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New York, New York – The current popular challenges to the Western-sponsored Arab dictatorships are hardly a new occurrence in modern Arab history. We have seen such uprisings against European colonialism in the region since its advent in Algeria in 1830 and in Egypt in 1882. Revolts in Syria in the 1920s against French rule and especially in Palestine from 1936 to 1939 against British colonial rule and Zionist settler-colonialism were massive by global standards. Indeed the Palestinian Revolt would inspire others in the colonised world and would remain an inspiration to Arabs for the rest of the century and beyond. Anti-colonial resistance which also opposed the colonially-installed Arab regimes continued in Jordan, in Egypt, in Bahrain, Iraq, North and South Yemen, Oman, Morocco, and Sudan. The massive anti-colonial revolt in Algeria would finally bring about independence in 1962 from French settler colonialism. The liberation of Algeria meant that one of the two European settler-colonies in the Arab world was down, and only one remained: Palestine. On the territorial colonial front, much of the Arabian Gulf remained occupied by the British until the 1960s and early 1970s, and awaited liberation.

After the 1967 War

Amidst the dominant melancholia that struck the Arab world following the 1967 defeat by Israel’s simultaneous invasions of three Arab countries and the occupation of their territories and the entirety of Palestine, the Palestinian revolutionary guerrillas’ challenge to Israel’s colonial power at the Battle of Karamah in March 1968 brought renewed hope to tens of millions of Arabs and renewed concern for the Arab neo-colonial dictatorships (Arafat’s much exaggerated role of his exploits during the battle notwithstanding). The Palestinian revolution was inspirational to many but it also coincided with revolutionary efforts not only around the Third World generally but also in Arab countries as well, which in turn, had inspired the Palestinians.

The best revolutionary anti-colonial news in the Arab world after the June 1967 defeat would come from the Arabian Peninsula. It was in November 1967 that the South Yemeni revolutionaries delivered an ignominious defeat to the British and liberated their country from the yoke of colonial Britain, which had ruled Aden since 1838. The South Yemenis would soon found the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen, which would last for 22 years before its ultimate dissolution by North Yemen and its Saudi allies.

In neighbouring Oman, the on-going struggle to liberate the country entered a new stage of guerrilla warfare under the leadership of the People’s Front for the Liberation of Oman and the Arabian Gulf (PFLOAG), which came together in September 1968 as a result of the unification of a number of Omani guerrilla groups fighting the British-supported Sultan Said bin Taymur. The PFLOAG had liberated territory in Dhofar from which it continued to launch its attacks to liberate the rest of the country. Indeed national liberation movements were active across the Gulf, and not least in Bahrain where an on-going national liberation struggle, a workers’ movement, students and women’s activism, all coalesced against British colonial rule and their local servants.

Repression

But the US-British-Saudi-Israeli alliance was determined to crush all the revolutionary groups that it could defeat and co-opt those that it could not crush. The effort started in the Gulf. Bahrain, which had been the hotbed of workers and anti-colonial unrest for decades, continued its struggle against British domination and the Bahraini ruling family allied with British colonialism. But as the British were forced out of South Yemen and the threat to their Omani client continued afoot, they transferred their military command to Bahrain, a step that was followed  by massive British capital investment in the country (as well as in Dubai). These developments expectedly brought more repression against the Bahraini people and their national liberation movement. Indeed, it was in this context that the Shah of Iran laid territorial claims to Bahrain and threatened to annex it to Iran as its “fourteenth province.” His territorial ambitions would only be tempered by his Western allies and the United Nations in 1970, after which the Shah would give up on his claims in return for massive Iranian capital investment in the emerging small Arab states of the Gulf, including the United Arab Emirates. The West thanked the Shah for his magnanimity and continued to reward him diplomatically and politically.

On the Jordanian front, King Hussein’s army would reverse the Palestinian guerrillas’ triumphs and defeat them in a massive onslaught in September 1970. The PLO guerrillas would finally be expelled from the country completely in July 1971. However, the PLO guerrillas continued to have a strong base in Lebanon from which they continued to operate against Israel and the Arab dictatorships.

In Sudan, the communist party continued to get stronger in the late 1960s, until the 1969 coup by Ja’far al-Numeiri, who initially could not fully marginalise the communists and waited until he strengthened his regime in 1971 to do so. An attempted coup against his authoritarian rule failed. In its wake, he rounded up thousands of communists and executed all the party’s major leaders, destroying the largest communist party in the Arab world. The Numeiri dictatorship would continue until 1985 and soon the democratic struggle against him would fail bringing in the Saudi-supported candidate Omar al-Bashir who seized power in 1989 continuing in Numeiri’s footsteps.

Only the PFLOAG kept advancing in the early seventies, which required a massive effort on the part of the US-British-Saudi-Israeli alliance to defeat it. The Shah of Iran and the Jordanian King were subcontracted for the effort. They dispatched military contingents to Oman, and, abetted by British advisors, were finally able to defeat the guerrillas and safeguard the throne for Sultan Qabus, the son of Sultan Said, who overthrew his father in a palace coup in 1970 organised by the British.  With the final defeat of the Omani revolutionaries in 1976, the PLO remained the only revolutionary group that survived the onslaught alongside a poor and weak South Yemen, which would finally be swallowed up by the Saudi-supported North Yemen in 1990.

Co-Optation

Saudi and other Gulf money poured into the coffers of the PLO to make sure that Palestinian revolutionism, which was partially crushed in Jordan, would never turn its guns against another Arab regime again. Indeed, Gulf money would transform the PLO into a liberation group that was funded by the most reactionary regimes in the Third World. Arafat’s road to Oslo began after the 1973 war and the massive funding he would begin to receive from all oil-rich Arab dictatorships, from Gaddafi to Saddam Hussein and all the Gulf monarchies. It was this domestication of the PLO that impelled Arab regimes to recognise it in 1974 as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people and the main reason why they supported its recognition by the UN that same year. Indeed, Arafat’s reactionary alliance with Arab dictators was such that some PLO intelligence apparatuses began to share intelligence on Arab dissidents with Arab dictators, including the PLO intelligence apparatus led by Abu Za’im who surrendered Saudi dissident Nasir Sa’id in December 1979 to Saudi intelligence based on the request of the Saudi ambassador to Lebanon. Said was never heard from again and is believed to have been killed by the Saudi authorities. On the diplomatic and solidarity front, while the Polisario front declared the independence of the Western Sahara in 1976, Arafat refused to recognise the state out of respect for his alliance with King Hassan II.

The New Uprisings

As the Palestinian revolutionary groups were the only ones not fully domesticated, as far as the US and other imperial powers were concerned, though they had become sufficiently domesticated from the perspective of the Arab regimes, the new challenge would come from the Palestinian people themselves who revolted in 1987 against their Israeli occupiers. It was this second Palestinian major revolt in half a century, which many now see as inspirational to the present uprisings across the Arab world, which had to be crushed. The Israelis tried their best to crush it but failed. The PLO took it over quickly lest a new Palestinian leadership supplant the PLO’s own authority to represent the Palestinians. As the PLO took over the intifada, efforts were made by the Israelis and the Americans to finally co-opt the PLO and neutralise its potential as a spoiler of US and Israeli policy in the region. It was in this context that Oslo was signed and the PLO was fully transformed from a threat to Arab dictatorships, their US imperial sponsor, and the Israeli occupation, into an agent of all three, under the guise of the Palestinian Authority, which would help enforce the Israeli occupation in an unholy alliance with Gulf dictators and the United States. From then on, PLO/PA guns will only target the Palestinian people.

The US-British-Saudi-Israeli alliance in the region today is following the same strategies they followed in late 1960s and early 1970s and continuing the strategy they followed with the PLO in the early 1990s. They are crushing those uprisings they can crush and are co-opting those they cannot. The efforts to fully co-opt the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings have made great strides over the last few months, though they have not been successful in silencing or demobilising the populations. On the other side, Bahrain’s uprising was the first to be crushed with the efforts to crush the Yemenis continuing afoot without respite. It was in Libya and in Syria where the axis fully hijacked the revolts and took them over completely. While Syrians, like Libyans before them, continue their valiant uprising against their brutal regime demanding democracy and social justice, their quest is already doomed unless they are able to dislodge the US-British-Saudi-Qatari axis that has fully taken over their struggle – which is very unlikely.

The Palestinians

This brings us to the Palestinian scene. The Palestinian uprising or intifada of 1987 was the first unarmed massive civilian revolt to take place in decades. It was in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union and the first US invasion of the Gulf that the United States decided to co-opt the Palestinian uprising by giving political and financial benefits to a PLO class of bureaucrats who would proceed to sell out the Palestinian struggle. Thus Arafat neutralised the uprising at Oslo in 1993 and went on to wine and dine with Israel’s and America’s leaders while his people remained under occupation.

But If the Palestinians were a source of concern to the Arab regimes after 1968 lest they help other Arabs revolt against their dictatorships, today, it is the Palestinian Authority (PA) that is worried that the Arab uprisings may influence West Bank Palestinians to revolt against the PA, which continues its intensive security collaboration with the Israeli occupation and its US sponsor. Indeed, while the Israelis failed in the late 1970s in their effort to create a political body of Palestinian collaborators through their infamous Village Leagues, the PA became, not the new “Urban Leagues” that many Palestinians dubbed it, but a veritable National League of collaborators serving the Israeli occupation. The PA’s recent bid for statehood and recognition at the UN and at UNESCO is an attempt to resolve the current stasis of its non-existent “peace process” and the dogged negotiations with the Israelis before the Palestinians revolt against it, especially given the dwindling dividends to the beneficiaries of the Oslo arrangement.

The PA indeed has two routes before it in the face of the collapse of the so-called “peace process”: dissolve itself and cease to play the role of enforcer of the occupation; or continue to collaborate by entrenching itself further through recognition by international institutions to preserve its power and the benefits to its members. It has chosen the second option under the guise of supporting Palestinian national independence. How successful it is going to be in its entrenchment bid remains to be seen, though its success or failure will be calamitous for the Palestinian people who will not get any independence from Israeli settler colonialism as long as the PA is at the helm.

