Here in Virginia, we are currently suspended between “Lee-Jackson Day”, which was celebrated as a state-wide holiday on Friday, and “Martin Luther King Day”, celebrated as a holiday both state-wide and nationally, tomorrow.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, 1929-1968, was a world-renowned nonviolent struggler for the cause of human equality, and against the war in Vietnam. Robert E. Lee, 1807 – 1870, was a career army officer who commanded all the Confederate armies during the American Civil War. Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson, 1824 – 1863, was a Virginia teacher who served as a corps commander in the (Confederate) Army of Northern Virginia under Robert E. Lee.
Back in the 1980s, when I was newly here in the US, there was a big nationwide discussion over the idea of adding a remembrance of King Day to the national calendar. I think it actually did happen then, under President Reagan. But states were still free to give their own employees the day off on King Day or not, as they chose. At some point there, Virginia, a southern state in which pro-Confederate sentiment still runs strong in some places, effected a compromise by having a “joint” public holiday for all three of these men– Lee-King-Jackson Day, which sandwiched poor Dr. King’s memory between that of two Confederate generals.
In recent years– I can’t remember exactly when, but since we moved here in ’97– the two days got disaggregated, so at least Dr. King doesn’t have to put up with those old secessionist (and deeply segregationist) bedfellows. And state employees here, and schoolkids etc, get two days off in mid-January instead of one.
What are we celebrating on “Lee-Jackson Day”, pray?
Anyway, we had a South African friend staying over the weekend. He told us how in his country, previously “divisive” public holidays have been replaced by intentionally inclusive and pro-reconciliation remembrances, which I think is a great idea. He said that even Soweto Uprising Day, which the ANC always used to mark every year on June 16, has now been rebranded as “Children’s Rights Day.” And various days that previously were celebrations of famous Afrikaaner victories etc have been rebranded as “Reconciliation Day” or whatever.
If the South Africans can do that, so soon after 1994– surely we here in Virginia could do something similar, and not have these divisive and highly personalized holidays? I mean, I know that celebrating Dr. King’s heritage is supposed to be a unifying thing to do, and in a way it is. (Can the same possibly be said of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson?) But maybe it would be better to just have one mid-January holiday and call it “Equality Day” or “Reconciliation Day”, celebrating the values for which Dr. King struggled rather than the one individual himself…
News from Gitmo
The ACLU’s Ben Wizner, who’s observing the Guantanamo Military Commission sessions that resumed last Wednesday, has been blogging his work there. It looks like good reading. You can comment either there or here.
Update, Sunday evening:
I hope you’ve all gone over and read some of Wizner’s blog. It’s the best window I’ve found so far into what’s going on inside Gitmo.
In this post from last Wednesday, for example, he says that the chief prosecutor in the “Military Commissions” there told him and his colleagues from three other NGOs that more than four years after the opening of Gitmo, interrogations there are still continuing. Of course, we don’t know whether these are still of the highly abusive sort reported from Gitmo earlier– the authorities have refused to allow the NGO reps to visit any prisoners or their living quarters; and I believe the ICRC also has problems getting access to detainees.
This, at the time that the former commander of the Gitmo detention center, Gen. Geoffrey Miller, has just recently taken “Article 31”, that is, the military-law equivalent of the Fifth Amendment, to justify his refusal to testify in a torture-related case.
In this post from Thursday, Wizner gives a good, fairly detailed description of two MC cases that he sat in on.
One was definitely Kafka-esque. The defendant, Yemeni Ali Hamza Al-Bahlul, started off by citing nine reasons why he had decided to boycott the hearing. I guess Wizner was working with an interpreter, and he understood these reasons only partially. But one was “Because of discrimination based on nationality . . . . The British detainees were not subjected to military trials, because Britain refused to allow its citizens, even Muslims, to be tried”; another was because of “the secret evidence issue”.
Wizner reports that Presiding Officer Peter Brownback then said,
- “Please, before you boycott… can I ask you one more thing?” Al Bahlul put his hands in front of his face, then removed his headset.
After a recess, Brownback formally denied al Bahlul’s previous request to represent himself – reasoning, oddly, that al Bahlul’s boycott rendered him “incompetent” to represent himself. (This was circular: the Commission’s refusal to permit al Bahlul to represent himself was almost certainly a principal cause of the boycott.) Brownback then ordered Tom Fleener to sit at counsel table and to state his credentials.
