The Agonist - Global War on Terror

Renouncing Islamism: To the brink and back again

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 03:35:36 -0800

Johann Hari writes:

Independent.co.uk - Ever since I started meeting jihadis, I have been struck by one thing – their Britishness. I am from the East End of London, and at some point in the past decade I became used to hearing a hoarse and angry whisper of jihadism on the streets where I live. Bearded young men stand outside the library calling for "The Rule of God" and "Death to Democracy".

In the mosques across the city, I hear a fringe of young men talk dreamily of flocking to Afghanistan to "resist". Yet this whisper never has an immigrant accent. It shares my pronunciations, my cultural references, and my national anthem. Beneath the beards and the burqas, there is an English voice.

{snip}

The Muslims who arrive here every day from Bangladesh, or India, or Somalia say they find the presence of British Islamists bizarre. They have come here to work and raise their children in stability and escape people like them. No: these Islamists are British-born. They make up 7 per cent of the British Muslim population, according to a Populous poll (with the other 93 percent of Muslims disagreeing). Ever since the 7/7 suicide bombings, carried out by young Englishmen against London, the British have been squinting at this minority of the minority and trying to figure out how we incubated a very English jihadism. continues @ link.

Khadr to face charges in U.S.

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:05:55 -0800

Washington | November 13

CBC - Omar Khadr will be transferred to the United States from Guantanamo Bay to face charges in a military commission, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Friday, on the same day that the Supreme Court of Canada heard a federal government appeal in his case.

It is unclear when or where the 23-year-old inmate will be transferred, but he is one of 10 high-profile detainees to be sent to the U.S. to face justice.

Five of those inmates, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackings, will be on trial in a federal civilian court in New York City.

Five other inmates, including Khadr, will be headed to military commissions in the United States on a variety of terrorism charges.

News of his transfer came on the same day as the Canadian government pleaded its appeal in the Supreme Court on Khadr's latest case. Ottawa asked the top court to overturn a Federal Appeal Court decision to uphold a lower-court ruling that required Ottawa to try to repatriate Khadr, the only Western citizen still being held at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

On Friday, Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre told reporters that "any decision to ask for Mr. Khadr’s return to Canada is a decision for the democratically elected government of Canada and not for the courts.”

Asked whether that meant the government would ignore the Supreme Court's decision if it rules against it, Poilievre repeated that Khadr's fate should be decided by an elected government and not the courts.

9/11 suspects to be tried in New York: Official

Reuters, By Jeremy Pelofsky and James Vicini, November 13

WASHINGTON -- U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said Friday that he planned to seek the death penalty against the five men accused of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks if they are convicted in federal criminal court.

"I fully expect to direct prosecutors to seek the death penalty against each of the alleged 9/11 conspirators," Holder told reporters in unveiling plans to try the men, including the alleged plot mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, in federal court.

Mohammed and four other top terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay are to be sent to New York to be tried in a criminal court, the first major step to closing the controversial prison.

U.S. will try 9/11 plotters in New York, foresaking military trials

Miami Herald, By Carol Rosenberg, November 13

Confessed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and his four co-accused will face a federal trial in New York City — not a military tribunal in Guantánamo, Attorney General Eric Holder announced Friday.

Charges against the alleged al Qaeda kingpin have not yet been filed in the Manhattan court.

But President Barack Obama's administration has decided to abandon a Pentagon prosecution and pursue the case of the mass murder case of nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001 in a civilian setting.

"They will be brought to New York -- to New York -- to answer to their alleged crimes in a courtroom just blocks away from where the Twin Towers once stood,'' Holder said.

Khadr to face U.S. military tribunal

The Globe And Mail, By Paul Koring, November 13

Canadian Omar Khadr, the last westerner left in Guantanamo Bay, will face trial by military tribunal unlike the high-profile Sept 11, 2001, attacks plotters who will be brought to New York for trial in a civilian courts where they have far greater rights and protections, U.S. officials announced Friday.

Mr. Khadr's lawyer Barry Coburn, accused the administration of resorting to Bush-era injustice.

