Tag Archives: saddam hussein

Oct 07

From the Vault: More Victims Won’t Stop the Terror (10/2001)

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Today is the ninth anniver­sary of the war in Afghanistan. In recog­ni­tion, here’s my Non​vi​o​lence​.org essay from 10/7/2010. It’s all sadly still top­i­cal. Nine years in and we’re still mak­ing ter­ror and still cre­at­ing enemies.

The United States has today begun its war against ter­ror­ism in a very famil­iar way: by use of ter­ror. Igno­rant of thou­sands of years of vio­lence in the Mid­dle East, Pres­i­dent George W. Bush thinks that the hor­ror of Sep­tem­ber 11th can be exor­cised and pre­vented by bombs and mis­siles. Today we can add more names to the long list of vic­tims of the ter­ror­ist air­plane attacks. Because today Afgha­nis have died in terror.

The deaths in New York City, Wash­ing­ton and Penn­syl­va­nia have shocked Amer­i­cans and rightly so. We are all scared of our sud­den vul­ner­a­bil­ity. We are all shocked at the level of anger that led nine­teen sui­cide bombers to give up pre­cious life to start such a lit­eral and sym­bolic con­fla­gra­tion. What they did was hor­ri­ble and with­out jus­ti­fi­ca­tion. But that is not to say that they didn’t have reasons.

The ter­ror­ists com­mit­ted their atroc­i­ties because of a long list of griev­ances. They were shed­ding blood for blood, and we must under­stand that. Because to under­stand that is to under­stand that Pres­i­dent Bush is unleash­ing his own ter­ror cam­paign: that he is shed­ding more blood for more blood.

The United States has been spon­sor­ing vio­lence in Afghanistan for over a gen­er­a­tion. Even before the Soviet inva­sion of that coun­try, the U.S. was sup­port­ing rad­i­cal Muja­hadeen forces. We thought then that spon­sor­ship of vio­lence would lead to some sort of peace. As we all know now, it did not. We’ve been exper­i­ment­ing with vio­lence in the region for many years. Our for­eign pol­icy has been a mish-mash of sup­port­ing one despotic regime after another against a shift­ing array of per­ceived enemies.

The Afghani forces the United States now bomb were once our allies, as was Iraq’s Sad­dam Hus­sein. We have rarely if ever acted on behalf of lib­erty and democ­racy in the region. We have time and again sold out our val­ues and thrown our sup­port behind the most heinous of despots. We have time and again thought that mil­i­tary adven­tur­ism in the region could keep ter­ror­ism and anti-Americanism in check. And each time we’ve only bred a new gen­er­a­tion of rad­i­cals, bent on revenge.

There are those who have angrily denounced paci­fists in the weeks since Sep­tem­ber 11th, angrily ask­ing how peace can deal with ter­ror­ists. What these crit­ics don’t under­stand is that wars don’t start when the bombs begin to explode. They begin years before, when the seeds of hatred are sewn. The times to stop this new war was ten and twenty years ago, when the U.S. broke it’s promises for democ­racy, and acted in its own self-interest (and often on behalf of the inter­ests of our oil com­pa­nies) to keep the cycles of vio­lence going. The United States made choices that helped keep the peo­ples of the Mid­dle East enslaved in despo­tism and poverty.

And so we come to 2001. And it’s time to stop a war. But it’s not nec­es­sar­ily this war that we can stop. It’s the next one. And the ones after that. It’s time to stop com­bat ter­ror­ism with ter­ror. In the last few weeks the United States has been mak­ing new alliances with coun­tries whose lead­ers sub­vert democ­racy. We are giv­ing them free rein to con­tinue to sub­ject their peo­ple. Every weapon we sell these tyrants only kills and desta­bi­lizes more, just as every bomb we drop on Kabul feeds ter­ror more.

And most of all: we are mak­ing new vic­tims. Another gen­er­a­tion of chil­dren are see­ing their par­ents die, are see­ing the rain of bombs fall on their cities from an uncar­ing Amer­ica. They cry out to us in the name of peace and democ­racy and hear noth­ing but hatred and blood. And some of them will respond by turn­ing against us in hatred. And will fight us in anger. They will learn our les­son of ter­ror and use it against us. They cycle will repeat. His­tory will con­tinue to turn, with blood as it’s Mid­dle East­ern lubri­cant. Unless we act. Unless we can stop the next war.