As I have argued before, the Israeli-PA-US disagreement is about the terms and territorial size of the disconnected Bantustans that the PA will be given and the nature and amount of repressive power and weapons its police force would have to use against the Palestinian people, while ascertaining that such weapons would never have a chance of being used against Israel.  If Israel shows some flexibility on those, then the disconnected Bantustans will be quickly recognised as a “sovereign Palestinian state” and not a single illegal Jewish colonial settler will have to give up the stolen lands of the Palestinians and return to Brooklyn, to name a common place of origin for many Jewish colonial settlers. It is this arrangement that the PA is trying to sell to Israel and the US. Without it, the PA is threatening that West Bankers may very well revolt against it, which would be bad for Israel and the US. So far, neither the US nor Israel is buying it.

The Struggle Continues

As for the larger Arab context, those who call what has unfolded in the last year in the Arab World as an Arab “awakening” are not only ignorant of the history of the last century, but also deploy Orientalist arguments in their depiction of Arabs as a quiescent people who put up with dictatorship for decades and are finally waking up from their torpor. Across the Arab world, Arabs have revolted against colonial and local tyranny every decade since World War I. It has been the European colonial powers and their American heir who have stood in their way every step of the way and allied themselves with local dictators and their families (and in many cases handpicking such dictators and putting them on the throne).

The US-European sponsorship of the on-going counterrevolutions across the Arab world today is a continuation of a time-honoured imperial tradition, but so is continued Arab resistance to imperialism and domestic tyranny. The uprisings that started in Tunisia in December 2010 continue afoot despite major setbacks to all of them. This is not to say that things have not changed and are not changing significantly, it is to say, however, that many of the changes are reversible and that the counterrevolution has already reversed a significant amount and is working hard to reverse more. Vigilance is mandatory on the part of those struggling for democratic change and social justice, especially in these times of upheaval and massive imperial mobilisation. Some of the battles may have been lost but the Arab peoples’ war against imperialism and for democracy and social justice continues across the Arab world.

By Joseph Massad

18 November 2011

@ Al Jazeera

Joseph Massad is Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History at Columbia University. He is author of several books including: The Persistence of the Palestinian Question (Routledge, 2006) and Desiring Arabs (Chicago University Press, 2007), and Colonial Effects (Colomibia University Press, 2011).

NEW HAVEN – The United States has a classic multilateral trade imbalance. While it runs a large trade deficit with China, it also runs deficits with 87 other countries. A multilateral deficit cannot be fixed by putting pressure on one of its bilateral components. But try telling that to America’s growing chorus of China bashers.

America’s massive trade deficit is a direct consequence of an unprecedented shortfall of domestic saving. The broadest and most meaningful measure of a country’s saving capacity is what economists call the “net national saving rate” – the combined saving of individuals, businesses, and the government. It is measured in “net” terms to strip out the depreciation associated with aging or obsolescent capacity. It provides a measure of the saving that is available to fund expansion of a country’s capital stock, and thus to sustain its economic growth.

In the US, there simply is no net saving any more. Since the fourth quarter of 2008, America’s net national saving rate has been negative – in sharp contrast to the 6.4%-of-GDP averaged over the last three decades of the twentieth century. Never before in modern history has the world’s leading economic power experienced a saving shortfall of such epic proportions.

Yet the US found a way to finesse this problem. Exploiting what Valéry Giscard d’Estaing called the “exorbitant privilege” of the world’s reserve currency, the US borrowed surplus savings from abroad on very attractive terms, running massive balance-of-payments, or current-account, deficits to attract foreign capital.

The US current account, which was last in balance in 1991, hit a record deficit of $801 billion (6% of GDP) in 2006. This gap has narrowed in the past couple of years, but much of the improvement probably reflects little more than the temporary impact of an unusually tough business cycle.

This is where America’s multilateral trade deficit enters the equation, for it has long accounted for the bulk of America’s balance-of-payments gap. Since 2000, it has made up fully 96% of the cumulative current-account shortfall.

And that is what ultimately makes the China-centric blame game so absurd. Without addressing the root of the problem – America’s chronic saving shortfall – it is ludicrous to believe that there can be a bilateral solution for a multilateral problem.

Yet that is exactly what US officials, together with many prominent economists, believe America needs. Since the trade deficit is widely thought to put pressure on US jobs and real wages, the US-China trade imbalance has come under special scrutiny in these days of great angst. Yes, China does account for the largest component of America’s multilateral trade deficit – making up 42% of the total trade gap in 2010. Conscious outsourcing and supply-chain management decisions by US multinationals play an important role in exaggerating China’s share. But that does little to let China off the hook in the eyes of Washington.

Long-standing charges of currency manipulation provide the proverbial smoking gun that US politicians – of both parties – believe justifies the imposition of steep tariffs on China’s exports to the US (which totaled $365 billion in 2010). That was precisely the argument behind the US Senate’s recent overwhelming approval of a “currency bill” that took dead aim on China.

While it may be convenient to hold others accountable for America’s problems, this is bad economics driving bad politics. In an era of open-ended US government budget deficits and chronic shortfalls in personal saving, America is doomed to suffer subpar savings and massive multilateral trade deficits for as far as the eye can see.

In that vein, closing down trade with China, while failing to address the saving shortfall, is like putting pressure on one end of a water balloon. The Chinese component of America’s multilateral trade deficit will simply migrate somewhere else – most likely to a higher-cost producer. That would be the functional equivalent of a tax hike on beleaguered American families – hardly the solution that US politicians are promising.

This is not to ignore important US-China trade issues that need to be addressed. Market access should be high on the agenda – especially for a sluggish US economy that needs new sources of growth, like exports. With China now America’s third largest – and by far its most rapidly growing – export market, the US should push hard to expand business opportunities in China, especially as the Chinese economy tilts increasingly toward internal demand. China should be viewed as an opportunity, not a threat.

At the same time, the US government should come clean with the American public about charges of Chinese currency manipulation and unfair trade practices. The renminbi has, in fact, appreciated by 30% relative to the US dollar since mid-2005. In broad multilateral terms – a far more meaningful gauge because it measures a currency’s value against a broad cross-section of a country’s trading partners – the “real effective” renminbi currently stands about 8% above its most recent 12-year average (1998-2010).

Yes, China continues to accumulate a vast fund of foreign-exchange reserves. But this is as much the result of speculators’ “hot money” plays as it is a conscious and perfectly reasonable effort by Chinese policymakers to remain focused on financial stability and manage currency appreciation in a gradual, disciplined, and orderly fashion.

China-bashing in the US speaks to a corrosive shift in the American psyche. It deflects attention away from those truly responsible for perpetuating the greatest saving shortfall in history. Washington has been seduced by the political economy of false prosperity. That seduction has encouraged America to squander its savings and live beyond its means for nearly two decades. Now the game is up.

The ultimate test of any nation’s character is to look inside itself at moments of great challenge. Swept up in the blame game, the US is doing the opposite. And that could well be the greatest tragedy of all. After all, America’s 88 deficits did not arise of thin air.

By Stephen S. Roach

28 October 2011

@ Project Syndicate, 2011.

Stephen S. Roach, a member of the faculty at Yale University, is Non-Executive Chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia and the author of The Next Asia.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2011.

 

UK firms have been urged to ignore stereotypes and grasp long-term business opportunities in Saudi Arabia

British officials like to talk of a strategic relationship between the “two kingdoms” – the UK and Saudi Arabia – building on close bilateral ties between London and Riyadh going back decades.

This is not just “camel corps” bluster frequently heard from the cosy confines of the Foreign Office. The links between the two countries do indeed run deep. Saudi Arabia is the UK’s largest trading partner in the Middle East, and Britain is the Saudi kingdom’s second largest foreign investor after the US, visible exports totalling £3.1 billion ($4.88 billion) in 2010, a rise of 16 per cent on the previous year. Saudi-UK joint ventures number over 200 and counting.

But the UK’s committed band of Saudi friends are frustrated with the overall response of corporate Britain to the scale of the Saudi opportunity.

Though British firms are doing well in the kingdom, noted influential former UK ambassador to Riyadh Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles at the Opportunity Arabia conference in London in late September, British firms should be doing far more to win orders and friends in the kingdom.

At the annual event staged by the Middle East Association to raise the profile of Saudi business in the UK, Sir Sherard – now a director of international business development at BAE Systems – didn’t mince his words.

Presenting the kingdom as a rock of stability in a turbulent region, politically influential both regionally and internationally, with the largest economy in the MENA region, Sir Sherard bemoaned the failure to market these advantages properly.

“Saudi Arabia is a country of huge potential but it always seems to undersell itself, particularly to UK exporters and investors,” said Sir Sherard. “It seems there’s a group of devotees who do understand the kingdom and care for it and who go back again and again – but there are too many who don’t understand it.”

A blunt speaker frequently critical of the allied effort in Afghanistan since retiring from the Foreign Office, Sir Sherard says both sides need to do more to build on historic ties.

Baroness Liz Symons, a former trade minister in Tony Blair’s government, urged UK firms to get their feet on the ground. “If you want to do business in Saudi Arabia you have to go there, get there early and stay there,” she told the conference.

Sir Sherard, a fluent Arabic speaker who headed the British embassy in Riyadh between 2003 and 2006, views Saudi Arabia as an unvarnished opportunity for British business. “Saudi Arabia remains the serious country in the Middle East and in my view the most stable – a country with a serious economy, equivalent to over a quarter of Arab GDP, with an excellent economic outlook and enormous prospects through the decades ahead,” he said.

However, Saudi Arabia suffers from a series of prejudices. Prime among these are an impression that it is an absolute monarchy ruled by gerontocrats prone to blocking reform. Sir Sherard was keen to puncture these myths.

“There are images of Saudi Arabia instead of information, stereotypes instead of statistics, prejudice instead of plain facts,” he said.

The kingdom is making progress, said Sir Sherard. When he left Saudi Arabia, the kingdom ranked 38 in the World Bank’s ease of doing business ranking – in the four following years it leapt from 38th to 11th.

Despite growing volumes of business between the UK and Saudi Arabia, Sir Sherard argued these are not growing at the rate they might. “Investor appetite is high but not as high as it should be. Yes, UK exports last year were still up 16 per cent at £3.6 billion so they are doing well, but in my view not doing well enough,” he said.

His message to UK firms is to get out there and stay there. He pointed to BAE’s extensive presence in Saudi Arabia going back four decades (see page 46), and its willingness to invest in upskilling Saudis and then employ them; 58 per cent of BAE Systems’ 6,0000 employees in the kingdom are Saudi nationals. “We’re proud of our plans to transfer skills from Lancashire or Surrey out to the Kingdom,” said Sir Sherard.

