Justice and democracy is the only way...

The Norwegian prime minister, Jens Stoltenberg, says his country will "not be intimidated or threatened" by Friday's terror attacks, which left 76 people dead.
The country would "stand firm in defending our values" and the "open, tolerant and inclusive society", he said. "The Norwegian response to violence is more democracy, more openness and greater political participation.", The Guardian wrote... 
The Norwegians seem to understand that the only viable response to mass murder is not more violence, but more democracy...That is the antidote, and the only one, to violence.
Revenge, it must be said,  is the tool of the feeble and inarticulate...
In this post 9/11 world, only progress, justice and democracy can defeat the extremists, and certainly not military might...
If our values, which we endlessly proffer,  have any significance, then it is in times such as these that we must test them...and uphold them...
And yet, are we worthy of them? Hopefully so, or are the Anders Behring Breivik of this day and age correct to conclude that our present civilization is doomed and must be done away with?
It is in such crises that we must remain true to ourselves...
We can only prevail, for what do the nihilists have to offer?
Yet, shall we be brave enough, shall we have the necessary fortitude to remain who we are, no matter what the consequences?
We are in dire need of leadership...Perhaps, at last, shall we find some, not in Paris, Berlin, London or Washington, alas, but in  Oslo...
(the photograph above is by AFP)

Justice for Natalia Estemirova...