Apr 22

Torture for Ideology

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Reports are in that link up the US tor­ture pro­gram and the hunt for the non-existent weapons of mass destruc­tion. Jonathan S Lan­day in McClatchy News quotes a “for­mer senior U.S. intel­li­gence offi­cial famil­iar with the inter­ro­ga­tion issue”:

“The main [rea­son for the tor­ture] is that every­one was wor­ried about some kind of
follow-up attack (after 9/11). But for most of 2002 and into 2003,
Cheney and Rums­feld, espe­cially, were also demand­ing proof of the links
between al Qaida and Iraq that (for­mer Iraqi exile leader Ahmed)
Cha­l­abi and oth­ers had told them were there.”

“There was con­stant
pres­sure on the intel­li­gence agen­cies and the inter­roga­tors to do
what­ever it took to get that infor­ma­tion out of the detainees,
espe­cially the few high-value ones we had, and when peo­ple kept com­ing
up empty, they were told by Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s peo­ple to push
harder,” he continued.

All this is not really a sur­prise; I cov­ered it in real time over on Non​vi​o​lence​.org. There were numer­ous reports that the Vice Pres­i­dent and Sec­re­tary of Defense were push­ing the intel­li­gence agen­cies to come up with evi­dence that would back their flawed theories.

The United States is sup­posed to be the cham­pion of free­dom but we resorted to the most bru­tal of communist-era tor­ture tech­niques because our high­est offi­cials were more inter­ested in their car­toon view of the world than the com­plex real­ity (and not so com­plex: any­one who’s taken an “Intro to Islam” class would know that an alliance between Sad­dam Hus­sein and Osama bin Laden would be have been very unlikely). When facts and ide­o­log­i­cal the­o­ries don’t match up, it’s time to dig for more facts and revisit the ideologies. 

Oct 24

Katrina bin Laden and Our Public Enemies

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We now know that while Osama bin Laden and Sad­dam Hus­sein didn’t con­spire together, they did have one thing in com­mon: their power was funded by our depen­dence on their oil. But even as Saddam’s show trial begins, tele­vi­sions are watch­ing America’s new national secu­rity ene­mies: Kat­rina and Wilma. Al Qaida’s 9/11 attacks and the Sad­dam Hussein’s dic­ta­tor­ship were “pow­ered by” oil indus­try for­tunes and short-sighted global energy poli­cies, the same poli­cies now bring­ing us global warm­ing and mon­ster storms.
Before mak­ing land­fall in Mexico’s Yucatan and pound­ing Florida, Hur­ri­cane Wilma was declared the most pow­er­ful Atlantic hur­ri­cane in his­tory. That we got to a W-name itself is cause for con­cern: the first trop­i­cal storm of the year gets a name start­ing with “A” and so forth through the alpha­bet. This sum­mer has been the “most active hur­ri­cane season”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_Atlantic_hurricane_season since record-keeping started 150 years ago. We’ve seen so many storms that weather offi­cials have now run through the alpha­bet: mete­o­rol­o­gists are now hav­ing to track Trop­i­cal Storm (now Depres­sion) Alpha 350 miles north of the Bahamas. In 2004, “five dev­as­tat­ing hur­ri­canes ripped across Florida”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Atlantic_hurricane_season, each one com­ing so fast on the heels of the last that few of us could even name them a year later. As I write, Wilma is pound­ing West­ern Florida, one of the fast-growing regions in the coun­try. And of course Kat­rina dev­asted New Orleans and the Gulf Coast just two months ago.
Global cli­mate change is here. After decades of polit­i­cal hem­ming and haw­ing, only the most slimy of oil indus­try apol­o­gists (and Pres­i­dents) could argue that global warm­ing hasn’t arrived. We’ve built a national cul­ture built on inef­fi­cient burn­ing of fos­sil fuels. Devel­op­ers put more and more peo­ple on unpro­tected sand­bars built, main­tained and insured by tax dol­lars. Some­day is here and our weather is only going to be get­ting worse. We could be prepar­ing for the inevitable adjust­ments. We could be invest­ing in con­ser­va­tion, in renew­able ener­gies. We could change our tax codes to encour­age sus­tain­able hous­ing: not just get­ting new devel­op­ment off beaches but also build­ing urban and semi-urban com­mu­ni­ties that reduce auto­mo­bile depen­dence.
Instead we spend bil­lions of dol­lars on our oil addic­tions. We’re now wait­ing for the “announce­ment of the 2,000th U.S. mil­i­tary casu­alty in iraq”:http://www.afsc.org/2000/. Admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials used Kat­rina to roll­back envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion reg­u­la­tions in Louisiana. The arc­tic ice cap is rapidly melt­ing away (the North Pole is now ice-free for part of the year) but oil indus­try offi­cials point to the good news that we will soon be able to put “year-round oil rigs in the ice-free seas there”:http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1010–07.htm.
How many Kat­rina bin Laden’s and Sad­dam Wilma’s does it take before we get the news.

