I'm crashing on the deadline to write my increasingly lengthy Hizbullah piece for Boston Review. (Celebrated 'New Years Eve' at c. 11 p.m. last night. Go figure.)
So today, I was writing about Hizbullah's impressive work in the provision of basic public services. Since the party was actually born in mid-1980s in the turmoil of a blisteringly destructive war situation, I immediately thought: Hey, why didn't the Bush administration turn to these experienced pros to do the reconstruction/rebuilding job in Najaf, Sadr City, etc, instead of the US Army and Halliburton??
Okay, silly question, I know. But still, the contrast between H's record in Lebanon and that of the US reconstruction effort in Iraq is certainly informative.
Here's a fragment from what I've been writing:
Harik provides some interesting glimpses into some of these activities, and presents as illustrative a report produced for the U.N. Economic and Social Commission for West Asia in 1999, that looked at the work of a sizeable rural development project run by the RC. She picked out a part of the ESCWA report that identified operational features of the RC project that, she felt, "dramatically collide with stereotypes of fundamentalist organizations as backward and perceptions of their leaders as ignorant fanatics." These features included:
Harik writes--and the people I talked with Lebanon all confirmed-- that Hizbullah's social-service affiliates and schools provide all their services on a low-cost basis to those Lebanese who need them, whether Muslim or Christian, and that subsidies are available for very low-income users. Many Christian parents send their children to Hizbullah-run schools, especially in the south where many of these schools are often judged to provide the best education available. The budgets for the schools and all the other service-provision organizations are met from a combination of sources: user fees, government subsidies (where available), donations from Iran, support from international development bodies, and allocations from the khums, the one-fifth share of one's income that a Shiite believer is obligated to pay to Islamic charitable organizations. One researcher told me that Hizbollah-related organizations now control the significant income stream constituted by khums donations made by the numerous Lebanese Shiite emigrés in West Africa.
Harik writes that Hizbullah's commitment to, and success in, providing these services on a continuing basis is quite unique among the political parties in Lebanon. She notes, too, that its success in this sphere has-- in conjunction with the skill its political operatives have shown in their dealings with most other parts of the Lebanese body politic-- helped to build and buttress a sturdy base of political support for it in many parts of the country...
I think the book can't have been an easy one for her to write. She notes in the preface that she was a new professor at AUB in 1982 when Israel invaded Lebanon. And in the years that followed, "Like all Americans living and working in Beirut at the time, I was deeply affected by acts of terrorism said to have been ordered by the Islamic Republic of Iran and carried out by locals about whom very little was known at the time... "
Nonetheless, in admirably objective fashion she evidently set aside her own fears, distrust, and apprehensions enough to try to understand the workings of this new force that--with Iranian help-- was bursting onto the political scene in Lebanon in those years.
Her book came out last April. More recently it's been joined on the lists by one from her AUB colleague Ahmad Nizar Hamzeh. So far, I prefer hers. His is thin by comparison, and overly loaded with poli-"sci" jargoneering.
Also, while I'm talking about this issue out in the blogosphere, I'd love to know if any of you readers has any idea what's been happening to the broad range of websites that Hizbullah used to have.
If you go to this very handy-looking portal on the Arab gateway site, it looks as though it would take you to some Hizbullah-related sites that could be a great boon for anyone (like me!) who's doing research on the topic against a tough deadline.
But most of the links given there in the collection of "Hizbullah websites" don't actually lead anywhere. I don't know when that portal-page was compiled, or how long it's been since those sites were down. Also, I have a whole list of "Hizbullah" URLs from another researcher, and none of them leads anywhere, either.
Does anyone out there know what happened?
The only three Hizbullah-related sites I've found that aren't down are the one for their weekly paper, Al-Intiqad, which is a pretty good site in Arabic but definitely lacking in the English-language department... And then we have this site which is the "personal" website of Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah. It's quite well organized in both Arabic and English, though it's not as up-to-date as I'd like. Then, there's the one I linked to above for the Islamic Health Society. But that one seems to cover only certain public-health type things that the IHS does, and doesn't have much info at all about the large hospitals and other health-related things that Hizbullah does.
Anyway, let me know via a comment here if you have info or any clues as to what's happening with the Hizbullah URLs there. Thanks!
Great news from President Bush, who has decided to increase tenfold, to $350 million, the amount of aid his administration will be giving to survivors of the Indian ocean tsunami.
We probably shouldn't let up in our efforts to persuade the Prez to re-order his priorities towards global neighborliness and away from the waging of war (principally); but away the staging of extravagant parties, as well.
But still, it's important to recognize that the guy has now made a dramatic change in his approach. Thank you, President Bush.
So, what other welcome changes of heart and of policy might we expect in the year ahead? Here are some of my dreams:
I've been writing a bit recently about the incredible peace movement that existed in Israel in the early 1980s, and then about the Israeli "Four Mothers" peace movement that persuaded the Israeli government to pull its military clear out of Lebanon in May 2000. Where are these Israeli peace movements today? The concessions and momentum can't all come from the Palestinian side.
Let's hope we see a joyful re-emergence of the pro-peace forces from both sides of the line in the months ahead. But realistically, the Israeli peaceniks are much better placed to turn the tide of history and decisionmaking these days than their Palestinian counterparts. History surely calls on them to do so.
** That the Iraqi elections of January 30 go off "sufficiently" peaceably, and "sufficiently" fairly-- with the criteria for fairness there being principally that the Sistanist (UIA) list be declared the winner, rather than Allawi's list-- and then, that the results are not subject to endless, divisive contestation...
All the indicators I've seen point to the probability of a strong UIA victory. But the temptation to the US hawks to somehow steal the election for "their son-of-a-bitch", Allawi, must I imagine be very strong. Plus, the potential for vote stealing-- in a situation where the security conditions on the ground are chaotic, there are no credible domestic or international observers deployed, and the votes of the large numbers of overseas Iraqis will all be flown to Jordan for counting-- will be very high.
So the potential for subsequent contestations of the election's validity will be equally high, too.
Can the Bush administration find a way to swallow its pride and live with a strongly pro-Sistani government in power in Iraq? It won't be easy. Sistani and as far as I know just about everyone in the UIA coalition remain committed to working for a speedy withdrawal of all the US troops. But my dream is that the Bushies find a way to deal with this quite legitimate and justified demand, and comply. (Anyway, the consequences of them failing to find a rapid and decent way out of Iraq are horrible to contemplate.)
** That in the contest of finding a cover for its "redeployment offshore" from Iraq, the Bush administration rediscover the value of having a robust UN system, and rediscover a US role within the UN that is more in line with current international realities.
Back in the days of the Clinton administration, Madeleine Albright used to boast about how the US was "the indispensable nation." Now, things look quite a bit different than that. I dream that someone--though I still can't figure out whw-- within the Bush team rediscover something more like the US's true weight within the global community, and change the country's approach to the rest of the world in line with that.
** Okay, and now we're really steamin', I dream that 2005 is the year when policymakers in the US, the EU, and all the world's rich countries will suddenly understand how harmful their current, very protectionist policies in the international markets for staples like basic foodstuffs and cotton have truly been for the billions of people who live in poor nations-- and will move to end those policies.
Oxfam has been producing some great-looking analysis on how the subsidies that rich governments give to "their" farmers-- and here, we're talking mainly about big agro-business getting these subsidies, not the proverbial "family farmer"-- have resulted in the systematic dumping in world markets of commodities at prices that have already wiped out many farmers in poor countries.
