Pro-life Politicians Armed with New Pro-Woman Facts and Arguments

A recent nationally representative opinion poll (+/- 4 percentage points) has found that 86 percent of American adults believe significant emotional problems after an abortion are common or very common. Only 16 percent of those polled believed that abortion generally makes women's lives better. About half stated that it is common or very common for women to feel pressured into unwanted abortions.
The poll was commissioned by the Elliot Institute, which specializes in medical research and public education regarding abortion's impact on women. Results from the poll are included in the Political Resource Kit that the Elliot Institute has developed to help candidates and elected officials to address this emerging political issue.

According to the poll data, gender had nearly as much effect on beliefs as did political views about abortion. Overall, men were significantly more likely than women to believe abortion made women's lives better. The gender gap was most pronounced among pro-choice respondents, with pro-choice men 43 percent more likely than pro-choice women to believe that abortion makes women's lives better.

Overall, approximately 80 percent of respondents stated that research on post-abortion complications should be a moderate to high priority. Three out of four believed that efforts to provide alternatives to abortion and support for those who suffer post-abortion problems should be a political priority.

"Politicians who ignore the issue of post-abortion complications are ignoring an important concern of the American people, especially of the 30 million women who have had abortions," said David Reardon, Ph.D., the director of the Elliot Institute.

Reardon cited poll results showing that 52 percent of respondents said they would be more likely to vote for a political candidate who calls for government support for post-abortion grief counseling programs. This position was especially attractive to pro-choice women, with 63 percent reporting that they would be more likely to vote for such a candidate, compared to only 46 percent of pro-choice men. Only 26 percent overall said they would be less likely to support such a candidate.

The poll also revealed relatively high awareness of the problem of coerced abortions. Even though the problem of women being pressured into unwanted abortions has not received significant media coverage, 80 percent of those polled believed coerced abortions are not uncommon, with nearly one in five stating that the problem was "very common."

The Elliot Institute's newly released Political Resource Kit provides extensive background material on the problem of coerced abortions, and the related problem of violence and homicide perpetrated against women who resist unwanted abortions.

The Elliot Institute is urging public leaders, political candidates, and grassroots activists to download the kit free of charge from their special reports vault at www.afterabortion.info/reports.

The Political Resource Kit Includes:

New National Poll Results
A Simple, Irrefutable Answer to the Hard Cases
Petition for Legislative Hearings, Signed by Women Who Became Pregnant from Sexual Assault
Reversing the Gender Gap: Touch the Hearts, Earn the Trust, Win the Votes of 30 Million Post-Abortive Women -- a comprehensive candidates' guide, published in pocket guide format
Important Facts About Unwanted Abortions
Special Report on Coerced Abortion in America
Updated Summary of Recent Post-Abortion Research
Strategic Rationale for "Poor-Choice Candidate" Positioning
Talking Points -- to connect with millions of voters directly impacted by abortion
"These materials will help candidates win strong support from millions of voters often overlooked by both sides of the abortion issue," said Reardon. "Americans know that abortion hurts women and that coerced abortions are far too common. The vast majority want political leaders who will help women to avoid abortions if possible and to help those who are suffering from past abortions to receive compassionate care."
Reardon is also urging concerned citizens to copy and distribute the fact sheets and other materials contained in the kit to their political representatives and candidates. "Most politicians, on both sides of the abortion debate, are still stuck on the old arguments and clichés that define the abortion debate as a conflict between the rights of women and the rights of unborn children," said Reardon. "These materials will help them move on to the next level of debate, which acknowledges that many abortions involve coercion, which violates mothers' rights and generally causes more harm than good.

"Our poll shows that Americans on both sides of the debate overwhelmingly support efforts to eliminate unwanted and harmful abortions. Most know that the welfare of women and their children are intertwined; hurting one hurts both. Women deserve better options than abortion, but they won't get better options until the problem of unwanted abortions becomes a higher-profile issue among politicians. Thirty million women already know the truth. Now they're waiting for politicians to understand their real needs and problems. That's why we're distributing this free information kit."

Resource Kit Includes Poll Results,
Coerced Abortions Report, and
Solid Answers to Hard Questions

China Persecution

Most of the 100 Christians arrested July 12 in China’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region have been released by China’s police following international outcry about the arrests.

Five Christians, however, are still being held in the area and could be facing long prison sentences. Mr. Zhao Xinlan, 50; Ms. Li Cuiling, 44; Mr. Wang Chaoyi, 39; Mr. Yang Tian Lu, 39; and Ms. Gao Rui’er, 28 are still being held in the A Ke Su prefecture, near the provincial capital of Urumqi.

In another province, Anhui, a major underground church leader has been transferred to prison. Luo Bing Yin is a leader in the Ying Shang house church group which includes about five million members. He has been sent from a local detention center to the Funan Prison. VOM sources say there has not been a court hearing, and the charges against him are unknown. He has twice been imprisoned before, first in 1978 and then again in 2001. The case against him in 2001 was handled by the national public security office, as he is considered an important figure in the underground church.

“This case has become very serious,” said Todd Nettleton, director of news services for The Voice of the Martyrs. “We urge the Chinese government to publicly state its charges against this brother and hold a public hearing on his case.”

Luo’s wife, Huang Xiu Lan, and their two children, a 17-year-old daughter and an 11-year-old son, are under intense pressure from the police.

VOM sources say that Brother Luo’s business, a DVD-duplication company, was also raided by police, who confiscated computers and other equipment. These computers reportedly contained information about other underground Christians in China.

Finally, VOM sources report additional arrests in Henan Province, following the arrest of more than 100 Christians meeting for a retreat on August 6. In the days following that raid by more than 200 police and military personnel, family members of some of the arrested Christians have also been arrested. Pastor Han Quan Shui was arrested on August 6. His wife, known simply as Mana, was arrested the following day. Ru Xi Feng, the mother of a pastor who died in 2000, was also arrested on August 7. Xue Ying, the wife of arrested pastor Zheng Wan Shun was detained and interrogated by police.

In addition to those arrests, the families of six of those arrested August 6 have received formal notice of the “criminal detention” of their family members. Chinese law allows incarceration up to three years without formal charges or a trial.

“China talks about religious freedom,” said Nettleton, “but where is it? We urge the release of these Christians who simply want to worship God freely according to the dictates of their conscience.”

Letters of protest can be sent to the Chinese Embassy in Washington DC at the following address:

Ambassador Yang Jiechi
Embassy of the People’s Republic of China
2300 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington DC 20008
Tel:(202) 328-2500 Fax:(202) 588-0032
Director of Religious Affairs: (202) 328-2512

Sudan Admits Abuses, Rape By Its Allies In Darfur

The Sudanese government has acknowledged for the first time that its militia allies in Darfur have committed serious human rights abuses, including rape, and given the United Nations a list of 30 suspects, Khartoum dailies said Sunday.

The list was handed over to the UN Human Rights Commission's international observer, Emanuel Akoy, by Justice Minister Ali Mohammed Osman Yassin, the papers said.

Rape was among an array of accusations leveled against the 30, despite long-standing denials by Sudanese officials of rights watchdog Amnesty International's accusations that rape was being used systematically as a weapon in the suppression of the 18-month-old armed rebellion by ethnic minorities in Darfur.

"The government does not deny that human rights abuses occur and it will not protect those who commit them," Ali Mohammed Osman Yassin admitted on Sunday.

He called for "help from international observers and voluntary organizations" and asked them to "pass on any information they have, particularly concerning rapes," to the authorities.

Penalties against named militia commanders were among possible sanctions against Sudan canvassed by Washington at the United Nations last month before the Security Council decided to give Khartoum until Aug. 29 to take action on disarming the Janjaweed militia or face unspecified "measures."

The list is designed to placate the UN Security Council, which will consider the situation in Darfur from Aug. 30, the day after the ultimatum expires.

The Janjaweed are pro-government Arab militia, accused by the UN and humanitarian organizations of forcing black African Sudanese off their land.

UN chief envoy to Sudan, Jan Pronk, has to present a preliminary report on Darfur to the Security Council on Tuesday, Sudanese sources say.

Among those on the list of suspects are two former policemen believed to have been involved in the torching of a village and who were sacked and imprisoned in Nyala, in South Darfur State and two reservist soldiers from the Popular Defense Forces, accused of raping two women refugees.

On Friday, UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) director of Sudan operations, Jean-Marie Fakhouri, said most of the displaced people in the Masteri camp near the Chad border, who fled attacks on their own villages, were still prey to the depredations of the state-sponsored Arab militias.

In July, Amnesty International accused Khartoum of crimes against humanity and expressed concern particularly about wide-scale rape and other forms of sexual violence against women, including kidnapping, sexual slavery and torture.

The government has constantly denied this and has organized demonstrations by women, particularly in Darfur itself, to denounce these "false accusations" against Sudan.