Nov 30

It’s Official: US Abuse at Gitmo

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While the images of U.S. solid­ers tor­tur­ing iraqi pris­on­ers at Al Grahib Prison in Badg­dad have been broad­cast around the world, US offi­cials have fre­quently reas­sured us that con­di­tions at the U.S. deten­tion camp in Guan­ta­mano Bay, Cuba, were accept­able and in accord with the Geneva Convention’s rules for treat­ment of pris­on­ers. As proof the Pen­ta­gon and Bush Admin­is­tra­tion have fre­quently cited the fact that the Inter­na­tional Red Cross reg­u­larly inspects prison con­di­tions at Guan­ta­mano. They for­got to tell us what they’ve seen.
A con­fi­den­tial report pre­pared by the Inter­na­tional Red Cross this sum­mer found that con­di­tions at Guan­ta­mano Bay were “tan­ta­mount to tor­ture.” Strong words from a cau­tious inter­na­tional body. Because of the way the IRC works, its reports are not made avail­able to the pub­lic but instead pre­sented to the accused gov­ern­ment, in the hope that they will cor­rect their prac­tices. In pred­i­ca­ble fash­ion, the Bush Admin­stra­tion pri­vately denied any wrong­do­ing and kept the IRC find­ings secret. In a dis­play of incred­i­ble audac­ity it then defended itself _from other accu­sa­tions of torture_ by cit­ing the IRC’s pres­ence at Guan­tanamo, con­ve­niently omit­ting the IRC’s strongly-worded crit­i­cisms. Amaz­ing really.
The IRC report is still secret. We only know of it second-hand, from a memo obtained by the _Times_ that quotes from some of its find­ings (“Red Cross Finds Detainee Abuse in Guantanamo“http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/30/politics/30gitmo.html, Nov 29). What kind of stuff is going on there? The _Times_ recently inter­viewed British pris­on­ers who had been detained in Afghanistan and iraq and sent to Guan­tanamo Bay. Here’s one story:
bq. One one reg­u­lar pro­ce­dure was mak­ing unco­op­er­a­tive pris­on­ers strip to their under­wear, hav­ing them sit in a chair while shack­led hand and foot to a bolt in the floor, and forc­ing them to endure strobe lights and loud rock and rap music played through two close loud­speak­ers, while the air-conditioning was turned up to max­i­mum lev­els.
It’s not nee­dles under fin­ger­nails or elec­trodes to the pri­vates, but it is indeed “tan­ta­mount to tor­ture.” While it was hard to believe these pris­on­ers’ sto­ries when they were first pub­lished a few months ago, they become much more cred­i­ble in light of the IRC con­clu­sions.
We still don’t know about what’s hap­pen­ing in the camp. The Bush Admin­is­tra­tion has the power, not to men­tion the duty, to imme­di­ately release Inter­na­tional Red Cross reports. But the United States has cho­sen to sup­press the report. No tor­tur­ing gov­ern­ment has ever admit­ted to its actions. Sad­dam Hus­sein him­self denied wrong­do­ing when _he_ ran the Al Grahib prison and used it for tor­ture. We rely on bod­ies like the Inter­na­tional Red Cross to keep us hon­est.
There are those who defend tor­ture by appeal­ing to our fears, many of which are indeed grounded in real­ity. We’re at war, the enemy insur­gents are play­ing dirty, Osama bin Laden broke any sort of inter­na­tional con­ven­tions when he sent air­lin­ers into the World Trade Cen­ter. Very true. But the United States has a mis­sion. I believe in the ide­al­is­tic notion that we should be a bea­con to the world. We should always strive for the moral high ground and invite the world com­mu­nity to join us. We haven’t been doing that lately. Yes it’s eas­ier to fol­low the lead of some­one like Sad­dam Hus­sein and just tor­ture any­one we sus­pect of plot­ting against us. But do we really want him as our role model?