June 5, 2004 8:10 AM EST | Link
How to train abusers
You want more clues as to how widespread physical abuse is in US-run detention facilities? Read about Specialist Sean Baker.
Baker was a member of a military-police unit in the Kentucky National Guard who pulled a tour of guard duty at Gitmo. One day in January 2003, an officer ordered Baker to play the role of a balky detainee in a training exercise. He put that dehumanizing orange jumpsuit on over his unifrm and cowered, as ordered, under a bed in a mock 'cell'.
According to this report by the NYT's Nick Kristof, this is what Baker said happened next:
- "They grabbed my arms, my legs, twisted me up and unfortunately one of the individuals got up on my back from behind and put pressure down on me while I was face down. Then he — the same individual — reached around and began to choke me and press my head down against the steel floor. After several seconds, 20 to 30 seconds, it seemed like an eternity because I couldn't breathe. When I couldn't breathe, I began to panic and I gave the code word I was supposed to give to stop the exercise, which was `red.' . . . That individual slammed my head against the floor and continued to choke me. Somehow I got enough air. I muttered out: `I'm a U.S. soldier. I'm a U.S. soldier.' "
Then [continues Kristof] the soldiers noticed that he was wearing a U.S. battle dress uniform under the jumpsuit. Mr. Baker was taken to a military hospital for treatment of his head injuries, then flown to a Navy hospital in Portsmouth, Va. After a six-day hospitalization there, he was given a two-week discharge to rest.
But Mr. Baker began suffering seizures, so the military sent him to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center for treatment of a traumatic brain injury. He stayed at the hospital for 48 days, was transferred to light duty... and was finally given a medical discharge two months ago.
Meanwhile, a military investigation concluded that there had been no misconduct involved in Mr. Baker's injury. Hmm. The military also says it can't find a videotape that is believed to have been made of the incident.
Most appalling, when Mr. Baker told his story to a Kentucky reporter, the military lied in a disgraceful effort to undermine his credibility.
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- Helena
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June 4, 2004 7:36 AM EST | Link
Gelb on Tenet resignation
I cruised around the 'net a bit to check out speculation etc about Tenet's resignation. Actually, the most interesting thing I found came from that very well-connected old fox, Les Gelb.
(Gelb even taught Tenet in a seminar when Tenet was a senior at Georgetown U., back in 1981, and they've stayed in pretty close touch since.)
Here's the most interesting thing I saw Gelb saying, in the interview with him on cfr.org:
- Generally, you never know exactly what is going on. You hear some people repeating one rumor and other rumors come out, too. I don't think his leaving helps Bush politically, and I don't think he would resign to help Bush politically.
Btw, I agree with Gelb that Tenet's resignation doesn't help Bush politically.
#1 It adds to the impression of an administration in gathering chaos (prez hiring private legal advice, polygraphing of high offocials at the Pentagon over the Chalabi leak, Ashcroft not talking to Ridge, etc etc etc.... )
#2 If Tenet is a "private citizen", he'll be in a much better position to defend himself and name the other names that need to be named since the upcoming, reportedly extremely damaging reports on pre-9-11 failures and other issues start rolling off the presses.
Continue reading " Gelb on Tenet resignation"|
- Helena
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June 3, 2004 10:45 PM EST | Link
Tenet resigning--who's next?
I'm in Ontario. I see there's lots of speculation about why George Tenet resigned. Of course, there are many reasons he should have resigned, at many points along the way-- him and Colin Powell, both. Indeed, those two and anyone else of any possible integrity in the service of this government...
One of the delightful (and weird) twists on this story is that our dear old buddy Ahmad ('Don't blame me, I only sold them the snake-oil') Chalabi, who is now in Najaf, rapidly trying to reinvent himself as a Shi-ite national hero (?), is now acting the wounded party and blaming Tenet for having framed him re the passing-secrets-to-Iran business.
If we were to believe Chalabi - oh, ha-ha-ha, this is almost to crazy to write... If we were to believe Chalabi (!), then Tenet's sudden downfall might look like the doing of Chalabi's longtime backers in the Wolfie-Feith-Perle circle?
But what it certainly looks like to me is that there's a really delightful falling-out among all the rabble who've been running our country's so-called foreign 'policy' under Bush...
And Tenet's resignation surely isn't the end of it.
