samedi 25 décembre 2010

Christmas Eve 1914


Christmas Eve 1914


by

Mike Harding


Christmas Eve, 1914, stars were burning, burning bright

And all along the Western Front the guns were lying still and quiet.

And men lay dozing in the trenches, in the cold and in the dark,

And far away behind the lines, a village dog began to bark.



Some lay thinking of their families, some sang songs and others were quiet

Rolling fags and playing Brag, to pass away that Christmas night.

But as they watched the German trenches, something moved in no-man's land

And from far away there came a soldier, carrying a white flag in his hand.



Then from both sides, the men came running, crossing into no-man's land

Through the barbed wire, mud and shell-holes; shyly stood there shaking hands

Fritz brought out cigars and brandy, Tommy brought corned beef and fags

Stood there laughing, crying, singing, as the moon shone down on no-man's land



On Christmas day we all played football, in the mud of no-man's land

Tommy brought a Christmas pudding, Fritz brought out a German band

And when they beat us at the football, web shared out all the grub and drink

And Fritz showed me a faded photo of a dark-haired girl back in Berlin



For four days after, no one fired. Not one shell disturbed the night

For old Fritz and Tommy Atkins, they'd both lost the will to fight.

So they withdrew us from the trenches, sent us far behind the lines,

Sent fresh troops to take our places- ordered guns; "Prepare to fire".



And next night, in 1914, flares were burning, burning bright.

The message came, "Prepare offensive, over the top we're going tonight!"

And men stood waiting in the trenches, in the cold and in the dark,

All along the Western Front the Christmas guns began to bark.



Merry Christmas,
and may this day be one of peace everywhere, as it was on the Western Front, December 25, 1914...
Richard

mardi 21 décembre 2010

What would you do...?

Last Friday was Bradley Manning’s twenty-third birthday.
Initially imprisoned in Kuwait, he was transferred two months later to Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, where he has been held in particular harsh conditions.
From the beginning of his detention, Manning has been held in intensive solitary confinement. For 23 out of 24 hours every day -- for seven straight months and counting -- he sits completely alone in his cell. Even inside his cell, his activities are heavily restricted; he's barred even from exercising and is under constant surveillance to enforce those restrictions. For reasons that appear completely punitive, he's being denied many of the most basic attributes of civilized imprisonment, including even a pillow or sheets for his bed (he is not and never has been on suicide watch). For the one hour per day when he is freed from this isolation, he is barred from accessing any news or current events programs, wrote Glenn Greenwald in salon.com.
His treatment is harsh, punitive and taking its toll, his lawyer David Coombs told The Daily Beast.
Would the pressure on Manning be as intense if the successful prosecution of WikiLeaks’ editor-in-chief Julian Assange did not hinge on the former accepting to testify against the latter?
Manning, accused of being the chief source of WikiLeaks and principle purveyor of classified documents to the website, has been charged with transferring classified data and delivering national defense information to an unauthorized source.
If convicted by the military court, PFC Manning could spend the next fifty years in jail.
The US authorities hope to establish a link between Assange and Manning in order to prosecute the WikiLeaks founder on conspiracy charges.
In order to do so, they must establish that Assange solicited the classified material and aided and abetted the informant.
Invoking the 1917 Espionage Act is considered too hazardous and uncertain. The authorities would, in theory, be compelled to prosecute not only The New York Times, exclusive publisher of the leaks in the US, but anyone else who may have read or discussed the classified cables.
Indeed, according to Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at American University, one of the flaws of the Espionage Act is that it draws no distinction between the leaker or the spy and the recipient of the information, no matter how far downstream the recipient is….Taken at its word, the Espionage Act makes felons of us all.
Hence, the conspiracy route is the preferred option, all the more so as it avoids a ruthless confrontation with defenders of the First Amendment.
Unfortunately for the Justice Department however, no evidence, yet, has emerged proving that Assange insigated the leak, although it seems that Manning did communicate with the WikiLeaks editor.
I mean, I’m a high profile source…and I’ve developed a relationship with Assange…But I don’t know much more than what he tells me, which is very little.
It took me four months to confirm that the person I was communicating with was in fact Assange, Manning allegedly told Adrian Lamo, a former hacker with whom he held a series of online chats, between May 21 and May 25, 2010.
On May 26, Lamo reported Manning to the FBI…
Nevertheless, pursuing the conspiracy approach could also threaten all investigative journalists who routinely solicit confidential, secret or classified information from their sources. If Assange is prosecuted today, it may be their turn tomorrow…
Who is Bradley Manning and why is he accused of being WikiLeaks' informant?
He grew up in Crescent, a small town in Oklahoma.
Interestingly, a previous whistleblower had made the town famous thirty-six years ago…
Karen Silkwood, a union activist and employee of the Kerr-McGee plutonium plant, was found dead in her car on Highway 74. She was driving to Oklahoma City to meet a NYT reporter, David Burnham, on November 13, 1974. The documents she was to give the latter, and which purportedly exposed egregious safety violations at the plant had disappeared.
The plant was closed one year later.
Meryl Streep played Silkwood in a 1983 Hollywood film about the case…
Manning’s father Brian spent five years in the Navy before his son’s birth, and after his parents divorced, Bradley went to live with his Welsh mother in Wales.
An intelligent though aloof youth, Manning was known as a geek in his teen years.
After high school, Manning returned to the US to live with his father, but the latter threw him out of the house when he discovered that his son was gay…
After being temporarily homeless, he moved in with an aunt.
In 2007, he joined the Army. He seemed to have faith in the US and its ability and willingness to change the world for the better.
I think he thought it (enlisting) would be incredibly interesting and exciting.
He was proud of our successes as a country. He valued our freedom, but probably our economic freedom the most.
I think he saw the US as a force for good, Jordan Davis, a friend of Manning’s wrote the journalist Denver Nicks.
His relationship with Tyler Watkins, a student at Brandeis University, brought him into contact with the local hacker community.
Friends said Private Manning found the atmosphere here to be everything the Army was not: openly accepting of his geeky side, his liberal political opinions, his relationship with Mr. Watkins and his ambition to do something that would get attention, wrote Ginger Thompson of the NYT.