It has been two years already since she was abducted and murdered…
On July 15, 2009, Natalia Estemirova’s body was found in Ingushetia with bullet wounds to the head and chest.
She had been working diligently and tirelessly for Memorial, Russia’s most prominent human rights organization.
In Chechnya (a place Anna Politkovskaya called a small corner of hell), she specialized in cases of kidnapping, forced disappearances and extrajudicial killings involving militants and others, cases that should have been investigated by the authorities, had the latter not been complicit…
In Chechnya, however, the security apparatus of Ramzan Kadyrov, the restive republic’s president, is widely suspected of being behind these egregious human rights abuses, part of the brutal campaign to crush the rebellion led by Islamic militants, and instigated by Kadirov’s patron, Vladimir Putin.  
One week before her murder, she had issued a report on an execution involving the Kurchaloi district police that took place in the Chechen village of Akhkinchu-Borzoi.
Was her murder the police’s reply?
Perhaps, for she did have many enemies in Chechnya, particularly among those bent on prosecuting their vicious war against the militants and their relatives on their own terms, contemptuous of both justice and the rule of law…
Two years later, no one has been arrested by the authorities for the man accused  by the latter of having committed the deed, Alkhazur Bashayev, an Islamic militant, was shot dead by Russian security forces in November 2009.
Hence, as far as the Russian authorities are concerned, the case is closed because it has been solved…The murderer having been identified (and killed, conveniently precluding the possibility of a trial), the Chechen authorities are thus absolved of any responsibility in the murder, and, consequently, in any other suspicious killing in the republic...  
Since Natalia Estemirova did not issue any reports involving Mr. Bashayev, Russian human rights activists never took the official version seriously.
As a result, human rights organizations launched their own investigation into the murder in the hope that a credible police inquiry will one day take place…
The report, entitled Two Years After the Murder of Natalia Estemirova: Investigation on the Wrong Track, sponsored by Memorial, the Russian investigative newspaper Novaya Gazeta, (which published Politkovskaya’s reports on Chechnya) and the International Federation of Human Rights based in Paris, was presented last Thursday by Oleg Orlov, Memorial’s chairman.
According to the report, the examination of DNA samples found on Natalia Estemirova’s body did not match those of Mr. Bashayev or his brother, Anzor Bashayev, also charged in the case.
The latter, currently living in France, provided a DNA sample to Memorial.
The French authorities granted political asylum to Anzor Bashayev, and rebuffed Russian requests to extradite him.
There is no serious proof to really consider the version in which Alkhazur Bashayev is the main suspect in the killing of Natalia Estemirova, Orlov declared.
Human rights groups have accused the Russian authorities of fabricating a case in order to avoid exploring other possibilities, including the following embarrassing and explosive scenario: that officers in Chechnya’s security apparatus, at the behest of the republic’s president, eliminated a dangerous human rights activist that had been relentlessly exposing their criminal activities.
In this particular case it seems Special Forces tried to build a disguise version to take the investigation away from the real murderers, the report claims.
There were very strong circumstances around Estemirova’s murder that suggested that there could have been some official involvement. You know, the threats that had been made against Estemirova and others like her, the threats against Memorial, the timing of the threat, the kinds of crimes that Estemirova had been investigating-all of that pointed to a very strong official interest in seeing some kind of harm done to her, Rachel Denber, of Human Rights Watch, told RFE/RL.
Svetlana Gannushkina, a Memorial activist, presented a copy of the report to Russian President Dimitri Medvedev on July 5...He has yet to issue any comment…
The journalist Tom Parfitt once wrote that Natalia Estemirova was one of the bravest people in Russia. But, she was much more than that, for she knew whom she was confronting, yet plodded on nevertheless…
Significantly, other determined and brave human rights activists inspired by her example yet not deterred by her fate have been pursuing the same cause, justice and the rule of law.
In November 2009, four months after Natalia was killed, a group of Russian lawyers founded the Joint Mobile Group of the Russian Human Rights Organizations in Chechnya (Mobile Group).
The organization sends activists to Chechnya in order to investigate human rights abuses, record testimony and collect evidence.
Two months after its creation, the Mobile Group was asked to investigate the disappearance of Islam Umarpashaev, who was kidnapped from his home in Chechnya, on December 11, 2009, and held at the headquarters of the Chechen Special Task police Force (OMON). There, he claims he was abused and tortured by police officers.
The Mobile Group lodged an official complaint and seized the European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg. The latter then requested that the Russian government investigate the matter.
Three months after the Mobile Group’s intervention in the case, Umarpashaev was released because, according to one of his abductors, his father went all the way to the European Court and created problems.
The Mobile Group is now demanding that the Russian authorities launch an official and credible investigation into the matter and hold all those who may have broken the law accountable.
In the meantime, and for their own safety, the Umarpashaev family has had to flee Chechnya.
The Caucasian republic, therefore, remains a very dangerous place, particularly for those brazen enough to demand justice.
We have been working in Chechnya for many years. These days, people there are simply paralyzed by fear, not daring to lodge complaints against law enforcement and security officials under de facto control of the Chechnya leader, Ramzan Kadyrov. By persevering in his quest for justice, Islam Umarpashaev is displaying immense courage, Tanya Lokshina, Russia researcher at Human Rights Watch, declared.
Needless to say, Mobile Group activists have been threatened and harassed by the Chechen police.
For their efforts, the Mobile Group was awarded the 2011 Front Line Award for Human Rights Defenders at Risk.
The work of the Joint Mobile Group is an inspirational example of how committed individuals, despite all the pressures that are brought to bear on them, can hold the line in defense of justice, truth and the rule of law. It is the denial of access to justice that enables tyrants to prevail. This is why the work of human rights defenders like the Joint Mobile Group is so important, declared former Irish President Mary Robinson, now President of the Mary Robinson Foundation, upon presenting the award to Igor Kalyapin, founder and head of the organization, at Dublin City Hall.
Two years after Estemirova’s murder, there are more questions than answers about the circumstances surrounding her killing. The Russian authorities need to deliver justice in Estemirova’s case to demonstrate their sincerity about protecting human rights in Chechnya and throughout the Caucasus, Hugh Williamson, Europe and Central Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said.
As the Estemirova case has shown (the same, alas can be said concerning the murder of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya, killed on October 7, 2006, Putin’s birthday…) the land of Putin, Medvedev and Kadyrov is incapable of delivering justice, and is not the least interested in doing so.
As such, we need not worry concerning their sincerity about protecting human rights.
They are much more interested in power than in justice…
Yet, as the bold and fearless Russian human rights community has demonstrated, the authorities can be compelled to release victims of human rights abuses if there is sufficient pressure exerted from both within and without Russia.
The Russians do seem loath to attract the attention of the European Court of Human Rights and suffer potentially ignominious legal defeats there, and, more generally, in the court of world opinion…
Therefore, it is vital that we all apply pressure on the Russian authorities and compel them to protect human rights activists in the Caucasus, and the Chechen people from violence and abuse…
Amnesty International has launched a campaign demanding justice for Natalia Estemirova.
Let us support this effort (you can sign the petition here).
Do we not owe at least this much to Natalia Estemirova?
(the photograph above is by Vladimir Rodionov RIA/Novosti)

Deference to power, in the land of Gavroche?