“We thought that the incoming Obama administration signalled a new day with respect to these cases, a new respect for civil liberties, an abhorrence of torture, a respect for the time-honored legal procedures and protections that are mandated by the Constitution and enforced by the federal courts,” he said.

Instead and despite the president's promises it has failed “to make these fundamental protections available to Omar Khadr, who was fifteen years old when he was detained in Afghanistan as a child soldier and has been locked away in Guantanamo ever since, is, quite frankly, devastating and shocking to me personally.

“I had thought this administration was better than that.”

Key 9/11 Suspect to Be Tried in New York

New York Times, By Charlie Savage, November 13

WASHINGTON — Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and four other men accused in the plot will be prosecuted in federal court in New York City, the United States attorney general announced Friday.

But the administration will prosecute another set of high-profile detainees now being held at the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is accused of planning the 2000 bombing of the Navy destroyer Cole in Yemen, and four other detainees — before a military commission.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced those decisions in a news conference Friday at the Department of Justice. The arrangements would mean that civilian prosecutors would handle those detainees accused of the 2001 terrorist attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, northern Virginia and Pennsylvania, while the 2000 attack against the Cole would remain within the military system.

No detainee is being moved right away. Under a law Congress enacted this year, lawmakers must be given 45 days notice before the executive branch moves any Guantánamo Bay detainee onto United States soil.

The decision marks a milestone in the administration’s efforts to close the Guantánamo prison, something that President Obama announced shortly after taking office that he would do within a year, but that has proved difficult to achieve because of uncertainty about what to do with the detainees housed there.

JOhn Pilger - 2009 Sydney Peace Prize speech

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 03:05:10 -0800

Breaking The Great Australian Silence |John Pilger | November 5

Thank you all for coming tonight, and my thanks to the City of Sydney and especially to the Sydney Peace Foundation for awarding me the Peace Prize. It's an honour I cherish, because it comes from where I come from.

I am a seventh generation Australian. My great-great grandfather landed not far from here, on November 8th, 1821. He wore leg irons, each weighing four pounds. His name was Francis McCarty. He was an Irishman, convicted of the crime of insurrection and "uttering unlawful oaths". In October of the same year, an 18 year old girl called Mary Palmer stood in the dock at Middlesex Gaol and was sentenced to be transported to New South Wales for the term of her natural life. Her crime was stealing in order to live. Only the fact that she was pregnant saved her from the gallows. She was my great-great grandmother. She was sent from the ship to the Female Factory at Parramatta, a notorious prison where every third Monday, male convicts were brought for a "courting day" - a rather desperate measure of social engineering. Mary and Francis met that way and were married on October 21st, 1823.

Growing up in Sydney, I knew nothing about this. My mother's eight siblings used the word "stock" a great deal. You either came from "good stock" or "bad stock". It was unmentionable that we came from bad stock - that we had what was called "the stain".

One Christmas Day, with all of her family assembled, my mother broached the subject of our criminal origins, and one of my aunts almost swallowed her teeth. "Leave them dead and buried, Elsie!" she said. And we did - until many years later and my own research in Dublin and London led to a television film that revealed the full horror of our "bad stock". There was outrage. "Your son," my aunt Vera wrote to Elsie, "is no better than a damn communist". She promised never to speak to us again.

The Australian silence has unique features.

Growing up, I would make illicit trips to La Perouse and stand on the sandhills and look at people who were said to have died off. I would gape at the children of my age, who were said to be dirty, and feckless. At high school, I read a text book by the celebrated historian, Russel Ward, who wrote: "We are civilized today and they are not." "They", of course, were the Aboriginal people.

My real Australian education began at the end of the 1960s when Charlie Perkins and his mother, Hetti, took me to the Aboriginal compound at Jay Creek in the Northern Territory. We had to smash down the gate to get in.

The shock at what I saw is unforgettable. The poverty. The sickness. The despair. The quiet anger. I began to recognise and understand the Australian silence.