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- Helena
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June 2, 2004 10:58 PM EST | Link
Kurds doing okay
Am I the only person remarking on this-- but aren't the Kurds doing pretty well in the current government-forming process?
They have two of the top five jobs. In addition, they have the Foreign Affairs portfolio, and the Public Works portfolio (a.k.a. the huge patronage possibilities portfolio). I am really, really glad that after decades of getting screwed by Saddam and his neighbors, these Kurds look as though they may be well positioned to look out for their own interests in the months ahead.
It ain't ever easy being a minority. But over the past 13 years, the Kurds have been able to set their society on its feet--with the help of the Western air umbrella--and in particular, they've been able to create a fairly stable-looking system of political representation. (After a small but bloody intra-Kurdish civil war along the way there in the mid-1990s.)
They're lucky. The crystallization of differing political interests into well-formed political parties is far less well advanced in the Sunni Arab or especially the Shi'a Arab community. That means that if--as I surely hope--the country moves into a situation of increasing and mainly democratic self-rule, the country's non-Kurds may continue to be at a relative disadvantage compared with their Kurdish compatriots.
Continue reading " Kurds doing okay"|
- Helena
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June 2, 2004 10:49 PM EST | Link
U.S. military pressgangs at work
The strain imposed on U.S. military planners by the total failure to do decent follow-up ('Phase 4') planning for either Iraq or Afghanisatn continues to grow. Today, the NYT carried an impassioned plea from an Army captain that the soldiers about to be re-impressed into the forces to keep up the troop strength are being very harshly treated.
The program in question is called "stop-loss". The captain is called Andrew Exum. Here's the bottom line on what he wrote:
- for enlisted soldiers, men and women who sign on with the Army for a predetermined period of service in lieu of commissions, stop-loss is a gross breach of contract.
These soldiers have already been asked to sacrifice much and have done so proudly. Yet the military continues to keep them overseas-- because it knows that through stop-loss it can do so legally, and that it will not receive nearly as much negative publicity as it would by reinstating the draft.
Volunteer soldiers on active duty don't have the right to protest or speak out against the policy... For those of us who have seen these soldiers repeatedly face death, watching them march off again-- after they should have already left the Army-- is painful.
I don't know when he wrote that piece. But it sure is timely. Today, AP has some big stories about stop-loss being implemented for:
- several units about to go to Iraq: most of the 2nd Brigade of the 10th Mountain Division, from Fort Drum, N.Y.; the 265th Infantry Brigade of the Louisiana National Guard; the 116th Armored Brigade of the Idaho National Guard; the 278th Armored Cavalry Regiment of the Tennessee National Guard, and the 42nd Infantry Division's headquarters staff, from the New York National Guard.
The 2nd Brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division, a South Korea-based unit, is expected to deploy later this summer and will be subject to the expanded stop-loss program as well, officials said.
Nah, I think we all really know where the buck really stops. 1600 Pennsylvania Ave in Northwest DC is where the guy in question lives. (Or just possibly, the Naval Observatory up on Mass Ave... home of Unca Dickie.)
All that sorrow, all those lives ended, broken, or mangled beyond recognition. In our country and even more so in Iraq.
As Yankeedoodle would say: 86-43-04.
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- Helena
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June 2, 2004 9:38 PM EST | Link
Transitional justice and Iraq
I've just been reading a really intriguing report about the attitudes of Iraqis towards reconciliation and 'justice' that has been published by a body called the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ), in New York.
The report is called Iraqi Voices. It's 74 pages in that PDF version, and quite a lengthy read. The data in it are a little old, since they all date from last July and August. Also, the ICTJ did not use a totally "scientific" social-science methodology in their investigation (and as a result, their findings are presented in narrative rather than quantitative form, which is fine by me.)
What they had done to get their data was conduct fairly detailed interviews with 38 "opinion leaders" around the country and then hold smallish focus-group discussions among a total of some 340 Iraqis from different background. Their sampling was not "representative" at all. For example, of the 38 "opinion leaders", only six were from the south, while 20 were from the much more sparsely populated "north" of the country.
But still, I find the report really interesting. I don't know that attitudes on these important issues have necessarily changed very much inside Iraq in the past ten months. (What does anyone else think?) And honestly, that method of taking an unrepresentative but broad sampling from throughout a society, and doing some individual interviews and some small-group discussions, is almost exactly what I did in Mozambique last year, and it was incredibly revelatory and productive for me.
