a little is on the whole concept of "unilateral" withdrawals, such as Sharon currently espouses for Gaza. The Israelis undertook an earlier such withdrawal, back in May 2000, from the occupied zone they'd held inside South Lebanon since 1978. And that withdrawal brought a good measure of stability to the border between the two states.
But Gaza is different from South Lebanon in at least two key respects. So why is Sharon so intent on making the withdrawal from Gaza unilateral, I wonder?? Especially since keeping it unilateral will without a doubt mean it's a very ragged withdrawal under fire.
The withdrawal from South Lebanon was different from the one Sharon's envisaging for Gaza in these vital ways:
(1) There was a government in Lebanon that was ready and eager to reassert as much control as possible over south Lebanon after the Israeli withdrawal, and
(2) The population of the occupied zone here, though it had risen strongly against Israel's continued occupation, nevertheless has its roots and family landholdings here. So these people so could be expected to consider the reclamation of those lands after the withdrawal a real gain that should not easily be put in jeopardy thereafter by, for example, continuing to lob missiles over the Israeli border.
Neither of these factors applies in Gaza. There is no government there... and Sharon's stress on not negotiating the withdrawal with any Palestinian party means that it would be almost impossible for the PA or any other governing body to take root there, post the withdrawal.
And neither does most of the population of Gaza have any longheld family landholdings or other vested interests in the Strip. Eighty percent of the people in Gaza are refugees from 1948, from inside Israel. Israel has completely refused to listen to their claims for return or compensation. And most of them only have mean hovels to eke out a living in, in the sprawling refugee camps of Gaza. They have almost nothing left to lose, and their longstanding claims against Israel are still outstanding. Why should they be content weith "merely" reclaiming a small degree more control over their very unsatisfactory current living environment?
And actually, the degree of control they gain will not be large. Sharon is insisting on retaining control over all the entry and exit points around Gaza, and over the air-space; he also insists on retaining the right to re-enter any point of Gaza he wants, post the so-called "withdrawal"... So what kind of self-government does that allow the Palestinians of Gaza? Far, far less than the Black South Africans got in their Bantustans... and nobody anywhere else in the world (except Israel and South Africa) expected them to be able to live with that.
Indeed, that form of apartheid was deemed by the UN to be a "crime against humanity".
So why, I ask again, is Sharon so intent on making his planned withdrawal from Gaza "unilateral"?
I think I have one part of the answer...
The best explanation I can come up with is that, with or without the continued presence of Israeli settlers inside the Gaza Strip he intends to keep right on using the Strip as a free-fire zone.
You see, if the "withdrawal" of Israeli forces-- which in any case, as he has promised, will not be a full and final withdrawal-- takes place under any form of a negotiated agreement, the terms of that agreement will necessarily place some constraints on his ability to send Israeli forces back in again whenever he should please.
If it didn't place any such constraints, it would not be worth the paper it was written on... (Of course, you could say exactly that about the Oslo Accords, from the Palestinian point of view, since he over-rode the territorial provisions of Oslo in just that same way, back in 2002.)
But Sharon can't bear the idea of being constrained in any way by outsiders, at all!
So that, I think, is the main reason he's continuing to insist that the "withdrawal" he proposes from Gaza be unilateral: so he can keep on using Gaza as a free-fire zone.
So if he's going to be sending Israeli troops back into Gaza on a regular basis, and continuing to bomb the Strip from air, sea, and air whenever he pleases, what kind of a "withdrawal" is that, you might ask? Not much of one at all, in military terms... I do think, however, that he may be a little more serious about withdrawing the 8,000-some Israeli settlers from Gaza, than the troops.
This makes great sense for him, from several points of view:
(2) In addition, it leaves the whole of Gaza much "freer" to be a free-fire zone for the IDF since the IDF won't have to worry at all about the effects of any possible escalation on the settlers' lovely lifestyle.
(3) The planned "withdrawal" comes with many added political/diplomatic benefits for Sharon, too. It makes him look more "moderate" for world opinion. It keeps the Americans off his back (if they should ever care to get on it)-- since he can say, "Oh don't bother me about your road-map... I'll get there later when the time's right, etc etc... But for now, look, I'm making this extremely magnanimous move to withdraw from Gaza, so let me go ahead with that.
(4) In connection with the above, it also allows the nationwide settler movement to perform a lengthy, highly dramatic rendering of the "settlers resist their dispossession" road-show, like the one they previously performed around the issue of withdrawing from Yamit, in the Sinai. The "point" of this performance is to show world public opinion-- but especially the Americans-- how very "difficult" it is to organize a withdrawal of these hardy settler pioneers from anywhere at all-- so for G-d's sake don't even ask us to withdraw them from the West Bank, as well!
What I've also been thinking about but haven't had time write here yet is, of course, the whole effect of Arafat's decline on Palestinian leadership politics, and especially in the context of Sharon's Gaza "withdrawal" proposal.
Let me just leave it at this. Arafat's mental functioning has been in a very poor shape for several months now, already. In essence, the political transition to a post-Arafat era has beern underway for all of that time... Now, we are still obviously in the midst of it.
Abu Mazen is a decent placeholder. Can he be more than that? Only if this time around--unlike in 2003-- the Americans give him a LOT more help in realizing at least some basic political gains for the Palestinian people.
At this point, I'm not holding my breath thinking that this is going to happen. But who knows?
Yasser Arafat reportedly collapsed yesterday evening while eating soup with present "prime minister" Ahmed Qurei (Abu Alaa) and former PM Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen). The new reports coming out of the Muqataa compound in Ramallah where he has been imprisoned by the Israelis since March 2002 give a hint of the unseemly political jockeying and chaos that are underway there as contenders for power try to position themselves for the succession era.
The AP's Muhammed Daraghmeh writes this:
However, other Palestinian officials, including his spokesman Nabil Abu Rdeneh, denied that such a committee had been formed.
When looked at from that perspective, the sad effects of the many political mistakes that Arafat has made over past decades are evident. But his personal flaws are so deep that-- as I have written a number of times here and elsewhere--he started to think increasingly that the Palestinian question was all about him. Sharon was then able to play to that fantasy like a maestro, making it seem in the world of international diplomacy that the Palestinian issue was indeed all "about" dealing, or not dealing, with Arafat.
I've been following Arafat's political progress fairly closely for 30 years now-- I last saw him in person in the Muqataa, last February--and I can honestly say that I don't think he's a bad person... Just extremely, extremely limited in his political capabilities and personal vision.
At one level he's quite a phenomenon. The post-colonial world has in the past couple of decades--tragically-- seen all too many of what the Africans call "big men". You know: men who in their youth led daring and visionary independence movements, who were then handed the reins of power and spent some years in the heady and sometimes productive phase of nation-building... but whose rule later hardens into the autocracy/kleptocracy of the "big man", who has come to identify his own fate almost totally with that of his "nation"...
Arafat skipped through that middle phase--the one of nation-building--almost completely.
That is one dimension of the tragedy of Arafat...
Another is that I really don't think he ever understood the sinews of real strategic power in any real way at all. He understood grievance, and was endlessly willing and able to play that whining tune. And he was nearly always--with some notable exceptions-- a master of tactics. But a strategy that might direct what all those tactics andf all that sense of grievance should lead to? No, he never understood that.
If he had, he would not-- after his return to the occupied homeland in 1994-- have disbanded and battled against all the grassroots, mass civilian organizations in the West Bank and Gaza whose very steadfastness and liberationist creativity throughout by then 27 years of foreign military occupation had succeeded in bringing him back to the homeland long after the Israelis had determined that he and the whole PLO should be eliminated from history.
If he had understood the sinews of real popular power, he would never have wilfully cut his ties with the communities of the far-flung and in many cases very hard-pressed Palestinian diaspora, as he did by agreeing that a vote for a "national" authority that was held in 1996 should exclude all the Palestinian living as refugees outside the homeland. (Look at the contrast with the votes of recent years held for Bosnians or Afghans: in those votes, there was no question of disfranchising people simply because they were refugees.)
If Arafat had understood the sinews of power, he would never have placed his people's fate so firmly in the hands of a Washington that is almost structurally incapable of being evenhanded, and taken it so far away from the realm of international law, international legitimacy, and international coalition-building...
Okay, I can make all these laments about the old man's shortcomings. But the fact is that for many, many Palestinians Sharon's (and Arafat's) ploy of making the issue into one that was all "about" Arafat succeeded to the extent that it caused them to rally defensively and almost reflexively around "the old man" and his position as their "ra'is" (president).
