Why worry about Al Qaeda when Congress is controlled by saboteurs?

Joseph McCarthy had this country in terror in the 1950s claiming that a Soviet funded fifth column had infiltrated the highest levels of government. Little did he know. Now our country is under the control of ideologues whose first commitment is to an ideal with no concern for what it will do to the people they are responsible for. Have they no conscience about what they have already been doing to their own people? And they are confidently ready to do even more, with virtually no cost to themselves.

The Republicans formerly signed off on the profligate spending of the GW Bush administration, coupled with the liberal handout to all the rich in the “Bush Tax Cuts”, (remember the surplus that Bush inherited from Clinton?), but now have returned the old Republican religion of fiscal restraint. They are now in the process of disemboweling our government. The Democrats, who were pussy cats during the Bush administration are now pussy cats under Obama.

The result is a government committed to wrecking the whole fabric of our economy in one fell swoop. No one knows what the implications will be of what they are doing, but what seems clear is that Congress has virtually no interest is dealing with the most urgent and fundamental issue this moment: A depressed economy that is likely to languish for years on end. It seems certain that one way or another this Congress will abandon the poor and vulnerable to their own devices at a time when there are no other sources of help than the government.

I can’t find words for my own feelings about this government. We are all despairing of where this country is going. Aren't these leaders vulnerable to the criticism of the greatest social critic of all time?
“You load people down with burdens they can hardly carry, and you yourselves will not lift one finger to help them.”

Reflections on a note in Science about a Central Asian astronomer

The American Association for the Advancement of Science is the most prestigious scholarly organization in this country. But the June 17 issue of the society’s journal Science has a brief note [p 1365] that veils a useful distinction that to some of us is important.

The note is about the esteemed Central Asian astronomer Ulugh Beg. The note refers to a tribute made to Ulugh Beg by the Polish astronomer Johannes Hevelius in 1687. Hevelius asked for help in finding Beg’s map of the heavens and asked for it to be translated from the Persian.

The resultant map produced by Hevelius is being displayed in a show called Arabick Roots in London. The article refers to the “flow of knowledge from the Arab world to Europe in the 17th century.”
Technically the statement is OK but it masks a certain historical reality. That is, Ulugh Beg was not Arab; he was Turko-Persian, the grandson of Tamer lane, and the son of the famed ruler of Herat Shah Rukh who sponsored an elaborate Turko-Persian culture. Ulugh Beg wrote in Persian even though he may have known Arabic as well as Persian and Turkish. So the “Arabic world” in Ulugh Beg’s time was very Persian as well as Arabic. Much of the scholarly knowledge that came to Europe from the “Arab world” was very Persian as well as Arabic. In fact, some of the most scientific gains in those centuries were made by Central Asians – that is, Turko-Persians. So the flow of knowledge to Europe came from the Turko-Persian societies in Central Asia.

The ugly side of power in the capitalistic world

I can’t remember a time when the ways capital exerts its influence on social affairs has been so evident in the news.

We are in fact seeing the ugly side of power being displayed in lots of places these days. Usually power masks its ugly side. Syria, for example. Syria has been a stable country for many years, so that a careless observer traveling through would easily suppose that the people are content and all is well. What one only occasionally could see was how the regime in power – composed of a relatively small cadre of relatives and co-sectarians – could remain in control. We are seeing that mechanism of control now: their army has been shooting unarmed demonstrators on the streets. The number of dead is now more than 1400 (not 14,000 as NYTimes says in 7/20/11 issue). All of them were peaceful demonstrators, as far as we know – Of course what we know is limited to what the regime wants us to know. They are trying to control all the news coming out of the country -- fortunately unsuccessfully.

But in the capitalistic world power works differently. The mechanisms of influence exerted by large capitalistic interests are more subtle, usually. But they seem blatant these days, and evident in so many contexts, and many of them seem to be in the foreground of the news lately. Here are some articles that provide examples.

> ProPublica reports on how the donors to the campaign of Louisiana’s President of St Bernard Parish benefitted from the BP oil spill cleanup. “Spillionaires Revisited: Gov’t Official’s Associates Got Big Contracts After the BP Oil Spill.”

> The no-holds-barred way Rupert Murdock’s newspaper did its business is now coming out in the open. There are many good articles but one that summarizes all that is known can be found at the Telegraph web site:
Phone hacking: timeline of the scandal
It’s worth noting that Fox news and the Wall Street Journal, both owned by Murdock have made very little of it. The difference between what his papers have to say about it and what other papers have to say illustrates how much it matters that news ownership be as dispersed as possible.

> Paul Krugman and Robin Wells describe how the same sets of investment/ banking companies keep on bilking the system by over-reaching and then demanding bailouts: “The Busts Keep Getting Bigger: Why?” It's about economic downturns.

> Representative Fred Upton (R-MI) is now for incandescent light bulbs whereas he used to be against them. Try to guess why. Have a look at what drives this bizarre political boondoggle.

> Capital works on the side of contraband behavior also, of course, manifest in the brutality of the Mexican drug war: Here is the Los Angeles Times’ summary of what has been going on.

Sober reflections on the contraries that led to Bastille Day

[slightly revised 7/15/11 @3:11}
Sometimes a situation becomes so complicated, disputes become so irresolvable, and adversaries so irreconcilable, that a great deal comes to bear on what happens in a single moment. The outcome of a high-stakes situation can be revolutionary change, when the system in place gets upended. I keep hoping that the disputes in our Congress have not reached such a state. But as today is Bastille Day it might be worth noting some circumstances that led up to the French Revolution, in case you notice parallels.

The whole story is too complicated to try to tell here, but I quote William Sewell, Jr’s summary of the issues that set the clash of interests in motion, to create a huge societal convolution in France. I quote from Chapter 8 of his book “The Logics Of History”. I arrange his statement in stages, in order to emphasize how as the situation developed the problems became all the more dire and irresolvable so that the underlying premises that held the French Crown in power were being undermined before it was completely overturned.

> “In 1786 the comptroller general informed the king that the state was nearly bankrupt.

> By the summer of 1789, the crisis of the state’s funding had become a crisis of the system of social stratification (because fiscal reform would mean stripping the clergy and nobility of one of their major privileges, their immunity from taxation);

> it had become a crisis of the privileged corporate institutions that were the integument of the social order of old regime France (because their privileges were linked to particular fiscal arrangements);

> it had become a deep constitutional crisis (because it was unclear which governmental body had the authority to change the system of taxation)

> and it had also become a crisis of the very principles of the social and political order (because proponents of natural rights, national sovereignty, and civic equality had managed to dominate political discourse and gain a sizeable foothold among the deputies to the Estates General.)"

That is to say, the fundamental assumptions that held the King in place were now crumbling at just the time when a contrary and irreconcilable concept of authority was being widely discussed, namely, that sovereignty should belong to the nation and the populace should have a voice in determinations of how (and possibly by whom) they should be governed. The events that took place in a cascade of miscommunications and conflicting agendas as the problems became more acute could never have been predicted, but in retrospect it is possible to notice that the ambiguities and contraraties of the situation were destabilizing the system in place, that is, the monarchy. Nothing required that the events that took place should take place that way, but much in the way of a collapse was potential in the situation. And as events took place a series of errors of understanding and communication added to the possibilities that the old order might be swept away. A spark was all that was needed.

It’s hard to think about the irreconcilable contraries in France in late eighteenth century without wondering if our own country, and perhaps even the capitalistic world as we know it, might be careering toward a point when powerful contrary interests could become, as in the French Revolution, an uncontrollable societal convolution.