Other Saudi-British businesses were also keen to boost the Saudi economy’s strengths. Thamer Jan, general manager of commercial banking at Saudi British Bank, argued that Saudi Arabia had weathered the economic storm of the last few years much better than other emerging markets, with growth in the range of four to five per cent per year.

Reform challenges are significant, noted Jan, with unemployment the major issue. “This is a key challenge for us, as we have a relatively young population with 35 per cent of population under 15,” he said.

The government is making the effort to improve things. “The economy remains dependent on government spending. However strides are being made to encourage the private sector to play a more active role,” said Jan.

Another major challenge is the shortage in housing supply in Saudi Arabia. “There is significant demand in housing, with a need for up to one million new homes by 2015. The proposed mortgage law should assist people owning their own home, but is still a work in progress,” said Jan.

Much of the uplift for the housing sector is coming from a munificent King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, who in February and March 2011 announced a $130 billion financial package to spread the wealth wider. This is already having a major impact on the Saudi economy.

“Part of that package was a complete review of wages of government employees and it has had a strong impact on the economy both at private sector and public sector levels,” said Jan. “Spending will take time to filter though but we’ve seen evidence that it has positively impacted the economy and we expect 2011 to be a strong year.”

The Saudi financial sector, meanwhile, looks in robust fettle. “No Saudi banks have had to resort to government support, unlike some neighbouring economies,” said Jan.

According to Jan, there is an increased amount of cross-border business – payments, cash banking, treasury and trade finance. And with that there’s been strong infrastructure growth that has driven credit growth to 10 per cent in 2011, up from five per cent in 2010.

Excess liquidity is, however, one obstacle facing Saudi banks, he said. “The challenges for banks are primarily that we are at the moment running ample liquidity and that has driven some larger banks to misprice risk or price risk cheaply,” warned Jan.

The generally robust economic backdrop in Saudi Arabia is underpinned by a sustained move towards industrialisation, part of a strategic attempt to deliver more value-added to the resource-rich kingdom.

According to Leslie McCune, managing director of Chemical Management Resources, this is manifesting itself in the petrochemicals sector. “There’s a strong drive towards industrialisation that is much more pronounced than in previous years,” he told the conference, noting the words of the chief executive of state oil company Saudi Aramco, Khalid al Falih: ‘nations do not raise living standards by exporting commodities.’

McCune said there was now a growing resistance to exporting commodities to countries and then re-importing them. Why export plastic pellets to China to make into pipes to put into Jeddah’s municipal water system, he asked.

The wealth of opportunity on offer in Saudi Arabia in petrochemicals and other sectors will keep the kingdom on the UK and other countries’ radar screens.

But the clearest message from the conference was that having an on-the-ground presence is the key ingredient to making a success of a tough market – with more than one delegate grumbling about the cumbersome process of obtaining business visas.

For those with the patience and perseverance, the kingdom nonetheless offers substantial rewards, said Sir Sherard.

“If I have one message on my return to Saudi Arabia it is to vote with your feet, get out there and have a strategic vision, because in the end the rewards are enormous with enterprising young Saudis waiting connect with western investors,” he concluded.

Saudi-UK trade ties (2010)

Value of UK exports to Saudi Arabia (visible goods)             $4.6 billion

Estimated value of UK services exports to Saudi Arabia      $3 billion

Value of Saudi exports to UK        $1.5 billion

Number of UK-Saudi joint ventures            200

Total value of investment made by UK-Saudi joint ventures              $17.5 billion

by James Gavin

November 2011

@ The Gulf Business News and Analysis

The G20 summit in Cannes has concluded in disarray and without details in “agreements”. Leaders were unable to agree upon financing the IMF to help advanced capitalist countries in distress. No G20 state is willing to participate in the euro zone bailout fund.

However, one “achievement” is there instead of a total failure: interventions in two democracies – Greece and Italy – appeared close to coup although a G20 leader disagreed. So, all should agree with the leader: These are not coups de grace, but a mere attempt to change government or press government to listen to interventionists for the sake of markets. Italy and Greece have been made to submit to creditors’ dictation.

The Cannes Crisis Festival, considered a flop by some commentators, saw little progress on resolving Europe’s debt crisis. The leaders, as Angela Merkel acknowledged, had failed to interest any of the G20 state in investing in a new initiative. From her statement it appeared that China and Russia bargained a bit. Russia and China demand IMF to secure their investments. A strange symptom within a world structured along a NATO-WB-IMF-WTO design.

But Cannes summit has failed to raise market confidence. Stock markets in New York, Frankfurt and Paris initially expressed their reaction by moving down.

The continuing eurozone debt crisis dominated summit had the hope to increase IMF resources by $250bn to more than $1tn. But the hope has not touched this material world. The hope has been kept suspended for G20 finance ministers with the hope to be materialized in next February.

The summit communiqué made commitment to move “more rapidly” towards greater exchange rate flexibility, agreed to give IMF more money, welcomed Italy’s “wisdom” to invite the IMF to monitor its reforms, and called on countries with strong public finances to take steps to boost domestic demand.

“Dark clouds, Ban Ki-moon warned at an event with main stream labor leaders in Cannes, “have gathered once again over the global economy. […M]any people cannot even see the light at the end of a long, long tunnel.” With a similar mood, David Cameron said the crisis was having a “chilling effect” on his country’s economy. He hinted at worse to come, describing this as only “a stage of the global crisis”. The UK leader felt that in the interest of his country the eurozone crisis should be sorted out as rapidly as possible.

For playing down failure to make progress on major issues Nicolas Sarkozy tried to appear as a warrior for the cause of Robin Hood tax. Sarkozy expressed his willingness to “fight to defend Europe and the euro” as he said in a post-summit press conference.

Sarkozy said: We cannot accept the explosion of the euro, which would mean the explosion of Europe. He has assured that the G20 had agreed to boost the IMF. He made a forecast: G20 would agree by February. The French leader denied the demands on Silvio Berlusconi represented almost an IMF coup: “We never wanted to change governments, either in Greece or in Italy. That is not our role; that is not our idea of democracy.” However, he said that George Papandreou’s decision not to tell fellow EU leaders about plans to hold a referendum was “shocking”. Barack Obama reminded Greek and Italian parliaments to take decisive action. The US leader praised increased scrutiny of Italy as a step in the right direction.

The summit deliberations showed Britain’s inability to take burden. Cameron admitted that the G20 summit had failed to resolve the eurozone debt crisis. He went on: “I’m not going to pretend all of the problems in the eurozone have been fixed, they haven’t.” Cameron feels, “[t]he problem is that not all of the details… have been put in place.” He assured British taxpayers that increasing UK contributions to the IMF would not put their “money at risk”, and the money would not support a eurozone bailout. He revealed a fact: Contributing money to support the IMF was, as a trading nation, “in our interests”. He also suggested that the issue of increasing contribution to the IMF would not be put on a vote in the Commons. It appears that UK capital does not have interest in euro bail out, but in expansion of global business.

The Greek drama annoyed the Cannes festival as Papandreou announced to hold a referendum on austerity package being pushed through Greece’s throat. The political move panicked markets around the world and the G20 leaders. But dominating capital’s dictation made Papandreou step back. He threw away referendum plan to seek people’s mandate on the austerity plan that includes sell-off of public property. The Papandreou government sought confidence in parliament after alleged horse trading and survived a confidence vote.

Italy with its near-nonexistent growth was an amazing player in the Cannes show. Rome now threatens to carry Europe’s debt crisis up to a level that can fall on the entire earth’s capitalist economy, and make it spin listlessly. Italy’s borrowing rates are rising to the levels that forced the PIG to seek bailout “benevolence” in all its crudeness. With a $2.5 trillion debt Italy has agreed to let the IMF monitor its implementation of austerity program.

But, as a Reuter’s story described, the “fierce pressure from financial markets and European peers” was not a humiliation for Berlusconi as he agreed to have the IMF and the EU monitors. It was reported that Berlusconi “was summoned to a late-night hotel meeting with Merkel, Sarkozy, the IMF director general Christine Lagarde and Obama, where he was instructed to bring Italy under […] IMF surveillance to ensure he implements […] measures, including changes to the labor market, […] the sell-off of state assets.” However, Berlusconi tried to minimize the satiric-political impact of the decision, saying that it had been requested by Italy rather than imposed by world leaders. He boasted: He had invited the IMF to offer advice; he had rejected an offer of IMF funds. He claimed that his country was more solid than France or the UK. “Italian restaurants and vacation spots are always full. Nobody has the sense the country is in a crisis”, said the scandal-ridden Italian leader.

The IMF bosses will audit Italy’s books of accounts to make sure the austerity measures are implemented with brute force. An EC team will also supervise. Moreover, the Media Mughal of Italy with a history of not standing by promises had to make a new promise to European leaders in Cannes, the famous film festival place that sees attractive film figures: a confidence motion within 15 days in Roman Senate. These developments achieved by external and Italian finance elites impacted Italian politics. Desertions from coalition government of Berlusconi have made its life uncertain.

Shall there be horse trading in the country’s political market dominated by the rich? Shall the trade be called democratic distribution of patronage by one of the richest men of Italy? All, from Catholic Church to business, want Berlusconi’s exit. But the democratic warrior knows well that Italy is not Libya. This perception has led him to brush aside the desire of powerful interests. He has already found traitors to the country as he described party rebels. Have ghosts of fallen dictators overshadowed the character of Italian comedy in a Roman Holiday? However, there are all the possibilities of Berlusconi’s Mubarak Moment.

The world now is a bit different whatever the Italian leader claims. The IMF bosses do not only dictate the poor in the South. They are now showing muscles in advanced capitalist countries. Now, after Greek Tragedy and Italy Incident, the ruling elites, many of them are pure robbers and plunderers, of IMF-dictated-poor countries should get “rid” of sense of shame. The founding fathers of the Bretton Woods institutions had not imagined that one day in future their institutions designed to subdue the poor world would discipline advanced capitalist countries. Even, Marx had not imagined. Has something rotten down in the core of capitalism? The IMF is disciplining Ireland, Portugal and Greece, “dignified” capitalist countries not “shameless” like the poor countries.

