When I was a young journo working in the Middle East for the Christian Science Monitor, I was lucky enough to work for an extremely wise Foreign Editor called Geoffrey Godsell (of blessed memory) who always stressed that what the CSM wanted was not to have its reporters competing with people working for other international news dailies who sought to be a complete “newspaper of record” in every 24-hour period… No. Geoffrey used to stress over and over that it was more important to seek to understand the events I was writing about, even if that should take a bit more time.
“Leave chasing the so-called ‘scoops’ to the others,” he’d say. “Who knows in any given 24-hour period what will be of lasting importance, anyway? We want you to give us the stories of lasting importance.”
All of which is, I guess, a long-winded way of saying that I may be late, but I try to be good. I feel a bit late in having discovered a great new news source that covers a lot of the things that I’m interested in: Iraq, the Balkans, ICTY, Afghanistan, etc. But now that I have discovered it, I want to share the good news with you (if you don’t already know about it, which maybe you do.)
I’m referring to the excellent website of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, where you can get good, street-level reporting in English and a variety of other languages on all the above topics, and more.
Plus, they have a well-compiled page called the Iraqi Press Monitor, that provides a handy daily digest of the Arabic-language press in Iraq (plus, quite frequently, cartoons from Iraqi newspapers).
Anyway, today, I was cruising around the blogosphere, still a bit concerned that Riverbend still seems too depressed to post stuff for us… I had this feeling of “I want more, quality news and views from Iraq”. And where’s Anthony Shadid, anyway, just when we need him?? I’ve kind of had it with nervous-nelly gringos writing from inside the Green Zone or from dartingly short forays outside of it.
(Okay. I admit I’m even more of a nervous nelly than most of those gringo journos working there now. I haven’t even been to Iraq since the war; or indeed since 1981. But I’ve been writing this book on Africa, and the other one on Israel/Palestine. Gimme a break, already!)
So okay… I’m looking for news on Iraq, preferably by native-born Iraqis, and what I find is the IWPR.
In addition to their daily press digest, referred to above, what they also have up on their website is a weekly collection of stories–mainly ‘hard news’, but also some ‘soft news’ and ‘opinion’– produced by Iraqi trainees in a journalism training program they’ve been running there. And much of it is really, really good.
For example, if you go to this page and scroll down a bit, you’ll come to the latest week’s-worth of stories by the trainees. The most recent ones I found there (13 July dateline) were pretty interesting and wide-ranging. But last week’s collection (6 July) looked even better to me, in good part because they had a variety of different stories describing the street-level reaction to Saddam’s first court appearance.
Like this one, “Saddam’s TV Appearance Brings Popularity Surge: Support for the former dictator appears to strengthen after his self-confident debut in court”, written by Dhiya Rasan, from Baghdad. Rasan’s lede was:
Wiped
I’m wiped. I finished writing the section of my book on Rwanda today. And I don’t even have energy for blogging. What’s happening here??
Don’t worry. I’ll be back tomorrow with another rush of trenchant comments on the ways and woes of the world.
Tonight, I’ll curl up with a Carol Shields book I got from the library. Tomorrow, I’ll run, maybe dig a bit of garden… Then I’ll be back!
David Passaro/ Hyder Akbar contd.
The second good piece in today’s NYT mag is a short “as told to” piece featuring Hyder Akbar. You may recall that Akbar is the young Bay Area Afghan-American who had the un-nerving experience of accompanying a “wanted” man in Afghanistan into the custody of some US soldiers and contractors– only to be called in three days later and told that the man, Abdul Wali, was dead.
US contract employee David Passaro is now being tried in connection with the torture of that suspect. (I wrote a post about that here, on June 17.)
Anyway, in this latest piece, Akbar gives many more details than he had done in an earlier, NPR-broadcast radio diary about the time he spent taking Abdul Wali to the American base back in June 2003.
In fact, he stayed with Abdul Wali and with the three Americans who were interrogating him inside the US base for quite a while, interpreting between the two sides. (It seems that none of the Americans apart from him knew any of Abdul Wali’s language. Nor, as seems equally clear, did they understand anything about the local culture.)
So there they were: Akbar, then 18 years old, Abdul Wali, and also (according to Akbar’s latest account)…
- Steve, Brian and Dave, who proved to be David A. Passaro, the C.I.A. contractor now facing trial. It was more than 100 degrees in the small room, and above us, a fan whirred wildly.
The interrogation started casually enough. In his friendly Southern accent, Brian dispensed with the nuts and bolts: have you been in contact with Taliban? Were you Taliban? Then the subject turned to Wali’s recent visit to Pakistan.
”How long ago were you in Pakistan?” Brian asked.
