Category Archives: Issues

The U.S. invasion of Iraq was a crime and its perpetrators are murderers

Paul Savoy writes: Ten years after the invasion of Iraq, it is astonishing in a nation dedicated to the rule of law that every aspect of the war has been debated except the relevant law.

To be sure, a vast array of articles, books and films have documented how pre-war intelligence was “manipulated” or “misrepresented” or “twisted” or “cherry-picked” or “fixed around the policy,” and how the Bush Administration’s inadequate planning produced a “fiasco,” a “blunder,” and a “disaster” — terms used to convey the sinister nature and catastrophic effect of White House miscalculations without actually accusing anyone of anything so incriminating as a felony.

Two notable exceptions are former Los Angeles prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s book, “The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder,” which encountered a virtual boycott by the major news media when published in 2008, and “United States v. George W. Bush et al.,” by Elizabeth de la Vega, a former Assistant U.S Attorney who meticulously presents the case for criminal fraud under a little-known federal statute that does not require monetary loss by the victim as a condition for conviction. Both books rest their case on proof of deliberate deception by the President and members of his war cabinet — not an easy hurdle to overcome in a criminal trial, which requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

Contrary to common belief, however, an American president can be found guilty of criminal conduct without proof of the corrupt state of mind of the deliberate liar or the malignant motives of Nazis on trial at Nuremberg. The criminal mind also encompasses the all-too-common consciousness of human beings acting carelessly in deciding to kill other human beings, however justified their conduct may seem in their own eyes.

On the tenth anniversary of the invasion, the only truly serious question about the war is whether President George W. Bush and those who participated in the decision to invade Iraq did anything illegal or unconstitutional or criminal.

To raise such a question about a war initiated by own’s own country is always “a vocation of agony,” as Martin Luther King, Jr. said of the war in Vietnam when he finally chose in 1967 to break his silence about the conflict. Whatever the reasons for avoiding the Iraq question, whether it is President Obama’s understandable fear of further polarizing a sorely divided nation, or out of respect for the 4,422 Americans who gave their lives fighting for what they believed was a just cause, or because the legal issues are too big or too difficult, we must finally say about Iraq what Dr. King said about Vietnam. “We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak.” [Continue reading…]

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A Bibi-Barack love affair

Karl Vick reports: If there was any question about why President Obama came to Israel on the first overseas trip of his second term – and the question has come up – it vanished into the brilliant blue sky above Ben Gurion Airport when he reached the end of the red carpet and the microphone waiting there. The leader of the free world had come to issue a correction. Four years ago, delivering an address to the Muslim people in Cairo, Obama had irked Israeli Jews by citing the Holocaust as the justification for the 1948 founding of modern Israel. Israelis prefer to reach a bit further back — they find their deed to the land in the Bible – and the misapprehension was aggravated by what Obama did when he left Cairo: Fly past Israel to pay a call at Buchenwald, the World War II concentration camp.

There was none of that Wednesday. “More than 3,000 years ago, the Jewish people lived here, tended the land here, prayed to God here,” Obama began, getting right to it on the tarmac. “And after centuries of exile and persecution, unparalleled in the history of man, the founding of the Jewish State of Israel was a rebirth, a redemption unlike any in history. Today, the sons of Abraham and the daughters of Sarah are fulfilling the dream of the ages — to be ‘masters of their own fate’ in ‘their own sovereign state.’”

Benjamin Netanyahu looked on beaming. “I thought that was a wonderful line that I will cherish because it really gets down to the essence of what this state is about,” the prime minister said a few hours later, as the two leaders took questions at his Jerusalem residence. On the same page at last – somewhere in Psalms, just going by the praise-singing – the famously frosty pair appeared determined to project a budding buddydom. At the airport, when Obama shrugged off his suit jacket and flicked it over his shoulder, Netanyahu glanced over and, after first hitching up his pants, did the same, like a little kid imitating an older one. When they reached the display of Israel’s anti-missile systems, including Iron Dome, Netanyahu directed his guest through the exhibit by the colors painted on the tarmac: “Follow the red line.” Obama quipped: “He’s always talking to me about red lines.” An Iran joke. They can laugh about it now.