Russia made a major advance in the summit as the country will be allowed into the WTO, “the biggest step in world trade liberalization since China joined a decade ago.” The step will have implication on present major players in the world trade club. China’s increasing power was evident in the summit as the country resisted calls to allow its currency to appreciate. It now appears that these two countries are making their voices heard in the gathering of the powerful and aspiring-powerful.

The disarrayed drama, the unwillingness to fund IMF, the flexing of power reaching close to coup in advanced capitalist countries, the humiliations, etc. raise a few fundamental questions related to capitalist world system that was in euphoria with a brute onslaught named globalization a few years back.

By Farooque Chowdhury

Dhaka based free lancer Farooque Chowdhury contributes on socioeconomic issues.

 

 

 

This week in Chicago, militarized politicians of wealthy nations pretended to sit in discussion of how much more death they will deal to the poorest nation on earth. In reality, they are powerless to do otherwise. Our real rulers, the elite of the community of private investment banking are whom the public should be focused on. In the meantime those who sign orders for killing in illegal wars will soon be facing prosecution

Chicago, May 2012 – NATO’s top military leaders, representing the now centuries old world rule by private investment banking, make a pathetic and pompous photo-op show of a supposedly tactical decision, to give up murdering Afghani citizens in their own country’s homes, villages, cities and countryside after 2014.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/22/world/nato-formally-agrees-to-transition-on-afghan-security.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120522

(One can’t forget that CNN video of the NATO Secretary General explaining to us in his heavily German accented English (chillingly reminiscent of SS officers portrayed in World War Two movies), that the tens of thousands of NATO bombing sorties in Libya caused little or no civilian casualties.)

To make it look more like an official space-age planetary governing body than a gang of white collar criminals with homicidal intent, the conference hall is filled with an august circle of fifty delegate desks, each with the name of the country clearly indicated, as if to impress how very many nations are willing to share the responsibility for ten years of manslaughter of thousands upon thousands of innocent men, women and children in very their own beloved country.

If Barack Obama had been tried under Nuremberg-Principles on that same day in Chicago, the maximum leader could have spread his arms wide with lifted shoulders indicating in his defense that as everyone can plainly see, the genocide is, a multinational war crime atrocity in which he merely participates in as coordinator.

Whereas the President’s opening remarks http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2012/05/nato_chief_chicago_has_always_.html in Chicago , were largely congratulatory pleasantries with little reference to pre-announced plan to withdraw all troops by 2014, the President’s Remarks on Afghanistan War Troop Withdrawal as released by the White House, June 22, 2011 almost a year ago sought to justify withdrawal for the successes achieved:

“By the time I took office, the war in Afghanistan had entered its seventh year … al Qaeda’s leaders had escaped into Pakistan and were plotting new attacks … the Taliban had regrouped and gone on the offensive … I ordered an additional 30,000 American troops into Afghanistan … we’ve inflicted serious losses on the Taliban and taken a number of its strongholds … Al Qaeda is under more pressure … we have taken out more than half of al Qaeda’s leadership … we have put al Qaeda on a path to defeat … peace cannot come to a land that has known so much war without a political settlement … America will join initiatives that reconcile the Afghan people, including the Taliban … America, it is time to focus on nation building here at home … Let us responsibly end these wars … May God bless our troops. And may God bless the United States of America.”

We are aware of the truth of wire services reports over the past ten years, that NATO (mostly US Armed Forces), with all it thousands of troops and space-age death delivery systems, have only succeeded in exercising a varying amount of control over cities in Afghanistan and less than half of Afghanistan’s land area.

This boasting of military achievements in Afghanistan sounds familiar. After fifteen years of suffering more or less the same defeat in Vietnam, though throwing the equivalent of a 9/11 on the Indochinese population every month for fifteen years and having paid the French Colonial Armed Forces to do it for eight years earlier, the US and its European allies were driven out. In the end the only military achievement in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia was having brought death to between three and five million human beings for daring to oppose US-European neo-colonial military occupation and the corrupt and undemocratic government it had forced upon Vietnam.

The final military body-count achievement for Afghanistan will be more difficult to figure, for deadly terror began thirty-two years ago with Jimmy Carter’s arming and training fundamentalist hill tribes intent on preventing their daughters from going to schools of the women liberating socialist government in Kabul. The CIA secretly funded a civil war to frighten the Soviets into making the mistake of intervention, and then invited in fundamentalist Arabs like Osama bin Laden and paid them to fight the Russians. After eight years the Russians left, defeated by CIA Stinger missiles, Arab and war load led attacks aided by CIA allied secret services from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. For the ensuing years of war among the US backed war lords, bombarding cities, raping women and stealing everywhere the Taliban [Students of God] movement was born to restore civil society, protect women, restore public services and peace. Only after a few years respite came the US post 9/11 US bombing, invasion and ten years of occupation war on all Afghanistan on the pretext of a refusal to extradite Osama bin Laden without evidence or trial.

Hold your head in your hands as you listen to the usual preposterous claims of yet another American president representing the elite criminal leadership of the wealthy white world’s investment community declare that after ten years, “our forces” have broken the momentum of the Taliban.”

Just so, do some of us remember hearing Lyndon Johnson testify to ‘our gains in the war against the Godless Vietcong,'(viciously attacking our half million troops sent to save people not ready to govern themselves from trying.)

Those of us old enough remember as well US troops, planes and ships and/or covert operating CIA saving Greeks from Greek socialists;

– saving Koreans from uniting their nation after the US, having previously recognized their country as territory of Imperial Japan for forty years, divided it and installed a dictator who would massacre of 200,000 thousand communists, socialists, union activists men, women and their children in the South (so hated he had to flee for his life after the US reinstalled his government. The history of his dictatorship has been expunged from South Korean schoolbooks).

– saving Iranians from their first democratic (oil nationalizing) government;

– saving Guatemalans from a democratically elected but US business uncooperative government;

– saving Congolese from their popular first president to then suffer millions of lives taken under a brutal and corrupt US and Belgian installed dictator;

– saving Cubans (unsuccessfully), from revolutionary Cubans who chased away a US backed dictator;

– saving Lebanese from anti-Israeli Lebanese;

– saving Brazilians from a beloved popular president of the people;

– saving Bolivians from being free of their generals;

– saving Chileans from a popularly elected socialist president;

– saving Dominicans from Dominicans demanding their elected President back;

– saving Panamanians from a CIA-payrolled-agent President and saving one thousand of them from the trouble of living;

– saving Grenadians from independence from the US;

– saving Salvadorians from revolting against US backed massacres,

– saving Haitians from their beloved US kidnapped priest-President;

and after 9/11 when as Rev. Jeremiah Wright noted “Chickens have come home to roost.” repeating Malcolm X saying so after JFK’s assassination:

– everyone remember saving Iraqis from a murdering CIA aided dictator, and then saving a million Iraqis from a peaceful death;

– saving Somali from having a humane non-war lord Islamic government,

– saving Yemeni from overthrowing their brutal US backed dictator,

– saving Pakistanis from America hating Pakistanis;

– saving Libyans from a government that had brought them Arab socialism and a living standard higher that nine European nations with free health care and higher education;

The list goes on and encompasses nearly every non-white complexioned nation on earth, updating to the present saving of Syria from any possible peaceful existence uncontrolled by Western investment banks.

All these hundreds of bombings, invasions, occupation wars, covert overthrows, engendering of violence, false flag stimulating of civil wars and other acts of war like dis-stabilizing sanctions have all taken place under three names of high appointed officials forced upon presidents from Truman through Obama. All three are close confidants of David Rockefeller. Either the Dulles brothers, Henry Kissinger or Zbigniew Bzrezinski have overseen each the heinous taking of lives in illegal wars from Korea through the latest covert genocide in Syria.

Those who really rule and are in charge of these infinite unjust investment opportunities, which imperialist military criminally enforce with the inhuman horror of war, are neither capable of self-restraint nor respecting boundaries. The simple business amorality of the unchained power of money created as a false commodity, once released over humanity, flows downhill like water seeking its own level, covering every place possible everywhere, whether great or tiny. *

For a few days, in Chicago, militarized politicians of wealthy nations pretended to sit in discussion of how much more death they will deal to poorest nation on earth before they are allowed by their dominating investment banking community’s ruling elite to desist. How many of our observant honest journalist and peoples historians doubt that these uniformed and fine suited men who met in Chicago are merely going through the motions of diplomats and politicians and are in reality absolutely powerless to do otherwise.

At the same time, and by contrast, these militarized politicians, both elected and appointed, are legally responsible for the deadly war crimes they feel themselves above the law in committing their signatures to, though they do so for the investment community they are beholden to. This politicians, and not the war requesting investment community, sign orders for generals to pass on down through the chain of command to those who are actually pull the triggers. Will there not eventually be consequences for those responsible for illegal and undeclared wars – crimes against humanity?

The answer to this question, as Bob Dylan sang, “is blowin’ in the wind.” Former presidents, secretaries of state and defense feel forced to cancel trips abroad apprehensive of ugly citizen reaction and dangerous encounters that can require police protection, even temporary protective confinement. They best avoid a certain town in Vermont for fear of arrest under an local ordinance in effect.

Though Spain has reined in the strong willed judge who was frightening a lot of high officials involved in dirty wars, no one can be sure that judges elsewhere will not rise up to bringing the law to bear on crimes against humanity individually filed in national courts that international courts will not accept, as in the case of General Pinochet, who found himself arrested and in held in limbo between England, Spain and his own Chile for extradition charges filed.

This month saw the conviction by the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal of former President Bush junior and many of his appointees as guilty of the torturing they presided over. This tribunal of the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission is no lightweight, being founded by an internationally respected anti-imperialist, for twenty years Prime Minister of Malaysia, notoriously outspoken and tough on Western media when it slandered his nation or his administration.

In Cape Town, South Africa, the Bertram Russell-Sartre War Crimes Tribunal has been reconstituted for prosecution of Israeli crimes against Palestinians and an second panel to prosecute Barack Obama is being considered by another group.

http://kingcondemneduswars.blogspot.com/

Finally, the new campaign Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now, featuring country-by-country histories of US crimes following in the footsteps of peoples historian Howard Zinn and Martin Luther King teaching of honest history since 1945 and exposing how corporate media disinforms (1967 Beyond Vietnam sermon. The campaign is dedicated to promote awareness of the ever more meaningful important work of the National Lawyers Guild and the Center for Constitutional Law. http://prosecuteuscrimesagainsthumanitynow.blogspot.com/

Today’s international ‘untouchables’ will be Humanity’s prisoners tomorrow. “Times, they are a changing,” continued Bob Dylan.

