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Everybody’s Son

By Uri Avnery

22 October 2011

THE MOST sensible – I almost wrote “the only sensible” – sentence uttered this week sprang from the lips of a 5-year old boy.

After the prisoner swap, one of those smart-aleck TV reporters asked him: “Why did we release 1027 Arabs for one Israeli soldier?” He expected, of course, the usual answer: because one Israeli is worth a thousand Arabs.

The little boy replied: “Because we caught many of them and they caught only one.”

FOR MORE than a week, the whole of Israel was in a state of intoxication. Gilad Shalit indeed ruled the country (Shalit means “ruler”). His pictures were plastered all over the place like those of Comrade Kim in North Korea.

It was one of those rare moments, when Israelis could be proud of themselves. Few countries, if any, would have been prepared to exchange 1027 prisoners for one. In most places, including the USA, it would have been politically impossible for a leader to make such a decision.

In a way it is a continuation of the Jewish ghetto tradition. The “Redemption of Prisoners” is a sacred religious duty, born of the circumstances of a persecuted and scattered community. If a Jew from Marseilles was captured by Muslim corsairs to be sold on the market of Alexandria, it was the duty of Jews in Cairo to pay the ransom and “redeem” him.

As the ancient saying goes: “All Israel are guarantors for each other”.

Israelis could (and did) look in the mirror and say “aren’t we wonderful?”

IMMEDIATELY AFTER the Oslo agreement, Gush Shalom, the peace movement to which I belong, proposed releasing all Palestinian prisoners at once. They are prisoners-of-war, we said, and when the fighting ends, PoWs are sent home. This would transmit a powerful human message of peace to every Palestinian town and village. We organized a joint demonstration with the late Jerusalemite Arab leader, Feisal Husseini, in front of Jeneid prison near Nablus. More than ten thousand Palestinians and Israelis took part.

But Israel has never recognized these Palestinians as prisoners-of-war. They are considered common criminals, only worse.

This week, the released prisoners were never referred to as “Palestinian fighters”, or “militants”’ or just “Palestinians”. Every single newspaper and TV program, from the elitist Haaretz to the most primitive tabloid, referred to them exclusively as “murderers”, or, for good measure, “vile murderers”.

One of the worst tyrannies on earth is the tyranny of words. Once a word becomes entrenched, it directs thought and action. As the Bible has it: “Death and life are in the power of the tongue” (Proverbs 18:21). Releasing a thousand enemy fighters is one thing, releasing a thousand vile murderers is something else.

Some of these prisoners have assisted suicide bombers in killing a lot of people. Some have committed really atrocious acts – like the pretty young Palestinian woman who used the internet to lure a love-sick Israeli boy of 15 into a trap, where he was riddled with bullets. But others were sentenced to life for belonging to an “illegal organization” and possessing arms, or for throwing an ineffectual home made bomb at a bus hurting nobody.

Almost all of them were convicted by military courts. As has been said, military courts have the same relation to real courts as military music does to real music.

All of these prisoners, in Israeli parlance, have “blood on their hands”. But which of us Israelis has no blood on his hands? Sure, a young woman soldier remotely controlling a drone that kills a Palestinian suspect and his entire family has no sticky blood on her hands. Neither has a pilot who drops a bomb on a residential neighborhood and feels only “a slight bump on the wing”, as a former Chief of Staff put it. (A Palestinian once told me: “Give me a tank or a fighter plane, and I shall give up terrorism immediately.”)

The main argument against the swap was that, according to Security Service statistics, 15% of prisoners thus released become active “terrorists” again. Perhaps. But the majority of them become active supporters of peace. Practically all of my Palestinian friends are former prisoners, some of whom were behind bars for 12 years and more. They learned Hebrew in prison, became acquainted with Israeli life by watching television and even began to admire some aspects of Israel, such as our parliamentary democracy. Most prisoners just want to go home, settle down and found a family.

But during the endless hours of waiting for Gilad’s return, all our TV stations showed scenes of the killings in which the prisoners-to-be-released had been involved, such as the young woman who drove a bomber to his destination. It was a continuous tirade of hatred. Our warm admiration for our own virtue was mingled with the chilling feeling that we are again the victims, compelled to release vile murderers who are going to try and kill us again.

