Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef and poet-philosopher of the ecological movement, Derrick Jensen on Democracy Now!
The dominant culture is killing the planet
Monthly Archives: November 2010
America the material
At truthdig, Nomi Prins reviews A Question of Values, by Morris Berman:
A Question of Values is an alternately sobering and inspiring collection of essays by noted historian and cultural critic Morris Berman. Berman pulls no punches in laying bare the truths about who we are, not just as a nation, but also as individuals wrapped up in the destructive pursuit of material excess. In the unswerving style of his other writings, he rips apart the national illusion of greatness.
The book is divided into four sections: “Lament for America,” “Mind and Body,” “Progress True and False” and “Quo Vadis?” (Where are you going?). Each part examines the American identity from a historical, spiritual, technological and alternative future perspective, respectively. Taken together, they ask the imperative questions: How did we get to this point, and how do we get out? Or will we? (Here being a country caught in a societal malaise of promoting external accumulation over internal compassion.) Taken together, the sections inspect our inner and outer fabric as a nation.
In Section I, the second essay, “Conspiracy vs. Conspiracy in American History,” Berman dissects America’s profound sense of self-importance, a central theme of the entire collection. He discusses how the “post-election euphoria in the United States over Barack Obama was nothing more than a bubble, an illusion, because the lion’s share of the $750 million he collected in campaign contributions” came from Wall Street. Thus, the fact that Obama proceeded to promise to rein in Wall Street’s excesses lay in stark and rather public contrast to his own connections with the banks.
This political sleight of hand is part of a larger problem for which Berman lists four descriptive conspiracies (or fallacies): First, that we are a chosen people (so we get to do whatever we want); second, that America itself is a kind of religion; third, that we must endlessly expand, whether it be geographically or financially; and, lastly, that our national character is composed of extreme individuals going back to our colonization. This he considers to be the main reason why “American history can be seen as the story of a nation consistently choosing individual solutions over collective ones.”
Nature doesn’t do bailouts
Johann Hari writes:
Why are the world’s governments bothering? Why are they jetting to Cancun next week to discuss what to do now about global warming? The vogue has passed. The fad has faded. Global warming is yesterday’s apocalypse. Didn’t somebody leak an email that showed it was all made up? Doesn’t it sometimes snow in the winter? Didn’t Al Gore get fat, or something?
Alas, the biosphere doesn’t read Vogue. Nobody thought to tell it that global warming is so 2007. All it knows is three facts. 2010 is globally the hottest year since records began. 2010 is the year humanity’s emissions of planet-warming gases reached its highest level ever. And exactly as the climate scientists predicted, we are seeing a rapid increase in catastrophic weather events, from the choking of Moscow by gigantic unprecedented forest fires to the drowning of one quarter of Pakistan.
Before the Great Crash of 2008, the people who warned about the injection of huge destabilizing risk into our financial system seemed like arcane, anal bores. Now we all sit in the rubble and wish we had listened. The great ecological crash will be worse, because nature doesn’t do bailouts.
Obama’s national security state
Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and adjunct professor of law at Columbia University Law School, interviewed by International Socialist Revew:
ISR: Let’s start with the Obama administration’s policies on habeas corpus and on torture. As a presidential candidate, Obama said he would close Guantánamo, said he believed in habeas corpus rights, and was critical of President Bush. What’s been his practice since he came to office?
Michael Ratner: My office, CCR, is one of the legal groups that represents many of the Guantánamo detainees and brings these writs of habeas corpus. That is a fancy way of saying, “Let’s go to court, and see if there’s any evidence to hold the person.” The expectations of the team of lawyers representing the detainees was very high that Guantánamo would actually close, that Obama would do it. There were probably a little over 300 people in Guantánamo when he took office. It’s down to maybe 200-some now. But we expected better—and now it may go on for years. We really thought that Obama wouldn’t fight us in court on the rights of the detainees, that he would get the detainees either to another country or he would charge and try them. And of course, it hasn’t worked out that way at all, and it’s a deep disappointment. In fact a lot of the habeas lawyers signed a letter supporting Obama saying his election would actually be good for our clients. Obama’s effort to close it seemingly got off to a somewhat quick start. Obama, within two days of being in office, signed an executive order, which is essentially a presidential order, which said that Guantánamo would be closed in a year. Of course, as we speak now, it’s more than a year and a half after that order, and it is not near closed. Obama’s commitment has been abandoned. And he made a number of other promises that have not been met about secret detention sites, military commissions, and the like.
