Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
By Muhammad Idrees Ahmad | “The public has to be more alert”, warned one “international terrorism expert” in the Daily Mail late last year, because Scotland “is set to become another Israel within five years”. “[A]nti-terror measures will soon become a common feature of life”, he assured the audience, and called for “routine arming of police officers” and increasing children’s “awareness of the dangers of terrorism” and for them to be “encouraged” to report anything “out of the ordinary”.
The oracle of doom was one Amnon Maor, identified as the head instructor of counter-terrorism for the IDF and Israeli border police.1 Maor is working with security firm 360 Defence, based near Glasgow, which is “training Scottish police, military and civilians in security techniques”. This wouldn’t be the first time the British police benefits form Israeli anti-terror expertise. The police squad that carried out the extrajudicial execution of the young Brazilian electrician Jean-Charles de Menezes in the London underground had received similar training.
In the post-September 11 world, writes Naomi Klein, Israel has pitched its “uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the ‘global war on terror’.”2 Britain has since been furnished with its own unpopular occupation of Arab land – and the lessons from Israel are not lost on its architects. In disaster lies opportunity – and the only thing more useful than a thing to fear is fear itself. The give away line in Maor’s prescription above is his offer to increase children’s awareness of the dangers of terrorism – absent the real thing, fear will suffice. The Prime Minister may not have many achievements to his name, but he can claim patents to ‘Fortress Britain’, whose battlements sit on a foundation of fear.
The Power of Nightmares
In October 2001 it was revealed that the Pentagon was consulting Hollywood writers and producers specialising in spy thrillers and disaster flicks to imagine future attacks in order to best prepare for them. Developments such as the colour-coded threat alerts that change hue at the Department of Homeland Security’s caprice have alarmed even cold war hawks like Zbigniew Brzezinski. Lamenting the ‘culture of fear’ he writes:
“Fear obscures reason, intensifies emotions and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize the public on behalf of the policies they want to pursue… Such fear-mongering, reinforced by security entrepreneurs, the mass media and the entertainment industry, generates its own momentum.”3
In Britain each of the New Labour government’s political missteps has been accompanied by similar fear-mongering. While a terrorist threat does exist, its magnitude is wildly exaggerated. The European Police Office (Europol) released its first report on terrorism last year which listed 498 terrorist attacks for Europe in 2006; only one was attributed to Muslims. The majority – 136 – were carried out by the Basque separatist group ETA; only one of them deadly. When it came to the arrests on terrorism related charges, however, a good half were Muslims.4
It began with the ‘Ricin plot’: the highly publicised arrests, national hysteria and front page headlines. There was no Ricin, or a plot. It wouldn’t be until 2005, well after Colin Powell had used it in his case to sell the Iraq war to the UN, that the ban on reporting on the case was finally lifted and the public apprised of the truth.5 The February 2003 ‘terror alert’ had Blair scrambling tanks to Heathrow, timed conveniently to coincide with the large scale demonstrations against the coming war. Notable support in the media came from BBC propagandist Fred Gardner, long suspected of ties to the intelligence services6 which were themselves busy fanning the fire. Simon Jenkins, the conservative columnist noted, “In 2002-03, before the Iraq war, the security service supplied the Cabinet Office with a weekly catalogue of ‘terror fears’ – anthrax, smallpox, sarin, dirty nuclear devices and a Christmas bombing campaign – to soften public opinion for the war.”7
In June 2006, 250 heavily armed police men acting on ‘specific intelligence’ raided a home in Forest Gate arresting two young Muslims, shooting one in the process. The chemical weapons that they were alleged to have possessed were never found. Both were acquitted without charge. The police apologised. On August 10th, 2006, a day after then Home Secretary John Reid had hinted that new anti-terror measures were in order, the Deputy Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, Paul Stephenson, announced that the police had foiled a plot to commit “mass murder on an unimaginable scale”. Officials were soon conceding that the immediacy and scale of the threat may have been “exaggerated”; however, the scare succeeded in deflecting attention from Blair’s widely-denounced manoeuvres preventing a ceasefire in Lebanon. From Beirut, an outraged Robert Fisk wrote:
“Stephenson’s job is to frighten the British people, not to stop the crimes that are the real reason for the British to be frightened …I’m all for arresting criminals…But I don’t think Paul Stephenson is. I think he huffs and he puffs but I do not think he stands for law and order. He works for the Ministry of Fear which, by its very nature, is not interested in motives or injustice.”8
In November 2006, the MI5 director general Eliza Manningham-Buller warned of a violent threat from 1,600 suspects in 200 groups that could last “more than a generation”. Although she identified government policy towards Iraq as the main factor contributing to the rising radicalism, Blair endorsed the statement. He continued his scapegoating of Muslims with the periodic reiterations of the ‘Islamic threat’ to rationalize the fear, repression, lies and resentment brought in on the heels of the Iraq war. When Blair announced that “the rule of the game have changed”, no one took it more seriously than the tabloid press; they demonstrated just how toxic things could get when gloves come off with government sanction. Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian confessed:
“I try to imagine how I would feel if this rainstorm of headlines substituted the word ‘Jew’ for ‘Muslim’ – I wouldn’t just feel frightened. I would be looking for my passport.”
One can’t miss the Islamophobic nature of much of the hysteria when one compares the difference in the treatment of the cases of Robert Cottage and David Bolus Jackson of the BNP with that of Mohammed Atif Siddique. The case of the former two, arrested for the possession of rocket launchers, a “record haul of chemicals used in making home-made bombs”, extremist literature, and bomb-making information, barely got covered in national media; the latter, a 20 year old, received front page attention and eight years in prison for merely downloading extremist literature, and his attorney, Aamer Anwer, got charged with ‘contempt of court’ for calling the trial a “tragedy for justice”.
The new MI5 chief, Jonathan Evan, raised the fear factor a year on with the warning that 15-year-olds were being “groomed” for terror and that there were up to 2,000 people involved in “terrorist-related activity”. Recalling Donald Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknown’s”, the man appointed by John Reid with Tony Blair’s approval, bizarrely added “there are as many again that we don’t yet know of”. Described variously as “lurid”, “inflammatory”, “highly ideological”, “playing Halloween”, it came on the eve of the Queen’s address calling for yet another terror bill. The institutional imperative of self-preservation may also have been at play: MI5 has already expanded by 50 % with eight new regional offices, and will have doubled in size by 2011. Eyebrows have been raised at these very public interventions by the heads of a clandestine service. Simon Jenkins noted that chiefs of the secret service have long feared that the absence of a public profile may diminish funding appropriation. “The answer of both MI5’s Evans and MI6’s John Scarlett is to join the fear factory.”9
Taking Liberties
The assault on constitutional rights that started in the US with Clinton’s ‘Anti-terrorism and Effective Death Penalty’ law of 1996 was replicated in Britain with the ‘Terrorism Act 2000’. Section 41 of the Act granted police the right to detain terror suspects for up to one week without charge (criminal law on the other hand requires that suspects be charged within the first 24 hours of arrest, or be released). Section 44 granted police stop and search rights all across Britain – it has since been used against: Kevin Gillan and Pennie Quinto for protesting outside Europe’s biggest arms fair in London; the 82-year-old Walter Wolfgang for heckling Jack Straw at the Labour Conference; Sally Cameron for walking on a cycle-path in Dundee; the 80-year-old John Catt for being caught on CCTV passing a demonstration in Brighton; the 11-year-old Isabelle Ellis-Cockcroft for accompanying her parents to an anti-nuclear protest; and a cricketer on his way to a match over his possession of a bat.
In the United States, September 11 occasioned the most robust assault yet on civil liberties in the form of Bush’s ‘USA Patriot Act’ leading eminent constitutional law professor Sanford Levinson to describe Carl Schmitt, the leading authority on Nazi legal philosophy, as “the true éminence grise of the Bush administration” to the extent that the Administration (advised by Dick Cheney’s lawyer, David Addington) espoused a view of presidential authority “that is all too close to the power that Schmitt was willing to accord his own Führer”.10 The respected lawyer Gareth Pierce noted equally worrying tendencies in the UK:
“Blair bulldozed through Parliament a new brand of internment. This allowed for the indefinite detention without trial of foreign nationals, the ‘evidence’ to be heard in secret with the detainee’s lawyer not permitted to see the evidence against him and an auxiliary lawyer appointed by the attorney general who, having seen it, was not allowed to see the detainee. The most useful device of the executive is its ability to claim that secrecy is necessary for national security.”11
The ‘Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001’ succeeded in ramming through measures that had been rejected in the 2000 Act. The ‘Criminal Justice Act 2003’ doubled the period of detention without charge to 14 days. Although the government suffered a significant setback when the Law Lords swept aside the indefinite detention ruling since it broke European human rights legislation (described by the Law Lords as “draconian” and “anathema” to the rule of law, it was seen by Lord Hoffmann as a bigger threat to the nation than terrorism). Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, immediately made clear his intention to undermine it. The government obliged by subsequently passing the ‘Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005’ which gave the Home Secretary the right to use Control Orders and opt out of human rights laws.12
In the wake of the terrorist attacks in London on July 7, the government upped the ante with the ‘Terrorism Act 2006’, which doubled – yet again – the detention period to 28 days, a period far longer than any other state in the western world. The bill marked the first parliamentary defeat for Tony Blair, whose original proposal was for 90 days detention without charge.
Blair’s determination to deflect attention from the failures of his scandal-ridden government by turning the war on terror into a permanent undeclared state of emergency appeared finally to have hit a wall. However, despite a noticeably prudent start, Brown’s multiplying political problems soon had him reaching for Blairite nostrums. He renewed the case for doubling the period of detention without charge (subsequently reduced to 42 days). This despite the fact that the newly appointed Home Secretary Jacqui Smith had conceded that circumstances had not yet arisen where it had been necessary “to go beyond 28 days”. Seumas Milne reported in The Guardian that:
“it’s widely acknowledged in Westminster that a key motivation for this latest assault on long-established rights and freedoms is Brown’s determination to wrong-foot the Tories tactically and portray them as soft on terror”.
The deleterious effects of a creeping surveillance state cannot be discounted. While the public may have little enthusiasm for an ID card scheme after discs containing personal details of 25 million individuals were lost by the government, Brown remains adamant. Given the government’s record for handling personal data, proposals for a universal register of citizen’s DNA samples is very worrying. So are Tony Blair’s remarks about identifying problem children who may grow up to pose a menace to society by intervening before they were born.13 A new plan under the government’s e-borders scheme would require each person entering or leaving UK to answer 53 questions including “credit card details, holiday contact numbers, travel plans, email addresses, car numbers and even any previous missed flights”. Taken when a ticket is bought, the information, it was reported, “will be shared among police, customs, immigration and the security services for at least 24 hours before a journey is due to take place.”
When popular shows bear names like ‘Big Brother’, the appurtenances of mass surveillance society, such as the 4.2 million CCTV cameras, become an acceptable, even desired, part of the scenery. Privacy International rates Britain as an “endemic surveillance society” and, according to Timothy Garton Ash, the British state collects more data on its citizens than did the Stasi in East Germany. The more than 3,000 new criminal offences introduced under the Labour government have also turned privatized prisons into a growth industry. Today Britain has a higher incarceration rate than China, Burma or Saudi Arabia.
While the terrorist threat today has nowhere near the intensity of the IRA campaign, police are using military aircraft such as the Britten-Norman Islander used previously only in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Reaper robot drones of the type being used in Afghanistan will also be in operation during the Olympics.
Reign of the Terrorologist
Riding the back of the raft of anti-terror legislations are the terrorologists and the ‘security’ entrepreneurs; and they have found green pastures in Fortress Britain. With governments unwilling to address political causes, the trend is increasingly one of framing the subject in cultural terms: ‘they hate our way of life’, ‘they hate our freedoms’ etc. This clears the way for the terrorologist to step in and sell a toxic brew of cultural stereotypes and pop psychology packaged in pseudo-academic jargon. In his study of the trade, James Petras detects the following “eerily predictable patterns”:
“They use a common language to describe their subjects and their environment; they are extremely ideological under a thin veneer of scientific jargon; they possess a keen sense of selective observation; they always pretend to possess a psychological understanding though few if any have dealt close up with their subjects in any clinical sense except perhaps under conditions of incarceration and interrogation.