The Insurance Institution of Last Resort

The insurance protection of last resort

Societies hold together by more or less agreeing on a common myth. By myth I mean broad formulations of common interest and of how the world works, what the future looks like. They are broad and general formulations too abstract to be proven by empirical evidence. Rather, they are useful conventions of public discourse that enable people to make plans together and come to an understanding of how they share common interests. I say “more or less” because some people believe these myths while others are willing to work with them even if they aren’t sure about them, and maybe others work with them simply to get along because in fact they don’t really believe them; to disagree openly creates too much trouble. That’s how societies work, how collectivities of self-interested, self-oriented human beings work together.

The common myth of the Republican Party for some time has been that business – private industry – is more efficient than government. Bureaucracy costs too much, they suppose. Whatever has to be done can be done better, more efficiently, and cheaper than government. So they promote the idea that whenever possible government should be replaced by private industry. This is a proposition too abstract to prove even though a few scholars claim to have gotten results that make this view plausible.

So many people believe it. I even remember hearing Mark Shields on the News Hour a couple of years ago say that the Republican Party doesn’t believe in government. He has never hinted such an accusation since that I know of; I suspect he got some flack for saying it. But even if it is unfairly broad, the charge may be almost true for the most extreme elements on the Far-Far Right.

I don’t know for sure but I believe there were similar opinions among the Wall Street and Banking barons in the 1920s. What seems to have been true, in any case, was the belief that the market could solve most of the problems of the world. In any case, it was flourishing.

The prosperity of the 1920s however masked another rarely stated myth that lies behind most publics in the modern age: When things go wrong people demand that the government do something. When the market crashed and the banks failed the American people demanded that the government do something. And in fact Hoover’s administration started programs for the public that did help, but they came too slowly and too late. FDR became President by running against Hoover for the next four terms. He claimed to be representing the common man and boasted that the fat cats hated him. That was because whatever the myth was in the 1920s, in the 1930s the American people demanded that something be done. By the government.

The government is the insurance institution of last resort.

I fear the Republicans have forgotten that. If things turn bad they may have to pay for it as the Republicans did in the 1930s.

Ahmed Wali Karzai is dead

Reports of the assassination of Ahmed Wali Karzai, younger brother of Hamed Karzai, President of Afghanistan, indicate that he was shot several times by a former bodyguard of their older brother Qayyoum. Stratfor says this is a serious blow to the President. This is what they say:
“His death comes as a major blow to President Karzai who depended on Ahmed Wali for creating a social support base for the president in Kandahar province, the homeland of the Taliban. Ahmed Wali’s official position was head of the legislative council in Kandahar, but he wielded a disproportionate amount of influence in the province and the country at large, claiming close relations with a wide array of players including the CIA, local Taliban elements and even drug lords. Despite his close dealings with U.S. intelligence, American officials openly criticized Ahmed Wali in 2009, accusing him of corruption and being involved in the drug trade.”

Joseph Stiglitz on how severe the economic crisis is

The Nobel Prize Winner in Economics Joseph Stiglitz has explained in much more elegant terms than I could express in an earlier statement how dire the situation is for our country. Dire doubly: Dire because of the urgency that wise decisions be made soon and dire because the leadership of Congress continue to demonstrate an inability to get beyond their respective ideologies. RLC

From Project Syndicate 2011-07-06
Joseph Stiglitz: The Ideological Crisis of Western Capitalism

NEW YORK – Just a few years ago, a powerful ideology – the belief in free and unfettered markets – brought the world to the brink of ruin. Even in its hey-day, from the early 1980’s until 2007, American-style deregulated capitalism brought greater material well-being only to the very richest in the richest country of the world. Indeed, over the course of this ideology’s 30-year ascendance, most Americans saw their incomes decline or stagnate year after year.

Moreover, output growth in the United States was not economically sustainable. With so much of US national income going to so few, growth could continue only through consumption financed by a mounting pile of debt.

I was among those who hoped that, somehow, the financial crisis would teach Americans (and others) a lesson about the need for greater equality, stronger regulation, and a better balance between the market and government. Alas, that has not been the case. On the contrary, a resurgence of right-wing economics, driven, as always, by ideology and special interests, once again threatens the global economy – or at least the economies of Europe and America, where these ideas continue to flourish.

In the US, this right-wing resurgence, whose adherents evidently seek to repeal the basic laws of math and economics, is threatening to force a default on the national debt. If Congress mandates expenditures that exceed revenues, there will be a deficit, and that deficit has to be financed. Rather than carefully balancing the benefits of each government expenditure program with the costs of raising taxes to finance those benefits, the right seeks to use a sledgehammer – not allowing the national debt to increase forces expenditures to be limited to taxes.
. . . [Some of this is deleted. For a link to the full text of the article click on the title above]
. . .
Regrettably, the financial markets and right-wing economists have gotten the problem exactly backwards: they believe that austerity produces confidence, and that confidence will produce growth. But austerity undermines growth, worsening the government’s fiscal position, or at least yielding less improvement than austerity’s advocates promise. On both counts, confidence is undermined, and a downward spiral is set in motion.

Do we really need another costly experiment with ideas that have failed repeatedly? We shouldn’t, but increasingly it appears that we will have to endure another one nonetheless. A failure of either Europe or the US to return to robust growth would be bad for the global economy. A failure in both would be disastrous – even if the major emerging-market countries have attained self-sustaining growth. Unfortunately, unless wiser heads prevail, that is the way the world is heading.

Joseph E. Stiglitz is University Professor at Columbia University, a Nobel laureate in economics, and the author of Freefall: Free Markets and the Sinking of the Global Economy.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2011.
www.project-syndicate.org
For a podcast of this commentary in English, please use this link:
http://media.blubrry.com/ps/media.libsyn.com/media/ps/stiglitz140.mp3

The strange economics of American politics; and a layman’s history of the Great Depression

I’m having trouble figuring out how the current plans for recovery are supposed to work. I’m not an economist but it seems to me that the plans in some general way should add up, and so far I can’t figure it out.

What I hear from both parties is that the real issue is “Jobs, jobs, jobs”. We all expect we will be hearing about that in the forthcoming election. Also, we are told that for this reason the government must reduce spending. The deficit ceiling plans are not settled but we are getting a sense of some of the way they plan to work it out, and what appears to be happening is that both parties are going to agree to cutting back government spending. Maybe they will ask the super-rich to pay a few more taxes but as we all know the Republicans have been fighting that prospect tooth and nail; they don't even bother to conceal whose side they are on. For me, a non-economist on the sidelines, it’s hard to make sense of all this.

Here is the plan, as I understand it.
• The government will cut back: that is, it will reduce the number of government employees and also reduce the number of contracts with private industry.
• The government will cut back on Medicare and Medicaid, thus reducing the safety net for the most financially vulnerable sector of the economy.
• Also, the plan is to bring our troops home; the sooner the better. So, our troops will be brought back to join the labor force.

Now, lets add this up: fewer government jobs, less money to employ the lower income segment of our society, more unemployed veterans: That means, voila!, More Jobs! If there is a logic here I don't get it. How do we add layoffs, starving the poor, bringing in more unemployed from the military and get a bump in the economy?

These policies sound much like the policies that got this country into trouble during the Great Depression – that’s the way I remember it (but remember I’m not an economist). At a time when the stock market tanked and the banks failed the government cut back on expenditures. And as the world economy collapsed other countries did the same. To me that sounds like what has been going on in our time: Britain has cut back, the US is cutting back, the EU is struggling to right itself owing to the debt in several countries.