In a column entitled DSK and Conspiracy Theory, The NYT columnist Roger Cohen discusses the cultural differences existing between France and the US that the DSK sexual assault case highlighted.
French deference to power, he writes, -with the accompanying conspiracy theories-has encountered the hard-knuckled application of US law applied equally to anyone accused of a serious crime.
Deference to power?
France is the land of the 1789 Revolution that overthrew the Ancien Régime, guillotined its king and queen, and founded the Ist Republic; a land where its newly restored king was sent packing upon Napoleon’s triumphant return from Elba during les Cent Jours in 1815; a nation that drove out its restored monarch                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                during the July 1830 Revolution (les Trois Glorieuses) and yet again in 1848, that revolution giving way to the IInd  Republic.
Incidentally, it was during the June Uprising of 1832, initiated by students rebelling against the new monarchical regime that had followed les Trois Glorieuses, that Gavroche, the archetype of the streetwise Parisian gamin, cheeky, brave and free, created by Victor Hugo in Les Misérables, died while stealing bullets off the dead bodies of Gardes Nationales…
After the humiliating defeat at the hands of Germany in 1870, Napoleon III’s empire fell, and France’s IIIrd Republic was born, while in Paris, la Commune de Paris (the result of a popular uprising prompted by the military debacle) was brutally crushed by the government.
The feckless IVth Republic erected after the end of WWII was brought down by De Gaulle during the Algerian War so ineptly handled by preceding governments.
He created the Vth Republic, based on a strong presidency.
This system has prevailed to this day, though it was severely rattled in 1968, when France’s students once again took to the barricades in the capital’s streets demanding more freedom…
Deference to power?
French farmers routinely dump manure and various agricultural products in front of the gates of Prefectures (which represent the state in each of France’s Départements) whenever they are unhappy with their lot, which is often.
Not long ago, striking Continental Tire workers thrashed a Prefecture in Compiègne because their plant was about to close, and the state was not doing enough to help them.
A few years ago, a commando of farmers ransacked the office of the Minister for Environmental Affairs in Paris, to protest a new tax that would target environmentally unfriendly farms...
Such outbursts of indignation occur on a daily basis.
No week goes by without one group or another protesting vocally in the streets of France’s main cities.
Just last week, a Sarkozy government plan to outlaw GPS devices that allowed speeding motorists to detect the location of all radars along France’s road and designed to enforce speeding limits provoked such an indignant outcry that the Interior Minister had to back down.
A majority of the French considered the measure a crass provocation, designed to increase the number of fines imposed by the state in order to replenish its empty coffers in a period of huge public budget deficits, and not a measure intended to encourage drivers to slow down and limit the number of accidents and thus fatalities…
Few even bothered to suggest that only those who failed to respect the law (and thus the legal speed limits) would be penalized.
Deference to power?
In France, no such thing exists, which explains why it is a country so difficult to reform.
No government is ever considered sufficiently legitimate to enact a robust reform program.
Every reform that significantly alters the status quo engenders immediate and active resistance.
Millions then fill the streets, for weeks on end if need be.
This was the case last fall when Sarkozy sought to extend the legal retirement age to 62, (it was then set at 60). Sarkozy did not back down, but the conflict lasted months, and may cost him dearly in next year’s Presidential election.
Incidentally, when was the last time Americans demonstrated in the streets of the nation’s cities to defend their rights, or demand change?
Hence, the powers that be inspire nothing but contempt and suspicion.
The state is only legitimate when it provides protection and financial assistance…
As a result, it is not deference to power and the resulting tendency to believe in conspiracy theories that initially led many in France to believe that DSK had been set up.
This points to another cultural difference: the Cartesian strain in the French psychological makeup.
DSK headed a major, prestigious international organization that became even more influential after the global financial meltdown of 2008.
He regularly worked with the leaders of the globe’s major powers and was on first name basis with many of them.
He was also the most likely candidate to defeat Nicolas Sarkozy in next year’s French Presidential election.
Hence, the Cartesian mind could not help but wonder why anyone with such influence and prospects would run the risk of losing it all (and spending the rest of his life in a US jail) and sexually assault a maid in a hotel room…
Indeed, there are more traditional and discreet ways to cater to such needs…Why would he attack the maid?
It made no sense, and explains why many in France thought that DSK’s enemies, in Washington or Paris, had engineered his downfall.
This in no way however, justifies the arguments utilized by his friends (all part of the same enlightened, leftwing elite) to defend him.
The fact that no one died, that DSK merely loves women, perhaps too exuberantly or that it was merely a case of détroussage d’une domestique (taking sexual advantage of one’s social inferiors), such statements clearly revealed the fact that some of DSK’s advocates had retained an Ancien Régime mindset, where a  seigneur could do what he pleased because, well, he was a seigneur.
It is amusing to note that such contempt for women was voiced, albeit unwittingly, by those who consider themselves progressives and thus, defenders of women’s rights…
The conspiracy theory reaction was short-lived, however.
With perhaps one exception, no leader of the Socialist party (to which DSK belongs) ever suggested that he had been set up, even by the one most likely to benefit from his political demise, Nicolas Sarkozy.
In France, since his election in 2007, Sarkozy has been held responsible for anything and everything that goes wrong in the country (although, never for any positive developments), yet no prominent opposition figure has accused Sarkozy of having conspired against a dangerous political rival…
No doubt, this is due to the fact that they all knew their friend DSK was a serial, insistent womanizer.
One Socialist member of the National Assembly told the press last month she always made sure never to be alone in a room with DSK…
The French should have remembered their classics.
Are not Greek tragedies replete with heroes who provoke their own downfall due to some tragic flaw (Aristotle’s hamartia), that lead to disaster, but also serve to reveal their humanity?
Perhaps it was DSK’s tragic flaw that led him to assault a maid in a Sofitel hotel room, thereby recklessly destroying his reputation and dooming his political prospects…
Finally, one mere word about US law.
Many here in France were aghast to discover that it was the defendant’s responsibility to gather evidence that may benefit him or her during the trial.
In France, the Magistrate investigating a case gathers all the evidence that he or she can and finds relevant, no matter whose case it supports, the people’s or the accused.
DSK, with his millionaire wife, has had no difficulty hiring the best lawyers in Washington and New York, as well as private investigators instructed to unearth any element, in New York or Africa, that can be utilized against the maid, in order to discredit her and undermine the credibility of her accusations.
DSK will thus be well defended…
Would that have been the case had he been less well off?
Hardly…
Mr. Cohen writes of the hard-knuckled application of US law as applied to anyone accused of a serious crime.
I can hear, from my old house in the North of France, the guffaws of MM. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and company, the architects of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and of the National Surveillance State erected after 9/11(Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, enemy combatants, enhanced interrogation techniques (torture), secret prisons, ghost detainees, warrantless wiretapping and so on are its sterling manifestations!)
at the suggestion that US laws also apply to them…
Alas, that is another, albeit sad, story...
(in Delacroix's painting of La Liberté guidant le Peuple, the child depicted on the right inspired Victor Hugo's creation of Gavroche)

