1. “If President Bush and Vice-President Cheney think that time is on their side with respect to crimes committed by their administration, this week’s criminal conviction of former Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori should put those thoughts to rest. Returning to Peru in the hope of returning to power, Fujimori was instead put on trial and convicted of “crimes against humanity,” including the killing of 25 people by military death squad.
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For many years, U.S. officials have endorsed the idea of an international criminal court for rulers who commit human-rights crimes. Well, except for one big exception — U.S. officials always made it clear that the court would apply only to foreign rulers, not U.S. rulers. The rational was that the United States was different from everywhere else — here, public officials would not be able to escape justice for their crimes.
What nonsense!
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Of course not. And President Obama, the self-proclaimed agent of hope and change, has already signaled his position, by essentially proclaiming: “Let’s put the past behind us and move on.”
Is it any wonder that so much of the world looks upon the U.S. government as a paragon of hypocrisy and double standards? How else can one look upon a regime that calls for an international criminal court for everyone else’s rulers and immunity from its own rulers under the pretentious attitude of “Unlike others, we will prosecute and punish our own officials,” and then, when evidence of criminal wrongdoing surfaces, proclaims “Let’s put the past behind us and just move on.”
My hunch is that Bush and his people will be excluding Europe from those speaking engagements that garner them hundreds of thousands of dollars. They know what happened to Augusto Pinochet. But even sitting at home here in the United States for the rest of their lives might not be totally safe in the long run. Just ask Alberto Fujimori, who just got sentenced to serve 25 years in jail for offenses committed some 15 years ago.”
http://www.fff.org/blog/jghblog2009-04-09.asp
2. “How to End a War, Eisenhower’s Way
After Eisenhower made peace in Korea, not one American serviceman was killed in action during the remaining seven and a half years of his presidency. No American president since Ike can make that claim.
In bringing peace to Korea — a peace that has endured for over fifty years — Eisenhower asserted his personal authority as commander in chief. Perhaps only a five-star general could ignore his party’s old guard and overrule the country’s national security establishment, almost all of whom believed that military victory in Korea was essential. But Ike was an experienced card player. He could recognize a losing hand when he saw it, and he knew when to fold his cards. Only President Obama knows what he saw in Iraq, and only he can decide whether his hand should be folded.“
http://100days.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/11/how-to-end-a-war-eisenhowers-way/
3. “ A criminally stupid war on drugs in the US
How much misery can a policy cause before it is acknowledged as a failure and reversed? The US “war on drugs” suggests there is no upper limit. The country’s implacable blend of prohibition and punitive criminal justice is wrong-headed in every way: immoral in principle, since it prosecutes victimless crimes, and in practice a disaster of remarkable proportions. Yet for a US politician to suggest wholesale reform of this brainless regime is still seen as an act of reckless self-harm.
Even a casual observer can see that much of the damage done in the US by illegal drugs is a result of the fact that they are illegal, not the fact that they are drugs. Vastly more lives are blighted by the brutality of prohibition, and by the enormous criminal networks it has created, than by the substances themselves. This is true of cocaine and heroin as well as of soft drugs such as marijuana. But the assault on consumption of marijuana sets the standard for the policy’s stupidity.
Nearly half of all Americans say they have tried marijuana. That makes them criminals in the eyes of the law. Luckily, not all of them have been found out – but when one is grateful that most law-breakers go undetected, there is something wrong with the law.“
http://fairuse.100webcustomers.com/thatseemsfair/ft01.html
4. “The great right-wing freak-out
Symptoms of the conservative crack-up were on full display after President Obama’s trip abroad. Bill Kristol, take a bow.
The weeping and trembling of Sean Hannity, Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh and William Kristol underlined once again that the right-wingers are playground crybabies who kick and scream and faint whenever they do not get their way.“
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/04/13/obama/index.html
5. “Take a Deep Breath on Pakistan
I don’t know David Kilcullen. But the things he is alleged to have told Paul McGeogh of the Sydney Morning Herald about Pakistan are just bizarre.