Tonight, I would like to talk about this silence: about how it affects our national life, the way we see the world, and the way we are manipulated by great power which speaks through an invisible government of propaganda that subdues and limits our political imagination and ensures we are always at war - against our own first people and those seeking refuge, or in someone else's country.

Last July, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said this, and I quote: "It's important for us all to remember here in Australia that Afghanistan has been a training ground for terrorists worldwide, a training ground also for terrorists in South-East-Asia, reminding us of the reasons that we are in the field of combat and reaffirming our resolve to remain committed to that cause."

There is no truth in this statement. It is the equivalent of his predecessor John Howard's lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Shortly before Kevin Rudd made that statement, American planes bombed a wedding party in Afghanistan. At least sixty people were blown to bits, including the bride and groom and many children. That's the fifth wedding party attacked, in our name.

The prime minister was standing outside a church on a Sunday morning when he made his statement. No reporter challenged him. No one said the war was a fraud: that it began as an American vendetta following 9/11, in which not a single Afghan was involved. No one put it to Kevin Rudd that our perceived enemy in Afghanistan were introverted tribesmen who had no quarrel with Australia and didn't give a damn about south-east Asia and just wanted the foreign soldiers out of their country. Above all, no one said: "Prime Minister, There is no war on terror. It's a hoax. But there is a war of terror waged by governments, including the Australian government, in our name." That wedding party, Prime Minister, was blown to bits by one the latest smart weapons, such as the Hellfire bomb that sucks the air out of the lungs. In our name.

During the first world war, the British prime minister David Lloyd George confided to the editor of the Manchester Guardian: "If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don't know and they can't know."

What has changed? Quite a lot actually. As people have become more aware, propaganda has become more sophisticated.

One of the founders of modern propaganda was Edward Bernays, an American who believed that people in free societies could be lied to and regimented without them realising. He invented a euphemism for propaganda -- "public relations", or PR. "What matters," he said, "is the illusion." Like Kevin Rudd's stage-managed press conferences outside his church, what matters is the illusion. The symbols of Anzac are constantly manipulated in this way. Marches. Medals. Flags. The pain of a fallen soldier's family. Serving in the military, says the prime minister, is Australia's highest calling. The squalor of war, the killing of civilians has no reference. What matters is the illusion.

The aim is to ensure our silent complicity in a war of terror and in a massive increase in Australia's military arsenal. Long range cruise missiles are to be targeted at our neighbours. The Rudd government and the Pentagon have launched a competition to build military robots which, it is said, will do the "army's dirty work" in "urban combat zones". What urban combat zones? What dirty work?

Silence.

"I confess," wrote Lord Curzon, viceroy of India, over a century ago, "that countries are pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a great game for the domination of the world." We Australians have been in the service of the Great Game for a very long time. Do the young people who wrap themselves in the flag at Gallipoli every April understand that only the lies have changed - that sanctifying blood sacrifice in colonial invasions is meant to prepare us for the next one?

When Prime Minister Robert Menzies sent Australian soldiers to Vietnam in the 1960s, he described them as a 'training team', requested by a beleaguered government in Saigon. It was a lie. A senior official of the Department of External affairs wrote this secret truth: "Although we have stressed the fact publicly that our assistance was given in response to an invitation by the government of South Vietnam, our offer was in fact made following a request from the United States government."

Two versions. One for us, one for them.

Menzies spoke incessantly about "the downward thrust of Chinese communism". What has changed? Outside the church, Kevin Rudd said we were in Afghanistan to stop another downward thrust. Both were lies.

During the Vietnam war, the Department of Foreign Affairs made a rare complaint to Washington. They complained that the British knew more about America's objectives than its committed Australian ally. An assistant secretary of state replied. "We have to inform the British to keep them on side," he said. "You are with us, come what may."

How many more wars are we to be suckered into before we break our silence?

How many more distractions must we, as a people, endure before we begin the job of righting the wrongs in our own country?

"It's time we sang from the world's rooftops," said Kevin Rudd in opposition, "[that] despite Iraq, America is an overwhelming force for good in the world [and] I look forward to working with the great American democracy, the arsenal of freedom...".