Oxfam has a great campaign underway to Make Trade Fair. You can go here to find out more about it. Moreover, they back up the campaign with well-written, clear pieces of policy analysis. Some of the news they put out in 2004 looked modestly optimistic. Like this report on a recent WTO ruling that found that US subsidies to cotton framers, and "expert credits" provided to cotton farmers and producers of other basic commodities, had all violated WTO rules and should be ended.
That report was called, "Dumping: the beginning of the end?" Let's make sure that in the year ahead we do what we can to end such harmful practices, and help to "Make Trade Fair."
And a very Happy New Year to all of you! Thanks for making JWN into something a lot more lively and a lot less lonely than it would have been without y'all.
The Red Cross is now saying that more than 100,000 of our fellow humans may have died already in the Indian Ocean tsunami. In the days ahead many more scores-- perhaps hundreds-- of thousands may die unless vital water-purification, medical, and other urgent relief supplies can reach them.
In the months and years ahead entire communities along those damaged coastlines may be wiped out unless solid, long-term reconstruction efforts can be organized.
President Bush has thus far pledged just $35 million of US funds to help meet these needs.
That compares with the more than $250 million per day that his administration is spending on waging a destructive quagmire of a war in Iraq.
Or, with the $30 million to $40 million that AP estimates his January 19 inauguration party will cost.
We could start creating our own little "tsunami" of protest at these outrageous priorities. My friend Jean Newsom-- whose spouse, David, was formerly the US Ambassador to Indonesia-- suggests that Bush's inaugural festivities could be canceled and the sums saved sent immediately to help the relief effort.
I invite you to join me in calling the White House-- +1-202-456-1414-- and voicing this excellent suggestion to the comment-takers there. While you're about it you might also urge the President to call for a humanitarian ceasefire in all the conflicts in Asia-- and yes, that includes Iraq-- so the world community can focus on the massive logistical, relief, and rebuilding challenges around the Indian Ocean.
If you're a US citizen, you can also urge these policies on your representives in the U.S. Congress. If you don't know how to contact them, go to this webpage, punch in your zipcode, and get all the info there.
If you want to make a useful donation to the relief effort-- from the US or anywhere else-- or want more info about it, go to this great site, which has truly multinational info, available in a number of languages...
By the way, this site, the South-East Asia Earthquake and Tsunami site is an incredible achievement of the blogosphere. It is organized as a blog, and was only started in the evening (India time) of December 27. Since then it's been getting around 100 main posts per day, along with numerous 'comments' offering or seeking additional info. Many of the authors there seem to be Indians, but they have lots from Europe, the US, and elsewhere too.
What an amazing way to exchange information in a very timely fashion!
For example, one of the most recent posts notes that:
The sheer number of bodies in various states of decay have made their task all but impossible. The team has issued calls for help to forensic specialists from outside the country. So far, a team of specialists from the United Kingdom has answered the call for help.
... Well, there are lots of other things the folks on that site are in need of, too, so check it out.
Also, if you can join the little 'tsunami' of people trying to urge George Bush & Co. to re-order their priorities, that would be great. And pass this post on if you can!
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[Update, Dec 30: My original post, above, spurred the posting of a flurry of comments remarking mainly on a claim that "Sri Lanka, in a fit of racist pique, declined significant assistance from Israel." Thanks to all who commented on that. But I thought the discussion took up[ too much space on the main Comments board, so I've moved that discussion over here, for anyone who wants to read it. Comments on other topics more related to the main post are now welcome.]
Baghdad, Basel Muhammad, December 28, 2004:And here, while we're about it, is the report from Monday's Al-Hayat about the AMS's positions:
... Abu Zarr al-Kanani, the official spokesman for the "Mahdi Army", the military wing of the Sadrist current in Baghdad, accused the new Iraqi secret-police services of playing a role in the the operations of assassinating Shiite leaders. He said to al-Hayat that the return of some of the leaders of the former Iraqi secret-police services into the security services once again had allowed for the crystallization of this role.
Kanani added, "The American secret services absolutely do not want to see an Islamic government, whether Shiite or Sunni, taking over the premiership in Iraq, and that has led them to take up a direct part in assassinating Shiite and Muslim leaders." He continued, "We in the Sadrist stream are aware of this goal and precautionary measures have been taken to protect the life of the Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr and to assure his wellbeing."
Additionally, sources in the Islamic Daawa (Call) Party, which is SCIRI's essential partner in the Unified Iraqi Alliance electoral list revealed that the Shiite leaders had recently learned of the existence of a targeted list for killing the most prominent personalities on this (UIA) list, and it includes Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim [head of SCIRI] and Ibrahim Ja'fari [head of the Daawa Party] and Hadi al-Amery [head of the Badr Brigades, affiliated with SCIRI], and Abdel-Karim al-Anezi, a member of the politburo of the Daawa Party-- Iraq Organization, and Hussein al-Shahristani; all this without defining the party that is planning to carry out these killings.
Baghdad, Al-Hayat, December 27, 2004:
... At the same time that news reports were emerging about Washington's attempt to impose a "quota" of Sunnis on the parliament, something that the Independent Higher Commission for the Elections refused, the Association of Muslim Scholars revealed its readiness to "persuade" Sunni groups and individuals to participate in the elections in return for the fixing of a timetable for the withdrawal of the occupation forces, pointing to the fact that "even the UN is not persuaded about [the advisability of?] these elections", in their current form....(The Iraqi Press Monitor folks are taking the week off, so I'm even more motivated to do some of my own translations here.)
Abdel-Salam al-Kubaisi, a member of the AMS, stressed in a discussion with al-Hayat that the association is holding meetings with Shiite figures, some of whom are participants in the "Unified Iraqi Alliance" list put together by Sistani, with the goal of crystallizing a unified position toward the elections, "that will serve the interests of all." And Kubaisi said that, "the UN itself is not convinced by these elections and it is giving their results very little importance," adding that the elections will be "American."
Such terrifying pictures and information coming out regarding yesterday's Indian Ocean tsunami. They remind me of the urgency of us all starting to think and act like a single world community. The BBC has been reporting-- so far-- some 23,000 people known to have been killed. But the numbers are certainly rising.
So many people killed; their families bereaved. So many more badly injured. So many more again left homeless or otherwise vulnerable to the rapid spread of disease. So many hundreds of thousands of families' and communities' lives ruptured forever.
Human beings have incredible resilience. But if we were all, truly, a single human family, wouldn't the leaders of the rich countries all now set aside their pursuit of marginal advantage here or there and say, "Yes! This where we can all pull together to make a difference!"
Instead of which, the Bush administration has announced it will contribute just $15 million worth of aid to the relief effort. A tragically small amount. And this, just a week after it marked the approach of Christmas by saying it would anyway be cutting back on huge amounts of emergency aid previously earmarked for the world's poorest nations...
All this, while it continues to spend more than $250 million each day on waging the war in Iraq.
It's obscene.
Why can't the world's leaders call an Asia-wide ceasefire-- a ceasefire of all the conflicts now going on in the Asia-Pacific region, including those in Iraq, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere? Let's call in the UN to regulate and resolve all those conflicts; and concentrate meanwhile on delivering all the longterm development aid that the storm-hit communities will need over the next five years.
I think that's what a true "family" would do, don't you?
And while we're about it, if we were all one family, why would the Western media want to continue with its childishly self-centered focus on the problems that the storm surges have brought to westerners merely vacationing in what these media routinely refer to as "holiday islands"? As though these shore-side locations are not, more importantly, the permanent homes of many thousands times more numerous gatherings of human being who just happen not to be western, not to have white skins?