Obama has put new clothes on the Bush doctrine toward “enemy combatants,” but the underlying lawlessness of the doctrine is the same. In particular, imagine this: you go to court on behalf of someone in Guantánamo, and the judge has to decide whether there is sufficient evidence to hold him. What Bush said was they can be held as “enemy combatants,” and he gave the term a vague definition, such as that the person was hostile to the United States or picked up arms against the United States or belonged to a group that was hostile to the United States. If there was “evidence” those detainees could be held in prison indefinitely, essentially a form of preventive detention. We had hoped Obama would get rid of that entire preventive detention scheme. CCR’s view is there should not be a preventive detention scheme—it’s illegal and immoral. What you must do, and what is legally necessary, is to charge someone with a crime, and hold them only if they’re convicted. The rule is simple: charge and try people with crimes, or release them. There are not any other valid legal choices.
I considered this preventive detention scheme to be one of the worst hallmarks of the Bush administration. Sadly, this intolerable preventive detention scheme has continued, and you could say continued with a vengeance, under Obama.
The misunderestimation of Sarah Palin
In The Nation, Melissa Harris-Perry writes:
I assigned Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue in my course on women in contemporary US media and politics. I spent the week walking around town, riding the train and dashing through airports with the book tucked under my arm. “Isn’t she awesome?” gushed a waitress in a New Jersey restaurant. My seatmate on a flight to Louisiana smiled knowingly and whipped out her copy of Decision Points. On my way to California a guy in a University of Alaska sweatshirt nearly threw himself across the aisle to chat with me. It was a camaraderie with perfect strangers that I once evoked by wearing my Obama sweatshirt.
I expected my Princeton students—mostly young women, self-identified as liberal and feminist and actively engaged in local and national politics—to be critical of Palin. But although they found her authorial voice irritatingly self-assured and disagreed with her policy conclusions, they also found her surprisingly compelling. They thoughtfully drew parallels between her nontraditional (dare I say mavericky?) career choices and those of Hillary Clinton, whose Living History we read the same week.
I pushed my personal Palin test one step further by watching Sarah Palin’s Alaska with my 8-year-old daughter. My kid’s dislike of Palin is pure, instinctive and content-free. It’s not as though she has well-formed policy positions; she just knows that Palin was an opponent to be vanquished. Born in Hyde Park, my daughter learned to read “Obama” as her first word, because it was plastered on signs all over our neighborhood in 2004. My kid accompanied me to campaign events throughout 2008 and has heard many kitchen table commentaries railing against Palin and the Tea Party. But twenty minutes into the first episode, she was transfixed. She loved watching the baby bears. She was jealous that Palin had a studio in her house: “Mom, can’t you get one from MSNBC?” She cracked up with hand-clapping hysteria as the mountain-scaling Palin shouted, “I was never a gymnast or a cheerleader!” At the end my kid declared, “I know we don’t agree with her, but her life sure is interesting.”
Andrew Sullivan believes America won’t buy Palinism and in response to her Facebook mockery of Obama gaffes says: “A simple respect for the office she seeks would not reflect itself in these increasingly callow, sarcastic, cheap jibes at a sitting president.”
Really? Whoever is Obama’s opponent in 2012, I doubt they’ll refrain from taking cheap jibes at this president.
The “misunderstimation” of Palin has, I suspect, much more to do with the fact that those who view her with contempt have a hard time accepting the idea that they live in a country where she could be popular.
Crisis on the Korean peninsula or business as usual?
Vice Marshal Ri Yong Ho flanked by Kim Jong Un and Kim Jong Il
Steven Borowiec writes:
South Korean officials promised “enormous retaliation” if more North Korean attacks follow the shelling Tuesday of tiny Yeonpyeong island. For more than one reason, they can be glad that hasn’t happened.
