Category: activism

This month, a lot of media stories have compared President Johnson’s war in Vietnam and President Obama’s war in Afghanistan. The comparisons are often valid, but a key parallel rarely gets mentioned — the media’s insistent support for the war even after most of the public has turned against it. Full article.

“The initial turn-off when western feminism comes to the rescue, is the blanket assumption that the victim has no volition nor can respond to adversity with the commensurate degree of outrage because she is so accustomed and desensitised to her own subjugation. It is a strange mix of protective sororal sympathy and smugness.” Full article.

One of the most influential and longest-serving senators in U.S. history — a liberal standard-bearer who was also known as a consummate congressional dealmaker — Kennedy had been battling brain cancer, which was diagnosed in May 2008. Full article.

“by the next decade’s end, the national debt will equal three-quarters of the entire U.S. economy” – perhaps we should stop fighting misleading wars half way around the world? it could save us some money…

Read full article.

A young Afghan prisoner has returned to Afghanistan following his release from Guantanamo Bay. Mohamed Jawad arrived in Kabul on Monday. He was ordered freed last month after more than six years at Guantanamo. He was as young as twelve at the time of his capture and was tortured and threatened into confessing to throwing a grenade at a US soldier. Full article.

Adding insult to injury, some of those responsible [for torture] have been rewarded with lucrative careers in the private sector. Tenet, for example, is making millions of dollars in the intelligence business, including as a board member for defence contractor QinetiQ. And Jose Rodriguez, the former director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service who ordered the destruction of CIA interrogation videotapes, works with former CIA director Mike Hayden at the oddly named National Interest Security Company, an intelligence contractor. It’s shameful that people responsible for one of America’s darkest chapters are so richly rewarded. Full article.

Monday’s five-year-old report by the CIA’s inspector general, newly declassified and released under a federal court’s orders, described severe tactics used by interrogators on terror suspects after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Seeking information about possible further attacks, interrogators threatened one detainee with a gun and a power drill and tried to frighten another with a mock execution of another prisoner. Full article.

A U.S. Marine reservist and general has created a detailed report recommending that up to 400 of the 600 prisoners at the U.S.-run prison at the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan have done nothing wrong and should be released, NPR reports. For years now, the United States has insisted that the prisoners at Bagram have no right to challenge their detention in a U.S. court. Full article.

FOCUS: OPINION

Guantanamo’s ‘more evil twin’?

By Andrew Wander

While Obama concentrates on closing Guantanamo, rights activists say the US-run prison at Bagram continues to operate ‘in the shadows’ [EPA]

It is a US-run prison built from scratch on an US military base to hold “enemy combatants” captured in the so-called “war on terror”.

Those imprisoned there have never been charged with a crime, nor do they have any meaningful way of challenging their detention.

The inmates allege abuse at the hands of their captors, ranging from sleep deprivation to brutal beatings. And no, it is not Guantanamo Bay.

The Bagram Theatre Internment Facility lies on a sprawling US military complex, 40km northeast of the Afghan capital Kabul. It holds almost three times as many prisoners as Guantanamo and, as its better-known Cuban counterpart prepares to close, the Bagram prison is about to double in size. Full article.

heartbreaking to see three families struggle with disease and economic hardship, in the absence of healthcare insurance:

BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the Journal.

Some years ago, surgeons opened my daughter’s skull and removed a brain tumor that threatened to kill or blind her. Less than a month later, when one of my arteries suddenly shut down, open heart surgery saved my life, those skilled physicians and hospital still glow in my family’s memory.

But the dual crisis in our lives cost tens of thousands of dollars. When the insurance came through, we breathed a sigh of relief. The economist and Nobel Laureate, Paul Krugman, says that’s the thing about health insurance; you’ll never know when you will need it. If you need it and don’t have it your in deep, deep trouble.

That’s what happened to the families that you will meet in this week’s broadcast. The filmmaker Roger Weisberg, whose work has long been dedicated to putting a human face on public policy, traveled the country to meet people who desperately needed health care that they couldn’t afford.

What they went through and what they had to say about it is potent reminders that the need for health care reform is a national emergency. Here’s a look at CRITICAL CONDITION. More.

“Afghanistan is adjacent to Middle Eastern countries that are rich in oil and natural gas. And though Afghanistan may have little petroleum itself, it borders both Iran and Turkmenistan, countries with the se…cond and third largest natural gas reserves in the world. (Russia is first.) Since the 1990s, Washington has promoted a natural gas pipeline south through Afghanistan. The route would pass through Kandahar province. In 2007, Richard Boucher, U.S. assistant secretary of state, said: “One of our goals is to stabilize Afghanistan,” and to link South and Central Asia “so that energy can flow to the south.” Oil and gas have motivated U.S. involvement in the Middle East for decades.” Full article.

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF and SHERYL WuDUNN
Published: August 17, 2009

IN THE 19TH CENTURY, the paramount moral challenge was slavery. In the 20th century, it was totalitarianism. In this century, it is the brutality inflicted on so many women and girls around the globe: sex trafficking, acid attacks, bride burnings and mass rape.