Their style…slippery with euphemisms when it comes to dealing with the violence of their partisan states… Psychobabble provides a ‘legitimate’ sounding channel for… assuming a state of civilized superiority in the face of their dehumanized subjects. Indeed, the dehumanization process is central to the whole terrorist-political-academic enterprise…”14
One consequence of earning an elevated place in official demonology is that the bar for those passing judgement drops radically. When it comes to Islam, Muslims and their alleged links to terrorism, any shoddy indictment will pass muster. Doom-laden sensationalism makes for good copy; it makes no demands on rigour and scepticism, and a stable of ‘experts’ is readily at hand to amplify fear. The degree to which this has penetrated public discourse was demonstrated by the Big Issue – a publication generally about as provocative as a phonebook – with a front page story on ‘cyber terror’ and ‘online vigilantes’. Trotting out a stable of ‘terror experts’ the story served as a platform for several tendentious claims (“There are no longer clear boundaries between real-world cells and ‘amateurs’ assisting terror plots via their computers”; “al-Qaeda is equal in the media war”). Rather than question why a dubious source such as Evan Kohlmann – the man used as a ‘expert witness’ in the Atif Siddique trial, who “has no expertise beyond …an internship at a dubious think-tank”15 – should be consulted by Scotland Yard, the story served as a puff piece for three Israel lobby hacks. Rita Katz has served in the Israeli military; Aaron Weisburd runs Internet Haganah (Hebrew name for the paramilitary that later became the IDF) a project of the Society for Internet Research that works with the Mossad-linked Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center; and both Katz and Kohlmann are protégés of Steve Emerson whose own expertise includes having seen “the hallmarks of Middle Eastern terror” in the Oklahoma bombing (actually carried out by Timothy McVeigh, a decorated white Christian war-hero).
The trade of the terrorologist is not new: incubated in the Reagan administration’s earlier ‘war on terror’, its proponents had been exposed and elegantly debunked by Edward Hermann. September 11 ushered in a new breed – ubiquitous, ideological, and relentless. Some, such as Rohan Gunaratna of the St. Andrews-based Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence (CSTPV), reinvented themselves over night as ‘experts on al-Qaeda’. Gunaratna’s book Inside Al Qaeda became an instant best-seller, even though before the date his expertise was limited to South Asian groups, such as the Tamil Tigers. In the book he claimed he was the “principal investigator of the United Nations’ Terrorism Prevention Branch”. However, after a Sunday Age investigation, he admitted that no such position existed. Intelligence services have been generally dismissive of his claims.
However, despite all this, he keeps making appearances as an ‘expert witness’ at various UK prosecutions and in media reports.
CSTPV itself bears some scrutiny. Established by an alumni of the RAND Corporation (a US think-tank which played a key role during the Cold War; satirized as the ‘Bland Corporation’ in Dr. Strangelove, it was an enthusiastic supporter of the arms race), the Centre has links to the government and intelligence agencies. Shaping discourse on terrorism through its two influential academic journals, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, and Terrorism and Political Violence, CSTPV emphasises terror directed against states, while mostly ignoring violence by states, excluding however those not allied to the West (‘Hell is other people’, Sartre might say). Reports by the Centre have been used by the government to rationalise permanent anti-terror legislation. The RAND-CSTPV nexus also has stakes in the Iraq conflict through its links to mercenary firms operating in the country. However, despite the conflicts of interest, the Centre’s embedded expertise remains much in demand.16
CSTPV’s output may be ideological; but it still retains a degree of sophistication. With the low demands on rigour, joining the fray now are some actors less restrained. In early 2006 it was revealed that authorities at several universities, including my own, were co-operating with Special Branch as a result of a recently published study by the right wing Social Affairs Unit. Conducted by Anthony Glees, the Director of Brunel Centre for Intelligence and Security Studies, the study claimed to find evidence of Islamist, animal liberation and British National Party recruitment on UK campuses. The evidence comprised of the fact that people who have been arrested under anti-Terrorism legislation attended universities at some point. It castigated Universities for teaching students “theoretical tools for understanding the world”, such as Marxism, which could lead to further radicalization when students moved “from campus to Mosque”. Policy Exchange, another dubious neoconservative outfit, shouldered its way into the debate with an Islamophobic report on extremist literature being promoted through various Mosques which, to the BBC’s credit, was publicly debunked by a Newsnight investigation. This, however, did not deter Policy Exchange members from using the report to lobby the EU.
Hero and Horse
On November 18, 1822, the Observer reported that nearly “a million bushels of human and inhuman bones” had been imported in the previous year from Europe into the port of Hull. Battlefields swept alike of the “bones of the hero and the horse which he rode” delivered their haul to Yorkshire bone grinders who reduced them to granulary state. “In this condition they are sold to the farmers to manure their lands.”17 Two centuries on, the gap between the ‘support our troops’ rhetoric and reality has yet to be bridged.
An internal report into the state of the British Military obtained by The Independenton May 11 reveals that soldiers are living in such poverty that they can’t even afford food, with many living on emergency food voucher schemes set up by the Ministry of Defence (MoD). “Commanders are attempting to tackle the problem through ‘Hungry Soldier’ schemes, under which destitute soldiers are given loans to enable them to eat” the paper reported. With its proclivity for market solutions, the tradition of soldiers getting three square meals a day for free has been replaced with a controversial Pay as You Dine (PAYD) regime, which charges soldiers not on active duty for their meals, leading many into debt.
Likewise, slightly more than a year back on March 11, 2007, the Observer had revealed the shocking picture of neglect and poor treatment of wounded soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq. It reported, for example, that “the youngest British soldier wounded in Iraq, Jamie Cooper, was forced to spend a night lying in his own faeces after staff at Birmingham’s Selly Oak Hospital allowed his colostomy bag to overflow. On another occasion his medical air mattress was allowed to deflate, leaving him in ‘considerable pain’ overnight despite an alarm going off.” Another complaint alleged that one soldier “suffered more than 14 hours in agony without pain relief because no relevant staff were on duty”. (This, of course, is as much a reflection of the chronic lack of surplus within the health system as it is of the wider militarised draw on public resources.) The MoD has already revealed a serious shortage of medical staff in the armed forces:
“There was a 50% shortfall in the number of surgeons required by the army, an 80% shortfall of radiologists and a 46% shortfall of anaesthetists.”18
Soldiers in the field haven’t fared any better: for example, both Reg Keys and Rose Gentle lost sons in Iraq due to the lack of proper equipment. Iraq has taken its toll on an overstretched military. Due to “continuing high level of operational commitment” an MoD report has revealed, “more than 1 in 10 soldiers were not getting the rest between operations they needed.” The report also referred to a “continuing difficult environment for army recruitment and retention”. With a high number of officers and other ranks going over voluntarily with another 2,000 awaiting approval of their applications to quit, the armed forces as a whole are nearly 7,000 under strength, the report revealed.19
The crisis has caused the military to redouble its recruitment efforts with visits to Scottish schools up by more than 180% in the last three years, The Heraldrevealed. The news comes only weeks after the National Union of Teachers voted to block future military careers’ presentations “to pupils as young as 14” in England and Wales. “Despite the outlay of almost £500m, in 2006-07 the field army – the frontline operational part of UK ground forces – missed its ‘gains to strength’ (GTS) recruitment goal by 12%. In 2007-08, it achieved only 63% of its target.”20 (In the US, the military has been reduced to enlisting former convicts and the mentally ill.) The degree of desperation is also evident in the recent advertising campaign for military recruitment: the military experience is presented as a sanitized adventure, an adrenaline-soaked escape from ennui. High-minded calls of duty and honour have been replaced with ones such as “for the travel, for the action, for the adventure”; “for the fun, for the friendship, for the Friday nights”.
The MoD caused much consternation among the National Union of Teachers when it distributed materials on the Iraq war for use in schools. The ministry was accused of “misleading propaganda” which “unethically” targeted recruitment materials at schools in disadvantaged areas. One worksheet described the purpose of the UK mission in Iraq as “helping the Iraqis to rebuild their country after the conflict and years of neglect”. Touting “achievements” in “security and reconstruction” it failed to mention the US-led invasion, its legality, Iraqi civilian deaths or the absence of WMDs. This is not the MoD’s only advance on the classroom. Another example is the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (DSTL) outreach programme, which sends DSTL scientists to talk to university and school students to encourage them to think about a career at the lab. According to Frances Saunders, the chief executive, DSTL sponsors “year-in-industry students, and are working with the MoD to develop school lesson texts to get people interested in the science behind defence.” Although DSTL already has strong links with universities including Southampton, Imperial, Oxford and Cambridge, Saunders plans to broaden this network.
Not since Suez has the military suffered a greater loss of prestige. RAF airmen in Cambridgeshire were recently advised against wearing uniforms in public in order to avoid being “verbally abused” for their participation in Afghanistan and Iraq. With the demoralizing effect of ill-conceived interventions abroad, the struggle for politicians is then of rehabilitating the myth of the military, rather that the military itself. What interests policy makers is not so much the military, but the cult of military. Plans are also underway to introduce US-style citizenship ceremonies for children and a new public holiday to celebrate ‘Britishness’ by 2012, as part of “wide-ranging proposals to strengthen British citizenship.”
In sharp contrast to the decrepit military stands the fortunes of the private military industry. The preference of recent governments for market solutions has facilitated the transfer of most military R&D to the private sector, with giants like QinetiQ and BAe Systems securing plum deals. When the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (Dera) was split in two in 2001, QinetiQ, a British company with links to the US-based Carlyle group, absorbed the majority of its activities. Along with a raft of other lucrative PFIs, the private military industry is set to benefit from the largest to date, involving at least £14 billion of taxpayers’ money, for a privatised Military ‘Academy’ at St Athan in the Vale of Glamorgan to train all-service personnel and private ‘security services’. The corporate bonanza in Iraq has had Private Military Contractors – mercenaries – reaping windfalls profits for investors with stakes in the businesses, such as Frederick Forsyth and former Foreign Secretary Malcolm Rifkind (of Aegis and ArmorGroup respectively). The lure of salaries, at times reaching as high as £1,000 a day, may be one reason why the military is losing so many of its men to the mercenary business.21
While the defence establishment has long complained of funding shortages for the forces, the R&D budget remains secure. The MoD, it was reported, has promised not to raid the R&D budget to pay for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. However, this injunction doesn’t apply in the reverse, as it has been revealed that the Conflict Prevention Fund set aside for clearing landmines and removing arms from conflict zones was being raided to pay BAe Systems to subsidise the £5m-£10m servicing cost of six Tornado jets in Iraq. The measure was needed because the MoD has closed its own state-of-the-art facility for servicing Tornado jets presented as a way of saving £500m over 10 years.22
Sensing opportunity as the war on terror grinds on, its neoconservative architects have swooped in from across the Atlantic to establish a presence in Britain. With ties to the arms industry and the neoconservative wing of the Israel lobby, the Henry Jackson Society seems to be assuming the role that the Committee on Present Danger played in the United States. Its Israel-centric worldview, as exhibited by its roster of speakers, predisposes it towards perpetual conflict. The support for a militarized ethnocracy is not the natural inclination of a liberal-democratic Britain; it can only be sustained in a context where Israel can be seen aligned with Britain in an overarching conflict against a common enemy. So it is that the Israel lobby has contrived to pass its enemies off as those of the ‘West’. HJS appears well placed to sustain this state of conflict should the Tories get in as its supporters include two of David Cameron’s key advisers. It is a dangerous confluence of interests.
Fortress Britain in the end is as much a consequence of ill-conceived alliances as it is a response to the neoliberal order’s need for distraction from its inherent contradictions. While not nearly as unscrupulous as his predecessor, Gordon Brown’s growing travails may lead him to seek the politician’s time-honoured remedy: to scare the hell out of the population. One only hopes that Fortress Britain is the apogee of what Tony Blair had set in motion with his promise to stand “shoulder to shoulder” with George W. Bush in his so-called ‘war on terror’, because things could always be worse.
Muhammad Idrees Ahmad is a member of Spinwatch.org. His commentaries on arts, politics and culture appear on Fanonite.org.
