Category: politics

Compiled below, in hopes that it may be of some assistance to Eric Holder, John Conyers, Patrick Leahy, active citizens, foreign courts, the International Criminal Court, law firms preparing civil suits, and local or state prosecutors with decency and nerve is a list of 50 top living U.S. war criminals. These are men and women who helped to launch wars of aggression or who have been complicit in lesser war crimes. These are not the lowest-ranking employees or troops who managed to stray from official criminal policies. These are the makers of those policies. Full article.

Actor Mark Ruffalo reads union leader Eugene Debs’ famous “Canton, Ohio” speech. Part of a reading of Voices of a People’s History of the United States (Howard Zinn and Anthony Arnove) at All Saints Church in Pasadena, CA on Feb 1, 2007.

Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan – The pace of American combat deaths in Afghanistan has quickened anew as roadside bombs killed five U.S. troops in 24 hours in the same western province, the American military said Thursday. Full article.

Jarrett, one of Obama’s closest friends and top advisors, also linked the Blackwater question to the safety of U.S. personnel in war zones: “Do not forget that we have men and women who are at risk every day overseas doing the very best they can to defend our country and so the president has to balance putting them at further risk with having the kind of transparent and open and clear availability of information that you so desperately want.” What this has to do with Blackwater is anyone’s guess. If what Jarrett was saying is that Blackwater keeps Americans safe abroad and therefore transparency on the company will not be forthcoming, then that is a pretty scandalous position. If Jarrett was referring to the administration’s blocking of the release of prisoner abuse photos (which was discussed earlier in the event), then it is a bankrupt argument. Full article.

The Supreme Court, over two Justices’ dissents, on Monday ordered a federal judge in Georgia to consider and rule on the claim of innocence in the murder case against Troy Anthony Davis (In re Davis, 08-1443) The Court told the District Court to “re…ceive testimony and make findings of fact as to whether evidence that could have been obtained at the time of trial clearly establishes [Davis’] innocence.” Full article.

Written by qunfuz, PULSE, August 17, 2009 at 4:07 pm

In “The End of Tolerance: Racism in 21st Century Britain”, Arun Kundnani writes, “Racisms are no longer domestically driven but take their impetus from the attempt to legitimise a deeply divided global order. They are the necessary products of an empire in denial.”

Commentators call for immigrants to be schooled in ‘our national story’, which includes hefty chapters on the beneficence of empire. Gordon Brown says, “The days of Britain having to apologise for the British Empire are over. We should celebrate!” Sarkozy urges France to be “proud of its history,” meaning its imperial history.

European empires did sometimes construct railways and drainage systems in the conquered lands. They did build law courts and disseminate a certain kind of cuture. But these questionable achievements must be understood against the larger ugly backdrop. Economies under imperial rule stagnated at best. Huge swathes of Africa were transformed from subsistence agricultural land to cashcrop plantations. When the value of the crop plummetted, or when the crop was grown more cheaply elsewhere, local people were left hungry and unskilled on exhausted soil. Africa has still not recovered from this deliberate underdevelopment. During British misrule, preventable famines killed tens of millions of Indians. Elsewhere in the empire, hundreds of thousands were forced into concentration camps, and torture was institutionalised. There were the genocides of indigenous Australians and Americans, by massacre and land theft as well as by disease. There was the little matter of the transatlantic slave trade.

The ethnic-sectarian tensions and political backwardness of much of the third world have roots in imperial power games. For instance, when the 1857 Indian uprising against the British was put down, the British developed a policy of excluding Muslims from education and economic power. A divide and rule strategy to exacerbate pre-existent Hindu-Muslim tensions was implemented precisely because the revolution had shown a remarkable degree of Indian national unity. And, as usual, traitors were rewarded. The twenty two families that rule what is now Pakistan (staffing the military high command and both major political parties) are the landowning families that ‘acquired’ their land in return for loyalty to the occupiers during the colonial period, especially in 1857.

Whenever there was a sign of a lesser people organising itself along ‘modern’ European lines, the British crushed the potential challenge. An example is Muhammad Ali’s Egypt, with its state education system, rational miltary organisation, and secularising legal code. A more recent instance is the Anglo-American 1953 coup against Mossadeq’s democratic nationalist government in Iran.