Fleener did so and then immediately moved to withdraw as defense counsel, explaining that al Bahlul didn’t want him as a lawyer, and ethical rules required that he not participate against the wishes of a client. Fleener had sought guidance from the state bars of Iowa and Wyoming, where he is licensed to practice, and had not yet received responses. Brownback denied the request. “You are de facto and de jure the only counsel Mr. Al Bahlul has, and as he pointed out earlier, it is him against the United States. You are the only one on his side.” The result is that proceedings in al Bahlul’s case will continue, though al Bahlul refuses to speak to — or even look at — his defense counsel.
Anyway: to have Wizner blogging a hearing like this is great. In near-real time, too. I’m sure that if Rebecca West or Hannah Arendt were alive today, they would be down at Gitmo blogging it. H’mm, maybe I should find a way to get there…. once I finish this Africa book.
Washington’s Iranian dilemma
All three of the major Middle East crisis-areas that I identified in this JWN post last week are entering new and even more dangerous phases.
That is: Iraq; Israel-Palestine; and the Iranian nuclear developments.
The Bushites find themselves faced, in all three of these areas, with choices that are just about impossible for them to make– if they stick to the pugnaciously unilateralist approach to foreign affairs that they’ve pursued since 9/11.
In fact, it’s very interesting and significant already that they’re trying to take the Iranian case to the Security Council rather than “simply” deploying their own or Israel’s military might to obliterate the cause of their concern there.
But even the Bushites are realistic enough to understand that if they did attempt an “Osirak” option:
- (1) It would only set back the Iranian program– whatever that is intended to achieve, which we still do not know– by a short period of time;
(2) It could meanwhile confidently be predicted to provoke a firestorm of violent anti-US and anti-Israeli actions throughout the Middle East– including very probably against both the widely-dispersed US forces in Iraq and their lengthy and vulnerable supply lines;
(3) It could also be predicted to provoke a massive and largely unpredictable political/diplomatic reaction throughout a world that has seen the US government giving a nod and a wink to the “outside the law” acquisition of nuclear weapons by Israel, India, and Pakistan, but which then chooses to launch military action action to end a nuclear program in Iran that– even with the launching of fuel-enrichment activities– still does not transgress the basic terms of the NPT.
What will happen at the Security Council if the Bushites succeed in their campaign to have that body consider the case of the Iranian nuclear developments? Who knows? It certainly wouldn’t easily result in the kind of strong-condemnation outcome that the Bushites would aim for. The balance of global power is no longer one that is prepared almost “automatically” to give Washington whatever it asks for.
And if the Security Council starts examining the status of the NPT– how about looking at the degree of progress on Article 6, while we’re about it?
… Anyway, I’ve opened this thread here for people to discuss the Iranian nuclear question. It certainly won’t be “going away” as an issue anytime over the next three weeks! Nor will the other two portions of Washington’s current Middle East “trifecta”.
I, however, will be “going away”… Well, not literally. But this week my agent and I have been nailing down the arrangements for publishing my book on transitional justice issues in Africa. They involve me rewriting just about the entire manuscript within the next three weeks. I need to bring the length down from 108K words to under 100K, and do some re-arranging. Good job my whole professional formation was on the basis of “Deadlines ‘R’ Us”, eh?
So expect my postings here over the next few weeks to be even more scrappy and idiosyncratic than usual. (Though I have a very interesting one up my sleeve for you, soon.) In the meantime, have some good conversations here among yourselves if you should wish…
The question of Hakim
Nearly all the media commentary up till now, about the inflammatory statement that SCIRI leader Abdul-Aziz Hakim made Wednesday about the present text of the Constitution being untouchable, has referred to Hakim as incontestably the most powerful individual within the big Shiite electoral coalition, the UIA– and therefore, within all of Iraq. E.g. this news article: “THE most influential politician in Iraq”, as cited uncritically by Juan Cole. Other examples abound in both the MSM and blogosphere…
But why do all these people buy this assumption so uncricitically? It is heavily promoted, of course, by Hakim and his SCIRI supporters themselves…
I noted in several JWN posts between Dec. 20 and Jan. 1 that Hakim’s predominance inside the UIA was by no means a done deal. (See here, here, here, and here.)
I’ve seen no news reports or other evidence since that last post that change the conclusion I expressed there, namely that:
- the outcome of the intra-UIA power struggle will be very important for the course Iraq takes over the coming months and years. Thus far, I see the two poles of the main struggle being occupied by Hakim and Sadr, with the current PM, Ibrahim Jaafari straddling somewhere between them.