At least that majority of the western tourists who have survived these storms have intact homes to go back to. But how about the indigenous people of Sri Lanka, Thailand, Aceh, and the other hard-hit places? What has happened to the homes and lives of those people is a hundred times more devastating.
But there on the BBC t.v. feed this evening were the anchor (Mike Embley) and one of the correspondents, a white guy in Sri Lanka, blithely conflating the categories of "people" and "western tourists" as though no-one who didn't fall into that latter category really counted as "people" at all....
As in this exchange (as I remember it):
Correspondent: Yes, people have been told that that's the only way out. And in case they've lost their travel documents, the British Embassy is opening a special office to issue documents that will allow them to get home...
If the BBC wants to be taken seriously as a global means of communication, it will certainly have to do do a lot better than that.
Meanwhile there are, as always, important lessons to be remembered about the contribution that sound local governance can make to the ability of communities to withstand and survive horrifying natural disasters. Last September I noted a few contrasts between the way that Cuba and Haiti were able to deal with the after-effects of that season's hurricanes in the Caribbean. (Cuba: fairly well. Haiti: abominably poorly.) This time around, we can certainly forecast that this disaster will place a huge strain on the national governments in all the affected countries. How well will they deal with this? Let's see.
There are some things, though, that money can and do should for all the affected communities. One is to set up decent, region-wide, technical early-warning systems-- like they have in the Pacific but not, sadly, until now in the Indian Ocean. Another worthwhile thing (which also requires good local administration, in addition to some resources) is to make sure there's a sound, well-rehearsed plan for responding to any warnings that come along.
Those are all great things to do over the long and medium terms. But first: can't we all just start thinking a little like a single human family, and get our priorities and attitudes in line with that? Imagine what a wonderful, warm, and high-achieveing "family" this could be, and what we could all become together!
I mourn that this has not happened yet. But mainly, right now, I'm mourning for all the people whose lives have been lost or torn apart by this storm. All that amazing human potential, all that concentrated human loving-kindness and wisdom: gone, agonizingly, just like that. And their loved ones mourning, picking up, and having to carry on.
I belong to the "unprogramed" strand of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), which means that when we come together to worship we do so very simply indeed. We have a square, undecorated worship space that every Sunday is opened up twice for people who want to come to pray or meditate together for an hour while we wait for the leadings of the Spirit of Love. Nothing "programed" or pre-planned happens during that hour at all. Sometimes, we'll sit there for the full hour and no-one will feel led to speak. Sometimes, several people will speak.
In my early experiences of this way of worshiping I found it rather strange, since I'd grown up in the Anglican church. What, no music? No stained glass? No incense? No liturgy? No priest? No 'communion'? Just-- us?
Then, I really started to love unprogramed Quaker worship-- for its simplicity, its inclusiveness, its surprises and riches, and its continual, experienced affirmation of the ability of every person to dig deep and discover the workings of love inside themselves.
One part of the way we worship and are organized is that we don't have any priests, or-- as George Fox, the founder of Quakerism in England in the 17th century, called them-- "hireling ministers". Nor do we have churches ("steeple houses"). This helps us to live out the Quaker testimony of simplicity. We don't have to raise huge amounts of money to pay for the upkeep of grandiose palaces of worship or the salaries of church officials. We are a network of worship communities ("meetings"), each of which governs itself through a monthly "Meeting for worship with a concern for business."
Another part of the way we worship is that we don't stick to--or indeed, have any need for-- a liturgical calendar. Not for us the massive Christmas-related extravaganzas that many Christian churches here and elsewhere organize. Our Quaker meeting here in Charlottesville, Virginia does have a tradition of having someone open our meeting house for worship twice on Christmas Eve-- once at 7:30 p.m., and once at 11 p.m.-- and inviting anyone who wants to join a special , one-hour-long meeting for worship at those times to do so. In what some of us think is a slightly un-Quakerly, possibly even liturgical, gesture, participants traditionally each take a candle to the worship; and the candles are placed together in a group on the floor in the middle of the bare, square meeting space...
Well, that's as complicated as it gets for us, at Christmas. I find there's something incredibly powerful about commemorating the birth of Jesus of Nazareth, who was such a powerful teacher and role-model. Something powerful, too, about celebrating a birth at this time of year, which in our northern hemisphere is a time of long nights, biting cold, and biological dormancy: how heartening to be reminded that new life, new hope, is on the way!
Quakers are one of a number of pacifist Christian churches here in the USA (and elsewhere). These churches-- Quakers, Mennonites, Church of the Brethren, Amish, etc.-- all have long histories and traditions. Most are descended from peace-church communities that originally came here to the US to escape strong discrimination or even persecution back home in in Europe. They (we) draw on the original, pacifist teachings of the Christian gospels while setting aside teachings that came into the "Christian" establishment much later, in the times of Augustine of Hippo, that allow for the idea that a war might be considered "just", etc., etc.
Here in Charlottesville we have good congregations of the Mennonite church and the Church of the Brethren. We also have many fine members and leaders in other Christian churches who are-- along with a great bunch of Jewish people and people of no particular religious affiliation-- strong activists in the local peace movement, the Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice.
On Thursday evening, December 23, I was downtown participating in CCPJ's weekly rush-hour peace vigil on the busy corner outside the local Federal Government office building. Our country so badly needs a strong reminder of the essentials of Jesus's teachings about the need for love and nonviolence right now! I was holding up two signs, back-to-back: "Honk for peace" on one side; "Support our troops, bring them home!" on the other.
We got so many honks, and friendly waves, from passing motorists, you couldn't believe it! At times throughout the hour, it seemed that 50% or more of motorists were honking. I particularly appreciate the guys who drive the city's semi-touristy "trolley"-type buses. When they "honk" for us, they clang their trolleys' bells loud and repeatedly as they cross that busy intersection. On Thursday, those clangs sounded incredibly festive!
From my long experience on that peace vigil, I can say that we get a particularly high proportion of supportive honks from African-American motorists, and a somewhat lower proportion from white motorists; a higher proportion from drivers coming into the intersection from the industrial areas south of town than from drivers coming in along the other three approaches to it; and an extremely low level of any hostile gestures at all. Last Thursday, amidst maybe 300-500 honks and friendly waves, I discerned only one gesture that seemed hostile, and that only ambiguously so.
Well, being on the peace vigil Thursday felt to me like a great, Christmas-related activity. Going to the earlier of the Christmas Eve worship sessions on Friday evening also felt like an inspiring, centering thing to do. Then yesterday, Bill and Lorna and I started our Christmas Day by opening our family Christmas presents under the small, gaily decorated cedar tree in our family room. In the afternoon we spent a large-ish chunk of time cooking. Lorna is a deeply convinced vegetarian, so we had decided to cook four or five of the vegetarian recipes from the Lebanese cookbook she gave me for Christmas last year, and produce them in time for a festive dinner for the three of us. (Neither of my older two kids could be with us for Christmas, but we had lovely phone calls from them in the morning.)
I find that cooking something you've never cooked before is always a little iffy. Like the first time we tried to make falafel from that cookbook, back in January... (Don't ask!) There are especially lots of "unknown unknowns" if you're trying to combine recipes or make substitutions to account for vegetarianism, as we were. But it all worked out unbelievably well! This was our main course: Eggplant and chickpea stew; Burghul-stuffed tomatoes and zucchinis; Feta-cheese bread (made from scratch); and Lebanese-style potato omelettes. Oh, and along the way there we also baked a double batch of chocolate cookies that had chocolate drizzled across the top of them and crushed candy-canes strewn on top of that...