Notes
1. Might he be the same Amnon Maor of the squad of six Israeli border policemen who back in 1994 were sentenced to six months in prison with one year suspended sentences and a fine of NIS 1,000 each, for brutally assaulting an Arab in a supermarket whose cart had accidentally knocked one? “The six also arrested a passerby who witnessed the beating, and had asked them to stop and to show identification”, the Jerusalem Post reported. The Judge castigated them for abuse of authority and violating “all norms of acceptable behaviour”. (Jerusalem Post, 8 December 1994)
2. Naomi Klein, ‘How war was turned into a brand’, The Guardian, 16 June 2007
3. Zbigniew Brzezinski, ‘Terrorized by “War on Terror”’, Washington Post, March 25, 2007
4. European Terrorism Situation and Trend Report 2007; David Miller, ‘The statistical invisibility of Islamist “terrorism” in Europe’, Spinwatch, 23 May 2007
5. Duncan Campbell, ‘The ricin ring that never was’, The Guardian, 14 April 2005
6. Gardner admits that the MI6 tried to recruit him while he was stationed in Cairo, however, he insists he turned them down. See David Rowan, ‘Interview: Frank Gardner’, Evening Standard, 15 June 2005
7. Simon Jenkins, ‘These fear factory speeches are utterly self-defeating’, The Guardian, 7 November 2007
8. Robert Fisk, ‘If You Want the Roots or Terror, Try Here’, The Independent, 12 August 2006
9. Seumas Milne, ‘A pointless attack on liberty that fuels the terror threat’, The Guardian, 8 November 2007
10. Sanford Levinson, ‘Torture in Iraq & the rule of law in America’, Daedalus, Summer 2004
11. Gareth Peirce, ‘Was it like this for the Irish?’, London Review of Books, 10 April 2008
12. See ibid. for a description of the true onerous nature of the control orders, especially for detainees with families.
13. Henry Porter, ‘The way the police treat us verges on the criminal’, The Observer, 29 October 2006
14. James Petras, ‘Anatomy of the “Terror Expert”’, Counterpunch.org, 7-8 August 2004
15. Jim Crace, ‘Just how expert are the expert witnesses?’, The Guardian, 13 May 2008
16. J. Burnett and Dave Whyte, ‘Embedded expertise and the “War on Terror”’, Journal for Crime, Conflict and the Media, 2005, 1(4): 1-18.
17. Quoted in the incisive study of the social consequences of conflict, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, by veteran correspondent Chris Hedges.
18. Jonathan Owen and Brian Brady, ‘Soldiers need loans to eat, report reveals’, The Independent, 11 May 2008; Ned Temko and Mark Townsend, ‘Scandal of treatment for wounded Iraq veterans’, The Observer, 11 March 2007
19. Richard Norton-Taylor, ‘Under-strength and under strain as experienced soldiers queue to quit’, The Guardian, 23 November 2007
20. Ian Bruce, ‘Army visits to Scottish schools soar by 180% in three years’, The Herald, 12 May 2008
21. ‘Corporate Mercenaries’, War on Want, 30 October 2006
22. David Hencke, ‘MoD plans raid on landmine removal fund to keep Tornados flying in Iraq’, The Guardian, 10 March 2008
his article originally appeared in Variant magazine
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Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
By Sandy English | According to a report issued last week by the human rights organization Amnesty International, the plight of nearly 5 million Iraqis displaced from their homes since the American invasion of 2003 is worsening in nearly every respect.
The report observes the “crisis has steadily increased in size and complexity.” One in eight Iraqis is now internally displaced or a refugee.
Amnesty International notes that the trend of reduction in Iraqi deaths in the second half of 2007 has reversed, with nearly 2,000 Iraqis killed in March and April because of the US-backed Iraqi government’s campaign against the Madhi Army in Basra and Sadr City in Baghdad.
“The wider human rights situation in Iraq remains dire,” the report continues. “People are being killed every month by armed groups, the Multinational Forces, Iraqi security forces, and private military and security guards. Kidnappings, torture, ill-treatment and arbitrary detentions pervade the daily lives of Iraqis. Violence against women and girls, including rapes and killings in ‘honour crimes,’ is reportedly on the rise.”
The report cites the atrocious living conditions in most of Iraq as an additional factor driving people to flee the country. According to Oxfam, in 2007 70 percent of Iraqis had no access to clean drinking water and 43 percent were living on less than a dollar a day. Child malnutrition has increased from 19 percent in 2003 to 28 percent last year.
About half of Iraqis who have fled their homes remain in other parts of Iraq because of the increasing restrictions on leaving the country. Denial of access to refuge abroad is at least in part due to the actions of the Iraqi government, which—along with its American masters—has a vested interest in reducing the number of people fleeing the country.
The report, for example, notes that one factor in the Syrian government’s decision to introduce stricter visa requirements for Iraqis crossing the boarder was “the request of the Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.”
Earlier this month the senior US coordinator for Iraqi refugee issues, Ambassador James Foley, encouraged the Iraqi government to step up its efforts to repatriate Iraqis, although he admitted that the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that 70 percent of those returning to Iraq were unable to resettle in their own homes. Foley said, “It’s fairly clear the government was not prepared to provide returnees with housing, with essential services.”
Amnesty’s report makes the case that no place in Iraq can be considered safe, including the northern region controlled by the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG). Political tensions between Kurds and Arabs exist, and there are repeated Turkish incursions in the Kurdish-controlled areas. Many internal refugees from central and southern Iraq are putting a strain on the resources of the KRG.
The bulk of Iraqi refugees have fled to Syria. Although no official census has been taken, some estimates place the figure at 1.5 million.
Protection for Iraqi refugees in Syria is precarious. Some manage to obtain temporary visas and others register with UNHCR.
The majority, however, has no official status and is subject to deportation back to Iraq at any time. In particular, Iraqis who have been arrested, or even simply accused of minor crimes, are subject to expulsion. These include misdemeanors necessary for survival, such as possession of forged documents or illegal entry to Syria.
Most Iraqis in Syria have been there since 2006, and what funds they brought with them are now vanishing. Increasing numbers are dependent on food aid. A 20-percent increase in the price of food since late 2007 in Syria, as well as a decrease in government food subsidies, has increased need.
As Iraqi families in Syria fall further and further into poverty, child labor has been on the rise. The report estimates that only 43,794 of 200,000 school-age refugee children were enrolled in school in 2007. While many of them are denied places by the school authorities because of overcrowding, or cannot attend because of long commutes or difficulties with the curriculum, more and more children are working to help support their families.
Iraqi refugees in Syria have access to the public health system, but the system itself cannot meet their needs. Iraq families are often required to make a financial contribution for treatment that they cannot afford. In addition, Iraqis in Syria suffer from a much higher incidence of trauma because of their experiences in Iraq and have complex psychological needs that go untreated.
Five hundred thousand Iraqi refugees reside in Jordan (8 percent of the population). Here, if anything, the situation is even worse than in Syria. Access to Jordan is also highly restricted. The report observes that young men in particular are turned back at the border. In May the Jordanian government instituted new visa requirements, forcing Iraqis to apply for visas before they travel to Jordan.
Most Iraqis in Jordan have no legal status. Iraqis with no residence permit must pay US$761 for every year that they are without official status. Further, Iraqis are not permitted to work. As in Syria, Iraqis in Jordan are becoming poorer every week. Some work illegally, the report says, “where they are reported to be vulnerable to low pay, exploitation, and arbitrary dismissals.” Rents are also on the rise, and Iraqi families are now sharing apartments and, in many cases, rooms with others.
As in Syria, education of children is a problem because of child labor and because Iraqi children are required to have their school documents from Iraq with them.
Emergency medical care for refugees has been restricted recently, and Iraqis with serious medical conditions in Jordan have no or limited access to treatment. Iraqis have access to private clinics, but for the vast majority the cost of these clinics makes treatment there impossible.
The report says that 77 percent of the 50,000 Iraqis in Lebanon are there illegally, although the government has recently announced a plan to regularize their status. To achieve legal status, a refugee is now required to pay a fee of the equivalent of about US$630 and a sponsor willing to put up an equivalent of US$1,000 guarantee. Most Iraqis in Lebanon are living in poverty. About 40 percent of Iraqi children “aged between six and 17 did not enroll in school because of the high tuition fees and the need to work.”
The report makes a special note about the myth of voluntary returns to Iraq from all countries. The widespread American and Iraqi government propaganda that the situation in Iraq is “normalizing” has led to a spate of reports after late 2007 of refugees returning to Iraq. State television has broadcast calls for refugees in the region to come back. For those who do return, the reality has been devastating
For example, the report notes, “Two highly publicized officially organized return convoys from Syria took place in November 2007, one from Aleppo and the other from Damascus. Despite an attempt to make the convoys a flagship initiative, symbolizing a recovered Iraq to which Iraqis could make voluntary, safe and sustainable returns, the reality was very much the opposite. Many of the individuals who returned found dreadful conditions. Of the 30 families who returned and were interviewed by one of UNHCR’s partners in Iraq, only a third could go back to their original homes, while two thirds became internally displaced. Some of the returnees found their property looted, occupied or destroyed. In addition, the return incentive of around US$1,000 promised by the Iraqi government has yet to be received by the returnees, according to reports.”
It does seem clear that some refugees are retuning to Iraq, but to call this repatriation voluntary is deceptive. The report observes that the main reason for return appears to be poverty or other hardship. For example, “Information gathered about people the respondents knew who had returned showed that most had cited their inability to afford to live in Syria as the reason they had gone back to Iraq (56 per cent). Only 16 per cent had returned because they had heard that the security situation had improved. Of those, however, 59 percent wanted to leave Iraq again and return to Syria. Some 47 per cent of these could not return because they lacked the money (31 per cent) or did not have a visa (64 per cent).”
If the bourgeois governments of Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon have treated Iraqi refugees with disdain, they have, at least, admitted them in larger numbers and allowed them to stay for at least some length of time.
The same cannot be said of the wealthiest countries near Iraq. Saudi Arabia, for example, is building a wall, “complete with sensors and night vision,” along its border with Iraq to prevent refugees form entering the country. According to a recent report by UNHCR, neighboring Kuwait has accepted about 45,000 Iraqi refugees, “most of whom entered on three-month visit visas and then overstayed.” Kuwait does not recognize the right to asylum.
The conduct of Europe and the United States is even more hostile to the basic human rights of Iraqi refugees.
The report observes, “Some countries outside the region that do have the means to support the relatively few Iraqi refugees who have crossed into their territory have adopted policies that appear intended to make rejected asylum-seekers destitute and so encourage their ‘voluntary’ return.”
Amnesty International singles out the United Kingdom, the junior partner in the invasion and devastation of Iraq, as particularly egregious in this regard. When an asylum seeker’s appeal has been rejected, no second application is allowed and the seeker must leave the country within 21 days. Some Iraqis who have gone though this process have simply returned to Iraq.
Other European nations have curtailed the numbers of Iraqi refugees that they will admit. Since 2003 Germany has withdrawn refugee status from Iraqis protected from the regime of Saddam Hussein. “In 2007,” the report states, “5,780 new revocation procedures for Iraqi refugees were introduced. Many resulted in revocation of protection status.”
Deportations or Iraqis from Europe are now at a record high. In the UK, at the end of 2007, there had been an increase of 105 percent over the previous year.
The report points out that the United States has resettled only 753 Iraqis between 2003 and 2006. The government pledged to take in 25,000 more refugees after 2007, but this has not been honored, and the total number of Iraqis resettled in the US is 1,608. Amnesty International believes that a newly announced target of resettling 12,000 Iraqi refugees by September 2008 is also unlikely to be met.
The primary reason for this has been US anti-terrorism laws. As the report states: “Resettlement cases headed for the USA and Australia are suffering serious delays due to the rigorous security checks to which Iraqis are being subjected in several countries. This is hindering the ability of resettlement to provide a fast and effective response to the dire situation of the most vulnerable refugees.”
The report makes a special plea for the Palestinians who have left Iraq because of violence and attacks on them due to their presumed favored status under the Baathist regime. Thousands live in dangerous and squalid camps along the Iraq-Syrian boarder.
Referring to one such camp, the Amnesty International report states, “Al-Waleed camp is in the Iraqi desert approximately 200m inside the Iraqi passport control. The unbearable conditions include extreme temperatures, the presence of snakes and scorpions, and serious protection issues such as the reported presence of armed non-residents entering the camp. One aid worker who has visited the camp described it as ‘hell.’”
In a related report issued last week, the United Nations Committee on Human Rights documented an increase in the number of global refugees and internally displaced persons to 67 million in 2007, up 2.5 million from a year before. About half of these have fled their homes because of natural disasters (or the inability of states to deal with disasters), and the remainder because of armed conflict. Iraq and Somalia saw some of the largest changes between 2006 and 2007 in the numbers of internally displaced persons.