Meanwhile, delegates began arriving in the Nigerian capital Abuja on Sunday on the eve of African Union (AU)-sponsored talks on the conflict in Darfur, AFP reporters saw.

Delegations from both of the armed groups behind Darfur's 18-month old rebellion - the Movement for Justice and Equality and the Sudan Liberation Movement - met each other in the lobby of a luxury hotel in the city.

Sudanese embassy diplomats at another nearby hotel said they were expecting a team from their government to arrive "in the coming hours." Khartoum's delegation is to be led by Agriculture Minister Majzoub al-Khalifa.

Libya's Foreign Minister Abdelrahman Shalgam flew into the city, according to airport sources, an arrival which apparently confirmed reports from officials that Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi would not himself be coming.

The Arab League's Secretary General Amr Mussa had earlier left Cairo bound for the talks.

The one-day talks, dubbed the "Inter-Sudanese Peace Talks on the Darfur Crisis" in AU conference literature, are to be hosted by Nigeria's President Olusegun Obasanjo, the current chairman of the African Union.

Compiled by Daily Star staff

Soccer: We're No Symbol of Freedom, Iraq Coach Says

Iraq's Olympic soccer coach said Monday his side should not be seen as a symbol of freedom, taking issue with a campaign commercial for President Bush.

The flags of Iraq and Afghanistan appear in a commercial as part of Bush's drive for re-election in November. A narrator says: "At this Olympics there will be two more free nations -- and two fewer terrorist regimes."

But coach Adnan Hamad said Iraq, still plagued by violence daily, remained a country under occupation.

"You cannot speak about a team that represents freedom. We do not have freedom in Iraq, we have an occupying force. This is one of our most miserable times," he said.

"Freedom is just a word for the media. We are living in hard times, under occupation."

The Iraqi men's soccer side has been one of the surprises of the Olympics, reaching the semifinals of the competition. They play Paraguay Tuesday for a place in the final.

But their success has been overshadowed in the past few days by rows over the commercial for Bush, who went to war and ousted Iraq's Saddam Hussein last year.

Although Washington has officially handed power to an Iraqi interim government, more than 130,000 American soldiers remain in the country, battling with insurgents from various factions. Western officials also hold key positions behind the scenes.

"We want to give our people a cause to celebrate, to forget their problems," Hamad told reporters in the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki, the venue for Tuesday's match.

After Sports Illustrated magazine quoted Iraqi team members expressing outrage at the Bush ad, a British adviser to the Iraqi Olympic committee accused journalists of taking advantage of players' naivete and said sport should not be politicized.

But Hamad said: "One cannot separate politics and sport because of the situation in the country right now."

He said the violence which continues to afflict Iraq, more than a year after Bush declared major combat there was over, meant the team could not fully enjoy its success.

"To be honest with you, even our happiness at winning is not happiness because we are worried about the problems in Iraq, all the daily problems that our people face back home, so to tell you the truth, we are not really happy," he said.

The International Olympic Committee said it had not been in touch with the Bush campaign about its use of the Games in the commercial. National Olympic committees own the rights to the Olympic name and symbols in their countries, a spokeswoman said.

Ellie Tzortzi
Reuters
Monday 23 August 2004

Iran: The Babble and the Bomb

Western experts have made an art of frightening and wrong predictions about some major issues involving the Muslim and Arab world. The uninitiated should spend some time reading reckless analyses related to the Arab "petro-power" of the 1970s. According to some of those analyses, Arabs should have owned major chunks of the US and European productive sectors merely through purchases, or by investing the billions of dollars they made in that decade though the exercise of oil power. One wonders why Arabs don't own those assets.

Yet the same types of wrong-headed scenarios are being offered about a "nuclear" Iran, if it develops nuclear weapons. Let's be clear about one issue. Neither Iran nor North Korea should develop nuclear weapons. We already have too many nuclear powers on this small planet of ours, armed with enough nuclear weapons to blow it up many times over. But what if Iran does develop nuclear weapons? A number of facts and fictions about this issue should be well understood.

The first fact is that Iran does not yet have nuclear weapons. Second, it aspires to develop such weapons, if not now, then certainly in the foreseeable future - say, within 10 years. Third, Iran is genuinely afraid of a militaristic United States whose military forces are lurking beyond Iran's eastern border in Afghanistan and its western borders in Iraq, and, like North Korea, considers its own nuclear weapons as a source of deterrence to potential US military action against the regime.

The US under President George W Bush and his neo-conservative policymakers has every intention of unsheathing the regime-change strategy if he is re-elected in November. The neo-cons' aspirations of global hegemony have encountered a rude awakening in Iraq. However, those ambitions are neither abandoned, nor are they dead. They are undergoing a process of regrouping and rethinking about the future modalities of America's global dominance, but especially in the Middle East, in the event that Bush gets a second term.

Under a re-elected Bush, Iran has most to fear about America's potential exercise of regime change, for a variety of reasons. First, there continues to be bad blood between Iran and the US related to the hostage crisis of the late 1970s. Second, after the dismantlement of Saddam Hussein's regime, Iran has emerged as a major country that is confronting US hegemony in its immediate neighborhood, and is willing to take on the lone superpower rhetorically. Third, Iran continues to exercise considerable influence in Iraq. As such, it challenges America's dream of establishing its permanent presence in a subservient Iraq by ensuring the creation of a diffident regime.

Implanting Western-style democracy in Iraq and in the Middle East is the 21st-century version of the white man's burden of the lone superpower. But Iran remains a force - more symbolically than militarily - against America's desire to impose democratic liberalism on the Muslim Middle East, for Iran's rulers have their own vision for their country and for post-Saddam Iraq: that of continuing with the Islamic republic and preparing ground to ensure that some form of Islamic government is established in Iraq through elections. Because of these intricate reasons for conflict with the United States, there is no wonder fears related to regime survival drive Iran to seek a nuclear-weapons option. And that very same reason serves as just another wrinkle in the continuing - or even escalating - wrangling between Iran and the US.

The chief fiction related to Iran's potential development of nuclear weapons is the frequent suggestion that Egypt and Saudi Arabia would also consider developing nuclear weapons. The fact of the matter is that Egypt has no security-related reasons to develop nuclear weapons - even though Israel is a nuclear power, it is at peace with Egypt. It is true that Egypt is not at all happy that Israel not only has nuclear weapons but is also busy developing its naval-based nuclear power, while the US is creating such a fuss about the potential nuclear weapons development by Iran and North Korea. Ideally, Egypt would like to develop nuclear weapons if for no other reasons than just to gain strategic parity with Israel. However, if Egypt were seriously to consider developing nuclear weapons, the US$1.5 billion per year in US assistance to that country would be discontinued instantly. Given its acute economic-development-related problems, Egypt can least afford a potential loss of such substantial assistance.

Similarly, Saudi Arabia has no security-related reasons to develop nuclear weapons, even if Iran acquires them. Iran poses no threat to Saudi Arabia, especially considering the significance of the oil kingdom for the economies of Europe and Japan. No Iranian leader in his right mind would consider a harebrained scheme of even fomenting trouble inside Saudi Arabia, much less threatening the regime. Iran has little reason to contemplate the alternative to the current Saudi monarchy: Wahhabi extremists who don't even regard Shi'ites as Muslims. So, regardless of their mutual differences, Saudi Arabia and Iran are likely to get along even if Iran develops nuclear weapons.

Besides, developing nuclear weapons is not a realistic option for Saudi Arabia, even if no stringent global nuclear-proliferation regimes were in place. Development of nuclear weapons requires an enormous amount of indigenous technical knowledge, and elaborate supporting infrastructure, which Saudi Arabia is not only sorely lacking, but which would take decades to develop under the best circumstances. No country has, nor can any country hire, expatriate technocrats who can be counted on to make it a nuclear power.

Another suggestion floating in the US press is that Saudi Arabia has financed Pakistani nuclear weapons with some sort of secret understanding that it would be transferred, or at least shared, between the two countries. Needless to say, authors of this speculation are persons of the same background who invented the story that Saddam not only had nuclear weapons, but he was capable of launching them toward Britain within the span of 45 minutes. Considering the United States' earnest endeavors to forestall all global attempts related to nuclear proliferation, Pakistan would be wishing death for its own nuclear program by even contemplating a crazy scheme like transferring or sharing its nuclear weapons with Saudi Arabia.

As the US waits for the International Atomic Energy Agency and the European Union Three (France, Germany and the United Kingdom) to persuade Iran to abandon all aspirations of developing nuclear weapons, it is also becoming fairly certain that Iran has already made a decision to materialize that option. We are currently given two predictions about the date by which Iran would develop nuclear weapons. The Central Intelligence Agency estimates it to be by 2010, while Israel says 2007. Bush is likely to give the international actors time to persuade Iran to come clean regarding its nuclear program until November of this year. If he is re-elected, look for a possible preemptive US unilateral attack or a combined US-Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear facilities by late this year, or early next year.