Okay, I hear you say: Some of that doesn't sound very simple. But I can tell you it was fun. Cooking together as a family is always a good thing to do! Plus, we now have a refrigerator full of fabulous left-overs.
Anyway, I guess what I also wanted to write about here is the fact that the generally "simple" way that Quakers try to organize our religious commitments and practice gives us one particular blessing that not even the members of the other historic peace churches enjoy: We still have plenty of time left over, even at Christmas or Easter, to do the pro-peace work that many of us feel led to do.
Around five or six years ago, for example, we learned that our state, the (inappropriately named) "Commonwealth" of Virginia, was planning to execute five people during the upcoming month of April. What an outrage! We had quite a good network of anti-death penalty people here at the time, including many people from different churches. But most of the rest of them were very busy in March/April, organizing "Lent" activities and making their plans for the big "Holy Week" and "Easter" services.
Lent? Holy Week? Easter? These calendar constructs mean almost nothing to most Quakers. For us, every day, every minute of every day, is holy. Certainly, even if these concepts mean something to some people in our meeting, still, there is nothing that the Quaker meeting as a whole needs to do in order to plan special liturgies for these points on the calendar, or whatever... That year, we did nearly all the organizing that was needed for an awareness-raising campaign around the death penalty that was as broad and as public as we could make it.
Okay, I'll admit it freely. We didn't succeed in stopping even one of those executions. We didn't succeed in stopping the state's practice of capital punishment. And regarding this present war our country's in, not all the whole weight of the anti-war movement in this country succeeded in preventing it from happening. Nor have we held the Bush administration folks back from continuing to commit additioanl outrages like the most recent (and quite avoidable) assault on Fallujah.
But we carry on trying. (For my part, I find that the Buddhist teaching of "non-attachment to the fruits of one's labors" is a real powerful teaching in this regard as in many others. When's Buddha's birthday, anyway?)
And as we carry on trying to point out the tragedy and the essential folly of using violence in world affairs, at least we Quakers are not held back in our efforts by any extravagantly unnecessary and diversionary calls that our religious commitment might make on our time and our resources.
Maybe that fact, and the ability of earlier generations of US Quakers to focus on the moral/existential essentials of the world, was what enabled those Quakers to play such a strong, galvanizing role in the anti-slavery movement in this country?
So, we Quakers were "right" on the fundamental immorality of slavery. When will we manage to persuade the rest of our American compatriots that we are "right" today on the fundamental immorality (and the disutility) of war?
AP's Ali Daraghmeh is reporting that Hamas did pretty well in the small-scale municipal elections held in the occupied Palestinian territories yesterday. Indeed, Hamas did better than I'd expected in those elections, which were held in just 26 of the OPT's more than 600 local jurisdictions.
Those elections were an important "test" of the good faith-- in the run-up to the January 9 OPT-wide "presidential" race-- of all the parties concerned: not only Fateh and Hamas, but also, crucially, the Israelis. Indeed, can the Palestinians or anyone else have trust in the January 9 vote if it is held while Israel still holds unchallenged control over all major aspects of the security situation within the OPTs?
The jury is still definitely out on that, given Israel's arrests of numerous candidates in the municipals and the steps it's already taken to obstruct free campaigning in the presidential race.
Daraghmeh writes that, according to early results he'd seen, Hamas won nine of yesterday's 26 contests, and Fateh 14, with two of the races won by a joint Hamas-Fateh list and one-- Ya'bed-- still unreported. (He notes that in some cases interpreting the results requires a lot of local knowledge.)
For their part, Hamas claimed to have won 17 of the contests, so evidently both the major parties were claiming victory in some places.
Why was I surprised?
I admit haven't been following the story as closely as it deserved. But the 26 widely scattered communities, where just 150,000 registered voters live, are all in the West Bank, where Fateh and the other more secular parties are much stronger relative to the Islamic parties than in Gaza. (This foretells some interesting times for Gaza in the event of an Israeli withdrawal from there.)
Khalid Amayreh had a good, detailed report on Al-Jazeera (and Electronic Intifada) yesterday, writing about how the election campaign had proceeded in the small town of Dahiriya, near Hebron. He noted that for many years, the Israeli occupation authorities had simply handpicked the town's mayor. Back in 1976, the Israelis experimented with holding a municipal election there (as elsewhere in the West Bank). But when pro-PLO people won, they froze that whole approach and reverted to a system of appointments. They also summarily deported a number of the mayors elected on that occasion. ("Israel, the great democracy!")
Then, after the PLO/PA got some limited governance rights after the 1993 Oslo Accord, they simply continued the Israeli practice of appointing municipal leaders... Amayreh writes that they did this,
Amayreh also reports:
However, Rakad Abu Allan, an Islamist candidate, predicts that the midnight arrest would boomerang and make more people vote for the bloc. "I think many people are viewing the arrests as a certificate of good conduct for us. I am sure more people will give us their votes on the election day," he said.
Actually, y'all should go read the whole of Amayreh's piece. It does not bode well for all those pinning their hopes on Abu Mazen being an ultra-submissive peace negotiator. He writes:
Fatah leaders sought to dodge this observation, arguing that Abbas [Abu Mazen] was not yet a leader but that when and if he was elected, his picture would be everywhere. However, the unspoken words of many Fatah activists indicated that support for Abbas is lukewarm at best. One young man apparently could not keep his feelings suppressed.
He called Abu Mazin America's candidate, adding that he would not vote for him on 9 January. The fact that the activist was not rebuked by the Fatah multitude is telling.
A middle-aged Fatah activist sought to explain what seemed to be a widespread ambivalence toward Abu Mazin, especially among the movement's grassroots supporters and its younger generations. "Look, many people here are worried that Abu Mazin might deviate from our national constants.
"But I assure you that any Palestinian leader, even if elected, who chooses to compromise on these paramount issues will not live to regret his folly."
In parliament, it has striven to hold the national government to some degree of popular account. (A tough job!) And at the municipal level it has been quite happy to take over actual governance, striving to persuade additional voters through its performance there that it will one day be quite qualified to run an efficient and politically accountable administration at the national level.
In Palestine, Hamas is not fielding its own candidate in the "presidential" race on January 9. But it-- like Marwan Barghouthi and many of the other younger activists in Fateh-- layes great stress on the speedy holding of demonstrably fair elections for the Palestinians' (rump) parliament and the remaining 600 municipalities.
... Well, not long now till January 9. The Israelis have promised that they will "stay out of the Palestinian towns for 72 hours" during and around the time of that election. This is meant to sound like a sign of their "generosity", "good faith", and "support for democratic practice"?
But why only 72 hours? Why on earth not make it open-ended? And-- in order to have the Palestinians actually enjoying freedom of association and freedom of movement for a meaningful period of time in the lead-up to the elections-- why not have it start now, as well as be open-ended?
After all, if it is not "fatal" to the security of Israelis to have the IDF stay out of the Palestinian towns for those designated 72 hours, why should it be "fatal" if the stay-out is for longer than 72 hours???
Unless, of course, the reason the IDF is in so many Palestinian towns in the first place has little to do with security inside Israel, but is much more about maintaining a punishing level of pressure on the Palestinians, as per Moshe Ya'alon's infamous remarks of August 2002.