And yes, of course it has been a continuing outrage that Sharon has treated the man who is the Palestinians' elected leader in such a humiliating way... Who could deny that?
Now, however, we are most likely entering an era when the most lasting of Arafat's bitter legacies will start to have its effect: the danger-fraught period of political "succession".
As the AP clip I included above indicates, the succession period is likely to be highly contentious and damaging.
That fact is certainly one of his legacies, since the main method of his rule until now has been to set up large numbers of institutions of overlapping jurisdiction with the express aim of keeping all the people "beneath" him competing against each other for his time, attention, and resources. He has never really had an interest in building political or other institutions of lasting stability and durability-- for fear that the people who headed such institutions effectively might one day be able to compete against him.
This is, by the way, typical "big man"-ism. Think Mobuto, or Marcos.
I see that over at the BBC website, and doubtless elsewhere as well, pundits are starting to offer "mentions" of which individual they think is going to emerge as the next leader. I'm not going to get into that game. At this perilous point in the history of the Palestinians and their neighbors the Israelis, I don't think that the rise or fall of one or another individual within the existing PA/PLO structures makes much difference... I'll be looking at what happens to those structures, and to their relative durability vis-a-vis the much more stably anchored structures of the Palestinian Islamists, in a broader way. And from that standpoint, the fortunes of the secular Palestinian nationalists don't look good. But I'll have to wait for another time to write about that.
AP's Christopher Chester has a really clear "Q&A" presentation of the facts around the looting of the explosives from Al-Qaqaa.
He goes thru the following facts:
-- that the IAEA monitoring team had previously gathered all or most of such potentially nuclear-trigger-able high explosives from Iraq in Al-Qaqaa, for easier monitoring, and had checked and renewed the seals on the bunkers containing them on March 15, 2003, shortly before they were ordered to leave when Bush issued his ultimatum for the war;
-- that twice in early April, huge US military convoys had stopped at Al-Qaqaa to regroup or whatever as they made their way toward Baghdad. One of these had people in it who searched (unsuccessfully) for chemical weapons, but neither of them had anyone who showed any interest in the massive high-explosive cache -- though information about its location and importance was easily available from the IAEA should the US have been interested.
Then, this:
A. The unit that arrived April 3 reported some looting, and a spokesman for the brigade that arrived April 10 says looters were at the site. A month later, on May 8, a visiting American team found the plant heavily looted and several looters in the area, an Army official said Wednesday.
Al-Qaqaa is a large installation with more than 80 buildings that could house weapons, and it's unclear when and over how long a period of time the extremely heavy material was carted away.
___
Q. Did U.S. troops ever search the facility for the high explosives?
A. It appears that the first time U.S. troops searched specifically for high explosives was on May 27, 2003, after a purported request by the U.N. nuclear agency on May 3. The troops found that the seals had been broken. It's not known whether they did a further accounting of the materials themselves.
___
Q. If the Americans found the seals broken, did they inform the nuclear agency?
A. It doesn't seem so. The nuclear agency says it first learned of the disappearance of the explosives from the Iraqi government on Oct. 10, 2004. The Pentagon would not say whether it had informed the nuclear agency that the high explosives were not where they were supposed to be.
___
Q. Why didn't U.S. troops make an effort earlier than May 27, 2003 to account for the explosives?
A. Troop commanders have said they had no orders to search for high explosives — only for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. Saddam's alleged hidden stockpiles of these weapons of mass destruction were the Bush administration's justification for the war. The nuclear agency had warned about HMX in a report to the United Nations in February 2003 but did not specifically mention Al-Qaqaa.
___
Q. Was the U.N. nuclear agency in Iraq in the immediate aftermath of the invasion?
A. No. The inspectors pulled out before the invasion, and the U.S.-led coalition has not allowed their return for a resumption of general inspections. The coalition did invite inspectors to return briefly on two occasions for specific tasks, neither at Al-Qaqaa.
___
Q. Did the nuclear agency have legal custody of the site once the coalition invaded?
A. The agency never had legal custody, was not in charge of the facility or responsible for securing it overall.
Many people have expressed a concern that in the run-up to next Tuesday's election, the Bushites might be tempted to launch an "October surprise" in the form of some militarily spectacular action ... with the most "popular" targets for such a "Wag the Dog" exercise being identified as either (1) Fallujah or (2) some portion of the Iranian nuclear complex.
A number of friends have asked my evaluation of such fears. They are not totally baseless or irrational. In 1981, the context in which Menachem Begin launched the military attack against Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor was precisely the context of a hard-fought election at home. In fact, from the many years I lived in and have been concerned by Lebanon, I can tell you that nearly every election inside Israel was--until PM Barak finally withdrew his troops from this country in 2000-- prefaced by the sitting government in Israel launching some extremely lethal new escalation against this poor benighted neighbor.
(And people wonder why many Arabs have a jaded view of Israel's "democracy"?)
I don't under-estimate for a minute the degree to which Bush and many people in his entourage take many of their political and military cues from their friends in Israel. Nor do I under-esimate the "native political wiliness" of a person like Karl Rove, whose willingness to resort to electoral dirty tricks has in the past known almost no bounds.
Having said all that, though, I think a Bush-team-generated "October surprise" of the above-mentioned kind is quite unlikely this time around. And for that, I think we have largely the good sense of the Spanish electorate to thank...
Remember how mad the Spanish voters got when they thought that Bush buddy Jose-Maria Aznar was trying to make political capital out of a (genuine) national security crisis in their country?
Now I'm assuming that Aznar is a politically smart guy, who thought he knew his people, and therefore thought it would "play well" for his election campaign when he tried to blame the horrific Madrid train bombings on the Basque separatists (as a way of diverting attention from any possibility that the bombs might have been linked to his toadying policy toward Bush's military outrage in Iraq).
But did he miscall it!
Popular unease over Aznar's policy toward Iraq was already at such a high point that when the Spaniards saw him dodging and weaving and trying to sow internal contention at home rather than admit to the unpopularity of his Iraq policy... that his ploy ended up swinging the critical mass of public opinion against him.
Now okay. I know that many of the circumstances surrounding the posssibility of the Bushies launching a militaristic "October surprise" within the next six days would be very different. But I'm assuming two things. One, that the Bush team has examined what happened to Aznar very carefully indeed. And two, that they realize that popular unease among the US electorate with regard to the country's military stance in Iraq is at such a high point that they could not with any degree of assurance necessarily predict that a militaristic "surprise" would turn voters in Bush's favor.
At this point, indeed, it might even have the same effect as what happened in those last crucial pre-election days in Spain, and turn voters massively against the Prez.
Okay, I know this is Helena writing this, not Karl Rove. I am trying to make it Helena stripped of any wishful thinking; just the cool analytical Helena. But even then, I realize I probably think differently from that nasty-minded risk-taker Karl Rove.
But I still think that launching an "October surprise" at this point would be too big a risk even for Rove to take.
Further to this recent JWN post on JFDZ's, today I found a really excellent report that Human Rights First issued in June on the topic.
So far I've only been able to read the report's well-argued Introduction. It notes that the existence of JFDZ's at Gitmo and Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan is well known...
In addition, there are detention facilities that multiple sources have reported are maintained by the United States in various officially undisclosed locations, including facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Jordan, on the British possession of Diego Garcia, and on U.S. war ships at sea. U.S. government officials have alluded to detention facilities in undisclosed locations, declining to deny their existence or refusing to comment on reports of their existence.
... What is unknown about this detention system still outweighs what is known about it. But facilities within it share in common key features that – while having unclear benefits in the nation’s struggle against terrorism – make inappropriate detention and abuse not only likely, but virtually inevitable.
The Introduction concludes that:
Finally, even if some valuable information is being obtained, there are standards on the treatment of prisoners that cannot be set aside. The United States was founded on a core set of beliefs that have served the nation very well over two centuries. Among the most basic of these beliefs is that torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment is wrong, arbitrary detention is an instrument of tyranny, and no use of government power should go unchecked. The refusal to disclose the identity of detainees, prolonged incommunicado detention, the use of secret detention centers, and the exclusion of judicial or icrc oversight combine to remove fundamental safeguards against torture and ill-treatment and arbitrary detention. Current practices which violate these principles must be stopped immediately.