Continue reading " Transitional justice and Iraq"|
- Helena
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June 2, 2004 2:27 PM EST | Link
Riverbend's new post
Riverbend has a great new post up on her blog. She says she hasn't felt much like blogging recently. The new post is a great little reflection on cleaning the family's roof ready for summer-time sleepouts there.
She notes that sleeping out on the roof used to be just a tradition that her parents told her about... from the "olden days":
- They used to tell us endless stories about how, as children, they used to put out mats and low beds on the roof to sleep. There were no air-conditioners back then... sometimes not even ceiling fans. People had to be content with the hot Baghdad air and the energetic Baghdad mosquitos. Now my parents get to relive their childhood memories like never before because we've gone back a good fifty years. It's impossible to sleep inside of the house while the electricity is off.
Great, River! Thanks so much for coming back up. I am really eager to hear what-all you think of what's been going on.
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- Helena
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June 1, 2004 8:29 PM EST | Link
Zero tolerance for torture: the column!
Yes!!!
The life of a humble scribe like myself has its frustrations and disappointments. But every so often, I feel unbelievably blessed by being able to do what I do. And right now is one such moment. My column Zero-tolerance on torture: How hard is that? is in tomorrow's Christian Science Monitor. And it's already up, here, on their website.
I can't tell you how strongly I feel about this issue. (Regular JWN readers just possibly have an inkling.) I am really grateful to my editor on the CSM Opinion page, Clara Germani, for having squeezed this one into the paper outside of my regular schedule. It was probably she, too, who picked the title, which I'm kinda fond of.
So would any of the rest of you like to join in this campaign? Like, if you're a US citizen, you could write to your representatives in Congress? We could make signs and go hold 'em outside the political conventions?
Alternatively, if you prefer your activism to be in cyberspace, maybe you could send the column around to anyone on your lists. Call your local paper and ask them to run it... I don't know, I just wish we could get this campaign off the ground. How hard is that, indeed?
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- Helena
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June 1, 2004 7:57 PM EST | Link
What to do with $119.4 billion
The AP wire has a great little story that just came across my transom. It starts by reminding us that, "Congress and President Bush have so far provided $119.4 billion for the war in Iraq." And then, it gives a few examples of what that sum could buy.
Well, in the interests of "fair use" (!) I shan't reproduce the whole story here. But let's just note that that bunch of dough could pay tuition, room, and board to send 748,495 people--nearly the whole population of of Jacksonville, Florida-- to Harvard University for four years.
Or, it could buy a median-price ($174,100) U.S. home for 685,813 people-- slightly more than all the residents of Austin, Texas. One home for EACH of them, man, woman, and child, that is.
I hope your local newspaper carries the whole AP story, with the rest of its truly eye-opening examples.
Here's the thing, though. The story also notes that, "If the $119.4 billion were divided evenly among Iraq's estimated 25 million residents, each would get $4,776. That would be eight times the country's $600 per capita income."
So here's my question:
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- Helena
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May 31, 2004 10:11 PM EST | Link
Après nous, le deluge?
It strikes me that things are getting bad very rapidly for the U.S. in the Gulf. We have political mayhem in Baghdad, with the IGC quasi-puppets flexing their political muscles, Lakhdar Brahimi's mission in chaos, and no word at all from Sistani in the past two weeks. We have a once-again dangerously deteriorating situation in Najaf and Kufa. We have the Saudis running round like the Keystone cops at Khobar and, almost certainly, the world oil market about to get into a tizzy over that. We had the big bomb in Karachi...
It feels like it's too late and too dire now to sit around enjoying the schadenfreudies.
I've been really disappointed with the U.N. in recent weeks, and most particularly with Lakhdar's apparent willingness to let himself get rolled by Paul Bremer. But if the UN, with all its weight of international legitimacy, etc., can't help to midwife a half-way acceptable transition in Iraq, who can? Sometimes I wonder if the folks calling the shots in Washington still really, deep-down, want the UN to fail.
"Apres nous, le deluge"? Is that what's happening here?
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- Helena
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May 31, 2004 9:51 PM EST | Link
Deaths of U.S.-held detainees
I am so glad the the NYT has started to try to be a real newspaper and is--at last-- doing some things that look like serious investigative reporting.