Ehsan Ahrari, PhD, is an Alexandria, Virginia, US-based independent strategic analyst.

(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)

China's View of US 'lily pad' Strategy

US President George W Bush's August 16 troop-realignment speech - officially described as Global Posture Review - is read with great interest in the People's Republic of China. Unofficially billed as a "lily pad" bases strategy, it is aimed at creating a network of smaller bases closer to potential hot spots of the globe. Those bases will be used to perform offensive military operations worldwide, taking the fight to the enemy. Even though it is not focused on China, however, given that it describes a long overdue post-September 11, 2001, strategy of the United States' global force alignment, Beijing knows that it will affect its own strategic interests, not only as a rising power, but also as a wanna-be superpower.

In the contemporary strategic environment, no country in its right mind is willing to take on US troops on the basis of a force-on-force war-fighting strategy. At the same time, the greatest challenge to the lone superpower comes from terrorist groups that are constantly probing the world, seeking to destabilize the regional balance of power, and knowing full well that the global sheriff would be there to respond. By overextending its global presence, the transnational terrorists hope to make the United States vulnerable to their attacks. From Washington's vantage point, the agility and flexibility of those terrorist groups must be matched by developing similar characteristics in America's fighting forces to meet that challenge. Thus the Bush administration, after systematically examining the altered international strategic realities during the past three years, has formally released its Global Posture Review.

The US intends to realign its forces in order to make them "more agile and more flexible". About 60,000-70,000 uniformed personnel, and 100,000 civilian family members and civilian employees will move from overseas bases to the United States over the next decade. Two army divisions will leave Germany and return home. In addition, 37,000 troops currently deployed in South Korea, will also depart from their bases. Further negotiations with Turkey and Japan about potential troop redeployment are continuing. In all probability, the US force presence in Turkey might be somewhat reduced because of that country's refusal to station the US forces or allow them passage to northern Iraq during the invasion of Iraq. The greatest lesson for the Pentagon for such future contingencies is to have highly tenable backup plans. However, as a major Muslim ally, Turkey still figures prominently in America's global "war on terrorism". Thus it is politically not feasible to exclude Turkey from the future global posture. Regarding the US force presence in Japan, some troops might move, but with a clear understanding that Japan would increase its military activities with the US forces, primarily in the realm of regional naval activities, such as those in the Malacca Strait and in other joint naval exercises in the coming years.

Since Central Asia, South Asia and the Middle East are regions where transnational terrorist groups are exceedingly active now, and are expected to have even a stronger presence in the coming years, the Bush administration intends to make its enhanced force presence last at least 10 years.

China's interpretation of America's lily-pad global force presence strategy is variegated, and is based on a high degree of realism. In a recent article in the People's Daily, it calculates that the Bush administration attaches less significance to "old Europe" - for its refusal to unquestionably toe the US line before its invasion of Iraq - than the "new Europe". The latter region became important in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's (NATO's) "eastward march", even though the United States is purposely being tacit about that aspect of its global strategy, which is still aimed at containing Russia. In the Chinese calculation, containment remains as a major aspect of America's Global Posture Review involving their homeland. Thus this strategy is being studied with great care in Beijing with a view to developing timely countermeasures.

In Central Asia, Beijing's countermeasures will be highly intricate, nuanced and dynamic for a variety of reasons:


First, leaders in Beijing have no doubt that radical Islamists of Central Asia - a region that they regard as comprising Pakistan in the western extreme, Afghanistan, Central Asia, and China's own Xinjiang autonomous region - continue to be the most potent enemies of China and the United States.

Second, Beijing's leaders know that they cannot envisage America's presence in Central Asia in a purely black-and-white fashion, ie, regard it as purely good or bad. From Beijing's point of view, it might best be described as containing elements of both good and bad. It is good in the sense that the US is definitely deterring the Islamist proactivism by prolonging its force presence in a number of Central Asian countries, viz, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Kyrgyzstan. However, that force presence also has a potential of turning "bad" if the United States uses it in the long run to establish its hegemony in the area, a potential development that threatens China's own aspirations.

Third, the US presence in Central Asia is still promising because it also complements China's own proactivism and presence in that area within the framework of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

Fourth, the US presence in Central Asia is dynamic in the sense that China, Russia, and the United States may still negotiate avenues of cooperation in the coming years and reduce the destabilizing aspects of Islamist groups.

Fifth, finally and most important of all, America's force presence in Central Asia, as China envisages it, should be constantly watched with a view to altering its own strategy in that area.

America's presence in Central Asia is a source of some comfort, but at the same time a reason for anxiety, for China. The comforting aspect involves containing, or even curtailing, the influence of Islamist forces, especially in Afghanistan and the Afghan-Pakistan border area, where the top al-Qaeda leadership is hiding but still hopes to widen the scope of its destabilizing activities in the contiguous areas in the future. But China is worried by the continued inability of the government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai to extend its authority in his country, and especially in areas contiguous to Tajikistan.

At the same time, the growing US-Pakistan nexus is being watched in Beijing with a considerable amount of suspicion. As a junior partner of the Sino-Pakistan nexus, Pakistan looms large in the calculations of China's mandarins who are in charge of their country's maneuvering vis-a-vis India, another rising power in its immediate neighborhood. So China does not want to see Pakistan becoming too significant an actor in America's regional strategy, for it may not remain as useful to China's own power game with India.

Even though the US-India strategic partnership is not related to America's lily-pad global strategy, Beijing has viewed with great suspicion its sustained evolution. The US-India strategic partnership has not only outlived the transition from the Democratic administration of former president Bill Clinton to the Republican Bush administration, but also it has been expanding its scope, even in the post-September 11environment. China has no doubt that this partnership has swung the pendulum of advantage in favor of India. However, the transition in India from the former Bharatiya Janata Party-led government to a government led by the Congress party might turn out to be somewhat deleterious for the continuing evolution of that strategic partnership, or so China's leaders probably hope. With the return of Congress to power, India is manifesting some old foreign policy predilections of the Jawaharlal Nehru era, outdated nostalgia for the moribund Nonalignment Movement, or the return of the Cold War-era insistence on India's independent foreign policy. There is no suggestion that the US-India strategic partnership would undergo any amount of unraveling or lose its insignificance. However, any amount of setback would be a matter of great satisfaction to China. Now Beijing would be carefully studying any future linkages between the new lily-pad bases strategy and the US-India strategic partnership.

The Middle East, on the contrary, figures heavily in the Bush administration's Global Posture Review. It has not been an area where China had a major strategic presence. However, that is about to change in the coming years. China's growing energy dependence compels it to ensure access to Middle Eastern oil (and oil from the Caspian Sea) by concluding a number of bilateral and multilateral agreements. The Middle Eastern arms markets were lucrative sources of hard currency for China during the Iran-Iraq War. As long as the Western arms remain hostage to the frequently unpredictable political climate in Washington, Berlin and London, China (along with Russia) will be a beneficiary, largely because of its willingness - or even eagerness - to sell arms to Middle Eastern countries.

After the toppling of Saddam Hussein, and in the prevalence of escalating anti-Americanism in the Middle East, China is hoping to emerge as a major seller of arms, and, consequently, a significant strategic actor in the area. In this sense, regardless of whatever significance Washington attaches to the Middle East from the perspectives of its new Global Posture Review, China enviages it as a promising area for its own aspirations to minimize America's presence and influence, albeit by taking a circuitous route.

In the final analysis, Global Posture Review is not envisaged by China as really giving the lone superpower an inordinate advantage over China's own global and regional ambitions. Beijing knows that it carries no political baggage in the Middle East compared to the hostilities that the United States is currently facing. It can cash in on that comparative advantage and it still hopes to move ahead in South Asia and East Asia, where the United States has a noticeable advantage for now.

Ancient civilizations have a powerful sense of history and an attendant uncanny sagacity to study their competitor's advantage, and then arrive at a conclusion that their own disadvantages are only transitory. That dialectical process enables them to assiduously strive to transform the strategic environment to their benefit, no matter the odds. Thus, China will continue its regional and global maneuvers to take a few steps backward and readjust in order to make further advances, America's new and dynamic Global Posture Review notwithstanding.

Ehsan Ahrari, PhD, is an Alexandria, Virginia, US-based independent strategic analyst.

(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)

Martyrdom or Victory for Muqtada

As another inevitable result of the "smoke them out" diplomacy of the Bush administration and Iraqi Premier Riyadh Malawi, untold damage is being done in the Muslim world: US Apache helicopters and AC-130 gunships bombing the vast holy grounds of the Wadi al-Salam cemetery, while the main shopping street leading to the Imam Ali Shrine - as well as most of Najaf's old city - lies in ruins. And in an overlapping graphic display, US forces now also occupy much of the 2-million-strong Sadr City, the vast Shi'ite slum in Baghdad.