To match the North’s aggression would cause a destructive conflict; to do nothing is to appear weak. A taxi driver in Seoul told me North Korea would never have attacked if the South still had a strong leader, like one-time military dictator Park Chung-hee. The driver said policies of engagement with the North had made the South into a pushover, a country that can be attacked without fear of serious retaliation. Nowadays, it seems everyone has a theory on how to handle North Korea.
Regardless, some things are fairly clear. To justify its military-first regime, North Korea always needs fresh evidence that the outside world wishes ill on the country. Its leaders need to present some acceptable reason why so many North Koreans are starving.
According to North Korea expert Brian Myers, “If the U.S. and South Korea cannot do anything for fear of Seoul coming under attack, and are foolish enough to make this line of reasoning public, then a future ‘provocation’ is merely a matter of time.”
Twenty-something Kim Jong Un is expected to take over leadership from his aging father soon, but the training wheels aren’t off yet. Some consider the North Korean attack a kind of practice for the young Kim, a way to demonstrate experience in dealing with conflict.
Myers plays down that angle: “I don’t like the current Western journalist habit of attributing NK’s every show of belligerence to the succession dynamic. It implies that things will change in the future once Kim Jong Un is settled in. I don’t consider that likely; when you are a military-first state you have to keep flexing your muscles on the world stage.”
The succession narrative invests too much significance in personality politics: the idea that a kind of rite of passage is playing out through which Kim Jong Un can demonstrate his capacity to be invested with the authority now possessed by his father. Yet as with all authoritarian regimes, the power of the state resides in the institution of the regime and the overriding interest of that institution is in its own continuity. Dynastic succession has less to do with a transfer of power than it has with maintaining the status quo.
The Sydney Morning Herald adds:
Behind North Korea’s cartoon dictator, handful of semi-functional nuclear weapons and threats of ”merciless” retaliation there is a desperate and exhausted nation that can barely concentrate beyond the next meal.
If there is any cause for reassurance after this week’s deadly attack on South Korean civilians and revelations that North Korea has a second nuclear program, it is that Kim Jong-il and his generals may be dangerous but there is little evidence they are collectively mad.
”Do you think the North Korean military is stupid enough to have a war with America?” says Park Syung-je, of the Asia Strategy Institute in Seoul. ”Do you think his son and others want suicide? I don’t think that is possible.”
North Korea has the world’s second-largest army with more than a million soldiers and nearly 5 million reservists, despite its population shrinking to just 23 million people after two decades of famine and malnutrition. But even within this privileged military strata soldiers are physically stunted, equipment is not maintained and even bullets are in short supply.
Cyber-con
In the London Review of Books, James Harkin writes:
Does Twitter have the power that is claimed for it? Some evidence from the contested Iranian election is presented in Death to the Dictator!, the first book-length account of the activist movement’s rise and fall. The book claims to be the work of an Iranian journalist writing under a pseudonym, and it mostly describes the experience of an (also pseudonymous) young man from Tehran who is swept up in the excitement and then arrested and tortured by the Basij militia. What starts out as a campaign alleging electoral fraud in support of a defeated politician quickly spirals into something more interesting: a chaotic uprising against the clerics and the Revolutionary Guards which, had it continued to spread and gather momentum, might have threatened the foundations of the Islamic Republic. Social media, however, play a minor role in Afsaneh Moqadam’s story, and an ambiguous one. At first the protesters are happy to use their mobiles to let each other know about upcoming rallies, and to share images of the demonstrations on YouTube. Soon, however, they grow wary of the rush of information. ‘Cellphone cameras, Facebook, Twitter, the satellite stations,’ the anonymous narrator complains: ‘The media are supposed to reflect what is going on, but they seem, in fact, to be making everything happen much faster. There’s no time to argue what it all means.’ Many come to believe that Western mobile phone companies have supplied the Iranian government with software to enable them to eavesdrop on their conversations. Some even fear that their mobiles have become bugging devices.
Before long the protagonist is urging his fellow activists not to bring their mobiles on demonstrations – if they lose them or drop them, they will be traced back to their owners. On one of the later demos, he notices someone surreptitiously taking pictures of himself and his fellow demonstrators on his mobile phone. Then he sees a photo of himself on a pro-government website that is soliciting help in identifying the troublemakers – a novel application of what internet gurus call ‘crowdsourcing’. It’s only after the crackdown on 20 June that the protesters retreat to their apartments to spend hours on the internet, sharing anti-filtering software and searching for scraps of news on Facebook, YouTube and reformist websites. And it’s now that the authorities clamp down hard: the internet is often blocked or so slow that it almost comes to a halt and the mobile network is often switched off, making it impossible to send texts. When service is finally restored, one semi-serious suggestion passed around among the activists is that they abandon the entire medium: ‘Boycott SMSs! That will cost the telecoms a packet!’