Assad sends tanks to crush resistance in Baniyas...

It is now Baniyas’ turn.
Syria army tanks withdrew from Dera’a last Thursday after an eleven-day siege.
Some fifty people were killed during this ordeal, as a result of what activists called indiscriminate shelling.
Tanks continue to surround the city however, thereby sealing it off from the outside world.
On Saturday morning, thirty tanks penetrated within Baniyas, a city located on the Mediterranean coast. An oil refinery is located there, and the town is a major center for the export of Syrian oil.
Residents of Baniyas tried to form human chains to prevent the tanks from advancing inside the city, but to no avail.
The army occupied Sunni districts, but not Alawite neighborhoods.
The Syrian government and its security apparatus are dominated by the Alawite, a Shiite minority sect.
Syrian forces also shot and killed several women on Saturday who were demonstrating against the government outside the city.
Members of the security forces asked them to leave and, when they refused to do so, they opened fire killing three of them and wounding five others who were hospitalized, an activist told Aljazeera.
The city’s electricity was cut, as were all means of communication.
Baniyas is now surrounded from all directions, not a single person can go in or out, a resident told Katherine Marsh, of The Guardian.
Residents are reporting the sound of heavy gunfire and seeing Syrian navy boats off the Baniyas coast. Sunni and mixed neighborhoods are totally besieged now, a human rights activist told Aljazeera.
Basically, we don’t know what’s happening in Baniyas, Wissam Tarif, the director of Insan, a Syrian human rights organization, told Anthony Shadid, of the NYT. Speaking on the phone with a resident of Baniyas, he heard firing, bullets, shooting and screaming, and then we lost contact.
Security forces spread out inside the city, arresting many.
They are conducting search operations in several areas. The army has lists and looking for people based on it, Rami Abdul Rahman, of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, told Reuters.
Over two-hundred were arrested, including a ten-year-old boy. It appears to be designed to punish his parents, Mr. Abdul Rahman told AP.
The military occupation of Baniyas came one day after what activists called The Friday of Defiance.
A Syrian opposition Facebook page called The Syrian Revolution 2011 (with over 170,000 members) and which has been very active in mobilizing protesters, called for Syrians to demonstrate after Friday noon prayers.
We will challenge injustice, we will challenge oppression, we will challenge fear, and we will be freed, one comment on the page read.
According to human rights groups, twenty-seven people were killed throughout Syria during these demonstrations.
The Syrian government is unabashedly attempting to crush the uprising by militarily occupying the centers of revolt, resorting to mass arrests (8,000 Syrians have been jailed or are unaccounted for since the demonstrations began mid March), and firing on protesters.
According to the Committee of the Martyrs for the 15 March Revolution, 708 have been killed during the unrest.
The strategy of Assad’s government is obvious: dissuade Syrians from openly challenging his regime by rendering defiance as onerous as possible.
Today, demonstrating in the streets of Syria’s cities is a life-threatening endeavor.
In Homs for instance, the country’s third largest city and one of the centers of the uprising, those wounded during demonstrations are no longer taken to the hospital by their friends or families. I can’t take him to the hospital, Abu Kami, referring to a friend, told Spiegelonline. Anyone who is brought to the hospital will be arrested. Hence, some activists are left to die at home…
Residents cannot even donate blood. But the police had blocked off the hospital, one angry donor told Spiegelonline. They were literally waiting for the wounded so that they could arrest them.
Moreover, even those who die in the hospital are no longer claimed by their families.
The parents of people who were shot to death were forced to go on television and state that their children were radical Islamists (who the regime blames for the unrest). That’s why no one is coming forward anymore, the frustrated donor added.
The Friday of Defiance was particularly bloody in Homs.
We answered the call to protest today. But the intelligence forces attacked us right away by opening fire on us, one activist told the NYT last Friday.
The violence, the arrests, the intimidation, the harassment are clearly taking their toll.
The protests can’t get the momentum to increase the numbers on the ground, as we saw in Egypt and Tunisia. The collective punishment of cities, mass arrests and the tactics of snipers created some fear, Radwan Ziadeh, a Syrian human right activist, currently a scholar at Georges Washington University in Washington, told Anthony Shadid, of the NYT.
Appalled by the violence, the European Union plans to impose travel restrictions and freeze the assets of fourteen Syrian dignitaries. Alas, Assad is not on the list.
The Facebook group Syrian Revolution 2011 challenged Assad to rise to the occasion:
Stop shooting all demonstrators, allow peaceful demonstrations, release all prisoners, allow political pluralism and free elections in six months, it wrote.
Will Assad have the courage to heed this advice?
This is highly unlikely.
If he had, Syria would be a democratic society and he would no longer be in power.
Assad is only interested in Assad and his wealthy and corrupt clan.
He and they must go.
Let us hope that the brave Syrian people will have the necessary resilience to topple the despicable Assad regime which has been preying on the nation for over forty years…
(the photograph of Baniyas residents demonstrating last Thursday is by AP)

