[pjnews] Redefining Torture
Info about subscribing or unsubscribing from this list is at the bottom of this message. http://www.truthout.org/docs_05/010305A.shtml Redefining Torture By Marjorie Cohn t r u t h o u t | Perspective Monday 03 January 2005 The election's over, but the Bush spin machine goes on. In anticipation of hard questions Alberto Gonzales will face at his attorney general confirmation hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee this week, Bush's lawyers are seeking to minimize the damage from the release of the torture memos in which Gonzales concurred. Gonzales wrote a memo in January 2002 that proposed for the first time, The war against terrorism is a new kind of war and this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions. Gonzales also designed the military commissions to deny due process to those who will face trials in them. (See my editorial, The Quaint Mr. Gonzales). An August 2002 memo leaked during 2004 set the stage for the torture of prisoners in Iraq and Guantánamo Bay. It helped provide an after-the-fact legal basis for harsh procedures used by the CIA on high-level leaders of Al Qaeda, according to the New York Times. In it, Bush's legal eagles defined torture so narrowly, the torturer would have to nearly kill the torturee in order to run afoul of the legal prohibition against torture. It said that to constitute torture, the pain caused by an interrogation must include injury such as death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions. That memo also set forth the opinion that the laws prohibiting torture do not apply to the President's detention and interrogation of enemy combatants, because he is Commander-in-Chief of the United States. And it posited various defenses to shield the President and his men from prosecution under the federal torture statute. The release of this memo, coupled with the repulsive torture photographs, launched a firestorm of criticism at the Bush administration. The White House quickly disavowed the memo as the work of a small group of Justice Department lawyers. But the Washington Post reported that administration officials now confirm it was vetted by a larger number of officials, including lawyers at the National Security Council, the White House counsel's office and Vice President Cheney's office. According to Newsweek, the memo was drafted after White House meetings convened by George W. Bush's chief counsel, Alberto Gonzales, along with Defense Department general counsel William Haynes and [Cheney counsel] David Addington. Haynes is one of Bush's judicial nominees who was not approved by the Senate; Bush, however, has resubmitted Haynes' name to the Senate, hoping Republican senators will engage in the unprecedented destruction of the filibuster. Now, on the threshold of Senate hearings to confirm Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General, Justice Department lawyers have redefined torture in a new memo meant to supersede the embarrassing August 2002 memo. The new memo, dated December 30, 2004, begins with the admirable statement: Torture is abhorrent both to American law and values and to international norms. Although undoubtedly aware of the abhorrent nature of torture back in 2002, the old memo's authors launched right into narrowing the definition of torture in its first paragraph. They didn't bother to mention that it is repulsive to the people. In the fourth paragraph of the 17-page December memo, its authors say: This memorandum supersedes the August 2002 Memorandum in its entirety. When the August 2002 memo came to light, it provoked such an outcry, Gonzales stepped up to the political damage control plate, and dubbed the Commander-in-Chief section unnecessary. Gonzales' damage control statement has now been codified in the December memo. It says: Because the discussion in that [August 2002] memorandum concerning the President's Commander-in-Chief power and the potential defenses to liability was - and remains - unnecessary, it has been eliminated from the analysis that follows. Consideration of the bounds of any such authority would be inconsistent with the President's unequivocal directive that United States personnel not engage in torture. What a relief! But wait. The new memo doesn't actually say the President doesn't have unlimited power to defy our torture laws. It begs the question by saying it's unnecessary to deal with the broader legal issue because Bush has commendably declared that U.S. personnel should not commit torture. The myriad reports, photographs, and testimonials that document widespread torture by U.S. personnel, however, show that Bush's directive has been ignored. So the scope of possible defenses to torture prosecutions would indeed be relevant. What the new memo does do is modify the definition of torture. We disagree with statements in the
[pjnews] Victims Of Tsunami Pay The Price Of War On Iraq