He trained as an intelligence analyst and was sent to Iraq in late 2009.
Yet, Manning had difficulty adapting to the military environment.
The diminutive five-foot-two, one hundred and five pound young man became increasingly isolated and ill at ease.
I‘ve been living a double life, he said.
Last May, he was demoted for assaulting an officer…
As an intelligence analyst, Manning had access to all sorts of classified material.
As a result, the more material he was exposed to, the more he became disillusioned with US policies, and the role the US military was playing in Iraq.
The event that may have spurred him to action was the following: asked to investigate why the Iraqi Federal Police had arrested fifteen individuals, Manning quickly discovered that they had been detained only because they had published a document critical of the Iraqi Prime Minister, denouncing the corruption prevalent in the Prime Minister’s Office.
I immediately took that information and *ran* to the officer to explain what was going on… he didn’t want to hear any of it… he told me to shut up and explain how we could assist the FPs in finding *MORE* detainees, he allegedly told Lamo.
I had always questioned [how] things worked, and investigated to find the truth… but that was a point where I was a *part* of something… I was actively involved in something that I was completely against, he added.
Manning felt that he could no longer countenance the US military’s deceptive and unethical behavior in Iraq.
He had lost faith in the ability or willingness of the US to fulfill its stated objectives in Iraq and elsewhere, and of betraying its ideals.
I don’t believe in good guys versus bad guys anymore…only [in] a plethora of states acting in self-interest…with varying ethics and moral standards of course, but self-interest nonetheless, he allegedly told Lamo.
He had sought out the former hacker, whom he believed would sympathize with his predicament. He could no longer bear his situation. I mean, I was never noticed…regularly ignored…except when I had something essential…then it was back to « bring me coffee, then sweep the floor »…felt like I was an abused work horse, he purportedly told Lamo.
As such, it was time to act, and attempt to influence the course of events.
If you had unprecedented access to classified networks 14 hours a day, seven days a week for eight plus months, what would you do he allegedly asked Lamo?
Manning himself was obviously weighing what do with this information, much of which contradicted the official version of events released by the US military, and exposed unethical if not criminal behavior.
He had unearthed what he characterized as incredible, awful things that belonged in the public domain and not on some server stored in a dark room in Washington D.C.
To ascertain the credibility of WikiLeaks, he sent them what he called a test cable in January 2010. WikiLeaks published the Reykjavik 13 cable February 18.
Then, he allegedly sent what became known as the Collateral Murder video depicting a scene in which an Apache helicopter fired on civilians in Baghdad, killing sixteen, including a Reuters photographer and his driver.
A video of the Granai raid in Afghanistan followed. WikiLeaks has yet to release it.
The US air strike killed some 140 civilians including women and children.
WikiLeaks also released the Afghan War Logs, and some 500,000 documents on the Iraq war.
According to the chats published by wire.com, downloading all this material proved remarkably simple.
I would come in with music on a CD-RW labeled with something like Lady Gaga.
He would then erase the music, all the while singing the Lady Gaga song Telephone
and download classified information.
He also removed any incriminating evidence from his computer.
What was Manning allegedly trying to do?
Provoke, hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms…if not… than we’re doomed as a species. I will officially give up on the society we have if nothing happens.
I want people to see the truth… regardless of who they are… because without information, you cannot make informed decisions as a public, Manning said according to the published chats.
Manning wanted accurate information to be released so that we could all come to our own conclusions based on facts and not the official propaganda released by the US government.
He stated clearly that he was not a spy, and had no interest in selling or giving the information to the enemies of the US.
It’s public data. It belongs in the public domain. Information should be free .It belongs in the public domain…he allegedly insisted.
Manning and Assange obviously share the same belief in the intrinsic value of transparency. Only total access to all the facts can allow a citizen to reach a truly informed opinion.
This issue is at the heart of the WikiLeaks controversy.
If Manning broke the law, he should be prosecuted and tried.
No one who believes in justice and the rule of law can dispute this point.
This administration however, has a proven track record of prosecuting whistleblowers, even outdoing its predecessors, yet no one else.
Why?
Why this double standard?
The list of wrongdoings committed by the previous administration is a distressingly long and familiar one: warrantless wiretapping, secret prisons, ghost detainees, extraordinary renditions, torture in Bagram, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and God only knows where else…
The Obama Administration has not considered it worthwhile to investigate, let alone prosecute anyone for these egregious abuses.
Why not?
Is it political pusillanimity or has Obama simply co-opted his predecessor’s national security agenda?
The Afghan war is now Obama's war and he has increased the number of US troops there.
He has significantly expanded the use of drones, a practice initiated by former President Bush, to kill terrorist suspects in Pakistan (the administration is also urging the Pakistani authorities to authorize an escalation of Special Ops raids on Pakistani soil…).
He has done the same in Yemen, and launched US air strikes there as well, some of which have killed civilians, including women and children.
He vowed to close Guantanamo, but has not done so.
He suspended military commissions only to reinstate them, allowing the disgraceful trial and conviction of Omar Khadr.
He has repeatedly invoked the state secrets privilege to prohibit all judicial review of past Bush and now Obama policies and practices.
In essence, by adopting the Bush national security agenda, he has made it his own, including all of its excesses, which he had pledged to reverse.…
Treating Manning as if was a convicted high profile terrorist, even though he has yet to be tried, is one of them.
The Obama administration clearly hopes that by prosecuting and mistreating Bradley Manning, other potential leakers will think twice before releasing classified information that could embarrass the US.
If Obama was truly interested in justice and the rule of law however, he would prosecute all those who broke the law in the name of national security (and, by doing so, not only undermined the constitutional rights of every citizen, but also sullied America’s reputation and good standing around the world), and not merely easy, and ultimately, harmless targets such as Manning…
(the photograph above of Manning was found here)