Since the second world war, the arsenal of freedom has overthrown 50 governments, including democracies, and crushed some 30 liberation movements. Millions of people all over the world have been driven out of their homes and subjected to crippling embargos. Bombing is as American as apple pie.

In his acceptance of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature, Harold Pinter asked this question: "Why is the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought of Stalinist Russia well known in the West while American criminal actions never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it never happened. It didn't matter. It was of no interest."

In Australia, we are trained to respect this censorship by omission. An invasion is not an invasion if "we" do it. Terror is not terror if "we" do it. A crime is not a crime if "we" commit it. It didn't happen. Even while it was happening it didn't happen. It didn't matter. It was of no interest.

In the arsenal of freedom we have two categories of victims. The innocent people killed in the Twin Towers were worthy victims. The innocent people killed by Nato bombers in Afghanistan are unworthy victims. Israelis are worthy. Palestinians are unworthy. It gets complicated. Kurds who rose against Saddam Hussein were worthy. But Kurds who rise against the Turkish regime are unworthy. Turkey is a member of Nato. They're in the arsenal of freedom.

The Rudd government justifies its proposals to spend billions on weapons by referring to what the Pentagon calls an "arc of instability" that stretches across the world. Our enemies are apparently everywhere -- from China to the Horn of Africa. In fact, an arc of instability does indeed stretch across the world and is maintained by the United States. The US Air Force calls this "full spectrum dominance". More than 800 American bases are ready for war.

These bases protect a system that allows one per cent of humanity to control 40 per cent of wealth: a system that bails out just one bank with $180 billion - that's enough to eliminate malnutrition in the world, and provide education for every child, and water and sanitation for all, and to reverse the spread of malaria. On September 11th, 2001, the United Nations reported that on that day 36,615 children had died from poverty. But that was not news.

Journalists and politicians like to say the world changed as a result of the September 11th attacks. In fact, for those countries under attack by the arsenal of freedom, nothing has changed. What has changed is not news.

According to the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, a military coup has taken place in the United States, with the Pentagon now ascendant in every aspect of foreign policy.

It doesn't matter who is president - George Bush or Barack Obama. Indeed, Obama has stepped up Bush's wars and started his own war in Pakistan. Like Bush, he is threatening Iran, a country Hillary Clinton said she was prepared to "annihilate". Iran's crime is its independence. Having thrown out America's favourite dictator, the Shah, Iran is the only resource-rich Muslim country beyond American control. It doesn't occupy anyone else's land and hasn't attacked any country -- unlike Israel, which is nuclear-armed and dominates and divides the Middle East on America's behalf.

In Australia, we are not told this. It's taboo. Instead, we dutifully celebrate the illusion of Obama, the global celebrity, the marketing dream. Like Calvin Klein, brand Obama offers the thrill of a new image attractive to liberal sensibilities, if not to the Afghan children he bombs.

This is modern propaganda in action, using a kind of reverse racism - the same way it deploys gender and class as seductive tools. In Barack Obama's case, what matters is not his race or his fine words, but the power he serves.

In an essay for The Monthly entitled Faith in Politics, Kevin Rudd wrote this about refugees: "The biblical injunction to care for the stranger in our midst is clear. The parable of the Good Samaritan is but one of many which deal with the matter of how we should respond to a vulnerable stranger in our midst... We should never forget that the reason we have a UN convention on the protection of refugees is in large part because of the horror of the Holocaust when the West (including Australia) turned its back on the Jewish people of occupied Europe who sought asylum."

Compare that with Rudd's words the other day. "I make absolutely no apology whatsoever," he said, "for taking a hard line on illegal immigration to Australia ... a tough line on asylum seekers."

Are we not fed up with this kind of hypocrisy? The use of the term "illegal immigrants" is both false and cowardly. The few people struggling to reach our shores are not illegal. International law is clear - they are legal. And yet Rudd, like Howard, sends the navy against them and runs what is effectively a concentration camp on Christmas Island. How shaming. Imagine a shipload of white people fleeing a catastrophe being treated like this.