Yet all these prisoners fervently believed that they had served their people in its struggle for liberation. Like the famous song: “Shoot me as an Irish soldier / Do not hang me like a dog / For I fought for Ireland’s freedom…” Nelson Mandela, it should be remembered, was an active terrorist who languished in prison for 28 years because he refused to sign a statement condemning terrorism.

Israelis (probably like most peoples) are quite unable to put themselves into the shoes of their adversaries. This makes it practically impossible to pursue an intelligent policy, particularly on this issue.

HOW WAS Binyamin Netanyahu brought to bend?

The hero of the campaign is Noam Shalit, the father. An introverted person, withdrawn and shy of publicity, he came out and fought for his son every single day during these five years and four months. So did the mother. They literally saved his life. They succeeded in raising a mass movement without precedent in the annals of the state.

It helped that Gilad looks like everybody’s son. He is a shy young man with an engaging smile that could be seen on each of the stills and videos from before the capture. He was youngish looking, thin and unassuming. Five years later, this week, he still looked the same, only very pale.

If our intelligence services had been able to locate him, they would have undoubtedly tried to liberate him by force. This could well have been his death sentence, as happened so often in the past. The fact that they could not find him, despite their hundreds of agents in the Gaza Strip, is a remarkable achievement for Hamas. It explains why he was kept in strict isolation and was not allowed to meet anyone.

Israelis were relieved to discover, on his release, that he seemed to be in good condition, healthy and alert. From the few sentences he voiced on his way in Egypt, he had been provided with radio and TV and knew about his parents’ efforts.

From the moment he set foot on Israeli soil, almost nothing about the way he was treated was allowed to come out. Where was he kept? How was the food? Did his captors talk with him? What did he think about them? Did he learn Arabic? Up to now, not a word about that, probably because it might throw some positive light on Hamas. He will certainly be thoroughly briefed before being allowed to speak.

FOREIGN CORRESPONDENTS repeatedly asked me this week whether the deal had opened the way to a new peace process. As far as the public mood is concerned, the very opposite is true.

The same journalists asked me if Binyamin Netanyahu had not been disturbed by the fact that the swap was bound to strengthen Hamas and deal a grievous blow to Mahmoud Abbas. They were flabbergasted by my answer: that this was one of its main purposes, if not the main one.

The master stroke was a stroke against Abbas.

Abbas’ moves in the UN have profoundly disturbed our right-wing government. Even if the only practical outcome is a resolution of the General Assembly to recognize the State of Palestine as an observer state, it will be a major step towards a real Palestinian state.

This government, like all our governments since the foundation of Israel – only more so – is dead set against Palestinian statehood. It would put an end to the dream of a Greater Israel up to the Jordan River, compel us to give back a great chunk of the Land-God-Promised-Us and evacuate scores of settlements.

For Netanyahu and Co. this is the real danger. Hamas poses no danger at all. What can they do? Launch a few rockets, kill a few people – so what? In no year has “terrorism” killed as many as half the people dying on our roads. Israel can deal with that. The Hamas regime would probably not be running the Gaza Strip in the first place if Israel had not cut the Strip off from the West Bank, contrary to its solemn undertaking in Oslo to create four safe passages. None was ever opened.

That, by the way, also explains the timing. Why did Netanyahu agree now to something he has violently opposed all his life? Because Abbas, the featherless chicken, has suddenly turned into an eagle.

On the day of the swap, Abbas made a speech. It sounded rather flat. For the average Palestinian, the case was quite simple: Abbas, with all his Israeli and American friends, has got no one released for years. Hamas, using force, has released more than a thousand, including Fatah members. Ergo: “Israel understands only the language of force”.

THE VAST majority of Israelis supported the deal, though convinced that the vile murderers will try again to kill us.

Never were the lines of division as clear as this time: some 25% opposed it. These included all the extreme right-wing, all the settlers and almost all the national-religious. All the others – the huge camp of the center and left, the secular, liberal and moderate religious – supported it.

This is the Israeli mainstream on which the hopes for the future are resting. If Netanyahu had proposed a peace agreement with the Palestinians this week, and if he had been supported by the chiefs of the army, the Mossad and the Security Service (as he was this week), the same majority would have supported him.