One recent product of this is this story by Steven Lee Myers in today's paper. It's titled: "Military Completed Death Certificates for 20 Prisoners Only After Months Passed". This refers to the fact that of the 37 deaths of foreign citizens in the US military's global gulag that have been reported since --it seems--December 2002, 20 of them had no death certificates issued until very recently.
At that point, I assume, after the breaking of the Abu Ghraib scandal, people in the military hierarchy started to realize that that just maybe, that many unreported deaths might look a little fishy?
Well, at least 17 of the deaths that have now --however belatedly--had certificates issued look very fishy anyway. These are all but one of the deaths briefly described in the table accompanying the article. The one exception there was one, in Mosul in december 2003, in which the death certificate explicitly stated, "No signs of abuse or foul play". Many others showed extreme signs of foul play (see below).
The caption to this table says it doesn't include "13 deaths attributed to natural causes." 18 + 13 = 31. So that makes 6 more deaths we need to know more about?
This is what I learned from looking at the table there:
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- Helena
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May 31, 2004 12:02 PM EST | Link
Gerard Prunier on 'la francophonie' under threat
I was pretty certain that my theory of the dangers of "the death-throes of la francophonie", or perhaps, more modestly, "la francophonie under threat", as described here yesterday, was not totally original.
Well, aujourd'hui I was just re-reading along in Gerard Prunier's great 1995 work, The Rwandan crisis; History of a Genocide and I came across this seasoned French scholar's take on the subject... Commenting on the military and political support that the Mitterand government gave to the virulently anti-Tutsi government in Rwanda during the four-year-long civil war against the Tutsi-led RPF that preceded-- or perhaps, prefaced-- the 1994 genocide, Prunier wrote of France's relationship with the Habyarimana government:
- the casual observer imagining that money is the cement of the whole relationship would have the wrong impression. The cement is language and culture. Paris' African backyard remains its backyard because all the [African] chicks cackle in French...
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- Helena
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May 30, 2004 9:53 PM EST | Link
Lorsque des voisins tuent leurs voisins
Alors, je vois que jusque vers le fin de mon dernier message j'ai ecrit que peut-etre quand le monde de la francophonie se sent encircle, c'est bien possible que les francophones commencent de tuer leurs voisins anglophones...
Mais je sais bien que le monde n'est pas assez simple que ca. Alors, je m'excuse a tous les lecteurs d'origine francophone s'ils m'ont mecompris. Beaucoup de mes meilleurs amis sont des francophones! En plus, si vous avez bien lu le blog "Actualites d'un monde just" pendant les mois derniers vous auriez su que j'admire beaucoup le bon monsieur Dominique de Villepin. Dommage qu'il n'est plus le ministre des affaires etrangeres, eh?
(Et je m'excuse pour mon francais rudimentaire. Mieux que rien, non?)
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- Helena
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May 30, 2004 8:55 PM EST | Link
Neighbo(u)rs killing neighbo(u)rs
My "day job" these days-- when I'm not posting stuff on the blog, tending my garden, or doing all the other things that can handily distract me from it-- is to write up all the material I've been gathering over the past 42 months on "How societies deal with legacies of atrocious violence." This will be a book, once I've wrestled all my material into shape.
These days I'm working on the chapters on Rwanda. Finding the best words to convey the horror of what happened during the genocide there--and especially the enthusiastic, public, and mass-participatory aspect of it-- is hard enough. Finding words that work toward providing an explanation of that is even harder.
This weekend, I'm going to what looks like a really timely conference in London, Ontario, titled "Why neighbours kill". (Note the Canadian spelling there.) They even have a website for the conference. I think I'm supposed to talk about Rwanda, with an emphasis on implications for post-genocide policies. Preventing iterations of violence/atrocity is the big concern of my book. However, as I think about the conference I've also been thinking about another situation of prolonged, genocidal or near-genocidal violence among neighbors with which I'm even more intimately familiar than the one in Rwanda: that is, the time I spent in Lebanon, 1974-81.
The Lebanese civil war started on April 25, 1975...
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- Helena
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May 29, 2004 10:30 PM EST | Link
The 'greatest generation'-- and W's lot
Even though I'm a pacifist (and some day I might tell you why), I recognize the great human qualities often exhibited by people who go to war: courage, self-discipline, a desire to make the world a better place...
Of course, those qualities can also be exhibited by pacifists. But arguing that point is not my purpose here. I just want to note that, in my view, what made the World War 2 generation the "greatest generation" as it is called was the vision and real leadership shown by the decisionmakers at that time in the crucial project of fashioning the post-war peace: qualities that are notably absent from the decisionmakers in our own sad era.