I don’t know what is intended by the prediction that Pakistan might “collapse” in six months. The country faces security challenges, and has already seen terrorist attacks such as the bombing of the Marriott in Islamabad, and it could well see more such big bombings. That is not a collapse. It is a reason for better police work and security measures. The Gilani government could fall (it is a parliamentary system), but that would just provoke new elections and PM Gilani would get a successor (assuming there isn’t another military coup, the real threat to ‘stability.’)
And this paragraph:
‘ “But Pakistan has 173 million people and 100 nuclear weapons, an army which is bigger than the American army, and the headquarters of al-Qaeda sitting in two-thirds of the country which the Government does not control,”
is self-contradictory and wrong. Maybe Kilcullen was misquoted or the quote is jumbled. The government firmly controls most of the country, which is to say Sindh and Punjab. There is instability in Baluchistan over Baluch desires for greater autonomy, but that large, craggy province only has 5 percent of the country’s population. Most of the Northwest Frontier Province is patrolled by Pakistani police and military. So there is no “two-thirds” of the country that the government does not control.
In fact, precisely since Pakistan has an army of 650,000 men under arms and another 500,000 reservists, it is absurd to think that a small rural insurgent group like the Taliban could “take over.”
What the government does not control is some parts of the Northwest Frontier Province and the 13 Federally Administered Tribal Areas, an area around the size of New Hampshire with a population (in FATA) of about 3.5 million.
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Small terrorist groups can be deadly, and the US could get hit by al-Qaeda again, even from FATA. But I doubt they can get up another attack of the magnitude of 9/11. The idea that FATA, this remote, mountainous region with a few rebellious and puritanical tribesmen and a small number of expatriate guerrillas, forms a dire threat to Western civilization (or even to the Pakistani military) just seems to me fantastical.
Good Pakistan policy requires that the hyperbole be dialed down. There no need to hyperventilate about a collapse, or a Taliban takeover, or about the defeat of a 650,000-man army by a few thousand scruffy tribesmen. It is that kind of hysteria that impelled the deadly use of drones to fight the “Taliban,” and which may be backfiring as young men from families with innocent dead in the US bombings turn to insurgency.”
AIG’s credit default swaps brought down the company, and has helped bring not only the American – but the world – economy to its knees.
Yet these criminals are now refusing to join a group of 2,000 other companies in voluntarily agreeing to a little bit of self-regulation. As I have previously written, self-regulation does not go nearly far enough.
Indeed, the fact that AIG – which is now owned by the U.S. and foreign governments – is not participating in the psuedo change of self-regulation means that the the governments are telling AIG it doesn’t have to participate. Governments own AIG (and keep throwing money at it), so they have the power to control AIG.
In other words, Bernanke, Geithner, Summers and the gang are telling AIG that its CDS trades won’t be subject to government regulation or self-regulation. In essence, they are telling AIG to keep doing the same thing which brought down the economy.“
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/04/aig-credit-default-swap-unit-after.html
7. “Even for the hardest-core Obama loyalists, it’s rather difficult to attribute these increasingly harsh condemnations of Obama’s civil liberties, secrecy and executive power abuses to bad motives or ignorance when they’re coming from the likes of Russ Feingold, TalkingPointsMemo, the Center for American Progress, Nancy Pelosi, EFF, the ACLU, The New York Times Editorial Board, Keith Olbermann, Jonathan Turley, The American Prospect, Bruce Fein, Digby, along with some of the most enthusiastic Obama supporters and a bevvy of liberal law professors and international law experts — those who were most venerated by progressives during the Bush era on questions of the Constitution and executive power.
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Whatever else one might say, the rule of law, the Constitution, and core civil liberties are the centerpiece of a healthy and well-functioning government, and nothing justifies an assault on those safeguards. That was the argument most progressives made throughout the Bush presidency, and the more Obama continues on the Bush/Cheney path in this area, the more solid the progressive consensus against his actions becomes.
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The Atlantic‘s Marc Ambinder reports that, like Sargent, he was “stonewalled” when trying to find out if the White House supports the State Secrets Act (in addition to Sargent, last week I also prodded a New York Times reporter to try to get an answer from the White House on this, and was told then, too, that they refuse to say what Obama’s views are).