I mention all this not because I want to suggest that Westerners are particularly evil, that they are the only ones to have committed crimes of empire and enslavement, or that indigenous peoples would have managed themselves perfectly if left alone. I mention it because Western imperialism continues and, as competition for resources intensifies, is escalating. Our awareness of the crimes of empire is important because the whitewashing of imperial history proceeds in concert with a ramping-up of imperial intervention.

I’ve been refreshing myself on British and French imperial history in the Levant by reading the excellent 1972 book “Syria: Nation of the Modern World” by Tabitha Petran.

Remember that during the 1917 British-instigated Arab Revolt, the prospect of a unified Arab state was dangled before the Arabs, so long as they were required to make trouble for the collapsing Ottomans. But the British and the French had already signed the Sykes-Picot agreement, which carved up the eastern Arabs into British and French zones of influence, and the Balfour Declaration, by which Englishmen awarded Arab Palestine, as if it were a medal or a school cap, to Zionism.

The British also famously created landlocked, resourceless Transjordan in an afternoon, the straight lines of its borders giving new resonance to the double meaning of the English word ‘ruler’. They kept control of Iraq (which they had cut off from Kuwait, but that’s another story) by applying the glories of modern warfare. “I do not understand this sqeamishness about the use of gas,” said British hero Winston Churchill. “I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes.” Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, later famous for the Dresden firestorm, enthused: “The Arab and Kurd now know what real bombing means in casualties and damage. Within forty-five minutes a full-size village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured.” This, I suppose, is what we should be celebrating with Gordon Brown. The British tried to install kings from the friendly Hashemite family in both places. In Iraq it took the army, and then Ba’athist army officers, to bring down the client regime. In Jordan the royal line stuck, and has been useful to the West ever since.

The French took the ex-Ottoman region of Greater Syria. Tabitha Petran’s book describes how the Maronite statelet on Mount Lebanon was expanded into a larger Lebanese state of reluctant Orthodox Christians, Shia and Sunni Muslims, and Druze, setting the scene for the later civil wars. As described, Palestine-Israel and Jordan had already been peeled away. Now the Syrian cities of Urfa, Aintab and Antioch, and the country’s largest port at Alexandretta, were ceded to the Western-oriented Turkish Republic. Cities lost their hinterlands, their markets and water supplies.

There were further unsuccessful efforts to dismember Syria. The French envisaged an Alawi state in the mountains around Lattakia and a Druze state around Jebel al-Arab in the south. They encouraged separatism in the Jezira and established ‘autonomous’ puppet governments in Aleppo and Damascus.

First the cutting, then the stunting. The Open Door economic policy flooded the country with cheap imports, while Syrian exports were heavily taxed. The consequences included a diminishment of gold reserves by 70%, a depreciation of the currency, mushrooming unemployment and a collapse in traditional skilled manufacturing. Throughout the French occupation, three percent of the state budget was spent on health care and five percent on education. French collective punishments against the unruly natives led to further trouble. For example, the gold fine imposed after an Alawi rebellion in 1921 made the mountain peasants for the first time hire their daughters out as domestic servants to the urban rich, which led to mutual resentments, which in turn intensified sectarianism when an Alawi-dominated army later took over the country’s political life.

Today the debate at the daring fringes of western political discourse is whether or not an empire would be a good idea, oblivious to the fact that there already is one. The United States underpins its control of markets with a military presence in more than 100 countries. In the larger middle east area, hundreds of thousands have died in American wars in the last half decade. These days, it’s called ‘the war against terror’. This is how far the dominant nations have come in their struggle to move beyond imperialism: they have learnt not to call it imperialism. But they used nice words in the past, too. When the French mangled and traumatised Syria’s society and economy, they did so in the name of a League of Nations mandate. Their supposed role was to develop Syria, to prepare its benighted people for independence.

One set of people forcing themselves on another set of people in order to ‘run’ their economy and reorganise their social life is a crime. It leads only to conflict and failure. This is an obvious truth that must not be forgotten.

Kashmiri activists and human rights groups say that rapes by men in uniform, extrajudicial killings and a lack of redress are endemic, not least because security forces are largely shielded from prosecution by laws put in place when Indian troops wer…e battling a once-potent insurgency here. Both local and national security forces here operate with impunity, they say. Full article.