Both of these countries are of considerable geo-strategic importance to American imperialism and have been the focus of recent American military action. It is noteworthy also that Colombia, which has between 2 million and 4 million internally displaced persons—by far the highest number of people in the Western Hemisphere—is a major recipient of US aid in dollars and military equipment.
The full Amnesty International report is available here.
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Report: Iraq social and refugee crisis is worsening
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Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
By Steve Wampler | LIVERMORE, Calif. — Airplane passengers and baggage might be screened one day by a machine under development at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) that can detect explosive, chemical and biological agents all at the same time.
A team of LLNL researchers has conceptually proven that a three-in-one machine, or “universal point detection system,” can be achieved, said George Farquar, a postdoctoral fellow and physical chemist at the Lab’s Glenn T. Seaborg Institute.
The team’s latest advance, using its mass spectrometry system to detect the presence of minuscule particles of explosives, is described in the March 1 edition of Analytical Chemistry, a semi-monthly journal published by the American Chemical Society.
“We have found we can potentially detect an incredibly small quantity of material, as small as one dust-speck-sized particle weighing one trillionth of a gram, on an individual’s clothing or baggage,” Farquar said. “This is important because if a person handles explosives they are likely to have some remaining residue.”
Using a system they call Single-Particle Aerosol Mass Spectrometry, or SPAMS, the Livermore scientists already have developed and tested the technology for detecting chemical and biological agents.
The new research expands SPAMS’ capabilities to include several types of explosives that have been used worldwide in improvised explosive devices and other terrorist attacks.
“SPAMS is a sensitive, specific, potential option for airport and baggage screening,” Farquar said. “The ability of the SPAMS technology to determine the identity of a single particle could be a valuable asset when the target analyte is dangerous in small quantities or has no legal reason for being present in an environment.”
The team conducted its explosives tests under laboratory conditions at LLNL last summer.
“The tests went well. They show the potential to identify explosives in a field setting,” Farquar said.
Besides Farquar, other LLNL researchers on the explosives detection team included the paper’s lead author, Audrey Martin, an LLNL chemist and Michigan State University Ph.D. student, chemists Eric Gard and David Fergenson, and physicist Matthias Frank.
The early history of the three-in-one detection system started at LLNL in 1999 with the development of what is called the Bioaerosol Mass Spectrometry (BAMS) system. This system can detect airborne biological pathogens and sound a warning in less than one minute.
In late 2005, Livermore researchers started work to expand the capabilities of BAMS to include chemicals and explosives, setting the stage for the new machine now called SPAMS.
“While this instrument started as a biological detector, we saw that it had the potential to do much more by detecting other threat agents, such as chemicals and explosives,” Farquar said.
The biological detection system underwent field testing for background studies at San Francisco International Airport in late 2005. Farquar describes the biological detection technology “as very solid.”
In late 2005, the biological system underwent testing for several biological “surrogates” at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University. A second round of tests – with smaller releases and seven days of autonomous sampling – is planned for later this month.
Initial studies to test the performance of SPAMS with four chemical “simulants” were undertaken in 2006.
Future plans for SPAMS include a field test at a large public facility in the United States later this year, upgrading the technology for removing particles from luggage and clothing, and adding the capability of detecting narcotics, Farquar said.
Research funds to add the capabilities of detecting explosives and chemicals have been provided by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and LLNL’s Glenn T. Seaborg Institute, which is part of the Chemistry, Materials and Life Sciences directorate.
Founded in 1952, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has a mission to ensure national security and to apply science and technology to the important issues of our time. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration.
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Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
By ERIC SCHMITT | WASHINGTON — An American ambassador helped cover up the illegal Chinese origins of ammunition that a Pentagon contractor bought to supply Afghan security forces, according to testimony gathered by Congressional investigators.
A military attaché has told the investigators that the United States ambassador to Albania endorsed a plan by the Albanian defense minister to hide several boxes of Chinese ammunition from a visiting reporter. The ammunition was being repackaged to disguise its origins and shipped from Albania to Afghanistan by a Miami Beach arms-dealing company.
The ambassador, John L. Withers II, met with the defense minister, Fatmir Mediu, hours before a reporter for The New York Times was to visit the American contractor’s operations in Tirana, the Albanian capital, according to the testimony. The company, under an Army contract, bought the ammunition to supply Afghan security forces although American law prohibits trading in Chinese arms.
The attaché, Maj. Larry D. Harrison II of the Army, was one of the aides attending the late-night meeting, on Nov. 19, 2007. He told House investigators that Mr. Mediu asked Ambassador Withers for help, saying he was concerned that the reporter would reveal that he had been accused of profiting from selling arms. The minister said that because he had gone out of his way to help the United States, a close ally, “the U.S. owed him something,” according to Major Harrison.
Mr. Mediu ordered the commanding general of Albania’s armed forces to remove all boxes of Chinese ammunition from a site the reporter was to visit, and “the ambassador agreed that this would alleviate the suspicion of wrongdoing,” Major Harrison said, according to his testimony.
Investigators interviewed Major Harrison by telephone on June 9, and the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee made excerpts of the transcript public on Monday.
At the time of the meeting, the company, AEY Inc., was under investigation for illegal arms trafficking involving Chinese ammunition.
On Friday, the president of the company, Efraim E. Diveroli, 22, and three others were charged with selling prohibited Chinese ammunition to the Pentagon that they said was made in Albania.
On March 27, The New York Times published an article that said Albanian documents showed that the Miami company had bought more than 100 million Chinese cartridges that were stored for decades in former cold war stockpiles.
Mr. Diveroli arranged to have them repacked in cardboard boxes, many of which split or decomposed after shipment to the war zones, according to the article. Different lots or types of ammunition were mixed. In some cases the ammunition was dirty, corroded or covered with a film.
The repackaging operation, carried out by an AEY subcontractor at the Rinas Airport in Tirana, has become the focus of the Congressional investigation.
According to the transcript excerpts released by the committee, Major Harrison told investigators that he did not agree with the decision to hide the boxes from the reporter, and said that he felt “very uncomfortable” during the meeting.
Major Harrison, who as the chief of the embassy’s office of defense cooperation was responsible for helping American efforts to train, equip and modernize Albania’s military, said that his suggestion to bar the reporter from visiting the Albania base was rejected.
In a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, the committee’s chairman, Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, said Monday that there were signs that embassy officials in Tirana tried to cover up the November meeting once Mr. Waxman’s staff began an investigation into the arms company. The letter said the committee would seek to interview Mr. Withers and other embassy personnel.
Attempts to reach Mr. Withers through the United States Embassy in Tirana were met with a request to refer all questions to Washington.
But a senior State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing criminal inquiry into AEY, said he had spoken Monday to Mr. Withers, who adamantly denied Major Harrison’s statement.
The senior official said the committee had never interviewed Mr. Withers or other top embassy personnel, and released the information on Monday to fan interest in a committee hearing on the company’s business dealings scheduled for Tuesday.
A State Department spokesman, Tom Casey, told reporters on Monday that the department was reviewing Mr. Waxman’s letter, which included Major Harrison’s statements.
“We have no information that would support the idea that U.S. officials were involved in some kind of illicit activity,” Mr. Casey said. “But obviously, again, any allegations made, certainly any questions raised, by the chairman of a major committee in Congress, is something that we will be happy to look into.”
Mr. Withers, a Foreign Service officer for 24 years, has been ambassador to Albania since July 2007. He has also served in Latvia, Nigeria, Russia and The Hague. His father, John L. Withers Sr., is a former director of the Agency for International Development.
A spokesman for the Albanian Defense Ministry in Tirana could not be reached for comment, and an official at the Albanian Embassy in Washington declined to answer questions.
Capt. Andres Vazquez, a military lawyer for Major Harrison in Germany, did not answer his phone on Monday night and did not reply to an e-mail message.
According to messages obtained by Congressional investigators, Major Harrison urged embassy officials to inform the committee of the Nov. 19 meeting between the ambassador and minister, but the embassy omitted any reference to the meeting in its official response to the committee’s questions.
Embassy staff members seemed sympathetic to the Albanians’ alarm. The day after the November meeting, the embassy’s regional security officer, Patrick Leonard, wrote an assistant an e-mail message obtained by the committee: “NY Times just arrived today and might be doing a story on this and it might get ugly. Ambassador is very concerned about the case.”
When The Times published its article on March 27, it was quickly forwarded to embassy officials. In an e-mail message to several embassy officials, Mr. Leonard said that the article focused on the arms company’s dealings. “No mention of Embassy involvement — thank God!”
In his letter to Secretary Rice, Mr. Waxman said the e-mail correspondence among embassy officials, combined with Major Harrison’s statements, “raises questions about both the State Department’s role in the shipment of illegal Chinese ammunition and the candor of the department’s response to the committee.”
In January 2007, the Army awarded the company a contract, potentially worth $298 million, that made it the main munitions supplier for Afghan security forces in the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
Mr. Mediu, the Albanian defense minister, resigned in March, before The Times published its article, after explosions at an arms depot near Tirana killed at least 16 people, wounded nearly 300 and littered the area with shrapnel and live munitions. He has denied corruption charges.
Dan Bilefsky contributed reporting from Prague.
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Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
By George Monbiot | Of course, it’s not a crime, and it’s hard to see how, in a free society, it could or should become one. But the culpability of the energy firms the climate scientist James Hansen will indict in his testimony to Congress today is clear. If we fail to stop runaway climate change, it will be largely because of campaigning by oil, coal and electricity companies, and the network of lobbyists, fake experts and thinktanks they have sponsored.
The operation sprang directly from Big Tobacco’s war against science. It has used the same fake experts, the same public relations companies and the same tactics: as I showed in my book Heat, the campaign against action on climate change was partly launched by the tobacco company Philip Morris. But while the tobacco companies’ professional liars were smoked out by a massive class action in the US, the sponsored climate change deniers still have massive influence over public perception. A survey published yesterday by the Observer shows that six out of ten people in Britain agreed that “many scientific experts still question if humans are contributing to climate change.” This is an inaccurate perception, which results from Big Energy’s lobbying.
Almost without exception, the scientists who claim to doubt that manmade climate change is taking place fall into two categories: either they are not qualified in the branch of science they are discussing or they have received money from fossil fuel companies. Of all the self-professed climate “sceptics”, I have been able to find only one – Dr John Christy of the University of Alabama – who has relevant qualifications and who does not appear to have received fees from lobby groups or thinktanks sponsored by the energy companies. But even he has had to admit that the figures on which he based his claims were the results of “errors in the … data”.
The others are the very opposite of sceptics. Many of them are paid to start with a conclusion – that climate change isn’t happening or isn’t important – then to find data and arguments to support it. In most cases, they cherrypick scientific findings; in a few cases, like the fake scientific paper attached to the celebrated Oregon petition, they make them up altogether. But people who don’t understand the difference between a peer-reviewed paper and a pamphlet are taken in. The energy companies’ propaganda campaign is amplified by scientific illiterates in the media, such as Melanie Phillips, Christopher Booker, Nigel Lawson, Alexander Cockburn and the television producer (who made Channel 4’s documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle) Martin Durkin.
I don’t believe that the energy companies should be prosecuted for commissioning the truckload of trash their sponsored experts publish. But their campaign of disinformation must be exposed again and again. Like the tobacco lobbyists, they are not only delaying essential public action; they also create the impression that science is for sale to the highest bidder.
The awful truth is that sometimes it is.
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Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
By George Monbiot | Which of these countries has the most prisoners per head of population? Sudan, Syria, China, Burma, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe or England and Wales? We win, or rather lose: I have ranked these countries in reverse order(1). On this measure, England and Wales have a more punitive judicial system than most of the world’s dictatorships.
On Friday, the government released new figures for the prison population(2). It broke all records, yet again. It has risen by 38% since Labour came to power(3), and now stands at 83,181. What does the government intend to do about it? Lock more people up. It is building enough new cells to jail 96,000 people by 2014(4). At the beginning of this month it laid out its plans for Titan prisons: vast broiler units, which will each house 2,500 people(5). But they’ll be only just big enough: the government expects the number of cons to rise to 95,600 in six years(6).