I think, before anyone goes running around blithely describing Hakim as “the most influential politican in Iraq” or whatever, they should actually present the evidence on which they base this conclusion? And also give due consideration to the counter-evidence that is out there. Otherwise, they’re just acting as shills for Hakim.
CSM column on Israel and Palestine
Here is the column I have in the CSM today, on the implications of the leadership crises in Israel and Palestine.
Iraqi oil affairs
The British-based anti-poverty movement War on Want is one of the co-publishers of what looks like a well-done new study of the production sharing agreements that Iraq’s American occupiers are trying to develop for Iraq’s oil industry. The study is called Crude Designs – The rip-off of Iraq’s oil wealth.
A recent press release from War on Want says:
- Figures published in the report for the first time show:
* the estimated cost to Iraq over the life of the new oil contracts is $74 to $194 billion, compared with leaving oil development in public hands. These sums represent between two and seven times the current Iraqi state budget.
* the contracts would guarantee massive profits to foreign companies, with rates of return of 42% to 162%.
The kinds of contracts that will provide these returns are known as production sharing agreement(PSAs). PSAs have been heavily promoted by the US government and oil majors and have the backing of senior figures in the Iraqi Oil Ministry. Britain has also encouraged Iraq to open its oilfields to foreign investment.
The report’s Executive Summary lays out those same facts and further explains:
- an oil policy with origins in the US State Department is on course to be adopted in Iraq, soon after the December elections, with no public debate and at enormous potential cost. The policy allocates the majority of Iraq’s oilfields – accounting for at least 64% of the country’s oil reserves – for development by multinational oil companies.
Iraqi public opinion is strongly opposed to handing control over oil development to foreign companies. But with the active involvement of the US and British governments a group of powerful Iraqi politicians and technocrats is pushing for a system of long term contracts with foreign oil companies which will be beyond the reach of Iraqi courts, public scrutiny or democratic control.
… The development model being promoted in Iraq, and supported by key figures in the Oil Ministry, is based on contracts known as production sharing agreements (PSAs), which have existed in the oil industry since the late 1960s. Oil experts agree that their purpose is largely political: technically they keep legal ownership of oil reserves in state hands, while practically delivering oil companies the same results as the concession agreements they replaced.
Running to hundreds of pages of complex legal and financial language and generally subject to commercial confidentiality provisions, PSAs are effectively immune from public scrutiny and lock
governments into economic terms that cannot be altered for decades.
In Iraq’s case, these contracts could be signed while the government is new and weak, the security situation dire, and the country still under military occupation. As such the terms are likely to be highly unfavourable, but could persist for up to 40 years.
I don’t know much about the strength of the oil workers’ trade unions in Iraq right now. But Gilbert Achcar just sent me this text, which is an English-language version of the speech that Hassan Jumaa Awad, the President of the General Union of Oil Employees in Basra, made at the big anti-war gathering in London on Dec. 10.
Awad concluded his speech thus:
- America does not want to withdraw at this time, because it did not complete its operation; it has not yet accomplished the second phase of the occupation, the economic occupation of Iraq. That is why the U.S. administration is currently putting forward its economic plans which include privatization of the oil and manufacturing sectors, and the production sharing agreement [PSA] project.
From this platform, I would like to make clear to all the positions of our Union, which are known to the Iraqi people:
1. Occupation forces must leave the country immediately and unconditionally.
2. We will stand firmly and resolutely against all those who want to tamper with the security and power of the Iraqi people.
3. We condemn terrorist attacks against our people and stress the importance of respecting human rights.
4. We support the honorable resistance that targets and strikes at foreign military forces and seeks to drive the occupiers out.
5. We will not allow the intrusion of foreign companies [in the oil sector] and production sharing agreements, and we will stand with all our force against monopoly firms such as Halliburton, KBR, Shell, and others.
6. We ask the patriotic forces, the antiwar movement and peace-lovers to support our Union in its campaign against privatization and PSAs.
7. We demand the unconditional cancellation of Iraq’s [foreign] debts, as these debts never benefited the Iraqi people but served the buried regime.
In conclusion, I wish you good luck and success, and I look forward to meeting you in a free, democratic, and united Iraq that would be a workshop for all free citizens of the world. I offer again my thanks and appreciation to the organizers of this conference
So anyway, it looks as though the new Iraqi government– when and if it should ever get formed!– will have three extremely important items on its agenda:
(1) Completing the still-incomplete negotiations for the Constitution,
(2) Negotiating the withdrawal (or otherwise) of the US/UK forces, and
(3) Determining the country’s oil policy– an item that looks as if it is going to be forced onto their agenda very early on.