So how do we know we are not on the verge of another Great Depression? That is a terrifying prospect.

To emphasize the point, I will rehearse what the Depression meant for my family. My father grew up in a wealthy Oklahoma family. Six sons. All went to college in the 1920s. But my grandfather lost everything in 1930. Everything; he was a pauper for the rest of his life. My father and mother had married just before the collapse, and although a graduate in Chemical Engineering he could not find work, although my mother got some income by teaching music in a small town. During the day my father carried ice for an ice factory (few people had refrigerators then) and at night he worked on a correspondence course in accounting. When he finally qualified as an accountant he looked for jobs keeping books for small companies. All of the companies were struggling to survive, and a couple times, when he finally got a company's books in order, he found out it was broke; there was no money even for him to be paid. He moved from job to job. We moved from town to town. When he got a job in Wichita he was able to take in one of our cousins, a teenager whose parents had no money. But that job disappeared and we had to live with a distant relative on an oil reservation, a man who was a gruffy old geezer who didn’t like kids (like me).

It was the war that brought the country out of depression. Roosevelt had started a number of national work projects in order to put people to work – Work Projects Administration, the CCC (I don’t remember what that stood for, but they built many of the facilities in national parks that are still in use). The government didn’t have much income so FDR had to borrow by issuing government bonds – all the while wondering whether it was a good idea to borrow from ourselves. Anyway, his administration started many of the safety-net programs like Social Security that the Republicans, who hated them then, are now trying to dismantle. And when war started in Europe Roosevelt borrowed more so that our country could support the Allies in Europe. When we entered the war the American government went into full press mode, mostly with borrowed money. And when the war was over the US Congress invented an amazing new idea – can anyone imagine a congress that would do this now?: they would pay the veterans to go to college. The GI Bill was opposed by the major universities of America. They thought it would bring the ordinary riff-raff into our institutions of higher learning, which saw them selves as serving the upper class (which of course no one wanted to admit existed in this country). It didn’t take even those universities long to discover there was money in this program for them so they finally went along with it -- and discovered that the veterans were better students than the usual college students.

All this took place because the government borrowed money. The more they spent on national projects the stronger the middle class got and were able to pay the taxes that kept the country going.

So much for what a non-economist remembers about how the world works. That’s why I at least can’t figure out how the plans being talked about in Congress today could add up to anything but disaster.

Another formulation of the issues in Central Asia

I'm glad to see any signs of interest in the growing investment of the Chinese in Central Asia, as is indicated in this opinion piece by Pepe Escobar, even if it seems a bit jargonistic ("Great Game", "pipelinestan", angel of history). In geopolitical terms we can speculate whether the war in Afghanistan-Pakistan is mere the current expression of what augurs to be a century-long power struggle over access and control over the mineral resources of Inner Asia. On that issue China is winning, as Escobar suggests. From Al Jazeera. RLC

Opinion
High stakes in Eurasia's 'New Great Game'
China and Russia will benefit from US mistakes in Afghanistan, and the operation in Libya, gaining influence and energy.

Pepe Escobar Last Modified: 04 Jul 2011 14:39

China is investing on a land-based Central Asian energy strategy - a pipeline-driven New Silk Road from the Caspian Sea to China's Far West in Xinjiang [GALLO/GETTY]
Antonio Gramsci once mused that the old order has died but the new one has not yet been born.

While Washington's geopolitical/energy focus was on Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Iran, and to a lesser extent on Central Asia, international politics was already in transition from a unipolar world towards a new, polycentric system.

And then the 2011 Arab Revolt irrupted all across the MENA (Middle East-Northern Africa) chessboard, turning all calculations upside down and reconfiguring the relationship between the US, the main Eurasian nations, and Northern Africa.

Time to recall an ultimate Cold Warrior, Dr Zbigniew Brzezinski, who in 1997, in the article "A Geostrategy for Eurasia", published by Foreign Affairs, conceptualised that: "Eurasia is the world's axial supercontinent. A power that dominated Eurasia would exercise decisive influence over two of the world's three most economically productive regions, Western Europe and East Asia. A glance at the map also suggests that a country dominant in Eurasia would almost automatically control the Middle East and Africa. With Eurasia now serving as the decisive geopolitical chessboard, it no longer suffices to fashion one policy for Europe and another for Asia. What happens with the distribution of power on the Eurasian landmass will be of decisive importance to America's global primacy and historical legacy."

US power waning

Fast forward to the first decade of the 2000s. The George W Bush administration devised a strategy for a Great Central Asia according to which the US would roll back Russia's traditional and China's growing influence.

Washington would have New Delhi as the partner of choice in Afghanistan and Central Asia - laying the foundations of a new Silk Road.

And Washington would establish itself not far from Xinjiang, in Western China, and close to Russia's underbelly. Essentially, that's how the US would win the New Great Game in Eurasia.

This strategy was inbuilt in the Pentagon's Long War - codename for the Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine - and its far more important, if half-hidden, twin: the global energy war.

In my 2007 book Globalistan, I branded this process as Liquid War; here we would find "liquidity" not only in terms of fast-flowing capital and information shaping liquid modernity (a hat tip to Zygmunt Bauman), but also as in oil/gas pipelines crisscrossing an enormous battlefield, what I have called Pipelineistan.

The problems with the Bush administration strategy may have already started way back in 2003, when Turkey - the bridge par excellence between Central Asia and the Mediterranean - decided not to support the war in Iraq.

Since then, Turkey has gotten closer to Russia and, following Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu's concept, in fact all its neighbors, especially Iran - performing what could be called an "escape from the US" - and thus denting its role as a NATO base for penetration into Eurasia.

It's in this context that an Ankara-Tehran-Damascus alliance was solidified (and, incidentally, may now be unraveling). Meanwhile Eurasia as a whole changed at breakneck speed.

Russia was "back" on a continental and also global scale; China and India emerged geo-economically; the US got bogged down in Afghanistan and Iraq. Soon the US was not the "indispensable nation" anymore.

China and Russia

Very few former Soviet states were annexed to the US sphere of influence - as it was expected after 9/11. Moreover, Washington's dream of a line of control stretching from the Mediterranean all the way towards Central Asia, aimed at cutting in two the Eurasian landmass, did not happen.

China and Russia developed a joint Eurasia policy - organised, among other channels, by the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), the Eurasian Economic Community and now increased military cooperation.

In Pipelineistan terms, China didn't have to send a single soldier (to Iraq) or get bogged down in an infinite quagmire (in Afghanistan); instead it will get plenty of oil from Iraq and much of the natural gas it needs from Turkmenistan.

China is massively investing in a land-based Central Asian energy strategy - a pipeline-driven New Silk Road from the Caspian Sea to China's Far West in Xinjiang.

The US's geopolitical perspective is characteristic of a sea power - framing its relationship with other nations from the position of an "island"; the Mediterranean basin and Central Asia are viewed as placed in a so-called "arc of instability", as defined by Dr Brzezinski.

Over these past few years, in a constantly evolving context, much more than Great Central Asia, what became paramount for Washington was the geopolitical concept of a Great Middle East - expanding on Brzezinski's "arc of instability" and running from the Maghreb all the way to Central Asia.

So as much as Brzezinski conceptualised Central Asia as a volatile and unpredictable "Eurasian Balkans", we had the Bush administration forcefully dreaming of the "birth pangs" of the Great Middle East. The aim was unmistakable; to cause a lot of trouble to the increasing geopolitical union between China and Russia.