There were two key aspects of that peace-building project that I want to note: (1) how seriously the British and their Allies took it, from the very early days of the war, and (2) how it was consciously designed to be unlike the highly punitive settlement of 1919, a settlement that had brought the world only Adolph Hitler and another, even more horrifying round of global war.
How seriously they took it.
My father, James Cobban, was not a high decisionmaker. He was a 29-year-old schoolmaster in London when the British were drawn into the war. He signed up almost immediately, and was assigned to an administrative branch of the Intelligence Corps. (M.I. 1-X, to be precise.) From the days of the blitz of London, people in the Intel Corps were already laying plans for their "future" occupation of Germany. That took courage and guts. It also took vision.
A little later, my father was involved in planning beach organization for D-Day. But once that was done, back they went to planning for the occupation of Germany. No-one would have dreamed of throwing their many meticulous plans into the trashcan.
Continue reading " The 'greatest generation'-- and W's lot"|
- Helena
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May 29, 2004 12:32 PM EST | Link
In Bernard Lewis-land meanwhile...
Responding to my recent post on Fouad Ajami, commenter John Koch asked the excellent question:
- Why pick on the humbled Ajami when, week by week, Lewis makes bold assertions and predictions, based on his presumed unsurpassed knowledge. No one challenges him or points out how his past predictions about Iraq turned out mostly wrong. Witness: Bernard Lewis Advocates War, Predicts Iraq Future (2002).
But John's right that at least Fouad seems to evince some general cognizance that his confident earlier predictions had not panned out. And I was interested in checking out what Bernard Lewis has been writing recently.
It was the work of a few moments to go on a visit to the strange land of fog, wilfull ignorance, and misperception inhabited by this sadly misplaced medieval (in more senses than one!) historian.
See, for example, this interview, conducted by Atlantic Monthly contributor Elizabeth Wasserman on April 15, 2004.
Well, Elizabeth was throwing him the most amazingly silly and softball questions. ("You mention that the reason that the Arab-Israeli conflict appears to be the central preoccupation in the Arab world is that it's the only local political grievance that people can discuss freely in the open forum." Yes, I know: it's not even a question, as presented there....) Meanwhile, April 15: never mind that over there in Iraq things were going to hell in a handbasket for the whole US imperial adventure and for hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people, eh?
So you might not want to wade through the whole, turgid transcript of Elizabeth's interview. But if you go to almost the very end, you can read this gem:
Continue reading " In Bernard Lewis-land meanwhile..."|
- Helena
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May 28, 2004 11:00 PM EST | Link
Back to the era of coups in Iraq?
Time was, back in the 1960s, that Baghdad was plagued by successive coups d'etat. Was that another one we saw there today, with Baghdad fashion maven Paul Bremer and his pals on the IGC launching a "pre-emptive strike" on Lakhdar Brahimi's ability to do the job that he thought had been entrusted to him, namely, taking a lead role in assembling Iraq's new "transitional" leadership?
Sure looked like a bit of a coup to me.
Bremer and the pals may think they've "pulled a fast one" on Brahimi by "naming" Iyad Allawi as the interim PM. But I'm sure that by doing that they will also have conisderably complicated the present Iraq-related diplomacy at the Security Council.
Brahimi, certainly, came across fairly miffed in his reaction to the IGC's "news". And I'm sure that Kofi Annan and several weighty members of the security Council will be miffed, as well.
And that matters. After all, what use would it be to Allawi to be the "Prime Minister" of a government that is still considered--like the existing IGC--to be totally a creation of the US occupation forces? If he can't be "Prime Minister" under an arrangement that includes a strong new U.N. resolution that significantly dilutes US control in Iraq, then I wonder why on earth he would consider the job to be worth having at all?
Ah well, people can be funny, I guess... Especially when there's the scent of all those billions of dollars of US "reconstruction aid" that might be attached to the job... Certainly, in the photo accompanying the Al-Jazeera story on the topic, Allawi already looks as if he's laughing all the way to the bank...