As for the prisoners – another 4000 are still held in Israeli prisons, and this number is liable to grow again. The opponents of the deal are quite right in saying that it will provide Palestinian organizations with a strong incentive to renew their efforts to capture Israeli soldiers in order to get more prisoners released.

If all of Israel is drunk with emotion because one boy has been returned to his family – what about 4000 families on the other side? Unfortunately, ordinary Israelis don’t put the question this way. They have got used to seeing the Palestinian prisoners only as bargaining chips.

How to thwart the efforts to capture more soldiers? There is only one alternative: to open a credible way to have them released by agreement.

Such as by peace, if you can excuse the expression.

The Economy Must Function Within Nature’s Limits

The economic theories are the present reference base that global capitalism validates its economic policies, which is a circular validation. That’s why, whatever measure we propose to reduce our carbon emission and manage the planet’s depleting resources, economist evaluate it within the hybrid-laissez-faire capitalism’s requirement of growth for a successful economy. To keep the economy growing governments presently manipulate the market by using the taxation system and use taxpayer’s money to give a competitive advantage to industries that maximise growth, for the profit of corporations.

The part that competition plays as a subset of capitalist economic system is as the control-medium for the economy, but its much more than that, it also acts as a decision maker for government, corporations, and individuals. That’s why the economy has to maximise production of goods and services resulting in extraction to depletion all useful minerals and living things. In addition, it forces the maximum extortion from working people in an insidious way; and with the advertisers, shops pressure-sells to every one to attain or maintain sales leadership. Furthermore and as detrimental is the widening discrepancy of power between governments, and between people due to competition. The purpose of competition is to separate people into categories.

Measures that are essential for our survival would stem from different datum; they are, from science-based measurements, observation of our planet’s mineral resources, its biosphere, and particularly our human needs. Those observations states, how much we can take from our environment, what and how much we can dump, and what sort of requirement we need to maximise our wellbeing. Bearing in mind, that we want our descendants to have the best possible life we can leave for them.

Our primary consideration should be to manage the economy in a way we can maintain life as long as the solar system allows us. Presently we disregard the damage we are doing to the planet and the biosphere, because our leaders have to give priority to the economy, that’s for the wealthy to increase their wealth and power. The worst aspect of ignoring our dependence on a healthy environment is that we are an inseparable part of that environment; therefore, damage to the environment will harm us in many ways. Unfortunately, a small damage or just a local damage to the environment we hardly notice and as we progressively damage it, over time, we still don’t notice it. When we do become aware of problem, we think that with our incredible technology and scientific knowledge, we will surmount all obstacles but the scientific community are much more pessimistic of our ability to overcome those dangers. Its likely to end up with the dilemma, that regardless of any decision we may take, the ecosystem and of course that’s us also will keep declining as the planet keeps on warming.

The difference between businesses as usual instead of gradually moving to a no carbon economy is, with business as usual, the corporation will maintain their increasing profits for a short time but unfortunately most of us will fair badly and later we will all be annihilate by our pollutions and depleting resources. However if we stop burning carbon, life may be nearly as difficult at first as we also have to reduce the carbon already in the atmosphere to pre-industrial levels. Nevertheless, we would then gradually improve our lifestyle, the ecology, and attain sustainability.

To stop our carbon emissions and use resources in a sustainable way, we will have to start from the present market economy. The first step should be to change from where and whom government levy their tax. Because we need to reduce and then stop burning fossil fuels, our reliance on mining minerals, and destroying forests etc, we must have an increasing tax and charges on those items. In addition, we must have full employment; we can achieve that if we reduce and then remove all taxes and charges on employing labour and on wages from work. Shifting the taxes levied from the use of labour and the earning from labour to the extraction or use of all minerals, using land, infrastructures, and on company profits. Those changes will also simplify and reduce cost of small business, which employs the major part of the labour force and are less dependent on energy. Removing taxes on labour will also remove the headache that wage earned usually go through working out their superannuation and relatively small tax. Those changes must start small, but increased quickly until we stop polluting and everyone that’s able to work can.

