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Book by John Maxwell
How to Make Our Own News: A Primer for Environmentalist and Journalists
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Not
even the shadow of Truth
By John
Maxwell
When
Colin Powell attempted to blind the world with science, to
convince us that the regime of Saddam Hussain was too dangerous
to tolerate, he spoke in front of a carefully hidden symbol
of human outrage against war and the murder of innocent people.
Behind him, but covered by an arras, was Picasso’s Guernica
a passionate protest in paint against the fascist
warplanes of Hitler and Mussolini slaughtering the
innocent civilians of the Spanish town of Guernica.
If the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour is a day that will live in
infamy, one wonders how historians of the future will describe
the Anglo-American led assault against the people of Iraq.
As the
New York Times editorialised on Thursday “Even
after most of the sites were searched, the places that had been
identified in spy photos as sinister weapons-production sites
had been shown to be chicken coops, and the scary reports about
nuclear weapons ready to be detonated proved to be the fantasies
of feckless intelligence analysts, die-hard supporters of the
invasion insisted that something would turn up.”
In
Britain, as in the United States, the truth-tellers have been
disgraced, one committed suicide, while the liars, the spin
doctors and the maleficent farceurs have moved on to bigger and
better things.
In
Iraq, where hundreds of thousands of children died because of
sanctions and thousands more were killed by picking up
attractively styled packages of death, the killing continues.
The
United States President, Mr Bush, with no rational excuse to be
in Iraq, demands the right to install democracy in that country
if he has to kill every Iraqi to do so.
As the
world waits the second installation of Mr Bush as President of
the United States, it may yet be determined that despite all the
damage he has caused in Iraq and in other places, the greatest
damage the President has done is to his own country and
its reputation for decency and fairness, however flawed:
to the idea of the United States as the pillar of Liberty
and a haven for democracy.
At
this moment, in a military court in Iraq, an American soldier is
on trial for gross abuses against helpless prisoners of war. The
official story is that he and a few other delinquents violated
established military orders and rules and subject prisoners to
humiliating and sometimes fatal terror and abuse.
Unfortunately
for the official story, it is now becoming clearer that the
torture and abuses at Abu Ghraib, at Guantanamo and at the other
outposts of the American gulag round the world were part of a
system, the product of an ideology and a psychology which
refuses to admit that all human beings are entitled to the same
rights.
The
President of the United States, with the advice of his Attorney
General and of the man slated to succeed that worthy, decided
that prisoners in the “war on terror” were ‘unlawful
combatants’ rather than prisoners of war.
According
to the Attorney General Designate, Alberto Gonzales, the
president’s warmaking powers gave him the constitutional
authority to overrule any relevant laws in the conduct of the
war on terror. Mr Bush, Gonzales argued, had the discretion
whether to respect the Geneva Conventions. An Assistant
Attorney General, one Jay S Bybee, alleged that it would
be unconstitutional to attempt to interfere with the
President’s direction of such core matters as the detention
and interrogation of prisoners .
Bybee
argues in another memo: ''Any effort to apply Section 2340A in a
manner that interferes with the president's direction of such
core war matters as the detention and interrogation of enemy
combatants thus would be unconstitutional.'' Section 2340A
refers to the United States law that incorporates the
international Convention Against Torture. (Atrocities in
Plain Sight; book review by Andrew Sullivan, NYT
13/1/05.)
Bybee
analyzed the relevant statutes against torture to see exactly
how far the military could go in mistreating prisoners without
blatant illegality. His answer was surprisingly expansive. He
argued that all the applicable statutes and treaty obligations
can be read in such a way as to define torture very narrowly.
Bybee asserted that the president was within his legal rights to
permit his military surrogates to inflict ''cruel, inhuman or
degrading'' treatment on prisoners without violating strictures
against torture.
For an
act of abuse to be considered torture, the abuser must be
inflicting pain ''of such a high level of intensity that the
pain is difficult for the subject to endure.'' If the abuser is
doing this to get information and not merely for sadistic
enjoyment, then ''even if the defendant knows that severe pain
will result from his actions,'' he's not guilty of torture.
Threatening to kill a prisoner is not torture; ''the threat must
indicate that death is 'imminent.' ''
Beating
prisoners is not torture either. Bybee argues that a case of
kicking an inmate in the stomach with military boots while the
prisoner is in a kneeling position does not by itself rise to
the level of torture.
Bybee
even suggests that full-fledged torture of inmates might be
legal because it could be construed as ''self-defense,'' on the
grounds that ''the threat of an impending terrorist attack
threatens the lives of hundreds if not thousands of American
citizens.'' By that reasoning, torture could be justified almost
anywhere on the battlefield of the war on terror. Only the
president's discretion forbade it. These guidelines were
formally repudiated by the administration the week before
Gonzales's appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee for
confirmation as attorney general.