The people in those leaking boats demonstrate the kind of guts Australians are said to admire. But that's not enough for the Good Samaritan in Canberra, as he plays to the same bigotry which, as he wrote in his essay, "turned its back on the Jewish people of occupied Europe".

Why isn't this spelt out? Why have weasel words like "border protection" become the currency of a media crusade against fellow human beings we are told to fear, mostly Muslim people? Why have journalists, whose job is to keep the record straight, become complicit in this campaign?

After all, Australia has had some of the most outspoken and courageous newspapers in the world. Their editors were agents of people, not power. The Sydney Monitor under Edward Smith Hall exposed the dictatorial rule of Governor Darling and helped bring freedom of speech to the colony. Today, most of the Australian media speaks for power, not people. Turn the pages of the major newspapers; look at the news on TV. Like border protection, we have mind protection. There's a consensus on what we read, see and hear: on how we should define our politics and view the rest of the world. Invisible boundaries keep out facts and opinion that are unacceptable.

This is actually a brilliant system, requiring no instructions, no self-censorship. Journalists know not what to do. Of course, now and then the censorship is direct and crude. SBS has banned its journalists from using the phrase "Palestinian land" to describe illegally occupied Palestine. They must describe these territories as "the subject of negotiation". That is the equivalent of somebody taking over your home at the point of a gun and the SBS newsreader describing it as "the subject of negotiation".

In no other democratic country is public discussion of the brutal occupation of Palestine as limited as in Australia. Are we aware of the sheer scale of the crime against humanity in Gaza? Twenty-nine members of one family - babies, grannies - are gunned down, blown up, buried alive, their home bulldozed. Read the United Nations report, written by an eminent Jewish judge, Richard Goldstone.

Those who speak for the arsenal of freedom are working hard to bury the UN report. For only one nation, Israel, has a "right to exist" in the Middle East: only one nation has a right to attack others. Only one nation has the impunity to run a racist apartheid regime with the approval of the western world, and with the prime minister and the deputy prime minister ofb Australia fawning over its leaders.

In Australia, any diversion from this unspoken impunity attracts a campaign of craven personal abuse and intimidation usually associated with dictatorships. But we are not a dictatorship. We are a democracy.

Are we? Or are we a murdochracy.

Rupert Murdoch set the media war agenda shortly before the invasion of Iraq when he said, "There's going to be collateral damage. And if you really want to be brutal about it, better get it done now."

More than a million people have been killed in Iraq as a result of that invasion - "an episode", according to one study, "more deadly than the Rwandan genocide". In our name. Are we aware of this in Australia?

I once walked along Mutanabi Street in Baghdad. The atmosphere was wonderful. People sat in cafes, reading. Musicians played. Poets recited. Painters painted. This was the cultural heart of Mesopotania, the great civilisation to which we in the West owe a great deal, including the written word. The people I spoke to were both Sunni and Shia, but they called themselves Iraqis. They were cultured and proud.

Today, they are fled or dead. Mutanabi Street has been blown to bits. In Baghdad, the great museums and libraries are looted. The universities are sacked. And people who once took coffee with each other, and married each other, have been turned into enemies. "Building democracy", said Howard and Bush and Blair.

One of my favourite Harold Pinter plays is Party Time. It's set in an apartment in a city like Sydney. A party is in progress. People are drinking good wine and eating canap? They seem happy. They are chatting and affirming and smiling. They are stylish and very self aware.

But something is happening outside in the street, something terrible and oppressive and unjust, for which the people at the party share responsibility.

There's a fleeting sense of discomfort, a silence, before the chatting and laughing resumes.

How many of us live in that apartment?

Let me put it another way. I know a very fine Israeli journalist called Amira Hass. She went to live in and report from Gaza. I asked her why she did that. She explained how her mother, Hannah, was being marched from a cattle train to the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen when she saw a group of German women looking at the prisoners, just looking, saying nothing, silent. Her mother never forgot what she called this despicable "looking from the side".