* “Rule by financial capital- by money and those who have it-in disregard of all non-financial values, has triumphed over democracy, markets, justice, life, and spirit” David Korten, in When Corporations Rule the World

By Jay Janson

Jay Janson is an archival research peoples historian activist, musician and writer; has lived and worked on all continents; articles on media published in China, Italy, UK, India and the US; now resides in NYC;. Howard Zinn lent his name to various projects of his; Global Research; Information Clearing House; Counter Currents,; Minority Perspective, UK; Dissident Voice, OpEdNews; HistoryNews Network; Vermont Citizen News and others have published his articles, 250 of which are available at http://www.opednews.com/author/author1723.html Weekly column, South China Morning Post, 1986-87; reviews for Ta Kung Bao; articles China Daily, 1989. Is coordinator of the King Condemned US Wars International Awareness Campaign (King Condemned US Wars) and creator of Prosecute US Crimes Against Humanity Now Campaign fearuting a country by country history of US crimes. Studied history at CCNY, Columbia U., U. Puerto Rico, Dolmetscher Institut München, Germany; Korean National University of Arts, Seoul; Radiotelevisione Italiana, Rome; Zagreb Radiotelevision,Yugoslavia; Hong Kong Arts Academy.

 

 

 

 

US drone attacks in northwest Pakistan killed at least 14 people in little more than 24 hours, including 10 who died in a Thursday morning missile strike on a mosque.

The escalation of the US drone war comes in the wake of the NATO summit in Chicago, where the Obama administration and the Pakistan Peoples Party government of President Asif Ali Zardari failed to reach an agreement on the reopening of a supply route for US-NATO occupation troops in Afghanistan, The route, which goes from the port of Karachi to the Afghan border, was closed by Islamabad in protest over US air strikes that killed two dozen Pakistani soldiers last November.

The new drone strikes are the most lethal manifestations of Washington’s displeasure at Pakistan’s failure to rapidly bow to US demands. The aftermath of the summit has also seen threats in Congress to cut off aid to Pakistan and a hysterical political and media campaign over a Pakistani court’s sentencing of a CIA informant who helped prepare the Navy Seal raid that ended in the assassination of Osama bin Laden.

Thursday’s missile strike by a pilotless US drone demolished a mosque in Mir Ai Bazar, a village in the North Waziristan tribal area bordering Afghanistan. Local officials reported that the unmanned plane fired two missiles demolishing the building and leaving 10 dead and several others wounded.

“Fear prevailed in the area as almost five drones were seen flying in the air after the incident,” local sources told the Pakistani daily Nation. The threat that the aircraft would fire more missiles prevented villagers from trying to rescue people from the rubble.

“The drone fired two missiles and hit the village mosque where a number of people were offering Fajr (morning) prayer,” Roashan Din, a local tribal leader, told NBC News. He confirmed that 10 bodies had been pulled from the wreckage of the mosque.

While US officials described the target of the attack as a “compound,” multiple Pakistani sources have confirmed that the building hit was a mosque.

Doctors at the Mir Ali hospital reported that six wounded had been admitted, with one dying there and four others remaining in critical condition.

The missile strike follows another attack on Wednesday in which four people were killed and several others injured. As in all such attacks, the victims were described as “suspected militants.” Wednesday’s strike targeted a house near Miranshah, the capital of North Waziristan.

These drone attacks are deeply unpopular in Pakistan, where it is estimated that they have killed as many as 3,000 people, most of them civilians. The report of the destruction of a mosque and more civilian casualties will no doubt fan growing anti-American sentiments, further complicating the attempts of the Zardari government and the Obama administration to reach a deal on reopening the Pakistan supply route.

Pakistan’s Foreign Office condemned the latest drone strikes, describing them as a “total violation” of Pakistani territory and sovereignty. Foreign Office spokesman Moazzam Khan characterized the US attacks as “illegal violations of international law and unacceptable.” Asked by a reporter why Pakistan did not bring the matter to the United Nations, Moazzam stressed that Islamabad wants “to resolve the issue bilaterally.” He described US-Pakistani ties as “an important relationship” and stressed that there is “a mutual desire” to reach an agreement between the two countries.

While the Zardari government has long issued public condemnations of the drone strikes, it had previously offered its tacit collaboration, going so far as to allow the Central Intelligence Agency to launch the pilotless aircraft from a landing strip inside Pakistan. Following last November’s strike on the Pakistani border posts, it forced the closure of this facility.

Further complicating US-Pakistani relations was the sentencing Wednesday of Shakil Afridi to 33 years in prison. Afridi, a Pakistani government doctor, was found guilty of treason for aiding the CIA in preparing the unilateral raid that sent Navy Seals deep into Pakistani territory to kill Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden last year. The raid was seen in Pakistan as a gross violation of the country’s sovereignty and a humiliation of the government and the military.

Afridi organized a fake vaccination campaign in the Pakistani military garrison town of Abbottabad, where bin Laden was living, in an attempt to obtain DNA samples from family members and thereby confirm his identity. Having risen to the position of surgeon general in Khyber Agency, a tribal area along the Afghan border, Afridi had reportedly served as a paid CIA informant for several years.

The charges brought against Afridi included conspiring “to wage war against Pakistan or depriving it of its sovereignty,” “concealing existence of a plan to wage war against Pakistan” and “condemnation of the creation of the state and advocacy of abolition of its sovereignty.” He was tried under the Frontier Crimes Regulation, a legal system created under British colonialism to maintain control in the rebellious tribal areas. This legal code does not allow defendants to have a lawyer. Under a recent amendment of the old British code, however, they do now have the right of appeal.

The sentencing drew shrill protests from Washington and the US mass media, which characterized Afridi as a “hero” and a “patriot.” Senators Carl Levin and John McCain, the chairman and top Republican on the Senate armed services committee, issued a joint statement calling the conviction “shocking and outrageous” and demanding that Islamabad pardon and release the CIA informant immediately. State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said Wednesday that there was “no basis” for jailing Afridi.

The Pakistani Foreign Office said that Afridi had been convicted “in accordance with Pakistani laws and by Pakistani courts” and affirmed that Washington and Islamabad “need to respect each other’s legal processes.”

He did not raise the case of Syed Ghulam Nabi Fai, a US citizen of Pakistani origin and former executive director of the Kashmiri American Council, who last March was sentenced to two years in prison after being found guilty of conspiracy for having worked for Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency.

Washington’s characterizations of Afridi as a “hero” are not shared by the vast majority of Pakistanis, who see him as a traitor, nor for that matter by fellow health professionals, who see his actions as having done potentially catastrophic damage to efforts to eradicate polio and other diseases in Pakistan.

Afridi’s theft of World Health Organization cooler boxes for use in a fake CIA orchestrated vaccination campaign have cast a cloud over all public health campaigns, raising suspicions that they could be fronts for US intelligence and state terror operations. Among the most immediately affected is Save the Children, the largest international aid agency in Pakistan. According to Pakistani officials, Afridi told his interrogators that he was put in touch with the CIA by Save the Children operatives.

Save the Children denies the claim, but its operations have been largely hindered, with employees denied visas, supplies stopped and senior officials forbidden from leaving Pakistan. David Wright, the country manager for Save the Children, denounced the use of a public health professional for US intelligence operations. “The CIA needs to answer for this,” he told the New York Times. “And they need to stop it.”

In a further indication of the continuing downward spiral of relations between the US and Pakistan, a Senate panel Tuesday passed a foreign aid budget that would slash US assistance to Pakistan by more than half. The Senate appropriations subcommittee on foreign aid voted to cut fiscal 2013 aid to Pakistan by 58 percent, while allowing for still further cuts if the supply route to Afghanistan is not reopened. There are growing demands in Congress for a complete aid cut-off. Pakistan has received some $20 billion in US aid since 2001.

By Bill Van Auken

 

 

 

 

The hearing took place nearly four months after the two presiding High Court judges, Sir John Thomas and Mr Justice Ouseley, deferred Assange’s appeal against a February 24, 2011, ruling that he could be extradited.

At the February hearing, District Judge Howard Riddle at Belmarsh Magistrates’ Court perversely ruled that extradition would not breach Assange’s human rights and that he would get a fair trial if he were ever charged in Sweden.

Assange’s lawyers have indicated they will appeal the latest decision to the Supreme Court. His legal team have only 14 days to do so and face huge obstacles. They must seek permission from the High Court by applying for a certificate of law of general public importance. Under UK law, Assange’s lawyers must justify their application by arguing that the case concerns a point of law of general importance to the public. Only if the High Court agrees with that can the Supreme Court hear an appeal.

Given that the same court has just rejected Assange’s appeal, permission is highly unlikely. This would mean Assange will be forcibly extradited to Sweden within 10 days of the hearing, even though he has not been charged with any offence.

The case against Assange is aimed at silencing WikiLeaks, which has made public thousands of secret US military documents exposing the criminal character of the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. WikiLeaks has also published hundreds of thousands of US diplomatic cables documenting the conspiracies carried out against the global population by Washington and its allies.

Since Assange’s arrest, the British state has worked hand in glove with the Swedish authorities for his extradition.

Assange rightly fears that, once in Sweden, Washington will move for his extradition to the US. A secret grand jury has reportedly been convened in Alexandria, Virginia, to this end. Located near the Pentagon, Central Intelligence Agency and Department of Homeland Security, this jury would almost certainly include people employed by or close to the US national security apparatus.

Once in the US, Assange could be charged under the Espionage Act and face a possible death sentence.

The judicial frame-up rests on allegations of rape and sexual assault made by two women in Sweden. Both admit to having had consensual sex with Assange last August. One alleges that, in one instance, Assange failed to use a condom. The other claims that on one occasion, Assange had sexual intercourse while she was not fully awake. Assange admits to consensual sex with each woman, but rejects any wrongdoing.

On the basis of these allegations, the Swedish authorities issued a European Arrest Warrant (EAW) against Assange, who was arrested in London last December. Following almost a week of solitary confinement, Assange has spent 330 days under house arrest. The extraordinarily restrictive bail conditions mean he must reside at the Norfolk home of one of his supporters on a 10 p.m. curfew, wear an electronic ankle tag and report to a designated police station each day.