“Shocking, disturbing … downright disgraceful. It’s such behaviour that fuels hatred and racism. SRK’s a world figure for God’s sake. Get real!” actor Priyanka Chopra said on her Twitter feed.

The federal information minister,… Ambika Soni, angrily suggested that India adopt a similar policy towards Americans travelling to India.

In New Delhi, the US ambassador, Timothy Roemer, said the US embassy was trying to “ascertain the facts of the case – to understand what took place”.

Khan, 44, has acted in more than 70 films, and has consistently topped popularity rankings in India for several years. Full article.

Sgt. Bishop is the second soldier from Fort Hood in as many weeks to be tried by the military for his stand against an occupation he believes is “illegal.” He insists that it would be unethical for him to deploy to support an occupation he …opposes on both moral and legal grounds, and has filed for conscientious objector (CO) status. A CO is someone who refuses to participate in combat based on religious or ethical grounds, and can be given an honorable discharge by the military. Full article.

We denounce the new ‘Cyber Crime Act’, imposed to curb Freedom of Speech. The “democratic civilian” government announced on Sunday that sending indecent messages through e-mails and mobile telephone Short Messaging Service (SMS) was an offense under the Cyber Crime Act (CCA) and its violators could be sent behind bars for 14 years, along with confiscation of property. If the violater is living abroad, he would be deported back to Pakistan.

We believe it is nothing but a repressive tactic used by the regime to control people. The government should be ashamed of this unusual “law” whereby anyone who criticizes the government or any politicians can be prosecuted.

All the citizens should stand up against this proposed law and should take this protest to other forums specially audiovisual media.

This business about al-Qaeda somehow taking control of Pakistan’s nukes is a fantasy, but if fear of a nuclear-armed Osama bin Laden is going to lead us into invading and occupying entire countries, then neither Afghanistan nor Pakistan qualify as th…e prime candidate. The chances of al-Qaeda acquiring a nuke from somewhere in the former Soviet Union – where loose nukes are floating around like autumn leaves in a forest – are far greater than this rather far-fetched Pakistan-goes-Islamist scenario. So why don’t we invade one of those former Soviet republics, say, Kazakhstan, where they might possibly pick up “lost” nukes from some criminal gang? Full article.

PESHAWAR, Pakistan – Eight Taliban militants were among 14 people who died in a missile strike Tuesday along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, a Taliban spokesman said Wednesday. Full article.

at the risk of being labeled a taliban sympathizer by my pakistani friends who send me disturbing images of policemen being beheaded by what looks like 12-14 year old boys and tell me to watch obaid chinoy’s alarmist documentaries, i have been suspicious of the military action in swat from the start. of course images of taliban brutality are grotesque, surreal, terrifying but i think that all of this wanton violence and its simultaneous promotion both in pakistan and the u.s., have to be seen in a broader context.

to me certain facts are obvious:

1. the u.s. is interested in establishing a permanent presence in south asia (afghanistan and pakistan) due to geo-political reasons. this is supported by the obscene amounts of money obama is spending on building double-walled, steel-reinforced fortresses in major pakistani cities. these will house american consulates but also american residences, following the baghdad model.

2. although there is no danger of the nukes “falling into the hands of the taliban”, the u.s. and its allies will feel better if they can monitor/block the potential sharing of that technology with any other islamic country. iran happens to be a neighbor. go figure.

3. the war on terror is a perfect cover for an indefinite u.s. occupation. the taliban had virtually nothing to do with 9/11 (they are not al qaeda) but our collective memory seems to fail us as usual. from annihilating al qaeda, our mission has expanded to annihilating the taliban and therefore by inference the pushtun people of afghanistan and now pakistan. the taliban have never been involved in international terrorism. their goals are local. they are mostly interested in regaining control of their territory. but who cares. the war on terror has become such a catchphrase for doing the unthinkable, that zardari tried to pass a moronic law whereby sharing jokes about him over the internet could be punishable by a 14 year prison sentence! the logic behind it? u guessed it: humor can hinder the serious work of fighting the WOT.

4. using the pakistani army to wage this war on terror makes excellent economic sense – it is dirt cheap both financially and in terms of american casualties. the idea of the pakistani army as a mercenary force used to accomplish american objectives in the region is nothing new. unleashing the army on its own people, on pakistani soil, at the behest of the pakistani state is nothing new either – the baluchis know that better than anyone and of course, bangladesh was created out of the same kind of military mayhem. let’s not forget that pakistan is a notoriously non-nationalist country.