Brilliant US heartland blogger (and JWN linkee) Marine's Girl has a great report on her blog today, on a John Edwards rally she went to in Lima, Ohio on Sunday.
Ohio is of course a crucial swing state in next Tuesday's election. (So is her present home state, Michigan.) Of course a Democratic Party rally doesn't provide a representative cross-section of the American populace. But JWN readers--especially those of you outside the US-- might really enjoy MG's record of what she found there.
If you haven't read her blog before you should know that her boyfriend, also a strong Bush critic, is a Marines sargeant who has been forced to extend his service in Iraq long after he thought he could quit the Marines.
Read this part, for example:
Veteran Iraqi blog-meistress Riverbend has had three good posts (out of three-- a great record, Riv!) so far in October. Thank God she's back, even if only intermittently.
The most recent one is a strong appeal to American voters not to inflict another four years of Bush rule on her country (or indeed, on ours).
The one before that is a great disquisition on the recourse to valium during a war.
Here is one great excerpt:
She wrote about 'Will', someone who had emailed her with an urgent question...
We had to use it during the first week of April, as the tanks started rolling into Baghdad. We had an older aunt staying at our house (she had been evacuated from her area) and along with my cousin, his wife, his two daughters, and an uncle, the house was crowded and- at bizarre moments- almost festive.
The bombing had gotten very heavy and our eating, and sleeping schedules were thrown off balance. Everything seemed to revolve around the attack on Baghdad- we'd hastily cook and eat during the lulls in bombing and we'd get snatches of sleep in between the 'shock and awe'. There were a few nights where we didn't sleep at all- we'd just stay up and sit around, staring at each other in the dark, listening to the explosions and feeling the earth tremble beneath.
So imagine this. It's a chilly night in Baghdad and the black of the sky suddenly lights up with flashes of white- as if the stars were exploding in the distance. The bombing was so heavy, we could hear the windows rattling, the ground shaking and the whiz of missiles ominously close. We were all gathered in the windowless hallway- adults and children. My cousin's daughters were wrapped in blankets and they sat huddled up close to their mother. They were so silent, they might have been asleep- but I knew they weren't because I could vaguely see the whites of their eyes, open wide, across the lamp-lit hallway.
Now, during the more lively hours of a shock and awe bombing storm, there's no way you can have a normal conversation. You might be able to blurt out a few hasty sentences, but eventually, there's bound to be an explosion that makes you stop, duck your head and wonder how the house didn't fall down around you.
Throughout this, we sit around, mumbling silent prayers, reviewing our lives and making vague promises about what we'd do if we got out of this one alive. Sometimes, one of us would turn to the kids and crack some lame joke or ask how they were doing. Often, the answer would be in the form of a wane smile or silence.
So where does the valium fit in? Imagine through all of this commotion, an elderly aunt who is terrified of bombing. She was so afraid, she couldn't, and wouldn't, sit still. She stood pacing the hallway, cursing Bush, Blair and anyone involved with the war- and that was during her calmer moments. When she was feeling especially terrified, the curses and rampage would turn into a storm of weeping and desolation (during which she imagines she can't breathe)- we were all going to die. They would have to remove us from the rubble of our home. We'd burn alive. And so on. And so forth.
During those fits of hysteria, my cousin would quietly, but firmly, hand her a valium and a glass of water. The aunt would accept both and in a matter of minutes, she'd grow calmer and a little bit more sane. This aunt wasn't addicted to valium, but it certainly came in handy during the more hectic moments of the war.
I guess it's happening a lot now after the war too. When the load gets too heavy, people turn to something to comfort them. Abroad, under normal circumstances, if you have a burden- you don't have to bear it alone. You can talk to a friend or relative or psychiatrist or SOMEONE. Here, everyone has their own set of problems- a death in the family, a detainee, a robbery, a kidnapping, an explosion, etc. So you have two choices- take a valium, or start a blog.
Although White House lawyers said they rushed to devise a new judicial structure that could handle serious Qaeda terrorists, many of the detainees sent to Guantánamo turned out to be low-level militants, Taliban fighters and men simply caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Pentagon's efforts to gather intelligence from more valuable prisoners were also deeply flawed, military intelligence officers said, complicating the prosecution of some detainees and nearly paralyzing efforts to release others.So the problematic interrogation techniques were one factor that delayed the holding of any form of hearing for the Gitmo detainees. Here was another:
in several instances, military officials said, Mr. Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul D. Wolfowitz, resisted moving forward with prosecutions, in part because they felt the cases were weak.Again, quite mind-boggling. You have prosecution cases that appear to be "weak"... So do you therefore apologize to the people you have been detaining for this many months already, say, "Gosh, we're sorry, we now realize you were just riff-raff on the battlefield," give them a nice compensatory payment, and help them to get back to their homes? You might think that would be the decent thing to do? Also, perhaps, smart, in that it might help to mitigate some of the considerable anger that the continuation of the detentions at Gitmo has caused throughout the world....?
It quickly became apparent that few of the prisoners captured in Afghanistan were the sort of hardened terrorists the administration had hoped for.Gosh, if it weren't so bloody tragic it would all seem like a farce. "The Keystone Cops do Gitmo". Something ike that. And these are the people who brag that they know how to increase our nation's security?
"It became obvious to us as we reviewed the evidence that, in many cases, we had simply gotten the slowest guys on the battlefield,'' said Lt. Col. Thomas S. Berg, a member of the original military legal team set up to work on the prosecutions. "We literally found guys who had been shot in the butt.''
The reserve officer chosen by Mr. Rumsfeld to lead the intelligence operation at Guantánamo, Maj. Gen. Michael E. Dunlavey, was told after his arrival there in February 2002 that as many as half of the initial detainees were thought to be of little or no intelligence value, two officers familiar with the briefings said. He also found that the prisoners included elderly and emotionally disturbed Afghan men, including one tribal elder so wizened that interrogators nicknamed him "Al Qaeda Claus."
The order that established the military commissions on Nov. 13, 2001 [that was the order under whose authority the whole Gitmo complex was set up], authorized the Pentagon to hold and prosecute any foreigners designated by the president as suspected terrorists.Unbelievable! The Pentagon and White House had been assuring us all that the people they'd shipped to Gitmo were "the worst of the worst"... and then at some point after they have gotten them there, for "most"-- that is, more than 50 percent-- of them, they can't even fill out a one-page form telling the White House why it is that the president should designate this particular person even to be a "suspected" terrorist.
On Jan. 22, 2002, at the request of the White House counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales, Pentagon lawyers directed intelligence officers at Guantánamo to fill out a one-page form for each prisoner, certifying the president's "reason to believe" their involvement with terrorism, officials said.
But within weeks, intelligence officers began reporting back to the Pentagon that they did not have enough evidence on most prisoners to even complete the forms, officials said.
By March 21, Defense Department officials indicated they would hold the Guantánamo prisoners indefinitely and on different legal grounds - as "enemy combatants" in a war against the United States.Meanwhile, a host of other problems were busy incubating in the nasty animal-type cages in which the Gitmo detainees were being held:
In public, the administration continued to maintain that the prisoners were both frighteningly dangerous and a likely font of vital intelligence. "They may well have information about future terrorist attacks against the United States," said Vice President Dick Cheney. "We need that information."... So we then had the bizarre picture of Elliott Abrams, infamous and indeed criminally responsible participant in some of the Reagan administration's worst human-rights abuses in Central America, being one of the two NSC officials who were designated by Condi to try to draw up a whole new strategy to deal with the Gitmo detainees and the thousands of Afghan detainees whom the administration was holding by then (spring 2002) within Afghanistan...
But at the State Department, diplomats were awash in complaints from foreign governments, many of them allies in the Afghan war, about the open-ended imprisonment of their citizens. F.B.I. agents and Justice Department officials were struck by how few strong prosecution cases there seemed to be, current and former officials said.
Officials said that C.I.A. officers who were trying to recruit some Guantánamo detainees as agents [what did I tell you? See 'South Africa' above ~HC] raised another fear: that the camp could become America's madrasa, or Islamic school, radicalizing prisoners by its harsh conditions, the indoctrination of militant leaders and the detainees' focused study of the Koran - the only book they were initially given to read.
Officials on the National Security Council staff were particularly uneasy. The discussions that produced the president's Nov. 13 military order had been dominated by a small circle of White House lawyers overseen by Mr. Cheney. Ms. Rice, like Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, had been excluded, officials said, an embarrassing slight given her role as a mediator on national security issues.