lundi 13 décembre 2010

The first great cyber war…?

Julian Assange, the Australian editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, turned himself in last Tuesday and is currently in jail, after the British judge in charge of the case denied him bail.
The British authorities having received a European arrest warrant issued by Sweden the day before, Mr. Assange was instructed to report to a London police station Tuesday morning at 930AM.
When he did, he was arrested.
He is now detained in the segregation unit of Wandsworth prison where he will have access to a computer in order that he may prepare his defense.
The Swedish authorities however, even though they did issue an arrest warrant, have not charged Mr. Assange with any wrongdoing.
Instead, they merely want to question him concerning accusations leveled against him by two Swedish women he encountered last August.
Gemma Lindfield, for the Swedish authorities, gave details of the allegations against Mr. Assange.
One of the charges is that he had unprotected sex with a woman, identified only as Miss A, when she insisted he use a condom.
Another is that he had unprotected sex with another woman, Miss W, while she was asleep, the BBC reported.
Mr. Assange has vowed to fight extradition to Sweden, fearing that that could lead to extradition to the US.
For, in the US, the release of State Department cables has infuriated many, who now seek revenge and demand that the Australian be prosecuted.
The WikiLeaks guy should be in jail for the rest of his life…
These are bad people doing bad things and they're going to get Americans and our allies killed and we should recognize that and recognize that is in effect an act of war against the United States, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told Fox.
Information warfare is warfare, and Julian Assange is engaged in warfare. Information terrorism, which leads to people getting killed, is terrorism, and Julian Assange is engaged in terrorism. He should be treated as an enemy combatant, he added.
I have no doubt someone can or will die as a result of these leaks, NY Republican Rep. Peter King told CNN. He claimed that the leaks were an invitation to murder.
He urged the Attorney General to designate WikiLeaks a foreign terrorist organization, claiming it posed a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States.
Former Arkansas Governor and Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee stated that whoever in our government leaked that information is guilty of treason. And I think anything less than execution is too kind a penalty. They've put American lives at risk…and any lives they endanger they're personally responsible for and the blood is on their hands, he told CNN.
It should be said however, that at this stage there is no evidence that Mr. Assange is directly or indirectly responsible for the leaking of the cables.
Instead, PFC Bradley Manning has been accused of doing so and is currently in detention..
Former President Clinton also condemned the leaks.
I'll be very surprised if some people don't lose their lives over these leaks. And goodness knows how many will lose their careers, he said.
Sarah Palin accused Assange of being an anti-American operative with blood on his hands.
Incidentally, a former adviser to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper called for Assange’s assassination.
I think Assange should be assassinated, actually. I think Obama should put out a contract and maybe use a drone or something, he told CBC.
Mr. Assange however, had taken all necessary precautions to ensure that the names of all those who could suffer from public exposure were removed.
In fact, the cables were not initially posted on the WikiLeaks website, but entrusted to the recipients, The New York Times, Le Monde, The Guardian, El Pais, and Der Spiegel. They did the redacting.
To date, only about 1,300 of the cables have been released, or less than 1% of the total.
For its part, the NYT even sent the cables it intended to publish to the Obama administration for review beforehand!
After reviewing the cables, the officials — while making clear they condemn the publication of secret material — suggested additional redactions. The Times agreed to some, but not all, the newspaper indicated.
Assange even invited the State Department on several occasions to pinpoint those cables it considered could undermine the national security of the US, but it declined to do so.
Assange had not been so meticulous when posting the previous installments relating to the Afghan and Iraq wars earlier this year.
Yet, the accusation made then that the revelations would lead to the deaths of many troops and US contacts proved baseless.
There is no evidence to date that anyone died because of the WikiLeaks revelations, according to…the Pentagon.
Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell has said previously that there was no evidence that anyone had been killed because of the leaks. Sunday (November 28), another Pentagon official told McClatchy that the military still has no evidence that the leaks have led to any deaths. The official didn't want to be named because of the issue's sensitivity.
« We have yet to see any harm come to anyone in Afghanistan that we can directly tie to exposure in the WikiLeaks documents, » Morrell told the Washington Post on Aug 11. But « there is in all likelihood a lag between exposure of these documents and jeopardy in the field », McClatchy reported.
The same accusations, nevertheless, are being parroted anew.
As a result, the US Justice Department is currently evaluating its legal options, seeking ways to indict Mr. Assange.
We have a very serious active, ongoing investigation that is criminal in nature. I authorized just last week a number of things to be done so that we can hopefully get to the bottom of this and hold people accountable, as they should be, Attorney General Eric Holder declared.
Some believe that the 1917 Espionage Act would be suitable to prosecute the Australian. Under this act, it is illegal to willfully communicate classified information that could undermine US national security.
I think there is a very good chance of a prosecution under the Espionage Act. His actions are not those of a responsible journalist that would enjoy the protection of the Constitution. He solicited people to commit a crime by sending him classified information. And then he disclosed it on a transmission belt, Jeffrey H. Smith a former general council at the CIA and now Washington lawyer, told McClatchy.
Yet, journalists have seldom been prosecuted on such grounds in the past.
Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, believes Assange will have a pretty good defense, if it were shown the classified cables were sent to WikiLeaks without his involvement. The Supreme Court has said the "innocent recipient of unlawful information" is usually protected in publishing it, she told McClatchy.
In addition, it may prove extremely difficult to establish that Julian Assange’s intent was undermining US security by releasing the cables.
As indicated above, he consulted the State Department prior to publication.
The problem here is for the United States to prosecute Assange, and in most other civilized countries, they have to show an intent. A crime has to be an intentional act, and if Assange did not intend in any way to harm anyone's interests -- and in fact, intended to further the interests of the [people of the] United States and the rest of the world -- that would be a difficult point to try to prove by the United States, that he had an evil motive here to further terrorism. That would be almost impossible to prove in court, Larry Klayman, a former prosecutor and founder of Judicial Watch and Freedom Watch, told RFE/RL.
Could he be charged with conspiracy?
The prosecution would need to prove that Assange solicited the documents and aided and abetted the informant. To date, no such evidence has been brought forward.
Trafficking in stolen government property may be another option.
Yet, the leaked documents are copies of those still in government possession.
Hence, they are not covered by property law, but by intellectual property law
This is less about stealing than it is about copying John G. Palfrey, a Harvard Law School professor specializing in Internet issues and intellectual property, told the NYT.
Government documents however, cannot be copyrighted…
In essence, Mr. Assange may have broken no laws at all…
This could explain the virulent campaign that has been launched in order to discredit him and his organization.
Some U.S. politicians and commentators have even called for the assassination or killing of Julian Assange. This is pretty extraordinary and lawless stuff. What this shows about the U.S.'s own conduct is that it is really trying to discredit WikiLeaks by shifting the focus from wrongdoing by the United States in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, spying on the United Nations and so on -- and instead, trying to focus all the legal attention, all the attention on crime and illegality, to WikiLeaks, Ben Saul, co-director of the University of Sydney's Centre for International Law in Australia, told REF/RL.
A number of major American corporations have severed all links with WikiLeaks.