Assange must now remain on the same bail conditions pending a decision on a further appeal. Even were Assange given permission to appeal to the Supreme Court, the hearing would not take place until next year.

Assange’s lawyers had argued in court that the EAW was invalid, having been issued by a prosecutor, Marianne Ny, and not by a “judicial authority”. The judges rejected this argument, stating that “the prosecutor was a judicial authority under the 2003 Act and Framework Decision.”

Assange’s defence also challenged the EAW on the basis that the alleged offences were not extraditable ones in the UK. In July, Assange’s lawyer, Ben Emmerson QC, argued, “What [Swedish prosecutors] must prove beyond reasonable doubt is that if these circumstances as alleged had happened in London, would they have constituted offences?” He added that the “description of conduct is not accurate. The arrest warrant misstates the conduct and is, by that reason alone, an invalid warrant.”

Thomas and Ouseley brazenly dismissed these arguments, stating, “The Court rejected Mr Assange’s contention that under the law of England and Wales consent to sexual intercourse on condition a condom was used remained consent to sexual intercourse even if a condom was not used or removed.”

They add, “The Court considered the issue of Offence 4 [the alleged rape] and ruled that the conduct described in the EAW was fairly and accurately reported.” (The full ruling can be read here: http://www.judiciary.gov.uk/Resources/JCO/Documents/Judgments/assange-judgment.pdf.)

The EAW was also challenged on the basis that Assange does not have the status of an accused person as he has not been charged with any offence, and a warrant cannot be used for the purposes of questioning someone.

The judges dismissed this. After acknowledging that “In the present case, as is accepted there is nothing on the face of the EAW which states in terms that Mr Assange is accused of the offences”, they continued, “The fact that the term ‘accused of the offence’ is not used does not matter if it is clear from the EAW that he was wanted for prosecution and not merely for questioning.”

Assange also argued that the EAW was “disproportionate”, as he had fully cooperated with the Swedish authorities when the allegations were first made. Within days, the senior prosecutor in Stockholm had thrown the case out as worthless, and only after the intervention of a prominent right-wing Social Democratic politician and lawyer was the case resurrected. The appellant’s legal team said that Assange would willingly undergo questioning over a video link or by other means.

Again, these arguments were dismissed. Essentially ruling that if the Swedish authorities are after Assange, they should be able to get him without hindrance, the judgement continued, “The Prosecutor must be entitled to seek to apply the provisions of Swedish law to the procedure once it has been determined that Mr Assange is an accused and is required for the purposes of prosecution.”

The judges dismissed Assange’s offer to answer questions without travelling to Sweden, stating, “In any event, we were far from persuaded that other procedures suggested on behalf of Mr Assange would have proved practicable or would not have been the subject of lengthy dispute.”

The decision again underscores the reactionary and arbitrary basis of the EAW system. In February, Assange described the High Court’s proceedings as a “rubber stamping process” and the “result of a European arrest warrant system run amok.”

Speaking after the court hearing, Assange said, “I have not been charged with any crime in any country. Despite this, the European Arrest Warrant is so restrictive that it prevents UK courts from considering the facts of the case, as judges have made clear here today.”

Enacted by the European Union in 2003 as part of the so-called “war on terror”, EAWs are now routinely used to extradite people to any EU country without due consideration of the facts of the case against them. Three people are extradited every day from the UK alone on EAWs. Julian Knowles, an extradition lawyer at London’s Matrix Chambers, who is familiar with the Assange case, said that prior to the High Court ruling, “Very, very few people defeat a European Arrest Warrant. The courts in England generally lean in favour of extradition.”

The legal lynching of Assange is part of a strategy by the ruling elite to destroy WikiLeaks. The High Court judges ordered that Assange pay court costs of £19,000. His lawyers indicated that the WikiLeaks founder might not be able to pay them.

As the result of a financial blockade by major US financial institutions—VISA, MasterCard, PayPal, Western Union and Bank of America—WikiLeaks has been unable to receive the donations that allowed it to function. WikiLeaks stated recently that “The attack has blocked over 95 percent of our donations, costing tens of millions of dollars in lost revenue,” adding that the “attack is entirely political.”

Last week, WikiLeaks was finally forced to suspend publication and issued a statement reading, “For almost a year we have been fighting an unlawful financial blockade. We cannot allow giant US finance companies to decide how the whole world votes with its pocket. Our battles are costly. We need your support to fight back. Please donate now.”

WikiLeaks is able to receive donations here: http://shop.wikileaks.org/donate

By Robert Stevens

3 November 2011

WSWS.org

Robert Stevens is a WSWS.org writer

The legislation, which includes sanctions against Iran’s Central Bank and strict curbs on official diplomatic contacts between Washington and Tehran, was approved unanimously by voice vote of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives.

The Committee chairperson and major sponsor of the legislation, Florida Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, said she hoped the whole House and the Senate would act quickly on the two bills so that their enactment would “hand the Iranian regime a nice holiday present”, presumably a reference to the Christmas holidays.

But lobbyists on Capitol Hill predicted that the Democratic-led Senate would be unlikely to act until after the New Year and that, barring any major new crisis between Tehran and Washington, the legislation’s more radical provisions would eventually be watered down.

Still, the fact that such draconian legislation is making headway in Congress is likely to further stoke rising tensions in the region, particularly in the wake of U.S. accusations last month that “elements” of Iran’s government plotted to assassinate the Saudi ambassador here and simmering press speculation that the government of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is actively considering an attack on Tehran’s nuclear facilities.

Indeed, Israel’s test-firing Wednesday of a long-range ballistic missile – the first such test in more than three years – appeared designed to heighten the speculation. The fact that the test was overseen by Defence Minister Ehud Barak, who, along with Netanyahu, is reported to favour an attack, did nothing to dispel that notion, despite denials by the government.

According to some observers here, the war talk in Jerusalem may be intended primarily to encourage lawmakers here to support the strongest possible sanctions legislation, which Netanyahu has repeatedly called for over the last several years.

“My guess is that this sudden campaign on the part of the Israelis is intended to scare the U.S. and the Europeans into a very strong diplomatic and economic response when the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) report providing additional information on Iran’s weaponisation activities comes out next week,” said Barry Blechman, a nuclear proliferation expert at the Stimson Center here.

“The bluster on military strikes tends to coincide with periods in which new sanctions are considered,” noted Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, which opposed the legislation approved by the Foreign Affairs Committee.

“The Israelis push this on the U.S. and the EU (European Union) by arguing that, absent new strong sanctions, Israel will be ‘forced’ to do strikes, and the U.S. then uses that argument to push sanctions on other states in and outside of the (U.N. Security Council). We’ve seen this pattern several times before,” said Parsi, author of an award-winning 2007 book, “Treacherous Alliance”, on the history of secret dealings between the U.S., Israel and Iran since 1979.

If that indeed was Israel’s intent, it seems to have succeeded in the House Committee where Democrats joined Republicans in expressing the need to punish Tehran.

The first bill, the Iran, North Korea and Syria Nonproliferation Reform and Modernization Act, would impose penalties against any individual or company – foreign as well as domestic – that has facilitated the transfer of equipment that could be used in Iran’s nuclear programme. It also would bar access to the U.S. of any vessels that have visited ports of any of the three countries in the last two years.

The second bill, the Iran Threat Reduction Act, is more comprehensive.

Among other provisions, it would sharply reduce the president’s authority to waive existing sanctions against any individual, company or country doing business with Iran; expand existing sanctions against companies that sell Iran refined petroleum to include any barter transactions; and impose sanctions against any individual, company or country that conducts a transaction with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which is believed to control as much as 40 percent of the Iran’s national economy.

Three last-minute additions to the bill also attracted special notice.

One provision would eliminate the president’s authority to waive, for humanitarian reasons, sanctions against companies that sell spare parts or repair services to Iran’s civilian aircraft industry, which has suffered more than 1,000 deaths in plane crashes over the past decade, in major part due to faulty or worn-out equipment.

A second provision would ban any contact between any person employed by the U.S. government and any Iranian official or agent unless the president certifies to Congress at least 15 days in advance that a failure to make such a contact “would pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the vital national security interests of the United States”.

“If enacted, this legislation …would prevent any exploration of ways to resolve disagreement over that Iranian nuclear program that we are supposedly so intensely concerned about,” wrote Paul Pillar, the U.S. intelligence community’s top Near East analyst from 2000 to 2005, on his blog on the nationalinterest.org website.

“…And it would prevent any diplomacy to keep U.S.-Iranian incidents or crises …from spinning out of control, unless the crisis conveniently stretched out beyond the fifteen-day notification period,” he added, noting that the nuclear stand-off between the U.S. and the Soviet Union during the Oct 1962 Cuban missile crisis lasted 13 days.

“It is impossible to imagine any purpose being served by such a provision other than enabling politicians to express once again how much they hate Iran and how implacable they are willing to be toward Iran,” noted Pillar, who now teaches at Georgetown University.

A third provision would require the president to determine within 30 days of the bill’s enactment whether Iran’s central bank is supporting the country’s alleged biological, chemical, nuclear, missile, or advanced conventional weapons programmes, supporting the IRGC, or aiding international terrorism.

If such a determination were made, the president would then be required to ban any foreign bank that does significant business with Iran’s central bank from engaging in economic activity in the U.S.

Even Washington’s European allies are known to have serious reservations about such a far-reaching step, which, administration officials have quietly warned, would almost certainly be challenged by Russia, China, and other major emerging countries, as well as provoke a nationalist response in Iran that would strengthen more hard-line factions.

“Today’s actions by the House Foreign Affairs Committee to legislate even more draconian, extraterritorial and unilateral sanctions on Iran …fly in the face of facts on the ground, the demonstrable failure of previous sanctions to achieve their stated purpose, and the basic rules of diplomacy among nations,” said Bill Reinsch, president of the National Foreign Trade Council, a business association representing U.S. and foreign multinational corporations here.

“The Committee’s approach would foreclose any constructive engagement by the administration and put the United States on a forced march to counter-productive confrontation,” he added.