"There was real concern that if detainees were harshly treated and deprived of due process, they were going to end up turning against the United States, if they had not already... We were not making any converts."Duh.
a 31-year-old Dane was sent home last February after signing an agreement to refrain from further militant activity. But last month, he said in an interview that he was on his way to Chechnya to fight with other Muslims, and invited Americans to use his earlier pledge "as toilet paper." (The man later retracted those statements, and Danish officials promised to keep him under close watch.)Look, the situation at Gitmo got so bad that even John Ashcroft got worried about it. That's how bad it was:
Officials of the Justice Department's criminal division, who worked closely with the F.B.I., were grappling with other questions. They saw the Guantánamo detentions as a source of cascading problems: angry foreign allies, a tarnishing of America's image overseas and declining cooperation in international counterterrorism efforts.Golden also has some good material about the role played by the military lawyers who were appointed as defense counsel in the (very small number of) cases brought before the special military review "commission" (= quasi court; but not a real court) that was estabished at Gitmo. As I've written about here before, these lawyers have done a good job, not least because they're very concerned to uphold the whole system of military justice in which they've been trained... Also, because people in the uniformed military in general (as opposed to the cowboys at the CIA and elsewhere) deeply understand the vaue of international commitments like the Geneva Conventions, on the protections of which US military personnel themselves rely, in the event they should be captured by foreign military forces.
"This was an issue of basic fairness," one former senior official involved in the discussions said. "The never-ending detentions were creating a lot of animosity among our allies. We pushed hard for them to move quicker. The attorney general pushed hard for it. They didn't, and there was an immense amount of frustration."
Nearly three years after Mr. Bush signed his military order, senior officials have begun to acknowledge privately that the fate of both Guantánamo and the military commissions is uncertain.Hallelujah! That's what gives me hope that, certainly if John Kerry wins on Nov 2, we might be successful in urging a dismantling of the Guantanamo gulag and the ending of the entire policy of maintaining jurisdiction-free detention zones.
Headline: A political-sectarian split in Iraq 100 days before the elections; The Shiites threaten anyone who abstains from voting with the fire of "hell" and the Sunnis see voting under the shadow of occupation as "a sin"
Baghdad-- al-Hayat, AFP, Reuters-- With the approach of the date of the Iraqi elections, which has been determined to be 100 days hence, the Friday sermons in the mosques of Iraq yesterday displayed a sharp split between Iraqis concerning them, along political and sectarian lines. At the same time that the sermons of the Shiite imams showed an enthusiasm for participation that reached the degree of threatening anyone who abstains from voting with "entry into hell", the sermons of the Sunnis were divided between those who called for a boycott because the voting under the shadow of occupation is "sinful" and those who urged a "negotiating" position [that urges participation in] voting in return for conditions, among them removing from the city of Fallujah the military option.
Al-Sayyed Ahmad al-Safi, the representative of the Shiite ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, laid stress in the Friday sermon in the shrine of Imam Hussein in Karbala on "obligatory participation" in the elections and he said, "He who contravenes that will go to hell." He confirmed that, "We must take responsibility and participate in an obligatory way because this is a national duty, and not taking part would signify treason against the right of the nation." And Safi added that, "Participation has an obligation based in religious law because the transgressor will enter hell." He clarified that, "The topic of the elections represents something truly significant for Iraqis in terms of following their destiny." He continued, "We must get ready to prepare ourselves to participate strongly in them in order to realize the hopes whose realization we've been awaiting a long time," without spelling out what these hopes were...
He denied, "The things some information media have mentioned" about the marja'iya's preparation of a unified list [I think that means, of its own unified list -HC] "because that is not true. The marja'iya guards its paternal relationship to the whole society ... and we are undertaking efforts to arrive at a unified list comprising exceptional personalities."The article concludes (my precis here) by reporting on the demands voiced by the representatives of Fallujah that they be allowed (once again) to have units of the police and national guard formed only of people from the city itself take over responsibility for it, and an end to the bombing, etc. But the minister of state for national security affairs, Qasem Daoud told Hayat that the people of Fallujah are part of the Iraqi people and we can't get into partitioning-type ideas. He seemed to accuse the people who were speaking for Fallujah of being under the thrall of "foreign terrorists" when they made their demands, and repeated that the government was resorting to violence against Fallujah only as a very last resort...
Ten days ago, Sistani called on citizens to register their names in the election registers on which the work [of assembling them] will start at the beginning of next month. He said in a fatwa, "It's a duty for all citizens entitled to vote--males and females--to make sure that their names are correctly registered on the voting rolls." And the Shi-i marja laid stress, either directly or through those close to him, on the holding of the elections on the decreed date at the end of January.
As for Shaikh Sadruddin al-Qabanji [Shi-ite--HC], he called in his sermon in Najaf on "The people of Fallujah to take a good example from Najaf and Samara on how to end their pain, so they can get themselves out of it and prepare themselves for the elections." He added, "We call on the (Sunni) Association of Muslim Scholars which is still undecided to participate in the election process and to avoid isolation ... And we Shiites seek an Iraq for all ... Not participating means that the occupation stays and the chaos continues."
On the other hand, Shaikh Mahdi al-Smaida'i [Sunni], the imam and preacher of the Ibn Taimiya mosque in Baghdad said, "The elections will not happen without the departure of the occupier even if in stages. And any candidate in the elections should be people of authentic muslim Iraqi nationality, and the only voters should be from the people of Iraq." He added, "Without those conditions fulfilled, anyone who enters the elections is considered sinful."
But the Sunni "Iraqi Islamic Party" which is participating in the provisional government under the leadership of Ayad Allawi distributed a short flier in Sunni mosques that called that, "Muslims should participate in the elections to nominate and elect people they trust, people who have pure, clean hands who seek the good of this country." And the flier concluded by saying, "Islam and Iraq are entrusted to your embrace, and do not let them fall from it."
Meanwhile, Sunni men of religion, and especially the "Association of Muslim Scholars" are trying to link th issue of the "political participation" of the Sunni sect in the Iraqi elections with the "battle" of Falljujah and the official spokesman of the AMS Shaikh Muhammad Bashar al-Fidi said yesterday, "If the destruction of the city occurs, and the air and artillery attacks continue, then we are committed, with the ulema (muslim scholars) of Iraq to the position in which we call for boycotting the elections and judging their results invalid. He added, "But if the bombing of the city and its destruction stops, and if the bombardment of other cities stops -- in that case we would return to another position."
A meeting that the Sunni community held on Wednesday, with the participation of a great number of men of religion, called for boycotting the elections if Fallujah is confronted with a military operation. And those at the meeting judged that, "Holding elections in the midst of the destruction of cities is rejected, and people of good morals call on the sons of the Iraqi people as a whole, should Fallujah undergo destruction and continue to be bombed from aircraft and artillery, or if other cities should suffer this, to boycott the elections and consider the results invalid."
Faiza of "A Family in Baghdad" has a long, English-language version up today of posts she wrote in Arabic on October 13 and 15.
This is heartwrenching writing. I can't even begin to make excerpts from it. She and her family are going to move house... Read about it. The whole post is worth reading.
At the end, she says:
America is building bases and camps in Iraq…as if declaring to us: We shall not leave for tens of years, maybe hundreds. This makes a lot of people angry, and they protest, so they move towards violence, hoping it would influence the American decision to remain here, and makes her leave earlier.
The American elections are also near… and both Bush and Kerry have no vision towards Iraq… both are lost, and flounder…
Four more years shall come to Iraq…four mysterious years.
...
And the American people keep asking there: why wouldn't things calm down in Iraq, and our government is behaving all justly and wisely there…
Come here and see how just and wise things are?? This people is the owner of the land, and these are armed foreign occupation forces, who deals with the people viciously… so, how will you breach this huge gap between you and the Iraqis???
Think with me of away to get out of this problem….. A way to help build confidence between the two parties, and open a new page…
They're promising they'll publish full accounts on the sons' websites.
Get info on how to donate through Paypal, and more info on the project, at Kahlid's blog-- here.
If you don't already have a Paypal account, just go to their website and set up an account. It's fast, easy, and secure.
(Okay... maybe not quite that easy... I'm having a bit of trouble doing it right now but will let you know what the wrinkles are once I've succeeded.)
... the International Criminal Court???
Back on July 1, 2002, the historic Rome Treaty came into force, and the ICC-- dream of so many in the international human rights movement-- was finally up and running.