Ambinder, however, notes that his “reporting leads [him] to believe that senior administration officials, including the White House counsel, Gregory Craig, oppose the current version of the legislation” and concludes: ”Make no mistake: Obama will be rolling back the spirit, if not the fact, of a campaign promise by opposing this bill.” Those are pretty strong words from one of the best friends the Obama White House has in the press corps.“
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/
8. “You Are Being Lied to About Pirates
Who imagined that in 2009, the world’s governments would be declaring a new War on Pirates? As you read this, the British Royal Navy – backed by the ships of more than two dozen nations, from the US to China – is sailing into Somalian waters to take on men we still picture as parrot-on-the-shoulder pantomime villains. They will soon be fighting Somalian ships and even chasing the pirates onto land, into one of the most broken countries on earth. But behind the arrr-me-hearties oddness of this tale, there is an untold scandal. The people our governments are labeling as “one of the great menace of our times” have an extraordinary story to tell — and some justice on their side.
Pirates have never been quite who we think they are. In the “golden age of piracy” – from 1650 to 1730 – the idea of the pirate as the senseless, savage thief that lingers today was created by the British government in a great propaganda-heave. Many ordinary people believed it was false: pirates were often rescued from the gallows by supportive crowds. Why? What did they see that we can’t? In his book Villains of All nations, the historian Marcus Rediker pores through the evidence to find out. If you became a merchant or navy sailor then – plucked from the docks of London’s East End, young and hungry – you ended up in a floating wooden Hell. You worked all hours on a cramped, half-starved ship, and if you slacked off for a second, the all-powerful captain would whip you with the Cat O’ Nine Tails. If you slacked consistently, you could be thrown overboard. And at the end of months or years of this, you were often cheated of your wages.
Pirates were the first people to rebel against this world. They mutinied against their tyrannical captains – and created a different way of working on the seas. Once they had a ship, the pirates elected their captains, and made all their decisions collectively. They shared their bounty out in what Rediker calls “one of the most egalitarian plans for the disposition of resources to be found anywhere in the eighteenth century.” They even took in escaped African slaves and lived with them as equals. The pirates showed “quite clearly – and subversively – that ships did not have to be run in the brutal and oppressive ways of the merchant service and the Royal navy.” This is why they were popular, despite being unproductive thieves.
The words of one pirate from that lost age – a young British man called William Scott – should echo into this new age of piracy. Just before he was hanged in Charleston, South Carolina, he said: “What I did was to keep me from perishing. I was forced to go a-pirating to live.” In 1991, the government of Somalia – in the Horn of Africa – collapsed. Its nine million people have been teetering on starvation ever since – and many of the ugliest forces in the Western world have seen this as a great opportunity to steal the country’s food supply and dump our nuclear waste in their seas.
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But the “pirates” have the overwhelming support of the local population for a reason. The independent Somalian news-site WardherNews conducted the best research we have into what ordinary Somalis are thinking – and it found 70 percent “strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence of the country’s territorial waters.” During the revolutionary war in America, George Washington and America’s founding fathers paid pirates to protect America’s territorial waters, because they had no navy or coastguard of their own. Most Americans supported them. Is this so different?
Did we expect starving Somalians to stand passively on their beaches, paddling in our nuclear waste, and watch us snatch their fish to eat in restaurants in London and Paris and Rome? We didn’t act on those crimes – but when some of the fishermen responded by disrupting the transit-corridor for 20 percent of the world’s oil supply, we begin to shriek about “evil.” If we really want to deal with piracy, we need to stop its root cause – our crimes – before we send in the gun-boats to root out Somalia’s criminals.
The story of the 2009 war on piracy was best summarised by another pirate, who lived and died in the fourth century BC. He was captured and brought to Alexander the Great, who demanded to know “what he meant by keeping possession of the sea.” The pirate smiled, and responded: “What you mean by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, while you, who do it with a great fleet, are called emperor.” Once again, our great imperial fleets sail in today – but who is the robber?”
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22399.htm