Botched operations

In these past few years, up to the - largely botched - Africom/NATO operation in Libya, the US strategy has been aimed at the militarisation of the entire arc between the Mediterranean and Central Asia.

Africom, the US Africa command implemented in 2008 with a headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany, has now engaged in its first African war, in Libya. Africom aims at rapid intervention all across Africa but also has its sights on the "New" Middle East and Central Asia.

So now the US strategy can finally be examined in detail as a militarisation of the Mediterranean-Central Asian arch.

That would assure the US a wedge between Southern Europe and Northern Africa; assure military control over Northern Africa and Southwest Asia, with particular emphasis on Turkey, Syria and Iran; and "cut" Eurasia in two. In sum: divide and rule.

So this geopolitical road map was bound from the start to target Syria (already happening); Iran (a perpetual neo-con dream); and even Erdogan's Turkey - all useful for a US advance in Eurasia.

Meanwhile Eurasian powers Russia, China and India - all BRICS member countries - not to mention Iran and Turkey themselves, are slowly calibrating their response.

In the midst of this ever-shifting accommodation of tectonic plates, Afghanistan assumes an even more crucial role. It could - and should - recover its status of crossroads/hub bringing Central Asia and South Asia together. Yet that may ultimately happen not under American sponsorship - but under Chinese and Russian partnership.

The Moscow/Beijing counterpunch is to organise the SCO as a rival to NATO in terms of providing security for Central Asia - and for Afghanistan. Wily Hamid Karzai has seen which way the wind is blowing - and he's all for it.

Moscow and Beijing have decided to enter into "tight cooperation" (their terminology) not only in Central Asia but in the Middle East and North Africa as well; Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao admitted as much in a recent op-ed piece for the Financial Times newspaper.

The wake-up call was the Western intervention in Libya. The Chinese economic/political/diplomatic push will be organised under the aegis of the BRICS group of emerging powers (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa).

The complex hidden agendas at play in Syria; the unraveling of the Ankara-Tehran-Damascus alliance; the West's double standards over Bahrain; Washington's determination to overstay its military presence in Iraq -these developments are all seen by Moscow and Beijing as part of a strategy to perpetuate Western dominance in the Middle East.

So expect even more feverish moves by the angel of history. Eurasian actors Turkey, Iran, Russia and China will be ever more active in the Mediterranean and Central Asia - the key geostrategic battleground in a 21st century New Great Game that might even be pitting Washington against Eurasia itself.

Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for the Asia Times. His latest book is Obama Does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

Source: Al Jazeera

Immigrant Young Maids of America, Watch Out!

This is addressed to immigrant women generally but in fact Rita and I know a number of them, and their stories are so similar to that of the Guinean maid who is about to lose her case against former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn that it occurs to me to address a note to them generally.

What I know about you is that you left your home country out of desperation. You had good reasons to flee, but they were too complicated to make sense to Americans who have scarcely any sense of what it’s like out there, and certainly your problems were far different from anything the American legal system would recognize. So you had to lie. And you had to get help fabricating a story that would make sense to the American legal system. Once you figured out what might work you memorized it.

The truth was otherwise, of course; the reality was far too bizarre from the American point of view that even your friends in American now cannot understand it. In fact, many of the judges that have to decide on your story, whether to allow you to immigrate, have becomes so jaded, so frustrated by the ways they have been deceived that they can be scornful of anything you tell them. So you have to make your story really good.

But anyway the story you invented got you here. And then once on the ground, you discovered how hard life is here, especially for someone who comes with essentially no skills. And of course you had no money. And no language. Whatever English you thought you knew was little help. Everyone talked so fast and used so many colloquial idioms that you were overwhelmed from the beginning.

So you were lost and helpless, with hardly a friend, and virtually no one with means to help. Desperate, you had to do whatever to survive. You had children, and you needed to escape from the dive the immigration authorities put you in when you arrived. So what you were reduced to, you will never want to admit.

Thank God, somehow you survived. You lived through those horrible days, and now you are at least more or less ensconced in this country. Eventually you came to know – it’s among the various schemes that get passed around among the immigrant populations of this country -- that if you claimed to have more children than you actually had your taxes would be lower and maybe you could even get more financial aid from the government. So you claimed your neighbor’s children on your taxes as well as your own.

All of this seems to have paid off. You at least have been able to survive. At least you are holding on. What you have not realized is that the lies are now your history, and they have left you vulnerable. With this kind of history you have little chance of making any claim in a dispute over any issue without your history being brought up against you in court. So without knowing it you have placed yourself in a far more vulnerable position than you know. Besides being limited in your English and your skills and still desperately poor you are un-savvy, and in this country that can be a tragic weakness. You are exceedingly vulnerable, and more so if you are young and pretty.

We all know the platitudes: In the end it doesn’t pay to lie. But the consequences in this country can be devastating if you have to make a case in court. If by some miracle you should inherit a billion dollars, there is maybe a chance for you. At least we surmise so from what we read in the newspapers.

A Sudanese regime that doesn't know how to blush.

A friend of mine recently said he recoiled when he saw yet one more report by Nicholas D Kristof about human rights violations. I had to confess that I myself sometimes have turned away from reports of violent and cruel abuses of women and the murder of unarmed helpless civilians. Outrage fatigue.

But then what would the world be like if there were no reporting on the abuses of power in the world. How many other incidents have taken place that have not been reported on? And how many powerful figures, even in the face of the evidence, lie, denying what they have done to vulnerable human beings in their paths? We live in a broken world, and without serious reporting few would have even a clue about what is going on.

Even so, I’m appalled at the shameless behavior of some regimes. Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, Iran, North Korea – in these countries and others the regimes in power will do anything to their own citizens to stay in place.

Now we hear about Sudan – again. Yet again we hear of a government that will send its troops into a community to brutalize, rape, and burn. Have they no shame? We can only invoke the language of one of the greatest social critics of all time: "Are they ashamed of their loathsome conduct? No, they are absolutely shameless. They do not even know how to blush." [Jer 8:12]

Here is a link to today’s report by Kristof: what would we do without him?
"Yet again in Sudan."

Are our politicians running the country over a cliff?

Does it seem strange to anyone the way politicians are proposing to fix the economy? So far, the only solution that either party seems to propose is to reduce the deficit. How is that supposed to produce a viable economy? I am not an economist but I believe we are in for a year of campaigning about deficit reduction solutions that won't solve anything.

What turns on my worry is the latest edition of Investment Outlook written by Bill Gross, manager of [what is said to be] the largest mutual fund in the world.

This is what I get from his new Outlook.

Both parties seem to believe "that balancing the budget will magically produce 20 million jobs over the next 10 years."

However,

"over the past 10 years, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, only 1.8 million jobs have been created."

In the mean time

"the available labor force has grown by over 15 million."

So what miracle power will enable any administration to produce 20 million jobs in the next 10 years?

At a time when interest rates can go no lower, we as a country are "untrained, under-invested and over-indebted relative to our global competitors."

At the same time,

"politicians feel that fiscal conservatism equates to job growth." However, "if implemented too quickly [it] could stultify economic growth."

Here is Bill Gross -- the guy who manages the largest bond fund in the world -- saying

"government must take a leading role in job creation.... In the short term, no rational observer can believe that global or even small businesses will invest here when the labor over there is so much cheaper. ... Our labor force is too expensive and poorly educated for today's marketplace."