Info about subscribing or unsubscribing from this list is at the bottom of this message. http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2005-01/01raptis.cfm Tsunamis And People http://coreykoberg.com/Tsunami/ photos from tsunami hitting Thailand's coast http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/c1187/ Surviving a Tsunami Lessons from Chile, Hawaii, and Japan http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0107-28.htm The Tsunami Victims That We Don't Count by Derrick Z. Jackson / Boston Globe Bush quoted all the numbers for the tsunami in speeches this week: 150,000 lives lost, including 90,000 in Indonesia; perhaps 5 million homeless; millions vulnerable to disease. That stands in hypocritical contrast to the refusal to count the Iraqi civilians killed in his invasion over false claims of weapons of mass destruction and the crime-ridden chaos of an occupation that did not plan on an insurgency. [...] No flags have been flown at half-staff for Iraqi civilians. There have been no moments of silence in Congress. There have been no speeches by Bush mourning the tens of thousands of children who are lost. Americans have not been asked to think of the tens of thousands more who will grow up without their parents or their brothers or their sisters. In a nation that supposedly reelected Bush on moral values, there have been no prayers from the White House for all the people whose fate is still unknown in Iraq. This was a bipartisan hypocrisy. [...] Let us do what we can for the victims of the tsunami. But no matter how much we weep for them, no matter what donations we spare, the offerings will not spare us from history's judgment, if not God's. Lugar said his heart goes out to the victims of the tsunami. No hearts have gone out to Iraqi civilians in this heartless coverup. Powell said of the tsunami, The power of the wave to destroy bridges, to destroy factories, to destroy homes, to destroy crops, to destroy everything in its path is amazing. He said, I have never seen anything like it in my experience. Yes, he has. It was in Iraq. The tsunami was us. http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/01/04/killing-vs-helping/ Killing vs Helping Bush and Blair no longer seem able to see the difference. By George Monbiot Published in the Guardian 4th January 2005 There has never been a moment like it on British television. The Vicar of Dibley, one of our gentler sitcoms, was bouncing along with its usual bonhomie on New Years Day when it suddenly hit us with a scene from another world. Two young African children were sobbing and trying to comfort each other after their mother had died of AIDS. How on earth, I wondered, would the show make us laugh after that? It made no attempt to do so. One by one the characters, famous for their parochial boorishness, stood in front of the camera wearing the white armbands which signalled their support for the Make Poverty History campaign. You would have to have been hewn from stone not to cry. The timing was perfect. In my local Oxfam shop last week, people were queueing to the door to pledge money for the tsunami fund. A pub on the other side of town raised £1000 on Saturday night. In the pot on the counter of the local newsagents there must be nearly £100. The woman who runs the bakery told me about the homeless man she had seen, who emptied his pockets in the bank, saying I just want to do my bit, while the whole queue tried not to cry. Over the past few months, reviewing the complete lack of public interest in what is happening in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the failure, in the West, to mobilise effective protests against the continuing atrocities in Iraq, I had begun to wonder whether we had lost our ability to stand in other peoples shoes. I have now stopped wondering. The response to the tsunami shows that, however we might seek to suppress it, we cannot destroy our capacity for empathy. But one obvious question recurs. Why must the relief of suffering, in this unprecedentedly prosperous world, rely on the whims of citizens and the appeals of pop stars and comedians? Why, when extreme poverty could be made history with a minor redeployment of public finances, must the poor world still wait for homeless people in the rich world to empty their pockets? The obvious answer is that governments have other priorities. And the one that leaps to mind is war. If the money they have promised to the victims of the tsunami still falls far short of the amounts required, it is partly because the contingency fund upon which they draw in times of crisis has been spent on blowing people to bits in Iraq. The US government has so far pledged $350m to the victims of the tsunami, and the UK government £50m ($96m). The US has spent $148 billion on the Iraq war (1) and the UK £6bn ($11.5bn).(2) The war has been running for 656 days. This means that the money pledged for the tsunami disaster by the United States is the equivalent of one and a half days