But to where, exactly?
I just went over to the ICC's website to update myself on what this much-lauded institution has been doing for the past two years... And the answer is--
Not very much of anything at all.
In the past year, the ICC seems to have issued a total of eight press releases! (None since April 20.)
Though it's a new-age international institution and has been in existence for more than two years already, its web-page on its own budgetary affairs gives us zero details on what it's budget is, how it acquired its funding, or what it spent it on.
Yes, but what of the content of those eight press releases, you ask? Isn't ICC prescutor Luis Moreno Campo busy using the organization's budget to launch investigations into atrocities all over the world??
Back in July 2003, Moreno issued a breathless press release to the waiting media, explaining that ... he could not start an investigation into anything to do with the US's launch of a gratuitous war against Iraq because, although the Rome Treaty allows for ICC prosecutions in cases of "Crimes of Aggression" the nature of those crimes has not yet been decided. Oh, also, neither the US nor Iraqi is a State Party to the Treaty.
Ah, but he did promise he'd be "closely following" the tragic situation in Ituri, in eastern Congo. Indeed, he promised that, "If necessary, the Office of the Prosecutor will seek authorisation from a Pre-Trial Chamber to start an investigation." (An "investigation" is a much more formal thing than "closely following".)
Since then-- nothing more about Ituri.
Then, in late February 2004, we had this from Moreno, promising that he would investigate,
Look, I don't want to criticize Mr. Moreno personally. But I do think that for a huge number of reasons the ICC has turned out to be an extremely disappointing body.
Perhaps this was an inevitable outcome, given the hostility shown towards it by not only the US but also Russia, China, and India, among the world's great powers?
No, I think the problem's a bit deeper than that...
For a while now, I have been thinking--and cautiously arguing in public--that the attempt to create a huge, perhaps technically admirable jurisprudential body at the world level for these kinds of crimes is to put the cart before the horse in a number of key respects:
So let's resolve the conflicts first, huh? Then, after that, everyone can talk about embedding (or re-embedding) into the affected societies some decent social norms of how people should treat each other.
So maybe something like the ICC might be a good idea. One day. When everyone in the world is a bit wiser, a lot more compassionate, and certainly, more fair-minded in not seeking "special treatment" for their own compatriots... When everyone's really ready for the kind of global legal system that applies one single law to all of God's children, whether they're rich or poor; whether they have nuclear weapons and therefore a veto on the Security Council, or not-- or, preferably, when nobody has either of those perks...
At that point, an ICC might be quite a good idea.
But for now?
... And, moving right along here with my indictment of the work of the international criminal tribunals of the 1990s, here are some interesting factoids that I calculated about the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (now almost ten years old, and still going strong...)
Amount the ICTR had spent by then, per head of Rwanda’s national population: c.$135.
And then, by way of comparison, average amount the South African government spent, through its Truth and Reconciliation Commission, on each of the perpetrators whose cases it adjudicated (7,116 cases total): $4,300.
Amount the TRC spent on its operations, per head of SA's national population: about $0.79.
...Anyway, comparisons like these are what I'm workiung on these days, as I fine-tune the back end of my book about post-atrocity policies in Africa.
Resources matter. Ask any Rwandan or black South African how she or he feels about this!
Hey, here's an idea! Maybe we could just shelve the whole ICC idea for another 20 years, until the world is a bit more ready for it (see above). And in the meantime, we could take whatever the annual budget of the ICC is--if they ever tell us!-- and just give it all to the people of the ten lowest-income nations in the world...
Well-informed JWN frequent-commenter Shirin responded to my invitation to give us more of her impressions of the history of the insurgency in Fallujah. I thought her comment, which was posted here, was worth putting into a main post, so I've done that (after a light edit) right here.
Thanks, Shirin!
I just want to also note the bullying ineptitude of the Negrocontra/Allawi regime in Iraq which actually detained some key Fallujah community leaders who had exited the city to come to talk to them about terms for a possible ceasefire. The US/Allawist forces detained the negotiators from Friday through Monday.
Not surprisingly, after the negotiators-- who included the city's police chief-- were released, they said they were suspending any immediate further pursuit of the ceasefire talks.
Duh! This was nearly unbelievably bad behavior by the US/Allawists, which should have been much more remarked on--by me and others--back when reports of it first surfaced over the weekend.
Whether it was political ineptitude, or just plain bullying-- which could, after all, be described as the same thing--that caused that behavior, the results for both Iraqis and Americans will certainly be more death, more destruction, more wounding, more hurt and suffering all round.
I've been following this story in Al-Hayat over the past few days, and should really show off my re-increasing command of written Arabic by quoting from one of those stories here. Instead, I'll just lift this quote from Today in Iraq:
"The fact is that I'm negotiating on behalf of Fallujah people — civilians, kids, women — who have no power but through being represented by somebody. Since the situation has got up to this, each can go wherever they want and we don't need to talk about negotiations," he told Al-Arabiya TV.
Over to you, Shirin-- and big thanks to you for contributing this:
According to the reports I am hearing the Americans are aerial bombing Falluja during the night and attacking from the ground during the day, meaning this "charmless town" of 300,000 souls is under virtual 24 hour a day attack. I also heard today that, just as they did last spring, they are not allowing Iraqis to leave the city, thereby imprisoning them - men, women, children, infants, elderly - in a death trap they, the Americans, have created. Families who attempt to leave the city are, as they were last spring, turned back at check points, or attacked from the air or the ground as they attempt to escape the bombardment of their city.
As I said yesterday, Falluja has never been the "hotbed of Ba`thists and Saddam supporters" the propagandists would have us believe - far from it, in fact. In truth, the so-called "privileged Sunni triangle", and the "Shi'ite south" and the "Kurdish north" and everything that flows from that myth is ignorant nonsense (including the manufactured spectre of sectarian/ethnic civil war), but that's another discussion for another time...
Certainly there were people in Falluja who supported Saddam Hussein for various reasons - or at least went along with the regime in order to survive, and even reap benefits - just as there were in every part of the country. There were no doubt people there who were genuinely loyal to him and his regime. There were Mukhabarat agents in Falluja, and there were people who were coerced into working on behalf of the government, just as there were in every part of the country (and let us not forget that the U.S. has also used various forms of coercion to induce Iraqis to act as their agents). However, Falluja was very well known for its dislike of and defiance against the Ba`thist regime, and was subjected to periodic purges as a result. Fallujans would say "if Saddam said to work harder, Falluja would take two days off". When Saddam ordered that Friday services all over the country include prayers for and praise of him, the Falluja mosques defied that order.
During the American invasion Falluja remained quiet and passive. There was no fighting from the city either during the invasion or in the early days of the occupation. For that reason, American forces saw no need to take any action regarding the city. Like most Iraqis, Fallujans were glad to be rid of Saddam, and hoped for the best from the Americans. Falluja also remained quiet and free of the chaos and looting and violence that was taking place in most of the country.
Then, in late May [2003] American forces came rolling into town, took over one of the schools as its base, and, completely ignoring the city leaders, and the needs, concerns and interests of the population, proceeded to take it over. They disrupted virtually every aspect of life in the city. They drove tanks up and down residential streets all night long and flew helicopters over neighborhoods, shining bright searchlights on the families trying to sleep on their roofs in the late spring and summer heat, thus violating the privacy of the home, and giving the impression they were spying on the women. They stopped families on the streets and male soldiers frisked women in front of their fathers, brothers, and husbands. They did a great deal to confirm many of the wildest rumours about their intentions to violate the honour of Iraqi women. They treated men in humiliating ways in front of their families and neighbors.
If their purpose had been to antagonize the residents of Falluja they could not have done a better job. But even then the people of Falluja remained non-violent, though they were becoming more and more enraged. Then, when the American forces ignored the requests of city leaders to vacate their school, a group of Fallujans decided to exercise their "new-found freedom"™ by holding a demonstration in front of the school to protest its takeover. That day the Americans shot and killed 15 unarmed protesters, and wounded many more. The next day there was another, smaller demonstration during which the Americans shot and killed three more unarmed Iraqis. That was when the people of Falluja reached their breaking point.
That's the history in brief. The terrible irony is that it would not have been very difficult at all for the Americans to build Falluja into a model of Iraqi-American cooperation. At the very least, by leaving it alone they could have avoided most if not all of the trouble with that city. Instead, by doing exactly the wrong - of the very worst - thing at every opportunity, they have turned it into the proverbial "hotbed of insurgency" (sic) and a place of massive horror, death and destruction.