As ever, Britain appears to be chasing the United States. In both absolute and relative terms, the USA’s prison population is the highest on earth: one percent of its adult population is behind bars(7). This is five times our preposterous rate and six times Turkey’s(8). It is over twice the rate of the nearest contender, South Africa(9). If you count the people under community supervision or on probation, the total rises to over 7 million, or 3.1% of the adult population(10). Black men who failed to complete high school in the US have a 60% chance of ending up in jail(11). I feel I need to say that again: 60% of unqualified black men go to prison. It’s beginning to look as if the state has stopped imprisoning individuals and started locking up a social class. Is this what we aspire to?
To judge by the remonstrations of the tabloids, the answer is yes. But why? And why, in the United Kingdom, is imprisonment still rising? It’s not because of rising crime. Last year crimes recorded by the police fell by 2%, while the most serious violent offences fell by 9%(12). Nor does it reflect the conviction rate. That fell by 4% in 2006 (we don’t yet have last year’s figures)(13). Stranger still, it is not connected to the rate of imprisonment either, which fell by 9% between 2004 and 2006(14).
The prison population is rising for one reason: people are being put away for longer(15). Between 1997 and 2004, the average sentence rose from 15.7 months to 16.1(16). That tells only half the story: the actual time served rose as well, as a result of new laws the government introduced in 1998 and 2003(17). In 2004 the courts started handing down indeterminate sentences – prison terms without fixed limits. These will be partly responsible for the projected growth in imprisonment over the next six years(18).
This exposes a remarkable contradiction in government policy. At the beginning of last year, the criminal justice ministers sent a begging letter to the courts asking them not to bang so many people up, as the prisons were bursting(19). But they are bursting because of the mandatory life terms, indeterminate sentences and other stern measures it has forced the judges to pass. In 2002, England and Wales had more lifers (5268) than the whole of the rest of the EU put together (5046) (20). I can’t find a more recent comparison, and since the accession of the former communist states this is bound to have changed. But it gives you a rough idea of how weird this country is.
So why, when the number of crimes, especially serious violent crimes, is falling, are both the government and the courts imposing longer sentences? Why does the UK consistently rank in the top two places for imprisonment in western Europe? Why, as this country becomes more peacable, does it become more punitive? I don’t know. Nor, it seems, does anyone else. But one thing I’ve noticed is that many of the states with the highest number of convicts are also those with the greatest differential between rich and poor. Within the OECD nations, the US has the second highest rate of inequality. Mexico, which is the most unequal, has the third-highest rate of imprisonment. In the EU, four of the five most unequal nations also rank among the top five jailers(21). The correlation, though by no means exact, seems to apply across many of the rich countries.
This doesn’t demonstrate a causal relationship. But there are three likely connections. The first is that inequality causes crime. This is what Anatole France referred to, when he claimed to admire “the majestic egalitarianism of the law, which forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”(22) But, while this has proved true at most times and in most places, crime is falling in England and Wales while inequality is rising. The second possible link is that prison causes inequality. The sociologist Bruce Western has shown that jail in the United States is a huge and hidden cause of deprivation(23). When people are locked up, they can’t acquire the skills and social contacts they need to get on outside. Employers are reluctant to take them on when they’ve been released, and they tend to be hired by the day or to get stuck in the casual economy, which is one of the reasons why so many return to crime. Among whites and Hispanics, wages for ex-cons are severely depressed. Among black people the effect is less marked: the “stigma of imprisonment”, Western suggests, appears to have stuck to the entire black underclass(24).
His ground-breaking research shows that US labour figures, which appeared to prove that the rising tide of the 1990s lifted all boats, were hopelessly skewed. The government’s claim that the boom had enhanced everyone’s job prospects – even those at the bottom of the heap – turns out to be an artefact of rising imprisonment: convicts aren’t counted in household surveys. Western found that while general unemployment fell sharply in the 1990s, when prisoners were included, the rate among unqualified young black men rose to its highest level ever: a gobsmacking 65%(25).
The third possible reason for a link between the two factors is that inequality causes imprisonment. I can’t prove this, and it is hard to see how anyone could do so. But my untested hypothesis runs as follows: the greater the wealth the top echelons accrue, the more ferociously they demand protection from the rest of society. They have more to lose from crime and less to lose from punishment, which is less likely to strike the richer you become. The people who help to generate the public demand for long prison terms (newspaper proprietors and editors) and the people who mete it out (judges and magistrates) are drawn overwhelmingly from the property-owning classes. “Those who have built large fortunes,” Max Hastings, who was once the editor of the Daily Telegraph, wrote of his former employer Conrad Black, “seldom lose their nervousness that some ill-wisher will find means to take their money away from them.”(26) Money breeds paranoia, and paranoia keeps people in prison.
References:
1. King’s College, London, 2008. World Prison Brief. http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/law/research/icps/worldbrief/wpb_stats.php?a…
2. BBC Online, 20th June 2008. Prison population at record high. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7465983.stm
3. National Statistics Office, viewed 23rd June 2008. Prison population: England and Wales.
www.statistics.gov.uk/STATBASE/Expodata/Spreadsheets/D7361.xls
4. Ministry of Justice, 1st February 2008. Minister opens first prison in government building programme. Press release. http://www.justice.gov.uk/news/newsrelease010208a.htm
5. Ministry of Justice, 5th June 2008. Titan prisons. Consultation Paper CP10/08. http://www.justice.gov.uk/docs/cp1008.pdf
6. Ministry of Justice, August 2007. Prison Population Projections 2007-2014. England and Wales. http://www.justice.gov.uk/docs/stats-prison-pop-aug07.pdf
7. Sky News, 29th February 2008. US Prison Population Reaches World High. http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30200-1307500,00.html
8. The US rate per 100,000 people is 751. UK: 152, Turkey: 127. King’s College, ibid.
9. 347 per 100,000.
10. Bruce Western, 22nd June 2007. Mass Imprisonment and Economic Inequality – III. Who we Punish: the Carceral State. http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-6959890/Mass-imprisonment-and-ec…
11. ibid.
12. Home Office, July 2007. Crime in England and Wales 2006/07. Statistical Bulletin. http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs07/hosb1107.pdf
13. Ministry of Justice, November 2007. Criminal Statistics 2006: England and Wales. http://www.justice.gov.uk/docs/crim-stats-2006-tag.pdf
14. ibid, Table 1.2.
15. Ministry of Justice, August 2007, ibid.
16. ibid.
17. The Ministry of Justice, August 2007, ibid, lists these factors as follows:
“• greater numbers of offenders recalled to prison for breaking the conditions of
their licence, reflecting legislative changes in 1998 and 2003;
• increased use of indeterminate sentences following the introduction of
Indeterminate sentences for Public Protection (IPPs) in April 2005;
• the introduction of Suspended Sentence Orders in April 2005 for which
offenders in breach can be taken into custody; and
• inflation in the time certain types of offender remain in prison (particularly in
recent years) as the use of Home Detention Curfew for the early release of
offenders has diminished and the parole rate has fallen.”
18. The Ministry of Justice, August 2007, ibid, states that “Much of the underlying growth in the High, Medium and Low scenarios can
therefore be attributed to the use of IPP [Indeterminate sentences for Public Protection] sentences.
19. Ministry of Justice, 23rd January 2007. Statement from the Criminal Justice Ministers to the National Criminal Justice Board:
Managing the Impact of Rapid Growth in the Prison Population.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmselect/cmconst/467/4…
20. Prison Reform Trust, March 2004. England and Wales, Europe’s lifer capital. http://www.prisonreformtrust.org.uk/subsection.asp?id=352
21. I took the inequality stats (as measured by the Gini Coefficient) from the CIA’s World Factbook: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2172….
22. Anatole France, 1894. The Red Lily.
23. Bruce Western, August 2002. The Impact of Incarceration on Wage Mobility and Inequality. American Sociological Review. Vol. 67, No. 4, pp. 526-546.
24. ibid.
25. Bruce Western, 22nd June 2007. Mass Imprisonment and Economic Inequality – III. Who we Punish: the Carceral State. http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-6959890/Mass-imprisonment-and-ec…
26. Max Hastings, 2002. Editor: An Inside Story of Newspapers. Macmillan, London.
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Mind-Forged Manacles
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Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
ADS | “Blood and Oil” is a very, very well made film that will show you something new even if you already know that - as Dubya admits - the United States is addicted to oil, even if you know the deal that FDR cut with the king of Saudi Arabia on February 14, 1945 (and have already seen the film footage of them meeting on a US ship accompanied by the king’s slaves and astrologers), even if you know the openly oily basis of the Truman Doctrine, the Eisenhower Doctrine, the Nixon Doctrine, the Carter Doctrine, and Reagan’s Persian Gulf policies, the origins of Centcom, and the oily panic of Bush I (who finally established that the policy of blood for oil would be hushed up and disguised by phony war justifications), even if you know that Bush I’s reneging on his promise to leave Saudi Arabia after driving the Iraqis out of Kuwait turned Osama bin Laden into an enemy of the United States, even if you’ve followed the crimes of Cheney-Bush and the establishment of Africom, even if you have been screaming against war for oil since before Shock and Awe.
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Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
By Joseph Neff | The private military company Blackwater has found an unusual way to skirt federal laws that prohibit private parties from buying automatic weapons. Blackwater bought 17 Romanian AK-47s and 17 Bushmasters, gave ownership of the guns to the Camden County sheriff and keeps most of the guns at Blackwater’s armory in Moyock.
Tiny Camden County — population 9,271 — is one of the most peaceful in North Carolina. In the last 10 years, there have been two murders, three robberies and seven rapes reported. The sheriff has just 19 deputies.
Sheriff Tony Perry said his department has never used the 17 AK-47s outside of shooting practice at Blackwater. None of his 19 deputies are qualified to use the AK-47s, Perry said, and his department’s need for automatic weapons is “very minimal.”
In the summer of 2005, Blackwater CEO Gary Jackson signed two agreements with Maj. Jon Worthington of the Sheriff’s Office. Worthington has worked as a firearms instructor for Blackwater.
“Blackwater has financed the purchase of 17 Romanian AK-47 rifles for the Camden County Sheriff’s Office for use by Sheriff’s Office,” the agreement says. “The Camden County Sheriff’s Office will have unlimited access to these rifles for training and qualification, and state of emergency use.” Worthington and Jackson also signed an agreement for the purchase of 17 Bushmaster XM15 E2S automatic rifles.
Why did Blackwater strike this deal with the Camden County sheriff?
“Because they needed guns, I imagine,” Jackson said.
Jackson said Blackwater was a good corporate citizen that provided equipment and training, often free, to local law enforcement.
Did Camden County need more automatic weapons than deputies?
“They are very well equipped,” Jackson said.
Perry said he can’t remember who came up with the idea for the weapons deal. He said the county was trying to put together a SWAT team at the time.
Not the best choice?
The AK-47 would be a poor choice of weapon for a SWAT team, said John Gnagey, executive director of the National Tactical Officers Association, the national organization of SWAT officers.
As a combat weapon, the AK-47 is too large and powerful for SWAT teams, Gnagey said. It is rugged but relatively inaccurate.
“And there’s the perception problem,” Gnagey said. “Every terrorist attacking the U.S. is armed with AK-47s. ”
Most SWAT teams use the H&K MP5 submachine gun or the Bushmaster M4, he said.
Under federal law, only government agencies — military or law enforcement — are allowed to acquire and possess automatic weapons. There is an exception for automatic weapons purchased before May 1986, when the law went into effect.
Firearms dealers are allowed, under strict conditions, to acquire an automatic weapon if they need to demonstrate the weapon to a police department or other government agency interested in buying the weapon.
Under federal law, it is illegal for a person to receive or possess an automatic weapon that is not registered to that person in the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record. The 34 weapons are registered to the Camden County sheriff. Seventeen AK-47s and five Bushmasters are stored and used at Blackwater. The other 12 Bushmasters are assigned to Camden County deputies, the sheriff said.
Weapons’ use defended
Jackson, the Blackwater CEO, said he was not violating federal firearms law.
“I don’t believe so,” Jackson said. “As long as I have contracts, I can buy fully automatic weapons.”
Jackson and Erik Prince, Blackwater’s owner, said Blackwater used the AK-47s in training to familiarize police officers or members of the military with a foreign weapon that they might come across while making an arrest or on a battlefield.
Blackwater may also use the AK-47s to train military personnel from other countries who come to the United States for anti-terrorism training funded by the State Department, Prince and Jackson said.