I will just conclude by noting that Iraq’s nationalization of its oil industry, which back in 1972 took control of the industry back from its British and other foreign “concessionaires”, was an extremely important step forward in the country’s history. But now– here come the same-old colonial powers, back once again.
Out of Egypt? US ‘black’ detainees in Europe
Why was the Egyptian Foreign Minister telling his Ambassador in London about the identity of the countries in eastern Europe where US government agencies were holding and interrogating, or planning to hold and interrogate, 23 Iraqi and Afghan prisoners?
To me, that is one of the most intriguing aspects of the “leak” that happened in Switzerland over the weekend, in which reporters from the Swiss weekly SonntagsBlick got hold of and wrote about intercepts that Swiss military intel had gotten from a fax that Egyptian FM Ahmed Abul-Gheit sent to his London embassy, last November 10.
What was the interest of the government of Egypt in the fate of these detainees, pray?
According to this English-language despatch from Swissinfo, which was quoting the SonntagsBlick article,
- The Egyptian fax stated that 23 Iraqi and Afghan citizens had been transferred to a Romanian military base near the port of Constanza for interrogation purposes. It added that similar detention centres had been set up in Ukraine, Kosovo, Macedonia and Bulgaria.
The simplest explanation for why the Egyptian government would be involved in this affair would be that these detainees were being hurriedly hustled out of Egypt. I suppose there are other explanations?
Another serious question is why any “Iraqi” detainees were among those being hustled around the Euro-Mediterranean area, at all. When the US forces invaded Iraq they assured the ICRC that they would comply there with the provisions of international humanitarian law that require, inter alia, that security detainees be kept in the occupied territory and not taken out of it. In Afghanistan, by contrast, the Bush administration always said it did not consider itself an “occupying power” under the terms of the Geneva Conventions, and therefore did not consider itself bound by those provisions.
Of course, there are many other ways– torture, etc– in which the US occupation authorities in Iraq have violated the Geneva Conventions. But to take Iraqis out of their country and shuffle them around the world in the CIA’s globe-girdling “black hole” prison system? That’s another very serious infraction, too.
I note, meanwnile, that the SonntagsBlock revelations have set off a flurry of related political activity in some of the European countries named, and elsewhere in Europe:
In Romania,
- Members of the team investigating the case of the alleged CIA prisons on Romanian territory have asked the Defense Ministry to make available all files on military airplanes that flew over, landed or took of from Romania starting in 2002.
The commission’s president, Liberal senator Norica Nicolai, said yesterday that similar requests have been made by the Civilian Aviation Authority and by the European Organization for Air Transport Safety.
In Brussels,
- The head of a European investigation into alleged CIA prisons in Europe said Tuesday the purported Egyptian government document naming countries where such prisons existed is a new lead which must be followed up.
… The Strasbourg, France-based Council of Europe began its investigation after allegations surfaced in November that U.S. agents interrogated key al-Qaida suspects at clandestine prisons in Eastern Europe and transported some suspects to other countries via Europe.
But in Switzerland– yes, Switzerland, longtime home of the ICRC and birthplace of the whole idea of “international humanitarian law”– the federal government earlier today,
- launched a probe … into the leak of an Egyptian diplomatic fax intercepted by its secret service that appeared to lend credence to allegations the CIA had secret prisons in Eastern Europe.
… The Swiss government, which defended the actions of its secret service in intercepting the message, said the federal prosecutor as well as military authorities had begun preliminary investigations over the leak.
“Somebody who acts like this is hurting the reputation and the credibility of our country. Moreover, they are punishable by law,” the government said in a statement.
But the bottom lines on this still, in my view, remain:
* Why is the US government holding prisoners quite illegally and “off the records” in a number of places around the world, and also transporting them across international borders?
* Who are these prisoners? Where are they being held currently? How can their situation be regularized so that they can receive the due protections to which they are entitled under law– whether international humanitarian law or the national law of the place where they are being held?
* And how can the US government and all its accomplices in the “black” detainees conspiracy be held to account for their shocking misdeeds on this issue continuously since October 2001?
(Hat-tip to Christiane for nudging me to write about this!)
CSM reporter kidnapped, Iraq
I just saw this report about a young Christian Science Monitor reporter called Jill Caroll being kidnapped in Baghdad.