I believe that if we apply justice and courage to human affairs, we begin to make sense of our world. Then, and only then, can we make progress.

However, if we apply justice in Australia, it's tricky, isn't it? Because we are then obliged to break our greatest silence - to no longer "look from the side" in our own country.

In the 1960s, when I first went to South Africa to report apartheid, I was welcomed by decent, liberal people whose complicit silence was the underpinning of that tyranny. They told me that Australians and white South Africans had much in common, and they were right. The good people of Johannesburg could live within a few kilometres of a community called Alexandra, which lacked the most basic services, the children stricken with disease. But they looked from the side and did nothing.

In Australia, our indifference is different. We have become highly competent at divide and rule: at promoting those black Australians who tell us what we want to hear. At professional conferences their keynote speeches are applauded, especially when they blame their own people and provide the excuses we need. We create boards and commissions on which sit nice, decent liberal people like the prime minister's wife. And nothing changes.

We certainly don't like comparisons with apartheid South Africa. That breaks the Australian silence.

Near the end of apartheid, black South Africans were being jailed at the rate of 851 per 100,000 of population. Today, black Australians are being jailed at a national rate that is more than five times higher. Western Australia jails Aboriginal men at eight times the apartheid figure.

In 1983, Eddie Murray was killed in a police cell in Wee Waa in New South Wales by "a person or persons unknown". That's how the coroner described it. Eddie was a rising rugby league star. But he was black and had to be cut down to size. Eddie's parents, Arthur and Leila Murray, launched one of the most tenacious and courageous campaigns for justice I've known anywhere. They stood up to authority. They showed grace and patience and knowledge. And they never gave in.

When Leila died in 2003, I wrote a tribute for her funeral. I described her as an Australian hero. Arthur is still fighting for justice. He's in his sixties. He's a respected elder, a hero. A few months ago, the police in Narrabri offered Arthur a lift home and instead took him for a violent ride in their bullwagon. He ended up in hospital, bruised and battered. That is how Australian heroes are treated.

In the same week the police did this - as they do to black Australians, almost every day - Kevin Rudd said that his government, and I quote, "doesn't have a clear idea of what's happening on the ground" in Aboriginal Australia.

How much information does the prime minister need? How many ideas? How many reports? How many royal commissions? How many inquests? How many funerals? Is he not aware that Australia appears on an international "shame list" for having failed to eradicate trachoma, a preventable disease of poverty that blinds Aboriginal children?

In August this year, the United Nations once again distinguished Australia with the kind of shaming once associated with South Africa. We discriminate on the basis of race. That's it in a nutshell. This time the UN blew a whistle on the so-called "intervention", which began with the Howard government smearing Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory with allegations of sex slavery and paedophile rings in "unthinkable numbers", according to the minister for indigenous affairs.

In May last year, official figures were released and barely reported.

Out of 7433 Aboriginal children examined by doctors, 39 had been referred to the authorities for suspected abuse. Of those, a maximum of four possible cases were identified. So much for the "unthinkable numbers". Of course, child abuse does exist, in black Australia and white Australia. The difference is that no soldiers invaded the North Shore; no white parents were swept aside; no white welfare has been "quarantined". What the doctors found they already knew: that Aboriginal children are at risk - from the effects of extreme poverty and the denial of resources in one of the world's richest countries.

Billions of dollars have been spent - not on paving roads and building houses, but on a war of legal attrition waged against black communities. I interviewed an Aboriginal leader called Puggy Hunter. He carried a bulging brief case and he sat in the West Australian heat with his head in his hands.

I said, "You're exhausted."

He replied, "Look, I spend most of my life in meetings, fighting lawyers, pleading for our birthright. I'm just tired to death, mate." He died soon afterwards, in his forties.

Kevin Rudd has made a formal apology to the First Australians. He spoke fine words. For many Aboriginal people, who value healing, the apology was very important. However, the Sydney Morning Herald published a remarkably honest editorial. It described the apology as "a piece of political wreckage" that "the Rudd government has moved quickly to clear away... in a way that responds to some of its supporters' emotional needs".