MasterCard and PayPal announced that they would no longer accept donations intended for the website.
At the behest of Senator Joseph Lieberman, head of the US Senate’s homeland security committee, Amazon.com removed WikiLeaks from it servers, no longer hosting its website. It quickly found another home, however (wikileaks.ch).
In fact, more than 1,300 mirror sites have emerged, such as the one in the French newspaper Libération, ensuring WikiLeaks could never be driven from the internet.
Assange’s Swiss bank account was frozen, depriving his defense fund of some 31,000 Euros.
Although neither WikiLeaks nor Assange have been charged with any offense, the latter is being treated as if were a high profile member of al-Qaeda.
As a result, this has led to spontaneous retaliatory actions against those WikiLeaks sympathizers accuse of persecuting the Australian.
An amorphous group of activists called Anonymous has launched cyber attacks against the web sites of MasterCard, Visa, the Swiss bank that closed Assange’s account, and the law firm representing the two women who have accused him of sexual misconduct.
While we don't have much of an affiliation with WikiLeaks, we fight for the same reasons. We want transparency and we counter censorship. The attempts to silence WikiLeaks are long strides closer to a world where we can not say what we think and are unable to express our opinions and ideas, the group said in a statement.
These attacks were part of what these activists have called Operation Payback.
Some have likened this campaign to one of civil disobedience, targeting corporaions that preferred to preserve their financial interests and submit to the will of the powerful instead of fostering freedom of speech.
The hacktivists of Anonymous may be accused of many things – such as immaturity or being run by a herd instinct. But theirs is the cyber equivalent of non-violent action or civil disobedience. It disrupts rather than damages, wrote The Guardian in an editorial.
Many other free speech advocates, though not participating in the cyber retaliatory campaign voiced their dismay and anger at the onslaught against WikiLeaks.
I can use my credit card to send money to the Ku Klux Klan, to antiabortion fanatics, or to anti-homosexual bigots, but I can't use it to send money to WikiLeaks. The New York Times published the same documents. Should we tell Visa and MasterCard to stop payments to the Times, Jeff Jarvis director of the interactive journalism program at the City University of New York's Graduate School of Journalism, told the WP.
What, in the end, are Julian Assange and WikiLeaks trying to accomplish?
This organization practices civil obedience, that is, we are an organization that tries to make the world more civil and act against abusive organizations that are pushing it in the opposite direction, Assange told TIME.
We don't have targets other than organizations that use secrecy to conceal unjust behavior, he added.
Some cables that were released exposed such targets. For instance, contrary to what the US government officially claimed, American and not Yemeni warplanes did engage in bombing raids in Yemen, some of which killed countless civilians.
This escalation of Obama’s secret war in Yemen was never publicly revealed until now.
In the December 17, 2009 attack, forty-one civilians were killed including fourteen women and twenty-one children, according to Amnesty International.
One of these targets, who escaped unscathed, was Anwar al Awlaki, US-born Islamic militant cleric accused of being an AQAP operative.
Saleh (the President of Yemen) lamented the use of cruise missiles that are “not very accurate” and welcomed the use of aircraft-deployed precision-guided bombs instead. “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours,” Saleh said (in a conversation with General Petraeus, then Commander of US Central Command) prompting Deputy Prime Minister Alimi to joke that he had just “lied” by telling Parliament that the bombs in Arhab, Abyan, and Shebwa were American-made but deployed by the ROYG (Republic of Yemen Government) WikiLeaks cable 10SANAA4 stated.
On December 15, 2009, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley denied any US involvement in military operations inside Yemen…
In another interesting cable, WikiLeaks revealed that in July 2009, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton ordered diplomats to spy on UN officials, and collect information such as email addresses, phone, fax and credit card numbers, including biographic and biometric information on UN Security Council permanent representatives.
Other revelations that fall into this category are the following:
*the UK government assured the US that measures had been taken to ensure that the Chilcot inquiry, formed to investigate Britain’s role in the war in Iraq, would not undermine US interests, thus potentially limiting the scope and significance of the investigation;
*the Bush Administration attempted to prevent Germany from investigating allegations that one of its citizens, Khalid El-Masri, abducted by mistake, was tortured by the CIA;
*the Obama Administration exerted immense pressure on the Spanish government to indefinitely postpone the prosecution of six Bush Administration officials charged with creating a legal framework that allegedly permitted torture.
Julian Assange is well founded to argue that unethical and deceptive behavior on the part of governments should be exposed.
WikiLeaks’ message, according to Assange, is to report the truth.
WikiLeaks coined a new type of journalism: scientific journalism. We work with other media outlets to bring people the news, but also to prove it is true. Scientific journalism allows you to read a news story, then to click online to see the original document it is based on. That way you can judge for yourself: Is the story true? Did the journalist report it accurately? Assange wrote in The Australian.
It is not clear however, what value resides in releasing cables that reflect private, unofficial perceptions of foreign leaders.
Revealing speculations regarding the mental health of the President of Argentina Cristina Kirchner, or descriptions of the Putin/Medvedev relationship (likened to Batman and Robin) for instance, only needlessly embarrass those involved.
Such information should remain confidential for these revelations can only disrupt if not harm international relations.
So, why release them as well?
However good his intentions may be, Assange’s inability to consistently discern what should be revealed, and what should not undermines his mission, his credibility and only empowers the enemies of transparency who want to shield all government activity from public scrutiny, and seek to control all the information that is released, including on the web.
Are we on the verge of the first great cyber war?
If so, the US government has lost the initial battle.
Its inability to prevent the release of classified documents has encouraged those inside its own government structures to leak revealing and embarrassing documents, alienated by recent past abuses such as, and the list though not exhaustive, is a distressingly long one: warrantless wiretapping, extraordinary renditions, secret prisons, torture, Guantanamo, Bagram, endless detention, enemy combatants, military commissions, the Afghan and Iraq wars that have led to thousands of deaths, etc, etc…These abuses have spawned a culture of secrecy within the US government currently obsessed about preventing the release of information that could prove not only embarrassing but also potentially immoral if not illegal.
Yet, the US, (and governments in general), has lost the ability to control the information it possesses, and is now desperately trying to reassert that control, whatever the cost may be, hence the vicious campaign against Assange and WikiLeaks now taking place. Its aim is clear: deter WikiLeaks and like-minded enterprises from revealing information not previously vetted by the US government.
There is an information war, and it’s about control. The choice is to either live in a transparent world or shut down the Internet, Jeff Jarvis told the WP.
Coldblood, a 22-yesr-old software engineer and Anonymous activist, agreed.
I see this as becoming a war, but not your conventional war.
This is a war of data. We are trying to keep the Internet free and open for everyone, just the way the Internet always has been, he told the BBC.
It is vital to ensure the Internet does remain free and impervious to government intervention, and particularly, US government meddling, precisely because recent, post 9/11 history has amply demonstrated that it cannot be trusted, and that it will ignore both US and international law without hesitation if it deems it in its national interest to do so.
In the name of national security, the US government has shown that it will take all necessary measures (including resorting to torture if need be) to achieve its objectives, preventing another major attack on US soil, the end justifying the means.
In such a context, WikiLeaks can only flourish, and if we must chose between censorship imposed by deceitful and unethical governments, and unfettered free speech, embodied by exuberant and at times irresponsible sites such as WikiLeaks, I for one will select the latter without hesitation…
(The photograph above of Julian Assange can be found here)