Obama kept calling Netanyahu “Bibi,” and choked both of them up a moment reading from the published letters of his brother Yonatan Netanyahu, who was killed leading the raid to rescue Israeli hostages at Entebbe. Netanyahu kept looking at Obama the way he spoke of him: approvingly. The handshakes were vigorous, the thanks effusive, and though they continue to differ on when it might be necessary to go military against Iran, the differences are no longer emphasized publicly. [Continue reading…]

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Israeli doctor ready to operate on Obama

That’s a headline in Israel’s leading daily Ynet: “Israeli doctor ready to operate on Obama.”

It’s not that Obama needs to be operated on, but just in case a surgeon is needed during the president’s visit, Professor Avi Rivkind, head of the department of surgery at the Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem, is on standby.

And just in case any of the close to one in five Israelis polled who say they hate Obama want to cause him harm, the same report helpfully includes his full schedule with locations and times when he will be present.

No doubt wherever a U.S. president travels, host governments make all kinds of contingency plans in anticipation of possible emergencies. Even so, I doubt that the press in any other country have seen fit to report on the availability of their surgeons to operate on the president.

With only 10% of Israelis viewing Obama favorably that makes him only slightly more popular there than he is in Pakistan. But whereas Pakistanis have a legitimate grievance — that hundreds of civilians have died in U.S. drone attacks — Israelis’ complaint is what? That 50% of U.S. foreign aid isn’t enough? Or is it just that he’s a black man with the middle name Hussein?

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What Obama won’t witness: apartheid in Hebron

Ali Gharib reports: Call it a welcoming committee. Around noon here, just as Barack Obama’s plane was slated to touch down in Israel, a group of Palestinians donned masks bearing the American president’s likeness and took to Shuhada Street in Hebron, in the southern West Bank. Joined by international and Israeli activists, all wearing tee-shirts that read “I have a dream,” they caught the army unawares. Within minutes, five Israeli soldiers swarmed the group of just over 20 protesters, detaining seven or eight of them (reports remain unconfirmed), including the two Palestinians leading the protests. Their crime? Walking down the street.

“Obama, come here to Hebron,” shouted Issa Amro, a local protest leader, in English, just as a scrum formed between the demonstrators and a handful of soldiers, who rushed to the scene. “I am Obama,” he added as a young settler, perhaps 12-years-old, snatched the cardboard Obama mask from his face, crumpling it into his back pocket. Within minutes, Amro was shoved to the street. He rose briefly only to be knocked down again, before being dragged off into detention.

Segregation is too light a word to describe what happens in Hebron, a city of less than 200,000 that feels like ground zero of the Israeli occupation. Home to Jewish holy site, the Tomb of the Patriarchs, Israeli settlers began arriving in droves after Israel’s takeover of the West Bank in 1967 (joining a small, longtime community that coexisted peacefully here for more than a century). The city is now dotted by small settlements, each home no matter how remote guarded by a soldier from the Israeli army. Now, several hundred settlers live in directly in the city. Eventually, settlers seized Shuhada Street, narrow road that used to house a local market. Eventually, in perhaps the starkest act of discrimination here, much of the road was closed to Palestinians altogether in 1994. Palestinian life in the area has suffered dramatically since.

The protesters had marched down from a local house, joining a cadre of others and walking with Palestinian flags and a banner reading, “We have a dream/ Apartheid in Hebron/ Open Shuhada Street.” Other demonstrators held up photos of Martin Luther King, Jr.—some wore masks of his likeness, too—and Frederick Douglas. The protests took on King’s spirit of non-violence: no demonstrator hurled so much as an insult, let alone a rock. Just as they passed into the section where the road becomes “sterile”—meaning Palestinians are not allowed to walk—a group of five soldiers confronted them, attempting to form a barricade. A settler emerged from a nearby building and moved a white Volkswagen panel van across the street, bottlenecking the pedestrian traffic. But a few of the protesters broke through, only to be stopped a few meters down the road. [Continue reading…]

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Obama must embrace Israel’s tribal politics

Daniel Levy writes: It was not always thus.