He quotes the former Washington University economist Hyman Minsky --

"a modern-day economic godfather who predicted the subprime crisis. 'Big Government,' he wrote, should become the 'employer of last resort' in a crisis, offering a job to anyone who wants one -- for health care, street cleaning, or slum renovation."

What the politicians seem to miss -- and our country will ignore at a terrible cost, I fear -- is these

"dominant headwinds that cannot be dismissed: 1] Labor is much more attractively priced over there than here, and 2] U. S. employment based on asst price appreciation/finance as opposed to manufacturing can no longer be sustained. The 'golden' days are over."

Western civilization prides itself on its rationality, it's ability to assess pitfalls ahead and adjust. So, where is the adjustment? Is anybody thinking about where this country is going? One of the problems with the power of interest-driven arguments is that the various interests involved in state building are preoccupied with short range benefits. Our system is set to re-assess, rethink every four years. Four years of planning driven by powerful corporate interests may drive the country over the cliff. Can there be a return?

Here is Bill Gross's assessment:

It is clear, however, that neither party has an awareness of the why or the wherefores of how to put America back to work again.

Juan Cole is now as admired as Owen Lattimore

If I am honest with myself I have to admit that I am profoundly envious of Juan Cole. I have long admired his work. He writes richly documented scholarly works and he runs a blog in which he demonstrates every morning that he has already read everything in Arabic and Persian that was published that day. He must read and write in his sleep.
Yes, it’s envy: I only wish I could have done half as much fine work as he has, and that I could maintain an informed, up-to-the-moment commentary on even a small sector of the world comparable to his blog. But now he has now been elevated to an unparalleled level of scholarly greatness by the revelation that someone in the George W Bush administration tried to sabotage his career.
Few scholars ever get such an honor. The only other one so honored that I know of was someone else I have long admired, Owen Lattimore. Lattimore was the most eminent scholar on Chinese affairs in the 1940s and 1950s. He wrote some of the greatest studies of all time on the influence of the frontier on social affairs. His Inner Asian Frontiers of China was one of the great works in a field now given a name, political ecology. He had a powerful influence on American foreign policy in his day, as he was Roosevelt’s adviser on East Asian affairs. But what distinguished him above many other worthy scholars of his time was Joseph McCarthy’s attack against him during the 1950s. McCarthy accused him of being a Communist sympathizer, “a top Russian spy.” At the moment of the attack Lattimore was en route to Afghanistan where he had been designated the new head of the United Nations Mission there. When he arrived in Kabul and read a telegram notifying him of McCarthy’s charges, he got back on the same plane and went home. In Washington he vigorously defended himself and when the hearings were over he published a book, Ordeal by Slander, written in three months, no doubt in a fit of anger.
So now it turns out that Juan Cole has been elevated to such a stature. Only in his case no one will admit to trying to dig up dirt against him. Yesterday’s New York Times only indicates that someone in the G W Bush administration was asking Glenn L. Carle, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer, to gather sensitive information on Juan Cole. Who would that be? We know that the office of the Vice President was up to such shenanigans – that’s why Scooter Libby went to jail.
Whatever the situation it has now elevated Juan Cole into the class of most envied scholars. He is now on a par with Owen Lattimore.

Siddique on the corrosive power of politics on Pakistan's military

Abubakar Siddique of Radio Free Europe has a great statement of the problem with Pakistan's military: It has long been not only rich [holding land, many companies, large trust funds, investment funds, etc.] but also politically entrenched. The combination of wealth and political power is corrosive everywhere. Siddique describes the extant problem [see also Tariq Ali, "The color Khaki"]. RLC

Radio Free Europe: Feature article
Pakistan: Armed With Power, Perks, And Privileges
June 04, 2011
By Abubakar Siddique

It has been a turbulent month for the Pakistani military.

First came the May 2 killing of Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, on Pakistani soil, by American commandos. The raid led to questions of how the Al-Qaeda leader could find a safe haven alongside Pakistan's elite military training academy, and how such a raid could be successfully carried out unbeknownst to the armed forces.

Then came the deadly insurgent attack on a naval base in Karachi on May 22-23, which took 16 hours to contain and which resulted in the death of at least 10 military personnel and four militants. Eyebrows were raised over how the armed services could fail to protect a key military installation.

Capping off the month was the kidnapping on May 29 of journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad. His abduction in the capital came shortly after he had written an investigative piece alleging that the Karachi attack stemmed from a breakdown in secret negotiations between the navy and Al-Qaeda.

There have been allegations that journalist Syed Salim Shahzad was tortured and killed by Pakistan's ISI intelligence agency.
Days after Shahzad warned that he had received threats because of his report, his tortured body was discovered far from the capital. Suspicions turned toward the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, considered an integral part of what Pakistanis refer to as the "military establishment."

Human rights campaigners and journalists are clamoring for investigations into Shahzad's death as well as reports he had been threatened by the ISI, which the intelligence agency denies.

An Old Debate Rekindled

It is far from open season on the military, which takes the lion's share of foreign aid, possesses enormous wealth, and has dominated political and economic life in Pakistan for decades.

But lawmakers, the media, and the public have now become emboldened enough to rekindle an old debate about the considerable perks and privileges enjoyed by the country's powerful military.

Why, they ask, are immense resources being used to prop up bloated security institutions while a growing and impoverished population is left wanting?

The grumbling can be expected to get louder in the coming days.

"There are a lot of questions about where the resources are going," says Islamabad-based author and journalist Zahid Hussain, who asks "whether the huge military budgets are properly utilized?

"There are also questions about the…military's own professionalism," he says. "Professionalism in dealing with this kind of situation. Particularly, there are questions about the army running other businesses and not concentrating on their professional duties."

These are the type of questions that Hussain has suffered personally for asking in the past.

In a 2002 article for "Newsweek" magazine, he documented how the Pakistani military had carved out a corporate and real-estate empire that gave the then-ruling generals enormous wealth, power, and advantages.

'Military Generals Play Golf All The Time'

In response, Hussain was banned for years from covering the press conferences of President General Pervez Musharraf, who held office from 1999-2008.

Others have suffered more for going against the grain in the nuclear-armed Islamic nation, which has been ruled by military dictators -- Musharraf being the last -- for more than 30 of the years since its founding in 1947.

Sixty-year-old Pakistani lawyer Asma Jahangir has spent most of her life campaigning for the rights of religious minorities and landless farm workers effectively bound to a life of modern-day slavery.

Her work has placed her in direct opposition to the military's dominance of the Pakistan's decision-making process. For this she has been imprisoned and placed under house arrest.

Peaceful demonstrations she has orchestrated have been met with harsh police violence, and her family's businesses have suffered as her patriotism has been questioned.

Nevertheless, Jahangir continues to be one of the most vocal public voices questioning the perks enjoyed by the military.

"These military generals play golf all the time," she said on a popular night-time talk show on May 26. "And then they talk about where they will get plots [of land]. Please tell me how a marriage hall can operate in a sensitive [military] installation such as the [naval base] that was attacked in Karachi recently. Have you heard this happening anywhere else?"

An Immense Economic Machine

Jahangir's comments have attracted angry press statements and letters to the editor from former senior military officers, as have more subdued criticisms lodged on other TV talk shows and newspaper columns.

It will take a lot more than public questioning to put a dent in the military's immense economic machine, however.

Under the country's annual budget released on June 3, the military gets a major slice of the pie -- about 25 percent. Healthcare and education, by contrast, receive only a sliver -- less than 5 percent combined.