“If the contract tells us to, we do it,” Jackson said.
The agreement between Blackwater and the Sheriff’s Office could be an illegal straw purchase, said Richard Myers, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A straw purchase, Myers said, is when one person fills out the federal firearms registration form to obtain a weapon for another person’s use.
“I prosecuted several when I was with the U.S. attorney,” Myers said. “If I were Blackwater’s attorney, I would be concerned about whether this is a genuine purchase or a straw purchase.”
Sheriff Perry said he did not consult a lawyer about the agreement until recently, when the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the FBI inquired about the arrangement. Last year two former Blackwater employees pleaded guilty to federal firearms violations. They were sentenced to probation on the condition that they assist federal investigators.
Perry said his department was cooperating fully.
“We’re not a target,” Perry said. “We may be a victim in it.”
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Blackwater, skirting federal law, using cache of AK-47s
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Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
By JAMES GLANZ, New York Times | Beyond the declines in overall violence in Iraq, several crucial measures the Bush administration uses to demonstrate economic, political and security progress are either incorrect or far more mixed than the administration has acknowledged, according to a report released Monday by the Government Accountability Office.
Over all, the report says, the American plan for a stable Iraq lacks a strategic framework that meshes with the administration’s goals, is falling out of touch with the realities on the ground and contains serious flaws in its operational guidelines.
Newly declassified data in the report on countrywide attacks in May shows that increases in violence during March and April that were touched off by an Iraqi government assault on militias in Basra have given way to a calmer period. Numbers of daily attacks have been comparable to those earlier in the year, representing about a 70 percent decline since June 2007, the data shows.
While those figures confirm the assessments by American military commanders that many of the security improvements that first became apparent last fall are still holding, a number of the figures that have been used to show broader progress in Iraq are either misleading or simply incorrect, the report says.
Administration figures, according to the report, broadly overstate gains in some categories, including the readiness of the Iraqi Army, electricity production and how much money Iraq is spending on its reconstruction.
And the security gains themselves rest in large part not on broad-scale advances in political and social reconciliation and a functioning Iraqi government, but on a few specific advances that remain fragile, the report says. The relatively calm period rests mostly on the American troop increase, a shaky cease-fire declared by militias loyal to the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, and an American-led program to pay former insurgents to help keep the peace, the report says.
“Clearly there are substantial changes in the security situation on the ground,” said Nathan Freier, a retired Army officer who served in Iraq in 2005 and 2007 and is now a senior fellow in the international security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
The administration prefers to focus on those improvements, Mr. Freier said. But the accountability office report, which Mr. Freier read on Monday, and his own observations in Iraq contain a different message, he said.
“Iraq remains a mixed bag and will continue to do so in perpetuity, to be quite honest,” he added.
Letters from the Treasury Department, the State Department and the Pentagon that were attached to the report all disagreed with many of its central findings. In the language common to such government exchanges, for example, the Pentagon said that it “nonconcurs” with the conclusion that a new strategy for stabilizing Iraq was needed.
The unclassified version of the American plan, laid out by President Bush in January 2007 in what he called “The New Way Forward in Iraq,” is still the proper guideline, according to the Pentagon, whose response was written by Christopher C. Straub, acting deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East.
“The New Way Forward strategy remains valid,” Mr. Straub wrote. “We recognize, as with all strategies, updates and refinements occur at various intervals to take into account changes in the strategic environment.”
But the president set out that plan as something that would take 12 to 18 months and would include achievements like enacting a law to regulate Iraq’s oil industry and handing all of Iraq’s provinces over to Iraqi control, the report says. As of this week, only 9 of 18 provinces had been handed over, according to the report, and the crucial oil law remains to be enacted.
In other cases, what appeared to be promising political developments have faltered. Although the Iraqi Parliament enacted a law reforming the heavy-handed purge from government of former members of the Baath Party, no members have yet been named to the commission created to carry out the law.
Still more important, the report asserts, the administration’s plan is not a strategy at all, but more a series of operational prescriptions scattered among various documents reviewed by the accountability office.
“A strategic plan should be a plan that takes you not only through the short term,” said Joseph A. Christoff, director of international affairs and trade at the accountability office.
“If the New Way Forward only takes you through July 2008, then you don’t have any guidance for achieving an Iraq that can do everything on its own,” including dealing with the threat of terrorism and defending its own borders, Mr. Christoff said.
Perhaps the most confounding element in the report is the sharp disagreement between the accountability office and the administration over the value of basic indicators of progress.
For example, in an analysis based on a classified study of Iraqi Army battalions, the office concludes that just 10 percent of them are capable of operating independently in counterinsurgency operations and that even then they rely on American support.
But the Pentagon, as stated in Mr. Straub’s letter, maintains that 70 percent of Iraqi units are in the lead in counterinsurgency operations. The difference may be partly semantics: Are the Iraqi units in the lead, with Americans close at hand, or are they able to operate on their own? But the office essentially concludes that the Pentagon is claiming that units with far lower readiness grades are ready to lead than it did in the past.
Similarly, by looking at official figures, the office was unable to substantiate American claims that Iraq had spent and committed more than 60 percent of its reconstruction budget in 2007. Instead, the number was 28 percent, the report said.
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Government Study Criticizes Bush Administration’s Measures of Progress in Iraq
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Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
Rick Shenkman, is the author of the just-published Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter (Basic Books, 2008). He blogs at Howstupidblog and is editor of George Mason University’s History News Network
Shenkman writes:
I do not wish to engage in a debate about the Iraq War. But the thought of planting a largely Christian army in the middle of the Muslim Middle East over the opposition of most countries in the region, when put as I have just put it, sounds daft. Why did it not ring bells of alarm to Americans in 2003 and after, especially as it became clear that our troops would be staying a long time and that no quick victory was possible? It did not because the administration saw to it that the issue was framed differently. We weren’t planting an army. We were spreading God’s miraculous gift of freedom to a benighted people very much in need of America’s missionary help. It was the triumph of myth over logic.
Why were Americans so susceptible to myth? Foreign policy specialists don’t usually spend a lot of time reflecting on this question. They should. It’s the key to what often goes wrong when foreign policy issues become the subject of public debate.
The answer is, I’m afraid, simple. Myths count more than facts in these debates because Americans don’t know many facts and don’t care to take the time to learn them. Unlike subjects with which they have first-hand experience–think gas prices–matters related to foreign countries are both exotic and incomprehensible to most Americans. This leaves them sitting ducks for wily pols who want to take advantage of their ignorance by playing on fear and patriotism.
The extent of Americans’ ignorance is underestimated. Only two in five know we have three branches of government and can name them. Only one in five know there are 100 US senators. And five years into the war in Iraq only one in seven can find Iraq on a map. Someone once said–the author is in dispute–that war is God’s way of teaching Americans geography. It’s a great line, but rather optimistic. A majority of Americans still haven’t bothered to take a look at the map of the country where we have been bombing and killing people since 1991.
Not all is grim. On the positive side, Americans did not make wholly irrational demands of their leaders after 9/11. American Muslims were not rounded up and sent to concentration camps after 9/11 (as Japanese-Americans were after Pearl Harbor). Mosques were not closed down. Nuclear weapons were not employed against our perceived enemies. And nobody was lynched. Given what has happened in American history any one of these responses or all of them might have been anticipated. That none occurred and that nothing like them occurred is worth noting.
But polls indicate that a significant segment of the American public was susceptible to wild conspiracy theories. A Scripps-Howard poll in 2006 found that 36 percent believe that it is “very likely” or “somewhat likely” that U.S. officials either allowed the attack to take place or were involved it.
Americans do not have a monopoly on conspiracy thinking. Nineteen percent of Germans said in a 2004 poll that 9/11 was the work of the CIA and Israel’s Mossad. The French turned Thierry Meyssan’s book The Appalling Fraud into a best-seller, despite the absence of evidence for its chief and crazy claim: that the Pentagon attacked itself on 9/11 with a cruise missile. Millions of Muslims around the world persist in believing that Jews were given advance warning of the attack on the World Trade Center.
But instead of the thoughtful debate we should by rights have had in this country, we settled for slogans:
We must fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here
The Global War on Terror (GWOT)
Mission Accomplished
You are either with us or with the terrorists
The axis of evil
To be sure the public eventually turned against Mr. Bush’s war in Iraq. The one thing the public usually gets is success and failure. And Mr. Bush’s war has been a spectacular failure when judged against all of the many measures by which he has asked us to judge it.
As we head into the Fall campaign and listen to the debates about the war we should keep in mind the limits of public opinion. If we don’t begin to address the problem of gross public ignorance there will be more Iraqs.
One poll finding we should all keep in mind is this. Even after the 9/11 Commission reported that there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and the Sept. 11 attack 50 percent of the country persisted in believing there was. The implications of this are mind boggling.
Rick Shenkman
George Mason University
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Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
Hearings for terrorism suspects before US military tribunals in Guantanamo Bay are going ahead despite a Supreme Court ruling that affirmed the detainees have a right to challenge their detention in a civilian court.
Legal experts had described the high court’s decision as the death knell of the special tribunals created by President George W Bush and his Republican allies in Congress to try “war on terror” suspects.
But Justice Department chief Michael Mukasey said the controversial tribunals at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, would continue their work and last week, two preliminary hearings were held as scheduled.
The hearings focused on Omar Khadr and Mohammed Jawad, a Canadian and Afghan both detained in Afghanistan for having allegedly thrown grenades when they were still teenagers.
The new judge overseeing the Canadian’s case, Colonel Patrick Parrish, who replaced another military judge who was forced to step down, announced that the trial for Khadr would start on October 8.
Jawad reportedly used his hearing to denounce his treatment, alleging during a two-week period US guards changed his cell every two hours to prevent him from sleeping, a technique dubbed the “frequent flyer program.”
Meanwhile a three-judge panel in federal court on Friday declined to intervene in the Khadr case in an appeal that focused on a procedural dispute.
The decision though does not preclude federal judges from wading directly into the tribunal trials in Guantanamo in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s ruling, which rejected the government’s assertion that the detainees lack habeas corpus rights.
The US Court of Appeals for the US capital on Monday ruled that Chinese prisoner Huzaifa Parhat, of the Chinese Muslim Uighur minority, is not an enemy combatant and has the right to seek his release from custody at Guantanamo.
Parhat’s release, however, was not expected any time soon since the appeals court said the Pentagon could hold a new tribunal on his status, which observers deemed likely.
Details of the decision were not immediately available because it involved classified information, according to the appeals court statement.
‘More to come’
Although no trial has begun in earnest at the Guantanamo naval base, 19 detainees have been charged and “there will be more coming in the not too distant future,” said Joe DellaVedova of the office of military commissions.
“The military commissions process continues to move forward, in a fair, open and transparent manner,” he said.
Among those already charged are several suspects who allegedly planned the September 11 attacks, as well as Al Qaeda militants accused of having fired rockets in the vicinity of US troops in Afghanistan or having undergone training in the use of explosives.
The first tribunal trial is scheduled to start on July 21 in a newly set up “portable” courtroom to try Salim Hamdan, a Yemeni who worked as a driver and bodyguard for Osama bin Laden.
The judge in the case, Captain Keith Allred, has scheduled a hearing for July 14 that will likely offer a chance to assess the consequences of the landmark Supreme Court ruling for the tribunals.
The fallout from the high court’s ruling is still unclear.
The justices concluded that the naval base in Guantanamo Bay, officially on Cuban territory, can be treated as US territory where rights enshrined in the US Constitution must be respected.
But it remains an open question if inmates enjoy all rights named in the constitution or only certain fundamental rights.
- AFP
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Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
Zogby | UTICA, New York - One out of every four working Americans (25%) describes their workplace as a dictatorship, while just 34% of bosses in the American workplace react well to valid criticism, according to a new Workplace Democracy Association/Zogby Interactive survey.
The survey also found that less than half of working Americans - 46% - said their workplace promotes creative or inventive ideas, while barely half - 51% - said their co-workers often feel motivated or are mostly motivated at work.
Asher Adelman, Founder and President of the Workplace Democracy Association, said that “As we prepare to commemorate our nation’s independence and celebrate the freedoms that we often take for granted, it is unfortunate and ironic that so many Americans work at organizations that are managed like mini-dictatorships.” Just 52% of respondents in the nationwide survey said their boss treats subordinates well, the survey revealed.