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samedi 27 novembre 2010

There is no justice here...

On October 26, Omar Khadr, a Canadian who was captured in Afghanistan eight years ago at the age of fifteen, and the last Western citizen detained in Guantanamo, struck a plea agreement with US military authorities.
The son of an al-Qaeda official who had brought his family to live in Afghanistan and who died in 2003, he pleaded guilty to the following charges: murder in violation of the laws of war; spying; providing material support for terrorism; conspiracy and attempted murder.
In exchange, Mr. Khadr was to receive an eight-year sentence, the last seven to be served in Canada.
Following his guilty plea, Omar Khadr was asked a long list of questions, a 50-paragraph, eight-page stipulation elaborating the details on which the plea agreement was based, entailing admitting all charges in the form of a public confession.
As a result, Khadr recognized being an alien, unprivileged, enemy belligerent.
Such belligerents, according to the US, have no legal right to attack US forces, even on the battlefield.
He also admitted to being a member of al-Qaeda, and of having committed murder in violation of the laws of war.
During a four-hour battle, he was accused of throwing a grenade that killed Sgt 1st Class Christopher Speer.
Sporting a dark suit, the young man, holding his head in his hands, repeatedly answered yes when asked by the judge to reply to the charges leveled against him.
The judge, Col. Patrick Parrish, asked Omar Khadr, has anyone forced you to enter into this stipulation? He answered no.
Later, he asked him, it’s your voluntary decision to continue with the plea of guilty?
Yes, he responded.
The judge also enquired whether anyone had made promises should he agree to plead guilty.
Naturally, the young man said no.
Tellingly, Omar Khadr, as part of the agreement, pledged to neither appeal the sentence nor later take legal action against the US.
One hour after it had begun, the hearing was over…
A further hearing would take place in the following days to determine the sentence of Omar Khadr, the first child soldier to be prosecuted by a Western nation since WWII.
Previously however, he had rejected a similar plea bargain offer because an admission of guilt would have justified the abuses inflicted on him since 2002, and, for all practical purposes, exonerated the US of all responsibility for torturing and arbitrarily detaining him for eight years.
I will not take any of the offers because it’ll give the US government an excuse for torturing me and abusing me when I was a child, he wrote.
Apart from his testimony, obtained in 2002 while he was wounded, and under duress at Bagram, described by an interrogator there as one of the worst places on Earth, there was little actual evidence against him, and no eyewitnesses to the principle charge, throwing the grenade that killed Christopher Speer.
In fact, there are reports-classified photographs and defence documents obtained by the Star-indicating that Khadr was already wounded and buried in rubble when Speer was killed. The prosecution ignored that evidence.
Why then, plead guilty?
Military commissions were created to produce guilty verdicts, regardless of the facts.
No one has ever been acquitted by such a court.
The day before the trial was to begin last August, the judge declared admissible Khadr’s forced confession…There was thus no mystery as to how the trial would end…
Last July, Omar Khadr repudiated all his lawyers, discouraged by a process he knew was specifically designed to convict him.
It is going to be the same thing with or without lawyers. It's going to be a life sentence, he wrote the court.
Before the trial, Guantanamo’s chief prosecutor, John Murphy told the press that there is a substantial likelihood of conviction based on the evidence.
A guilty verdict was therefore, a foregone conclusion and so would be the sentence delivered by a jury of US military officers: life in prison.
He is anxious to avoid a trial before that kangaroo court, Kate Whitling, one of Omar Khadr’s Canadian lawyers, told CNN.
The prosecutors had not dared to demand the death penalty, due to Khadr’s young age at the time of Speer’s death.
Did Khadr have much of a choice, hence?
There is no justice here. He either pleads guilty to avoid trial, or he goes to trial and the trial is an unfair process, his attorney, Denis Edney, told The Globe and Mail.
It came down to a choice, between an illegal trial and going home-and he chose the latter, he added.
The fact that the agreement stipulated that he could go home after one further year in Guantanamo was the decisive factor.
Tellingly, Omar Khadr had also accepted responsibility for two other murders no one had previously accused him of committing in order to secure a deal that would send him home.
For his lawyer, this confirms that he would have admitted to the killing of John F. Kennedy if doing so would have got him out of Gitmo.
Hence, Khadr’s admission of guilt was the only legal strategy possible, the only one enabling him to return to Canada.
For Khadr and his lawyer, it has no bearing on his actual responsibility for the deeds he is accused of having committed.
In our view, it’s all a fiction, Mr. Edney told The Globe and Mail. In our view, Mr. Khadr is innocent.
The irony is that his lawyer advised him to commit perjury and confess to murder and other serious crimes, as the lesser of two evils.
What is deeply disturbing about this case is the nature of the crimes Khadr was compelled to admit in order to avoid a trial that would have sent him to jail for life.
When MM. Obama and Gates revived the military commissions last year (the former had initially suspended them upon becoming President), a new definition of war crimes was appended.
According to Lt. Col. David Frakt, a former Guantanamo military defense lawyer, a detainee may be convicted of murder in the violation of the law of war even if they did not actually violate the law of war…
In the new [Military Commissions] Manual the following official comment has been included in explanation of the offense of Murder in Violation of the Law of War: « an accused may be convicted in a military commission … if the commission finds that the accused engaged in conduct traditionally triable by military commission (e.g., spying; murder committed while the accused did not meet the requirements of privileged belligerency) even if such conduct does not violate the international law of war», he added.
In short, the US reserves the right to accuse and convict anyone it chooses of war crimes, at its discretion, even if no war crimes were committed…
Secondly, the US will ignore international law when it finds it convenient to do so.
In essence, only in the US are the actions Omar Khadr has been accused of committing on the battlefield war crimes.
Everywhere else, they would have been considered but acts of war.
As a soldier, Christopher Speer did not enjoy a protected status (he was neither unarmed nor injured at the time of his death, for instance), and was killed during a four-hour firefight.
Furthermore, juveniles, even on a battlefield, are protected under international law.
Those holding them are under the obligation to assure their rehabilitation and social reintegration (UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Administration of Juvenile Justice, Beijing Rules), and provide educational and recreational opportunities (UN Rules for the Protection of Juveniles Deprived of their Liberty).
Instead, the US chose to ignore international law, detain him for years, abuse and torture him, and try him as an adult for war crimes no one recognizes as such but the US, though he was but fifteen at the time.
No wonder President Obama did not want him judged in federal court...
Martin Scheinin, UN special rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights, and professor of international law at the European University in Florence, Italy characterized the United States’ conduct in this case thus: I think it is a disgrace and a shame for the United States, he told AFP. None of the crimes for which Omar Khadr pleaded guilty are war crimes. Not a single one.
They are crimes codified in the Military Commissions Act several years after the fact. The court judging Omar Khadr is not even a military court, but a military commission which should not have the authority to deal with ordinary crimes, he added.
Furthermore, the charges that led to the Omar Khadr trial and conviction were not crimes when he was accused of having committed them…
In fact, wrote Daphne Eviatar, Senior Associate in Human Rights First’s Law and Security Program, they weren’t deemed war crimes by the United States until 2006- four years after Khadr allegedly committed them.
