I am so glad the the NYT has started to try to be a real newspaper and is–at last– doing some things that look like serious investigative reporting.
One recent product of this is this story by Steven Lee Myers in today’s paper. It’s titled: “Military Completed Death Certificates for 20 Prisoners Only After Months Passed”. This refers to the fact that of the 37 deaths of foreign citizens in the US military’s global gulag that have been reported since –it seems–December 2002, 20 of them had no death certificates issued until very recently.
At that point, I assume, after the breaking of the Abu Ghraib scandal, people in the military hierarchy started to realize that that just maybe, that many unreported deaths might look a little fishy?
Well, at least 17 of the deaths that have now –however belatedly–had certificates issued look very fishy anyway. These are all but one of the deaths briefly described in the table accompanying the article. The one exception there was one, in Mosul in december 2003, in which the death certificate explicitly stated, “No signs of abuse or foul play”. Many others showed extreme signs of foul play (see below).
The caption to this table says it doesn’t include “13 deaths attributed to natural causes.” 18 + 13 = 31. So that makes 6 more deaths we need to know more about?
This is what I learned from looking at the table there:
Author: Helena
Gerard Prunier on ‘la francophonie’ under threat
I was pretty certain that my theory of the dangers of “the death-throes of la francophonie”, or perhaps, more modestly, “la francophonie under threat”, as described here yesterday, was not totally original.
Well, aujourd’hui I was just re-reading along in Gerard Prunier’s great 1995 work, The Rwandan crisis; History of a Genocide and I came across this seasoned French scholar’s take on the subject… Commenting on the military and political support that the Mitterand government gave to the virulently anti-Tutsi government in Rwanda during the four-year-long civil war against the Tutsi-led RPF that preceded– or perhaps, prefaced– the 1994 genocide, Prunier wrote of France’s relationship with the Habyarimana government:
- the casual observer imagining that money is the cement of the whole relationship would have the wrong impression. The cement is language and culture. Paris’ African backyard remains its backyard because all the [African] chicks cackle in French…
Continue reading “Gerard Prunier on ‘la francophonie’ under threat”
Lorsque des voisins tuent leurs voisins
Alors, je vois que jusque vers le fin de mon dernier message j’ai ecrit que peut-etre quand le monde de la francophonie se sent encircle, c’est bien possible que les francophones commencent de tuer leurs voisins anglophones…
Mais je sais bien que le monde n’est pas assez simple que ca. Alors, je m’excuse a tous les lecteurs d’origine francophone s’ils m’ont mecompris. Beaucoup de mes meilleurs amis sont des francophones! En plus, si vous avez bien lu le blog “Actualites d’un monde just” pendant les mois derniers vous auriez su que j’admire beaucoup le bon monsieur Dominique de Villepin. Dommage qu’il n’est plus le ministre des affaires etrangeres, eh?
(Et je m’excuse pour mon francais rudimentaire. Mieux que rien, non?)
Neighbo(u)rs killing neighbo(u)rs
My “day job” these days– when I’m not posting stuff on the blog, tending my garden, or doing all the other things that can handily distract me from it– is to write up all the material I’ve been gathering over the past 42 months on “How societies deal with legacies of atrocious violence.” This will be a book, once I’ve wrestled all my material into shape.
These days I’m working on the chapters on Rwanda. Finding the best words to convey the horror of what happened during the genocide there–and especially the enthusiastic, public, and mass-participatory aspect of it– is hard enough. Finding words that work toward providing an explanation of that is even harder.
This weekend, I’m going to what looks like a really timely conference in London, Ontario, titled “Why neighbours kill”. (Note the Canadian spelling there.) They even have a website for the conference. I think I’m supposed to talk about Rwanda, with an emphasis on implications for post-genocide policies. Preventing iterations of violence/atrocity is the big concern of my book. However, as I think about the conference I’ve also been thinking about another situation of prolonged, genocidal or near-genocidal violence among neighbors with which I’m even more intimately familiar than the one in Rwanda: that is, the time I spent in Lebanon, 1974-81.