Since the apology, Aboriginal poverty has got worse. The promised housing programme is a grim joke. No gap has even begun to be bridged. Instead, the federal government has threatened communities in the Northern Territory that if they don't hand over their precious freehold leases, they will be denied the basic services that we, in white Australia, take for granted.

In the 1970s, Aboriginal communities were granted comprehensive land rights in the Northern Territory, and John Howard set about clawing back these rights with bribery and bullying. The Labour government is doing the same. You see, there are deals to be done. The Territory contains extraordinary mineral wealth, especially uranium. And Aboriginal land is wanted as a radioactive waste dump. This is very big business, and foreign companies want a piece of the action.

It is a continuation of the darkest side of our colonial history: a land grab.

Where are the influential voices raised against this? Where are the peak legal bodies? Where are those in the media who tell us endlessly how fair-minded we are? Silence.

But let us not listen to their silence. Let us pay tribute to those Australians who are not silent, who don't look from the side - those like Barbara Shaw and Larissa Behrendt, and the Mutitjulu community leaders and their tenacious lawyer George Newhouse, and Chris Graham, the fearless editor of the National Indigenous Times. And Michael Mansell, Lyle Munro, Gary Foley, Vince Forrester and Pat Dodson, and Arthur Murray.

And let us celebrate Australia's historian of courage and truth, Henry Reynolds, who stood against white supremacists posing as academics and journalists. And the young people who closed down Woomera detention camp, then stood up to the political thugs who took over Sydney during Apec two years ago. And good for Ian Thorpe, the great swimmer, whose voice raised against the intervention has yet to find an echo among the pampered sporting heroes in a country where the gap between white and black sporting facilities and opportunity has closed hardly at all.

Silences can be broken, if we will it. In one of the greatest poems of the English language, Percy Shelley wrote this:

Rise like lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep has fallen on you

Ye are many - they are few

But we need to make haste. An historic shift is taking place. The major western democracies are moving towards a corporatism. Democracy has become a business plan, with a bottom line for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope. The main parliamentary parties are now devoted to the same economic policies - socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor - and the same foreign policy of servility to endless war.

This is not democracy. It is to politics what McDonalds is to food.

How do we change this? We start by looking beyond the stereotypes and clich?that are fed to us as news. Tom Paine warned long ago that if we were denied critical knowledge, we should storm what he called the Bastille of words. Tom Paine did not have the internet, but the internet on its own is not enough.

We need an Australian glasnost, the Russian word from the Gorbachev era, which broadly means awakening, transparency, diversity, justice, disobedience. It was Edmund Burke who spoke of the press as a Fourth Estate. I propose a people's Fifth Estate that monitors, deconstructs and counters the official news. In every news room, in every media college, teachers of journalism and journalists themselves need to be challenged about the part they play in the bloodshed, inequity and silence that is so often presented as normal.

The public are not the problem. It's true some people don't give a damn - but millions do, as I know from the responses to my own films. What people want is to be engaged - a sense that things matter, that nothing is immutable, that unemployment among the young and poverty among the old are both uncivilised and wrong. What terrifies the agents of power is the awakening of people: of public consciousness.

This is already happening in countries in Latin America where ordinary people have discovered a confidence in themselves they did not know existed. We should join them before our own freedom of speech is quietly withdrawn and real dissent is outlawed as the powers of the police are expanded.

"The struggle of people against power, "wrote Milan Kundera, "is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

In Australia, we have much to be proud of - if only we knew about it and celebrated it. Since Francis McCarty and Mary Palmer landed here, we've progressed only because people have spoken out, only because the suffragettes stood up, only because the miners of Broken Hill won the world's first 35-hour week, only because pensions and a basic wage and child endowment were pioneered in New South Wales.

In my lifetime, we have become one of the most culturally diverse places on earth, and it has happened peacefully, by and large. That is a remarkable achievement - until we look for those whose Australian civilisation has seldom been acknowledged, whose genius for survival and generosity and forgiving have rarely been a source of pride. And yet, they remain, as Henry Reynolds wrote, the whispering in our hearts. For they are what is unique about us.