If Death to the Dictator! has little time for Twitter, that’s hardly surprising. When you look at the figures you realise that only a very small number of Iranians were using it. In 2009, according to a firm called Sysomos which analyses social media, there were 19,235 Twitter accounts in Iran – 0.03 per cent of the population. Researchers at al-Jazeera found only 60 Twitter accounts active in Tehran at the time of the demonstrations, which fell to six after the crackdown. There’s certainly a growing internet culture in Iran – in Blogistan, the media academics Annabelle Sreberny and Gholam Khiabany estimate that there are about 70,000 active blogs in the country, including a vibrant gay blogosphere – but it’s far from being the preserve of liberal reformists. Ahmadinejad’s supporters used Facebook and Twitter to spread his campaign messages while, on the other side, someone set up a Facebook group called ‘I bet I can find 1 million people who dislike Ahmadinejad’ (it had attracted 26,000 followers by April 2010). There’s little evidence, however, that any of this internet activity fuelled the street demonstrations; most were organised by word of mouth and text messages sent to friends. But the internet helped protesters bypass the state media and, for the few information-hungry Iranians who had it, Twitter allowed news to be sent out of the country when the authorities were blocking the mobile network. Even here, however, the global solidarity it bought for their cause might well have distracted them from the real work of reaching out to their fellow citizens.
It was more useful for the global media. ‘Twitter functioned mainly as a huge echo chamber of solidarity messages from global voices, that simply slowed the general speed of traffic,’ the authors of Blogistan conclude. On 16 June the authorities forbade journalists from covering the demonstrations without permission. Kicking their heels in their hotel rooms, most foreign correspondents began surfing through the blizzard of tweets and video clips to try and work out what was going on. But it was all difficult to verify, and a good part was tweeted from outside the country: to add to the chaos, many overseas sympathisers had changed their location to make it look as if they were in Iran. The point – perhaps – was to confuse the Iranian authorities by opening the information gates, but the flood of unverifiable tweets may have confused the protesters too. Some of what was sent around on Twitter – the news, for example, that Mousavi had been arrested – simply wasn’t true, so the movement’s high-profile foreign supporters were often retweeting rumour and disinformation from the comfort of their desktops. ‘Here, there is lots of buzz,’ the owner of a US-based activist site told the Washington Post. ‘But once you look … you see most of it is Americans tweeting among themselves.’
Iran tests its checks and balances
Jamsheed K. Choksy writes:
Casual Iran observers tend to portray the country’s most prominent political division as that between fundamentalist hard-liners and secular moderates. In reality, however, the struggle for Iran’s future is a three-way fight waged by the different branches of conservatives that control the parliament, the presidency, and the theocracy. The Green Movement may have stalled, but the parliamentary opposition to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has only grown stronger and more assertive over the past year — culminating in a recent push to charge the president with abuses of power warranting impeachment. Those efforts are coming to a halt under orders from Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who fears that the parliament’s attempt to assert itself against the president will also be at the expense of his own power base, the country’s conservative mullahs.
In fact, this isn’t the first round of infighting among Iran’s leaders. In July 2009, legislators warned Ahmadinejad that they would seek to oust him as the chief executive if he continued acting in an autocratic manner. Ahmadinejad responded by claiming the executive branch is the most important one of the government.
Ahmadinejad has also clashed with parliamentarians over his prerogative to influence the activities of the Central Bank. As financial hardships mount on common Iranians, in part due to mismanagement and in part from international sanctions, their elected representatives are blaming the president and his bureaucrats for the economy’s woes.
It’s a naked power struggle that has cloaked itself in ideology.