Despite the characteristic sense of entitlement conveyed by many in the Israeli elite in advance of Barack Obama’s first presidential visit: “You finally made it, what took you so long?” the must-go-to-Israel clause in the U.S. presidential contract is of surprisingly recent vintage.

Next week marks the ninth visit by a sitting U.S .President. But half of those previous eight trips were notched-up by Bill Clinton alone, and another two by George W. Bush in his very last year in office (yes, he waited eight years to say “Hi” in person). The nature of this Obama visit, most closely resembling the second Bush trip of May 2008, should tell us something about the changing contours of the U.S.-Israel relationship.

The first two presidential visits were in the 1970’s. Nixon came in 1974 (a quarter-century after Israel’s creation) and Carter in 1979, both unequivocally focused on advancing Israeli – Egyptian deals that served American regional interests: First, the post-1973 war separation of forces agreement, and later the Israel-Egypt peace treaty. Another fifteen years and two Presidents elapsed before Clinton became such a regular on these shores in the 1990s. All four of his trips were unmistakably dedicated to the peace process of the time – attending the Israel-Jordan peace agreement signing in 1994, Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral in 1995 (it would be absurd to de-link that occasion from the Israeli – Palestinian process), the post-bus-bombings and pre-election 1996 stop-over designed to save the peace process by hugging Shimon Peres (standing for election against Netanyahu), and finally a December 1998 visit to push the implementation of the Wye River Agreement, including an historic stop in Gaza (again, in part, a political visit to challenge Netanyahu). Even President Bush’s January 2008 jaunt was about pushing the Annapolis peace talks, however misguided and flawed those were.

So for thirty-plus years the ostensible driving factor for Presidential visits has been to align America’s Israel relationship with its national security interest, by promoting peace between Israel and its neighbors.

The second Bush visit in June 2008 broke that trend, dedicated as it was to celebrating Israel’s 60 anniversary and marking the primacy of the bilateral and political in defining American-Israeli interaction. The timing and anticipated content of the Obama visit would appear to continue that new orientation. It is again mostly about politics (U.S. domestic politics) and the bilateral relationship. The Palestinians will be mentioned and feature as part of the visit, yet expectations of a new Israel- Palestine initiative are low for good reasons. Obama is coming first and foremost to make a statement about the U.S.-Israel bond, not the illegal occupation, the unresolved conflict or American interests. [Continue reading…]

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CIA poised to hand over drone operations to Pentagon

Daily Beast: At a time when controversy over the Obama administration’s drone program seems to be cresting, the CIA is close to taking a major step toward getting out of the targeted killing business. Three senior U.S. officials tell The Daily Beast that the White House is poised to sign off on a plan to shift the CIA’s lethal targeting program to the Defense Department.

The move could potentially toughen the criteria for drone strikes, strengthen the program’s accountability, and increase transparency. Currently, the government maintains parallel drone programs, one housed in the CIA and the other run by DOD. The proposed plan would unify the command and control structure of targeted killings, and create a uniform set of rules and procedures. The CIA would maintain a role, but the military would have operational control over targeting. Lethal missions would take place under Title 10 of the U.S. Code, which governs military operations, rather than Title 50, which sets out the legal authorities for intelligence activities and covert operations. “This is a big deal,” says one senior administration official who has been briefed on the plan. “It would be a pretty strong statement.”

Officials anticipate a phased-in transition in which the CIA’s drone operations would be gradually shifted over to the military, a process that could take as little as a year. Others say it might take longer but would occur during President Obama’s second term. “You can’t just flip a switch, but it’s on a reasonably fast track,” says one U.S. official. During that time, CIA and DOD operators would begin to work more closely together to ensure a smooth hand-off. The CIA would remain involved in lethal targeting, at least on the intelligence side, but would not actually control the unmanned aerial vehicles. Officials told The Daily Beast that a potential downside of the Agency relinquishing control of the program was the loss of a decade of expertise that the CIA has developed since it has been prosecuting its war in Pakistan and beyond. At least for a period of transition, CIA operators would likely work alongside their military counterparts to target suspected terrorists. [Continue reading…]