We also must change to a very low carbon economy in a way that we lose only our affluence but gain a better quality of life. Standard of life is different from the quality of life one represents quantity and brand of stuff, while the other, the quality of our life, which includes nutritious food, safe and comfortable living space, and above all happiness, which is largely the result of secure, pleasant, safe, reliable relation with one another and the rest of nature.

It’s easy to reduce and then stop carbon emissions; all we have to do is to stop burning the stuff. When we stop burning carbon and achieve full employment with the tax changes stated above, we will not be able to produce so many things that we have to throw out because they are so cheap there not worth fixing and labour is too expensive due to the taxes and charges on it. We will be able to repair the products bolstering small businesses, which will create interesting and worthwhile jobs. We also won’t be able to afford food grown on the other side of the world or from broad acre and feedlots farming, but local family farmers will provide fresher food and become financially viable. We won’t be able to deplete the ocean of fish and turn forests into woodchip. We will then be able to obey nature’s requirement.

This means that, in future, our need for energy will have to be compatible with the ability of nature to provide it in a sustainable way, not determent by the need of a growing economy. There will be less available energy than we have now, and it may not be on tap exactly when we like to have it. To live within that constrain we will only be able to produce the goods and service that will enhance our lives and not have the surplus to overproduce or take part in activities that are destructive such as wars or simply to increase the wealth of the wealthy. How we produce and share those goods to fulfil our needs, will determine the style of life our children’s can have and even their ability to survive.

Nothing can replace fossil fuels; its flexibility, its enormous quantity, and its energy compactness, all of which has enable capitalism to provide the affluence in the industrialised countries. However, it produced the pollution, global warming, and the reason for many wars that are likely to increase as the fossil fuels run out. Oil powered machines have the ability to remove most of the world resources in a lifetime, it’s even the means to find the oil, extract, and transport it. Oil is also essential to clear fell and woodchip world forests, mine minerals without a thought for future generation, deplete most of what we find useful in the ocean.

We cannot rely on a more efficient use of energy, since this will produce cheaper products enabling a greater quantity of goods, which will use more resources, increasing demand of fossil fuels to top up renewable energy. It will defeat any idea of reducing the use of resources. Wikipedea- “In 1980 (Khazzoom-Brookes postulate) illustrated this well and early in the industrial revolution Jevons showed this phenomena.” “This idea is a more modern analysis of a phenomenon known as the Jevons Paradox. In 1865, William Stanley Jevons observed that England’s consumption of coal increased considerably after James Watt introduced his improvements to the steam engine. Jevons argued that increased efficiency in the use of coal would tend to increase the demand for coal, and would not reduce the rate at which England’s deposits of coal were running out.”

Machines didn’t cause the environmental degradation by running wild, however the competition has dictated the type of machines we made, the way we have to use them and with that system of control, better and more efficient machines will speed up the wreckage of the planet. The reason for the increase use of energy and resources is partly due to the intensity of the competition, our controlling factor. The present competitiveness will ensure that with increase efficiency, we will extract increasing quantity of stuff from the planet and have to tip more in landfill; we will end up emitting more pollutants.

Competition, especially for a very social being like us is similar to a virus infection; it’s an alien introduction into a cooperative social group. Competition is in direct opposition to cooperation; therefore, as a prerequisite for social existence, there must be some cooperation otherwise its chaos, furthermore, societies function best when there’s the most cooperation and the least competition. Maybe that is why Margaret Thatcher said “There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families.” That was as far as Thatcher would allow cooperation. However, humans are genetically very social. This competitive ideology has removed most of society’s control from people to an antisocial way of interacting, where businesses are competing against each other, or dishonestly colluding. Individuals have to compete against each other and against corporation. Competition occurs in nature when there’s a shortage of food or shelter, which can bring on competition, also herd animals especially the males compete for sex. Not all primates compete, as the mating is in many cases a mutual decision. No living things seek competition, but today we use this, desperate survival technique, as a universal decision-making and control method. There’s probably more cooperation than competition in life, if we are rational, it’s better and safer not to compete, and even only few people, would compete against friends to survive during food scarcity.