Israeli forces demolish mosque in a wave of West Bank demolitions
Joseph Dana reports:
Israeli forces demolished Palestinian homes in the Jordan Valley and the South Hebron Hills today in what seems as a wave of demolitions following yesterday’s demolitions all across the West Bank. Non-violent leaders from Beit Ummar have also been arrested in night raids. Grassroots organizers Mousa and Yousef Abu Maria were arrested from their homes as harassment continues in Beit Ummar
After carrying demolitions in the villages of Qarawat Bani Hassan near Salfeet, al-Jiftlik in the Jordan Valley and Hizma near Jerusalem yesterday, Israeli bulldozers returned to the Jordan Valley today. At 6:30 this morning, Israeli Civil Administration bulldozers accompanied by soldiers and armored military jeeps entered the Jordan Valley village of Khirbet Yarza, east of Tubas, and demolished the village’s mosque, a houses and four animal shelters. The demolitions rendered eleven people homeless.
Demolitions continued later in the morning in the South Hebron Hills village of al-Rifayaia, east of Yatta, where at 8:15 AM Israeli forces demolished a 250 meter house. The house was home to two families of twenty people, 16 of them minors.
“We will be with you until you are bankrupt and your economy collapses”
Daveed Gartenstein-Ross writes:
[In a March 2010 video, al Qaeda spokesman Adam] Gadahn put his finger on an important insight that AQAP [Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula] is now reiterating: Even failed attacks can help the jihadists by “bring[ing] major cities to a halt, cost[ing] the enemy billions, and send[ing] his corporations into bankruptcy.” Failed attacks, simply put, can themselves be successes. This is precisely why AQAP devoted an entire issue of Inspire to celebrating terror attempts that killed nobody.
A message making this point at length was posted to the Al-Fallujah Islamic forums in December 2009. The author mockingly addressed the security services monitoring the website, asking them to write the following in their reports:
A Very Serious Threat
Source: A Radical Islamist Forum
Warn them that they must protect every federal building and skyscraper, such as: Library Tower (California), Sears Tower (Chicago), Plaza Bank (Washington State), the Empire State Building (New York), suspension bridges in New York, and the financial district in New York.
Nightclubs frequented by Americans and the British in Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia (especially our dear Bali Island), the oil company owned by the former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in Sumatra (Indonesia), and US ships and oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, Gibraltar, and the Port of Singapore.
Let us not forget any airport, seaport, or stadium. Tell them to protect [these places] no matter the cost, day and night, around the clock.
The point is clear: Security is expensive, and driving up costs is one way jihadists can wear down Western economies. The writer encourages the United States “not to spare millions of dollars to protect these targets” by increasing the number of guards, searching all who enter those places, and even preventing flying objects from approaching the targets. “Tell them that the life of the American citizen is in danger and that his life is more significant than billions of dollars,” he wrote. “Hand in hand, we will be with you until you are bankrupt and your economy collapses.”
Unfortunately, the author, and the editors of Inspire, are all too right: The economics of this fight favor the terrorists, not those seeking to defend against terrorism.
America’s obsession with The Man
The American geopolitical prism is distorted in multiple ways, but none is more consistently evident than the strange idea that the actions of a nation can be understood simply by deciphering the thoughts and intentions of one man — even if we’re not always sure who The Man really is.
Iran — Ahmadinejad or Khamenei? North Korea — Kim Jong-il. Russia — Putin. Turkey — Erdogan. Syria — Bashar al-Assad. Egypt — Hosni Mubarak. Iraq — Saddam. Brazil — Lula. Venezuala — Chavez. Cuba — Castro. North Vietnam — Ho Chi Minh. South Africa — Mandela. Britain — Churchill. Germany — Hitler. Soviet Union — Stalin. China — Mao, Hu or who?
Reduce a nation to a single man and the task of understanding that nation’s cultural and political complexity will often be reduced to a question about how we deal with The Man.
Can he be trusted? Can he be befriended? Can he be bribed? Should he be kept at a distance? Does he need to be contained? Must he be killed?
For a few months in Afghanistan recently, Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour became The Man — a representative of the Taliban offering the US a ticket home. That man turned out to be an impostor, while the word is that the man with one eye and his fellow commanders have no interest in laying down their weapons:
Sayed Amir Muhammad Agha, a onetime Taliban commander who says he has left the Taliban but who acted as a go-between with the movement in the past, said in an interview that he did not know the tale of the impostor.