. . . [For more, click on the title above]

Iranian government thugs beat a famous woman scholar, who collapsed of heart attack

Haleh Sahabi's death was not accidental but deliberate, by a regime that has been reduced to showing its true character. The story of her death as she mourns the death of her father is told by Hamed Dabashi, Al Jazeera, June 3, 2011.

Haleh Sahabi: Our Antigone in Tehran: Haleh Sahabi defied human law to defend moral, divine law; her life writing a heroic legend of the future. AlJazeera [6/3/11]
Haleh Sahabi, 54, was a distinguished Quranic hermeneutician, a religious comparatist, a women's rights scholar, and a committed activist to the cause of her people's civil liberties. Haleh Sahabi was sentenced to a two-year prison term after she had joined a rally in front of the Iranian parliament in the aftermath of the contested presidential election of 2009.

While serving her term in jail, Haleh Sahabi was informed of her father's impending death. He was the prominent Iranian dissident Ezzatollah Sahabi (1930-2011), a revered democracy activist, known and admired for his mild manner, open-minded generosity of spirit, a liberal demeanor, and a commitment to non-violent activism on a religious-nationalist platform for over half a century.

Haleh Sahabi was briefly allowed out of prison to be present for the final days of her father's life. Ezzatollah died, at the age of 81 on May 31, 2011. Millions of Iranians in and out of their homeland were saddened by his death, deeply grateful for his moderate and caring positions, even those who did not agree with him.

His funeral began on the following day, June 1, under tight security control, and - according to a number of reliable eyewitness accounts- including those of Ahmad Montazeri, the son of the late Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, and Ahmad Sadr Haj Seyyed Javadi, an aging opposition politician - a band of organised plainclothes security forces began to disrupt the funeral, ridiculing and humiliating the attendants, and moved to snatch the body of the deceased from those who were carrying it for a proper burial.

Haleh Sahabi, leading the funeral, tried to prevent the disruption, while holding on to a picture of her father. The picture was violently taken away from her by a security agent and she was hit on her side. She fell to the ground in the scuffle and soon after died of a cardiac arrest.

The International campaign for Human Rights in Iran holds the plainclothes security forces responsible for Haleh Sahabi's death, and has called for an official investigation. "The shameful actions of government thugs in this incident reveal a deep contempt for traditions that belong to all Iranians, and they have resulted in a tragedy," said Hadi Ghaemi, spokesperson for the campaign. Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian Nobel Peace laureate, has declared Haleh Sahabi's death,"intentional murder".

[Click on the title for the whole article]

The ISI had been threatening the journalist that turned up dead and mutilated

Now it comes out that the ISI had threatened Saleem Shahzad, bureau chief of Asia Times Online, several times. He disappeared and his body showed up on May 31 badly mutilated. He was not only killed but tortured. Shahzad was of course a Pakistani citizen who of course should have been protected by the ISI; that the organization threatened him was reason for him to share some of the evidence with others who now have brought it into the open. Would we expect whoever did this to admit to have brutalized a journalist for not revealing his sources? It is no surprise that the ISI has denied it. RLC

04 Jun 2011, NewAgeIslam.Com
Why the ISI is Lying By Hameed Haroon
It has come to my notice that a spokesman of Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) while speaking to the official national news agency in Islamabad yesterday has questioned the “baseless allegations” levelled by Human Rights Watch on the basis of an email from Saleem Shahzad, the bureau chief of the Hong Kong-based Asia Times Online, in their possession. Shahzad was murdered three days ago near Islamabad after being abducted by unknown persons.
I wish to state on record that the email in the possession of Mr Ali Dayan, the monitor for Human Rights Watch (HRW) stationed in, Lahore Pakistan, is indeed one of the three identical emails sent by Mr Shahzad to HRW, his employers (Asia Times Online) and to his former employer, myself. I also wish to verify that allegations levied by HRW at the ISI are essentially in complete consonance with the contents of the slain journalist’s email.
In their denial issued Wednesday, an anonymous spokesman from the ISI has questioned the “baseless allegation” levelled against ISI by Mr Dayan of HRW. I wish to state on the record for the information of the officers involved in investigating journalist Saleem Shahzad’s gruesome murder that the late journalist confided to me and several others that he had received death threats from various officers of the ISI on at least three occasions in the past five years. Whatever the substance of these allegations, they form an integral part of Mr Shahzad’s last testimony. Mr Shahzad’s purpose in transmitting this information to three concerned colleagues in the media was not to defame the ISI but to avert a possible fulfillment of what he clearly perceived to be a death threat. The last threat which I refer to was recorded by Mr Shahzad by email with me, tersely phrased as “for the record”, at precisely 4:11am on October 18, 2010, wherein he recounted the details of his meetings at the ISI headquarters in Islamabad between the director general-media wing (ISI), Rear-Admiral Adnan Nazir, with the deputy director general of the media wing, Commodore Khalid Pervaiz, also being present.
The ostensible agenda for this meeting was the subject of Mr Shahzads’s story in Asia Times Online with respect to the Pakistan government freeing of senior Afghan Taliban commander, Mullah Baraadar. Mr Shahzad informed the senior officials that the story was leaked by an intelligence channel in Pakistan, and confirmed thereafter by the “most credible Taliban source”. The senior officials present suggested to Mr Shahzad that he officially deny the story, which he refused to do, terming the official’s demand as “impractical”.
The senior intelligence official was “curious” to identify the source of Mr Shahzad’s story claiming it to be a “shame” that such a leak should occur from the offices of a high profile intelligence service. Mr Shahzad additionally stated that the rear-admiral offered him some information, ostensibly “as a favour “ in the following words: “We have recently arrested a terrorist and have recovered a lot of data, diaries and other materials during the interrogation. The terrorist had a hit list with him. If I find your name on the list I will certainly let you know.” Mr Shahzad subsequently confirmed to me in a conversation that he not only interpreted this conversation as a veiled threat to his person, he also informed me that he let an official from the ISI know soon thereafter that he intended to share the content of this threat with his colleagues. ....
Source: The Indian Express URL: http://newageislam.com/NewAgeIslamWarOnTerror_1.aspx?ArticleID=4774

[For more click on the title above]

I realize that Manvendra Singh is an Indian criticizing a Pakistani organization, but he has described the real reason for this crime well:
Last Updated : 05 Jun 2011 10:53:28 AM IST

Saleem Shahzad was killed because his writings affected the image-building of an institution that is being devoured from within. His writings didn’t affect the image of the militants of Al-Qaeda or the various shades of the Taliban. The truth didn’t hurt them one bit. Rather it only exposed their infiltration of the armed forces, for which the militants groups are not in the least bit sorry. His writings irritated only the image-makers of the Pakistani military ‘establishment’. For their well-cultivated image of being in control of the destinies of the institutions as well as that of the country has taken a serious beating. . . . Establishments and governments don’t like the truth as news items, discussion points, power presentations etc. They know the truth well, but like it concealed from the public conversations.

[For the source, go to Establishment paranoia and Shahzad’s murder
http://expressbuzz.com/opinion/op-ed/establishment-paranoia-and-shahzad%E2%80%99s-murder/281206.html

What the Syrian police did to a thirteen year old child.

Remember the pulverized body of the young man Emit Till? He was tortured and brutalized by a racist mob in the United States. In Syria it is the government that does such things -- even to children.

The brutal treatment of the Syrian people by their government reveals what it is: inhuman, brutal, unfeeling, bestial. Nothing reveals to the world what controls conditions in Syria better than the revelation of what Syrian police did to one of their 13-year old future citizens. From Al Jazeera.