Professor Sachedina has visited Iraq a number of times since the US overthrow of Saddam Hussein. For an account of a conversation I had with him about Iraq last January, go here.
... So imagine my delight this morning when I saw he had sent the following, very important contribution to JWN, which I am of course honored to post here in full. It is worth a careful, close reading.
by Abdulaziz Sachedina
In the midst of today's political turmoil in Iraq there is a ray of hope for the future. There is nothing more exciting for any nation than to be able to democratically elect a government to represent and protect its people's rights. Yet as the people of Iraq prepare to choose a legitimate government in the elections scheduled for January 30, 2005, the 60 % Shiite majority bears a heavy moral burden. It has to reassure the 20% Sunni Arab minority that it will not be punished for its repression of the Shiites.
It was Imam Ali, the Prophet Muhammad's son-in-law and the inspiration of Shiite Islam, who emphasized the importance of forgiveness and compassion to those in positions of power. It is true that throughout their history in Iraq the Shiites have suffered when the minority Sunnis controlled absolute power. And under Saddam Hussein, powerful Sunni officials committed terrible atrocities against the Shiites. Not long ago, after the war began in earnest in March, 2003, in a meeting with Iraqi religious leaders in Amman, I heard a prominent Iraqi Sunni leader, Professor-Shaykh Qubaisi, urge Prince Hassan of Jordan to take over Iraq, so that the Sunni influence would continue in this "Arab" nation. The call appeared to suggest that if the Shiite majority were to come to power the "Arab" character of Iraq would be lost...
It is not far-fetched to suggest that the Arab world dominated by a Sunni majority has not remained neutral toward the Sunni insurrection in Iraq to destabilize the interim government and sabotage the elections. There is an unarticulated but widespread fear among Sunni Arabs that genuine democracy in Iraq will take away the power from the Sunni minority that enjoyed state protection under Saddam. More importantly, and against the liking of the Sunni-Arab world, real democracy would transform Iraq into a majority ruled "Arab" Shiite nation. The fiction entertained by many Arab scholars is that Shiism is a Persian phenomenon, and, hence, non-Arab. To see Iraq become a Shii-dominated democracy is anathema to many Arab nationalists. This is also the source of unsubstantiated accusation against Iraqi Shiites that they are in alliance with Iran and its traditional animosity towards Arab nationalism. It is important to recall that under Saddam the Shiite Arabs of Iraq adopted a most radical form of secular Arab nationalism against the liking of Iran under the Shah, and later on under the Ayatollahs.
As for the Iraqi Sunnis, it is important to emphasize that not all Sunnis in Iraq share the nightmare of Shaykh Qubaisi. In fact, a large majority of Sunni clerics want to work towards the preservation of Iraqi sovereignty under a democratic system, whoever the people decide to vote for. But given the Sunni conduct in the recent past of Iraq, their fear that the Shiite majority will disregard the rights and interests of the Sunnis is understandable. It is this fear that needs to be eased by the Shiite leadership at this time so that the elections in January could take place with the full participation of the Sunnis. The grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and other Shiite leaders, in the spirit of the ethics of responsibility as taught by Imam Ali, need to explicitly assure the Sunni minority that not only will their rights be protected through legitimate democratic governance but also that through constitutionally guaranteed political power-sharing, they, along with the Kurdish minority, will have the ability to participate meaningfully in determining the future of the nation.
At this critical time in the history of Iraq the perpetuation of the historical divide between the Shiites and Sunnis would be detrimental to the essential need of creating a national culture of citizenship built on equality and justice. The senior Shiite leadership thus far has emerged as a voice of fairness and sound political judgment. It should now assume the lead in providing the national voice of reconciliation between the two Muslim communities in sharing power for the betterment of all the citizens of Iraq. Such a message of reconciliation and forgiveness towards fellow Muslims coming from Ayatollah Sistani and other leading ayatollahs in Najaf will restore the confidence of the once powerful--and abusive--Sunni minority that they will not face reprisals from an elected Shiite majority. No community, however numerous and powerful, has a right to be indifferent to the ethics of responsibility in a democracy. The ball is in the court of the Shiite leaders. If they play it right then they will gain the gratitude of millions of people around the world who wish for peace and justice in Iraq for all.
~ A.S.
I'm busy writing about (Lebanese) Hizbullah this week. It's really interesting because,
In Lebanon, Hizbullah has always had a mass-organizing aspect to it, that few people in the west have ever focused much on at all. In addition, since 1989 they've been part of the Lebanese body politic. Since 1992 they've had around 12 of the 128 seats in the national parliament. In addition, since 1996 they've won municipal elections in increasing numbers of municipalities and now control 141 of them--from tiny ones to very large ones. All these are systems in which they've been RE-elected, so the voters must like something about them.
In addition, Hizbullah's done really well at reaching out to non-Shi-ites, including Christians...
(2) In 2000, Hizbullah's well-coordinated combination of mass organizing and tightly focused military resistance actions against Israel (overwhelmingly against Israeli military targets, not civilians), succeeded in bringing about a near-total and quite unilateral Israeli withdrawal from land the IDF had occupied in South Lebanon since 1982 (and some they'd occupied since 1978). Now, Sharon has been proposing a unilateral withdrawal of Israeli troops-- and settlers-- from Gaza. So, can the events in south Lebanon since 2000 tell us anything useful about how things may turn out in Gaza post a unilateral Israeli withdrawal there?
(3) It's a really interesting story in itself, too. When I quit living in Lebanon in 1981, Hizbullah didn't even exist! Since then, it has really established itself as, not just a major political force inside Lebanon, but also as the only well organized political party in the whole country. It's people are nearly universally seen as non-corrupt, serious, well trained, and impressively task oriented. As opposed to both the clan chieftains and the woolly "ideological" forces of various stripes who dominated Lebanese politics when I was there in the late 1970s. So how have these Islamist modernizers achieved this?
Another reason I think it's an intriguing story: all the Hizbullah officials I talked to in Beirut recently had an impressive command of, and a seemingly sincere copmmitment to, the discourse of democratic modernity: good citizenship, good governance, equality of rights, accountability of governments, etc etc. Only occasionally would they-- like John Locke in his day, for example-- slip in some scriptural reference to add authority to what was basically an appeal to non-theological democratic ideals...
Oh, and about their relationship with Israel...
One of the most punctilious and best informed Israeli writers on Hizbullah is Daniel Sobelman. Since the Israeli withdrawal in 2000, Sobelman has done two interesting analyses of the organization for Tel Aviv University's Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies. In this one, which was published in August 2004, he writes a lot about the nuanced paramters of the situation of operational mutual deterrence that has existed between Israel and Hizbullah since 2000, with the "rules of the game" between the two sides having become more clearly (and even explicitly) recognized by the two sides over those four years.
He concluded:
Since the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000, Israel has generally made sure to keep its responses and actions in Lebanon within the existing rules of the game, and sometimes even exercised self-restraint after terrorist attacks (especially in the first months after the withdrawal) in order to avoid opening another front of confrontation on top of the Palestinian one. Hizbollah took care in its declarations to attribute a limited and fundamentally retaliatory character to its activities in the north...
Considering that relations between Israel and Lebanon are defined as a state of war (or hostilities) and are influenced by the state of war existing between Israel and Syria - and in any case both countries have territorial demands of Israel - Israel's northern border is relatively stable and peaceful and displays signs of economic prosperity.