Wali looked confused, and I doubted he’d be able to answer. People in Kunar don’t have calendars; most of them don’t even know how old they are.
”You don’t have to give a specific date,” Brian said. ”Was it two, three days ago? Two, three weeks ago? Two, three months ago?”
”I don’t know,” Wali responded. ”It’s really hard for me to say.”
Soon therafter:
The trials of trying Saddam, contd.
The NYT mag has two (or perhaps more) good pieces in it today. One is this consideration by Peter Landesman of some of the trials of trying Saddam Hussein.
The piece reveals that Salem Chalabi, the INC-appointed head of the “Iraqi Special tribunal” is not completely stupid. (What it does not reveal are the strong pro-Likud inclinations of Marc Zell, whom Landesman mentions. Zell is the Israeli settler who was SC’s partner in the commercial-law company the two of them set up in Baghdad immediately after the start of the US occupation.)
Anyway, not completely stupid:
- ”Iraqis have their own goals for this tribunal, not that it brings justice but that it punishes people,” said Salem Chalabi, the Iraqi exile, nephew of Ahmad Chalabi and general director of the Iraqi Special Tribunal since April. ”I’m treading a thin line between what Iraqis want, which is a quick process to judge Saddam guilty and just kill him, and what the international community desires, which is due process, a fair trial. All this will end up being thrown aside if you let Iraqis take over. They may just want to go ahead and create a new kind of process and just kill everybody, which is a realistic alternative.” He added, ”A lot can go wrong.”
The piece also reveals that US investigators and prosecutions specialists continue to do much of the work of preparing Saddam’s indictment, even after Saddam’s largely nominal “handover” to the “legal custody” (but not the physical custody) of new Iraqi quasi-government.
Landesman quotes Zuhair Almaliky, the chief investigative judge of Iraq’s central criminal court, as saying: ”This tribunal is not ours; it is somebody who came from abroad who created a court for themselves… ‘Chalabi selected the judges according to his political opinions.”
He quotes M. Cherif Bassiouni, the former chairman of a United Nations commission to investigate war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, as saying:
Rwanda’s Kagame: losing his ‘license’?
The NYT had an interesting editorial about Rwanda’s gacaca courts today. The editorial writer referred to some of the ‘procedural’ problems with this court system, which is one of the main vehicles Pres. Paul Kagame’s government has been using to deal with the scores of thousands of still-untried genocide suspects who’ve been mired in the country’s prisons, some of them for nearly 10 years now.
The editorial also referred to Kagame as “Rwanda’s increasingly totalitarian president”. Not, imho, a totally inaccurate characterization of the guy (though I still have great empathy with the size of the dilemma his government–or any other government–would face as it tries to deal with the many still unresolved sequelae of the 1994 genocide.)
But seeing the NYT, this avatar of the “liberal establishment” US media, referring to Kagame in these terms made me wonder: Is Kagame on the verge of losing the victim’s license that he has been given by western liberals since 1994?
This term, ‘victim’s license’, was coined–or anyway, used in reference to Kagame–by George Monbiot, a columnist for Britain’s Guardian daily. Significantly, Monbiot used it both with reference to the Kagame government and to many post-Holocaust Jews.
In a column April 13, Monbiot wrote:
Our Quaker book on Israel/Palestine–finally!
Finally! After long labors, the book-length report that 14 of us–nearly all Quakers–have written on the Israel/Palestine situation is out. (Quaker process takes a famously long time, but we did it.)
It is called, When the Rain returns: Toward Justice and Reconciliation in Palestine and Israel, and it is being published by the American Friends Service Committee, Philadelphia. AFSC still doesn’t have a downloadable order form on their website. Tsk, tsk. Pending the moment that they get one up, I did some scanning of the hard-copy brochure they sent me. So now you can download and print the following items:
Continue reading “Our Quaker book on Israel/Palestine–finally!”
CSM column on Darfur
My column Safeguard Darfur refugees with unarmed UN monitors, which is running in Thursday’s CSM, can be found here. Tell me what you think.
Those charming Chalabis (contd.)
Douglas McCollam has a pretty well-researched piece in the latest Columbia Journalism Review titled “How Chalabi played the press”. His focus is, not surprisingly, on the run-up to the war, and way that everyone’s (then-)favorite snake-oil salesman worked assiduously and successfully to plant in the western press the kinds of stories that would jerk western governments–but especially the US!–into launching the war that he sought against Saddam.
From a quick read of the piece–and from what one knew already–the way it seemed to work was this: Chala got gobs of money from various US government agencies to run something called the “Information Collection Program” (ICP).
Collection?? Well, that was the easy part… He would just groom a few alleged “defectors” from Iraq who would tell their tales to selected journalists. The part that Chala really focused on, however, was information dissemination. And in that department, he found many, many journalists whom he played like fine violins.