In essence, Khadr was imprisoned, judged and convicted for crimes that were not crimes at all when he supposedly committed them in 2002.
There is no justice here, to repeat Mr. Edney’s lucid conclusion.
On October 31st, the military commission jury, composed of seven officers, sentenced Omar Khadr to a forty-year prison sentence for the crimes he admitted committing during the initial hearing.
During the sentencing hearing, the prosecutor presented ten witnesses, including the widow of the fallen Sergeant, Tabitha Speer.
You will always be a murderer in my eyes, she told Khadr.
Everybody wants to talk about how he’s the victim, how he’s the child. I don’t see that. He made a choice. My children had no choice [and] didn’t deserve to have their father taken by someone like you, she added.
Another important witness was Dr. Michael Welner, who had had the opportunity to interview Omar Khadr for some seven hours over two days.
He explained that, in Guantanamo, Khadr had been marinating in a radical Islamic community.
He is devout. He is angry. He identifies with his family, which has radical leanings. He is not remorseful and he is not westernized although he is very articulate and smooth. He’s highly dangerous. He murdered. He has been part of al-Qaeda. And we’re still at war, he told the court.
Yet, Khadr would not have been in a position to marinate there, assuming he was, if the US had not arbitrarily detained him in Guantanamo.
The psychiatrist seems to be confirming an accusation made by many critics of Guantanamo: the arbitrary detentions and abusive treatment exacerbate (when they do not actually engender) Islamic militancy and radicalism, potentially transforming ordinary individuals caught by US forces (or sold to them by unscrupulous Afghans or Pakistanis) because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, into dangerous extremists.
These individuals cannot be charged because there is no evidence, or if there is, has been potentially been defiled by torture.
Scores of Yemeni detainees for instance are still being held in Guantanamo even though the US government itself has conceded there are no longer any grounds to hold them.
Yet, due to the cargo parcel bomb plot revealed earlier this month, and last Christmas’ attempted attack on a US passenger aircraft also involving militants based in Yemen, no one in Washington has had the political courage to push for their release and send them home.
Congress and the White House seem to fear they may engage in militant activity should they return home.
Hence, even thought they have committed no wrong, and thus have been imprisoned arbitrarily, they are still being held for what they might one day do…
The Doctor’s testimony was undermined however, when it was discovered that his conclusions were based on the work of Danish psychologist Nicolai Sennels, author of Among Criminal Muslims.
The latter has characterized the Qur’an as a criminal book that forces people to do criminal things, and claimed that massive inbreeding within the Muslim culture during the last 1,400 years may have done catastrophic damage to their gene pool.
The defense was allowed to present only four witnesses.
Significantly, the details of the plea prevented Khadr's lawyers from putting anyone on the stand who actually knew Omar Khadr and believed he was not guilty, or at least didn't have a real choice about whether or not to assist al Qaeda and his father as an adolescent. A witness contradicting the plea would have called the entire deal into question, wrote Daphne Eviatar.
In addition, the judge refused to authorize any testimony regarding the abusive treatment inflicted on Khadr at both Bagram and Guantanamo.
One witness however, did contradict Welner’s testimony.
According to Cpt. Patrick McCarthy, a former legal adviser at Guantanamo, Omar Khadr was a model prisoner, respectful and helpful to military personnel.
Furthermore, he was not one of the radical detainees who assaulted guards.
Mr. Khadr was always very respectful. He had a pleasant demeanor. He was friendly…
Fifteen-year-olds, in my opinion, should not be held to the same level of accountability as adults
, he concluded.
His account of Omar Khadr is corroborated by Arlette Zinck, and English professor at King’s University College in Edmonton, Canada, who developed an epistolary relationship with the young detainee.
Contrary to what Dr. Welner had alleged, Omar Khadr did not read only Harry Potter and the Qur’an.
Under cross-examination, he was compelled to admit that the young man also read Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom, Obama’s Dreams from my Father, and A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah, among other works.
This may have been the result of Ms. Zinck’s positive influence.
In the media, she described the young man as a voracious reader, and a polite, thoughtful, intelligent person.
Omar Khadr expressed interest in attending King’s University College after his release.
Zinck indicated that she would write him a letter of recommendation should he apply.
This was not sufficient to sway the jury, who sentenced him to forty years in jail.
Fortunately for Mr. Khadr, the plea agreement guaranteed a maximum sentence of eight years, with the last seven to be served in Canada, which has finally accepted his repatriation.
Canada, unlike other Western nations such as Australia, Britain or France has always refused to get involved and intervene in order to obtain the release of one of its citizens.
Even after the guilty plea was announced, Lawrence Cannon, a spokeswoman for Canada’s Foreign Minister declared, this matter is between Mr. Khadr and the US government. We have no further comment.
Canadian security agents however, did not hesitate to collaborate with the Americans.
They interrogated their own citizen and shared their findings with his American jailers.
The nation’s Supreme Court, in a 9-0 ruling, concluded that the government’s inaction offends the most basic Canadian standards about the treatment of detained youth suspects.
Canada’s only contribution to his well-being, according to Mr. Edney, was to send him a pair of sunglasses (he has only one eye remaining and the other is damaged as a result of the fighting in 2002) this summer…
For President Obama, the plea bargain and the sentence hearing had the double advantage of ending a trial that could only embarrass the US.
Nevertheless, the US President will be remembered in the history books for at least one, though sinister, deed: he is the only Western leader ever to prosecute a juvenile for war crimes.
It is a singular and signal accomplishment indeed, for he chose a path not even MM. Bush and Cheney dared to tread…
Needless to say, justice was certainly not served on that dismal occasion.
I think it’s a lose-lose, where both the Obama administration and Omar Khadr mitigated their losses and cut the best deal that they could, Col. Morris Davis, a former chief prosecutor of military commissions at Guantanamo and architect of the case against Khadr, told CTV.
Yet, at what price?
The prosecution feared that the guilty plea would only encounter skepticism and so compelled Omar Khadr to deny that he had been made any promises in exchange, and had not been forced, if not blackmailed, to accept its terms.
The judge had even the audacity to tell Mr. Khadr: you should only do this if you truly believe it is your best interest.
In essence, Omar Khadr was confronted with the following dilemma: comprehensively accept the US claims in this case, that he is an alien, unprivileged, enemy belligerent, committed murder in violation of the laws of war thereby legitimizing these constructs of the Bush and Obama administrations, in exchange for an eight year sentence, or refuse the agreement and face a trial that had only one possible conclusion: life in prison.
Caught between Scylla and Charybdis, he chose Scylla.
Incidentally, since he has already been imprisoned for eight years, should he not be freed today?
He may be the only prisoner to have been jailed for sixteen years after having been sentenced to eight…
In short, President Obama’s military commission extorted a guilty plea in order to spare itself the embarrassment of convicting a juvenile to life in prison on bogus legal grounds.
As the Star concluded, in an article called A travesty of justice, the guilty plea spares Obama the ignominy of a full trial of a child soldier in a sham court, yet not the ignominy of having arbitrarily detained and abused a juvenile then manufactured charges to justify the odious treatment inflicted.
(The photograph above is by Brennan Linsley/Reuters)