The Lebanese civil war started on April 25, 1975…
The ‘greatest generation’– and W’s lot
Even though I’m a pacifist (and some day I might tell you why), I recognize the great human qualities often exhibited by people who go to war: courage, self-discipline, a desire to make the world a better place…
Of course, those qualities can also be exhibited by pacifists. But arguing that point is not my purpose here. I just want to note that, in my view, what made the World War 2 generation the “greatest generation” as it is called was the vision and real leadership shown by the decisionmakers at that time in the crucial project of fashioning the post-war peace: qualities that are notably absent from the decisionmakers in our own sad era.
There were two key aspects of that peace-building project that I want to note: (1) how seriously the British and their Allies took it, from the very early days of the war, and (2) how it was consciously designed to be unlike the highly punitive settlement of 1919, a settlement that had brought the world only Adolph Hitler and another, even more horrifying round of global war.
How seriously they took it.
My father, James Cobban, was not a high decisionmaker. He was a 29-year-old schoolmaster in London when the British were drawn into the war. He signed up almost immediately, and was assigned to an administrative branch of the Intelligence Corps. (M.I. 1-X, to be precise.) From the days of the blitz of London, people in the Intel Corps were already laying plans for their “future” occupation of Germany. That took courage and guts. It also took vision.
A little later, my father was involved in planning beach organization for D-Day. But once that was done, back they went to planning for the occupation of Germany. No-one would have dreamed of throwing their many meticulous plans into the trashcan.
In Bernard Lewis-land meanwhile…
Responding to my recent post on Fouad Ajami, commenter John Koch asked the excellent question:
- Why pick on the humbled Ajami when, week by week, Lewis makes bold assertions and predictions, based on his presumed unsurpassed knowledge. No one challenges him or points out how his past predictions about Iraq turned out mostly wrong. Witness: Bernard Lewis Advocates War, Predicts Iraq Future (2002).
Well, I disagree with the assessment that Fouad has been “humbled” by recent events… Momentarily taken aback, perhaps.
But John’s right that at least Fouad seems to evince some general cognizance that his confident earlier predictions had not panned out. And I was interested in checking out what Bernard Lewis has been writing recently.
It was the work of a few moments to go on a visit to the strange land of fog, wilfull ignorance, and misperception inhabited by this sadly misplaced medieval (in more senses than one!) historian.
See, for example, this interview, conducted by Atlantic Monthly contributor Elizabeth Wasserman on April 15, 2004.
Well, Elizabeth was throwing him the most amazingly silly and softball questions. (“You mention that the reason that the Arab-Israeli conflict appears to be the central preoccupation in the Arab world is that it’s the only local political grievance that people can discuss freely in the open forum.” Yes, I know: it’s not even a question, as presented there….) Meanwhile, April 15: never mind that over there in Iraq things were going to hell in a handbasket for the whole US imperial adventure and for hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people, eh?
So you might not want to wade through the whole, turgid transcript of Elizabeth’s interview. But if you go to almost the very end, you can read this gem:
Back to the era of coups in Iraq?
Time was, back in the 1960s, that Baghdad was plagued by successive coups d’etat. Was that another one we saw there today, with Baghdad fashion maven Paul Bremer and his pals on the IGC launching a “pre-emptive strike” on Lakhdar Brahimi’s ability to do the job that he thought had been entrusted to him, namely, taking a lead role in assembling Iraq’s new “transitional” leadership?
Sure looked like a bit of a coup to me.
Bremer and the pals may think they’ve “pulled a fast one” on Brahimi by “naming” Iyad Allawi as the interim PM. But I’m sure that by doing that they will also have conisderably complicated the present Iraq-related diplomacy at the Security Council.
Brahimi, certainly, came across fairly miffed in his reaction to the IGC’s “news”. And I’m sure that Kofi Annan and several weighty members of the security Council will be miffed, as well.