By Jim Lobe

03 November 2011

Inter Press Service

Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

On October 23 rd of this year, President Cristina Fernandez won re-election receiving 54% of the vote, 37 percentage points higher than her nearest opponent.  The President’s coalition also swept the Congressional, Senatorial, Gubernatorial elections as well as 135 of the 136 municipal councils of Greater Buenos Aires.  In sharp contrast President Obama, according to recent polls is trailing leading Republican Presidential candidates and is likely to lose control of both houses of Congress in the upcoming 2012 election.  What accounts for the monumental difference in voter preferences of incumbent presidents?  A comparative historical discussion of socio-economic and foreign policies as well as responses to profound economic crises is at the center of any explanation of the divergent results.

Methodology

In comparing the performance of Fernandez and Obama it is necessary to locate them in an historical context.  More specifically, both presidents and their immediate predecessors , George Bush in the US and Nestor Kirchner (deceased husband of Fernandez) in Argentina confronted major economic and social crises . What is telling, however, are the diametrically opposing responses to the crises and the divergent results.  On the one hand sustained growth with equity in Argentina and deepening crises and failed policies in the US .

Historical Context:  Argentina :  Depression, Revolt and Recovery

Between 1998 – 2002, Argentina experienced the worse socio-economic crises in its history.  The economy nose-dived from recession to full scale depression, culminating in double digit negative growth in 2001 – 2002.  Unemployment reached over 25% and in many working class neighborhoods, over 50%.  Tens of thousands of impoverished middle class professional lined up to receive bread and soup only blocks away from the Presidential palace.  Hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers, ‘ piqueteros'(picketers), blocked major highways and some raided trains shipping cattle and grain overseas.  Banks closed depriving millions of depositors of their savings.  Millions of middle class protestors organized radical neighborhood councils and linked up with unemployed assemblies.  The country was heavily indebted, the people deeply impoverished.  The popular mood was moving toward a revolutionary uprising.  Incumbent President Fernando De la Rua was overthrown (2001) scores of protestors were killed and wounded, as a popular rebellion threatened to seize the Presidential palace.  By the end of 2002, hundreds of bankrupt factories were ‘occupied’, taken over and run by workers.  Argentina defaulted on its external debt.  In early 2003, Nestor Kirchner was elected President, in the midst of this systemic crisis and proceeded to reject efforts to enforce debt payment or repress the popular movements.  Instead he inaugurated a series of emergency public works programs.  He authorized payments to unemployed workers (150 pesos per month) to meet the basic needs of nearly half the labor force.

The most popular slogan, of the multitudinous movements occupying the financial districts, factories, public buildings and the streets was “ Que se vayan todos ” (“All politicians get out’).  The entire political class, parties and leaders, Congress and presidents were rejected outright.  But while the movements were vast, militant and united in what they rejected , they had no coherent program for taking state power, nor national political leadership to lead them.  After two years of turmoil, the populace turned to the ballot box and elected Kirchner with a mandate to produce or perish.  Kirchner heard the message, at least the part which demanded growth with equity.

Context:  The US under Bush-Obama

The last years of the Bush administration and the Obama presidency presided over the worse socio-economic crises since the Great Depression of the 1930’s.  Unemployment and underemployment rose to almost a third of the labor force by 2009.  Millions of homes were foreclosed.  Bankruptcies multiplied and banks were on the verge of collapse.  Negative growth rates and a sharp decline in income, increased poverty and multiplied the number of food stamp recipients.  Unlike Argentina , discontented citizens took to the ballot box.  Attracted by the demagogic “change” rhetoric of Obama, they placed their hopes in the new president. The Democrats won the Presidency and a majority in both houses of Congress.  The first priority of Obama and Congress was to pour trillions of dollars in bailing out the banks, even as unemployment deepened and the recession continued.  Their second priority was to deepen and expand overseas imperial wars.

Obama increased the number of troops in Afghanistan by 30,000; expanded the military budget to $750 billion dollars; launched new military operations in Somalia , Yemen , Libya , Pakistan and elsewhere; augmented military aid to Israeli colonial armed forces; signed military pacts with Asian countries ( India , Philippines , Australia ) proximate to China .

In sum Obama gave maximum priority to expanding the militarized empire, depleting the public treasury of funds to finance the recovery of the domestic economy and reducing unemployment.

In contrast, Kirchner/Fernandez curtailed the power of the military, cut military spending and channeled state revenues toward employment programs, productive investments and non-traditional exports.

Under Obama the crises became an opportunity to revive and consolidate the financial power of Wall Street .  The White House augmented the military budget to expand imperial wars by deepening the budget deficit and then proposed to cut essential social programs to ‘reduce the deficit’.

Argentina from Crises to Dynamic Growth

In Argentina the economic catastrophe and popular uprising provided Kirchner with an opportunity to bring about a basic shift from militarism and speculative pillage to social programs and sustained economic growth .

The electoral victories of both Kirchner and Fernandez reflect their success in creating a ‘normal’ capitalist welfare state .  After 30 years of US backed predator neo-liberal regimes, this was a great positive change.  Between 1966 and 2002, Argentina suffered brutal military dictatorships culminating in the genocidal generals who murdered 30,000 Argentines from 1976to 1982.  From 1983to 1989 Argentina ‘s suffered under a neo-liberal regime (Raul Alfonsin) which failed to deal with the dictatorial legacy and which presided over triple digit hyper-inflation.  From 1989 – 1999 under President Carlos Menem Argentina witnessed the biggest sell-off of its most lucrative public firms, natural resources (petrol included), banks, highways, zoo and public toilets to foreign investors and kleptocratic cronies for bargain basement prices.

Last but not least, Fernando De la Rua (2000 – 2001), promised change and proceeded to deepen the recession that led to the final catastrophic crash of December 2001 and the closing of the banks, the bankruptcy of 10,000 firms and the collapse of the economy.

Against this background of total and unmitigated failure and the human disaster of US – IMF promoted “free-market” policies, Kirchner/Fernandez defaulted on the external debt, re-nationalized several privatized firms and  the pension funds, intervened the banks and doubled social spending, expanded public investment in production and increased popular consumption, on the road to economic recovery.  By the end of 2003 Argentina turned from negative to 8% growth.

Human Rights, Social Programs and Independent Foreign Economic Policy

Argentina ‘s economy has grown over 90% from 2003 – 2011, over three times that of the United States . Its recovery has been accompanied by a tripling of social spending, especially on programs reducing poverty.  The percentage of poor Argentines has declined from over 50% in 2001 to less than 15% in 2011.  In contrast US poverty has risen over the same decade from 12% to 17% and is on an upward trajectory over the same period.

The US has become the country with the greatest inequalities in the OECD with 1% controlling 40% of the country’s wealth, (up from 30% in less than a decade).  In contrast, Argentina ‘s inequalities have shrunken by half.  The US economy has failed to recover from the deep recession of 2008-2009, during which it declined by over 8%.  In contrast Argentina declined less than 1% in 2009, and has been growing at a healthy 8% (2010-2011).  Argentina has nationalized pension funds, doubled basic pensions and introduced a universal child welfare program to counter malnutrition and guarantee school attendance.

In contrast 20% of children in the US are now suffering from poor diets, drop-out rates are increasing for adolescents and malnutrition affects over 25% of minority children.  With more social cuts in health/education under way, social conditions can only worsen.  In Argentina the income of wage and salaried workers has increased over 50% over the decade in real terms, while in the US they have declined by nearly 10%.

Argentina ‘s dynamic growth of GNP has been fueled by growing domestic consumption and dynamic export earnings.  Argentina has a consistent large trade surplus based on favorable market prices and increased competitiveness.  In contrast domestic consumption has stagnated in the US , the trade deficit is close to $1.5 trillion dollars and revenues are wasted on non-productive military expenditures of over $900 billion a year.

While in Argentina the impulse for a policy of default with growth came about because of a popular rebellion and mass movements, in the US popular discontent was channeled toward the election of a Wall Street financial con-man named Obama.  He proceeded to pour resources into rescuing the financial elite instead of letting them go bankrupt and funding growth, competitiveness and social consumption.

The Argentine Alternative to Bailouts and Poverty

The Argentine experience goes counter to all the precepts of the international financial agencies (the IMF, World Bank), their political backers, and publicists in the financial press.  From the first year (2003) of Argentina ‘s recovery to the present, the economic experts have “predicted” that its growth was “not sustainable” – it has continued robustly for over a decade.  The financial writers claimed the default would lead to Argentina being shut out of financial markets and that its economy would collapse.  Argentina relied on self-financing based on export earnings and re-activation of the domestic economy and confounded the prestigious economists.

As growth continued, the critics in the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal claimed it would end once “unused capacity was exhausted”.  Instead growth earnings financed the expansion of the domestic market and created new capacity for growth especially to new markets in Asia and Brazil .

Even as late as October 25, 2011, Financial Times columnists still prattle about “the coming crises” in the manner of messianic fundamentalists who predict the pending apocalypse.  They harp on “high inflation”, “unsustainable social programs”, “overvalued currency”, and more predictions of “the end of prosperity”.  All these dire warnings occur  in the face of continued growth of 8% in 2011 and the overwhelming electoral victory of President Fernandez.. Anglo-American financial scribes should focus on the demise of their free market regimes in Europe and North America instead of denigrating an economic experience from which they might learn.

In refutation of the Wall Street critics, Mark Weisbrot and his associates point out (“The Argentina Success Story”, Center for Economic Bad Policy Research, Oct. 2011) that Argentina ‘s growth was based on the expansion of domestic consumption, increased manufacturing exports to regional trading partners as well as traditional agro-mineral exports to Asia .  In other words Argentina is not totally dependent on primary exports; it has balanced trade and is not over dependent on commodity prices.  In regard to high inflation, Weisbrot points out that “inflation may be high in Argentina but it is real growth and income distribution that matter with regard to the well-being of the vast majority of population”, (page 14) (my emphasis).

The US under Bush-Obama has pursued a totally perverse and divergent path to that of Kirchner-Fernandez.  They have prioritized military spending and expanded the security apparatus over the productive economy.  Obama and Congress have vastly increased the police state apparatus, reinforced their political influence over regressive budgetary policies while increasingly violating human and civil rights.  In contrast Kirchner/Fernandez have prosecuted dozens of human rights violators in the military and police and weakened the military’s political power.

In other words the Argentine Presidents have weakened the militarist pressure bloc which demands greater arms and security expenditures. They created a state more accommodative to their political project of financing economic competitiveness, new markets and social programs.  Bush-Obama revived the parasitical financial sector further unbalancing the economy.  Kirchner/Fernandez ensured that the banking sector financed the growth of the export sector, manufactures and domestic consumption.  Obama slashes social consumption to pay creditors.  Kirchner-Fernandez imposed a 75% “haircut” on bondholders in order to finance social spending.