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The god that failed: Evgeny Morozov’s ‘To Save Everything, Click Here’

Los Angeles Review of Books: Evgeny Morozov is done with the Internet. In his latest book, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism, Morozov dismantles the myth that the Internet is inherently a force for social change; it can no more fix higher education, save the economy, or topple a dictator than it can make us stupid, lonely, or shallow. “The Internet” (Morozov wraps the term in quotation marks for most of the book) is not a naturally occurring phenomenon or a living thing, but a socially constructed myth that “effortlessly fills minds, pockets, coffers, and even the most glaring narrative gaps.” “The myth of the Internet,” he argues, “tells us nothing about how the world works and even less about how it should.” In fact, at one point, he questions whether the Internet even exists.

Morozov is best known for the colorful hyperbole of his polemical criticism in The New Republic and elsewhere (his book reviews are often described as “devastating”), but the most compelling passages in To Save Everything follow a more measured tack, building bridges among the academic and popular literatures on technology in society. To understand the limitations of technocratic approaches to social problems, he reads in communication studies and political philosophy. To provide a context for his interpretation of the dominant Internet myth, Morozov draws on key works in the history, sociology, and anthropology of science and technology. The bibliography is diverse, ranging from the canonical debate between John Dewey and Walter Lippman on the role of expertise in democracy, to Bruno Latour’s more recent invitation to consider the agency of “non-human” actors. This type of synthetic work is all too rare in cultural criticism, and there is an excellent reading list embedded in the endnotes of To Save Everything, Click Here. If Morozov’s argument rings true — and, for the most part, it does — it is due to the strong philosophical foundation on which he stands.

To Save Everything is animated by a thoroughgoing critique of two central ideas that Morozov terms “solutionism” and “Internet-centrism.” The first describes an instrumental engagement with public life that regards all social and political issues as problems to be solved. The second refers to a fascination with the Internet as a wholly novel sociotechnical phenomenon (which Morozov first diagnosed in his 2011 book The Net Delusion). Solutionism and Internet-centrism are both worldviews infused with the technocratic values of efficiency, cleanliness, and productivity, values that are poorly suited, in Morozov’s view, to life in a pluralistic liberal democracy. [Continue reading…]

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An open letter to Paul Wolfowitz

Andrew Bacevich writes: [Albert] Wohlstetter’s perspective (which became yours) emphasized five distinct propositions. Call them the Wohlstetter Precepts.

First, liberal internationalism, with its optimistic expectation that the world will embrace a set of common norms to achieve peace, is an illusion. Of course virtually every president since Franklin Roosevelt has paid lip service to that illusion, and doing so during the Cold War may even have served a certain purpose. But to indulge it further constitutes sheer folly.

Second, the system that replaces liberal internationalism must address the ever-present (and growing) danger posed by catastrophic surprise. Remember Pearl Harbor. Now imagine something orders of magnitude worse — for instance, a nuclear attack from out of the blue.

Third, the key to averting or at least minimizing surprise is to act preventively. If shrewdly conceived and skillfully executed, action holds some possibility of safety, whereas inaction reduces that possibility to near zero. Eliminate the threat before it materializes. In statecraft, that defines the standard of excellence.

Fourth, the ultimate in preventive action is dominion. The best insurance against unpleasant surprises is to achieve unquestioned supremacy.

Lastly, by transforming the very nature of war, information technology — an arena in which the United States has historically enjoyed a clear edge — brings outright supremacy within reach. Of all the products of Albert Wohlstetter’s fertile brain, this one impressed you most. The potential implications were dazzling. According to Mao, political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Wohlstetter went further. Given the right sort of gun — preferably one that fires very fast and very accurately — so, too, does world order.