5. what we call the “taliban” is not a homogenous entity but a loose group of ragtag disenchanted, disenfranchised people who have diverse agendas. the taliban movement is part class struggle in an economically depressed, harshly stratified environment, part resistance to state and imperialist violence, part independence movement, part power politics, and part gang-related crime. islam might be used as a rallying cry but it is not at the center of what the taliban are after. here i have to make special mention of american drone attacks which have had the most direct, most positive impact on the swelling ranks of the taliban. like chechen black widows who lost their families in the russian onslaught that killed some 80,000 civilians, drone attack survivors can also find it judicious to become suicide bombers. as i watched an al-jazeera video of young children, orphaned by drone attacks, weeping over the destruction of a quran and vowing to avenge its desecration, i was nauseated not by their evil intentions but by the older men standing around them at this chaotic time, egging them on quietly but firmly. if the existing taliban, whatever their sub-classification may be, have become the de facto guardians of bereft, emotionally fragile young children, then what hope do we have for their future?

6. there is a local form of homegrown imperialism at work in pakistan. the pakistani government and elite are just as far removed from the lives of the common man, especially outside of lahore, karachi and islamabad, as are the americans. in a recent lecture on obama’s wars, snehal shingavi spoke eloquently about how islamophobia has completely devalued the lives of ordinary muslims, so that it becomes a matter of achievement, or at the very least of indifference, to claim the death of baitullah mehsud’s wife, who’s only crime was to be married to the man. i think it goes beyond islamophobia, for the same sort of cavalier disregard for the suffering of ordinary muslims is also exhibited by a large number of their muslim compatriots – at least 41% of them (who support military action) as shown by a recent gallup poll. so the displacement of 3 million refugees is justified. the razing of villages and the destruction of crops is acceptable. but the migration of refugees to cities outside of pashtun NWFP has been problematic. in karachi, pakistan’s largest city, port and financial center, the dominant political party, the MQM, has aggressively turned refugees away under the pretext of protecting the city from the most-invoked, international boogeyman, the taliban.

7. the relationship between india and pakistan, and therefore the conflict in kashmir, is at the core of what happens in that part of the world. by talking about “af-pak” as if india is irrelevant is absurd. america has not only taken india out of richard holbrooke’s portfolio, after a massive lobbying effort by the indian government, but it has gone further by engaging india in trade and nuclear deals. growing indian presence in afghanistan as evidenced by the disproportionately large number of indian consulates in that country is also fomenting angst in pakistan. newspapers are filled with accusations of heavy-handed indian support for the taliban and for baluchi separatists. unless these allegations are dealt with, unless there is some rapprochement between the two countries, pakistan’s innate fear of indian malfeasance and aggression will not be quelled and mutual troublemaking will continue to spark wars and counterinsurgencies.

8. u.s. occupation is not the answer. as i hear of blackwater guards in quetta, i am appalled. this is not the direction we want to go in, unless we want a repetition of iraq. whenever a country is occupied, it produces resistance, some kind of counter-insurgency. such is human nature. this has nothing to do with the ruggedness and pride of the pashtuns, or the islamic teachings of the quran, it has nothing to do with terrorist cells or how much people hate american freedoms. when people are occupied and bombed, they resist. by being an occupying force in south asia, the american government has added another layer of complexity to an already explosive situation. it’s hard for the pakistani and afghan presidents to fight the taliban when the extremists are the ones standing up to an occupying force and their own governments are seen as servile and indifferent (allowing the bombing of their own civilians). this is a war that zardari and karzai cannot win. it is a war that the pakistani army cannot fight. it is a war that many people in pakistan and afghanistan cannot support. it is an american war. it is an american occupation.

A fact-finding mission of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan to Swat has documented accounts of extrajudicial killings by the security forces, discovery of mass graves in the conflict-hit region and the unabated suffering of the civilian population. Full article.

300,000 people displaced by the fighting in Sri Lanka are held by the government in de facto detention camps. They cannot leave the camps, where conditions are “appalling” according to UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon.

Call on the Sri Lanka…n government to immediately allow the displaced civilians freedom of movement: those who wish to leave the camps should be free to do so. Article and petition.