The Iyad Allawi government has warned Muqtada al-Sadr, who heads the resistance in Najaf, at least three times: surrender, or else. Muqtada's answer, faithful to centuries of Shi'ite martyrdom, cannot be anything but "martyrdom or victory". Muqtada's spokesman in Najaf, Shaikh Ahmad al-Shaibani, still insists he wants a peace agreement - "not an ultimatum". But "peace" is something the former US Central Intelligence Agency asset Allawi simply cannot deliver, because its precondition, for Muqtada, is the US Army leaving Najaf.

Muqtada knows that the longevity of the standoff (the most recent one began on August 5) is directly proportional to his enhanced status as a resistance icon, and Allawi's loss of face. And if the Imam Ali Shrine is stormed, as his Baghdad spokesman Abdel Hadi al-Darraji puts it, there will be "a revolution all over Iraq".

Fighting continued on Monday around the shrine, with militia loyal to Muqtada in control of the mosque. US tanks pulled back slightly from positions they held on Sunday as close as 800 meters from the compound of the shrine, but earlier promises by Muqtada to vacate the shrine appear, once again, to be ringing false.

Muqtada's agenda has been spelled out in fine detail for 16 months now: one just has to grab a batch of video compact discs of his sermons, selling for US$1 apiece in Baghdad and the Shi'ite south. While Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani had chosen to "collaborate" - as Muqtada calls it - with the occupiers and their now-defunct Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), Muqtada, already in the autumn of 2003, was actively engaged in sabotaging the dream of the neo-conservatives: the fire sale of Iraqi assets enshrined in the interim constitution to be adopted by the transitional - Allawi's - government.

Former US proconsul L Paul Bremer - who thought he could take Muqtada out with military muscle, and failed - had let down disfranchised Shi'ite Iraqi masses in the first place. Muqtada, on the other hand, not only dressed them in black, gave them cranky Kalashnikovs and a place in his swelling Mehdi Army: he gave them a role as participants in a sort of shadow rebuilding of Iraq - the real thing, not US-inspired rhetoric coupled with disappearing funds. From Baghdad to Basra, Sadr centers were and still are heavily involved in setting up emergency generators, collecting garbage, fixing power and phone lines and directing traffic, making everyday life for Iraqis less miserable.

Chalmers Johnson, the author of Blowback and The Sorrows of Empire, would qualify the whole process as - what else - blowback: if Bremer and the CPA had not been so obsessed in transforming Iraq into a paradise for corporate looting and had provided security, job opportunities and functioning services to most Iraqis, Muqtada and his Mehdi Army would not even qualify as an historic footnote.

Muqtada's Iraq
What Muqtada wants Bremer could not possibly deliver, and much less Allawi. Muqtada refuses any "collaboration" with Allawi's government, which is regarded by himself and many Iraqis as a US-appointed puppet regime. The class-struggle angle is also inescapable: rich, exiled, businessman with dodgy espionage links (Allawi) calls a foreign-occupier army to smash a disfranchised urban proletariat (the Mehdi Army) offered a social role by a charismatic cleric.

Unlike Sistani and the Shi'ite political parties, Muqtada insists the precondition for any serious political process is the end of the occupation - and that's the main reason for his popularity. Muqtada would only admit foreign troops in Iraq if they were controlled by the United Nations.

What is the shape of a future Iraq in Muqtada's mind? Muqtada is above all an Iraqi nationalist - another reason for his popularity, even among Sunni Muslims. He wants no federalism, but a strong central government with a strong military (but with no Ba'athist officers: that's a tough call). This would be an Iraq ruled by a Shi'ite majority, but independent from Iran, and with none of its shades of Islamic revolution. Well, not that many, because Muqtada is in favor of velayat-e-faqih, or the predominance of theological power over secular power. So Iraq's democracy a la Muqtada would be relatively similar to Iran's, with an Iraqi equivalent of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ruling over an equivalent of an elected President Mohammad Khatami and a parliament also elected by universal suffrage.

Allawi simply cannot swallow any of this because his brief - as a US-appointed prime minister without a parliament - is to implement what Bremer could not, and Muqtada is in the way. The administration of US President George W Bush badly needs sprawling military bases in Iraq and a model corporate heaven in the Middle East. Bush is even usurping the amazing progress of the Iraqi soccer team in the Athens Olympics for his campaign-trail speeches - they are into the semifinals. But not even a miracle - an Iraqi soccer Olympic medal - would likely prevent what could go down in history as the 2004 Najaf tragedy.

Pepe Escobar

(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)

Rumsfeld's Kangaroo Court

You have to hand it to Bush and company. They don't mind thumbing their collective noses at the U.S. Supreme Court. In order to try and convince a federal judge in the District of Columbia that the Guantanamo prisoners do not need federal courts and habeas corpus petitions (in spite of the Supreme Court's ruling to that effect in June 2004), the Defense Department has begun "reviews" of the status of the "enemy combatants" it has held in cages in Cuba for going on three years.

Not surprisingly, the kangaroo court, consisting of military brass and JAG officers facing off against the prisoners, sans attorneys (they had military "helpers" who supposedly guided them through the sham proceedings), concluded that the men were indeed rightfully held. And there they will remain. The military provided interpreters. Judge, jury, bailiff, attorney, and your own "helper" are picked by your jailer. Some justice.

The Pentagon and the Justice Department have filed briefs with the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia, to which the Supreme Court remanded the cases of the winning litigants, arguing that the Supreme Court was dead wrong to declare that the prisoners were to have lawyers and access to the federal courts. Their filings made it clear that they would do everything in their power to see that no prisoner has access to an attorney. They propose Kafka-esqe rules that attorneys would be foolish to agree to--including having all of their communications with the prisoners not only recorded, but sent to the military and DOJ lawyers.

The government's flaunting of the Court's order could lead to a constitutional crisis--if a federal judge would find Rumsfeld and Ashcroft in contempt. That is not likely to happen.

Here is about all you are going to hear about the proceedings--a report from the Associated Press, without a byline. The Pentagon allowed a few "journalists" to sit in on some of the hearings of the nameless and hapless prisoners, on the ground that it review (and presumably "correct") the reports before they were printed.

Have I been dreaming through the last half of the 20th century? Did I just wake up to read about hearings in the Soviet Union or China? Sure seems like it.

Associated Press
Saturday, August 14, 2004; Page A09

A military review of the cases against four terrorism suspects held at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has concluded that they are classified properly as enemy combatants and will not be freed, the official overseeing the process said yesterday.

The four cases were the first of 21 reviewed to be decided. There is no appeal. Four additional cases were being heard yesterday at Guantanamo Bay, raising the total to 25. Their outcomes were not expected to be revealed immediately.

The Pentagon has insisted since it began holding individuals captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the war on terrorism nearly three years ago that they are enemy combatants, not prisoners of war, and can be held indefinitely without charges or access to lawyers.

Human rights organizations have challenged the Pentagon on this, and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld announced this year that the cases of each person held at Guantanamo Bay will be reviewed once a year to determine whether they are security threats to the United States.

When the Supreme Court ruled June 28 that the detainees had the right to challenge their imprisonment in federal court, the Pentagon quickly organized the separate review process to determine whether each detainee is an enemy combatant as defined by the Pentagon.

Navy Secretary Gordon R. England, who oversees the reviews but has no say in the outcome of individual cases, said an enemy combatant is "anyone who is part of supporting the Taliban or al Qaeda forces or associated forces engaging in hostilities against the United States or our coalition partners." The detainees are not represented by lawyers.

The reviews began July 30. In a change of policy yesterday, the Pentagon stopped releasing detainees' nationalities when their cases are heard. Nationalities, but not names, of the first 21 were released at their hearings, including five Thursday.

Lt. Cmdr. Beci Brenton, a spokeswoman for the review process, said the decision to stop providing nationalities was made after some countries objected to the release of that information.

Barring an unforeseen delay, all 585 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay will have their cases heard before the end of the year, England said. He said the hearings are taking longer than originally expected, mainly because of language barriers, but additional translators are being hired.

ELAINE CASSEL ON CIVIL LIBERTIES

The Warlords of America

On 6 May last, the US House of Representatives passed a resolution which, in effect, authorised a "pre-emptive" attack on Iran. The vote was 376-3. Undeterred by the accelerating disaster in Iraq, Republicans and Democrats, wrote one commentator, "once again joined hands to assert the responsibilities of American power."
The joining of hands across America's illusory political divide has a long history. The native Americans were slaughtered, the Philippines laid to waste and Cuba and much of Latin America brought to heel with "bipartisan" backing. Wading through the blood, a new breed of popular historian, the journalist in the pay of rich newspaper owners, spun the heroic myths of a supersect called Americanism, which advertising and public relations in the 20th century formalised as an ideology, embracing both conservatism and liberalism.