Since Sobelman wrote that piece, the most significant development has been Hizbullah's early-November launching of a drone aircraft that set off from lebanon, traveled to the israeli coastal resort of Nahariya, and returned safely to its Hizbullah handlers inside Lebanon. That scared the bejeesus out of many Israelis. For their part, many Lebanese very regularly get very fearful when Israel sends its much larger and armed jet-planes screeching over portions of Lebanon, or breaking the sound barrier over major Lebanese cities, etc... Which of course was one of the main points of Hizbullah's much more modest little drone project.
Sobelman wrote that,
But even that aggression against Hizbullah didn't result in the "Cold War" style balance between the two sides breaking down.
Altogether a fascinating story, I think.
In this recent post I wrote about the subversion of allegedly "humanitarian" arguments that are used as pretexts for war. Today I found this recent piece by John Pilger, on Counterpunch, in which he produces some very sobering evidence about how this process worked regarding Kosovo.
He writes:
Lies as great as those of Bush and Blair were deployed by Clinton and Blair in their grooming of public opinion for an illegal, unprovoked attack on a European country. Like the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, the media coverage in the spring of 1999 was a series of fraudulent justifications, beginning with U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen's claim that "we've now seen about 100,000 military-aged [Albanian] men missing ... they may have been murdered." David Scheffer, the U.S. ambassador at large for war crimes, announced that as many as "225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59" may have been killed. Blair invoked the Holocaust and "the spirit of the Second World War." The British press took its cue. "Flight from genocide," said the Daily Mail. "Echoes of the Holocaust," chorused the Sun and the Mirror.
By June 1999, with the bombardment over, international forensic teams began subjecting Kosovo to minute examination. The American FBI arrived to investigate what was called "the largest crime scene in the FBI's forensic history." Several weeks later, having not found a single mass grave, the FBI went home. The Spanish forensic team also returned home, its leader complaining angrily that he and his colleagues had become part of "a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines, because we did not find one not one mass grave."
Yankeedoodle is now sharing his duties at Today in Iraq with "Matt". Between them, they make a truly stellar team and they've made TII into even more of a must-read than it already was.
Today, Matt has posted the daily compilation of news there. One of the items is his own quick Google-led survey of the security situation in each of Iraq's 18 provinces.
His conclusion? That,
I've been thinking of doing a post here on the relationship between the violence and the election preparations in Iraq. I guess all the more reason now to do it. But it may have to wait till tomorrow.
I wrote my check to the American Civil Liberties Union last week. They've been doing a great job pursuing the government's records re the tortures of detainees. And yesterday they released yet more extremely revealing documents that they'd managed to get the FBI to release.
Go here for the portal to this latest batch of documents.
The ACLU's own media release focuses on this May 22 email, sent by an FBI person who signed herself/himself off as "On-scene commander--Baghdad" to a bunch of FBI agents in "Div13" and one in "Div10". The writer noted that some FBI agents present at Abu Ghraib had had clear but indirect evidence that other interrogators there were utilizing,
We emphatically do not equate any of these things our personnel witnessed with the clearly unlawful and sickening abuse at Abu G that has come to light. The things our personnel witnessed (but did not participate in) were authorized by the President under his Executive Order.
To me, an equally significant document in the new collection is this one, an email sent on August 2, 2004 from [name redacted] to Valerie E. Caproni, in the Office of the General Counsel of the FBI. (Maybe she IS the General Counsel? Anyone know?)
The sender writes:
On a couple of occasions, I entered interview rooms to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food, or water. Most times they had urinated or defecated on themselves and had been left there for 18 24 hours or more. On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. When I asked the MPs what was going on, I was told that interrogators from the day prior had ordered this treatment, and the detainee was not to be moved. On another occasion, the A/C had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room probably well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor.
It seems the FBI was at the time--and still may be-- in major rear-covering (CYA) mode. With good reason, since several of the other newly released emails make clear that interrogators from other US government agencies were trying to "impersonate" FBI officers, and this was of intense concern to people inside the FBI. See this doc, and this doc, and this one, and this one.
In the first of those docs there, a January 21, 2004 intra-FBI email (sender and recipients' names all redacted), the writer writes:
The last doc I mentioned in that list was a December 5, 2003 intra-FBI email from [redacted] to RBI officers Gary Bald, Frankie Battle, and Arthur Cummings, with the subject line "Fwd: Impersonating FBI at GTMO".
The author wrote:
Of concern, DOD interrogators impersonating Supervisory Special Agents of the FBI told a detainee that [one-third of a line redacted] These same interrogation teams then [half a line redacted] The detainee was also told by this interrogation team [line and a half redacted]
These tactics have produced no intelligence of a threat neutralization nature to date and CITF believes that techniques have destroyed any chance of prosecuting this detainee. [my emphasis, HC] If this detainee is ever released or his story made public in any way, DOD interrogators will not be held accountable because these torture techniques were done the ?FBI? interrogators. The FBI will be left holding the bag before the public.
So the detainees truly get caught up in a Catch-22 situation. If they'd never been tortured or other abused, it would be far easier for the US military to simply let the vast majority of them go free. But since they have been tortured/abused, they can't so easily be freed or even brought into a court of law; and thus their often quite illegal detention perforce continues...
This email provides a description of some of the worst tortures/abuses described anywhere in the ACLU-discovered paper trail to date. It's the documentation of allegations made to agents in the Sacramento office by a [name redacted] individual who had seen considerable abuses of civilian detainees in Iraq, including,
I went to check the post, and the Salon article I cited there indeed said that the "mulitiple incidents" of detainee mistreatment he'd seen included,
The Salon article indicated that Ford didn't file that report till August 2004. But it seems clear that the June 25 intra-FBI email referred to above relates to Ford's allegations, so he must actually have filed his report on or before June 25. Should be easy enough to find out...
My three strongest reactions to the latest batch of documents are (1) horror at realizing that what's been going on in Gitmo--and what may still be going on there and elsewhere-- has actually been just as bad as I feared; (2) satisfaction at seeing more and more of the truth (however ugly) actually coming out; and (3) interest at seeing the degree of inter-agency disagreement over the whole question of what to do with the massive number of detainess who continue to be scooped up and held in US-run detention facilities around the world.
Let's hope that that latter process continues to generate a good stream of "CYA" memos from various government agencies.
But let's meanwhile work even harder than ever to overturn all the "Executive Orders" from the White House or elsewhere that allow/encourage the continuation of grossly abusive treatment of detainees. (= war crimes.) And redouble our efforts for a clear and universal policy of "No tolerance for torture."
----
Update, later Tuesday.
Also of interest in the collection: this partial string of intra-FBI emil correspondence. In it, an unnamed FBI agent, apparently from the Omaha field office, reported up the chain of command on July 30, 2004 that one day when he'd been at Gitmo (exact date not remembered) he'd seen an Israeli flag being used apparently as an instrument of additional humiliation,
Item 1: The lede paragraph of a review in last Friday's WaPo of a new Chinese-made movie:
I was truly disgusted when I read this lead to a movie review on the front page of today's "Style" section: "The experience of 'House of Flying Daggers' isn't like going to a movie so much as going to a truly superb brothel. That is, pleasure is available in every room, in every configuration, in all possibilities, in polymorphic abandon."
It didn't take a genius to guess that the writer, Stephen Hunter, was a man; and I'm assuming that all the editors who signed off on such a simile must have been men, too?