Tortured and killed: Hamza al-Khateeb, age 13. The mutilation and death in custody of a 13-year-old child has sparked further furious protests in Syrian city of Daraa.
Hugh Macleod and Annasofie Flamand 31 May 2011 AL JAZEERA

Hamza al-Khateeb used to love it when the rains came to his small corner of southern Syria, filling up the farmers' irrigation channels enough so that he and the other children could jump in and swim.
But the drought of the last few years had left the 13-year-old without the fun of his favourite pool.
Instead, he'd taken to raising homing pigeons, standing on the roof of his family's simple breeze-block home, craning his neck back to see the birds circling above the wide horizon of fields, where wheat and tomatoes were grown from the tough, scrubby soils.
Though not from a wealthy family himself, Hamza was always aware of others less fortunate than himself, said a cousin who spoke to Al Jazeera.
"He would often ask his parents for money to give to the poor. I remember once he wanted to give someone 100 Syrian Pounds ($2), and his family said it was too much. But Hamza said, 'I have a bed and food while that guy has nothing.' And so he persuaded his parents to give the poor man the 100."
In the hands of President Bashar al-Assad's security forces, however, Hamza found no such compassion, his humanity degraded to nothing more than a lump of flesh to beat, burn, torture and defile, until the screaming stopped at last.
Arrested during a protest in Saida, 10km east of Daraa, on April 29, Hamza's body was returned to his family on Tuesday 24th May, horribly mutilated.
The child had spent nearly a month in the custody of Syrian security, and when they finally returned his corpse it bore the scars of brutal torture: Lacerations, bruises and burns to his feet, elbows, face and knees, consistent with the use of electric shock devices and of being whipped with cable, both techniques of torture documented by Human Rights Watch as being used in Syrian prisons during the bloody three-month crackdown on protestors.
Hamza's eyes were swollen and black and there were identical bullet wounds where he had apparently been shot through both arms, the bullets tearing a hole in his sides and lodging in his belly.

Hamza's mutilated, castrated corpse was riddled with bullet holes and burn marks [YouTube/SFP]
On Hamza's chest was a deep, dark burn mark. His neck was broken and his penis cut off.
"Where are the human rights committees? Where is the International Criminal Court?" asks the voice of the man inspecting Hamza's body on a video uploaded to YouTube.
"A month had passed by with his family not knowing where he was, or if or when he would be released. He was released to his family as a corpse. Upon examining his body, the signs of torture are very clear."
[Click on the title above for a link to the source and access to the whole article.]

The murder of Syed Saleem Shahzad: Pakistan's intelligence service is implicated

Many journalists have been killed in Pakistan, so the murder of Syed Saleem Shahzad can be considered more of what we have seen there for so many years. It was only last year that Pakistan was declared the most dangerous country on earth for journalists. But what makes his murder so much more heinous is that he was last seen in the custody of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI. This is an outfit that Shahzad’s research could never trust because he was trying to declare to the world what the ISI and other secretive elements of the government were doing. That he died in their hands reveals what they are: A brutal gang all their own; as some have said, “A state within a state.” Note that it was not enough to silence him; not enough to kill him: they had to brutalize him, pulverize his body. Such is in store for anyone who want to reveal what the ISI is doing.

Is the pen really mightier than the sword? I would hope so. I deeply admire the courage of many Pakistani journalists who continue to describe the world as they find it, in a country so threatening to those who would purvey the truth as they as they best can. It’s a dangerous place and what they do is a dangerous game. It is easy to criticize journalism, especially in retrospect, but at least such courageous people are out there, digging around to find out what is really happening, not just what those in power want tell the world in their own interest.

We grieve not only for Mr. Shahzad and his family, but also for the many other journalists who must be terrified by his murder. And we grieve for the Pakistani people. No one deserves the kind of government they have. I have despaired of writing one more time that Pakistan is the most dangerous place on earth. Its government is inept, weak, subject to the intimidating pressures of its own military-industrial complex, which is notoriously duplicitous. The Pakistani people don’t deserve such leadership, and yet they continue to be endlessly subjected to it; to a misinformed – no, a deliberately dis-informing – government.

And what hope is there for a realistic and fair solution to the Afghanistan war as long as this Pakistan regime has an influence on the issue?

Some links to recent reports:
Carlotta Gall in the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/01/world/asia/01pakistan.html?_r=1&ref=carlottagall
Pakistani Journalist Who Covered Security and Terrorism Is Found Dead.
A well-known Pakistani journalist has been found dead after being abducted over the weekend in an upscale neighborhood here and receiving repeated threats from Pakistan’s premier intelligence agency. … He disappeared Sunday evening in the center of this capital just two days after writing an article suggesting that a militant attack on the navy’s main base in Karachi on May 22 was carried out because the navy was trying to crack down on cells from Al Qaeda that had infiltrated the force. Pakistan’s armed forces, specifically the navy, have been highly embarrassed by the 16-hour battle that ensued at the base when six attackers climbed over a wall and blew up two American-made naval surveillance planes. Ten people were killed in the attack, and American and Chinese technicians working on the base only narrowly escaped injury as they were driven out through a hail of bullets. … Coming soon after the American raid on May 2 that killed Osama bin Laden, which caught the Pakistani Army and Air Force flat-footed, the attack on the naval base has shocked the entire country. The armed forces chiefs have been deeply angered by the humiliation they have suffered from both episodes, and in particular the many questions raised about their competence by Pakistan’s increasingly rambunctious news media. . . .

Al Jazeera: http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia/2011/06/20116124216513177.html
… Syed Saleem Shahzad had earlier told a rights activist he had been threatened by the country's intelligence agencies. He was found dead on Tuesday, and police said his body showed signs of torture. Ali Dayan Hasan, Pakistan representative for Human Rights Watch, said Shahzad had told him that he was under threat by Pakistan's military intelligence agency. "He told me he was being followed and that he is getting threatening telephone calls and that he is under intelligence surveillance," he told Reuters news agency. "We can't say for sure who has killed Saleem Shahzad. But what we can say for sure is that Saleem Shahzad was under serious threat from the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence) and Human Rights Watch has every reason to believe that that threat was credible." … His death underscores the dangers of reporting in Pakistan, which in 2010 was called the deadliest country for journalists.

Foreign Policy Online: http://afpak.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/06/01/daily_brief_pakistani_journalist_found_tortured_murdered_0
Pakistani police yesterday found the body of kidnapped journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad in a canal in the Mandi Bahauddir area of Gujarat district southeast of the capital Islamabad, from where Shahzad had been kidnapped on his way to a TV interview nearly two days before (NYT, ET, Tel, LAT, BBC, Reuters, Daily Times, WSJ, AJE, AFP). Shahzad's body reportedly bore extensive signs of torture, including broken ribs and wounds to his face, abdomen and internal organs (AFP). He was buried today in Karachi, his hometown (AP). Suspicion for the kidnapping and killing has fallen on Pakistan's intelligence services, who according to Human Rights Watch researcher Ali Dayan Hasan had threatened Shahzad as recently as last October (Post, Reuters, The News). Hasan told reporters Monday that he had been able to confirm through anonymous sources that Shahzad was in the custody of the intelligence services (NYT). Shahzad wrote a story Friday for the Asia Times alleging that al-Qaeda was responsible for last week's attack on a Pakistani naval base after Shahzad said navy officials refused to release sailors arrested for their alleged links to al-Qaeda.