In the modern era, most of America's wars have been launched by liberal Democratic presidents – Harry Truman in Korea, John F Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson in Vietnam, Jimmy Carter in Afghanistan. The fictitious "missile gap" was invented by Kennedy's liberal New Frontiersmen as a rationale for keeping the cold war going. In 1964, a Democrat-dominated Congress gave President Johnson authority to attack Vietnam, a defenceless peasant nation offering no threat to the United States. Like the non-existent WMDs in Iraq, the justification was a non-existent "incident" in which, it was said, two North Vietnamese patrol boats had attacked an American warship. More than three million deaths and the ruin of a once bountiful land followed.

During the past 60 years, only once has Congress voted to limit the president's "right" to terrorise other countries. This aberration, the Clark Amendment 1975, a product of the great anti-Vietnam war movement, was repealed in 1985 by Ronald Reagan.

During Reagan's assaults on central America in the 1980s, liberal voices such as Tom Wicker of the New York Times, doyen of the "doves," seriously debated whether or not tiny, impoverished Nicaragua was a threat to the United States. These days, terrorism having replaced the red menace, another fake debate is under way. This is lesser evilism. Although few liberal-minded voters seem to have illusions about John Kerry, their need to get rid of the "rogue" Bush administration is all-consuming. Representing them in Britain, the Guardian says that the coming presidential election is "exceptional." "Mr Kerry's flaws and limitations are evident," says the paper, "but they are put in the shade by the neoconservative agenda and catastrophic war-making of Mr Bush. This is an election in which almost the whole world will breathe a sigh of relief if the incumbent is defeated."

The whole world may well breathe a sigh of relief: the Bush regime is both dangerous and universally loathed; but that is not the point. We have debated lesser evilism so often on both sides of the Atlantic that it is surely time to stop gesturing at the obvious and to examine critically a system that produces the Bushes and their Democratic shadows. For those of us who marvel at our luck in reaching mature years without having been blown to bits by the warlords of Americanism, Republican and Democrat, conservative and liberal, and for the millions all over the world who now reject the American contagion in political life, the true issue is clear.

It is the continuation of a project that began more than 500 years ago. The privileges of "discovery and conquest" granted to Christopher Columbus in 1492, in a world the pope considered "his property to be disposed according to his will," have been replaced by another piracy transformed into the divine will of Americanism and sustained by technological progress, notably that of the media. "The threat to independence in the late 20th century from the new electronics," wrote Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism, "could be greater than was colonialism itself. We are beginning to learn that decolonisation was not the termination of imperial relationships but merely the extending of a geopolitical web which has been spinning since the Renaissance. The new media have the power to penetrate more deeply into a 'receiving' culture than any previous manifestation of western technology."

Every modern president has been, in large part, a media creation. Thus, the murderous Reagan is sanctified still; Rupert Murdoch's Fox Channel and the post-Hutton BBC have differed only in their forms of adulation. And Bill Clinton is regarded nostalgically by liberals as flawed but enlightened; yet Clinton's presidential years were far more violent than Bush's and his goals were the same: "the integration of countries into the global free-market community," the terms of which, noted the New York Times, "require the United States to be involved in the plumbing and wiring of nations' internal affairs more deeply than ever before." The Pentagon's "full-spectrum dominance" was not the product of the "neo-cons" but of the liberal Clinton, who approved what was then the greatest war expenditure in history. According to the Guardian, Clinton's heir, John Kerry, sends us "energising progressive calls." It is time to stop this nonsense.


Supremacy is the essence of Americanism; only the veil changes or slips. In 1976, the Democrat Jimmy Carter announced "a foreign policy that respects human rights." In secret, he backed Indonesia's genocide in East Timor and established the mujahedin in Afghanistan as a terrorist organisation designed to overthrow the Soviet Union, and from which came the Taliban and al-Qaeda. It was the liberal Carter, not Reagan, who laid the ground for George W Bush. In the past year, I have interviewed Carter's principal foreign policy overlords – Zbigniew Brzezinski, his national security adviser, and James Schlesinger, his defence secretary. No blueprint for the new imperialism is more respected than Brzezinski's. Invested with biblical authority by the Bush gang, his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives describes American priorities as the economic subjugation of the Soviet Union and the control of central Asia and the Middle East.
His analysis says that "local wars" are merely the beginning of a final conflict leading inexorably to world domination by the US. "To put it in a terminology that harkens back to a more brutal age of ancient empires," he writes, "the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together."

It may have been easy once to dismiss this as a message from the lunar right. But Brzezinski is mainstream. His devoted students include Madeleine Albright, who, as secretary of state under Clinton, described the death of half a million infants in Iraq during the US-led embargo as "a price worth paying," and John Negroponte, the mastermind of American terror in central America under Reagan who is currently "ambassador" in Baghdad. James Rubin, who was Albright's enthusiastic apologist at the State Department, is being considered as John Kerry's national security adviser. He is also a Zionist; Israel's role as a terror state is beyond discussion.

Cast an eye over the rest of the world. As Iraq has crowded the front pages, American moves into Africa have attracted little attention. Here, the Clinton and Bush policies are seamless. In the 1990s, Clinton's African Growth and Opportunity Act launched a new scramble for Africa. Humanitarian bombers wonder why Bush and Blair have not attacked Sudan and "liberated" Darfur, or intervened in Zimbabwe or the Congo. The answer is that they have no interest in human distress and human rights, and are busy securing the same riches that led to the European scramble in the late 19th century by the traditional means of coercion and bribery, known as multilateralism.

The Congo and Zambia possess 50 per cent of world cobalt reserves; 98 per cent of the world's chrome reserves are in Zimbabwe and South Africa. More importantly, there is oil and natural gas in Africa from Nigeria to Angola, and in Higleig, south-west Sudan. Under Clinton, the African Crisis Response Initiative (Acri) was set up in secret. This has allowed the US to establish "military assistance programmes" in Senegal, Uganda, Malawi, Ghana, Benin, Algeria, Niger, Mali and Chad. Acri is run by Colonel Nestor Pino-Marina, a Cuban exile who took part in the 1961 Bay of Pigs landing and went on to be a special forces officer in Vietnam and Laos, and who, under Reagan, helped lead the Contra invasion of Nicaragua. The pedigrees never change.

None of this is discussed in a presidential campaign in which John Kerry strains to out-Bush Bush. The multilateralism or "muscular internationalism" that Kerry offers in contrast to Bush's unilateralism is seen as hopeful by the terminally naive; in truth, it beckons even greater dangers. Having given the American elite its greatest disaster since Vietnam, writes the historian Gabriel Kolko, Bush "is much more likely to continue the destruction of the alliance system that is so crucial to American power. One does not have to believe the worse the better, but we have to consider candidly the foreign policy consequences of a renewal of Bush's mandate . . . As dangerous as it is, Bush's re-election may be a lesser evil." With Nato back in train under President Kerry, and the French and Germans compliant, American ambitions will proceed without the Napoleonic hindrances of the Bush gang.

Little of this appears even in the American papers worth reading. The Washington Post's hand-wringing apology to its readers on 14 August for not "pay[ing] enough attention to voices raising questions about the war [against Iraq]" has not interrupted its silence on the danger that the American state presents to the world. Bush's rating has risen in the polls to more than 50 per cent, a level at this stage in the campaign at which no incumbent has ever lost. The virtues of his "plain speaking," which the entire media machine promoted four years ago – Fox and the Washington Post alike – are again credited. As in the aftermath of the 11 September attacks, Americans are denied a modicum of understanding of what Norman Mailer has called "a pre-fascist climate." The fears of the rest of us are of no consequence.

The professional liberals on both sides of the Atlantic have played a major part in this. The campaign against Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 is indicative. The film is not radical and makes no outlandish claims; what it does is push past those guarding the boundaries of "respectable" dissent. That is why the public applauds it. It breaks the collusive codes of journalism, which it shames. It allows people to begin to deconstruct the nightly propaganda that passes for news: in which "a sovereign Iraqi government pursues democracy" and those fighting in Najaf and Fallujah and Basra are always "militants" and "insurgents" or members of a "private army," never nationalists defending their homeland and whose resistance has probably forestalled attacks on Iran, Syria or North Korea.

The real debate is neither Bush nor Kerry, but the system they exemplify; it is the decline of true democracy and the rise of the American "national security state" in Britain and other countries claiming to be democracies, in which people are sent to prison and the key thrown away and whose leaders commit capital crimes in faraway places, unhindered, and then, like the ruthless Blair, invite the thug they install to address the Labour Party conference. The real debate is the subjugation of national economies to a system which divides humanity as never before and sustains the deaths, every day, of 24,000 hungry people. The real debate is the subversion of political language and of debate itself and perhaps, in the end, our self-respect.




August 21, 2004

John Pilger was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been a war correspondent, filmmaker and playwright. Based in London, he has written from many countries and has twice won British journalism's highest award, that of "Journalist of the Year," for his work in Vietnam and Cambodia. This article was first published in the New Statesman.