Yet if the injustices that women in poor countries suffer are of paramount importance, in an economic and geopolitical sense the opportunity they represent is even greater. “Women hold up half the sky,” in the words of a Chinese saying, yet that’s mostly an aspiration: in a large slice of the world, girls are uneducated and women marginalized, and it’s not an accident that those same countries are disproportionately mired in poverty and riven by fundamentalism and chaos. There’s a growing recognition among everyone from the World Bank to the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff to aid organizations like CARE that focusing on women and girls is the most effective way to fight global poverty and extremism. That’s why foreign aid is increasingly directed to women. The world is awakening to a powerful truth: Women and girls aren’t the problem; they’re the solution.

One place to observe this alchemy of gender is in the muddy back alleys of Pakistan. In a slum outside the grand old city of Lahore, a woman named Saima Muhammad used to dissolve into tears every evening. A round-faced woman with thick black hair tucked into a head scarf, Saima had barely a rupee, and her deadbeat husband was unemployed and not particularly employable. He was frustrated and angry, and he coped by beating Saima each afternoon. Their house was falling apart, and Saima had to send her young daughter to live with an aunt, because there wasn’t enough food to go around.

“My sister-in-law made fun of me, saying, ‘You can’t even feed your children,’ ” recalled Saima when Nick met her two years ago on a trip to Pakistan. “My husband beat me up. My brother-in-law beat me up. I had an awful life.” Saima’s husband accumulated a debt of more than $3,000, and it seemed that these loans would hang over the family for generations. Then when Saima’s second child was born and turned out to be a girl as well, her mother-in-law, a harsh, blunt woman named Sharifa Bibi, raised the stakes.

“She’s not going to have a son,” Sharifa told Saima’s husband, in front of her. “So you should marry again. Take a second wife.” Saima was shattered and ran off sobbing. Another wife would leave even less money to feed and educate the children. And Saima herself would be marginalized in the household, cast off like an old sock. For days Saima walked around in a daze, her eyes red; the slightest incident would send her collapsing into hysterical tears.

It was at that point that Saima signed up with the Kashf Foundation, a Pakistani microfinance organization that lends tiny amounts of money to poor women to start businesses. Kashf is typical of microfinance institutions, in that it lends almost exclusively to women, in groups of 25. The women guarantee one another’s debts and meet every two weeks to make payments and discuss a social issue, like family planning or schooling for girls. A Pakistani woman is often forbidden to leave the house without her husband’s permission, but husbands tolerate these meetings because the women return with cash and investment ideas.

Saima took out a $65 loan and used the money to buy beads and cloth, which she transformed into beautiful embroidery that she then sold to merchants in the markets of Lahore. She used the profit to buy more beads and cloth, and soon she had an embroidery business and was earning a solid income — the only one in her household to do so. Saima took her elder daughter back from the aunt and began paying off her husband’s debt.

When merchants requested more embroidery than Saima could produce, she paid neighbors to assist her. Eventually 30 families were working for her, and she put her husband to work as well — “under my direction,” she explained with a twinkle in her eye. Saima became the tycoon of the neighborhood, and she was able to pay off her husband’s entire debt, keep her daughters in school, renovate the house, connect running water and buy a television.

“Now everyone comes to me to borrow money, the same ones who used to criticize me,” Saima said, beaming in satisfaction. “And the children of those who used to criticize me now come to my house to watch TV.”

Today, Saima is a bit plump and displays a gold nose ring as well as several other rings and bracelets on each wrist. She exudes self-confidence as she offers a grand tour of her home and work area, ostentatiously showing off the television and the new plumbing. She doesn’t even pretend to be subordinate to her husband. He spends his days mostly loafing around, occasionally helping with the work but always having to accept orders from his wife. He has become more impressed with females in general: Saima had a third child, also a girl, but now that’s not a problem. “Girls are just as good as boys,” he explained.

Saima’s new prosperity has transformed the family’s educational prospects. She is planning to send all three of her daughters through high school and maybe to college as well. She brings in tutors to improve their schoolwork, and her oldest child, Javaria, is ranked first in her class. We asked Javaria what she wanted to be when she grew up, thinking she might aspire to be a doctor or lawyer. Javaria cocked her head. “I’d like to do embroidery,” she said.

As for her husband, Saima said, “We have a good relationship now.” She explained, “We don’t fight, and he treats me well.” And what about finding another wife who might bear him a son? Saima chuckled at the question: “Now nobody says anything about that.” Sharifa Bibi, the mother-in-law, looked shocked when we asked whether she wanted her son to take a second wife to bear a son. “No, no,” she said. “Saima is bringing so much to this house. . . . She puts a roof over our heads and food on the table.”

Sharifa even allows that Saima is now largely exempt from beatings by her husband. “A woman should know her limits, and if not, then it’s her husband’s right to beat her,” Sharifa said. “But if a woman earns more than her husband, it’s difficult for him to discipline her.” Full article.

Extremists struck at the Iraqi Government with a wave of bombings and mortar attacks, killing at least 95 people and injuring more than 560 and raising new doubts about the withdrawal of US soldiers from the country. Full article.