(So we taxpayers here in the US found ourselves paying money to someone who then used it to try to sell his lies to us.)
McCollam writes that he thinks the strong focus on Judy Miller in the whole journo community is not totally fair. He seems to give his own “Golden Gull” award to someone called David Rose. In a piece in the May 2002 issue of Vanity Affair, Rose recounted many stories from Mohammed Harith, a former Iraqi “Mukhabarat ” (intel) officer, who claimed to have personal knowledge of Saddam Hussein’s mobile biological weapons labs.
According to McCollam, in Rose’s article, Harith claimed that, in addition to those (now-discredited) “mobile labs”,
- Hussein was close to building a new long-range missile. He also told of a trip to Africa to buy radioactive materials for a dirty bomb from renegade Russians. He spoke of a chemical weapons factory in Samarra and a bioweapons lab in the suburbs of Baghdad. And so on. In the piece, Rose effusively praised the INC’s defector operation, going so far as to say it resembled ‘nothing so much as the Underground Railroad, the clandestine network which rescued slaves from the American South before the Civil War.’
Oh, gimme a break.
As McCollam notes,
US Army & Marines: mental health alert
Well, we knew it would happen, and it has. Now, a study supported by the Military Operational Medicine Research Program, U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command of Ft. Detrick, Md., has discovered that war is hazardous to the mental health of the soldiers who fight in it.
The study, titled “Combat Duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, Mental Health Problems, and Barriers to Care” was published in the New England Journal of Medicine this week. In addition to revealing some interesting facts about the breadth of the mental-health problems caused by the Iraq and Afghan wars to US service members, it also gives one little window into the shockingly high number of service members who feel responsible for the deaths of nonconbatants–see below.
The principal author of the study was Charles W. Hoge, MD. His five collaborators include a numch of clinical psychologiosts and one other MD. Promising anonymity to respondents, they gave a self-administered questionnaire to a large number of service-people before they were deployed, and then to others subsequent to deployments in either Afghanistan or Iraq. Their principal finding was that:
- The percentage of study subjects whose responses met the screening criteria for major depression, generalized anxiety, or PTSD was significantly higher after duty in Iraq (15.6 to 17.1 percent) than after duty in Afghanistan (11.2 percent) or before deployment to Iraq (9.3 percent); the largest difference was in the rate of PTSD.
That would be Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
So if you calculate that the increase in these conditions has been on the order of 6.3 to 7.8 percent among the soldiers (and Marines) who went to Iraq, and that probably 250,000 US service members have now served in Iraq–maybe a lot more?– you could calculate that somewhere between 15,750 and 19,500 Americans have been given serious mental disorders as a result of Bush’s quite optional decision to launch that war.
And we can all imagine what that means for those individuals, their families, and the communities they return to, I’m sure.
Meanwhile, in The Hague…
Meanwhile, in the ICTY branch of the venture of international “justice”, the Serbs’ wily and venal former President, Slobodan Milosevic, has been declared physically not “fit” to stand trial. (He has heart problems.)
This concept of the necessity that a defendant be “fit to stand trial” is an intriguing but little-noted aspect of western criminal procedure. It is not just a byway of medico-legal arcana, but is central to the whole theory of the criminal trial and punishment within the western legal system. (Actually, I’m not sure how it works within a civil-law system, and would love to be elucidated. I’m more familiar with the philosophical underpinnings of common-law systems.)
My favorite punishment guru, the Scottish philosopher R.A. (Tony) Duff, has a whole chapter in his 1986 book Trials and Punishments that explores the theories of fitness to stand trial, fitness to be sentenced, and–this is a particuarly interesting one–“fitness to be executed”. I don’t, however, have that book to hand. All I have is his 2001 book, Punishment, Communication, and Community.
Here, on p.80, he writes:
- The criminal law of a liberal polity, and the criminal process of trial and conviction to which offenders are subjected, are communicative enterprises that address the citizens, as rational moral agents, in the normative language of the community’s values… It seeks not just (as might a soveriegn) their obedience to its demands, but their understanding and acceptance of what is required of them as citizens… ”
All fine and interesting stuff. And it just underlines even further the degree to which the creation of ICTY (and ICTR) were acts of amazing boldness, in that they asserted, merely by Security Council fiat, that the whole world does indeed constitute a single such normative community, within which Judge Patrick Robinson and the two other red-robed judges in the courtroom could address Milosevic or anyone else they cared to address as fellow-citizens, bound by the same normative code.
Ah would that this were so. But assertion of such a fact does, I think, require a degree of consent from those who are–presto! just like that! by fiat of the Security Council!–to be included within the bounds of such a community.
Slobo has notably never given his consent…