© John Pilger 2004

Thank Government for the Mess We’re in

The first presidential election in the post–9/11 era has people thinking hitherto unthinkable thoughts: Should the election be postponed if a terrorist attack occurs before election day? What if there is an attack on election day? What happens if an attack takes the lives of the winner of the election and his running mate before inauguration day? It has even been asked if these matters should be discussed publicly.

Advocates of thoroughgoing individual liberty are entitled to say “I told you so” on at least two counts.

First, they long warned that U.S. government intervention in the world’s trouble spots is like batting a hornet’s nest. It can only bring trouble. The Middle East is the most troubled of trouble spots, and the U.S. government has been batting it in various ways at least since World War II. No wonder the region has been a constant source of stress, a sinkhole for the taxpayers’ dollars, and the breeding ground for people who want to kill Americans. Those who wish to avoid a reassessment of American intervention insist that the jihadists hate our way of life, not U.S. foreign policy, and therefore would be attacking us anyway. But all the evidence goes the other way. Every time the jihadist leaders explain their cause, they talk about U.S. policy, not American civilization. I don’t know why they would lie about their motives. Even some CIA personnel acknowledge this, for example, the anonymous author of the recent book Imperial Hubris. As this author told NBC News, “It’s not a hatred of us as a society; it’s a hatred of our policies.”

The insistence by the Bush administration and its supporters that U.S. policy has nothing to do with the terrorist threat is a little too fevered to be credible. Those who see in anti-Americanism a reaction to U.S. policy are maligned as excusing violence by trying to understand its perpetrators. But a moment’s thought discloses that excusing and understanding are vastly different activities. Moreover, proponents of the Bush interpretation can’t really be against trying to understand the terrorists, because these proponents themselves claim to understand them. So this is really a debate between competing interpretations. They are welcome to offer their theory of the terrorists’ true motivation, but a little evidence would be nice.

The second ground for “I told you so” is that libertarian critics of U.S. foreign policy are advocates of decentralization. By definition, decentralization makes a society harder to disrupt. One of the strongest arguments for a truly free market is that it produces the maximum number of decision-making centers. To those unschooled in classical-liberal social theory, this sounds like a blueprint for chaos. But those familiar with the ideas of undesigned order, spontaneous coordination, and social evolution understand that decentralized decision-making is the fountainhead of robust social order. The reason is simple: Errors will be highly localized only in a resilient decentralized setting, where entrepreneurs earn profits by anticipating problems. But when the central authority makes a mistake, everyone under its jurisdiction suffers. The more highly centralized the system, the greater the suffering.

A similar thing may be said about overt attacks on a society. The more highly centralized the governing authority, the easier it is to disrupt the society by disabling that authority. There is simply no way for a bureaucracy to know all that the entire society knows. This is as true for security issues as it is for the production of steel or wheat. “Society” is smarter than any legislature or bureau.

The upshot is that decades of the centralization of power in Washington have left the American people terribly vulnerable to the same violent people the government has systematically provoked by its intervention. So what are we urged to do? We’re urged to seek protection from the identical ignorant centralized bureaucracy that put us in this mess in the first place. There’s got to be a better way.

Sheldon Richman is senior fellow at The Future of Freedom Foundation, author of Tethered Citizens: Time to Repeal the Welfare State, and editor of The Freeman magazine. Send him email.

500 Tragic Years of Mayan Life, Shown in an Exhibition of Outreach and Hope

Guatemala is known by most of the world for the soaring pyramids of the ancient Maya and the colorful weavings of their contemporary descendants. Folkloric images of the Maya Indians have been used to help attract tourism to a nation that was until eight years ago ravaged by a three-decade civil war. But within Guatemala, the Maya are often treated with no such respect.

Many Mayan leaders say they are disappointed with the scarce improvements in opportunities for the Maya, who make up roughly half of Guatemala's population and who most keenly suffered the war's wrath.

But now a traveling exhibition titled "Why Are We the Way We Are?," which opened in Guatemala's capital last week and will continue until June of next year, is trying to prompt a long-overdue national dialogue between the country's dominant nonindigenous population and the Maya. Created by the Guatemala-based Center for Mesoamerican Research with the collaboration of some top American museologists, the show has rallied support from business groups, media and government itself, elevating it to nothing less than a national event. At the exhibition's inauguration, Vice President Eduardo Stein of Guatemala hailed it as a "watershed in history."

"The significance of most shows comes from superlatives: the most beautiful Fabergé eggs, the only intact tyrannosaurus rex, the most Monets in one place at a time," said Jim Volkert, the associate director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, who was a consultant on the exhibition. "This show isn't that at all. Its significance is that it has the ability to affect the culture of a country, and that is rare in a museum context," he said.

Some indigenous activists say the Maya are the victims of a de facto apartheid instigated by Guatemala's non-Maya, while other Guatemalans deny that racism exists. What is certain, however, is that Guatemala is the country with the second-greatest income disparity between rich and poor in Latin America, behind only Brazil, according to the World Bank. And on which side of the divide citizens here find themselves depends largely on whether they are Indian.

United Nations statistics reveal that for every 10 Guatemalans who live in extreme poverty, seven are indigenous. Guatemala's version of a truth commission, the Historical Clarification Commission, concluded that during the country's armed conflict the vast majority of those who were killed, raped or tortured or who disappeared were Maya Indians. Some 200,000 were killed in the 36-year conflict. The commission also concluded that the military's scorched earth campaign amounted to genocide against the Mayas.

The show material is based on scholarly research on inter-ethnic relations and feedback from focus groups, and it forms part of a larger educational campaign here devoted to diversity. But for Tani Adams, the show's executive director, an exhibition format was the most logical way to promote a profound reckoning with a social ill that 500 years of history has rendered acceptable and even invisible to much of the population, indigenous and nonindigenous alike.

"Thousands of thousands of books have been written about this and are clearly not making a difference," said Ms. Adams, who is also the director of the Center for Mesoamerican Research, which created the show. "It's not like you read a book and say 'I'm never going to be racist again.' And I think a lot of training to deal with racism or ethnocentrism basically tells people, 'It's bad that you are racist, do something different.' But if you don't understand how you inherited these ideas you can't let them go. You need to go through a personal, transformative experience, a disorganizing experience, something that makes you question ideas you have always held unconsciously."

Claudio Tam Muro, an Argentine artist and designer, assumed the challenge of producing that experience in a 500-square-foot show that could be packed up on the back of a flatbed and taken to some of the most far-flung parts of the country after its six weeks in the capital. As a result, the show is almost devoid of the objects or artifacts that are the backbone of most museum shows. Rather, it relies on life-size photography (providing some visitors with their first experience of looking eye to eye with an indigenous person), graphics, video, audio, short texts and interactive tools.

Mr. Muro set out to use different sensory media to communicate the show's message. The result is a roughly hourlong zigzagging circuit divided into two sections. The bulk of the first section addresses the historical construction of discrimination. It is careful not to omit mentions of the discrimination that existed in pre-Colombian societies, before moving on to the violence of the Spanish conquest, the segregated society of the colonial years, and the crusade for assimilation during the Republican era. This section is filled with tightly spaced areas whose walls are painted in rich, dark colors. It culminates in a small black space with a low ceiling that produces for the visitor the claustrophobia that Mr. Muro says is "what discrimination feels like."

Afterward the visitor emerges into the second section, which addresses modern-day Guatemalan race relations. It explores stereotypes and their effects; the staggering statistics of how the two Guatemalans live; and it features testimonies about how many Guatemalans see their identity. In this section the spaces get progressively larger and the colors brighter, while the content becomes a more upbeat message about diversity.

"The easiest thing to create is a polemic or an exhibit of anger, but that will only work for the committed," said Elaine Heumann Gurian, former deputy director of the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, who was a consultant on the show. "This exhibit points no fingers,'' she said. "It says we are all in this together and have to solve it together."

The text in the show is spare, understated, almost simple. But the the creators hope that conversations and debates will emerge from it. For instance, Juan Luis Hernandez left the exhibition recently with ideas he said he hadn't ever considered. The Maya Indians who crouch over the earth on his father's plantation and the servant who cleans his room are the only indigenous people this 17-year-old has ever talked to. And he admits, he's never even talked much to any of them.

He said that what struck him most was a video in which an Indian woman "says that indigenous people do want to be included in society and progress, but don't feel they are allowed to."

"I had always thought Indians were poor because they didn't want to get ahead in life," Mr. Hernandez said, "but the truth is, I've never asked them what they wanted."

Catherine Elton
New York Times

Pope Condemns Unethical Science, Cloning

CASTEL GANDOLFO, Italy -- Pope John Paul II warned in a statement released Sunday that humanity's speedy progress in science and technology risks overlooking moral values, citing with particular concern experiments in human cloning.

The pontiff -- in a message written Aug. 6 but released Sunday for the start of a Church-organized meeting on the theme of progress -- insisted that advanced research must not become an end in itself.