dimanche 21 novembre 2010

The enemies of justice and democracy lurk not only on the rugged Afghan-Pakistan border but in Washington as well...

Last Wednesday, a federal court in New York convicted Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a thirty-six-year-old Tanzanian, of one count of conspiracy to destroy government buildings and property.
The first Guantanamo Bay detainee to be tried in a civilian court, he was acquitted however, on the other 284 counts, including 224 for murder, one for each victim of the bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998.
The prosecutors plan to demand the maximum penalty when Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani is sentenced next January, that is to say, life in prison.
Quite predictably however, opponents of the Obama administration, which has pledged to try some Guantanamo detainees in US civilian courts, seized on the verdict to excoriate the President and Attorney General Eric Holder, deeming that all terrorists suspects (for, until they have been tried and convicted, are but that, suspects) should be tried solely by military commissions.
Liz Cheney, daughter of the former Vice -President, and head of the conservative organization Keep America Safe, issued a statement that began thus:
The Obama Administration recklessly insisted on a civilian trial for Ahmed Ghailani, and rolled the dice in a time of war.
For such critics, conducting a fair trial for a terrorism suspect, which, by definition, will preserve and respect the rights of the accused, is by nature reckless.
For them, civilian courts and jurors obviously cannot be trusted to deliver the only verdict that is acceptable in such cases, and in a time of war, a guilty one…
Hence, to expect them to bring this about is akin to rolling the dice.
If the evidence against these suspects is so sound and convincing, then why are these critics making such a claim?
Ironically, the fundamental strengths of the civilian court system, the examination and evaluation of the evidence presented by the prosecution and cross-examined by the defense is in fact, a liability for these critics.
For, if the evidence fails to convince a jury, the defendant could actually be acquitted, an unconscionable act for them.
As far as they are concerned, terrorists are to be judged by special courts, convicted and locked away, if not given the death penalty, and certainly not acquitted or partially acquitted during a free and fair trial.
The latter are for Americans, not foreign terrorists…
Failing to convict these terrorists on all counts sends the wrong message to our enemies. It’s dangerous. It signals weakness in a time of war, according to Keep America Safe.
Weakness?
When a democracy resorts to the rule of law and civilian courts, where the rights of both the prosecution and the defendant are scrupulously respected, to try terrorism suspects, is it truly putting its weakness on display?
A democracy remains true to itself and its values by always adhering to the rule of law even when, or especially when, dealing with enemies who hold both human life and justice in contempt.
In addition, which is the more efficient method to combat Islamic extremism?
Detain them for years in secret prisons and Guantanamo, subject them to abject abuse and torture, try them in special courts that deny them their fundamental rights and before which no American citizen would ever be brought, when they are tried at all, or subject them to the same rules that we reserve for ourselves, and ensure that they are treated humanely and fairly?
Which method does more to validate and vindicate al-Qaeda’s anti-Western ideology, to inflame Muslim public opinion against the West, to recruit additional militants in al-Qaeda’s anti-western, nihilistic jihad, the former or the latter?
The best way, the only way to discredit the fanatics and their vile tactics and inflammatory language is to steadfastly remain ourselves, and not resort to practices that only thuggish regimes utilize…
Secret detention, endless detention, abuse, torture, bogus trials, this is what the extremists thrive on and use to fuel their followers‘ bitterness and wrath toward the West…
Remaining true to itself and its laws thus, in no way undermines a society and its ability to defend itself from external threats such as terrorism, but actually strengthens it.
In addition, would not our image in the Islamic world measurably improve if we ceased invading and occupying Muslim countries, refrain from killing hundreds if not thousands of Muslims each year, and made an even half-hearted attempt to resolve the Palestinian question?
In essence, the more we respect our own principles and values, the feebler the Islamic extremist movements will become…
For many Republicans however, such as Peter King, the future chairman of the House of Representatives’ homeland security committee, civilian courts cannot deliver their brand of justice.
He characterized the Ghailani verdict as a total miscarriage of justice, and added, this tragic verdict demonstrates the absolute insanity of the Obama administration’s decision to try al-Qaeda terrorists in civilian courts.
What is tragic about a verdict delivered by an independent, civilian jury that simply examined the evidence (the admissible evidence, that is) and responded as it saw fit?
In a democracy, that is called justice.
What must also be mentioned however is that none of the defendants are al-Qaeda terrorists until they have been recognized as such by a court.
For Mr. King and his like-minded colleagues, the simple fact that someone has been detained in Guantanamo and thus recognized as an unlawful combatant by the President is sufficient proof of guilt.
Why then, bother conducting a fair trial that may expose the evidence against many suspects for what it is, bogus and tainted?
The trial becomes a mere formality, when there actually is one, designed to sentence the guilty to the most severe penalty possible.
That is how you treat enemies during a time of war, according to the Bush/Cheney/King school of constitutional rights.
These people are warriors, to quote Senator Graham, but unlawful ones, such that the President who has designated them as such can them deprive them of their rights at the stroke of a pen, particularly the right to a fair trial.
These foreigners simply do not deserve one, for the simple fact that they allegedly dared to attack America, and by doing so, forfeited all the rights civilized nations afford not only their citizens but also those individuals that fall under their jurisdiction.
It is this conception of justice that many would characterize as total insanity.
Mr. King considers insane the proposition that the rights of all human beings should be respected, even those of one’s enemies.
Incidentally, Mr. King has enthusiastically defended George Bush for approving the use of waterboarding on detainees such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 9/11 mastermind, and even suggested that the former President should get a medal for having done so.
Currently on a book tour, Mr. Bush has repeatedly boasted having authorized it against terrorist suspects.
Waterboarding however, is considered a war crime by all civilized countries including the US, until the Bush/Cheney presidency, that is.
In fact, during the Tokyo Trials convened at the conclusion of WWII, Japanese soldiers were prosecuted for having committed acts of torture that included waterboarding.
The Japanese were tried, convicted, and hung for war crimes committed against American POWs. Among those charges for which they were convicted was waterboarding, John McCain himself told reporters in 2007.
Amnesty International and the ACLU have called for an investigation to examine whether or not former President Bush did violate US and international law banning the use of torture.
Will Attorney General Eric Holder consider appointing a special prosecutor?
This is highly unlikely even though the US is under the legal obligation to investigate all potential violations of the ban on torture committed by its citizens. If it does not, foreign nations may elect to do so.
Yet, President Obama having established at the outset of his mandate that he wanted to look forward and not backward, it is highly unlikely Mr. Holder will take the slightest initiative to satisfy the demands of Amnesty International and the ACLU.
The President himself however, while visiting Indonesia earlier this month, urged his hosts to investigate the abuses of the Suharto regime.
We can’t go forward without looking backwards, he told them.
Why should that be true for Indonesia but not for the US?
In the end, is Mr. King evenly remotely interested in justice?
We must try them (al-Qaeda terrorists) as wartime enemies and try them in military commissions at Guantanamo, he added.
Why?
Evidence obtained through coercion and torture is inadmissible in a civilian court.
Case in point, prosecutors in the Ghailani case declined to present his confession as evidence during the trial.
The statements obtained while he was detained illegally in one of the CIA’s secret prisons and then at Guantanamo were coerced and obtained under duress, according to his lawyers.
Furthermore, US District Judge Lewis Kaplan who presided over the proceedings refused to authorize the testimony of a potentially giant witness for the government, Hussein Abebe, a Tanzanian who allegedly sold Ghailani the explosives that were then used during the embassy attacks.
Investigators learned of the witness’ existence during the interrogation sessions held at the secret prison and then at Guantanamo.
Since Ghailani was most probably tortured during his detention, any information thus obtained was deemed inadmissible by the court, and rightly so.
As a result, the opponents of civilian, thus fair trials were quick to point out that only military commissions could adequately try terrorist suspects.
The judge in this case, applying constitutional and legal standards to which all U.S. citizens are entitled, threw out important evidence. The result is that the jury acquitted on all but one conspiracy count, Lamar Smith, future Judiciary Committee Chairman from Texas, told the NYT.
For the supporters of military commissions, that the important evidence was obtained through torture is irrelevant.
Military commissions were created for this very purpose: convict defendants with evidence (the accuracy of which is also irrelevant as long as it is incriminating) that no civilian court could ever take seriously, and thus admit it as such.
Omar Khadr’s confession obtained, like Ghailani’s under torture, was declared admissible by the presiding military judge at his militarty commission trial.
The military commissions serve one purpose and one purpose only: deliver a guilty verdict, or threaten detainees with life imprisonment in order to extort a plea bargain whereby they recognize their guilt in exchange of a more lenient sentence, as in the Omar Khadr case (I hope to deal with this in a future post).
Constitutional and legal standards only apply to US citizens, these supporters of torture and military commissions erroneously claim.
As such these foreigners, even if, like Khadr, they were only fifteen when apprehended by US forces, will have to settle for military commissions (if they are to be tried at all and not condemned by the President to indefinite detention), where tainted evidence is welcome, and skeptical jurors absent altogether.
US Army officers are considered more reliable to produce the desired (guilty) verdict.
This is what the Cheneys, Smiths and Kings call justice…
Ironically, it is the very tactics employed by the Bush/Cheney administration and enthusiastically supported by MM. King, Smith and Ms. Cheney and so many other Republicans and not a few Democrats, the enhanced interrogation techniques (and what everyone else call torture), that produced the verdict now so shrilly denounced as inadequate by these apologists of torture!
Unfortunately, however, this verdict, and the rabid attacks that followed it, may lead the Obama administration to conclude it is unwise to try Khalid Sheik Mohammed in a civilian court, as it had vowed to do one year ago.
It may now decide that choosing the civilian trial may be too politically risky and burdensome.
Indeed, how much legitimate, untainted evidence against Mohammed is available, and would it be sufficient to convince a jury to convict him?
Would a military commissions trial be satisfactory and credible?
Assuredly not.
Hence, Obama may be tempted to resort to the most unacceptable and morally repugnant of options: indefinite detention…
This disgraceful option would simply comfort those critics of Guantanamo who have always claimed that it was nothing but a modern-day Bastille, where individuals are arbitrarily detained by royal fiat, the presidential, lettres de cachet, and beyond the reach of the law and justice.
What is equally clear, his declarations to the contrary notwithstanding, is that Obama has no intention of closing Guantanamo as promised.
He did not think it worth his while to expend the necessary political capital do so while the Democrats held the majority in Congress. Now that he has lost the House, this issue will be for the next President to address or not.
Mr. King made this quite clear: they couldn’t come close to getting that done when the democrats were in charge. There’s no way they’re going to get it now that Republicans are in charge, he declared…No less was expected of him…
The enemies of justice and democracy lurk not only on the rugged Afghan-Pakistan border but in Washington as well.
These US militants, we presume unwittingly, are trying to accomplish what bin Laden could only dream of and that his nemesis Bush/Cheney initiated so potently, the subversion of the nation’s values and constitution, all in the name of preserving freedom and security and winning their sacrosanct war on terror.
What is deeply disappointing is that Obama did not see fit to decisively reverse course and base the political and ideological struggle against Islamic extremism (you may have noticed I did not use the expression war, for this is a struggle military forces are doomed to lose) on the values of justice and democracy, universal values at that, and not on the perversion of them which is what the Bush/Cheney supporters and torture enthusiasts chose to do, hoping to shock and awe their foes into submission…
On the day after his inauguration, Obama vowed to continue the struggle against terrorism, but he said, we are going to do so in a manner that is consistent with our values and our ideals.
The Republicans and many Democrats have clearly turned their backs on such a principled approach.
Let us hope President Obama will not do likewise…
Success in the struggle against al-Qaeda and their followers depends on it.
(the photograph of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani can was found here)

vendredi 12 novembre 2010

Is democracy a luxury that China cannot afford?