With the passing of the Cold War, global hegemony seemed America’s for the taking. What others saw as an option you, Paul, saw as something much more: an obligation that the nation needed to seize, for its own good as well as for the world’s. Not long before we both showed up at SAIS, your first effort to codify supremacy and preventive action as a basis for strategy had ended in embarrassing failure. I refer here to the famous (or infamous) Defense Planning Guidance of 1992, drafted in the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm by the Pentagon policy shop you then directed. Before this classified document was fully vetted by the White House, it was leaked to the New York Times, which made it front-page news. The draft DPG announced that it had become the “first objective” of U.S. policy “to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival.” With an eye toward “deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role,” the United States would maintain unquestioned military superiority and, if necessary, employ force unilaterally. As window dressing, allies might be nice, but the United States no longer considered them necessary.

Unfortunately, you and the team assigned to draft the DPG had miscalculated the administration’s support for your thinking. This was not the moment to be unfurling grandiose ambitions expressed in indelicate language. In the ensuing hue and cry, President George H. W. Bush disavowed the document. Your reputation took a hit. But you were undeterred.

The election of George W. Bush as president permitted you to escape from academe. You’d done yeoman work tutoring candidate Bush in how the world works, and he repaid the debt by appointing you to serve as Donald Rumsfeld’s deputy atop the Pentagon hierarchy. You took office as Osama bin Laden was conspiring to attack. Alas, neither Rumsfeld nor you nor anyone else in a position of real authority anticipated what was to occur. America’s vaunted defense establishment had left the country defenseless. Yet instead of seeing this as evidence of gross incompetence requiring the officials responsible to resign, you took it as an affirmation. For proof that averting surprise through preventive military action was now priority number one, Americans needed to look no further than the damage inflicted by nineteen thugs armed with box cutters.

You immediately saw the events of 9/11 as a second and more promising opening to assert U.S. supremacy. When riding high a decade earlier, many Americans had thought it either unseemly or unnecessary to lord it over others. Now, with the populace angry and frightened, the idea was likely to prove an easier sell. Although none of the hijackers were Iraqi, within days of 9/11 you were promoting military action against Iraq. Critics have chalked this up to your supposed obsession with Saddam. The criticism is misplaced. The scale of your ambitions was vastly greater.

In an instant, you grasped that the attacks provided a fresh opportunity to implement Wohlstetter’s Precepts, and Iraq offered a made-to-order venue. “We cannot wait to act until the threat is imminent,” you said in 2002. Toppling Saddam Hussein would validate the alternative to waiting. In Iraq the United States would demonstrate the efficacy of preventive war. [Continue reading…]

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Jaron Lanier asks whether we have given up too much power to the big digital corporations

The Guardian: Jaron Lanier, groundbreaking computer scientist and infectious optimist, is concerned that we are not making the most of ourselves. In Who Owns the Future? he tellingly questions the trajectory of economic value in the information age, and argues that there has been a fundamental misstep in how capitalism has gone digital. For Lanier, late capitalism is not so much exhausted as humiliating: in an automated world, information is more important to the economy than manual labour, and yet we are expected to surrender information generated by or about ourselves – a valuable resource – for free.

Information here is a broad term for any conscious intellectual, artistic, or pragmatic contribution to the production of goods, services and cultural output, but it also includes the data that we unconsciously radiate simply by exhibiting certain behavioural and consumer traits. Lanier’s project is to foresee how livelihoods might be better sustained in a world in which information is king.

In his view, disproportionate economic power now accumulates around companies who “own the fastest computers with the most access to everyone’s information”. We donate extremely lucrative information – our interests, demographic predilections, buying habits, cyber-movements – in exchange for “free” admission into social media networks. (Digitisation has also allowed banks to repackage the “information” of a mortgage debt and sell it on as increasingly complex financial products, while excluding the indebted home-owner from a percentage of the profits.) Lanier argues that the early internet years have fetishised open access and knowledge-sharing in a way that has distracted people from demanding fairness and job security in an economy predicated on data flow. [Continue reading…]

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The shame of America’s gulag

Chris Hedges writes: If, as Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, “the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons” then we are a nation of barbarians. Our vast network of federal and state prisons, with some 2.3 million inmates, rivals the gulags of totalitarian states. Once you disappear behind prison walls you become prey. Rape. Torture. Beatings. Prolonged isolation. Sensory deprivation. Racial profiling. Chain gangs. Forced labor. Rancid food. Children imprisoned as adults. Prisoners forced to take medications to induce lethargy. Inadequate heating and ventilation. Poor health care. Draconian sentences for nonviolent crimes. Endemic violence.