What on earth were they thinking? That the pages of the WP are a kind of snickery boys' club where the writers and readers-- all of them "guys"-- can sit around together and fantasize about the debasement through prostitution of women, girls (and yes, perhaps, young boys as well)?
How do they imagine the "experience" of "going to" a brothel is for the (overwhelmingly female) people who perforce have to end up working there, providing all that "pleasure" to their male clientele?
Did they stop for a minute to imagine that the paper's women readers might read that simile very differently from a large number of-- but not all-- your male readers? Did they even remember that it's possible that (gasp!) the paper does indeed have quite a few female readers? What on earth kind of a communication where they trying to send to us with this jejune snickering?
Please, "guys", get your act together. Fast. It's bad enough that the WP's op-ed pages are almopst totally dominated by contributions from male writers-- as though the "wisdom" in the human race is concentrated nearly wholly in male heads... But to make the content of the paper actively hostile to female readers, as well? That's going ways too far.
Sincerely,
Helena Cobban
Mr. Getler passed along your note to me. Thank you so much for sharing your
opinions on the review written by Stephen Hunter, whose articles I edit. I
can't comment on women's voices in The Post's Op/Ed pages, but where I
work, the Style section, I am one of five female editors out of about 11
editors total. Our newly-appointed department head is also a woman (Deborah
Heard).
That said, I'm not surprised that you, and likely other readers, found that
particular movie review's lead offensive. One person's idea of humor is
often another person's idea of offensive. If we were to remove all the
potentially-offensive sentences from the Style pages, I don't think we
would produce a very provocative, intriguing and relevant section. Of
course, you're welcome to disagree.
I like to hear from readers--the Post is blessed with a varied readership
that likes to talk back to us. I welcome your comments in the future and I
hope you'll keep reading Style.
Best,
Leslie
Thanks for your letter.
I have no idea how old you are but I can't believe you are so inexperienced that you've never before encountered the "hey, it was just humor" defense of stereotyping hate-speech. Except, of course, that that is never a sustainable defense of such speech. In addition, the article in question was not in the genre of "humor". It was a movie review. The writer was casting around for a simile to express his idea of "available", "polymorphic" "pleasure and he chose the image of "a truly superb brothel". I don't see that he was attempting humor.
But even if he were writing "humor", the "hey, it was just humor" defense for inter-group stereotyping is anyway unsustainable. Let's bring in all those thigh-slapping jokes that link the ideas of "Jews" and "stinginess"! Or "African-Americans" and "laziness"... Or "Polish-Americans" and "being stupid"... Ho, ho, ho!!!
And while we're about it, a joke about "beautiful Asian women" and "brothels". Oh yes, that's a real thigh-slapper, too.
Why don't you and Stephen Hunter just try saying "sorry" for the offense you caused. That might be a good place to start.
Sincerely,
Helena Cobban.
(P.s. Score for women's contributions on today's WaPo Oped page: 0 / 5.)
... And it concluded,Once upon a time, the International Committee of the Red Cross was a humanitarian outfit doing the Lord's work to reduce the horrors of war. So it is a special tragedy to see that it has increasingly become an ideological organization unable to distinguish between good guys and bad.
the ICRC has become just another politicized pressure group like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. ICRC President Jakob Kellenberger is reportedly planning to visit Washington soon to press the U.S. government on Guantanamo and other issues. We hope he is told that he is leading his organization toward the loss of its $100 million-plus annual subsidy from U.S. taxpayers, as well as its special status come future revisions of the Geneva Conventions.Another interesting article Christiane found was this December 15th piece in the Guardian (London), on the related subject of the travails the British Red Cross Society has been facing in its working relationship with the British government and military. Writer Anne Kelly quotes Nick Young, the BRCS's chief executive, as saying:
"We are able to work across the front line for only as long as we are seen as neutral... The moment that sense of impartiality is lost, our mission is lost. We might as well pack up and go home. We'll be seen as part of the war machine and we'll be unable to operate."Finally, here is C's translation of this piece , published in Le Temps on December 18th (yesterday):
The CIA manages a secret prison for high ranking Al-Quaeda members in Guantanamo
United States. Did the ICRC delegates meet with all the detainees in the US army camp in Cuba? The president of the organization, Jakob Kellengerger is still waiting for a meeting in Washington.
Alain Campiotti, in collaboration with Richard Werly.Jakob Kellenberger wants to go to Washington at the beginning of next year. The president of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) wants the highest level of the administration to know about his concerns for the detention conditions in the military camp of Guantanamo, in Cuba. But no answer comes; the meeting isn't yet arranged. On the American side, there is no great enthusiasm. The ICRC is the bugbear of the conservatives since its delegates, after a June visit in the camp, have spoken of interrogation methods "tantamount to torture" in a report which was leaked.
Saturday 18th December 2004
Waiting for his invitation letter, Jakob Kellengerger has surely benefited from reading the Washington Post's issue of Friday. Citing military and intelligence sources, the capital's daily states that the CIA manages a secret center of detention, inside of Guantanamo, separated from the rest of the camp by high palisades and where high ranking Al-Qaeda members, particularly precious in the eyes of the agency, are detained. This protected enclosed place has never been mentionned publicly. It exists by virtue of a presidential decision authorizing the CIA to detain clandestinely, in unknown conditions, prisoners of "high value" for intelligence. In the prison of Abu Ghraib, in Baghdad, the agency had ghost detainees under control, which were kept hiden from the ICRC delegates. Other special prisons have existed in Bagram, near of Kaboul, in ships on sea and also in Thailand.
Special section
The ICRC delegates, who make frequent visits in Guantanamo, can not ignore the special section about which the Washington Post is talking. But did they meet with the detainees of the CIA ? The ICRC is always cautious : it admits that the access to Guantanamo has been large and hopes that it has met with everybody. It's hardly possible.
One of the high value prisoners in the camp is named Mohamedou Oulad Slahi. The presence of the Mauritanian has been confirmed by the report of the 9/11 Commission. Slahi acted as the direct intermediary between Mohamed Atta, his comrades of the Hamburg cell (the hard core of the commando of the 2001 plotters) and Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. He was arrested fifteen days
after 9/11 and handed over to the Americans. Other members of the main staff of Al Qaeda are perhaps also under the control of the CIA in Guantanamo: Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the brain of the operation; Ramzi Binalshibh, one of his assistants who left Germany; Abu Zubaida, the recruiter in chief, first responsible person arrested; Hambali, the leader of the terrorist network in Southeast Asia. The sources of the Washington Post think that there are nearly forty detainees in the special center of Cuba.
The Americans state that the arrested Al Qaeda staff members have spoken and that the Europeans have benefited from these informations. How were they interrogated? Does the ICRC talk of them when it denounced, in its confidential July report to the Pentagon, the use of physical and mental coercion tantamount to torture? It is about that, among other things, that Jakob Kellenberger wants to talk in Washington. And it is that which has triggered the conservative fit of anger. Rush Limbaugh, the bluntest polemist of the right says that the ICRC "hates America". Fred Barnes, the chief editor of the Weekly Standard and commentator of Fox News requests the expulsion of the ICRC from Guantanamo. And the Wall Street Journal wants the abolition of the special statute of the ICRC with a revision of the Geneva Conventions.
In Washington, Jakob Kellenberger doesn't have only enemies. The New Republic, the weekly of the "liberal hawks", is shocked by the outburst against the ICRC. It remembers that the Pentagon has continually used the presence of the ICRC as an alibi in Guantanamo: everything is OK, since they are allowed in there. But the organization knows that Rumsfeld was abusing it. He said it. In reports which are no longer so confidential. George Bush would be wise to receive the former Swiss diplomate with his small grey beard. They have so many things to talk about.