[pjnews] Iraq's Kurds Enjoy Self-Rule
Info about subscribing or unsubscribing from this list is at the bottom of this message. http://snipurl.com/bpug The New York Times 31 December 2004 Iraq's Kurds Enjoy Self-Rule and Are Trying to Keep It By Richard A. Oppel Jr. ERBIL, Iraq - Even at night, on a busy thoroughfare in this Kurdish city, the sedan is an easy mark for the Kalashnikov-toting police at the checkpoint. It has Baghdad license plates and, more alarmingly, Arabs in the front seat. What are you doing here? the police demand, motioning the car to the side. It was a routine exchange, but one that reveals how far Erbil and the entire Kurdish region have drifted from the rest of Iraq and toward an informal but unmistakable autonomy that Kurdish leaders are determined to preserve. Residents in northern Iraq already call the area Kurdistan. The territory, stretching from Kirkuk on the region's southern edge to the Tigris River in the west and to Turkey and Iran in the north and east, is patently a world apart from the rest of Iraq. There is a building boom, with new apartments, hospitals and shopping centers. The gleaming 10-story Hotel Erbil, opened in October, is often sold out, its 167 rooms renting for $68 to $193. Markets bustle, and even the devalued dollar goes a long way, with decent-quality Turkish-made pullovers for $12 and a Pepsi and shwarma sandwich - the Iraqi hot dog - for a little more than 50 cents. While extensive areas of Iraq remain plagued by violence, the Kurdish sector is calm, with tight security maintained by swarms of Kurdish police officers and militiamen. Reconstruction projects, lagging in many parts of the country, are moving briskly ahead. The Kurds have veto power over most laws passed by the central government in Baghdad and have their own 80,000-member military, the pesh merga, whose troops are far better disciplined and skilled than most of their new Iraqi counterparts. In many places it is impossible to find an Iraqi flag. But the Kurds' red, white and green standard with a shining sun in the middle flies everywhere, even atop an Iraqi border guard compound in far northeastern Iraq. Yet while the Kurdish region may appear to be, for all practical purposes, a separate country, it can preserve its shaky independence only by denying it, and not just to Baghdad. Powerful neighbors, particularly Turkey and Iran, which both have substantial Kurdish populations, are highly sensitive to the slightest hint of Kurdish nationalism. And the United States rejects any idea of independence, which has wide support among Kurdish residents. The Kurds' desire for autonomy promises to tear at the unity of the new Iraq that the election planned for late January is supposed to help build. The voters are to choose a legislature to write a new constitution. But some Iraqi leaders have already expressed resentment at the most important safeguard of Kurdish independence: the power to veto the new constitution. For now Kurdish officials appear unwilling to coexist on anything but their own terms, which means bolstering their autonomy and preventing outside interference, whether from Baghdad or another country. Hamid Afandi, the minister of pesh merga for the Kurdish regional government based in Erbil, outlined one possible strategy: take control of Kirkuk - the disputed oil city north of Baghdad, where Kurds are even now wresting land from the Arabs who were settled there by Saddam Hussein - grab a far larger share of Kirkuk's oil revenue than the Kurds now get and use that to triple the size of the pesh merga force. We are ready to fight against all forces to control Kirkuk, Mr. Afandi said. Our share is very little. We'll try to take a larger share. So far, the Americans have blocked those ambitions, Mr. Afandi said. If they would permit us, we could control Kirkuk, he said, but it is forbidden. Kurdish officials say they will take part in the writing of the new constitution on the assumption that if they do not like what emerges, they have a veto. According to the existing temporary constitution, the public referendum on the new charter will be defeated if two-thirds of voters in three provinces (the Kurdish-dominated region of northern Iraq has three) reject it. But other Iraqi leaders have in the past suggested that the temporary constitution will no longer be operative after the January election, depriving Kurds of their veto power. Striving to avoid that sort of outcome, the main Kurdish political parties have joined forces to offer a unified slate of candidates. And the Kurds finished a huge voter registration drive in early December in hopes of packing the new parliament with as many representatives as possible. But it has been a difficult process, compounded by the region's deep mistrust and suspicion of Arabs. Up to 90 percent of the voter registration forms in Erbil Province contained errors, according to Kurdish officials. Those people in Baghdad did this deliberately! said