"The results achieved in various fields of science and technology are considered and defended by many as a priori acceptable," he said. "In this way, one ends up expecting that what is technically possible is in itself also ethically good."

The pontiff continued: "There is no one who does not see the dramatic and distressing consequences of such pragmatism, which perceives truth and justice as something modeled around the work of man himself. It is sufficient, as one example among others, to consider man's attempt to appropriate the sources of life through experiments in human cloning."

John Paul cited this as an example of "the violence with which man tries to appropriate the truth and the just, reducing them to values that he can dispose of freely, that is, without recognizing limits of any kind if not those fixed and continually overcome by technological possibility."

The pope has issued condemnations of cloning in the past. At his visit a week ago to the French shrine of Lourdes, he urged that life be "respected from conception to its natural end."

Fresh debate over cloning was sparked Aug. 11 when Britain granted its first license for human cloning for stem cell research. The license went to researchers who hope eventually to create insulin-producing cells that could be transplanted into diabetics.

Many scientists believe stem cells hold vast promise for treating an array of diseases. Stem cells can potentially grow into any type of human tissue and scientists hope to be able to direct the blank cells to grow into specific cell types needed for transplant.
Copyright © 2004, The Associated Press

When the Feds Come Knocking

The FBI or local police ring your doorbell. They've come to ask a few questions, they say. Just part of a routine investigation or community outreach program.

You freak out. Perhaps you've publicly suggested that Mr. Bush's Iraqi mission was less than accomplished, or questioned which God Mr. Bush talks to, and in which tongue. Maybe you plan to attend an anti-war demonstration, just to see friends, of course. Worse, you get your news from a politically dubious website, or you've committed that most heinous crime, PWM - Protesting While Muslim. What should you do?

The question could become crucial to your well-being, and that of your like-minded friends. My personal, time-tested answer in a moment. But, first, here's what prompts my concern.

Last week, the New York Times reported that local FBI field offices have spent months canvassing their communities for potential "troublemakers." The G-men claim to have developed a list of people who might be planning - or have information about the possibility of - violent and disruptive acts at the Republican National Convention and other coming political events. The Feds - and local police with whom they work - call these lists of likely suspects "intelligence."

In Denver, four FBI agents and two local police use such lists to visit a local Quaker group that protests the war. Quakers are historically non-violent. It's part of their religious faith. So why had the six investigators taken so much time away from chasing real terrorists? Sarah Bardwell, a 21-year-old intern with the Quaker group, thought she sussed their cunning plan.

"The message I took from it," she told the Times,"was that they were trying to intimidate us into not going to any protests and to let us know that,"hey, we're watching you."?

Congressman John Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, quickly agreed. In a letter to the Justice Department's Inspector General, he and two of his colleagues charged that the FBI visits looked like 'systematic political harassment and intimidation of legitimate antiwar protestors."

"This looks like it's much more about intimidation and coercion than about criminal conduct," added Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. "It's not enough for the F.B.I. to say that there's the potential for criminal activity."

"That's not the legal threshold," he explained. If it were,"they could investigate anybody."

The G-Men and local police, it turns out, were acting as part of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, which shows us how Team Bush fights the War on Terror. Having used intelligence to drag the country into a preemptive war, they now want to preempt opposition to it. Why am I not surprised?

As a Vietnam anti-war protester and then an investigative journalist exposing undercover CIA operations against European and Third World governments, labor movements, and others who did not fit in with Washington's view of how the world should be run, I frequently saw how police and intelligence agencies gather, use, and make up intelligence. So, with all respect to my fellow civil libertarians, stifling protest and chilling free speech are only part of what the the lawmen are now doing.

The other part threatens us far more. Even before Congress seriously considers creating a domestic intelligence service, as some damned fools have suggested they do, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, FBI, and local cops are quietly building their own ad-hoc secret police. And like other politicized gumshoes throughout history, they will increasingly collect information on everyone they can, use it however they can, and put their hooks into as much of our private and political lives as we let them get away with.

For decades, F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover used carefully guarded bits of information to threaten and manipulate everyone from Presidents and Senators to Martin Luther King, Jr., Hollywood actors, left-wing activists, labor organizers, university professors, Black Panthers, and anti-war protesters.

Working with local and state "Red Squads," Hoover's Counterintelligence Programs, or COINTELPRO, used their intelligence to help provocateurs disrupt and discredit those the Director despised, creating much of the senseless violence the FBI claimed to oppose. With an unending War on Terror, the present secret police could become even more dangerous.

So, now that I've eased your fears, how should you respond when they come to call?

Simple. Just smile and refuse to let them in. Think of them as burglars coming to case your home or office, because everything they see and learn about you, your friends, and where you live and work could help an informant or provocateur know how to infiltrate your group or organize a break-in to get address books, membership records, and lists of financial contributors. An FBI provocateur I once knew and wrote about told me of a large check I had deposited years before.

If the FBI and police lack a warrant and have no reason to suspect that a crime is underway, they have absolutely no legal right to enter without your permission. Why give it? No matter how friendly they seem, you have nothing to gain by letting them in. Be polite, sure. But leave it at that.

Step outside to talk to them. Ask each of them for their identification. Take it in your hand - they hate that - and jot down all the information on it. Better yet, read the information into a small tape recorder, along with your play-by-play of what's going on. If you have a camera, ask to take their picture, or have someone else take your picture with them. Then, tell them you would love to talk to them, but only with your lawyer present. Would they care to make an appointment?

Back in the 1960s, the FBI came to visit my father at his office to warn him about all the trouble I was getting into at Berkeley. A conservative businessman, but a very protective parent, he invited them into his office, offered them coffee, and then brought in one of his partners, whom he introduced as his company lawyer. The pretense worked, and the G-Men quickly said good-bye. My father found it hilarious.

Not often, but sometimes, Poppa knows best. The Joint Terrorism Task Force, FBI, and local police intelligence units seriously threaten our freedom. But we win half the battle if, like dear old Dad, we learn to laugh as we fight back against them.



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A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he writes for t r u t h o u t.
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Guantanamo's Military Trials are Condemned as Grossly Unfair

Tomorrow for the first time since the Second World War, America will start a series of military tribunals to prosecute four of the 600 prisoners it is holding at Guantanamo Bay.

The US insists the tribunals will be fair, and are the appropriate way to deal with prisoners that President George Bush described as "killers" and his Attorney General, John Ashcroft called "uniquely dangerous".

But human rights groups and legal campaigners have condemned the hearings as unprecedentedly unfair and in contravention not just of the Geneva Conventions but a raft of other international laws.

"We're concerned that the military commission rules lack key fair-trial protections," said Wendy Patten, a director of Human Rights Watch, based in New York. "Under these rules, the military serves as prosecutor, judge, jury, appeals court and, potentially, even as executioner. The commission rules do not create a level playing field. The military commissions offer no possibility for independent appeal, no matter how serious the error. A fair system of justice provides an opportunity for trial mistakes to be corrected through independent review."

The tribunals were ordered by President Bush in November, 2001, as a way of prosecuting alleged al-Qa'ida and Taliban fighters captured during the war in Afghanistan in the aftermath of the 11 September attacks. The Bush administration said at the time that the circumstances surrounding the attacks on New York and Washington were so unique that suspects could not be tried in normal courts without serious damage to national security.

The last US tribunals were held to try eight German saboteurs, captured in New York and Chicago in 1942. Six of them were executed, one was sentenced to life and the other to 30 years. The two who were jailed were granted executive clemency in 1948 and deported.

The four Guantanamo prisoners to be tried are David Hicks, an Australian citizen, Salim Ahmed Hamdan and Ali Hamza Ahmed Sulayman al-Bahlul, who are Yemeni, and Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al-Qosi, from Sudan. Two of the four British prisoners, Feroz Abbasi and Moazzam Begg, also face military trial.

Mr Hicks, a former cattle drover who converted to Islam and fought in Kosovo, is the only Caucasian prisoner. The other three being tried are accused of serving as bodyguards for Osama bin Laden. The Australian faces charges of conspiracy to commit war crimes, attempted murder and aiding the enemy. The other three also face terrorism conspiracy charges. None faces a death sentence, US officials said.

Critics say the tribunals are heavily stacked against the men having a fair trial because of the rules regulating the hearings. Louise Christian, a solicitor who represents Mr Abbasi's family, said: "These tribunals breach every norm for a fair trial."

Defendants and their lawyers have no right to see evidence used by prosecutors, conversations between defendants and their lawyers will be monitored, there will be no jury, just a panel of military judges, and the legal standard required for a conviction is a lower than in normal civilian courts.

Defence lawyers have also been told that even if they do learn of classified information they will not be permitted to inform clients. Information obtained through torture or coercive interrogations will be permitted. The government says the rules are necessary to protect classified information and secret sources. The prisoners have had little contact with their lawyers. Mr Hicks and others selected for military tribunals are believed to have been held in solitary confinement for almost 30 months.