“Traditionally-managed companies, by inadvertently draining the motivation levels of their employees, are stifling productivity, innovation, and creativity. Companies cannot expect to remain competitive when such large numbers of employees do not feel like they are treated like responsible adults nor when they feel like their input has little or no impact on the company’s decision-making process,” said Adelman.
Possible Solutions
Adopting democratic processes can have a significant impact on employee morale and thus improve their levels of productivity and creativity: 80% of workers said they work better when they are given the freedom to decide how to best do their job.
Another problem in the workplace identified in the survey: 31% of respondents said they believe that their human resources departments or upper management almost always or sometimes hire the wrong people. But, the survey indicated, a solution to poor hires may exist within the workplace. Almost one person in five (18%) workers said they would feel more motivated at work if employees were selected and hired by groups of coworkers instead of by the bosses.
“Companies that want to boost employee engagement levels must adopt democratic and innovative practices in the way the entire company is managed,” said Adelman. “Executives should be sharing information with all employees about the company’s ongoing performance and goals, and employees should be empowered with greater discretion and decision-making abilities. In addition, it goes without saying that employees should be rewarded and compensated when the company is successful in achieving its goals.”
The nationwide interactive survey was conducted May 20-22, 2008, and included 2,475 respondents. The measure of error is +/- 2.0 percentage points. This is the largest national representative study of this phenomenon in the U.S. to date.
Results can be found online at:www.workplace-democracy.org. The Workplace Democracy Association is the sole U.S. nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting and raising awareness about the benefits of workplace democracy.
For content, contact: Asher Adelman, Workplace Democracy Association 949-273-4372 contact@workplace-democracy.org
For methodology, contact: Fritz Wenzel, 315-624-0200 ext. 229 or 419-205-0287 or fritz@zogby.com
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ONE IN FOUR AMERICANS CALL THEIR WORKPLACE A DICTATORSHIP
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Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
By Shamus Cooke | The global debate around free-trade and its consequences has evolved tremendously in recent years, from tiny circles of leftist critics into a broad international protest movement. Although the movement began to bloom in response to the policies of the World Trade Organization (WTO), the biggest demonstrations have been in response to the now-popular “bi-lateral” free-trade agreements that economically powerful countries sign with poorer nations. Once one has become conscious of the problems created by free-trade agreements, whether they are international or regional, an immediate task presents itself: finding a feasible alternative.
Yes, the trade policy advocated by most big business politicians is “free-trade,” and yes, this policy has had devastating consequences for working and poor people worldwide, while filling the already-full bank accounts of the rich. But the issue of “free-trade” alone isn’t sufficient to fully explain the vast social problems that plague so many countries.
For example, many progressive-minded people come to the seemingly common-sense conclusion that, if free-trade is bad, then its opposite, protectionism, must be good. However, this is not the case, as we will explain below. The search, therefore, for a real alternative, has led some to attach themselves to the notion of “fair trade.” This term means different things to different people, as there is no strict definition as to what fair trade is, or what it would look like if actually implemented. The ambiguous definition has attracted a wide range of adherents, from the honest progressive to the dishonest reactionary. Though there remains no concrete political program, there are sections of the fair trade movement that have some ideas as to what they want, but not how to get there, as shown by the Alliance for Responsible Trade:
“This enormous, unified movement is one of people telling those political leaders, financial speculators and the transnational corporations who promote neoliberal policies that their agenda is unacceptable. It is a movement of people demanding their very humanity. They do so by stating that nutritious food, a comfortable place to live, a clean and healthy environment, health care and education are human rights.”
There is much progressive content in this quote that should be encouraged. But there is something crucial lacking as well. For instance, one might ask, “What exactly is trade, and how do we make it fair?” Ultimately, one can not “trade” what one does not own. What trade under capitalism really means is that companies produce, buy and sell commodities on an international level, not for socially useful purposes, but for profit. At bottom, what is “unfair” is that unelected individuals or small groups of individuals own these corporations – the entities that control society’s vast wealth. And with that wealth comes powerful political influence; i.e., laws are passed to protect the interests and profits of the corporations. Understanding trade must begin here, at the foundation, so that proposed solutions don’t merely address the effects of the world economic structure, but its cause. A brief outline of the history of the fair trade movement, along with its various challenges and limitations, will help us gain a better perspective on possible solutions to a problem that goes far beyond trade.
The origins of the fair trade movement had little to do with politics. The NGO’s and religious organizations that founded the movement in the 1940s viewed the issue from a humanitarian, philanthropic perspective: third world countries were horribly poor and something needed to be done to help them. The solution the fair-traders devised came from a stark economic fact: workers and small farmers in poor countries seemed to be getting unfairly compensated for the goods they were producing. A hypothetical example is a blanket that took 10 hours to weave, but fetched only three dollars on the world market. To combat this inequity, fair trade organizations created shops where one could buy handicrafts and culturally unique goods at “fair” prices. The above-market price offered was considered a donation of sorts, and there remain segments of the fair-trade movement that retain this perspective and limit their focus accordingly.
The example of the blanket weaver can be used, on a small-scale, to explain a crucial economic law that keeps both blanket weavers and poor nations impoverished.
For example, a blanket that previously sold for $10 may now only fetch three dollars on the international market because machinery was used to reduce the amount of labor time required to produce it (in economics this is reflected in the Labor Theory of Value). In other words, if a producer is the first to invent a new machine that can make the same product more efficiently while investing less labor time in it, and the blanket can then be sold profitably for say, two dollars instead of three, a new standard is created internationally. Therefore, when two producers with unequal machinery compete on the world market, the technologically inferior producer must invest more labor time to create the same product, but can still only charge as much as the international standard set by the most efficient producer. Since labor, in combination with nature, is the source of all wealth, countries that have better machinery can undercut and out-compete poorer countries.
There can therefore be no “fair” trade where vast inequalities in productivity exist, especially when rich nations have such an immense productivity advantage in technology, due to the tremendous wealth they’ve accumulated over previous generations through colonialism, slavery, and more recent imperialist military interventions. Advanced technology is one example of how this accumulated wealth serves only to further distance the rich and poor countries through competition on the world market.
Once a nation has a productive advantage over the majority of other nations, it becomes a champion of free trade, so that its cheaper commodities may dominate the international market, economically invading the less-developed countries and destroying their domestic industries. It was these “deeper causes” of inequality that the founding fair-traders were oblivious to, eventually leading activists to seek out new ideas.
The “2nd wave” of the fair-trade movement began with a deeper political analysis than its predecessor. An understanding of the international system of trade was developed, including the global financial and trade institutions that help maintain the unequal status-quo. In fact, an overemphasis was developed towards these organizations, ignoring the above-mentioned structural and economic factors that inevitably make “fair trade” impossible under capitalism.
The movement’s focal point was Europe, where a variety of progressive organizations worked in conjunction with a coalition of third world nations known as “The Group of 77″ in an effort to reform the institutions that govern the capitalist system. The high point of this movement was its formal recognition by the United Nations, which adopted the slogan of “Trade not Aid,” at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. However, it amounted to naught. The rich countries that control the UN eventually derailed the movement, through a policy of pitting the poor countries against each other through bribes, concessions, and threats.
This defeat led to the demoralization of the rank and file activists, who, burned by their attempt to reform a major institution of capitalism, chose to refocus their efforts on the more “practical” grassroots work of “market access.” But even this less-grandiose strategy soon encountered resistance. Not only do large corporations own most of society’s wealth, but also the means to transport it. Producers in poorer countries who sought to continue their way of life found it increasingly difficult to market the already-decreasing value of their goods. This was typically limited to agricultural goods, since most small-scale manufacturers had already been destroyed by the “invisible hand” of the market.
The large corporations that dominate agricultural production did not want competition from smaller outfits, and used their connections to the corporations that owned the ports and railways – often it was one in the same – to effectively exclude the unconnected. The fair-trade movement focused on the grass-roots buying and selling of goods produced by non-corporate groups, villages, or collectives, who were striving to stay alive in a world dominated by large corporations. Many segments of the fair-trade movement continue to align themselves with this approach, but ultimately, the perspectives for these tiny islands of “fair trade” are limited, surrounded as they are by a sea of imperialism and giant multi-nationals.
Fair Trade CertifiedAs of December 2006, 569 producer organizations in 58 countries were fair trade certified. The fair trade label has now found its way into the supermarkets owned by the mega corporations. The availability of these products – once again, usually above-market prices – has been enthusiastically received by those able to afford them. An entire political philosophy has evolved from the buying of “socially just” products, known as “consumer activism.” The preachers of this philosophy are of course mainly from the middle-class, and have been largely unable to expand their efforts beyond select clothing and agricultural goods. Once again, those who considered the concept of fair-trade to be worthwhile were forced to search for new ideas that could take them beyond the obvious limitations posed by consumer activism.
Currently, the fair-trade movement has grown to encompass new layers with a consistently widening perspective, most notably, the involvement of labor unions. This came as a result of an accelerated process of global economic integration that capitalism required to maintain its existence, commonly referred to as “globalization.” The most crucial aspect of globalization involved the working class of the world: world capitalism created a situation where the majority of the earth’s population lives on virtual slave wages; the corporations of the rich countries, constantly bothered by “their” workers’ demands for higher wages, fled to the third world where wages are lower and as a consequence, profits are higher.
This “corporate flight” in search of ever-lower wages has in turn lowered the wages of workers everywhere. A corporation in the U.S. paying unionized workers cannot compete with one in China paying a dollar a day. Jobs and facilities were shipped overseas, union membership sank to new lows and the once mighty political power of the unions dissipated. This is how organized labor in the rich countries was drawn into the fair trade movement: out of necessity.
But “fair-trade” to the bureaucrats who control the unions is merely protectionism dressed up in radical-sounding clothing. Protectionism is the extremely limited, nationalistic solution they offer to the outsourcing of jobs and facilities. On the surface, this might seem like a common-sense solution: if a company produces a commodity that cannot compete with a foreign company, and the workers wish to keep their jobs, the company’s “competitiveness” seems like a priority. And if your political perspective is strictly bound to the confines of capitalism, there really is nowhere else to go. It is this slavish submission to the market economy that is proving debilitating to workers, when what is truly needed is a much broader, internationalist, working class solution.
The “company first, workers second” approach of worker-management “partnerships” has been used to destroy the wages and benefits of workers, setting the union movement back decades. The intent of the “partnership” approach is also used to foment nationalism and aims at fooling workers into thinking that the enemy is not at home, in the plush homes of the stockholders, but abroad: the companies and workers of foreign countries.
This nationalist ideology not only divides workers, but disempowers them, and instead links their fate to governmental policy. If a union’s strategy is to beg Congressmen to erect tariff barriers to protect them from cheap Chinese goods, dangerous waters are being entered. The mega-corporations that own these politicians end up asking for the same thing: they view China’s rise as a threat to their “strategic interests,” i.e., profits. And as history teaches, economic threats are often solved by military means.
Already many countries are developing protectionist tendencies similar to those that erupted before WWI and WWII. After WWII, capitalism experienced a prolonged boom, leading to increased free-trade cooperation in the WTO, dominated by the most powerful countries.
Despite the rise of powerful multi-national corporations and institutions, the nation state is still the basic unit of the capitalist system, and these nation states have opposing interests (since all multi-nationals have a “home base”). The irreconcilability of national interests under capitalism will always lead to contradictions, even within small trading blocs. The virtual collapse of the WTO is itself an expression of this. The boom is now over, and an “everyone for themselves ” protectionist mentality has taken over. The rich countries are done cooperating in the WTO and are instead opting for regional trade agreements where they can secure the resources and trade leverage desired with poorer countries. These trading blocs are dominated by specific imperialist powers, such as the European Union (Germany), NAFTA (U.S.), CAFTA (U.S.), PARTA (Australia), ASEAN (Japan), and UNASUR (Brazil). History teaches that trade blocs invariably turn into military blocs.
Throughout its history, fair trade has failed to define the clear political principles needed for developing a strategy capable of achieving its goals. Generally speaking, fair-trade has sought to transform capitalism into something it cannot be. This requires a new perspective that can break through the above, inevitable restrictions one encounters while trying to reform the market economy. Capitalism cannot be reformed. In the dog-eat-dog world of profit-making and competition, “fairness” plays absolutely no role. Nor can it. If workers’ rights, the environment, health care, or human rights restrict profit-making, they will be paid lip-service to but ignored nonetheless.