In this competitive capitalist milieu, scientist evaluations are easily relegate to be less valid than opinions of political, reviewer, shock jock, and economist commentators particularly when it may have an effect on economic growth, that’s, corporation’s profits verses resources depletion and climate change. Politicians are influence and rely on common understanding derived from the Media to convey their message. This gives those people an advantage over scientist as politicians when they are talking to the public, who are also inform by the same organisation, are therefore reassured and it makes sense. While scientist, whose job is to observe, measure, experiment, and test the state of the world have made a very different assessment that contradicts the established understanding that the public have derived from the Media and, as the Media is a prior knowledge, it has a competitive advantage.

Governments world over are giving primacy to the needs of the capitalist growth economy, over future generation’s welfare, while scientist’s reports, which the governments employ to be informed of the health of the biosphere, are shelfed. Politician will make life very difficult for everyone within a few decades, regardless of the directions we then take because due to a time lag the oceans take to warm to a new stable level, it will then probably be to late and the planet will be unliveable. Business as usual could give the wealthy people in the industrial countries continuing lavish life for a short time, maybe a decade or two, until the economy collapses due to lack of resources and a more violent climate. In the ensuing chaos, money and what were the most valuable assets might become worthless while other basic resources might become priceless; it could even leave our powerful billionaires powerless, which might expose them to unpleasant retribution from their angry victims.

People expect the damage we are now doing to the planet can be fixed by our science-based technology as if its miracle -based. By the time it becomes obvious that we have depleted the planet of its vital resources and damaged the ecosystem, we will have a paralysed capitalist economy; the climate will become unbearable. Those changes will start to trigger off a chain of adjustment that is largely unpredictable and could be increasingly severe. That frightful outlook would be due to the tardiness we are expressing now to reduce our consumption, emissions of carbon, and deal with increasing population, all of which would have been an easy task two to three decades ago, but a difficult one now, and an impossible one if we leave it for a decade or two. The use of those resources has changed the ecology and the physical state of the planet, from the outer part of the atmosphere to the bottom of the deepest oceans and this is still in process.

We have two-reference point for people, the primary one is our human need of survival, security, and happiness, the other one is our external dependency on the environment and that takes in a combination of living things, the ecosystem, couple to the non-living component of the planet. Our survival requirements are; the physical one, food, water, and shelter, the other is our psychological needs. They are as vital for our wellbeing and as we are probably the most social of all living things we need company that is compassionate, and cooperative, and with our affinity for others, we experience, satisfaction, pleasure, and happiness when we cooperate and help each other.

The sun gave the biosphere practically all its energy and inturn the biosphere has provided all our subsistence until the industrial revolution. From then on fossil energy replaced the biosphere for most of our dependence for energy. That fossil energy allowed us to grow, expand our extraction of minerals, intensify the use of land, created artificial climate in gigantic buildings etc, but we are now dependent on fossil fuels like a drug. The fossil fuels will run out leaving us with infrastructures that can only function effectively with those fuels, we will then need different infrastructure but we won’t have the surplus energy we had in the pass. We’re on that dead end road.
We ignore the damage or change we are inflicting on the biosphere and how much stress we impose on ourselves because we are powerless to do much about it, while competition controls the economy and the economy adds to the controls of the world societies and its people. It should be obvious that competition prevents people from living within nature’s ability to sustain us and to interact with one another in a way that can give us security and contentment. This is because to stay viable in the economy, one must give precedence to the demands made by competition over those of nature and our longing for security.

People are psychologically very tough and can withstand extreme physical, mental strains, but the strain we exsert on the ecosystem are beyond its capacity to bear much longer, and without a healthy vibrant ecology, the climate looses its major regulator. To get to that fatal stage the economy demands more sacrifice and hard work from people to maintain the growing wealth for the corporations. Life can be easier if we reduce our wasteful and useless needs that the present faulty economy demands.