Finally, Falluja has always been a socially, culturally and religiously very conservative city - hardly a place that someone like Saddam would find a welcome. Now, by all reports, rather than being a "Ba`thist stronghold", it has become "the Islamic Republic of Falluja" - NOT a very welcoming environment for "Saddam loyalists".
These are two separate, but very important, news items that I picked up from JWN linkees.
First this, from Juan Cole yesterday. He reports on an item from AFP/ ash-Sharq al-Awsat about Ayatollah Sistani's spokesman Hamid al-Khaffaf, who said at a gathering at the Sadr Center in Najaf on Monday that:
-- No "ideal" parliament can, Khaffaf said, be elected under the election system currently ordained for next January's election system... (We've heard that criticism from Sistani/Khaffaf before).
-- But Khaffaf also warned that "the grand ayatollahs would not hesitate to bring people into the streets for the sake of a good result in the elections such that the righteous win their rights." (The direct quote there is from Juan, and maybe AFSP, though not necessarily from Khaffaf.)
Another headlining piece of news... This from Matt, filling in for Yankeedoodle at Today in Iraq:
Anyway, the piece that Matt linked to there, in virtualjeruslaem.com, is by the JTA's Ron Kampeas. It is definitely worth reading more of...
Jewish opposition to the war is pronounced — 10 percentage points more than among the general population, according to some national polls — and likely plays a role in continued, solid Jewish support for Democrats, despite the unprecedented backing for Israel that President Bush has shown.
“I was considering voting for Bush when I thought being in Iraq was best for us and best for Israel,” said John Drill, 47, a building contractor in West Caldwell, N.J. “Then I thought it wasn’t best for us, but it was good for Israel. Now I’m convinced it’s not good for Israel.”
At the end of 2002, just months before the war, an American Jewish Committee poll found that 59 percent of U.S. Jews approved U.S. action against Iraq, while 36 percent disapproved. A year later, those numbers had flipped to 54 percent against and 43 in favor.
In the most recent AJCommittee poll, posted last month, 66 percent of American Jews surveyed disapproved, and 30 percent approved. General polling of Americans shows opposition to the war in the mid-50s.
“There are more people who are conflicted now, who want to remove themselves from support of the war,” Rabbi Amy Schwartzman of Temple Rodef Shalom in Falls Church, Va., said of her congregation.
That’s a striking shift, she noted, given the number of military families at her temple. Schwartzman estimates that between six and ten congregants have been in active military service throughout the Iraq war...
[B]oth before and after the war, the danger facing Israel was a particularly strong factor driving Jewish opinion.
“Most people spoke as Americans first, although many people saw it through the lens of Israel,” Schwartzman said of discussions among her temple members. “The question of whether we’re creating a more secure Middle East was important to them as it relates to Israel.”
That’s a view that apparently continues to prevail among national Jewish groups, despite growing grassroots opposition. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee has been unstinting in supporting the war; in his speech to the AIPAC policy conference in May, Bush earned his biggest cheers when he mentioned Iraq.
In June, the American Jewish Committee awarded Australian Prime Minister John Howard its “Liberties Medallion,” in large part for his role in defying his own public’s opinion and allying with the United States in Iraq.
The Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations never formally endorsed the war, but its daily e-mail bulletin to constituents often links to articles supporting the war.
Such expressions of support derive from a tradition of American Jewish deference to two governments: Jewish leaders reflexively heed the sitting Israeli government, and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is glad to have the United States on board as an ally against Arab recalcitrance; and the Bush administration’s “with-us-or-against-us” posture on Iraq has cowed Jewish groups that value White House access.
Still, there are signs that Jewish organizational leaders are beginning to edge toward a degree of criticism. The Anti-Defamation League, which expressed its support for Bush administration policy before the war, said in May that it was “deeply troubled” by allegations of prisoner abuse by U.S. troops. So did the Reform movement and the National Council of Jewish Women.
Berkley, the Nevada representative, suggested that a sense of betrayal underlies the growing anger.
A former AIPAC board member, Berkley recalls asking Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney before the war how Israel would factor into any invasion plan.
“The vice president explained in great detail at that meeting in the White House that they knew exactly where the weapons of mass destruction were located in Iraq that were aimed at Israel, and he assured me that when we went in, those missiles would be the first that the United States takes out,” she said. “In retrospect, this administration had absolutely no idea what we were getting into.”
“They deceived themselves, and in doing so they deceived the rest of us,” she said.
Okay, we've been here in Beirut for 16 days and finally, tonight, Bill and I made a foray into the rebuilt "downtown" area.
We've driven through it a few times; at some speed, remarking on the number of new buildings that have gone up there in the five years since we were last here. Tonight, we exited the AUB campus onto the Corniche and walked east about a mile (through the old hotel district) till we came to the still-being-rebuilt areas of the old downtown.
For a period soon after I came to live here in 1974, I would transit downtown three or four times a day. I was living in Fakhani, a strongly Palestinian area quite a ways out of the central district to the southwest. I was studying Arabic at St. Joseph, the Jesuit university not far from downtown, and I also had a part-time job in an ad agency up on Hamra Street. So in the mornings I'd get a service (share-taxi) from Fakhani to downtown, walk briskly the few blocks to St. Joseph-- where Bashir Gemayyel was studying law at the time. After a couple of hours there I'd walk back to downtown, perhaps pick up a knafeh bi-kaakeh to eat along the way, and get a service up to Hamra to go to my job for 2-3 hours. Then, a service back to downtown and to St. Joseph for the afternoon classes. Later, go back to the ad agency.
Gosh, I got to know certain routes and parts of the downtown really well... Where to go and look for a gypsy service if the main thoroughfares were blocked. Which corners were, on a dark evening, places where some stupid guy might make a grab at you. Where there would often be Egyptian migrant workers fighting on the street. Which were the fun little souks to come to late at night with friends for a sahlab treat. Where the cheap restaurants were that you could sit at late at night and watch the porters sweating as they hauled huge loads of fresh vegetables in to the market stalls at 3 a.m. Where the tricksters and shell-game artists would congregate to take advantage of people coming fresh into the city from the countryside. All of that.
Later, I'd come and hand in my copy at the Daily Star offices downtown.
A little after that, downtown became a battlefield...
The Palestinian and Lebanese-Muslim forces which held West Beirut fought their way eastward from the hotel district and were blocked exactly at downtown. A whole mile-square block of downtown became the northen anchor of the "Green Line" that snaked southward throughout the whole city. (Much of it is still more or less "green". That is, the population divided there. The ruins of the city buildings along that line became no-go zones for everyone, and within a couple of years voracious green creepers, seedlings, and bushy great plants had taken root there. Now, 25 years later, many of them are large trees, growing out of the still-uncleared ruins.)
In 1989, at the time of the Taef Agreement, which laid the cement for whatever degree of social-political peace the Lebanese have been able to win among themselves, the Lebanese Sunni contractor Rafiq Hariri, who had made billions of dollars in the construction business in Saudi Arabia, came "home" to be Prime Minister. Part of the deal was that he'd use some combination of his own capital, Saudi capital, Lebanese government-backed loans, and goodness knows what other funding to completely rebuild downtown Beirut.
Heck, by then, he'd probably already built 20 entire cities inside Saudi Arabia, from scratch. If anyone could do this job in Beirut, the thinking went, it would be Rafiq Hariri.
At the technical, project-management level, much of it has been impressive. Whole swathes of ruined building in the downtown were demolished; the rubble was carted out to sea and dumped to form a bunch of new land (title to which, I believe went to Hariri's company?) On the blocks of old downtown thus cleared, Hariri's architects and builders then went to work with a will. In many or perhaps most cases they sought to rebuild the phsyical aspects of the old downtown almost exactly in the same style it had had before the war.
So now, you can walk down graceful cobbled streets lined with commercial buildings faced with high arched arcades in an instantly recognizable French-colonial style. Six or seven streets come together in a replica of the old Sahet al-Najma (Place de l'Etoile). The old Serail (government) building has been lovingly restored-- andf now it sits atop an architectural park that features many of the carvings that were found during the reconstruction work.
At some technical level, it was a very classy job.