Bonnie Kerness and Ojore Lutalo, both of whom I met in Newark, N.J., a few days ago at the office of American Friends Service Committee Prison Watch, have fought longer and harder than perhaps any others in the country against the expanding abuse of prisoners, especially the use of solitary confinement. Lutalo, once a member of the Black Liberation Army, an offshoot of the Black Panthers, first wrote Kerness in 1986 while he was a prisoner at Trenton State Prison, now called New Jersey State Prison. He described to her the bleak and degrading world of solitary confinement, the world of the prisoners like him held in the so-called management control unit, which he called “a prison within a prison.” Before being released in 2009, Lutalo was in the management control unit for 22 of the 28 years he served for the second of two convictions—the first for a bank robbery and the second for a gun battle with a drug dealer. He kept his sanity, he told me, by following a strict regime of exercising in his tiny cell, writing, meditating and tearing up newspapers to make collages that portrayed his prison conditions.

“The guards in riot gear would suddenly wake you up at 1 a.m., force you to strip and make you grab all your things and move you to another cell just to harass you,” he said when we spoke in Newark. “They had attack dogs with them that were trained to go for your genitals. You spent 24 hours alone one day in your cell and 22 the next. If you do not have a strong sense of purpose you don’t survive psychologically. Isolation is designed to defeat prisoners mentally, and I saw a lot of prisoners defeated.” [Continue reading…]

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America is asking all the wrong questions about drones

Jack L. Amoureux writes: Whether or not drones should be employed in the United States is the wrong question. Americans should be asking, “Is it ethical to use drones anywhere?”

Recently, concerns about how the U.S. government manages and deploys its fleet of around 7,000 drones have become especially prominent. Just last year President Obama, under mounting pressure, acknowledged the systematic use of drones in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere after a U.S. citizen was killed by a drone strike in Yemen.

Senate hearings on whether to confirm a key architect of the drone program, John Brennan, as director of the CIA underscore the increasingly urgent questions being asked of the administration. As part of the confirmation process, several senators insisted that the president share secret memoranda about drones, and Senator Rand Paul, R-Ky., mounted a 13-hour filibuster on the Senate floor over the administration’s refusal to rule out the possibility of a drone strike against a U.S. citizen on domestic soil.

But drones have become a hot button issue for a surprisingly diverse set of political actors only as armed drones flying over our heads have become more of a reality. Opposition has coalesced around the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens and a call for greater transparency and regulation of domestic drones. There is, however, a worrisome void in this debate about U.S. drone policy and practice — the lack of focus on the ethics of drones, whether used domestically or abroad. This neglect puts the United States out of step with the debates that are happening in the areas of the world most affected by drones. [Continue reading…]

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Why the ‘color revolutions’ failed

Melinda Haring and Michael Cecire write: The fate of the “color revolutions” — the symbolically-named series of peaceful uprisings in the former Soviet Union — have been terribly disappointing. In Georgia (“Rose,” 2003), Ukraine (“Orange,” 2004), and Kyrgyzstan (“Tulip,” 2005), popular uprisings against entrenched leaders brought to power reform-minded politicians who pledged to transform post-Soviet dens of corruption into modern states. But in all three places, those promises of far-reaching change never really materialized. Yet scholars and democracy promotion organizations continue to mine them for lessons that might apply to the Arab Spring transitions. Here’s why that’s a mistake.

In Georgia, where the endlessly energetic Mikheil Saakashvili embraced the West and free-market reforms with apparent gusto, elite corruption still continued apace. In Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko’s public spats with one-time ally Yulia Tymoshenko were so vicious that Viktor Yanukovych — the villain of the Orange Revolution — managed to return to office as prime minister in 2006, and won election as president four short years later. In Kyrgyzstan, Tulip Revolution leader Kurmanbek Bakiyev quickly established himself as a political strongman and informally put his son Maksim in charge of all business transactions. After bloodshed erupted in 2010, when citizens refused to sit idly by, after a winter of power shortages and intense price shocks while the first family enriched itself, President Bakiyev fled to Minsk.