The wealth-producing functions of the giant corporations can be transformed into socially useful enterprises and run on a democratic basis by the workers themselves, as opposed to the undemocratic economic / political domination that exists under private ownership. Running society should be a social task, where everybody has a say as to what is produced and how. The political philosophy that best reflects this idea is commonly referred to as socialism, and is the starting point for anyone who wishes to create a truly fair society.
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Alternatives to Free Trade: Fair Trade and Beyond
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Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
By Juan Cole | American television loves natural disasters. The Burmese cyclones that may have carried off as many as 200,000 people offered the cameras high drama.
The floods in Wisconsin, Iowa and Missouri along the Mississippi River, which have wiped out thousands of homes, have been carefully detailed hour by hour.
But American television is little interested in the massive disaster blithely visited upon Iraq by Washington. Oh, there is the occasional human interest story. Angelina Jolie’s visit sparked a headline or two. Briefly.
By now, summer of 2008, excess deaths from violence in Iraq since March of 2003 must be at least a million. This conclusion can be reached more than one way. There is not much controversy about it in the scientific community. Some 310,000 of those were probably killed by US troops or by the US Air Force, with the bulk dying in bombing raids by US fighter jets and helicopter gunships on densely populated city and town quarters.
In absolute numbers, that would be like bombing to death everyone in Pittsburgh, Pa. Or Cincinnati, Oh.
Only, the US is 11 times more populous than Iraq, so 310,000 Iraqi corpses would equal 3.4 million dead Americans. So proportionally it would be like firebombing to death everyone in Chicago.
The one million number includes not just war-related deaths but all killings beyond what you would have expected from the 2000-2002 baseline. That is, if tribal feuds got out of hand and killed a lot of people because the Baath police were demobilized or disarmed and so no longer intervened, those deaths go into the mix. All the Sunnis killed in the north of Hilla Province (the ‘triangle of death’) when Shiite clans displaced from the area by Saddam came back up to reclaim their farms would be included. The kidnap victims killed when the ransom did not arrive in time would be included. And, of course, the sectarian, ethnic and militia violence, even if Iraqi on Iraqi, would count. And it hasn’t been just hot spots like Baghdad, Basra, Mosul and Kirkuk. The rate of excess violent death has been pretty standard across Arab Iraq.
As for the Iraqis killed by Americans, like the 24 civilians in Haditha, the survivors are not going to be pro-American any time soon. The US can always find politicians to come out and say nice things on a visit to the Rose Garden. But the people. I don’t think the people are saying nice things in Arabic behind our backs.
The wars of Iraq– the Iran-Iraq War, the repressions of the Kurds and the Shiites, the Gulf War, and the American Calamity, may have left behind as many as 3 million widows. Having lost their family’s breadwinner, many are destitute.
Although it is very good news that the number of Iraqis killed in political violence fell in May to 532 according to official sources, the number was twice that in March and April. And,it should be remembered that independent observers have busted the Pentagon for grossly under-reporting attacks and casualties. If someone shows up dead and they aren’t sure exactly why, it isn’t counted as political violence, just as an ordinary murder. Attacks per day are measured by whether the mortar shell scratches any US equipment when it explodes. If not, it didn’t happen. McClatchy estimated a year and a half ago that attacks were being underestimated by a factor of 10.
By the way, isn’t is a little odd that the death rate fell in the month of the Great Mosul Campaign? I conclude that either it can’t have been much of a campaign or someone is cooking the death statistics.
But over 500 a month dead in political violence is appalling enough. The Srebenica massacre in 1995 killed 8,000. At the average rate of death in Iraq this winter and spring, a similar massacre will have been racked up in 2008. In the Northern Ireland troubles over 30 years, about 3,000 people died, and it was widely considered a bad situation. That death toll is still being achieved every 6 months in Iraq according to the official May statistics.
And, of course, by the rule of 11,that death toll would be like nearly 6,000 Americans dying in political violence every month, or 72,000 a year. (Note that this 72,000 figure would only be political deaths, since it does not include criminal homicides). The annual total murder rate in the US is about 16,000, including political violence, what little there is. The US is one of the most violent societies on earth, and Iraq in May makes it look like a pacifist convention.
In these situations, typically 3 persons are wounded for every one killed. In Iraq, I suspect it is higher, because US bombings and guerrilla bombings are such a big part of the violence. But let us be conservative.
That would mean 3 million Iraqi wounded in the past five years.
Equivalent to 33 million Americans wounded, that is, the entire state of California crippled or in bandages.
As for the displaced (i.e. homeless), they amount to a startling 5 million persons. There were 1.8 million internally displaced in January of 2007, and by December it had risen to 2.4 million. There are 2.3 million externally displaced, 2 million of them in Jordan and Syria.
In fact 5 million displaced persons is almost the entire population of nearby countries such as Jordan or Israel! 5 million is about the number of Jews in Israel, for instance. In absolute numbers, that is how many Iraqis are living in some other country or some other province, having lost their homes.
Some 1.4 million Iraqis are stuck in Syria, many becoming increasingly penniless. Another 500,000 to 800,000 have been displaced to Jordan, which has now closed its borders to them. Please read this excellent piece of reporting, which points out that the US has done diddly squat for these millions of people upon whom it has visited a world class catastrophe, neither allotting meaningful amounts of aid nor admitting more than a token number as immigrants. Sweden has admitted 40,000 Iraqis, nearly 4 times what the US even plans to. Please write the Senate and the Congress and demand that something be done for these, our victims.
40% of Iraq’s middle class is outside the country.
Very few of the refugees abroad have returned, only a few thousand. Only 12% of the returnees say they are going back because they think it is safe now, according to UN border polls.
The refusal of the refugees to return makes me suspicious of the good news stories about security improvements in Iraq. There is an Arabic proverb that “The people of a house know best what is in the house.”
2 Shiite brothers who returned home to Baquba an hour northeast of Baghdad were just kidnapped and killed by Sunnis.
5 million displaced Iraqis would be like 55 million displaced Americans, or the equivalent of everybody in California and New York combined
American commentators peculiarly lack a social dimension to their analyses. So if PM Nuri al-Maliki sends some troops up to Mosul and the guerrillas there lie low for a while, that is “progress” and “good news.” Well, maybe it is, I don’t know.
I do know that the apocalypse that the United States has unleashed upon Iraq is among the greatest catastrophes to befall any country in the past 50 years. It is a much worse disaster over time than the Burmese cyclone or the Mississippi floods.
You won’t see it on television very much these days.
Even if it gets better, it won’t get better very fast for all those millions wounded, widowed, orphaned, and displaced; as for the 1 million dead, as they say in Arabic, God have mercy on them (Allah yarhamhum). Maybe it will get better sooner for the politicians in the Green Zone. They are the sort of people that the think tanks in Washington seem to care about.
McClatchy reports political violence in Iraq on Saturday:
‘ Baghdad
- Around 1 p.m. a bomb planted in the car of the office manager of the Iraqi minister of Higher Education and Scientific Research exploded in Al Tobchi neighborhood injuring three including the minister’s office manager.
- Around 4 p.m. a bomb planted in a civilian car exploded in Al Nidhal Street injuring two Iraqi employees of a local LG Company branch.
- Around 5 p.m. a bomb planted in a police vehicle exploded in Al Andalus square injuring two policemen.
- Police found two dead bodies throughout Baghdad; one in Al Baladiyat, one in Mansour.
Diyala
- Police found the bodies of two brothers, Ali and Mohamed Zaid, in Al Tahrir neighborhood in Baquba . . .
Kirkuk
- Around 8 a.m. a car exploded in central Kirkuk injuring the two passengers in the car. Police said they suspect the two passengers were planning a car bomb attack. The two suspects are under investigation, police said.’
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The Real State of Iraq
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Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
Radio Free Europe | Ahead of an EU-Turkmen meeting on human rights in Ashgabat, civic activists and independent journalists in the country have been reporting widespread harassment, intimidation, and even the detention of government opponents.
On June 23, a day before the first full Human Rights Dialogue between the EU and Turkmenistan, Amnesty International issued a report saying that Turkmens are subject to “widespread and systematic” violations of human rights. Titled “Turkmenistan: No Effective Human Rights Reform,” the report states that “impunity pervades for police, security services, and other government authorities despite promises of the government of President [Gurbanguly] Berdymukhammedov to protect human rights.”
Amnesty International declard that Turkmen authorities target independent journalists, including RFE/RL correspondents, in an attempt to silence independent voices.
Another human rights group, the Vienna-based Turkmen Initiative for Human Rights (TIHR), voiced similar concerns. TIHR wrote on June 23 that “public activists, journalists, and some unwanted individuals continue to be repeatedly persecuted,” adding that “repressions have recently [been] exacerbated.”
TIHR also said that RFE/RL’s Turkmen Service correspondents based in the country are subject to persecution by law enforcement agencies. “The persecution methods used by the special services range from cutting off correspondents’ telephones to explicit threats and intimidation of the correspondents and their relatives, including children,” the group said.
Amnesty called on EU delegates to use the June 24 meeting to press Turkmen authorities to honor their international human rights obligations.
Amnesty’s EU office director, Nicolas Beger, said in a statement on June 23 that “a fundamental part of the EU-Central Asia strategy is centered on ‘Human Rights Dialogues.’ To be coherent, the participants of tomorrow’s meeting must demonstrate that human rights are an integral part of their interactions — and not a fig leaf behind which either side is free to privilege economic cooperation.”
Followed And Expelled
Turkmenistan-based correspondents and contributors to RFE/RL’s Turkmen Service, or Radio Azatlyk, say intimidation and harassment have increased in recent days.
Sazak Durdymuradov, a regular contributor to RFE/RL’s Turkmen programs, was detained and reportedly ill-treated in prison. His relatives say police detained Durdymuradov at his house in the town of Baharden, some 200 kilometers west of Ashgabat, on June 20.
He was first taken to a psychiatric clinic in the town of Bezmein near Ashgabat. But when family members went to Bezmein to visit him on June 21, they did not find him there, and did not learn of his whereabouts until today.
A relative of Durdymuradov’s told Radio Azatlyk that he was held in the Baharden detention center, where his wife visited him early on June 24. She said Durdymuradov was beaten up after he refused to make a written promise not to work for RFE/RL.
“Until today, Sazak Durdymuradov has been kept in the Baharden region’s [security service] detention center. He announced a hunger strike. His wife says Sazak was beaten. His health condition is bad,” his relative said. She added that Durdymuradov was subsequently taken to a remote psychiatric clinic in eastern Lebap Province.
Osman Hallyev, Radio Azatlyk’s correspondent in Lebap Province, says he has been under virtual house arrest since last week.
“Even though they did not officially tell me, I have been under house arrest,” Hallyev says. “My mobile phones were cut off. They have been watching my house for 24 hours from four sides. If I leave the house, they follow me. There are police officers among them. The situation is getting worse hour by hour. Even my grandchildren, who have to go to kindergarten, are afraid to go out.”
Hallyev says his son, Umyt, was expelled from university on June 20. The university administration told him several times in the past that he and his father must stop collaborating with RFE/RL.
Umyt, 23, who was studying at the Turkmen State University of World Languages in Ashgabat, was officially dismissed for failing an exam, but said that one of his professors admitted to having been pressured by the authorities.
Gurbandurdy Durdykuliev, a civic activist from the western Turkmen city of Balkanabad and a frequent guest on Radio Azatlyk, has also been targeted by Turkmen authorities.
In the June 23 report, Amnesty wrote that police had visited Durdykuliev at his home and written “recommendations” that he undergo a psychiatric check-up, and that an attempt had been made to burn down the activist’s house.
Last week, Durdykuliev’s 10-year-old son Aman was forcibly taken from a summer camp near Ashgabat, for which he had been selected because he was a top student. “A young man named Akmurat told me I did not have the proper documents and took me away,” Aman said. “He also said that KGB agents did not want me to stay there. He then paid a taxi driver to drive me home.”
Durdykuliev sees the incident as part of the authorities’ attempt to intimidate and silence him. “The Turkmen authorities have turned a 10-year-old boy into their enemy,” he says.
RFE/RL’s Turkmen Service correspondent Rozynazar Khudaiberdiev contributed to this report
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Activists, Journalists Harassed Ahead Of EU Meeting
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