The war on terror is over. It is time to move on...

Justice was done, President Obama declared last Sunday night in his televised address informing the nation and the world that US forces had killed Osama bin Laden.
Was the killing of bin Laden an act of justice?
He was shot twice in the head.
To date, no photos of his body have been released as they are deemed by the administration to be too gruesome to be made public.
On Wednesday, President Obama decided that none would be issued.
You know, we don’t trot out this stuff as trophies. We don’t need to spike the football, he said. The administration is worried that graphic pictures could further incite violence against Americans.
Yet, could bin Laden have been captured instead of killed?
Initially, the Obama Administration clearly indicated that the answer was no.
He was engaged in a firefight with those that entered, John Brennan, the President’s counterterrorism adviser, told the press on Monday.
In addition, he unequivocally indicated that bin Laden was obviously a coward who preferred expensive mansions to Spartan caves:
Here is bin Laden, who has been calling for these attacks, living in this million-dollar-plus compound, living in an area that is far removed from the front, hiding behind women who were put in front of him as a shield. I think it really just speaks to just how false his narrative has been over the years.
It seems however, that Mr. Brennan spoke too hastily…
The very next day, Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, contradicted this version of events.
In the room with bin Laden, a woman-bin Laden’s wife-rushed the US assaulter and was shot in the leg but not killed. Bin Laden was then shot and killed. He was not armed, he said.
Osama bin Laden did not have a weapon nor did he hide behind a human shield when he was shot and killed by Navy Seals.
He did resist however. The resistance was throughout, as I said, the spokesman indicated.
What was the nature of bin Laden’s resistance, since he had no weapon?
Resistance does not require a firearm, Mr. Carney insisted, but he declined to elaborate.
If bin Laden was killed in the circumstances described by Mr. Carney, then should he not have been captured and brought to justice instead?
Indeed, as The Guardian columnist Gary Younge put it, this was not justice, it was an extra-judicial killing. If you shoot a man twice in the head, you do not find him guilty. You find him dead. This was revenge. And it was served very cold indeed.
That many Americans felt avenged by the killing of bin Laden by US forces was obvious and perfectly understandable given the heinous nature of the crimes committed on 9/11.
As such, shortly after President Obama announced the news, many spontaneously took to the streets of New York and Washington D.C., and chanted USA, USA…
Yet, democracies, by their very nature, are committed to the rule of law.
Professor Nick Grief, an international lawyer at Kent University, told The Guardian that the killing of bin Laden did resemble an extrajudicial killing without due process of the law. It may not have been possible to take him alive, but no one should be outside the protection of the law.
Indeed, laws are surely designed to protect the weak and innocent, but everyone else as well, in a civilized society. As Mr. Grief indicated, even the Nazis were given trials at Nuremberg, after World War II.
Whatever feelings of elation and relief may dominate the airwaves, they must not be allowed to submerge core questions about the legality of the exercise, nor to permit vengeance or summary execution to become substitutes for justice, Michael Mansfield, a leading British defense lawyer, told the paper.
Hongju Koh, a State Department legal advisor, did not share this view.
But a state that is engaged in an armed conflict or in legitimate self-defense is not required to provide targets with legal process before the state may use lethal force, he said.
John Bellinger III, a legal counsel at the Sate Department during the preceding administration, concurred. The assassination prohibition also does not apply to killings in self-defense. The executive branch will also argue that the action was permissible under international law both as a permissible use of force in the US armed conflict with al-Qaeda and as a legitimate action in self-defense, given that bin Laden was clearly planning additional attacks, he told The Guardian.
In any case, after 9/11, the Bush Administration decided to pursue what it branded the war on terror through military means, and military means only.
Afghanistan was invaded shortly after 9/11 in order to punish the Taliban government for harboring bin Laden and al-Qaeda, then Iraq, on the specious grounds that it posed an imminent threat to world peace. Saddam Hussein was actively pursuing the development of weapons of mass destruction, according to the Bush/Cheney narrative, which he would then give to terrorist organizations bent on attacking the US.
In essence, MM. Bush and Cheney transformed al-Qaeda into an existential threat, which had to be annihilated, whatever the cost.
Hence, the US sought to eradicate the terrorists on their own turf, the logic in vogue at the time being that it was preferable to fight them there than here.
The Bush/Cheney administration devised a national security strategy that also militarized the US judicial system.
Guantanamo was transformed into an extra territorial prison for enemy combatants (that only the President had the power to designate as such) who would thus remain beyond the reach of the Geneva Conventions.
Military commissions were set up to try these enemy combatants at Guantanamo, characterized by a drastic curtailment of the rights of the defendant. Detainees could aslo be held indefinitely without trial...
The CIA developed its own network of secret prisons, beyond the reach of the ICRC, where high value targets, ghost detainees, could be robustly interrogated, and tortured if need be.
Evidence obtained in such conditions would be admissible in a military commission.
In an age where terrorists could strike any time, anywhere, information needed to be obtained quickly, by whatever means necessary…
Warrantless wiretapping was secretly authorized by the Bush Administration to ensure the intelligence agencies could expeditiously detect any new potential threat to the homeland…
Fear of a second devastating attack was so pervasive in post-9/11 America that these measures hardly encountered any opposition at all (outside of the lefwing and libertarian blogosphere)…
Hence, the preservation of civil and constitutional rights was no longer a priority but subservient to the demands of national security.
Shielding the homeland from a new 9/11, whatever the cost, even if that meant we have to work the dark side, as Vice President Cheney put it five days after 9/11, had become the obsession of the Bush/Cheney White House.
In such a context, the rule of law, the necessity of respecting international law, was an anachronistic hindrance, a weakness that America’s enemies would surely capitalize on.
Yet, how many people have died, needlessly died, to avenge the 9/11 tragedy, and ensure that America is not attacked again?
In Iraq, according to Iraq Body Count, over 100,000 civilians have been killed since 2003.
The Lancet study estimated that during the 2003-2006 period, 650,000 died.
In Afghanistan, another 10,000 civilians have lost their lives.
In both countries, the casualties keep mounting…
Was the Bush/Cheney militaristic approach, largely co-opted , alas, by Obama, the wisest and most efficient one  in order to honor those who died on 9/11 and seek justice for the unconscionable crimes committed on that day?
Does the shedding of so much blood, so much innocent blood, constitute a fitting tribute to the victims of 9/11?
The Islamic extremists skillfully exploited this brutal, belligerent approach responsible for so many victims.
By what measure of kindness are your killed considered innocents while ours are considered worthless?
By what school [of thought] is your blood considered blood while our blood is water? Therefore, it is [only] just to respond in kind, and the one who started it is more to blame, bin Laden wrote in April 2004.
The extremists are adept at taking advantage of America’s prowess to further their own agenda.
Each civilian casualty at the hands of US forces is a propaganda victory offered to its enemies, who can then exploit it as a recruiting tool.
It is precisely that American capacity, propensity to destroy and kill that bin Laden hoped to harness by attacking the US on 9/11
He knew what the American response would invariably be: to lash out militarily against the ummah (the Muslim world), a senior al-Qaeda operative, Saif al-Adl said.
The Americans took the bait and fell into our trap, he added.
Indeed, two days before 9/11 bin Laden engineered the assassination of the most prestigious and powerful foe of both al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, Ahmad Shah Massoud, the commander of the Northern Alliance, in anticipation of the upcoming invasion of the country…
The Afghan mujahidin had succeeded in defeating the Soviet empire after ten years of war, which eventually led to its collapse.
Such was bin Laden’s interpretation of the Soviet withdrawal and downfall.
If the mighty Soviet empire could be defeated, then there was no reason to believe that the US would not suffer a similar fate on Afghan soil. The strategy that had been so successful once only needed to be replicated. Bin laden defined it thus: employ guerilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the mujahidin, bled Russia for ten years, until it went bankrupt.
His objective was, therefore, clear: continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy, he said in 2004.
The mistakes of Brezhnev are being repeated by Bush, he gleefully concluded in 2007.
The paradox here is that bin Laden’s central objective was to drive out all US troops from the Muslim world, and then reestablish the Caliphate. Yet, he considered that only a massive influx of US troops to the region could ultimately bring this about…
Bin Laden believed that the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia, the Muslim Holy Land, Mecca being the birthplace of the Prophet, and Medina the place where he first established an Islamic state, was sacrilegious. But that was not his only grievance.
First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples, he wrote in his Fatwa Urging jihad Against America, in February 1998..
The US presence was thus not only sacrilegious, but also posed a threat to the region’s valuable resources and independence.
The fact they had been invited there by the Saudi royal family after Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990 was particularly humiliating, for he had proposed his services to the Saudi leadership: he would lead an army of mujahidin to confront Saddam Hussein…The Saudi leadership ignored his offer, preferring American assistance instead.
Secondly, bin Laden resented America’s policy towards Iraq, where the UN embargo, spearheaded by the US, was progressively strangling the country.
Iraq holds a special status for Muslims, for it was the seat of the Caliphate for some five hundred years.
Thirdly, the US’s indiscriminate and unflagging support for Israel, which was occupying the third holiest Muslim sanctuary, Jerusalem, was unacceptable.