Like every one else, the intense competitive environment also controls the information Medias. Media proprietors have to maximise the number of people who use their services to maximise the income from advertisers and minimise cost for customers, if possible to nothing. The dire consequence of that financial arrangement is it gives the advertisers, the most competitive section of the economy, an undue power over the Media all through a cascade of competitive control. Competition for the Media has an added danger because it’s so intensive that we sacrificed honesty, public knowledge, and our feelings for others. The tendency to dumb down, to achieve a two-fold benefit, it reduces people’s critical ability and it’s an easy way to increase circulation. The Murdoch News Empire became a victim of that; it sacrificed its integrity. It achieved the greatest spread of ignorance and confusion of any media in the last fifty years. Murdoch thought he was in control, but the competition controlled him, as we all are, but to far less degree for most of us. Competition breeds dishonesty and even Murdoch’s News Media and his children need honesty if they are to survive.

By Lionel Anet

31 July, 2011

Countercurrents.org

Lionel Anet is a writer from Australia.

‘War on terror’ set to surpass cost of Second World War

By Rupert Cornwell in Washington

Thursday, 30 June 2011

The total cost to America of its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus the related military operations in Pakistan, is set to exceed $4 trillion – more than three times the sum so far authorised by Congress in the decade since the 9/11 attacks.

This staggering sum emerges from a new study by academics at the Ivy-league Brown University that reveals the $1.3 trillion officially appropriated on Capitol Hill is the tip of a spending iceberg. If other Pentagon outlays, interest payments on money borrowed to finance the wars, and the $400bn estimated to have been spent on the domestic “war on terror”, the total cost is already somewhere between $2.3 and $2.7 trillion.

And even though the wars are now winding down, add in future military spending and above all the cost of looking after veterans, disabled and otherwise and the total bill will be somewhere between $3.7 trillion and $4.4 trillion.

The report by Brown’s Watson Institute for International Studies is not the first time such astronomical figures have been cited; a 2008 study co-authored by the Harvard economist Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz, a former Nobel economics laureate, reckoned the wars would end up costing over $3 trillion. The difference is that America’s financial position has worsened considerably in the meantime, with a brutal recession and a federal budget deficit running at some $1.5 trillion annually, while healthcare and social security spending is set to soar as the population ages and the baby boomer generation enters retirement.

Unlike most of America’s previous conflicts moreover, Iraq and Afghanistan have been financed almost entirely by borrowed money that sooner or later must be repaid.

The human misery is commensurate. The report concludes that in all, between 225,000 and 258,000 people have died as a result of the wars. Of that total, US soldiers killed on the battlefield represent a small fraction, some 6,100. The civilian death toll in Iraq is put at 125,000 (rather less than some other estimates) and at up to 14,000 in Afghanistan. For Pakistan, no reliable calculation can be made.

Even these figures however only scratch the surface of the suffering, in terms of people injured and maimed, or those who have died from malnutrition or lack of treatment. “When the fighting stops, the indirect dying continues,” Neta Crawford, a co-director of the Brown study, said. Not least, the wars may have created some 7.8 million refugees, roughly equal to the population of Scotland and Wales.

What America achieved by such outlays is also more than questionable. Two brutal regimes, those of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, have been overturned while al-Qa’ida, the terrorist group that carried out 9/11, by all accounts has been largely destroyed – but in neither Iraq nor Afghanistan is democracy exactly flourishing, while the biggest winner from the Iraq war has been America’s arch-foe Iran.

Osama bin Laden and his henchmen probably spent the pittance of just $500,000 on organising the September 2001 attacks, which killed 3,000 people and directly cost the US economy an estimated $50bn to $100bn. In 2003, President George W Bush proclaimed that the Iraq war would cost $50bn to $60bn. Governments that go to war invariably underestimate the cost – but rarely on such an epic scale.

If the Brown study is correct, the wars that flowed from 9/11 will not only have been the longest in US history. At $4 trillion and counting, their combined cost is approaching that of the Second World War, put at some $4.1 trillion in today’s prices by the Congressional Budget Office

Hillary Clinton Plays Russian Roulette With Justice

By Yvonne Ridley

30 December, 2010
Countercurrents.org

I wonder if Hillary Clinton really believes in the pompous invective that shoots from her lips with the rapidity of machine gun fire.

We had a classic example of it just the other day when she let rip in her grating, robotic monotones over a Moscow court’s decision to jail an oil tycoon.

To be fair to Clinton, she was not alone. There was a whole gaggle of disapproving foreign ministers who poured forth their ridiculous brand of Western arrogance which has poisoned the international atmosphere for far too long.