But he said the Taliban leadership had given no indications of a willingness to enter talks.
“Someone like me could come forward and say, ‘I am a Talib and a powerful person,’ ” he said. “But I can tell you, nothing is going on.”
“Whenever I talk to the Taliban, they never accept peace and they want to keep on fighting,” he said. “They are not tired.”
Where does this obsession with The Man come from? Faith in personal salvation through Jesus Christ? The institution of the regal American presidency? The religion of individualism?
Whatever its origin, it skews America’s relations with the world — a world in which individuals, even those regarded as the authors of history, both shape and mirror the societies, cultures and historical junctures within which they operate. It is that which they mirror, to which we give far too little account.
Impostor claiming to be Taliban leader was key to meetings coalition touted as mark of progress
The Wall Street Journal reports:
The revelation that an impostor passed himself off as a Taliban leader in Afghan peace talks called into question coalition reports of progress in the war, and illustrated how little the allies know of the insurgency’s top leaders and the difficulty that lack of knowledge presents for U.S. strategy.
The man, who claimed to be one of the highest-ranking members of the Taliban, held at least two meetings with Afghan President Hamid Karzai and other officials in recent months, officials said.
Senior coalition officers—U.S. Gen. David Petraeus, chief of coalition forces, foremost among them—had sought to portray the nascent peace talks as a sign that the one-two punch of American forces clearing territory and Special Operations forces targeting insurgent field commanders was wearing down the Taliban and pushing them to the negotiating table.
Those claims are now in question. Many Western officials have concluded that the peace process is making little progress and the Taliban are ready to fight on.
“The whole American academic world are racists and hypocrites when it comes to Palestinians”
Professor Francis Boyle slams his fellow academics for capitulating to the Israel lobby.
Boyle on “The impending collapse of Israel in Palestine.”
An American jolt for the Middle East
Chester Crocker, Scott Lasensky and Samuel W. Lewis propose that the US lays out its own set of principles for solving the Israeli-Arab conflict.
At a minimum, the American declaration should be based on the 1967 lines, with agreed territorial swaps; support a compromise on Jerusalem that allows for two capitals for two states; include provisions about security limitations and guarantees; reiterate America’s support for an agreed solution to the refugee problem; and reaffirm our long-standing commitment to the state of Israel. But American principles should also include some caveats, given that our ultimate interest is in an agreed, viable solution — not in any particular formula.
What would it take for American ideas to succeed? Unlike some past efforts, Washington should not try to “pre-cook” this declaration with one or more parties or to choreograph their reactions. In fact, the U.S. statement of principles would be explicitly described as what our own country believes in and can support; and by implication what it cannot support.
Thus the U.S. statement would not be designed to achieve immediate approval or adoption by the parties. Its purpose would be to clarify where America stands, how we define our interests and what we can work for. It would aim at influencing the climate of thinking in the region, sobering up those with illusions and encouraging those who need our support.
The authors here presuppose that the United States would be willing to display a level of autonomy from Israel that it has been incapable of demonstrating for many years. If such an initiative was taken, it would not only be momentous as an intervention but also because it could only be done by an administration that had truly unshackled itself from the Israel lobby.
US anticipates imminent nuclear test by North Korea
The Chosunilbo reports:
The U.S. Air Force moved a WC-135 Constant Phoenix reconnaissance jet from the U.S. mainland to the Kadena Air Base in Okinawa, in September in preparation for another nuclear test by North Korea, the Sankei Shimbun reported Tuesday.
The WC-135, a modified aircraft, is able to detect nuclear explosions from the air by collecting samples from the atmosphere. It was stationed in Okinawa about a month before North Korea carried out its second nuclear test in May 2009. Apparently the U.S. believes that another nuclear test is imminent after unusual movements were detected at the North’s test site.
Tim Shorrock: Direct talks with North Korea are the only answer to end Korean War
“The United States has only one choice in dealing with North Korea, even after its deadly artillery attack on a South Korean island,” writes Tim Shorrock, an investigative journalist who has covered Korea for more than 30 years. “Negotiate directly with its government, forge an agreement to end Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons program, and move towards a peace agreement to formally end the Korean War.” (Democracy Now!)