Do authoritarian and repressive regimes have an intrinsic advantage when launching an economic policy the aim of which is to modernize rapidly an impoverished and underdeveloped nation?
Can only such regimes deliver quick economic growth?
Conversely, does democracy inhibit rapid economic growth because of the obligations it willingly shoulders, such as catering to the needs of various and often antagonistic constituencies?
In short, could China have created the world’s second largest economy in just thirty years had it not been led by an authoritarian and repressive regime which denied its citizens all of their fundamental rights in order to produce the desired outcome, economic prosperity?
Should China therefore, heed the advice of the west and launch its Fifth Modernization, democratization, or wait until the nation’s economy is robust enough to satisfy the material needs of most, if not all, Chinese?
Some in Asia, such as Kishore Mahbubani, dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, in a recent NYT op-ed, accuse the West of being shortsighted on the issue of democratization.
The notion that by recognizing and encouraging Chinese dissidents such as Liu Xiaobo the West can help foster a democratic movement in China is a delusion, a counterproductive one, which can only lead to instability not democracy, he claims.
Infatuated with its ideals of justice and democracy, the West refuses to entertain the notion that there may exist what Mr. Mahbubani calls an alternative point of view, presumably embodied by the regime.
If, as Mr. Mahbubani noticed, few Chinese did indeed publicly celebrate Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Peace Prize, it is because they feared enduring the wrath of those enforcing this alternative point of view.
Nevertheless, some actually had the courage to do so, and were promptly arrested and have been harassed by that alternative point of view’s security apparatus ever since.
No one denies the great benefits that Deng Xiaoping’s modernization program based on opening up the country to outside and particularly Western influence unleashed.
That is indeed an unparalleled achievement and worthy of praise.
Many foreigners came to China to invest, and thousands of young Chinese went abroad to study…
If Western values are so pernicious, why did Deng allow them to go?
Surely, Mr. Deng must have evaluated the potential consequences of exposing thousands of youths to the Western, democratic model.
Those brazen enough to believe that not only socialism (another Western import) could have Chinese characteristics, but democracy as well, and brought those ideas home, were maimed and killed by the thousands on June 4, 1989 at Tiananmen.
MM. Deng and Li actually unleashed the PLA on China’s youth…
It is reassuring to note that Mr. Mahbubani brands the autocratic regime’s reaction a mistake.
Most observers around the world saw an authoritarian regime commit, not a mistake, but a great crime in order to preserve its monopoly on power.
What in the end was more destabilizing and traumatic, the call for democracy, or the violent repression of the democracy movement?
How many were killed on that fateful day?
The great leaders in Beijing never divulged the figure, to preserve stability no doubt…
Yet, the values of justice and democracy are not Western, Eastern or Central, they are universal.
La Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen was not bestowed by the French revolutionaries on the French alone, but on all of humanity.
No doubt, no doubt, we are told, but these foreign values would be too destabilizing for a country like China.
Better to keep over a billion people shackled to ensure that they do not destabilize a system now able to feed them properly.
That is the argument the apologists of tyranny always invoke to justify depriving human beings of their fundamental rights.
Democracy activists are thus dismissed as selfish, vain and irresponsible stooges of foreign powers, unwittingly undermining the nation and impeding its progress.
Furthermore, this argument goes, democracy is the central element in a Western plot designed to overthrow the regime. Those converted to Western values are thus either fools or traitors.
Only the autocrats know what is good for China, certainly not those foreigners who did such great harm to China in a not-so-distant past and even less those criminals or fools who parrot their justice-and-democracy propaganda.
Leave China alone, the admirers of the Chinese leadership argue.
Only a regime ruthlessly imposing order and discipline could have achieved such remarkable growth in the span of a generation, these apologists claim.
As such, China’s leaders should be commended for their achievements, not condemned for their human rights abuses, mere collateral damage on the road to prosperity.
Mr. Mahbubani does have a point however, when he emphasizes that the West does have a double standard on the human rights question.
The US has indeed much to answer for: not only Guantanamo but also Abu Ghraib, Bagram, secret prisons, ghost detainees, extraordinary renditions, warrantless wiretapping, enhanced interrogation techniques (what Bush administration lawyers call torture), and the list goes on...
Those blatant and flagrant human rights abuses tarnished America’s reputation, which it will take decades of virtuous behavior to restore.
These abuses also undermined its moral authority and left it in no position to criticize anyone’s human rights record.
Alas, President Obama has elected to preserve Guantanamo, military commissions, extraordinary renditions, indefinite detention and so on, thus betraying the great faith placed in him by human rights activists in the US and throughout the world.
MM. Bush and Cheney must feel vindicated indeed…
The UK is also currently grappling with its own version of Abu Ghraib.
Nevertheless, do these human rights abuses justify Tiananmen, the jailing of a non-violent pro-democracy literature professor, and the systematic repression of democracy activists?
No, and nothing ever will.
One can measure the level a civilization has reached by the way it treats its own people.
Feeding and providing for a nation of over one billion people is indeed an extraordinary feat and Deng’s contribution in this effort is evident.
Yet, what is the point of providing for them if the price is persecution?
What choice does the regime allow its citizens, or rather, subjects?
Live decently, but without any rights.
Demand to live decently without forfeiting those rights and you are deprived of both the former and the latter.
The autocrats have been able to deliver a measure of prosperity but only by negating all those fundamental rights China vowed to respect (e.g., Article 35 of its constitution, and the international covenants that it signed ).
Do material progress and prosperity justify tyranny?
Should we condone the crimes committed by the thugs who rule in Beijing because they have succeeded in erecting the planet’s second largest economy?
Does the end, relative prosperity, justify the means, systematic repression of all pro-democracy activism?
Are we to understand that, if Liu Xiaobo was sentenced to eleven years in jail, it is for a good cause, for the well-being of the Chinese people?
Presumably, his revolutionary ideas (simply demanding that the autocrats respect the country’s constitution) could prove contagious and infect other Chinese citizens, leading them to demand that their rights be also respected.
Where would that leave the regime?
What the autocrats are in facts trying to preserve is not stability, but their monopoly on power.
If the regime were truly interested in stability, than it would start a dialogue with such moderates as Liu Xiaobo, and negotiate a path conciliating both economic growth and democratic rights.
India faces many of the challenges confronting China today: a huge population whose material needs must be met; ethnic, and religious tensions; massive pockets of poverty and underdevelopment, particularly in the countryside; huge inequality-inducing income variations, for instance.
Yet, it has attempted to confront these daunting issues with the help of its people, not in spite of or against them.
It is the Indians who elect their rulers, not a miniscule minority of apparatchiks in secret meetings, behind closed doors.
Has democracy in India led to unrest?
Sometimes, but to instability and anarchy?
No!
Only the Chinese can compel the regime to give back what it has extorted, their fundamental democratic and human rights. Few in the West have any doubt about that.
A Nobel Peace Prize will do little to overthrow an authoritarian regime, but perhaps it can help call attention to the fate of a brave man the autocrats in Beijing have tried so resolutely to humiliate and destroy.
This Nobel Peace Prize is trying to convey to them the following message: do not try to fool your people or us; Liu is no criminal, only a man whose ambition is to live like one, in dignity and freedom.
The world is watching and admiring China’s rise, but also the fortitude and resilience of Liu Xiaobo and his fellow dissidents
The resurrection of the Chinese nation cannot come at the price of the dignity and fundamental rights of its people.
The regime will be held accountable for the way its treats them, and its crimes, all its crimes exposed and denounced.
Hence, contrary to what Mr. Mahbubani maliciously claims, it is not Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Peace Prize that is ignoble, but the ruling clique’s fanatical persecution of a man who only believes that we should end the practice of viewing words as crimes
(the photograph of Chinese President Hu Jintao unveiling a statue of Deng Xiaoping in 2004 is by Xinhua)