He decreed these policies to be a clear declaration of war on God.
As such, he issued the following fatwa to all Muslims:
The ruling to kill Americans and their allies-civilian and military- is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque (in Jerusalem) and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim.
Hence, and contrary to what is often stated, bin Laden did not target the US because he hates our freedom and is jealous of our way of life.
He did so because of its policies and their effects on Muslims…
After all, other democracies such as Switzerland or New Zealand share America’s values and way of life, yet have never been attacked by al-Qaeda…
They have no troops in Muslim lands and therefore have never harmed the local populations.
It must be made clear however, that nothing and certainly not US foreign policy, no matter what we may think of it, can ever justify mass terrorist attacks againstg civilians…
Nevertheless, It is important to place al-Qaeda’s agenda in its relevant political context.
Has bin Laden’s strategy succeeded, and is the American empire wobbling?
According to Nobel recipient, Joseph Stiglitz, the Iraq War will eventually cost the nation over $3 trillion and the conflict in Afghanistan slightly less
Homeland Security, a direct legacy of 9/11, has probably cost another trillion since September 2001.
The rise in oil prices also should be noted, as well as the economic slowdown that followed the attacks.
The US debt now stands at $14.3 trillion (compared to $9.8 in 2000), and the debt ceiling will have to be raised soon, otherwise the US will have to default in early August 2011.
Bin Laden did not fully succeed, yet neither did he utterly fail…
At this stage, it seems obvious that, ten years on, the US can no longer afford to sustain several major military conflicts simultaneously and for a long duration.
That phenomenon was precipitated by the al-Qaeda strategy, and Washington‘s reckless reaction to it…
US troops have not been driven form Muslim lands however, and al-Qaeda no longer has its charismatic leader to pursue its delirious agenda…
To return to our question posed earlier, could the Navy Seals have captured bin Laden?
It is difficult to say.
But this is a guy who’s extremely dangerous. If he’s nodding at someone in the hall, or rushing to the bookcase or you think he’s wearing a suicide vest, you’re on solid ground to kill him, suggested John Bellinger III, a legal counsel at the State Department during the Bush Administration.
According to new details on the raid issued on Wednesday, bin Laden did have an AK47 and a Makarov pistol in the vicinity when the Seals entered the room
Yet, would the Obama Administration really have relished the prospect of trying bin Laden?
Probably not, if the administration’s handling of the Khalid Sheik Mohammed trial is any indication…
As such, it seems evident that the founder of al-Qaeda would not have been tried in a civil court, but before a military commission in Guantanamo where he no doubt would have been held…
Criticism from within some circles in the US and from abroad would have been withering and thus unpleasant.
Yet, a fair and public trial given to bin Laden would have offered a powerful display of democracy and justice at work.
It would have demonstrated to the world what the rule of law signifies, and that even the most evil of men is treated in a civilized way, his fundamental rights as a human being (albeit, that he may not deserve) protected.
That our values are universal, that they apply to all and not only to some (the chosen few to which we belong) and that even our enemies are treated in accordance with them, a civil trial of bin Laden would have made obvious to all, including America’s enemies…
This will never happen, but, alas, the US is no longer equipped to hold such a trial, its judicial system having been grievously undermined by the Bush/Cheney and now Obama national security agenda.
If the war on terror had not so completely eroded the US judicial authority it is wholly plausible to conceive that bin Laden could have been tried exactly the same way as Sheikh Omar, mused Robert Lambert in The Guardian.
Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheikh, was arrested in 1993 and convicted of seditious conspiracy in Federal District Court in Manhattan, after issuing a fatwa encouraging militants to bomb targets in New York City.
Is the war on terror over now that bin Laden is dead?
It must be.
The militaristic strategy recklessly followed these last ten years has engendered much too much death and destruction.
Why stay in Afghanistan now that the central objective there has been achieved, the eradication of al-Qaeda and the death of its founder and leader?
What, precisely, is the US currently accomplishing in Iraq?
War has never been the most efficient method to promote peace, progress and prosperity.
What are we waiting for to propose such an agenda?
Through arms sales and giveaways, its military presence and its propensity for intervention, the US has for decades underwritten and encouraged violence as the main stay of Middle East politics. Washington has talked peace while promoting war, Andrew Bacevich wrote in The LAT.
It is high time to pursue different policies and the Arab Spring offers us an opportunity to do so.
The revolt of the people across the Middle East clearly shows that they yearn for peace, progress, prosperity, and the opportunity to choose their own leaders…
Let us help them do just that, but not by resorting to Apache helicopters and the 82nd Airborne.
It is time to talk peace, but promote it as well…
(the photograph above is by Ng Han Guan/AP Photo)
 