But the social fabric that had been an essential aspect of the old downtown never got repaired. The city is still just about as divided-- Chrsitians in the east; Muslims, Druze, and Christians who like living with them in the west-- as it ever was. And no accommodation at all has been made for low-income people to have a real role in the new downtown. Goodness only knows where the wholesale produce markets are held now. It's not there. Goodness knows whether there are any conglomerations of Egyptian migrant workers anywhere in the city these days. They certainly aren't there. Very few businesses have moved back in.
What does exist there, however-- in much greater numbers than when we were here in 1999--are restaurants and cafes-trottoirs. The restauranteurs, who have always been among Lebanon's most innovative entrepreneurs, have colonized the rebuilt buildings in droves... So there's quite a lot of activity at street level, in the evenings; but probably not much activity in upper floors, or at other times of day.
When we were there in 1999, the whole place was eery; like an echoing stage set for a movie that would never be made. Block after block after block of it. And the whole built area surrounded by empty bulldozed blocks that had yet to be built.
Now, it connects better to the hotel district. (Which still holds its own atrocities, like the towering, shell-shattered concrete walls of the old Holiday Inn.) And there's good street-lighting, which meant that we felt quite safe walking to downtown from the Corniche.
There were some impressive, even moving, aspects of what the downtown project has achieved so far. We arrived just before some Muslim evening prayers. Three or four beautiful smaller mosques in the downtown area were broadcasting rival calls to prayer. Old, golden stone structures with lovingly nested domes atop them. A couple of them were attracting sizeable numbers of worshippers. All of them looked as though they'd been rehabbed with care and attention to detail.
We looked in on a couple of equally well restored churches: one Catholic, and one Orthodox. At the Orthodox church, a sacristan told us a little about the church's history. The present structure was, he said, at least the fourth to be built on this site since the Roman era. The foundations of the older three churches were still under the floor of the present church, he said, with the oldest dating back to the fifth century. On the walls were some lovely frescoes-- some, with bullet-scars still visible, dating from before the war; others, recently painted by artists from Greece and Russia.
We walked down to the old clock-tower. It was surrounded this evening by a large-scale, outdoor exhibit of photos of people who have overcome serious physical or mental impairments... It was really sobering to read the captions. Of the eight or so portraits there, three of the subjects--all of whom had lost two or more limbs-- were described as war-wounded. One was described as a land-mine victim from 1987. And no fewer than three were people from age 17 through 34 who'd lost functioning as a result of polio.
Polio!!!
That is exactly what happens during protracted wars. People get wounded from munitions... They also suffer because of the breakdown of immunization systems.
I wish every single person in the western human-rights movement who thinks that it might be worth fighting wars "for the sake of human rights" would come and look at that exhibit.
Well, we had a really fine dinner there, then found a cab to come back here to AUB.
I've beern working on a bunch of writing these past few days. Including some ideas for posts for JWN that have not, so far, panned out. They will sometime soon, I'm sure.
Ramadan Karim to everyone, by the way.
Brent Scowcroft, who was the first Pres. Bush's National Security advisor (and therefore Condi Rice's boss that time around) has weighed in again with publicly expressed views that directly challenge key aspects of W's foreign policy.
In an Oct. 14 article in the Financial Times that I had missed, FT reporter Daniel Dombey reports that Scowcroft told him that W,
Brent Scowcroft, a former national security adviser and close collaborator of former president George H. W. Bush, told the Financial Times that the US administration's "unilateralist" stance had contributed to the decline of the transatlantic relationship...
"Sharon just has him wrapped around his little finger," Mr Scowcroft said. "I think the president is mesmerised."
"When there is a suicide attack [followed by a reprisal] Sharon calls the president and says, 'I'm on the front line of terrorism', and the president says, 'Yes, you are. . . ' He [Mr Sharon] has been nothing but trouble."
Mr Scowcroft also cast doubt on Mr Sharon's plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip, which last week Dov Weisglass, a leading Israeli adviser, said was intended to prevent the emergence of a Palestinian state.
"When I first heard Sharon was getting out of Gaza I was having dinner with Condi [Rice] and she said: 'At least that's good news.' And I said: 'That's terrible news . . . Sharon will say: 'I want to get out of Gaza, finish the wall [the Israelis' security fence] and say I'm done'."
That Scowcroft is speaking out in this way now, and to a leading European publication, has to be significant. His last major speakout was in mid-August 2002, when he ran an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal under the simple heading "Don't attack Saddam".
On that occasion, according to Bob Woodward's book "Plan of Attack", Scowcroft received two important phone calls shortly afterward...
One was from Colin Powell, who thanked him for having given him "some running room."
The other was from Condi, "and they had sharp words." Everyone knew then (and knows now) that Scowcroft is extremely close to Bush senior. Condi apparently told Scowcroft back then that his article "made it look as if the president's father had weighed in. At minimum it was a slap at the president."
According to Woodward (p. 160),
According to the Thursday FT piece:
"This is a man who's really driven to seek re-election and done a lot of things with that in mind," he said. "I have something of a hunch that the second administration will be quite different from the first."
It might be that he's trying to help W's election effort by softening some of the harsh edges of his foreign policy?
In today's WaPo, Glenn Kessler has a piece drawing on the FT piece. Kessler added,
So many indicators of a crumbling of the US-Allawist position in Iraq!
(1) The emergence of the news about Wednesday's mini-mutiny by 18 members of a supply US Army supply company in Tallil, near Baghdad.
Seems like this supply unit, at least, reached a vital breaking point?
Interesting, too, that the news emerged in public--via cellphone calls that the soldiers were allowed to make even during their detention-- and that an (un-named) "senior Army officer" told the NYT that the soldiers had raised "some valid concerns" about the dangerous nature of the mission they'd refused to undertake...
The NYT writes: "Though the soldiers have been released from detention, they could face anything from reprimands to courts-martial."
(2)The US has been asking the Brits to move "up to 650" of the troops they now have in Basra somewhat further north, so they can help protect the US troops' rear during the projected push into Fallujah.
The British government has so far not been able to say yes. Meanwhile, the opposition parties in London (where Blair faces re-election fight in the next few months) have expressed their intention that this proposal not be implemented easily:
Liberal Democrat defence spokesman Paul Keetch warned against placing British forces under US command.
He said: "British forces should remain under direct British control within the British sector. Any change to this basic command structure should be brought before the House of Commons.
"With the public disquiet about ongoing operations in Iraq, placing British forces under direct US control would not be supported by the British people."
The story says that a good proportion of the people who'd brought weapons along to the collection point to turn them in were not even being allowed into the collection point before paying a bribe to get in... And the clear implication was that many of these people finally took their weapons back home with them.
Great. Just what Sadr City needs.
Another possible sign of the unreliability of the Iraqi forces came in this NYT story, written Oct. 9 by embedded reporter James Glanz. He writes about going on overnight patrols with US soldiers doing "surprise" house-to-house searched in Yusufiya, southwest of Baghdad.
The idea is to try to catch "insurgents and their weaponry" when they're least expecting it... But when the Americans arrived at house after house after house, they found nobody home:
It is not as though no one lives here. Fresh onions and tomatoes sat on a counter, some of them cut up and ready to eat. Children's sandals lay where they were kicked off on a porch or at the bottom of a stairway. Small Iraqi banknotes tumbled to the floor when a cupboard was pulled open.
But nobody was home. While terrorism suspects and militia fighters have routinely slipped away from their pursuers ever since last year's invasion, the sudden emptying of whole towns before unannounced raids appears to be a new phenomenon.
"Something happened, and they knew we were coming," said Staff Sgt. Norm Witka of the 1st Brigade, 23rd Infantry Regiment, whose unit was one of those that poured into the towns and searched nearly every room of every house.
The mystery of the disappearing populace has repeated itself during sweeps by soldiers and marines in northern Babil Province, a patch of land about 30 miles south of Baghdad. It is an area that is not only hostile to the American occupation but thought to contain important supply lines for insurgents elsewhere in the country...
Theories about why the people are fleeing are varied, and little is known of where they go, or for how long. ..
When asked where all the people had gone, one of the few residents shrugged and made a sweeping gesture toward the countryside. "Felah," he said, using the word for farmer.
We went, my friends and I, to attend a lecture about Democracy, and the Elections. The lecturer was an Iraqi lady, who said she attended some work-shop discussions about the subject, and she'll explain it to us, so we could explain it to others. She spoke about the meaning of the two words, and their relation with each other. Then she spoke about the methods of elections, and their traits, then the civil society and its role in elections, the relation of the civil society with the parties, and the danger in the party's dominance over the civil organizations.