Asia Times Online's incomparable Pepe Escobar has a lengthy piece there today titled "Evildoers, here we come"... Evidently, that's a reference to how he sees the mindset of the GWB-2 administration.
As Escobar says right up at the front of the piece:
Then, before going through the situation country by country, he presents the considerable amount of evidence there isfor thinking that the 2nd GWB administration will be even more warlike than the first one:
A good part of Bob Woodward's intriguing book "Plan of Attack" describes in detail just how hard W had to work from November 2001 through mid-2002 to, effectively, seduce fellow Texan General Tommy Franks into believing that it just "might-could" be possible to undertake a war of the kind that Rumsfeld had in mind against Iraq and come out of it successfully.
After what all the service chiefs have experienced in Iraq in the past 21 months, don't expect any member of the US officer corps at all to be open to a similar seduction today, with respect to any of the other countries in the neocons' cross-hairs.
Yes, it's true that here in the US we still have "civilian control of the military" (which is generally a good idea). But still, the service chiefs here are also all long-time adepts at working Capitol Hill. So don't expect that "next time around", the Bushies could get an "enabling resolution" through the Congress with anything like the alacrity and ease they enjoyed back in November 2002.
What's more, the cumulative effect of the whole series of culpable mis-steps the US has taken over the past three years with respect to Iraq-- including the deliberate buildup to and fanning of the flames of that quite unnecessary invasionr; the launching of it; and several significant mis-steps taken in its aftermath-- has been that the considerable amount of international goodwilll the US enjoyed as of September 2001 has been completely dissipated.
They claim they have a "coalition of the willing" for Iraq? They couldn't get even world-class brown-nose Tony Blair to sign up for any kind of a "coalition" going into any of those other countries...
So I'm not as worried as Pepe Escobar seems to be that the Bushies would actually be able to act on any of the extremely bellicose rhetoric now steaming out of their ears with regard to Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, or North Korea. In addition, I think he's raising an unnecessary degree of alarm when he concludes:
(Another piece of evidence related to the Bushies' attitudes towards Syria: Ori Nir of The Forward has a piece in there today in which he cites "knowledgeable American and Israeli sources" as saying that, "While Syria's repeated offers to reopen peace talks with Jerusalem are triggering a fierce debate within the Israeli military and political establishment, the Bush administration appears united in its opposition to launching such negotiations... Washington has ... quietly told Israeli leaders that this would be a bad time to resume talks with Syria." Presumably, the Bushies are eager to keep the "threat" of a possible future Israeli attack on Syria as one of their many means of pressuring President Asad's regime. Oh boy.)
Back to Escobar... He cites two really interesting sources. One is this recent post by Riverbend-- her first in about four weeks. As with every single sentence that River writes, this post is definitely worth a read. She writes at length about the terrible effects that Iraq's ongoing fuel shortage is having on the daily life of even middle-class Baghdadis. (Imagine the effects on people who find it even harder than her family does to pay around $4.00 per gallon for gasoline! ... And this, in a country almost swimming on a sea of oil...)
Interestingly, she writes that,
Ahmad Chalabi is at the head of one of those lists- who would join a list with Ahmad Chalabi at its head?
And the other really interesting source cited by Escobar was this article about Iran's planning to deal with a possible US attack, published on Asia Times Online on Thursday. It's by Kaveh Afrasiabi, who's evidently a very smart and well-connected professor of political science at Tehran University.
This piece is definitely worth reading and studying closely. Afrasiabi writes:
But still, it is definitely worth while for all Americans, including our leaders, to remember that when they even consider launching an attack against Iran, they are notably not talking about some penny-ante country that lacks its own considerable experience of running wars.
As Afrasiabi notes,
(2)Also, to "increase the arch of crisis for the US, in Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which of course border Iran, and in both of which some of the US forces are highly vulnerable.
(3) Psychological warfare, and
(4) What Afrasiabi calls, "an emerging 'proto-nuclear deterrence' according to which, as he writes:
The CSM ran my column on Iran in today's edition. I think it came out pretty well despite some hasty last-minute edits.
In addition, today was the day they finally ran a letter from someone affiliated with 'CAMERA', the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America. It criticized me for writing in my column on Shatila last month that the ugly 1982 massacre there had been "Israeli-orchestrated". You can see the text of the letter here.
I quite agree-- based on my own extensive study of the evidence-- with letter author Gilead Ini that the massacre in question "was carried out by Lebanese Christian militiamen of the Phalangist party." (Though I'd tend to put quotes around that adjective "Christian".)
I also think Mr. Ini is quite entitled to express his judgment--which he bases on his reading of the Israeli government's own Kahan Commission enquiry into the events-- that,
In an exchange with Jonathan on the Comments board of this recent JWN post I wrote that what happened in Shatila in those terrible days,
I wish he had also had the space to note that, because of the way it viewed Mr. Sharon's role, the Kahan Commission report stated that:
Tonight I got some time browse around in the collection of documents relating to US interrogations of detainees around the world that the American Civil Liberties Union has worked hard to get declassified and has recently been putting up on their website.
The ACLU's own media presentation of the two most recent sets of these docs focused on
(2) Evidence that US Marines undertook mock executions of Iraqi juveniles and engaged in other forms of abuse (released 12/14/04).
My first observation: just how much of the text of these docs was "redacted" (edited out) by the issuing agency before they were turned over to the ACLU under the ACLU's "freedom of information" request!
My second observation: how strongly the FBI seemed to have objected to many of the interrogation techniques used by the military "under marching orders," as one FBI officer noted, "from the Sec Def" (i.e. Rumsfeld).
When we're talking about interrogations that trouble even the FBI, then I think we're talking about something serious...
In addition, the most recent set of docs released (the top fifteen currently on the ACLU's single portal to the PDF texts of the docs) concerned a group of nine US Navy medics who all deployed in Iraq with different Marines units in Feburary 2003... They came back with some tales and allegations (that got picked up by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service) about abuses they'd seen or heard about in Iraq.
That investigation led to "no further action". But along the way there, there were several reports that individual corpsmen had experienced mental-health problems after their deployment; and in this doc, someone--name blanked out-- is quoted as advising that, "all of the corpsmen have experienced some form of problem from what they observed in Iraq."
But anyway, about the FBI...
Early May was the time when the Abu Ghraib abuses (tortures) suddenly exploded into the public consciousness with the publication of some of those truly troubling photographs from there...
This doc from the ACLU collection gives one tiny window into the way one group of people inside the FBI reacted. The doc in question contains a fully recorded email exchange involving five different messages among FBI officers. You know, the kind, where you hit "reply" to an email and your text gets fired off with the text of the message you're replying to reproduced underneath it... So you need to read this exchange of emails from the bottom up...
Sunday May 9 at 2:31 p.m., Caproni, Valerie E. (Div09) fires off a message to three fellow-officers, including only one -- Harrington, TJ (Div13)-- whose name is NOT redacted. In it Caproni says:
Has there been any written guidance given to FBI agents in either GTMO [Gitmo] or Iraq about when they should "stand clear" b/c of the interrogation techniques being used by DOD or DHS [then, a large portion redacted].
We spoke to FBI OGC [Office of the General Counsl?] with our concerns. I also brought these matters to the attention of DOJ during detainee meetings with [two or more words redacted?] express their comments to [redaction]
...
"TJ," he or she said: