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By Francis A. Boyle

13 February, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

As the Lawyer for the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina during Yugoslavia’s War of Extermination against the Bosnians, I represented all 40,000 raped Women of Bosnia, argued their case for genocide before the International Court of Justice in The Hague (the World Court of the United Nations System), and won two World Court Orders of Provisional Measures of Protection on their behalf on 8 April 1993 and 13 September 1993. See my book “ The Bosnian People Charge Genocide!” (1996).

The Pope and his Cardinals and his Archbishops and his Bishops are ultimately responsible for the widespread and systematic Sexual Abuse of thousands of completely innocent children around the world, which constitutes a Crime against Humanity under the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court, in particular article 7(1)(g)—“rape”—and article 7(1) (k)— “Other inhumane acts of a similar character intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health.” According to the well known principle of Command Responsibility under International Criminal Law, the Pope and his Cardinals and his Archbishops and his Bishops should all be prosecuted for their own criminal acts and the criminal acts of their subordinate priests for the reasons set forth in Rome Statute article 28(b):

“b) With respect to superior and subordinate relationships not described in paragraph (a), a superior shall be criminally responsible for crimes within the jurisdiction of the Court committed by subordinates under his or her effective authority and control, as a result of his or her failure to exercise control properly over such subordinates, where:

(i) The superior either knew, or consciously disregarded information which clearly indicated, that the subordinates were committing or about to commit such crimes;

(ii) The crimes concerned activities that were within the effective responsibility and control of the superior; and

(iii) The superior failed to take all necessary and reasonable measures within his or her power to prevent or repress their commission or to submit the matter to the competent authorities for investigation and prosecution.”

To every Catholic Cardinal, Archbishop, Bishop, Priest, Abbot, Monk, and Brother in the entire world I ask: What did you know and when did you know it about your colleagues and friends and subordinates and superiors sexually abusing Children? And why did you not act immediately and effectively to stop them? As Jesus Christ said about protecting Children: “If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea” (Matthew 18:6).

Professor Francis A. Boyle is an international law expert and served as Legal Advisor to the Palestine Liberation Organization and Yasser Arafat on the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence, as well as to the Palestinian Delegation to the Middle East Peace Negotiations from 1991 to 1993, where he drafted the Palestinian counter-offer to the now defunct Oslo Agreement. His books include “ Palestine, Palestinians and International Law” (2003), and “ The Palestinian Right of Return under International Law” (2010). Professor Boyle instituted the course on International Human Rights Law at the University of Illinois College of Law and previously taught that course at Harvard.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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By Barry Grey

13 February, 2013

@ WSWS.org

The most significant point in President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday night was a passing and euphemistically worded reference to his program of extra-judicial drone assassinations. “Where necessary, through a range of capabilities, we will continue to take direct action against those terrorists who pose the gravest threat to Americans,” he declared.

Every congressman, senator, cabinet member, Supreme Court justice and general in the House chamber knew that with that statement Obama was defending his asserted power to secretly order the assassination of anyone in any part of the world, including American citizens. The president went on to make clear he was intent on making state murder a permanent and completely institutionalized government function.

His administration, he said, had worked “tirelessly to forge a durable legal and policy framework” to guide such operations. He went on to indicate he might be open to suggestions for giving the assassination program a fig leaf of “transparency” and legality, pledging to “engage with Congress to ensure… our targeting, detention and prosecution of terrorists remains consistent with our laws and system of checks and balances…”

That such a statement could be made before a joint session of Congress, to the general approbation of those in attendance, underscores the crucial aspect of the real state of the American union that received no mention in Obama’s address or any of the media commentary—the catastrophic state of American democracy.

The speech came just over a week after the publication of an administration’s white paper laying out a pseudo-legal justification for Obama’s claim to the power, unchecked by judicial or congressional oversight, to order the assassination of American citizens. This assertion, already acted on in the drone missile murder of three Americans, abrogates democratic principles that go back hundreds of years and renders the Bill of Rights and its guarantee of due process a dead letter.

The US government now claims the type of unchecked powers previously associated with fascist regimes and military juntas. The white paper follows the enactment of military funding bills that sanction indefinite military detention of accused terrorists and their alleged supporters, including US citizens.

Tuesday’s State of the Union address will soon be followed by Congress’ stamp of approval on this sweeping assault on democratic rights, with the Senate’s confirmation of Obama’s pick to head the Central Intelligence Agency, John Brennan, currently the chief White House counterterrorism adviser and overseer of the administration’s drone assassination program.

The real question, completely evaded in Obama’s demagogic and dishonest speech, is what in the state of the American union gives rise to the accelerating movement toward police state forms of rule.

The speech itself was an attempt to use left-sounding rhetoric to give a “progressive” gloss to a reactionary, anti-working class program. Obama began with the lying claim that war is a thing of the past and the economic crisis is over. (“After a decade of grinding war, our brave men and women in uniform are coming home… Together, we have cleared away the rubble of crisis…”).

Presenting himself as the defender of the great American “middle class”—a complete abstraction designed to conceal the existence of a working class—Obama declared that the task of government is to work “on behalf of the many, and not just the few.” This is a principle that bears no relation either to the conditions that exist in the US or the policies Obama has pursued and will continue to pursue.

In fact, in very the next breath, Obama boasted of having already slashed $2.5 trillion from the deficit, “mostly through spending cuts,” and proposed to cut hundreds of billions more from the social entitlement programs—Medicare and Social Security—upon which tens of millions of elderly Americans depend. Using Republican proposals for even deeper cuts as a foil, he proposed to accompany this unprecedented attack on social programs with the elimination of unspecified tax loopholes for the wealthy, supposedly resulting in “everybody doing their fair share.”

The rest of his laundry list of token proposals to help the middle class was of the same character. He proposed, for example, to make America a “magnet for new jobs and manufacturing.” He hailed the return of manufacturing by Caterpillar, Ford, Intel and Apple to American shores, neglecting to mention that US corporate “in-shoring” was based on massive cuts in workers’ wages and benefits.

Obama made much of a proposal to raise the minimum wage to $9 an hour. This would, in fact, leave a family of three existing on a minimum wage paycheck below the absurdly low official poverty threshold.

On foreign policy, Obama proclaimed that the Afghanistan war would be over by the end of 2014. He then invoked 9/11 and the “war on terror,” praised US military interventions in Libya, Yemen and Somalia and US support for the French invasion of Mali, threatened North Korea and Iran, and reiterated Washington’s policy of regime-change in Syria.

There was absolutely nothing in the speech that reflected the actual state of American society. Far from the crisis being over, more than four years after the Wall Street crash of 2008, unemployment—which Obama barely mentioned—remains at near-Depression levels. Poverty, hunger and homelessness continue to increase.

Workers’ wages continue to decline, while corporate profits and CEO pay reach record heights. Under Obama, the chasm between rich and poor has grown wider.

Two statistics provide a sense of the scale of social inequality in America. During Obama’s first term, 93 percent of all income gains went to the richest 1 percent of Americans, and over the period 2007-2010, US median net worth declined by 38.8 percent.

 

Such staggering and growing levels of social inequality are incompatible with democratic forms of rule. The Wall Street aristocracy whose interests Obama serves intends to widen the gap further by intensifying the assault on wages and working conditions and dismantling what remains of the social reforms of the 1930s and 1960s.

This will only heighten class tensions, already reaching the boiling point. The American ruling class is not blind to the buildup of working class opposition—not only in the US, but internationally—to the policies of austerity and war. It is in anticipation of social upheavals in the US on a scale not seen since the 1930s that the Obama administration and the entire political establishment are putting into place the framework for mass repression and dictatorial rule.

Lead: The scheduled North Korean nuclear weapons test may not only trigger the eruption of the volcanic Mt. Baektu as geologists warn, but also the eruption of deadly hostilities between the two warring Korean states.

By Nile Bowie

12 February 2013

Tensions on the Korean Peninsula have ignited once again, marking the most-unstable period of inter-Korean relations since Kim Jong-un began his tenure in December 2011. Following the successful launch of an indigenous satellite into orbit using a long-range missile in December 2012, the UN Security Council recently tightened sanctions on the DPRK that impose asset freezes and travel bans on individuals involved in state companies and North Korea’s space agency. Although talk of Pyongyang conducting a highly controversial nuclear test has been in the cards for months, the DPRK has recently threatened to respond to tightened UN sanctions using “stronger measures” than a nuclear test. While bellicose rhetoric is to be expected from Pyongyang, recent statements against the United States and South Korea are unusually high on the richter scale of belligerence. “We are not disguising the fact that the various satellites and long-range rockets that we will fire and the high-level nuclear test we will carry out are aimed at the United States,” stated North Korea’s National Defense Commission.

Pyongyang has also warned of “physical countermeasures” against South Korea if they participate in the UN sanctions against the North, stating, “as long as the South Korean puppet traitors’ regime continues with its anti-DPRK [North Korea] hostile policy, we will never sit down with them.” Reports claim that North Korea has allegedly been placed under martial law and its people told to “prepare for war” with the South. South Korean sources have reported that Kim Jong-un has issued a secret order to “complete preparations for a nuclear weapons test and carry it out soon.” Seoul-based military sources have also claimed that Pyongyang plans to conduct two simultaneous nuclear tests at once, or in quick succession, based on satellite data monitoring the North’s Punggye-ri nuclear test site.

To further complicate matters, General Jung Seung-jo, Chairman of South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff, has warned that the South could launch pre-emptive strikes against the North if it tried to use nuclear weapons, stating, “if [the North] shows a clear intent to use a nuclear weapon, it is better to get rid of it and go to war, rather than being attacked.” Analysts have predicted that the upcoming nuclear weapons test could fall on February 16, the birthday of late North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, or February 25th, the inauguration day of South Korean President-elect Park Geun-hye. North Korea’s plans to test nuclear weapons go against the conciliatory tone struck by Kim Jong-un toward relations with the South in his New Year’s Address and his intentions to bolster the isolated state’s moribund economy.

Pyongyang is often credited with being a wildcard, but a closer examination of its domestic affairs in recent years shows that moves towards nuclearization are inevitably linked to extracting as many aid concessions as possible (especially at a time when political changes are taking place in South Korea), in addition to buying time for the regime in Pyongyang to incrementally improve its weapons technology. Pyongyang is keen to avoid being overly reliant on Beijing, and so North Korea actually has a strong imperative to secure as much aid as possible from the US and South Korea to keep itself afloat. A third nuclear test does not serve the DPRK’s interests and will only further strain its economic lifeline with China, even possibly inviting preemptive strikes from South Korean forces, leading to open war and a truly unpredictable situation that all regional players should be keen to avoid.

From the perspective of the Kim regime, which molds the opinions that North Korean civilians uphold, half of the Korean Peninsula is occupied by the United States. State newspapers such as the Rodong Sinmun routinely refer to the South Korean government as a puppet of the United States, recently highlighting Pyongyang’s displeasure with increasingly provocative joint US-ROK military drills, “ultra-modern war means are being amassed in south Korea and in the areas around the Korean Peninsula. The U.S. nuclear submarine and Aegis cruiser entered south Korea to hold combined marine exercises and to show off ‘military muscle’… warmongers are inciting war fever while touring units in the forefront areas.”

North Korea routinely complains of discrimination by world powers, compelling it to resort to nuclear deterrence; the fact that South Korea faced no international obstruction over its recent satellite launch only reinforces Pyongyang’s rationale. By acknowledging the “ultra-modern” military capabilities of the joint US-ROK forces, it can be gathered that the North realizes its own arsenal is much less sophisticated, as many military analysts confirm. The military muscle of the US-ROK forces certainly poses an existential threat to Pyongyang, and as a result, the Kim dynasty sees the proliferation of nuclear weapons as the only surefire way to guarantee its own security. However, the North Koreans must realize that they can only get away with nuclear adventurism for so long, and it appears that the DPRK may soon be at risk of aggravating the hand that feeds it – literally.

China is not looking for any additional agitation as it prepares for its once-in-a-decade leadership transition. Analysts are pondering how Xi Jingping’s administration will treat North Korea. China’s seven member Politburo Standing Committee (PSC) is the ultimate decision-making and policy-shaping body, and two members of China’s incoming PCS, Zhang Dejiang and Sun Zhengcai, have spent years in close proximity to North Korea, engaging in cross-border interactions with North Korean counterparts aiming to promote economic reform in Pyongyang. Despite nearly open war between the two Koreas in 2010 after the shelling of Yeonpyeong Island and the sinking of a South Korean military vessel, China’s relationship with North Korea during the incumbent Hu Jintao administration was marked by several victories – noticeable economic cooperation with Beijing the stable succession of Kim Jong-un, and the general lack of external interference in the DPRK’s affairs.

Much to the surprise of many analysts, China backed the recent UN sanctions on Pyongyang, indicating some disapproval with the Kim dynasty’s hostility. Even so, it is unlikely that Beijing and Washington will begin playing from the same sheet music. China signaled its frustration with the North in an opinion piece in the ultra-nationalistic newspaper, the Global Times, “If North Korea engages in further nuclear tests, China will not hesitate to reduce its assistance to North Korea.” The editorial went on to say that if the US, Japan and South Korea “promote extreme U.N. sanctions on North Korea, China will resolutely stop them and force them to amend these draft resolutions.” China’s position on this issue should be commended for its balanced approach. For Beijing, stability is the name of the game; China does not want any military confrontations or mass refugee spillovers into its borders.

 

Even as Beijing becomes more upfront with its discontent, China has a valuable economic stake in North Korea’s development; it continually invests in joint ventures with Pyongyang and has led initiatives to develop the nation’s vast untapped mineral resources (which include deposits of coal, iron ore, gold ore, zinc ore, copper ore, and others) valued at a staggering $6.1 trillion. The centerpiece of Beijing’s foreign policy strategy towards the North under Xi Jingping will be encouraging the regime to behave more sensibly and focus on meeting the needs of its people. Perhaps policy makers in Beijing will have an easier time convincing Pyongyang to drop the nuclear rhetoric in exchange for a meaningful security pact by which Pyongyang is guaranteed military support from China if things ever get ugly. Given the non-interference stance championed by Beijing, it would be doubtful that Beijing would extend itself in this way.

Plans for a third nuclear test will also put South Korean President-elect Park Geun-hye in an extremely uncomfortable position, making it easy for her to enrage those on both South Korea’s left and right depending on how hard or soft a line she toes with Pyongyang. Park has spoke of easing relations with the DPRK, but like her predecessor, she maintains that the North’s denuclearization is a prerequisite for any negotiations – translation – there will be no negotiations and the ROK’s foreign policy trajectory is likely not to differ from that of hardline-conservative President Lee Myung-bak. Pyongyang has repeatedly demonstrated its unwillingness to comply with the ROK’s demands, and vice-versa. Inter-Korean relations appear to be following a repetitive script, with Washington’s solution to every issue being to tighten sanctions on the North.

The case has never been stronger for the withdrawal of the 28,500 troops stationed in South Korea, a move that would satisfy civilians in both Koreas and yield higher chances of provoking a positive response from Pyongyang. Analyst Geoffrey Fattig argues in favor of a new approach being taken by the US by highlighting how Washington’s main source of leverage against the North is the military option, citing the friction caused by the mere presence of US troops, “the Obama administration needs to realize that it is holding a weak hand and fundamentally change its strategy… it is time for the Obama administration to start withdrawing the American military from Korean soil. Not only would such a move save billions of dollars annually at a time when the cost of maintaining America’s global garrison is coming under increasing scrutiny, but it would shift the impetus for negotiating solutions to the long-running dispute squarely onto the shoulders of the key players in the region.”

Pyongyang is playing a dangerous game and its continued belligerence can only be tolerated for so long. At this stage, Kim Jong-un’s rhetoric of bringing about a “radical turn in the building of an economic giant” can only be taken as seriously as Pyongyang’s hilarious claims of “conquering space” by launching its satellite. By failing to be a coherent actor in the economic, security and diplomatic realms, the DPRK is doing more long-term harm to its existence than it realizes. North Korea suffered immense human losses during the Korean War throughout the relentless US bombing campaign that flattened the country; it has legitimate grievances in wanting to safeguard its national security, but its lunatic defiance, odious personality cult, and unwillingness to follow Beijing’s advice by making serious economic reforms only further ostracizes Pyongyang in the eyes of the international community, to the point where its right of self-defense is being infringed by UN resolutions.

Additionally, geologists have warned that further nuclear tests may trigger an eruption of Mt. Baekdu, a dormant volcano, which is located near the Punggye-ri nuclear site. Mt. Baekdu plays an important role in ethno-nationalist North Korean propaganda, being the fictional birthplace of the late Kim Jong-il and an enclave of purity from which the Korean race was born out of. For North Korea’s seasoned propaganda writers, an erupting Mt. Baekdu would be the perfect backdrop for the long-touted “holy war” often evoked to hasten the day when racially-pure North Koreans liberate their southern brethren from the occupying US vampires. In the reality the rest of us live in, the scheduled nuclear test may not only provoke the eruption of Mt. Baeku, but also the very real possibility of a deadly military conflict between the two Koreas – a conflict that must be avoided no matter how provocative, belligerent or infantile either side behaves.

By Wolfgang Weber

12 February, 2013

@ WSWS.org

A month ago, French soldiers, tanks and fighter jets invaded the West African country of Mali. Since then, Germany has been expanding its involvement in the colonial war from week to week.

The government in Berlin immediately declared its unconditional support for the French invasion, providing two Transall transport aircraft to carry troops, arms and ammunition of the West African Economic Union (ECOWAS) to the war zone. In the meantime, Berlin has provided an additional transporter; and the Bundeswehr (Armed Forces) has rapidly built up a support base in Dakar (Senegal). If is from here that the Transall craft operate, with a support force of 75 soldiers.

At the United Nations’ “donor conference” to finance the war, Berlin promised immediate payments of US$20 million towards a fund totalling US$456 million. This will serve to strengthen the Mali army and to finance the African-led International Support Mission to Mali (AFISMA).

As Defence Minister Thomas de Maizière (Christian Democratic Union, CDU) told the Munich Security Conference last weekend, the Bundeswehr will contribute 40 engineers to the European Training Mission (EUTM Mali). These will train troops from Mali and ECOWAS to be able to conduct combat missions.

At a “troop providers’ conference for Mali” in Brussels on Tuesday last week, Berlin also announced the deployment of 40 army doctors and paramedics, as well as the delivery and operation of a field hospital.

The French government’s request for support by Bundeswehr tanker aircraft is already being prepared technically. Without air-to-air refuelling, French bombers and fighter jets would not be able to travel the extremely long distances from their bases in France or Africa to their missions in Mali.

Since the belligerent nature of these operations and the training of Malian soldiers cannot be denied, they must be approved by the Bundestag (federal parliament), which should happen retrospectively in early March.

Chancellor Angela Merkel, Defence Minister Thomas de Maizière and Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle never tire of protesting that they are acting out of “solidarity with France” and for the “defence of the security of Europe against terrorists.” This is the same mendacious war propaganda with which the United States justified the war against Iraq.

Paris and Berlin say the aims of the war are the elimination of groups such as Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO). These same organisations were funded and armed in Libya by the US, France, Britain and their allies in Qatar and Saudi Arabia to fight against Muammar Gaddafi.

In Syria, organisations like al-Nusra, which is close to Al Qaeda or works with it, are part of the National Coalition of the Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces (NCSROF), which is recognised by the NATO powers and the Gulf countries as “the legitimate representatives of the Syrian people”, and is armed and financed by them to foment the overthrow of the Assad regime.

The war in Mali is a dirty colonial war. It is not a matter of a “war on terror”, but the military control of the Sahel in order to plunder its largely untapped natural resources in the long term.

The national bourgeois regimes that rule there are corrupt and hated. They have only been able to cling to power with the help of the French military in putting down uprisings. To this end, France maintains bases in its former colonies with naval units, tanks and fighter jets. In return, France, as well as other foreign mining companies and investors, are given access to cheap land, exploration rights and mining concessions.

France also used its military bases in neighbouring countries for the invasion of Mali. It is supported in the war over the Sahel by other imperialist powers. As with the war in Libya, Britain has immediately declared its support. As well as money and weapons, Prime Minister Cameron last week also promised the deployment of several hundred soldiers.

The US has announced the establishment of a permanent military base in Niger. As well as a 300-man elite squad, drones are being stationed there capable of carrying out surveillance and combat missions over the Sahel. A US drone base is also planned in Burkina Faso in southern Mali.

In just a few weeks, Mali and its neighbours have been transformed into a veritable military staging area for the imperialist powers and their local African allies. In addition to the 4,000 French soldiers deployed, the German Transall planes will transport around ECOWAS 7,000 soldiers. They will also be joined by hundreds of American, British and German troops.

Two years ago, France, Britain and the US initiated a new round of wars to subjugate the African continent to direct colonial rule with their aggression against Libya. At that time, the Berlin government had decided against open German participation. That was not out of a love of peace, but with regard to China and Russia, which were heavily involved in Libya with investments and trade agreements and which are significant trading partners for German business.

In addition, the Bundeswehr was ill prepared for such an extensive and prolonged military campaign. With troops in Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa and other war zones, its capacity for foreign missions was exhausted.

The Bundeswehr, reorganised and rearmed 10 years ago by the previous Social Democratic (SPD)-Green Party government into an effective fighting force for international operations, was in a crisis. The then-defence minister, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg (Christian Social Union, CSU), had made more of a name for himself through high-profile media appearances than for actually reforming the structure of the Bundeswehr.

 

Guttenberg was finally forced to resign following a plagiarism scandal, and was replaced by Thomas de Maizière (CDU) in March 2011, just two weeks before the bombing of Libya by the US, Britain and France.

De Maizière is considered a quiet but effective organiser. He was also familiar with the Bundeswehr since childhood. His father, Ulrich de Maizière, a staff officer in Hitler’s army, had built up the modern Bundeswehr in the 1950s and 1960s as the army inspector and general inspector.

Thomas de Maizière drove forward the “reorientation of the Bundeswehr” with professional efficiency. This was implemented during 2012 at the level of the ministry and the supreme military command. In January of this year, work began on the third, operational level, in a variety of so-called command capabilities.

For example, on January 15, in time for the first mission in Mali, the new, high-tech Bundeswehr Central Logistics Command opened in Erfurt. Under its command, 15,000 Bundeswehr personnel organise the logistics of all worldwide operations—i.e., supplying military task forces, weapons, transportation, clothing and food.

Thus, two years after the war in Libya, Germany is from the start an “equal partner” with the other great powers in the colonial war in Mali.

In an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung, at the opening of the Munich Security Conference, de Maizière stressed the importance of this change. With more than 6,000 soldiers deployed abroad, Germany was making a significant contribution by European standards, he said. France has only 2,700 soldiers, and Britain 11,000, participating in multilateral missions, he said. “Our involvement began in 1992 with medical missions in Cambodia, but now it is clear that the Bundeswehr can fight too.”

In the same interview, de Maizière made clear that the Bundeswehr is not thinking of withdrawing from Afghanistan in 2014, and will stay there at least another 10 to 15 years. The mission will only be completed in its current form at the end of 2014. “We will then be present in a different way in Afghanistan”, he said, “so that the previous efforts were not in vain. That is, if they want sustainability.”

When asked whether such a policy can be implemented with domestic political support, he replied: “Yes, of course. But we will have to change the justification…. International missions must be…explained realistically and the reasons should not be too pathetic.”

In plain language, where the German government had argued in the 1990s and at the beginning of the Afghanistan mission that they were concerned with the “defence of human rights” and the “construction of wells, schools and hospitals”, in future, wars would have to be justified with reference to German interests and by openly declaring that they required great sacrifice and costs.

At present, combat missions in Mali are still being carried out and “legitimised” within existing alliances such as NATO, the UN or the EU. But German imperialism is already pursuing its own interests.

The chancellor made this clear when five days after the start of the French aggression in Mali, she received Alassane Ouattara, the president of the neighbouring state of Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) and agreed to a substantial increase in investment by German energy and agricultural companies in this country.

At the concluding press conference, she said, “It is often thought of in Germany that this is actually a French sphere of influence, and so we don’t need to get involved there. The president will use his visit to make clear in Germany that this is by no means the case, and that other countries also have good relations to Ivory Coast.”

One-hundred-ten years after the barbaric genocide of the Herero and Nama in German South West Africa by the Kaiser’s military, and 70 years after Rommel’s murderous African campaign in World War II, Germany is once again acting openly as a colonial power in the new “scramble for Africa”.

According to a survey by the Emnid polling institute on January 17, 60 percent of the German population clearly reject this policy. But it is supported all the more vehemently by all the parties in the Bundestag.

The SPD and Greens attack the ruling coalition from the right: Germany must be an even more comprehensive and active participant in the war in Mali! The Left Party contributes to the official war propaganda by claiming the issue is one of “stopping terrorism” and settling “internal conflicts in Mali”. It merely criticises the choice of means, saying the “use of force” in the African country is wrong.

The German Trade Union Federation (DGB) is also marching in lockstep with the Bundeswehr. In the midst of the Mali war, de Maizière invited the DGB to meet him. It was the first such meeting in 30 years. DGB president Michael Sommer stressed the good atmosphere at the meeting. The DGB and the Bundeswehr agreed to cooperate further and to issue a joint statement.

De Maizière noted the earlier peace demonstrations of the DGB and claimed, without contradiction, that the Bundeswehr was also an “organisation of peace”.

By Tom Engelhardt

12 February, 2013

@ TomDispatch.com

You could, of course, sit there, slack-jawed, thinking about how mindlessly repetitive American foreign and military policy is these days. Or you could wield all sorts of fancy analytic words to explain it. Or you could just settle for a few simple, all-American ones. Like dumb. Stupid. Dimwitted. Thick-headed. Or you could speak about the second administration in a row that wanted to leave no child behind, but was itself incapable of learning, or reasonably assessing its situation in the world.

Or you could simply wonder what’s in Washington’s water supply. Last week, after all, there was a perfect drone storm of a story, only a year or so late — and no, it wasn’t that leaked “white paper” justifying the White House-directed assassination of an American citizen; and no, it wasn’t the two secret Justice Department “legal” memos on the same subject that members of the Senate Intelligence Committee were allowed to “view,” but in such secrecy that they couldn’t even ask John O. Brennan, the president’s counterterrorism tsar and choice for CIA director, questions about them at his public nomination hearings; and no, it wasn’t anything that Brennan, the man who oversaw the White House “kill list” and those presidentially chosen drone strikes, said at the hearings. And here’s the most striking thing: it should have set everyone’s teeth on edge, yet next to nobody even noticed.

Last Tuesday, the Washington Post published a piece by Greg Miller and Karen DeYoung about a reportorial discovery which that paper, along with other news outlets (including the New York Times), had by “an informal arrangement” agreed to suppress (and not even very well) at the request of the Obama administration. More than a year later, and only because the Times was breaking the story on the same day (buried in a long investigative piece on drone strikes), the Post finally put the news on record. It was half-buried in a piece about the then-upcoming Brennan hearings. Until that moment, its editors had done their patriotic duty, urged on by the CIA and the White House, and kept the news from the public. Never mind, that the project was so outright loony, given our history, that they should have felt the obligation to publish it instantly with screaming front-page headlines and a lead editorial demanding an explanation.

On the other hand, you can understand just why the Obama administration and the CIA preferred that the story not come out. Among other things, it had the possibility of making them look like so many horses’ asses and, again based on a historical record that any numbskull or government bureaucrat or intelligence analyst should recall, it couldn’t have been a more dangerous thing to do. It’s just the sort of Washington project that brings the word “blowback” instantly and chillingly to mind. It’s just the sort of story that should make Americans wonder why we pay billions of dollars to the CIA to think up ideas so lame that you have to wonder what the last two CIA directors, Leon Panetta and David Petraeus, were thinking. (Or if anyone was thinking at all.)

 

“Agitated Muslims” and the “100 Hour War”

In case you hadn’t noticed, I have yet to mention what that suppressed story was, and given the way it disappeared from sight, the odds are that you don’t know, so here goes. The somewhat less than riveting headline on the Post piece was: “Brennan Nomination Exposes Criticism on Targeted Killings and Secret Saudi Base.” The base story was obviously tacked on at the last second. (There had actually been no “criticism” of that base, since next to nothing was known about it.) It, too, was buried, making its first real appearance only in the 10th paragraph of the piece.

According to the Post, approximately two years ago, the CIA got permission from the Saudi government to build one of its growing empire of drone bases in a distant desert region of that kingdom. The purpose was to pursue an already ongoing air war in neighboring Yemen against al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula.

The first drone mission from that base seems to have taken off on September 30, 2011, and killed American citizen and al-Qaeda supporter Anwar al-Awlaki. Many more lethal missions have evidently been flown from it since, most or all directed at Yemen in a campaign that notoriously seems to be creating more angry Yemenis and terror recruits than it’s killing. So that’s the story you waited an extra year to hear from our watchdog press (though for news jockeys, the existence of the base was indeed mentioned in the interim by numerous media outlets).

One more bit of information: Brennan, the president’s right-hand counterterrorism guy, who oversaw Obama’s drone assassination program from an office in the White House basement (you can’t take anything away from Washington when it comes to symbolism) and who is clearly going to be approved by the Senate as our the new CIA director, was himself a former CIA station chief in Riyadh. The Post reports that he worked closely with the Saudis to “gain approval” for the base. So spread the credit around for this one. And note as well that there hasn’t been a CIA director with such close ties to a president since William Casey ran the outfit for President Ronald Reagan, and he was the man who got this whole ball of wax rolling by supporting, funding, and arming any Islamic fundamentalist in sight — the more extreme the better — to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Chalmers Johnson used to refer to the CIA as “the president’s private army.” Now, run by this president’s most trusted aide, it once again truly will be so.

Okay, maybe it’s time to put this secret drone base in a bit of historical context. (Think of this as my contribution to a leave-no-administration-behind policy.) In fact, that Afghan War Casey funded might be a good place to start. Keep in mind that I’m not talking about the present Afghan War, still ongoing after a mere 11-plus years, but our long forgotten First Afghan War. That was the one where we referred to those Muslim extremists we were arming as “freedom fighters” and our president spoke of them as “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.”

It was launched to give the Soviets a bloody nose and meant as payback for our bitter defeat in Vietnam less than a decade earlier. And what a bloody nose it would be! Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev would dub the Soviet disaster there “the bleeding wound,” and two years after it ended, the Soviet Union would be gone. I’m talking about the war that, years later, President Jimmy Carter’s former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski summed up this way: “What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”

That’s all ancient history and painful to recall now that “agitated Muslims” are a dime a dozen and we are (as Washington loves to say) in a perpetual global “war” with a “metastasizing” al-Qaeda, an organization that emerged from among our allies in the First Afghan War, as did so many of the extremists now fighting us in Afghanistan.

So how about moving on to a shining moment a decade later: our triumph in the “100 Hour War” in which Washington ignominiously ejected its former ally (and later Hitler-substitute) Saddam Hussein and his invading Iraqi army from oil-rich Kuwait? Those first 100 hours were, in every sense, a blast. The problems only began to multiply with all the 100-hour periods that followed for the next decade, the 80,000th, all of which were ever less fun, what with eternal no-fly zones to patrol and an Iraqi dictator who wouldn’t leave the scene.

The Worldwide Attack Matrix and a Global War on Terror

Maybe, like Washington, we do best to skip that episode, too. Let’s focus instead on the moment when, in preparation for that war, U.S. troops first landed in Saudi Arabia, that fabulously fundamentalist giant oil reserve; when those 100 hours were over (and Saddam wasn’t), they never left. Instead, they moved into bases and hunkered down for the long haul.

By now, I’m sure some of this is coming back to you: how disturbed, for instance, the rich young Saudi royal and Afghan war veteran Osama bin Laden and his young organization al-Qaeda were on seeing those “infidels” based in (or, as they saw it, occupying) the country that held Islam’s holiest shrines and pilgrimage sites. I’m sure you can trace al-Qaeda’s brief grim history from there: its major operations every couple of years against U.S. targets to back up its demand that those troops depart the kingdom, including the Khobar Towers attack in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 U.S. airmen in 1996, the destruction of two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, and the blowing up of the USS Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden in 2000. Finally, of course, there was al-Qaeda’s extraordinary stroke of dumb luck (and good planning), those attacks of September 11, 2001, which managed — to the reported shock of at least one al-Qaeda figure — to create an apocalyptic-looking landscape of destruction in downtown New York City.

And here’s where we go from dumb luck to just plain dumb. Lusting for revenge, dreaming of a Middle Eastern (or even global) Pax Americana, and eager to loose a military that they believed could eternally dominate any situation, the Bush administration declared a “global war” on terrorism. Only six days after the World Trade Center towers went down, George W. Bush granted the CIA an unprecedented license to wage planet-wide war. By then, it had already presented a plan with a title worthy of a sci-fi film: the “Worldwide Attack Matrix.” According to journalist Ron Suskind in his book The One Percent Doctrine, the plan “detailed operations [to come] against terrorists in 80 countries.”

This was, of course, a kind of madness. After all, al-Qaeda wasn’t a state or even much of an organization; in real terms, it barely existed. So declaring “war” on its scattered minions globally was little short of a bizarre and fantastical act. And yet any other approach to what had happened was promptly laughed out of the American room. And before you could blink, the U.S. was invading… nuts, you already knew the answer: Afghanistan.

After another dazzlingly brief and triumphant campaign, using tiny numbers of American military personnel and CIA operatives (as well as U.S. air power), the first of Washington’s you-can’t-go-home-again crew marched into downtown Kabul and began hunkering down, building bases, and preparing to stay. One Afghan war, it turned out, hadn’t been faintly enough for Washington. And soon, it would be clear that one Iraq war wasn’t either. By now, we were in the express lane in the Möbius loop of history.

“Stuff Happens”

This should be getting more familiar to you. It might also strike you — though it certainly didn’t Washington back in 2002-2003 — that there was no reason things should turn out better the second time around. With that new “secret Saudi base” in mind, remember that somewhere in the urge to invade Iraq was the desire to find a place in the heart of the planet’s oil lands where the Pentagon would be welcome to create not “enduring camps” (please don’t call them “permanent bases”!) — and hang in for enduring decades to come.

So in early April 2003, invading American troops entered a chaotic Baghdad, a city being looted. (“Stuff happens,” commented Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in response.) On April 29th, Rumsfeld held a news conference with Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, broadcast on Saudi TV, announcing that the U.S. would pull all its combat troops out of that country. No more garrisons in Saudi Arabia. Ever. U.S. air operations were to move to al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar. As for the rest, there was no need even to mention Iraq. This was just two days before President Bush landed a jet, Top Gun-style, on an aircraft carrier off San Diego and — under a White House-produced banner reading “Mission Accomplished” — declared “the end of major combat operations in Iraq.” And all’s well that ends well, no?

You know the rest, the various predictable disasters that followed (as well as the predictably unpredictable ones). But don’t think that, as America’s leaders repeat their mistakes endlessly — using varying tactics, ranging from surges to counterinsurgency to special operations raids to drones, all to similar purposes — everything remains repetitively the same. Not at all. The repeated invasions, occupations, interventions, drone wars, and the like have played a major role in the unraveling of the Greater Middle East and increasingly of northern Africa as well.

Here, in fact, is a rule of thumb for you: keep your eye on the latest drone bases the CIA and the U.S. military are setting up abroad — in Niger, near its border with Mali, for example — and you have a reasonable set of markers for tracing the further destabilization of the planet. Each eerily familiar tactical course change (always treated as a brilliant strategic coup) each next application of force, and more things “metastasize.”

And so we reach this moment and the news of that two-year-old secret Saudi drone base. You might ask yourself, given the previous history of U.S. bases in that country, why the CIA or any administration would entertain the idea of opening a new U.S. outpost there. Evidently, it’s the equivalent of catnip for cats; they just couldn’t help themselves.

We don’t, of course, know whether they blanked out on recent history or simply dismissed it out of hand, but we do know that once again garrisoning Saudi Arabia seemed too alluring to resist. Without a Saudi base, how could they conveniently strike al-Qaeda wannabes in a neighboring land they were already attacking from the air? And if they weren’t to concentrate every last bit of drone power on taking out al-Qaeda types (and civilians) in Yemen, one of the more resource-poor and poverty-stricken places on the planet? Why, the next thing you know, al-Qaeda might indeed be ruling a Middle Eastern Caliphate. And after that, who knows? The world?

Honestly, could there have been a stupider gamble to take (again)? This is the sort of thing that helps you understand why conspiracy theories get started — because people in the everyday world just can’t accept that, in Washington, dumb and then dumber is the order of the day.

When it comes to that “secret” Saudi base, if truth be told, it does look like a conspiracy — of stupidity. After all, the CIA pushed for and built that base; the White House clearly accepted it as a fine idea. An informal network of key media sources agreed that it really wasn’t worth the bother to tell the American people just how stupidly their government was acting. (The managing editor of the New York Times explained its suppression by labeling the story nothing more than “a footnote.”) And last week, at the public part of the Brennan nomination hearings, none of the members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is supposed to provide the CIA and the rest of the U.S. Intelligence Community with what little oversight they get, thought it appropriate to ask a single question about the Saudi base, then in the news.

The story was once again buried. Silence reigned. If, in the future, blowback does occur, thanks to the decision to build and use that base, Americans won’t make the connection. How could they?

It all sounds so familiar to me. Doesn’t it to you? Shouldn’t it to Washington?

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. His latest book, co-authored with Nick Turse, is Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050.

Interview By Kourosh Ziabari

11 February, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

The American physician and peace activist Dahlia Wasfi believes that the U.S. government has hypocritically turned a blind eye to the suffering of the people of Bahrain under the oppression and crackdown by the Al Khalifa regime, while using the unrest in Syria to Balkanize and disintegrate the country and further its agenda for the Greater Middle East.

“I think my government wins the contest for whose country’s politicians use double standards the most. US leaders turn a blind eye to the violent repression of protesters by the Al Khalifa regime because Manama , Bahrain hosts the headquarters to the US Fifth Naval Fleet and US Naval Forces Central Command. As long as the American agenda is being served, American leaders have no concerns with human rights violations,” she said in an interview with Fars News Agency.

Dr. Wasfi spent part of her early childhood in Iraq while the former dictator Saddam Hussein was ruling the country. She returned to the US when she was 5, earned her B.A. in Biology from Swarthmore College in 1993 and her medical degree from University of Pennsylvania in 1997.

What follows is the text of Fars News Agency’s interview with Dahlia Wasfi about the 23-month-long crisis in Syria , U.S. support for the Al-Qaeda mercenaries in the war-hit nation and the regional countries’ plans for fragmenting and breaking apart Syria and Iraq .

Q: It seems that the United States and its regional allies are after Balkanizing Syria and Iraq as two Shiite nations that are close to Iran and have firmly stood up against Israel and its policy of colonizing Palestine . Why such regional countries as Turkey , Saudi Arabia and Qatar have joined this vicious campaign of undermining Syria and Iraq ? Is their final objective delivering a heavy blow to Iran after eliminating its two major allies?

A: I believe that the goal for the US is to maintain political control over the region of Western Asia (usually called the Middle East by Westerners) in order to establish control over its precious resources, primarily oil. Israel is also seeking domination of countries in the region in order to continue to expand its borders; to expand its power in the region; and to expand its power in the world. The Zionist agenda was described by Israeli Oded Yinon in his document “ A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties .” Yinon projected the rise of Israel ‘s power in the region by way of the fracturing of neighboring Arab nations along ethnic and/or religious lines. He envisioned that this splintering, as observed in Lebanon , could be repeated in Egypt , Syria , Iraq , and Jordan to weaken them. I see our 21 st century destruction of Iraq , destruction of Libya , and ongoing destruction of Syria as part of the effort to reinforce Western hegemony in the region.

While global superpowers like the US are acting in their own interests, so are regional countries, in order to maximize their own power. (I think it is a reasonable expectation for survival in a region targeted by superpowers.) I regret that I am too ignorant of the individual histories of Turkey , Saudi Arabia , and Qatar to fully address their complicity with the Western agenda. But each government has something to gain from that collaboration. Turkey represses its Kurdish population without question from its Western allies (compare America ‘s silence with Turkey to its belligerence with Saddam Hussein concerning his regime’s repression of Iraqi Kurds. Saudi Arabia is a long-time ally of the US . The 1991 Gulf War was launched from massive military bases in the Kingdom. The Saudi monarchy is a repressive regime, exceedingly wealthy while many Saudis live in poverty. But political and military support from the United States has been a critical factor in the survival of the regime. Qatar has strong economic ties to the US , particularly in dealings of oil and natural gas. The tiny nation is host to the overseas headquarters of US CENTCOM (US Central Command), the Unified Combatant Command of the US Department of Defense.

To address the question, “Is their final objective delivering a heavy blow to Iran after eliminating its two major allies?” I cannot say specifically what the US government’s plan is; I can only say that in general, the US seeks control of the region’s resources. However, in an interview with Democracy Now on March 2, 2007 , Retired General Wesley Clark alluded to a grand US governmental plan to attack seven countries in the region over five years: Iraq , Syria , Lebanon , Libya , Somalia , Sudan , and finally, Iran . This plan was developed by October 2001, within weeks of the events of September 11, 2001 . If this is accurate, then perhaps the US is still saving Iran for last. But we have to remember that prior to the 2003 Shock and Awe invasion, Iraq and Iran were NOT allies. With the loss of security during and after the invasion, Iranian-based religious groups and their militias crossed the border to the west and took control of the southern part of Iraq , Najaf and Karbala in particular. The US also fostered a bloody sectarian conflict in Iraq , severely weakening the country. The destruction of Iraq —a historic adversary of Iran —was a benefit to Iran ‘s power in the region.

Q: The U.S. troops have finally left Iraq after almost one decade of bloody war which claimed thelives of thousands of innocent civilians, including women and children. But there are again efforts in progress to undermine and weaken the Iraqi government. Who are the main elements behind these efforts? Can we say that the United States is following a policy of dominating Iraq ‘s vast oil reserves after superficially pulling out its troops from the country?

A: The US has officially withdrawn from Iraq , but thousands of troops still remain to guard the massive embassy in Baghdad and its “diplomatic” representatives. In addition, thousands of mercenaries and CIA personnel continue to operate in Iraq . (I don’t know for sure, but there is a good chance that Mossad maintains a presence in Iraq as well.)

Because of Nouri Al-Maliki’s friendly relationship with Iran , the US may seek to undermine his power. The Kurds of Iraq have been used repeatedly as a “fifth column” against the leadership in Baghdad . ( A “ fifth column” is a group of people who secretly undermine a larger group, such as a nation, from within.) In the 1970s, with US support, the Kurds were encouraged t o rise up against the regime of Saddam Hussein (described in Tariq Ali’s “Bush in Babylon , p.119). Today, some oil deals in the north are being finalized without approval from Prime Minister al Maliki . This may be another example of Western powers keeping pressure on the government in Baghdad through the Kurds.

As for the demonstrations occurring throughout Iraq today, these are legitimate protests by Iraqis against the corruption and oppression of the current The demonstrators are also decrying Iranian influence in Iraqi affairs. Saddam Hussein’s regime ruthlessly destroyed any opposition to its rule. Because the Ba’athist government was secular, Hussein eliminated religious groups who might threaten his power. Some of these religious leaders were killed; others were exiled and found refuge in Iran . Many of these expatriates supported the US/UK invasion to depose Saddam Hussein. They allied with the US , whose administrators involved them in the new Iraqi government. Members of their militias also became incorporated into the Iraqi police and armed forces, which were then armed and trained by the US .

Q: What do you think about the involvement of Al-Qaeda mercenaries in the war against the Syrian government? It was on the reports that hundreds of Al-Qaeda members have infiltrated into the Syrian soil and are taking part in terrorist operations against the civilians and officials. But it seems that the United States is not discontent with the presence of Al-Qaeda in Syria . What’s your take on that?

A: This is a good example of the hypocrisy of United States policy. We do not stand by one set of values or morals; rather, we stand by a quest for political and economic global supremacy. And I suppose that for my government, the end justifies the means. Regarding Syria, concern has been raised about the possibility of The Nusra Front—a group that evolved out of Al-Qaeda in Iraq—taking control of Syria if Bashar Al-Assad is removed from power . Yet, for the Obama administration, the benefits of deposing Bashar Al-Assad (as if we have the right to meddle in a sovereign nation’s affairs) apparently outweigh the negative consequences—for Syrians and everyone else. The US is covertly supplying the Syrian insurgency with heavy weapons . In similar hypocritical fashion, the US supports aspirations for independence for Iraqi Kurds, but backs Turkey ‘s repression of Turkish Kurds. The Kurdish population is divided primarily between Iran , Iraq , Syria , and Turkey . The divisions were effected when the empirical powers carved up the region following World War I. Though their ancestry and ethnicity is constant, each national Kurdish group is treated differently by the US based on what suits our economic agenda.

Q: On December 16, 2012 the Iranian foreign ministry presented the outlines of a six-step plan for resolving the crisis in Syria, which included terms such as a comprehensive ceasefire, the cessation of the arms smuggling and the complete withdrawal of the foreign-backed mercenaries and troops from Syria. How much can this plan be practically effective in bringing to an end the 22-month-long unrest in the country?

A: That’s very interesting news! I heard nothing about this plan in the Western press, and unfortunately, I am limited to the English language. (I did just locate this report from English Al Arabiya News.) The American corporate media is making an effort to depict Iran as a threatening, rogue state. President Ahmadinejad is characterized as a dangerous, untrustworthy leader. The idea that Iran is putting forth a plan for negotiation and diplomacy to bring resolution to the crisis in Syria goes against our media’s demonization of the Iranian leadership. I wonder if this is why I didn’t hear any news about it.

But a non-violent diplomatic resolution is not what the US is seeking in Syria . The US wants Bashar Al-Assad removed from power. As long as the insurgency in Syria and its various groups are backed by the United States , they will not have to work for compromise. It was a similar situation following the August 2, 1990 occupation of Kuwait by Iraq . The government in Baghdad set forth numerous proposals for negotiations with the United States . They were all refused as “non-starters.” In Syria as in Iraq , the US is pursuing its own political and economic agenda which does not include negotiations.

Q: The United States and its European allies justify their political pressures and proxy war on Syria as part of their efforts to promote democracy in the country and prevent President Assad from “killing his own citizens.” However, they have brazenly turned a blind eye to the killing of protesters and imprisonment of political and peace activists in Bahrain and the repressive measures taken by the Al Khalifa regime against the Bahraini people. Isn’t it some kind of resorting to double standards?

A: Yes! I think my government wins the contest for whose country’s politics use double standards the most. US leaders turn a blind eye to the violent repression of protesters by the Al Khalifa regime because Manama , Bahrain hosts the headquarters to the US Fifth Naval Fleet and US Naval Forces Central Command. As long as the American agenda is being served, American leaders have no concerns with human rights violations. (Actually, my government has not turned a blind eye to the Bahraini regime’s oppression; the Obama administration recently resumed arms sales to the regimeas violent attacks on “their own people” continue.)

The situation was similar with US support of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq during the 1980s. US government leaders knew very well of his repressive rule. However, because an alliance with Iraq served our agenda to keep the new theocracy of Iran in check after 1979, then-President Ronald Reagan armed and financed the Iraqi Army during the eight year war with Iran .

The US government turned a blind eye to the regime’s human rights violations for the sake of our geopolitical gain. At the same time, though officially the US government condemned Khomeini’s regime, certain US political and military leaders secretly dealt arms with Iran and used the earnings to fund paramilitary terror groups (the Contras) in Nicaragua . US support of the militaries of both Iraq and Iran helped to continue the war for eight long years. This long conflict that weakened both countries—and cost a total of around one million casualties and great suffering for everyone involved—supported the US agenda of controlling the region’s resources, as well as enhancing Israeli national security.

And speaking of hypocrisy, compare the US response to Iraq ‘s occupation of Kuwait and the US responses (or lack thereof) to serial invasions of Palestinian territory and the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza since 1967. My government invokes human rights in order to garner public support for its policies; it overlooks human rights violations and atrocities when it suits our economic and political purposes. Certainly, the CIA-led coup of Mohammad Mossadegh is another prime example of our double standards. The democratically-elected Prime Minister of Iran, who won on a platform of nationalizing Iran ‘s oil and oil profits, was removed from power to protect the interests of Western oil companies, namely British Petroleum (BP). So much for democracy.

One of the true reasons for removing Saddam Hussein from power in 2003 was to protect the US dollar. Hussein was committed to changing the currency of the UN’s Oil-for-Food Program from the American dollar to the Euro, which would have devalued the dollar. We had no interest in freedom and liberty for the Iraqi people, as is confirmed by the severe repression in Iraq today. What we are concerned with is supreme economic and political power.

Q: You have written and spoken extensively on the plight of the Palestinian nation. Let’s touch upon that issue as well. Israelis have just taken part in the legislative elections and the extremist right-wing party of Benjamin Netanyahu has won the majority of the seats in the parliament. Will this victory empower Netanyahu and the Likudniks to ratchet up their aggressive measures against the innocent Palestinian civilians? Had the Israeli Occupation Forces launched the Operation Pillar of Defense to solidify their position in the Israeli public and attract more votes?

A: There is a saying from (I think) Mark Twain which states that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. If this is true, then I think we can expect the continuation of the Zionist plan for the complete ethnic cleansing of Palestine; continued Israeli construction of illegal settlements; continued expansion of the borders of the Jewish state; and continued collective punishment of Palestinians in Gaza by siege and military assault. It is certainly possible that the launch of Operation Pillar of Defense just prior to the Israeli elections was a calculated show of strength to garner more votes. However, I’m not sure that the Israeli government was able to carry out its plans to their full extent. For the first time, the resistance in Gaza used long-range Fajr-5 missiles , which have the capacity to hit major Israeli city centers, including Tel Aviv. I believe that this development caused the Israeli military to limitthe duration of itsassault (to eight days); I expected the attack to last at least as long as the three weeks of Operation Cast Lead. Nevertheless, Netanyahu’s Likud-Beitenu electoral alliance wonthe January 22, 2013 vote.

Q: What’s your viewpoint regarding the future of the Middle East? Can the United States succeed in putting in power puppet regimes which take its orders and are reluctant to resist the Israeli occupation and American imperialism and finally shape the Greater Middle East which Washington had envisioned?  Haven’t the popular uprisings of the Middle East also known as Arab Spring throw a spanner in the works of the United States and render its plots futile?

A: Oil and natural gas are the life-blood of most developed nations. Whoever controls the flow of oil can control the world’s economies. Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once said, “ Oil is much too important a commodity to be left in the hands of the Arabs,” and I think this racist attitude persists in Washington, DC today. This Western quest to control the resources of this region has brought—and continues to bring—so much suffering to the indigenous populations. The US and its ally Israel have picked up where the British and French (among others) Empires left off.

As we see today in Mali, the French are still fighting to hold onto their old colonies. Colonialism is alive and well in the region today, but so is the people’s resistance and struggle for autonomy. The grassroots actions of the so-called “Arab Spring”are trying to establish real self-determination in the region. In response, the US is making efforts to co-opt such movements. I think that this is what happened in Syria, for example, where the movement for change born within the Syrian population became hijacked by foreign interests and foreign mercenaries. But as long as there is life, there is hope. The masses survive and endure the most difficult and traumatic situations. They do not give up their struggle for justice. And so, neither can I.

Kourosh Ziabari is an award-winning Iranian journalist and media correspondent. He writes for Global Research, CounterCurrents.org, Tehran Times, Iran Review and other publications across the world. His articles and interviews have been translated in 10 languages. His website is http://kouroshziabari.com

By Michael T. Klare

11 February, 2013

@ TomDispatch.com

Presidential decisions often turn out to be far less significant than imagined, but every now and then what a president decides actually determines how the world turns. Such is the case with the Keystone XL pipeline, which, if built, is slated to bring some of the “dirtiest,” carbon-rich oil on the planet from Alberta, Canada, to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast. In the near future, President Obama is expected to give its construction a definitive thumbs up or thumbs down, and the decision he makes could prove far more important than anyone imagines. It could determine the fate of the Canadian tar-sands industry and, with it, the future well-being of the planet. If that sounds overly dramatic, let me explain.

Sometimes, what starts out as a minor skirmish can wind up determining the outcome of a war — and that seems to be the case when it comes to the mounting battle over the Keystone XL pipeline. If given the go-ahead by President Obama, it will daily carry more than 700,000 barrels of tar-sands oil to those Gulf Coast refineries, providing a desperately needed boost to the Canadian energy industry. If Obama says no, the Canadians (and their American backers) will encounter possibly insuperable difficulties in exporting their heavy crude oil, discouraging further investment and putting the industry’s future in doubt.

The battle over Keystone XL was initially joined in the summer of 2011, when environmental writer and climate activist Bill McKibben and 350.org, which he helped found, organized a series of non-violent anti-pipeline protests in front of the White House to highlight the links between tar sands production and the accelerating pace of climate change. At the same time, farmers and politicians in Nebraska, through which the pipeline is set to pass, expressed grave concern about its threat to that state’s crucial aquifers. After all, tar-sands crude is highly corrosive, and leaks are a notable risk.

In mid-January 2012, in response to those concerns, other worries about the pipeline, and perhaps a looming presidential campaign season, Obama postponed a decision on completing the controversial project. (He, not Congress, has the final say, since it will cross an international boundary.) Now, he must decide on a suggested new route that will, supposedly, take Keystone XL around those aquifers and so reduce the threat to Nebraska’s water supplies.

Ever since the president postponed the decision on whether to proceed, powerful forces in the energy industry and government have been mobilizing to press ever harder for its approval. Its supporters argue vociferously that the pipeline will bring jobs to America and enhance the nation’s “energy security” by lessening its reliance on Middle Eastern oil suppliers. Their true aim, however, is far simpler: to save the tar-sands industry (and many billions of dollars in U.S. investments) from possible disaster.

Just how critical the fight over Keystone has become in the eyes of the industry is suggested by a recent pro-pipeline editorial in the trade publication Oil & Gas Journal:

 

“Controversy over the Keystone XL project leaves no room for compromise. Fundamental views about the future of energy are in conflict. Approval of the project would acknowledge the rich potential of the next generation of fossil energy and encourage its development. Rejection would foreclose much of that potential in deference to an energy utopia few Americans support when they learn how much it costs.”

Opponents of Keystone XL, who are planning a mass demonstration at the White House on February 17th, have also come to view the pipeline battle in epic terms. “Alberta’s tar sands are the continent’s biggest carbon bomb,” McKibben wrote at TomDispatch. “If you could burn all the oil in those tar sands, you’d run the atmosphere’s concentration of carbon dioxide from its current 390 parts per million (enough to cause the climate havoc we’re currently seeing) to nearly 600 parts per million, which would mean if not hell, then at least a world with a similar temperature.” Halting Keystone would not by itself prevent those high concentrations, he argued, but would impede the production of tar sands, stop that “carbon bomb” from further heating the atmosphere, and create space for a transition to renewables. “Stopping Keystone will buy time,” he says, “and hopefully that time will be used for the planet to come to its senses around climate change.”

A Pipeline With Nowhere to Go?

Why has the fight over a pipeline, which, if completed, would provide only 4% of the U.S. petroleum supply, assumed such strategic significance? As in any major conflict, the answer lies in three factors: logistics, geography, and timing.

Start with logistics and consider the tar sands themselves or, as the industry and its supporters in government prefer to call them, “oil sands.” Neither tar nor oil, the substance in question is a sludge-like mixture of sand, clay, water, and bitumen (a degraded, carbon-rich form of petroleum). Alberta has a colossal supply of the stuff — at least a trillion barrels in known reserves, or the equivalent of all the conventional oil burned by humans since the onset of commercial drilling in 1859. Even if you count only the reserves that are deemed extractible by existing technology, its tar sands reportedly are the equivalent of 170 billion barrels of conventional petroleum — more than the reserves of any nation except Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. The availability of so much untapped energy in a country like Canada, which is private-enterprise-friendly and where the political dangers are few, has been a magnet for major international energy firms. Not surprisingly, many of them, including ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and Royal Dutch Shell, have invested heavily in tar-sands operations.

Tar sands, however, bear little resemblance to the conventional oil fields which these companies have long exploited. They must be treated in various energy-intensive ways to be converted into a transportable liquid and then processed even further into usable products. Some tar sands can be strip-mined like coal and then “upgraded” through chemical processing into a synthetic crude oil — SCO, or “syncrude.” Alternatively, the bitumen can be pumped from the ground after the sands are exposed to steam, which liquefies the bitumen and allows its extraction with conventional oil pumps. The latter process, known as steam-assisted gravity drainage (SAGD), produces a heavy crude oil. It must, in turn, be diluted with lighter crudes for transportation by pipeline to specialized refineries equipped to process such oil, most of which are located on the Gulf Coast.

Extracting and processing tar sands is an extraordinarily expensive undertaking, far more so than most conventional oil drilling operations. Considerable energy is needed to dig the sludge out of the ground or heat the water into steam for underground injection; then, additional energy is needed for the various upgrading processes. The environmental risks involved are enormous (even leaving aside the vast amounts of greenhouse gases that the whole process will pump into the atmosphere). The massive quantities of water needed for SAGD and those upgrading processes, for example, become contaminated with toxic substances. Once used, they cannot be returned to any water source that might end up in human drinking supplies — something environmentalists say is already occurring. All of this and the expenses involved mean that the multibillion-dollar investments needed to launch a tar-sands operation can only pay off if the final product fetches a healthy price in the marketplace.

And that’s where geography enters the picture. Alberta is theoretically capable of producing five to six million barrels of tar-sands oil per day. In 2011, however, Canada itself consumed only 2.3 million barrels of oil per day, much of it supplied by conventional (and cheaper) oil from fields in Saskatchewan and Newfoundland. That number is not expected to rise appreciably in the foreseeable future. No less significant, Canada’s refining capacity for all kinds of oil is limited to 1.9 million barrels per day, and few of its refineries are equipped to process tar sands-style heavy crude. This leaves the producers with one strategic option: exporting the stuff.

And that’s where the problems really begin. Alberta is an interior province and so cannot export its crude by sea. Given the geography, this leaves only three export options: pipelines heading east across Canada to ports on the Atlantic, pipelines heading west across the Rockies to ports in British Columbia, or pipelines heading south to refineries in the United States.

Alberta’s preferred option is to send the preponderance of its tar-sands oil to its biggest natural market, the United States. At present, Canadian pipeline companies do operate a number of conduits that deliver some of this oil to the U.S., notably the original Keystone conduit extending from Hardisty, Alberta, to Illinois and then southward to Cushing, Oklahoma. But these lines can carry less than one million barrels of crude per day, and so will not permit the massive expansion of output the industry is planning for the next decade or so.

In other words, the only pipeline now under development that would significantly expand Albertan tar-sands exports is Keystone XL. It is vitally important to the tar-sands producers because it offers the sole short-term — or possibly even long-term — option for the export and sale of the crude output now coming on line at dozens of projects being developed across northern Alberta. Without it, these projects will languish and Albertan production will have to be sold at a deep discount — at, that is, a per-barrel price that could fall below production costs, making further investment in tar sands unattractive. In January, Canadian tar-sands oil was already selling for $30-$40 less than West Texas Intermediate (WTI), the standard U.S. blend.

The Pipelines That Weren’t

 

Like an army bottled up geographically and increasingly at the mercy of enemy forces, the tar-sands producers see the completion of Keystone XL as their sole realistic escape route to survival. “Our biggest problem is that Alberta is landlocked,” the province’s finance minister Doug Horner said in January. “In fact, of the world’s major oil-producing jurisdictions, Alberta is the only one with no direct access to the ocean. And until we solve this problem… the [price] differential will remain large.”

Logistics, geography, and finally timing. A presidential stamp of approval on the building of Keystone XL will save the tar-sands industry, ensuring them enough return to justify their massive investments. It would also undoubtedly prompt additional investments in tar-sands projects and further production increases by an industry that assumed opposition to future pipelines had been weakened by this victory.

A presidential thumbs-down and resulting failure to build Keystone XL, however, could have lasting and severe consequences for tar-sands production. After all, no other export link is likely to be completed in the near-term. The other three most widely discussed options — the Northern Gateway pipeline to Kitimat, British Columbia, an expansion of the existing Trans Mountain pipeline to Vancouver, British Columbia, and a plan to use existing, conventional-oil conduits to carry tar-sands oil across Quebec, Vermont, and New Hampshire to Portland, Maine — already face intense opposition, with initial construction at best still years in the future.

The Northern Gateway project, proposed by Canadian pipeline company Enbridge, would stretch from Bruderheim in northern Alberta to Kitimat, a port on Charlotte Sound and the Pacific. If completed, it would allow the export of tar-sands oil to Asia, where Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper sees a significant future market (even though few Asian refineries could now process the stuff). But unlike oil-friendly Alberta, British Columbia has a strong pro-environmental bias and many senior provincial officials have expressed fierce opposition to the project. Moreover, under the country’s constitution, native peoples over whose land the pipeline would have to travel must be consulted on the project — and most tribal communities are adamantly opposed to its construction.

Another proposed conduit — an expansion of the existing Trans Mountain pipeline from Edmonton to Vancouver — presents the same set of obstacles and, like the Northern Gateway project, has aroused strong opposition in Vancouver.

This leaves the third option, a plan to pump tar-sands oil to Ontario and Quebec and then employ an existing pipeline now used for oil imports. It connects to a terminal in Casco Bay, near Portland, Maine, where the Albertan crude would begin the long trip by ship to those refineries on the Gulf Coast. Although no official action has yet been taken to allow the use of the U.S. conduit for this purpose, anti-pipeline protests have already erupted in Portland, including one on January 26th that attracted more than 1,400 people.

With no other pipelines in the offing, tar sands producers are increasing their reliance on deliveries by rail. This is producing boom times for some long-haul freight carriiers, but will never prove sufficient to move the millions of barrels in added daily output expected from projects now coming on line.

The conclusion is obvious: without Keystone XL, the price of tar-sands oil will remain substantially lower than conventional oil (as well as unconventional oil extracted from shale formations in the United States), discouraging future investment and dimming the prospects for increased output. In other words, as Bill McKibben hopes, much of it will stay in the ground.

Industry officials are painfully aware of their predicament. In an Annual Information Form released at the end of 2011, Canadian Oil Sands Limited, owner of the largest share of Syncrude Canada (one of the leading producers of tar-sands oil) noted:

“A prolonged period of low crude oil prices could affect the value of our crude oil properties and the level of spending on growth projects and could result in curtailment of production… Any substantial and extended decline in the price of oil or an extended negative differential for SCO compared to either WTI or European Brent Crude would have an adverse effect on the revenues, profitability, and cash flow of Canadian Oil Sands and likely affect the ability of Canadian Oil Sands to pay dividends and repay its debt obligations.”

The stakes in this battle could not be higher. If Keystone XL fails to win the president’s approval, the industry will certainly grow at a far slower pace than forecast and possibly witness the failure of costly ventures, resulting in an industry-wide contraction. If approved, however, production will soar and global warming will occur at an even faster rate than previously projected. In this way, a presidential decision will have an unexpectedly decisive and lasting impact on all our lives.

Michael Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, a TomDispatch regular and the author, most recently, of The Race for What’s Left, just published in paperback. A documentary movie based on his book Blood and Oil can be previewed and ordered at www.bloodandoilmovie.com. You can follow Klare on Facebook by clicking here.

By Adil E. Shamoo

09 February, 2013

@ Warscapes.com

All indicators are pointing to a looming sectarian civil war on Iraq’s horizon. It is possible to avoid this civil war, but so far, the country’s leaders are not willing to compromise, and outside parties show little interest in stopping it. They should care more than they do: if not resolved, a bloody civil war in Iraq will fuel the rising conflict among Sunni-Shia across the Middle East — now in Lebanon and Syria — with the potential of spreading into other countries and inviting extremists to take advantage of the conflagration.

Of course the United States’ nine-year occupation of Iraq unleashed this friction between Sunni and Shia, the underlying inferno that keeps Iraqis killing each other. According to Iraq Body Count, 4,505 Iraqis died from violence in 2012-409 in the month of Ramadan alone. Many will say this is civil war already, with numerous groups carrying out suicide attacks, bombings and outright assassinations on a daily basis. No one knows for sure who is responsible most of the time, but invariably it is Al-Qaeda, Sunni militants, lingering Baathists, sectarian fighters, and insurgent nationalists who are to blame.

Politically, it’s a mess. Iraq’s President Jalal Talabani is in failing health, suffering from the effects of a stroke and convalescing in Germany. Talabani is a moderate and a Kurd and has been a unifying figure on the issue of the Kurdish relationship with the central authority in Iraq. Many political factions are gearing up for a fight to replace him, amid serious tensions between the semi-autonomous north and Baghdad.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is hunting down his opponents, including his own vice president, Tariq Al-Hashimi. The Sunni politician was charged with terrorism in 2011 when three of his bodyguards were accused of murder and committing acts of torture, supposedly under al-Hashimi’s orders. Al-Hashimi escaped first to Kurdistan, and in September 2012 was sentenced to death in absentia by an Iraqi court. He is now residing in Turkey where he is reportedly safe from extradition. Furthermore in December, al-Maliki’s security forces raided the home and offices of the Sunni finance minister, Rafie al-Issawi, and arrested ten of his bodyguards on charges of terrorism. Mr. Issawi was accused in the past with links to terror, but no proof has ever been offered.

Since coming to power, al-Maliki has taken complete control of the country’s security forces through executive orders. This control was Maliki’s ticket to his own survival and that of the government, but since then his regime has been accused of torturing prisoners and other abuses once consigned to his predecessor, Saddam Hussein. This has generated an opposition that is now willing to do anything to topple him, including terrorism, fomenting further sectarian violence and unrest.

Many of the seeds of this conflict were sewn in the US-written constitution and new Iraqi laws under which al-Maliki now operates. For example, the constitution institutionalized the separation of Kurds, Shia and Sunni by regionalization and the division of oil revenues (an ongoing source of tension that has yet to be resolved). Furthermore, the United States helped to form the National Intelligence Service (NIS), which under the occupation was reporting directly to the CIA. At present, NIS officially reports to al-Maliki.

Meanwhile, waiting in the wings is AIyad Allawi, the head of the Iraqiyya coalition and darling of the CIA. He seeks to form his own government, as Iraqiyya has wide support as the largest winning bloc in the 2010 parliamentary elections. The Kurds too, are taking advantage of the weak and unstable government to ratchet up their own demands for autonomy — including clear access and control of all oil revenues in Kurdish territories.

In recent weeks, large and frequent demonstrations across the Sunni areas of Baghdad and in the cities of Ramadi, Mosul, Samara and Tikrit, have demanded improved living conditions, an end to government discrimination against former Baathists, and a nullification of the de-Baathification laws. Saleh al-Mutlaq, a Sunni deputy prime minister echoing others, has demanded the resignation of the Nuri al-Maliki’s government. And the Sunni speaker of parliament, Osama al-Nujaifi, in January called for an amnesty law to free Sunnis detained on what Sunnis say are discriminatory charges of terrorism.

The prime minister, while releasing some female prisoners, has called for the demonstrations to cease in the interest of national security. He is bolstered by counter-demonstrations demanding the maintenance of the status quo, and rightfully expressed fears of any Baathist return to power.

Mr. al-Maliki has had an historic opportunity to unify Iraq and move it forward economically. He may still have time, but he must start by ending the violence and changing his own policies, including the use of authoritarian and undemocratic methods to govern. Iraqis have suffered too much.

But one man alone cannot transform the entire landscape. First, Mr. Allawi needs to suspend his burning desire to become a prime minister. Others – from the Kurds, and Sunni and Shia leaders such as Muqtada al-Sadr – need to cooperate in earnest with the government for the sake of national unity. It will take such herculean efforts to stop Iraq from sliding into a civil war.

Adil E. Shamoo is an associate fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies, a senior analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus, and the author of Equal Worth: When Humanity Will Have Peace. His blog is www.forwarorpeace.com. He can be reached at ashamoo@som.umaryland.edu

By Countercurrents.org

09 February, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

Hard-line Egyptian clerics have called for the assassination of opposition leaders and claimed sexual assaults against women protesters were justified [1].

On Friday, February 8, 2013, opposition leader Hamdeen Sabahy said that death threats against him or other members of the opposition umbrella group, the National Salvation Front (NSF), would not deter him or his supporters from peaceful protests. “Our faith in the revolution kills any threats,” Sabahy said on his official Twitter account.

Last week, hard-line Salafi Muslim cleric Mahmoud Shaaban, issued a de facto fatwa saying leaders of the main opposition coalition, the National Salvation Front, would be condemned to death under Islamic law.

The NSF leadership also includes Mohamed ElBaradei and former presidential contender Amr Mouss. Shaaban named both Sabahy and ElBaradei in the video, which was posted online.

Another cleric, Wagdi Ghoneim, mirrored Shaaban’s sentiments by calling on supporters to “kill the thugs, criminals, and thieves who burn the country.”

“Strike with an iron fist. Otherwise, the country will be lost at your hand and they’ll say it is your fault,” he said. Ghoneim warned that if Morsi’s government does not act, citizens will.

Death, Crucifixion or the amputation of limbs, were all cited by the clerics as punishments under Sharia law for those who attempted to overthrow their ruler.

Islamist president Morsi condemned the religious edicts on Thursday, saying “Practicing religious violence or threatening to do so has become one of the gravest challenges facing the Arab Spring,” Ahram Online cites a presidential statement as saying.

On Thursday, the country’s chief prosecutor Talaat Ibrahim ordered an investigation into Shaaban for his fatwa.

Egypt’s interior ministry moved to provide extra security for Sabahy and ElBaradei following the threat, but Sabahy refused, saying he “lives and will continue to live as a private citizen.”

Their edicts took on considerably more weight following the assassination of Tunisian opposition leader Chokri Belaid. Belaid, a secularist who was highly critical of Tunisia’s Islamist-led government, was gunned down outside his home on Wednesday, sparking violent demonstrations across the country.

Belaid’s murder “sounds danger alarms from Tunisia to Cairo, and warns of the cancerous growth of terrorist groups cloaked by religion and carrying out a plot to liquidate the opposition morally and physically,” The NSF said in a statement.

‘They are going to get raped’

A third cleric justified rampant, mob fueled sexual assaults against women protesters in Tahrir Square.

“They are going there to get raped,” cleric Ahmed Mohammed Abdullah said, characterizing the woman as “devils” who “speak with no femininity, no morals, no fear…”

He further cast aspersion on opposition calls to make sexual assault against women a “red line” that must not be crossed.

“Does that apply to these naked women?” he said. “Nine out of 10 of them are Crusaders (Christians) and the rest are … widows with no one to rein them in.”

He further implored them to “Learn from Muslim women, be Muslims.”

Violent mobs often consisting of hundreds of men have been responsible for a series of increasingly frequent and brutal sexual assaults against women. The highest-ever number of such assaults was reported on the January 25 protest to mark the two-year-anniversary of the Egyptian revolution.

At least 19 women were attacked, with one having to undergo surgery after her genitals were sliced with a knife, Global Post cites health officials as saying.

Women of all ages, veiled and unveiled, have been attacked on the square, the paper cites activists who compile reports on sexual violence as saying. The say the attackers are using the women as a political tool.

“These people are not revolutionaries. They are part of the counterrevolution, trying to stop us from succeeding,” 52-year-old Nadia Refaat, a self-described leftist and feminist protester in Tahrir, told the Global Post. “They are trying to scare women. But we will not be afraid.”

AFP carried a photo of the cleric Ahmed Abdullah

RT, Feb 9, 2013, “Rape, death threats and fatwas: Egypt opposition in crosshairs”,

http://rt.com/news/egypt-women-opposition-rape-770/

By N. Jayaram

09 February, 2013

@ Countercurrents.org

It was bad enough that Ajmal Kasab, the only Pakistani captured after the 2008 attacks in Bombay, was stealthily hanged without a public debate last November. It is far worse that the Kashmiri Afzal Guru was hanged on the morning of 9 February 2013 following his highly questionable conviction over the 2001 attack on the Indian parliament.

Many eminent lawyers, scholars and journalists have written extensively, pointing out gaping holes in the entire trial and appeal process as well as the rejection of petitions to the president of India on Afzal Guru’s behalf. They include senior lawyers Nandita Haksar and Indira Jaisingh, writers Arundhati Roy, Praful Bidwai and Nirmalangshu Mukherji and the late K.G. Kannabiran, a former president of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties.

Journals such as the Economic and Political Weekly and this website have periodically shed light on the case and established that the way Afzal Guru has been treated is a complete travesty of justice. Not only articles in journals and newspapers but books too have been written on the subject, including December 13: Terror Over Democracy by Nirmalangshu Mukherji (2005) and 13 December, a Reader: The Strange Case of the Attack on the Indian Parliament by Arundhati Roy (2006) detailing the role played by Delhi police officer Rajbir Singh in putting together the case, the acquittals that followed in the Delhi High Court (including that of S.A.R. Geelani, lecturer in Arabic at a Delhi college), the challenges in the Supreme Court and its confirmation of the death sentence for Afzal Guru despite the questionable nature of the evidence produced in the case. A website dedicated to the case has collected some of the pertinent writings: http://www.justiceforafzalguru.org/

The Supreme Court said: “The collective conscience of the society will be satisfied only if the death penalty is awarded to Afzal Guru.” It was, to say the least, unfortunate that a court of law decided to pander to its assumed notion of “collective conscience” rather than abide by points of law.

The ignominious role played by the national media in the wake of the 13 December 2001 parliament attack has also been well documented by Nirmalangshu Mukherji and others. The media seems to have eaten out of police officials’ hands instead of asking tough questions. As Sukumar Muralidharan of the International Federation of Journalists has pointed out, members of the profession failed to do what they ought to have at least after the High Court verdict – investigate the claims of the police and revisit the case they had not yet examined.

Afzal Guru’s execution is the second time after Ajmal Kasab’s on 21 November 2012 that the government has carried it out stealthily, ignoring the need to share the appeal process with the public, the lawyers for those convicted and their families. The execution of Dhananjoy Chatterjee on 14 August, 2004 following his conviction over the rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl in 1990 followed a public discussion.

In many of the now steadily shrinking number of countries that retain the death penalty, long delays such as in the cases of Afzal Guru and Chatterjee would automatically have led to commutations. Nearly 150 countries are abolitionist in law or in practice, meaning that they have not carried out execution for many years or observe a moratorium.

Rather than moving in that direction, the Indian government has been riding roughshod over people’s aspirations. Following the massive nation-wide upsurge in the aftermath of a gang-rape (and eventually murder) in New Delhi on 16 December 2012, the government set up a committee headed by former Chief Justice of India, J.S. Verma, with Justice Leila Seth and former Solicitor General Gopal Subramaniam assisting. But when the committee offered a detailed set of recommendations within a record time of a few weeks, recommendations which were widely praised by women’s organisations and lawyers’ collectives, the government stealthily put out an ordinance, circumventing the need to face parliament and draft a detailed bill.

Then when Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi came calling at the Sri Ram College of Commerce on 6 February 2006, Delhi Police sided with Hindutva elements and rough-handled those protesting against his visit. And hours after Afzal Guru’s execution, the same police again sided with the Saffron elements, arresting several peaceful protestors.

Meanwhile, the same day as the execution, in another part of India, namely Bangalore, hundreds of peaceful demonstrators against the evictions of 1,500 families from a shantytown were met by a few hundred policemen, who proceeded to make arrests. The police are siding with a company owned by the son of a former senior-most police official of Karnataka.

A respected reporter in Mangalore, Naveen Soorinje, who exposed a Hindutva attack on young people enjoying a birthday party last year, continues to be in prison even after the state cabinet withdrew the charges framed against him. There again, there are persisting allegations of police collusion with Hindutva elements.

Indian politicians have to realise that if they ride roughshod over democratic norms and ignore the rule of law today it can backfire on them when their opponents come to power and imitate their cynical actions.

Moreover if they think hanging Ajmal Kasab and Afzal Guru is easy, they need to figure out how to respond to those who ask why not Balwant Singh Rajoana (for the 1995 assassination of Punjab chief minister Beant Singh) and Murugan, Santhan and Perarivalan (for the 1991 assassination of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi). The Akali Dal, an ally of the Bharatiya Janata Party, has appealed against any move to hang Rajoana. The fury of Sikhs worldwide would certainly be too great for the Indian state to bear. The Tamil Nadu state assembly has gone on record in demanding that the three Tamils be spared.

With obvious electoral gains in mind, the Congress government has gone after soft Muslim targets. And the BJP is happy to make vociferous demands for the hanging of Muslims accused of terrorist acts while calibrating its stance in other instances.

How long will the people of India turn a blind eye to such cynicism? Instead of whipping up and pandering to mob demands, the Indian state ought to be pursuing peaceful development by fostering coexistence. But that would need a modicum of wisdom currently sadly lacking in the rulers in New Delhi.

N. Jayaram is a journalist now based in Bangalore after more than 23 years in East Asia (mainly Hong Kong and Beijing) and 11 years in New Delhi. He was with the Press Trust of India news agency for 15 years and Agence France-Presse for 11 years and is currently engaged in editing and translating for NGOs and academic institutions. He writes a blog: http://walkerjay.wordpress.com/