This has created huge difficulties for those trying to represent them. One lawyer has not seen his client in four months because of a government delay in giving clearance to a translator. Another has reportedly withdrawn because she has another job, leaving her client with no representation.

Last March, five British prisoners were released without charge from Guantanamo and freed within a day in Britain. Two others not facing trial are Martin Mubanga and Richard Belmar. Three UK residents, Bisher al-Rawi, Jamil al-Banna and Jamal Abdullah, are also held.

This month, three of the freed Britons helped compile a detailed report claiming prisoners at the Cuban prison camp suffered torture, mistreatment and sexual humiliation.

Lieutenant-Commander Susan McGarvey, a spokeswoman for the hearings, said: "I think the commissions will be viewed with great interest, and over time, people will realise how full and fair they truly are."

IN THE DOCK

David Hicks, 29, an Australian, converted to Islam and fought in Kosovo in 1999, then allegedly with the Taliban until the Northern Alliance caught him.

Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al Qosi, 44, born in Sudan, is accused of being an al-Qa'ida paymaster and supply chief.

Ali Hamza Ahmad Sulayman al Bahlul, 33, from Yemen is said to have been a bodyguard for Bin Laden.

Salim Ahmed Hamdan, also from Yemen. Age unknown. Also accused of being Bin Laden's bodyguard as well as driver.

Andrew Buncombe
23 August 2004

When the Marines Make Policy, Iraq Burns

Who's in charge?

Argument over American policy in Iraq and the Middle East presumes that there is a considered policy in Washington and that in Baghdad, people are in charge - L. Paul Bremer 3rd until recently, Ambassador John Negroponte now - who carry out Washington's policy.
.
One would think policy discipline would be particularly important now to the Bush administration. A Pew poll of American opinion, published last week, says that foreign policy has become the most important issue in the presidential election, replacing economics. Surely somebody in the White House is paying close attention to Iraq?
.
It seems not. The New York Times reported this week that two of the most sensitive recent U.S. decisions in Iraq were taken by regimental-level Marine Corps officers without consulting either Washington or senior officials, Iraqi or American, in Baghdad.
.
Outside Falluja, a city of more than half a million people and a center of Sunni nationalism, a Marine Corps force replaced army troops in April. After the several U.S. private security operatives in the city were murdered and their corpses mutilated, the Marines mounted an assault to search for and arrest the unidentified murderers.
.
The attack provoking armed uprisings against the American occupation elsewhere in Iraq. This did attract attention in Washington, and American forces were eventually ordered to make a thinly disguised handover of Falluja to some of the same people they had just been fighting. Most of Falluja has since been no-go territory for Americans.
.
In Najaf, in early August, commanders of another newly arrived Marine force decided on their own to end a four-month defiance of American and Iraqi governmental authority by Moktada al-Sadr and his so-called Mahdi Army of radicalized young Shiites.
.
The Marines violated the agreed "exclusion zone" around the Imam Ali Mosque, Shiite Islam's holiest shrine, setting off an eight-day battle. The Marines had to be reinforced by U.S. Army and untested Iraqi forces. Truces followed but failed to hold, and at the time of writing the confrontation remains unresolved.
.
Who is in charge in Iraq, if military initiatives of the highest political sensitivity are being left to gung-ho Marine commanders, with a career interest in demonstrating how much tougher the Marines are than the army units they replace?
.
Why then is Ambassador John Negroponte in Iraq? He is now building up what is to become a 3,000-person U.S. mission to a nominally sovereign Iraq, whose new interim government is supposed to be taking political control of the country.
.
It is reported that when the shooting started between the Marines and the Mahdi army, and Negroponte was informed that Sadr was summoning help, he "decided to pursue the case" - apparently meaning that he backed what the Marines had started, leading to the present stand-off in Najaf.
.
The Falluja fiasco took place when Bremer was proconsul. It was Bremer who touched off the original clash with Sadr four months ago when he decided to shut down Sadr's radical newspaper - which "nobody read," as Bremer was warned at the time - and sent forces to arrest "or kill" Sadr. This provoked the earliest uprisings by Sadr's armed sympathizers in Najaf, Baghdad and elsewhere. The United States had subsequently to back down, at least temporarily.
.
As a result, Sadr, who was originally a figure of minor and local consequence, was turned into a national leader of the Shiite community and a threat to that community's existing moderate leadership.
.
This lack of political supervision of the Marines, and the responsibility of both Bremer and Negroponte in these confrontations, adds to an American record in Iraq that has displayed a persistent lack of common sense. The pursuit of Sadr has so far proved a political and military disaster. A policy of attacking large cities with armor, artillery and airpower in order to seize individuals defies reason.
.
The fundamental question in Iraq is whether the United States should simply get out, cutting its losses now. There are many Americans who believe that, including this writer. But neither the Bush government nor the Kerry campaign wants to contemplate so enormous and desperate an act of common sense.
.
The only chance of minimizing current costs is to do everything possible to lend legitimacy to the interim government and its chaotically formed new National Assembly. This means, above all, allowing it, and not the U.S. Marines, to run the country and to make the important security decisions.



See more of the world that matters - click here for home delivery of the International Herald Tribune.
< < Back to Start of Article Who's in charge?

PARIS Argument over American policy in Iraq and the Middle East presumes that there is a considered policy in Washington and that in Baghdad, people are in charge - L. Paul Bremer 3rd until recently, Ambassador John Negroponte now - who carry out Washington's policy.
.
One would think policy discipline would be particularly important now to the Bush administration. A Pew poll of American opinion, published last week, says that foreign policy has become the most important issue in the presidential election, replacing economics. Surely somebody in the White House is paying close attention to Iraq?
.
It seems not. The New York Times reported this week that two of the most sensitive recent U.S. decisions in Iraq were taken by regimental-level Marine Corps officers without consulting either Washington or senior officials, Iraqi or American, in Baghdad.
.
Outside Falluja, a city of more than half a million people and a center of Sunni nationalism, a Marine Corps force replaced army troops in April. After the several U.S. private security operatives in the city were murdered and their corpses mutilated, the Marines mounted an assault to search for and arrest the unidentified murderers.
.
The attack provoking armed uprisings against the American occupation elsewhere in Iraq. This did attract attention in Washington, and American forces were eventually ordered to make a thinly disguised handover of Falluja to some of the same people they had just been fighting. Most of Falluja has since been no-go territory for Americans.
.
In Najaf, in early August, commanders of another newly arrived Marine force decided on their own to end a four-month defiance of American and Iraqi governmental authority by Moktada al-Sadr and his so-called Mahdi Army of radicalized young Shiites.
.
The Marines violated the agreed "exclusion zone" around the Imam Ali Mosque, Shiite Islam's holiest shrine, setting off an eight-day battle. The Marines had to be reinforced by U.S. Army and untested Iraqi forces. Truces followed but failed to hold, and at the time of writing the confrontation remains unresolved.
.
Who is in charge in Iraq, if military initiatives of the highest political sensitivity are being left to gung-ho Marine commanders, with a career interest in demonstrating how much tougher the Marines are than the army units they replace?
.
Why then is Ambassador John Negroponte in Iraq? He is now building up what is to become a 3,000-person U.S. mission to a nominally sovereign Iraq, whose new interim government is supposed to be taking political control of the country.
.
It is reported that when the shooting started between the Marines and the Mahdi army, and Negroponte was informed that Sadr was summoning help, he "decided to pursue the case" - apparently meaning that he backed what the Marines had started, leading to the present stand-off in Najaf.
.
The Falluja fiasco took place when Bremer was proconsul. It was Bremer who touched off the original clash with Sadr four months ago when he decided to shut down Sadr's radical newspaper - which "nobody read," as Bremer was warned at the time - and sent forces to arrest "or kill" Sadr. This provoked the earliest uprisings by Sadr's armed sympathizers in Najaf, Baghdad and elsewhere. The United States had subsequently to back down, at least temporarily.
.
As a result, Sadr, who was originally a figure of minor and local consequence, was turned into a national leader of the Shiite community and a threat to that community's existing moderate leadership.
.
This lack of political supervision of the Marines, and the responsibility of both Bremer and Negroponte in these confrontations, adds to an American record in Iraq that has displayed a persistent lack of common sense. The pursuit of Sadr has so far proved a political and military disaster. A policy of attacking large cities with armor, artillery and airpower in order to seize individuals defies reason.
.
The fundamental question in Iraq is whether the United States should simply get out, cutting its losses now. There are many Americans who believe that, including this writer. But neither the Bush government nor the Kerry campaign wants to contemplate so enormous and desperate an act of common sense.
.
The only chance of minimizing current costs is to do everything possible to lend legitimacy to the interim government and its chaotically formed new National Assembly. This means, above all, allowing it, and not the U.S. Marines, to run the country and to make the important security decisions.

William Pfaff TMSI Saturday, August 21, 2004
International Herald Tribune