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- Helena
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May 28, 2004 10:38 PM EST | Link
Most Americans reject torture
In an interview May 22 , 2004, Harvard law prof Alan Dershowitz, a one-time liberal who has become a leading apologist for the use of torture in the war against terrorism, crowed that "Americans" had come to share his point of view:
Asked if he thought Americans were ready to "do what it takes" to get information from terrorists who threaten American lives, Dershowitz [said]: "I think so. But I think Americans want us to do it smarter, want us to do it better..."
Not so fast, big guy! The American people are actually a lot smarter, or let's say wiser*, than you give them credit for! And certainly a lot wiser than you are... A WaPo/ABC News poll published today reveals that 63 percent of Americans say they think the use of torture is "never acceptable".
More than half, 52 percent, also say the use of "physical abuse but not torture" is never acceptable.
This whole poll has produced results that are pretty encouraging for those of us who want to persuade the US government to adopt a policy of zero tolerance for torture. Because of that, I tabulated all the results that the WaPo website gave on various different web-pages into one simple table.
You can find the table here. Feel free to use it, but a little attribution for my work in tabulating the data would be nice...
------
* For my discussion of why it is that respecting the Geneva Conventions--on banning torture as well as on other things--is not only the "right" thing to do but also the "smart" thing to do, check out this May 12 post on JWN. Especially the end part of it.
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- Helena
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May 28, 2004 3:39 PM EST | Link
Who wants to be 'feared'?
Well, I'm still not particularly enamoured of the lackluster John Kerry. And no, despite what it may have seemed from this recent post, I certainly don't want to see him being pushed any further to the RIGHT.
Anyway, today I happened on this piece by Jodi Wilgoren in the NYT. It's titled "Kerry Foreign Policy Crew Has a Clintonian Look to It", which is an accurate description of the situation, as evidenced by what Wilgoren writes about there... Basically, the same-old-same-old: Berger, Holbrooke, Perry, Albright (yawn), with the addition of a couple of slightly younger--but oh yes, most decidely white male--faces.
Zzzzz.
We don't need that same-old over again. We need vision. We need a true commitment to internationalism. We need... well, a whole bunch of things very different from what these tired old retreads seem to promise.
Anyway, down there in the body of this piece, my attention was drawn to this handful of sentences, describing a conversation Wilgoren must have had with that tired old veteran's veteran in the foreign-policy analysis world, Les ("let's split Iraq into three!") Gelb:
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- Helena
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May 27, 2004 11:10 PM EST | Link
Tolerating torture: the slipperiest slope
What is the main reason why we need to press President Bush to make an unequivocal and verifiable commitment to ending the US government's use and toleration of torture?Because any hint at all from the highest echelons of government that this kind of deeply abusive behavior is ever acceptable at all is a slippery slope down which it is all too easy for a government, its employees, and even a supposedly democratic citizenry to slide.
We now have two prime examples of this slippery slope phenomenon:
(1) In Israel, the legislature specifically allowed for the security services to apply "moderate physical pressure", at first in cases where there was good reason to suspect that a suspect had concrete informatin about a "ticking time-bomb" just about to explode...
Oops! Down the slippery slope they went!
"Moderate physical pressure" became a use of stress positions, dousing with cold water, and other means of inflicting pain so harsh that many survivors have had lasting side-effects. (See, for example, this 2002 Amnesty International report.)
As for "ticking time bombs"?
Continue reading " Tolerating torture: the slipperiest slope"
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- Helena
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May 26, 2004 8:39 PM EST | Link
Fouad Ajami's mea not-quite-culpa
I admit it. There is a certain delicate pleasure to be had by parsing the terms in which one-time supporters of--and even cheerleaders for--Bush's quite optional invasion of Iraq have started to try to wriggle off the hook of their own prior positions.
I wrote here in mid-March about Michael Ignatieff's attempt in that direction.
But at least I have a good deal of respect for most of Ignatieff's public work and argumentation.
Today, we have the public writhings --on the New York Times Op-Ed page, no less--of a quite different fish, Fouad Ajami.
Ajami--just like Ahmad Chalabi, as it happens--is a Shi-ite Arab who left his homeland while still young and ended up in the United States as a strong supporter of Israel and a darling of the neo-cons. Beyond that, Ajami is blessed (cursed?) with a delusion that he is Joseph Conrad reincarnate, a condition that manifests itself through the generation of prose of a staggeringly self-aggrandizing, mock-heroic grandeur.
(Actually, I think Edward Said had that delusion, too. Don't know what the cause of it is/was in either case?)