And that matters. After all, what use would it be to Allawi to be the “Prime Minister” of a government that is still considered–like the existing IGC–to be totally a creation of the US occupation forces? If he can’t be “Prime Minister” under an arrangement that includes a strong new U.N. resolution that significantly dilutes US control in Iraq, then I wonder why on earth he would consider the job to be worth having at all?
Ah well, people can be funny, I guess… Especially when there’s the scent of all those billions of dollars of US “reconstruction aid” that might be attached to the job… Certainly, in the photo accompanying the Al-Jazeera story on the topic, Allawi already looks as if he’s laughing all the way to the bank…
Most Americans reject torture
In an interview May 22 , 2004, Harvard law prof Alan Dershowitz, a one-time liberal who has become a leading apologist for the use of torture in the war against terrorism, crowed that “Americans” had come to share his point of view:
Asked if he thought Americans were ready to “do what it takes” to get information from terrorists who threaten American lives, Dershowitz [said]: “I think so. But I think Americans want us to do it smarter, want us to do it better…”
Not so fast, big guy! The American people are actually a lot smarter, or let’s say wiser*, than you give them credit for! And certainly a lot wiser than you are… A WaPo/ABC News poll published today reveals that 63 percent of Americans say they think the use of torture is “never acceptable”.
More than half, 52 percent, also say the use of “physical abuse but not torture” is never acceptable.
This whole poll has produced results that are pretty encouraging for those of us who want to persuade the US government to adopt a policy of zero tolerance for torture. Because of that, I tabulated all the results that the WaPo website gave on various different web-pages into one simple table.
You can find the table here. Feel free to use it, but a little attribution for my work in tabulating the data would be nice…
——
* For my discussion of why it is that respecting the Geneva Conventions–on banning torture as well as on other things–is not only the “right” thing to do but also the “smart” thing to do, check out this May 12 post on JWN. Especially the end part of it.
Who wants to be ‘feared’?
Well, I’m still not particularly enamoured of the lackluster John Kerry. And no, despite what it may have seemed from this recent post, I certainly don’t want to see him being pushed any further to the RIGHT.
Anyway, today I happened on this piece by Jodi Wilgoren in the NYT. It’s titled “Kerry Foreign Policy Crew Has a Clintonian Look to It”, which is an accurate description of the situation, as evidenced by what Wilgoren writes about there… Basically, the same-old-same-old: Berger, Holbrooke, Perry, Albright (yawn), with the addition of a couple of slightly younger–but oh yes, most decidely white male–faces.
Zzzzz.
We don’t need that same-old over again. We need vision. We need a true commitment to internationalism. We need… well, a whole bunch of things very different from what these tired old retreads seem to promise.
Anyway, down there in the body of this piece, my attention was drawn to this handful of sentences, describing a conversation Wilgoren must have had with that tired old veteran’s veteran in the foreign-policy analysis world, Les (“let’s split Iraq into three!”) Gelb:
Tolerating torture: the slipperiest slope
What is the main reason why we need to press President Bush to make an unequivocal
and verifiable commitment to ending the US government’s use and toleration
of torture?
Because any hint at all from the highest echelons of government that this
kind of deeply abusive behavior is ever acceptable at all is a slippery
slope down which it is all too easy for a government, its employees, and
even a supposedly democratic citizenry to slide.
We now have two prime examples of this slippery slope phenomenon:
(1) In Israel, the legislature specifically allowed for the security
services to apply “moderate physical pressure”, at first in cases where there
was good reason to suspect that a suspect had concrete informatin about a
“ticking time-bomb” just about to explode…
Oops! Down the slippery slope they went!
“Moderate physical pressure” became a use of stress positions, dousing with
cold water, and other means of inflicting pain so harsh that many survivors
have had lasting side-effects. (See, for example,
this
2002 Amnesty International report.)
As for “ticking time bombs”?
Continue reading “Tolerating torture: the slipperiest slope”