Kirchner-Fernandez have won three presidential elections, each by a larger margin.  Obama may be a one-term president, even with the billion dollar campaign funding from Wall Street, the military industrial complex and the pro-Israel power configuration.

The popular opposition to Obama, especially the “ Occupy Wall Street movement ” has a long way to go to emulate the success of the Argentine movements that rousted incumbent presidents, blocked highways paralyzing production and circulation and imposed a social agenda that prioritized production over finance, social consumption over military expenditures.  The “Occupy Wall Street Movement” has taken a first step toward mobilizing millions of active participants necessary to creating the social muscle that turned Argentina from a US style client state into a dynamic independent welfare state.

By James Petras

31 October 2011

Countercurrents.org

James Petras is the author of more than 62 books published in 29 languages, and over 600 articles in professional journals.

In Beirut, I attend their events and was honored to play a small part in assisting with last spring’s AI research on the subject of disappeared Palestinians and Lebanese which resulted in AI’s excellent April, 2011 publication: Never Forgotten: Lebanon’s Missing People. This report documents one of the bitter legacies of the 1975-1990 civil war which is the thousands of people whose fates remain unknown.

I have crossed paths with AI researchers in the Middle East and recently during three months in Libya I followed their work which included the human rights problems of black Libyans, particularly from the Tawagha region but also in eastern and western Libya where blacks were often taken from hospitals never to be seen again.

AI rightly condemned the number of massacres and extra-judicial killings perpetrated by both pro-Gadhafi and NTC partisans, many of which, like the 53 recently executed Gadhafi supporters found at the Mahari Hotel in Sirte involved the kidnapping and murder of patients in hospitals. These grisly scenes have shocked the world’s conscience and all people of goodwill condemn them. They weaken substantially the moral authority of the group currently claiming power in Libya.

Despite its generally exemplary work, Amnesty International, like the rest of us, in not infallible.

This is evident in its 10/25/11 released 39 page report: Health Crisis: Syrian Government Targets the Wounded and Health Workers.

AI’s conclusion from its “research” in Syria, which consisted significantly of collecting Al Jazeera and Al Arabia type media accounts including the dubious reports on the same subject by CNN’s Arwa Damon, and sundry anonymous U-tube clips is virtually identical to what it concluded from its investigation in Libya on the same subject.

However, there is a great distinction between Syria and Libya, their medical professions and their current challenges.

AI claims this week, without convincing material, probative or relevant evidence that Syrian authorities, including Hospital administrators and staff, have since March 2011 turned Syrian hospital into instruments of repression in order to crush protests and demonstrations.

AI’s report claims that Syrian citizens wounded in protests or incidents related to the current unrest “have been physically assaulted in state-run hospitals by medical staff, and in some cases denied medical care, while others taken to hospital have been detained or have simply disappeared.”

AI offers as its proof of these claims the weakest and seemingly most competition-driven support of any Amnesty International reports I have read. It reeks of yet another orientalist double standard and ignores similar claims from citizens in western countries of similar actions by their governments.

This observer recently had the opportunity to visit with administrators and medical staff at some of Syria’s largest state-run Ministry of Health hospitals (Syria also has Higher Education Hospitals for university students and Ministry of Defense Hospitals, the latter being roughly equivalent to American Veterans Hospitals for the military,) which is Damascus General Hospital, established in 1952. Damascus Hospital sees approximately 800 patients daily and is one of 90 hospitals belonging to the Ministry of Hearth that together serve all of Syria with 14, 571 beds.

Among those I had the opportunity to meet with at Damascus Public Hospital and to discuss issues raised by Amnesty International were Dr. Mahmoud Naji (damahosp@mail.sy) who is the Director of the Emergency Department and Intensive Care Unit at Damascus Hospital and Dr. Adib Mahmoud, (damahosp@mail.sy), Damascus Hospital administrator.

Both the Syria Medical Emergency Association, of which Dr.Naji is a representative and the Syrian Medical Association, have large memberships with the reputation of being fiercely independent of and resistant to outside influences.

At the same time they have achieved individual treatment and medical ethics standards that help make Syria’s medical services the highest rated in the Middle East.

Amnesty qualifies its findings with complaints that it did not have access to Syrian hospital staff, and that it wanted to protect its “witnesses” by withholding some specifics such as time, place, and circumstances of alleged wrongdoing by members the Syrian medical community, as well as the unwillingness of alleged victims of abuse to come forward.

For their part, Syrian medical staff, more than two dozen I met individually with, complained to this observer that AI’s Report is deeply flawed and that in fact Syrian hospitals welcome foreign visitors for tours and dialogue with all questions honestly addressed. Syria’s medical profession has justifiably taken umbrage at what it considers, as one Physician described, “Amnesty International’s “gratuitous defamation of Syria’s medical community.”

According to Amnesty’s report, but without providing convincing collaborative evidence, wounded patients in at least four government-run hospitals had been subjected to torture and other ill-treatment, both by medical workers and security personnel.

AI’s charges that Syrian medical staff humiliate or refuse to treat patients brought laughter from some care givers at Damascus Hospital, as they explained the strict procedure they abide by from the moment a patient arrives at the emergency entrance.

“We treat each patient to the best of our ability and we are strictly forbidden from questioning them about the circumstances of their injury,” Dr. Mahmoud Naji explained.

This observer was invited to literally follow arriving emergency room patients as they were admitted and treated and until they were assigned a bed in the appropriate ward.

A nurse, who was filling out a patient’s medical forms noted, “In certain cases if there was an auto accident, for example, and an injured person arrives while the accident is being investigated then we could contact authorities. However, our patient privacy rules are very strict in Syria and we can only ask medical and certainly not political questions, “according to one ER intern as she took the blood pressure of an arriving young woman who complained of stomach cramps.

One Physician who had trained at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston explained, “ I am sure there must be some abuse and especially in the middle of an area where there is fighting, but I have personally never heard of any physician or medical personnel doing what some Western media have alleged without submitting proof. He continued, “Do police officers sometimes come to the hospital? Yes but it’s like what you would see, for example, in America on a week-end night at the emergency room in maybe the 200 largest cities., isn’t it?

When I was training in Boston and with all that goes on in the early hours of the morning in big cities, one sees more police cars outside emergency rooms than ambulances.

While it’s not like that here, the police presumably sometimes have reason to suspect that a crime may have been committed and the arriving injured person might be the victim or the perpetrator and an officer has the duty to complete a police report. I believe it’s similar anywhere isn’t it?”

Another Dr. commented, “And yes, our medical profession has been criticized along with our government because it is claimed by some that some injured people may not want to come to our hospital thinking we might report them to the police. We will not. Does that not also happen in every society?

Someone is injured while doing something wrong or criminal and they are afraid of being arrested so they seek alternative treatment from friends or private clinics. Yes, that sometimes happens in our country. Every citizen can choose where they seek treatment.”

This observer also toured Syria’s Al Mouwasat government hospital, which like all government hospital in Syria is free to all, and met at length with a variety of staff just as AI could have and still can. It is Syria’s oldest and largest and has received dozens of patients over the past six months who had been injured during anti-government demonstrations.

Al Mouwasat, with approximately 850 beds was founded in 1946, the year the French occupiers left. 1946 was also the year US President Harry Truman promised to “take on that mean trust-the American Medical Association” and enact free health care for all Americans. Nearly 66 years later the gap between Syria and the US in terms of civilized and affordable medical care for its citizens is vast.

I participated in briefings from several physicians and staff including the Hospital administrator, physicians and nurses. We discussed at length any subject I raised including AI accusations. 

Among those who discussed rumors that some Syrian medical staff refused treatment or reported to authorities or intimidated patients were surgeon Dr. Osama Yousef Shahin, Dr. Ayham Obied vascular surgeon, Dr. Imad Alasha, Director of the ER Department, and ER surgeon Dr. D. Shadia as well as Mouwasat hospital’s Administrator and various staff.

All can be contacted directly, by AI or others, via the hospital email address which is info@almouwasat and arrangements can be made for visitors to come and see for themselves.

One doctor who appeared a bit offended by AI type accusations even offered to request from among scores of current or former patients their permission to provide AI with their phone numbers so they could discuss privately AI’s sweeping and unsupported allegations against the Syrian Medical community including the charge that they work in cooperation with various militias but also with government security services.

Dr. Alusha explained: “A few casualties from May are still hospitalized and others even come from “field hospitals” set up by opponents of the government. We do not ask them anything about where they received earlier treatment or their political views. We have not seen any of the claimed patient betrayal events described in some western media reports.”

Al Mouwasat has 4 ER operating theatres and routinely does about 50 operations per day. As with other hospitals visited, May 2011 was the most active month recently for Syria’s ER departments which are always open 24/7 with no cost to any patient, domestic or foreign.

Al Mouwasat hospital, like Damascus General Hospital and others, has received patients from Deraa, Homs, Hama, Idlib, and other communities according to Dr. Shahin who explained: “Any human being will be treated here without charge and without politics or the police being summoned and for as long as necessary until the patient regains good health. Jewish patients are also welcomed and while our government does not recognize the legitimacy of Israel, Israeli citizens will receive the same care as everyone else. Just yesterday we received Lebanese from the Bekaa Valley with gunshot wounds. They come here because our care is of high quality and it’s free ever for foreigners and without political complications. We specialize also in Total Parenteral Nutrition (TPN) which attracts patients from across Syria and abroad. I think I speak for almost every Syrian medical person what I insist that we are doctors and care givers with a variety of political views which we leave at home. We comply with our Hippocratic Oath which we take seriously.”

According to Syria’s Ministry of Health, it has not received any complaint to date, either from the patients or from their relatives about maltreatment or political pressure.

In its Report: “Health Crisis: The Syrian Government Targets the Wounded and Health Workers,” Amnesty International falls significantly below an objective standard and fails to shoulder its burden of proof for the charges it levels at Syria’s medical community.

The fact that AI appears to have been somewhat lazy in its work and continues hyping its deeply flawed “investigation” is egregious.

AI also failed to meet the standard of investigative work that we who will continue to support and endorse its human rights work expect from it.

By Franklin Lamb

31 October 2011

Countercurrents.org