Then the elements of elections, which are: The Base, The Candidates, and The Campaign; and the method of delivering a message of every candidate to convince the public…
She said The Base consists of three elements:
-An Element who had fixed his opinion, his candidate, and sticks to him.
- An Element who decided not to vote.
- And an Element who is wavering, and he is the one to whom all invitations and debates are addressed, to convince him to vote for one of the candidates.
She said every candidate has a message, which he keeps repeating to people's attention until they memorize it…I smiled........... imagining the poor American citizen these days…they all fight, and debate, giving him the headaches, as they try, each separately, to say he is completely right, and the other is completely wrong…and whoever votes for the opponent is a complete fool…Ha, ha, ha…
A game that gives people the headaches…as if you are in a Bazaar…each is calling for his merchandise, wanting to sell it more than the others.
But people's lives and destinies are decided here…inside this chaos, shouting, and headache-promoting noise…
I don't know…as if I see the propaganda, the competition, and the debates, are subjected to a lot of acting, and show-offs, more than honesty, calmness, and rationality.The media plays its role here…where truth gets mingled with lies, justice with false…and facts get lost.
A very dangerous game….this is Democracy.
And the bad people could maneuver it, because they play like jugglers, in a circus. And the audiences are poor….who could easily be tricked.
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... Why would America want to convince the world, that there are some clerics, like Al-Sadder, who hate democracy, or anything good, to Iraq and the Iraqis, and that these leaderships must be eliminated, or, put down to scale??? Why do they say that these leaderships want to reproduce the Iranian sample, here?? Who said so?? This is like the story of the civil war, that they want for it to start in Iraq, everyday…in vain.
These seem to be the illusions in Bush's administration's heads…as he strikes the opposition here, heaping accusations upon them, fabricated in his mind. And the people in America believe him, and support him, saying to him: We are with you, we don't want the Iranian sample in Iraq.
But who said the Iraqis want the Iranian sample in Iraq??? Who ever spoke so???
Even Al- Sadder in his speeches did not portray himself as a political leader of Iraq. The man spoke of the homeland, the occupation army, and perhaps he said that resisting the occupation is legitimate, perhaps he was honest, and doesn't want personal benefits, or maybe he wants to put pressure to gain a post, or a representation percentage in the Parliament, or so…
Why wouldn't they allow someone like him to have an existence in the Parliament, and the next elections? Doesn't he represent a faction of Iraqis? Even if they were a faction less educated, and has less of a vision than others, time is capable of developing such factions, or eliminating them from existence, people learn their experience with days, and choose the better leaders… that is how the process of maturing people's experiences goes on, all along human history…
Why wouldn't we allow a percentage of seats to the people of Fallujah, Sammarra, Ramadi, and others? Why do we attack, kill, and change town's maps, and elections?? Why would they come up with declarations, that the highly- tension areas will be excluded from the elections.
Is it logical that the whole Parliament, and the coming Iraqi government, all of them support Bush's view point in life??
This is an injustice….and Democracy means justice. This is stupidity, an increase of violence, tension, and a runaway…
In order to absorb anger and violence, give the other party a chance to express himself, do not oppress or kill him, thinking you have eliminated evil… more likely you have created evil, and gave it the strength against you… day by day, violence will increase…and problems shall not be solved, but rather will be more complex, by stupidity and stubbornness…If you do not give a chance to the opposition to speak up, and have a dialogue with them, you might as well have pushed it to the paths of evil and darkness… as was the case in Chechnya against Russia, and the extremist Palestinian formations, that appeared on the field, after all attempts of logical dialogue between the Palestinians and the israili government failed, a government as frozen as Bush and his stiff mentality, and his lack of ability to absorb the presence of the ''Other""…. He controls the media, speaks about himself and the ""Other""…accusing his opponents of always being criminals, dark people, who wouldn't want Democracy, or freedom… and the events of September is the fruit of a stupid policy, which created enemies, whose number and size can't be counted…
The fruit of a stupid policy, and here is the world paying its price in more victims, and endless violence…
Violence gets more violence…and dialogue isn't weakness….dialogue is strength. Dialogue opens the doors to peace…and peace is a victory to all humans…
In my mind now, I thought of : The Noble Peace Prize… why wouldn't they start a prize for those who wage wars?? Because they are fools…and plenty, and the way of war is easy, and a rushing, foolish, decision…
But the way of peace, as the way of virtue, is hard and difficult to cross, and only great ones and geniuses can go through it…. Making by that a bright history for humanity.
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Why wouldn't America solve matters in a rational, quiet, diplomatic way??
Why does she hold the heavy stick, and hit whoever stands in opposition against her, accusing them with false charges?? Isn't that a weakness, and lack of wisdom in running things?? Is the manner of hitting and violence a civilized manner, in facing the ""other""??
The lady in the lecture said about Democracy: It teaches us how to respect the other opinion… yes, this is the theory, but the reality here is something different…
Here, the American Democracy is: How to destroy the other opinion, and how to wipe it out of existence, by all means…… and the Bush reason is always: they are extremists, who hate us…
Oh, my GOD…who is the extremist?? Who started the violence, the hurt, the " in advance hits"??
The style of the American Administration is distrusting the other…heaping accusations against him, then hitting him, and destroying him.Is this the Democracy??
I think America is in a fix… where are the beautiful theories, and what were their connection to this painful, ugly, reality the world is living through, because of the bad policies, bad management, and the unlimited aggression against the other…. These conducts indicate a defeated, abortive mentality….like the mentality of Saddam Hussein
.
That who is sure of himself, wins the battle quietly, without destroying and disfiguring the opponent…opening the door of dialogue with the other, because he is strong, and full of confidence in himself. And the loser raises storms to win the round, by terrorizing the others, frightening them, and closing their mouths.
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Going back to the story of the Arabs and Iranians in Fallujah, or Sammarra, or the other hot spots. After each American bombing of these towns, or clashes and campaign, the newspapers come out with headlines like: The capture of a number of Syrians, Yamane, and Iranians. That, of course, is in addition to the Invisible Man: Al-Zarqawi, and his gang.
Of course, up till now, we saw no one, either on TV., or in the newspapers, no real faces, no real people who would say they were from Al-Zarqawi gang, or Iranians, or whatever, and would confess their crimes in front of people.
Nothing but mock web sites, and silly, naïve letters, signed by this and that.
Every person can start a web site, and say whatever he wants…shall we believe all this gibbering??
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This week I started understanding these stories…
Someone wants to circulate, in America and the world, that these clashes and problems has nothing to do with the Iraqis, that there are some scum of mercenaries or lunatics, who call themselves Mujahideen, who came here to fight America…as for the Iraqis, they are in a state of harmony and contentedness with the occupation forces, no resistance, and no clashes.
Yes, there might be some truth in part of this theory, that America promotes, and work to maintain, by keeping the uncontrolled state of the boarders…where there are no security forces, nor order there, since the occupation of Iraq till now…the boarders are a loose, ignored, uncontrolled area. There is no presence of an American, nor Iraqi, strong force.
So, the situation looks deliberate now….they want to open the boarders to everyone who wants to confront America and fight her, here in Iraq, this new battle zone, so, why go to far away America??
We get two birds by one stone….we confirm our existence in Iraq, with the ploy of fighting terrorism, and control the fate of all the states of the region. And protect America and its people, from terrorism and its people. ( There are two more birds in the story: Iraqi Oil, the free treasure, and protecting the loved, pampered Israel)…ha, ha, ha…
As for the miserable Iraqis who would fall victims to this vicious plans, well, who cares about them?? Who shall count them?? Who will defend them, and stop their bleeding???
No one, of course…
We are an escape goat, so that America, and its people could live in peace, and sleep soundly. And let death and destruction be ours….and happiness and calmness be theirs.But Bush covers all this by weeping for us, that he wants the shining future and democracy for us, and he must accomplish that one day….so, we should be patient, and wait….
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As for the kidnapping gangs, killings, and beheadings on the internet…and the daily trapped cars…the killings of the new recruiters in the Iraqi Police and Army…these are a two-edged weapon… they prove Bush's inability to control the situation, if his enemies were behind them. And at the same time, he uses them to his advantage, a pretext to remain here and clean Iraq of terrorism..
Who opened the doors of hell, and brought them here?? It seems that Bush's plan