An act of betrayal...

Guantanamo is a particularly significant issue because it demonstrates Obama’s fundamental lack of core convictions, contrary to what he had led us to believe during the 2008 Presidential campaign.

We were told to expect change, that the Bush/Cheney world view and approach belonged to the past…The rule of law, and civilized behavior worthy of a great democracy  would now be a political imperative for Obama’s America…

We were evidently misled…

The absolute ethical necessity to close Guantanamo may have reflected a belief he held at the time Bush/Cheney still wielded  (many would have said, abused) power in Washington.

Once he arrived in the nation’s capital, however, the issue was less significant because he was now in charge, presumably. The concept of justice for all was once again in safe hands, that is to say, his own...Those who took human and constitutional rights seriously no longer had anything to worry about…This conviction was so universally engrained that Obama actually won the Nobel Peace Prize his first year in office.

Closing Guantanamo, the modern-day Bastille, and an infamous symbol of abuse and of arbitrary detention, demanded the new President’s undivided attention and wholehearted support…Since the Obama Administration claimed that the facility was a recruiting tool for terrorists, many assumed the new President would not relent until he had reached the intended objective. Obama had vowed to close it at the conclusion of his first year in office.

The new, excessively popular president could have exerted the necessary pressure on a Democratic Congress to ensure this blight on America’s reputation would be forever obliterated….

And yet, he failed to do so…

The rule of law was no longer a priority, but conditioned by politics…

The rule of law was no longer a popular, political issue, thus expendable…

The notion of trying terrorist suspects in civilian courts, of transferring those held in Guantanamo to the US mainland, ceased to make political sense. It seemed more politically savvy to cater to the people’s fear, than  cultivate or educate their sense of justice and fairness…

We had hoped that a former professor of constitutional law would have done his utmost to promote the cause of justice, and not chosen the facile path of political expediency.  

He had too much else to do than to fight for such fundamental principles, we were told.

Pardon my naiveté, but what is more important than that?

Similarly, the trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed was to have been a defining event, according to Attorney General Holder.

Our nation has had no higher priority then bringing those who planned and plotted the attacks to justice, Holder also recklessly declared.

Justice?

Caving in to pressure from local NY politicians ( including, alas, the Mayor of New York)  more interested in public opinion polls than principles, Holder relented.

KSM will be tried in Guantanamo, where justice is an alien concept, defiled by water-boarding, forced sleeplessness, other various “enhanced interrogation techniques” and arbitrary and indefinite detention...

Some have been held for nine years without charge, and will neither be tried nor released, thanks again to Obama who did not se fit to abolish the precedent set by his reckless predecessor …

Who would have thought that MM. Bush and Obama’s America would have resurrected les lettres  de cachet abolished by revolutionary France in 1789? Can anyone, alas, now take the US seriously when it sees fit to lambast another nation’s human rights record?

This, also, shall be part of Obama’s legacy…

How many of us shall be able to forget and forgive this grievous act of betrayal?

(the photograph of Guantanamo can be found here)

Assad sends tanks to crush uprising in Dara'a

In this military assault on Dara'a this morning, the Syrian army killed 25 protesters and left their bodies in the streets, according to a report by Euronews...
The army then combed the streets in an attempt to round up all potential demonstrators.
They are entering houses, they are searching houses. They are carrying knives and guns, one witness told The Guardian...
Assad has clearly opted for the Libyan option in response to his people's demand for freedom....
He is clearly his father's son, and reports that he was in fact a reformer capable of gradually transforming his country into a democracy were clearly misguided...
Assad and his clique must go and then be held accountable for their numerous crimes...
Some 400  Syrians have been killed since the beginning of the uprising last month...