So today, here is Ajami, bloviating as follows:
Continue reading " Fouad Ajami's mea not-quite-culpa"|
- Helena
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May 25, 2004 10:04 PM EST | Link
So, has the torture stopped yet?
Why does it seem that no-one is asking the right question yet:
Has the U.S. government definitively stopped all use of cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishment against people in U.S.-run detention facilities in Iraq and everywhere else around the world?
And then: How can we be certain that that behavior has stopped?
I'm sorry, friends, I know I wrote here about this just two days ago. But until someone can reassure me on the above two points then-- given the behavior of many organs of the U.S. government over the past 30-plus months--I am going to have to assume that the torture is continuing.
Maybe not (this week) in Abu Ghraib; but quite likely, in many other places. And maybe next week, back in Abu Ghraib again...
I am going to have to assume that all the "consternation" expressed by various spokesmen for the Bush administration is consternation over the fact that the abusive behavior of U.S. government employees and contractors has been revealed, rather than over the fact of the abusive behavior itself.
No-one in the administration has yet provided any clear-cut declarations at all to the effect that, "From now on the US government and all its employers and contractors will abide completely by the Geneva Conventions and all other relevant international and domestic regulations in its treatment of the detainees under its control."
That's the kind of declaration I would look for, as a first step.
Instead, we've just had flurries of declarations to the effect that, "Our own investigations into the abuses are thorough and are continuing... The perpetrators were only a few bad apples... But you can just trust us to deal with this whole thing... "
That is, the same kinds of avowals of good intent, coupled with thinly veiled instructions that everyone else should just butt out of enquiring into this whole business, that you hear from serial abusers in just about any situation of chronic rights abuse.
By the way, yesterday Human Rights Watch put up on their website a good summary of all the "International and U.S. Law Prohibiting Torture and Other Ill-treatment of Persons in Custody".
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- Helena
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May 24, 2004 4:58 PM EST | Link
Kerry-Zinni?
Let's face it, John Kerry has NOT come out with a clear position on the all-important Iraq question. He needs a running-mate who has.
So how about Marines Gen. Anthony C. Zinni (retd.)?
Zinni's book only came out today. No time to read it yet! But he did a really good interview with CBS yesterday. (And here are the remarks he made at the Center for Defense Information on May 12th.)
Zinni was also the one who famously, before the fact of the Bushite invasion of Iraq, warned it would turn into a "Bay of Goats".
Yesterday, to CBS's Steve Kroft, he said:
- And to think that we are going to 'stay the course,' the course is headed over Niagara Falls. I think it's time to change course a little bit, or at least hold somebody responsible for putting you on this course. Because it's been a failure.
Exactly who, in Zinni's view, is it that should be held accountable?
- Well, it starts with at the top. If you're the secretary of defense and you're responsible for that. If you're responsible for that planning and that execution on the ground. If you've assumed responsibility for the other elements, non-military, non-security, political, economic, social and everything else, then you bear responsibility...
Certainly those in your ranks that foisted this strategy on us that is flawed. Certainly they ought to be gone and replaced.
[Kroft comments coyly that, "Zinni is talking about a group of policymakers within the administration known as 'the neo-conservatives' who saw the invasion of Iraq as a way to stabilize American interests in the region and strengthen the position of Israel." He names as members of this group Wolfie, Feith, Richard Perle, Eliot Abrams, and 'Scooter' Libby, and adds: "Zinni believes they are political ideologues who have hijacked American policy in Iraq." Zinni responds as follows...]
I think it's the worst kept secret in Washington. That everybody - everybody I talk to in Washington has known and fully knows what their agenda was and what they were trying to do...
And one article, because I mentioned the neo-conservatives who describe themselves as neo-conservatives, I was called anti-Semitic. I mean, you know, unbelievable that that's the kind of personal attacks that are run when you criticize a strategy and those who propose it. I certainly didn't criticize who they were. I certainly don't know what their ethnic religious backgrounds are. And I'm not interested.
I know what strategy they promoted. And openly. And for a number of years. And what they have convinced the president and the secretary to do. And I don't believe there is any serious political leader, military leader, diplomat in Washington that doesn't know where it came from.
But quite aside from any musing about Kerry putting him on the ticket, I think it is great that this accomplished, well-informed, and insightful person has gotten his views so well out there in the public discourse--and just before the Prez finally goes on the air tonight to "reassure" us that he has a policy on Iraq.