I am just hoping and praying that she and the translator kidnaped along with her are both okay.
So very many people are being quite illegally deprived of their liberty in Iraq today– and threatened, many of them, with physical mistreatment or even annihilation.
I’d like to take this opportunity to tell anyone who might know the people who’re holding Jill Carroll a little about the Christian Science Monitor that they might not know.
The newspaper was founded as a regular daily newspaper around 100 years ago by Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy, a courageous American woman who founded a new branch of Christian belief called Christian Science. The paper is still owned and operated by the Christian Science church, but it functions just like a regular newspaper in the secular world, with the exception that a portion of one page is given over to “today’s religious article.”
The church is not involved in any attempt to “convert” Iraqis or any other Middle Easterners to the faith. Many of the reporters working for the paper are not even members of the C.S. church; some of them are. All of them are good, professional journalists.
I have worked with the newspaper in one way or another since 1976, and have written a regular column for them since 1990. (As regular JWN readers will know, I am not a Christian Scientist, but a member of another Christian church, the Quakers.) One of the things I admire about the paper is the fact that, being owned by a church, it is the only major US national daily that is not subject to commercial pressures by advertisers– a factor that in the case of several other papers and broadcast media has caused journalists to modify their reporting of facts that might be detrimental to Israel. Journalists working for the CSM can describe things as they honestly see them. The CSM has also, throughout the decades, built up a strong record of giving broad and thoughtful coverage to issues in the developing countries.
No-one in Iraq or elsewhere ever deserves to be detained illegally. But it seems particularly tragic– in Jill Carroll’s case, as in that of the four CPT abductees– that western people who are making a serious, peaceful, and respectful attempt to build bridges of understanding with all communities in Iraq should be kidnapped and held in this way.
Please! Can the people holding these abductees find a way to release them all in safety?
Hamas ready to take responsibility?
This, from AP is interesting:
- Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar was asked if the atmosphere were ripe for Hamas to form a government that would not deal with Israel, Hamas reported on its Web site.
“Yes. We are running for the Legislative Council to put an end to the vestiges of Oslo,” Zahar said, referring to the Oslo peace accords between Israel and the Palestinians of the early 1990s.
I don’t have time to hunt down the original source (described as a posting on Hamas’s own website) or put in much background here. But until now Hamas has sustained a policy of seeking only strong representation in the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), rather than explicitly to govern.
However, the implosion of Fateh and the rest of the current PA (see e.g. here) means that there is a real crisis of governance in Palestinian society that is harming every community in the occupied territories. Any political organization that takes itself seriously and that has some governing capabilities would have to step forward and express readiness to do so.
Zahar is the head of Hamas in Gaza but not the overall head of the movement. Still, his word is extremely weighty.
It will be interesting to see how Israel and the US respond to this. Elections are still scheduled for January 25. Of course, there may well be those in the Israeli right wing who would seek to use the present crisis-ridden circumstances on both sides of the “Green Line” as a pretext for escalation.
Iraq: government “within weeks”??
Percipient as ever (irony alert there), “Uncle” Jalal Talabani, still the President of Iraq, predicted today that a new government could be formed in his country “within weeks”.
This is all so very reminiscent of what happened after the election of January of last year. Back then it took 88 days between election day and the day on which a new “government” arising from those elections was sworn in.
Those 88 days were marked by terrible, terrible waves of violence in the country. And the administration that was then sworn in was able to solve none of the country’s problems and meet pitifully few of its people’s needs.
I pray to God the same thing is not going to happen this time around, too. But Talabani’s announcement of just how long he thinks government formation might take is really depressing. And of course, just like after the January 2005 election, this time too the violence has been escalating badly.
This Hayat article quotes un-named “diplomats” as saying they expect it will not take three months to cobble together the new government this time, as it did last time…
It also quotes British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw as saying that the withdrawal of British troops from Iraq is “a matter of months”. Also this,
- He added that the British troops “will remain as long as the Iraqi government wants them to remain… and we hope in practice that we can withdraw our troops in stages, on our own responsibility, not from Basra in the first instance but from from other governorates. We need to coordinate this withdrawal with the Iraqiswhen they confirm that their troops have become ready to carry all the responsibility in these districts. It is a matter of months, and we are here to liberate Iraq, not exercize imperialism here.” And Straw stressed that the future Iraqi government should be “truly a government of national unity rather than being [a government of] only one party.”
How very kind– one might even say “liberating”– of Minister Straw to tell the Iraqis what kind of a government they should or should not have.