North Korea as a concentration camp

The more we know about North Korea the more it looks like a concentration camp -- the whole country, a place where the government has for years sought to seal its population from all outside influences. It is hard to internalize how abusive the place is.

This is a country whose abuses of its own citizenry awaken images of Nazi "race science." The BBC says that North Korea is testing new chemical weapons on women and children. In fact, the families that fail to have pedigrees of fully obedient citizens for three generations have been used in such "scientific" tests. [See the following site: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/this_world/3436701.stm]

Hundreds of thousands of people are imprisoned without charge. It's not because they have committed a crime. It is because their relatives are believed to be critical of the regime and so they are punished.
According to President Kim Jong Il, the bad blood and seed of any dissident must be rooted out down to three generations.
Forced labour and starvation rations ensure that prisoners do not escape. Those who try to are publicly executed.
…
Kwon Hyok, a former North Korean army intelligence officer, was also chief guard at "Prison Camp no. 22". For the first time on camera, he describes specially-made glass gas chambers used for human experimentation.

Another source on conditions in North Korea is a video that shows several thousand children starving on the streets, ignored and unprotected. [See the following site: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1875007335054132657#]

Also, the PBS News Hour recently aired a clip from a forthcoming film, Kimjungilia, that documents the horrors of life in North Korea. Here are some of the statements about conditions in the country, from that clip.

[W]hen I started forced labor [at the age of nine], I didn't have time for them [pet fish]. I didn't even have time to cry. Every day was so tiring. We worked so hard. I was so cold. You don't care about your pet fish when you're dying.
We never knew when we'd get beaten. There was constant fear.

Another speaker

… in 1994, we were having a very hard time. We would go to the mountains to pick roots. We ate grass from the fields and bark from the trees.

The experience of a young woman:

Narrator: There are an estimated 300,000 prisoners in the camps today. But even outside the camps, life is difficult. There are fears that food shortages could get as bad as they were in the mid-'90s, when Byeon Ok-soon was growing up.
… Byeon Ok-soon lived with her parents, three brothers, and sister in a northern town. The only source of food was the state-run distribution system. By the time she was 17 that system had collapsed.
BYEON OK-SOON (through translator): One day, I was with my father in the mountains. I got soaked with rain while we were foraging. After we finished I went home. My body started to burn and I fainted.
We had nothing to eat and we certainly couldn't buy medicine. So, they laid me to one side, waiting for me to die. I had typhoid fever and was in a coma.
NARRATOR: Ok-soon woke up from her coma in China. Her brother had carried her on his back across the Tumen River. He left her in the care of an old woman while he looked for work to pay for her medical treatment.
As the oldest brother, it was his duty to care for his parents and siblings. He took his duty very seriously.
BYEON OK-SOON (through translator): After he saved me in China, with our parents back in North Korea, my brother felt very tortured. He would get food and take it back to our parents. He was constantly sneaking back and forth.
When he realized the North Korean authorities were on to him, he decided to give himself up. If you give yourself up, you expect to receive a lighter sentence. That's what he thought. Instead, he was taken and publicly executed.

A former Captain in the military:

PARK MYUNG-HO, escaped North Korea (through translator): The military suffered, too. The state only supplied us with rice and salt. We had to get everything else ourselves.
NARRATOR: Park Myung-ho was a captain in the Korean People's Army. He served for 20 years. His father had also been a soldier.
PARK MYUNG-HO (through translator): These days, many officers desert. Even if you want to work, there are always supplies missing, making it impossible to do the job. But commanders go on issuing orders every day. You have to steal the supplies you need.
If you care at all, it is impossible not to express your frustration. Consequently, many are arrested. That's what drove me to escape. We decided to cross the 38th Parallel by boat. We evaded navy ships twice. Because our boat was small and theirs were big, we could see them first and get away.
Actually, the North Korean ships had no fuel. They couldn't start their engines and were under sail. When I saw all the trees on the mountains, I knew we were in South Korea.

Another man’s escape:

I came up with the idea of escaping. I knew we could get shot or electrocuted. All of a sudden, I was afraid. And then my friend said, "I don't think we can do it." But I couldn't give up. I had to escape. I practically dragged him. And then I slipped in the snow, so he ran ahead of me. When I saw the wired gates, I figured he was squeezing through the electric wires. So, I followed his lead and squeezed through, too. When I got up and looked behind me, I realized I was on the other side of the gates. And then I saw my friend was stuck and didn't move. He was still stuck in the wires. If I hadn't fallen, I would have been the first to squeeze through the electric wire. I would have been the one electrocuted.

Converging layers of hypocrisy in Bahrain's abuse of its own citizenry

In an op-ed piece in Al Jazeera ["The role of the Islamic Republic in Bahrain," 27 May 2011] Hamid Dabashi points out the many layers of hypocrisy that have converged in the treatment of demonstrators in Bahrain. His primary focus is Iran, but in the process of explaining Iran's perfidy he mentions that of several other countries that happen to be hostile to Iran.

"The Sunni royal family in Saudi Arabia," according to Britain's Daily Telegraph, "fears the growing influence of Shiite Iran in the Middle East, and is helping Bahrain's Sunni rulers retain power."

Also,

"the [UK] Ministry of Defence has now admitted that members of the Saudi Arabian National Guard sent into Bahrain may have received military training from the British Armed Forces in Saudi Arabia".

In the mean time Bahrain is the home of the US Fifth-Fleet,

"which makes "the great advocate of democracy" turn a blind eye to the murderous regime in Bahrain. . . "

Even though Iran's Shiite clerical regime might seem to support the Shiite demonstrations in Bahrain it is fully aware of the resemblance of those demonstrations to those of its own Shiite citizens it has repeatedly suppressed. The last thing the Iranians want is for those demonstrations to succeed.

The influence of the Islamic Republic in Bahrain is on the ruling regime: teaching it, by example, how viciously to quell a democratic revolt.

Saudi Arabia, Britain, the United States, Iran -- these countries for various and contrary reasons are supporting the Bahrain regime's abuses of its own people:

"The repression," Patrick Cockburn reports, "is across the board. Sometimes the masked security men who raid Shia villages at night also bulldoze Shia mosques and religious meeting places. At least 27 of these have so far been wrecked or destroyed, while anti-Shia and pro-government graffiti is often sprayed on any walls that survive." He further reports, "Nurses and doctors in a health system largely run by Shias have been beaten and arrested for treating protesters. Teachers and students are being detained. Some 1,000 professional people have been sacked and have lost their pensions. The one opposition newspaper has been closed. Bahraini students who joined protests abroad have had their funding withdrawn."

The Bahrain regime has even set about to silence all authentic reporting on what's going on inside the country.

"Bahraini authorities have begun an assault on local journalists working for international news agencies - with arrests, beatings and, apparently in one instance, electric shock."

States, whatever their claims, can be heartless when it comes to protecting their own interests. Even the U.S.; even Britain.

Dabashi's point is that the Bahraini regime is no better than that of Iran, as both repress their citizens with impunity.

[T]he Islamic Republic and Bahrain are in fact identical - not just in the majority of their population being Shia but in being ruled by two identically brutal and intolerant dictatorships. The Islamic Republic is frightened out of its wits by the Arab Spring, especially on its own back door, in Bahrain: for the more this Spring blooms and flowers the more it exposes the criminal atrocities of the Islamic Republic over the past thirty years, including, most recently, its own homegrown Green Movement - which one might in fact consider an early blooming of the Arab Spring.

[Click on the title above for a link to the whole piece.]