(As my son said: If the only thing the President has been able to say during the past four important days is that he will "shortly be making a speech designed to reassure us"-- then how reassuring is that?)
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- Helena
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May 23, 2004 3:51 PM EST | Link
Helping the torture victims heal
How many people have been victim to the practice of torture inside the United States' global gulag, and what do they need in order to heal?Answer to that first question: an assessment urgently needs to be carried out.
Answer to the second question: let's start with--
Definition of torture given in Article 1 of the UN's 1985 Convention Against Torture, which was ratified by the US Congress in 1994:
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For the purposes of this Convention, torture means any act by which
severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted
on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information
or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed
or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or
a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when
such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with
the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting
in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only
from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.
The veterans in the western world in terms of working with victims/survivors of torture at rehabilitation are undoubtedly the good people at the Copenhagen-based International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims (IRCT), who have been doing this work since 1974 and has been running a specialized Rehabilitation and Research Centre for Torture Victims ( RCT ) was in Copenhagen since 1982. (Check out their very impressive English-language website for more details of their work.)
Continue reading " Helping the torture victims heal"
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- Helena
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May 23, 2004 2:24 PM EST | Link
Has the torture actually stopped?
I have been thinking intensively about the effects the widespread pattern of tortures in Abu Ghraib and othe parts of the United States' global gulag has had on two distinct groups of people: the survivors of those acts, and the U.S. Army.But first, a very important but seemingly innocent question to which I have seen as yet, no clear answer:
Has the practice of administering torture at many locations inside the U.S. gulag actually been definitively brought to a halt yet?
How would we know that it has? What kind of evidence would it take for us to convince ourselves and the rest of the world that it has?
I know one thing. The fact that Gen. Geoffrey Miller is still in charge of the Abu Ghraib branch of the gulag is distinctly not reassuring. Miller is the Marines General and former commander of the Gitmo branch of the gulag who was the one who institutionalized the "conditioning", i.e. torture, of suspects over at the Abu Ghraib branch back last October.
... And now we're supposed to believe that this old fox can successfully be the one to "clean up" the abuses in that hen-house? What do they take us for-- dummies?
Indeed, given (1) the distinct possibility that permission for the "conditioning" to occur was given at the very highest levels of both the military command in Iraq the civilian leadership of the Pentagon, and (2) the lengthy record of these leaderships in trying to sweep all the evidence about the tortures under the rug for many months till Sy Hersh and Dan Rather forced it into the open, there is almost nothing that those leaderships by themselves could do at this point that would provide me with the necessary level of reassurance that the torture has actually stopped.
Which brings me back to a suggestion I made here last June, to the effect that in the case of our earlier, very lively concerns about Saddam Hussein's terrible record of rights abuses, people in the global human rights movements should-- in the years before the war-- have been aggreessively promoting the idea of the UN forming a robust, intrusive 'Human Rights Monitoring, Verification , and Inspection Commission' to investigate all the suspected abuses inside the country. You know, a sort of 'Human Rights UNMOVIC' analogous to the WMDs UNMOVIC that governments that had concerns/allegations about Saddam's WMDs program were able to form back in the fall of 2002...
Continue reading " Has the torture actually stopped?"
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- Helena
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May 21, 2004 2:46 PM EST | Link
Who's in charge here?
More, from whichever of the Keystone Cops is making decisions regarding the management of the US occupation this week...
Or, are there any adults in the house?
This, just in from Reuters:
- The two leaders of the U.S. military unit at the center of the Iraqi prison scandal could still face sanctions even though they have recently returned to their work duties, an official said on Friday.
The U.S. military suspended Capt. Donald Reese, commander of the 372nd Military Police Company, and his top noncommissioned officer, First Sgt. Brian Lipinski, in January after revelations of abuse from soldiers in the unit.
A military spokesman confirmed for the first time on Friday that the two men had quietly regained their leadership positions three weeks ago just as pictures of abuses in Abu Ghraib began to circulate in worldwide media.
"Captain Donald Reese and First Sgt. Brian Lipinski were suspended from their duties with the 372nd Military Police Company on January 18, 2003 and returned to their duties on April 30, 2003," Major Scott Bleichwehl, a U.S. military spokesman, said in an e-mail.
"The return of these individuals to their positions does not equate to them being fully exonerated. The final disposition of their reprimands has not yet been completed."
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- Helena
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