West Bank turning into a police state where torture is frequently used
American officials and journalists visiting the West Bank, if they are eager to boost the credibility of its unelected political leaders, like to speak about the professionalism of the Palestinian Authority’s security services. For instance, an aide to Hillary Clinton was recently quoted by Roger Cohen, saying:
[A]s we approached Ramallah there were these troops in berets. They were so professional, we thought at first they were Israel Defense Forces. But, no, they were Palestinians, this completely professional outfit, and it was clear this was something new.
What could be more inspiring — to a visitor from Washington — than Palestinians who looked like Israelis?
The Financial Times presents a much grimmer picture in which local human rights groups warn that a brutal regime is emerging with the authoritarianism of a police state. (As a report by David Rose almost two years ago makes clear, the trend is not new — but it is getting worse.)
Naiema Abu Ayyash’s worst fears were confirmed this month when she finally managed to visit her husband in Jericho prison.
Badr Abu Ayyash, 42, a farmer and local politician in the west Bank, was arrested by the Palestinian Authority’s Preventive Security unit on September 14. Aside from two brief and apparently supervised phone calls, his family was denied all contact with him.
“He looked very different,” said Ms Abu Ayyash, a mother of four. “He could hardly walk. He had difficulty breathing and was very thin. When he shook my hand, I noticed that he had no strength at all.”
She has no doubt her husband was tortured. “I started screaming at the officer: ‘What are you doing to him?”’ Her pleas fell on deaf ears. After a few cursory exchanges, her husband was led back to his cell.
According to former inmates and activists familiar with Palestinian prisons, Ms Abu Ayyash has every reason to be worried. They say prisoners affiliated with the Islamist Hamas movement, which runs the Gaza Strip, are beaten regularly and deprived of medicine and basic comforts such as blankets and mattresses.
There is evidence that a significant number of detainees are tortured during interrogation. The most common form of abuse is known as Shabeh, in which detainees are handcuffed and bound in stress positions for long periods.
Claims of torture and abuse by members of the Palestinian security forces are not new. There has, however, been a sharp rise in reported cases, leading Human Rights Watch to remark last month that “reports of torture by Palestinian security forces keep rolling in”. The New York-based organisation also bemoaned the “rampant impunity” of officers allegedly involved in the abuses.
Many analysts and observers fear that life in the west Bank is taking on an increasingly authoritarian hue. “I feel real concern that we are reaching the level of a police state,” says Shawan Jabarin, the director of al-Haq, a Ramallah-based human rights group.
It is a concern shared by Randa Siniora, the director of the Palestinian Independent Commission for Human Rights, the ombudsman responsible for processing complaints against Palestinian officials. Her commission received more complaints about torture in the west Bank in October than in any month since mid- 2009. “We are looking at a very gloomy situation,” she said. “I am afraid that this [problem of torture and abuse] will become systematic.”
Ahmadinejad faces impeachment threat
The Wall Street Journal reports:
Iran’s parliament revealed it planned to impeach President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad but refrained under orders from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, exposing a deepening division within the regime.
Lawmakers also launched a new petition to bring a debate on the president’s impeachment, conservative newspapers reported Monday.
The reports of challenges to Mr. Ahmadinejad were intended as retorts to a powerful body of clerics that urged Mr. Khamenei to curb the parliament’s authority and give greater clout to the president.
In a report released Sunday and discussed in parliament Monday, four prominent lawmakers laid out the most extensive public criticism of Mr. Ahmadinejad to date.
Farnaz Fassihi talks about the move by Iran’s parliament, later blocked by the nation’s supreme leader, to impeach President Ahmadinejad.
They accused him and his government of 14 counts of violating the law, often by acting without the approval of the legislature. Charges include illegally importing gasoline and oil, failing to provide budgetary transparency and withdrawing millions of dollars from Iran’s foreign reserve fund without getting parliament’s approval.
“The president and his cabinet must be held accountable in front of the parliament,” the report stated. “A lack of transparency and the accumulation of legal violations by the government is harming the regime.”
The moves against Mr. Ahmadinejad come as the regime faces domestic pressure over his plans to gradually eliminate subsidies for fuel, food and utilities from an economy strained by a string of international sanctions over Tehran’s controversial nuclear program.