The US Secretary of State said Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s conviction raised “serious questions about selective prosecution and about the rule of law being overshadowed by political considerations”.

Although Khodorkovsky, 47, and his business partner, Platon Lebedev, 54, were found guilty of theft and money laundering by a Moscow court, critics like Clinton say the trial constitutes revenge for the tycoon’s questioning of a state monopoly on oil pipelines and propping up political parties that oppose the Kremlin.

Clinton’s censure was echoed by politicians in Britain and Germany, and Catherine Ashton, the EU foreign policy chief, urged Moscow to “respect its international commitments in the field of human rights and the rule of law”.

Now while it may appear to be quite touching to see all these Western leaders express their outrage over a trial involving the one-time richest and most powerful man in Russia’s oil and gas industry, you have to ask where were these moral guardians when other unjust legal decisions were being made in US courts, for example?

So why have the Americans and Europeans rushed to make very public and official statements so quickly on a matter of oil and gas, in another country not in their sway or control? Okay, so it is a rhetorical question!

But shouldn’t Clinton put a sock in it? The USA is still squatting in Cuba overseeing the continuing festering mess caused by one of the biggest boil’s on the face of human rights – yes, Guantanamo is approaching a decade of incarcerating men without charge or trial. At least Khodorkovsky had his day in an open court and can appeal.

Instead of sticking her nose in to other countries’ judicial processes, perhaps the US Secretary of State would care to look into her own backyard and tell us why one of her soldiers was given a mere nine month sentence earlier this month after shooting unarmed civilians in Afghanistan?

And after he’s served his sentence US army medic Robert Stevens can still remain in the army, ruled the military hearing. His defence was that he and other soldiers were purely acting on orders from a squad leader during a patrol in March in Kandahar.

Five of the 12 soldiers named in the case are accused of premeditated murder in the most serious prosecution of atrocities by US military personnel since the war began in late 2001. Some even collected severed fingers and other human remains from the Afghan dead as war trophies before taking photos with the corpses.

By comparison, just a few months earlier, Dr Aafia Siddiqui, was given 86 years for attempting to shoot US soldiers … the alleged incident happened while she was in US custody, in Afghanistan. She didn’t shoot anyone although she WAS shot at point blank range by the soldiers. The critically injured Pakistani citizen was then renditioned for a trial in New York. The hearing was judged to be illegal and out of US jurisdiction by many international lawyers.

Did Clinton have anything to say about that? Did any of the foreign ministers in the West raise these issues on any public platform anywhere in the world? Again, it’s a rhetorical question.

Of course a few poorly trained US Army grunts, scores of innocent Afghans, nearly 200 Arab men in Cuba and one female academic from Pakistan are pretty small fry compared to an oil rich tycoon who doesn’t like Vladamir Putin.

But being poor is not a crime.

Exactly how would the Obama Administration have reacted if Russian President Dmitry Medvedev criticized the lack of even handedness in the US judicial system and demanded Dr Aafia Siddiqui be repatriated? What would be the response if Medvedev called an international press conference and demanded to know why 174 men are still being held in Guantanamo without charge or trial?

Just for the record the US judicial system imposes life sentences for serious tax avoidance and laundering of criminally-received income – crimes for which the Russian tycoon has been found guilty. Sentencing will not take place until Moscow trial judge, Viktor Danilkin, finishes reading his 250-page verdict, which could take several days.

In her comments Clinton said the case had a “negative impact on Russia’s reputation for fulfilling its international human rights obligations and improving its investment climate”.

How on earth can anyone treat the US Secretary of State seriously when she comes out with this sort of pot, kettle, black rhetoric? This from a nation which is morally and financially bankrupt, a country which introduced words like rendition and water-boarding into common day usage.

My advice to Clinton is do not lecture anyone about human rights and legal issues until you clean up your own backyard. In fact the next time she decides to open her mouth perhaps one of her aides can do us all a favour and ram in a slice of humble pie.

British journalist Yvonne Ridley is the European President of the International Muslim Women’s Union as well as being a patron of Cageprisoners. She is also a presenter of The Agenda and co-presenter of the Rattansi and Ridley show for Press TV