It is
difficult to see how Mr Bush and his Cabinet can escape
responsibility for any or all of the heinous acts alleged
against US soldiers anywhere in the war on terror.
According
to the International War Crimes Tribunal indictment against
Slobodan Milosevic, Individual criminal responsibility
includes committing, planning, instigating, ordering or
aiding and abetting in the planning, preparation or
execution of any crimes referred to in Articles 2 to 5 of
the Tribunal Statute.
The
Milosevic indictment makes it plain that it does not matter
whether the defendant actually ordered any of these crimes, only
that being in a position to stop them he could and should
have prevented them.
I
believe that any judge would be compelled to find not only
that Mr Bush aided and abetted these heinous crimes but that he
was the intellectual author of them.
Certainly
the American soldiers carrying out these acts believed that they
were doing them on behalf of their Commander in chief.
The
White House has been even more recently involved in ensuring
that torture could continue as a means of interrogation.
According
to a story in the New York Times on Thursday, the White
House defeated a recent Congressional initiative to limit the
use of harsh interrogation techniques. The Senate had approved
overwhelmingly (96-2) new restrictions on the use of
extreme interrogation measures by US intelligence officials. The
new rules would have explicitly forbidden intelligence
officers to use torture or inhumane treatment and would
have required the CIA and the Pentagon to report to Congress
about the methods they were using.
This
Congressional initiative was killed in committee after the
intervention of the White House. The National Security Adviser,
Condoleezza Rice, opposed the restrictions on the ground that
they provided “legal protections to foreign prisoners to which
they are now entitled under existing law and policy.”
Death
Squads For Iraq
According
to Newsweek magazine, the US Department of Defense, the
Pentagon, is now considering a bold new option for checking the
insurgency in Iraq. One senior military officer told the
magazine: "What everyone agrees is that we can’t just go
on as we are … We have to find a way to take the offensive
against the insurgents. Right now, we are playing defense. And
we are losing."
The
new strategy is not really new – it was used by the Reagan
administration to defeat the leftist insurgency in El Salvador
twenty years ago. Faced with losing the war, the United States
funded or supported nationalist forces that included death
squads which hunted down and murdered actual or suspected left
wing leaders and community organisers. The insurgency was
eventually defeated, at the cost, some say, of more than a
hundred thousand civilian lives/.
The
same strategy was tried even earlier, in Vietnam, where
Operation Phoenix decimated the community leadership of the
Vietnamese countryside in an unsuccessful attempt to quell that
insurgency by "drying up the swamp.”
The
interim Iraqi regime of Iyad Allawi is according to Newsweek,
among the most forthright supporters of the ”Salvador
option.” The rationale is to intimidate the largely
Sunni insurgency by terrorising those who are thought to be
giving at least tacit support to the guerrillas.
According
to a new report prepared for the Central Intelligence Agency,
the ultimate result of the Iraq war may be to incite more
terror, not less. Just as the US attempt to squash the Fallujah
uprising helped instead to spread it, the CIA think-tank
theorises that the war in Iraq is creating a training and
recruitment ground for a new generation of professionalised
Islamic terrorists. The report says that the risk of a terrorist
attack involving biological weapons is steadily growing.
The
"dispersion of the experienced survivors of the conflict in
Iraq" to other countries will create a new threat in the
coming 15 years, especially as the Al Qaeda network mutates into
a volatile brew of independent extremist groups, cells and
individuals, according to the report by the National
Intelligence Council.
I
don’t think it needed a think tank to tell the CIA that. In
fact I myself suggested it a month after 9/11:
“Trying
to 'get' bin Laden, as the FBI got Al Capone, is impossible, and
anyway is sure to lead to further terrorist attacks. As I said
in my first column on this subject, terrorists and/or 'freedom
fighters' do not need to be led, if they are sufficiently imbued
with a righteous sense of injustice and grievance. It is, after
all, perfectly possible that the WTC terrorists were a
self-contained group, determined to do their bit for Allah and
the greater glory of Islam. Did they really need a bin Laden?
“The
grievance and bitterness were there before bin Laden and will
survive him. As long as the causes for this bitterness
and grievance persist, so long will the destructive anger
and the horrific self-sacrifices continue.
“Fighting
"terrorism" is fighting a symptom. The disease will
continue as long as Corporate America continues to push the
American state in the furtherance of its own, hidden agenda
while concealing its true nature from its own people.”
I
may, of course, have been wrong.
Copyright
2005 ©John Maxwell /
john.maxwell02@uwimona.edu.jm
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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update10 April 2012
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