So much for the vaunted color revolutions, not one of which has produced a consolidated democracy.

Why did they fail? Quite simply, the rule of law never took root. Too often, the color revolution governments acted above or with little regard to the democratic legal standard to which they held their predecessors. For example, Georgia’s record of protecting property rights was abysmal, Ukraine was inescapably seized by vendetta politics, and Bakiyev presided over Kyrgyzstan as though it were his personal fiefdom. Though the governments all professed a commitment to democracy and the rule of law, the maladies that typified the preceding regimes quickly came to describe the new governments. Supporters made a key mistake: They took the revolutions themselves as the apogee of democracy rather than focusing on the hard, grinding work of institution-building. [Continue reading…]

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Amazon Indians unite against Canadian oil giant

Survival International: Amazon Indians from Peru and Brazil have joined together to stop a Canadian oil company destroying their land and threatening the lives of uncontacted tribes.

Hundreds of Matsés Indians gathered on the border of Peru and Brazil last Saturday and called on their governments to stop the exploration, warning that the work will devastate their forest home.

The oil giant Pacific Rubiales is headquartered in Canada and has already started oil exploration in ‘Block 135’ in Peru, which lies directly over an area proposed as an uncontacted tribes reserve.

In a rare interview with Survival, a Matsés woman said, ‘Oil will destroy the place where our rivers are born. What will happen to the fish? What will the animals drink?’

The Matsés number around 2,200 and live along the Peru-Brazil border. Together with the closely-related Matis tribe, they were known as the ‘Jaguar people’ for their facial decorations and tattoos, which resembled the jaguar’s whiskers and teeth.

The Matsés were first contacted in the 1960s, and have since suffered from diseases introduced by outsiders. Uncontacted tribes are also at extreme risk from contact with outsiders through the introduction of diseases to which they have little or no immunity. [Continue reading…]

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A sentence worse than death

William Blake, Elmira Correctional Facility, New York State: “You deserve an eternity in hell,” Onondaga County Supreme Court judge Kevin Mulroy told me from his bench as I stood before him for sentencing on July 10, 1987. Apparently he had the idea that God was not the only one justified to make such judgment calls.

William Blake

Judge Mulroy wanted to “pump six buck’s worth of electricity into [my] body,” he also said, though I suggest that it wouldn’t have taken six cent’s worth to get me good and dead. He must have wanted to reduce me and The Chair to a pile of ashes. My “friend” Governor Mario Cuomo wouldn’t allow him to do that, though, the judge went on, bemoaning New York State’s lack of a death statute due to the then-Governor’s repeated vetoes of death penalty bills that had been approved by the state legislature. Governor Cuomo’s publicly expressed dudgeon over being called a friend of mine by Judge Mulroy was understandable, given the crimes that I had just been convicted of committing. I didn’t care much for him either, truth be told. He built too many new prisons in my opinion, and cut academic and vocational programs in the prisons already standing.

I know that Judge Mulroy was not nearly alone in wanting to see me executed for the crime I committed when I shot two Onondaga County sheriff’s deputies inside the Town of Dewitt courtroom during a failed escape attempt, killing one and critically wounding the other. There were many people in the Syracuse area who shared his sentiments, to be sure. I read the hateful letters to the editor printed in the local newspapers; I could even feel the anger of the people when I’d go to court, so palpable was it. Even by the standards of my own belief system, such as it was back then, I deserved to die for what I had done. I took the life of a man without just cause, committing an act so monumentally wrong that I could not have argued that it was unfair had I been required to pay with my own life.

What nobody knew or suspected back then, not even I, on that very day I would begin suffering a punishment that I am convinced beyond all doubt is far worse than any death sentence could possibly have been. On July 10, 2012, I finished my 25th consecutive year in solitary confinement, where at the time of this writing I remain. Though it is true that I’ve never died and so don’t know exactly what the experience would entail, for the life of me I cannot fathom how dying any death could be harder or more terrible than living through all that I have been forced to endure for the last quarter-century. [Continue reading…]

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