I believe the key to our self respect - and our legacy to the next generation - is the inclusion and reparation of the First Australians. In other words, justice. There is no mystery about what has to be done. The first step is a treaty that guarantees universal land rights and a proper share of the resources of this country.

Only then can we solve, together, issues of health, poverty, housing, education, employment. Only then can we feel a pride that comes not from flags and war. Only then can we become a truly independent nation able to speak out for sanity and justice in the world, and be heard.

Who is seeing the real Afghanistan?

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 12:20:48 -0800

Last week the Washington Post printed two letters from different sources who had spent time on the ground in Afghanistan that came to very different conclusions about the American presence there.

First, there is the letter from Matthew Hoh, the former Marine captain who had fought in Iraq and had recently taken a temporary foreign service assignment in Zabul province. One State department official referred to this area as, “one of the five or six provinces always vying for the most difficult and neglected.” Hoh had developed great misgivings about the war and had become so disillusioned that he chose to resign. Hoh wote in his resignation letter,

I fail to see the value or the worth in continued U.S. casualties or expenditure of resources in support of the Afghan government in what is, truly, a 35-year old civil war…. The United States presence in Afghanistan greatly contributes to the legitimacy and strategic message of the Pashtun insurgency.

Matthew Hoh has served his country bravely in combat and he has responded to a policy with which he disagreed by making the honorable choice to resign. His observations about the situation in Zabul province merit serious consideration. I wish that many others in the previous administration who had serious misgivings about policy but waited to reveal them until after leaving office had, instead, followed Hoh’s example.

Several days later, a letter to the editor appeared in the Washington Post from Benjamin Joseloff, an American serving as a fellow at the Afghanistan Legal Education Project. This initiative, started by Stanford Law students, is devoted to a helping Afghan universities improve the quality of their legal education. Joseloff writes....

continue reading Brian Vogt's post at http://blog.psaonline.org/2009/11/03/who-is-seeing-the-real-afghanistan/

Military refines a 'constant stare against our enemy'

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 04:53:51 -0800

Julian E. Barnes | Washington | November 2

LAT - The Pentagon plans to dramatically increase the surveillance capabilities of its most advanced unmanned aircraft next year, adding so many video feeds that a drone which now stares down at a single house or vehicle could keep constant watch on nearly everything that moves within an area of 1.5 square miles.

The year after that, the capability will double to 3 square miles.

Military officials predict that the impact on counter-terrorism operations in Afghanistan will be impressive.

"Predators and other unmanned aircraft have just revolutionized our ability to provide a constant stare against our enemy," said a senior military official. "The next sensors, mark my words, are going to be equally revolutionary."

[...]

Computers will take the Gorgon Stare images and "quilt" them into a mosaic that shows a large swath of territory, military officials said. That will enable the Defense Department to keep unblinking watch on a midsize city or village -- turning the Reapers into a kind of heavily armed traffic camera.

Such "pattern of life" intelligence is considered crucial for analysts who are trying to hunt down members of an insurgent network. Using the video feeds, analysts will be able to zoom in on different parts of the city, or follow the movement of particular people.

[...]

Predator and Reaper drones also can intercept electronic communications from radios, cellphones or other communication devices.

Last year, the Air Force overhauled how it organized its intelligence analysts. For the first time, video-feed analysts worked side by side with those listening to the audio.

"It is not just video resolution, it is not just signals, it is not just access to analysts," said the Defense official. "What has really evolved is the fact we can integrate a variety of information and analyze it in real time."

The number of Air Force unmanned drones available for deployment has increased significantly. In 2006, the Air Force was able to fly six drones at a time. Now operators are able to keep 38 aloft at once -- and the Air Force hopes to reach 50 by 2011.

With the wide-area surveillance technologies, the number of video feeds collected at one time is due to expand exponentially -- from 38 today to nearly 3,000 by 2013.

"This is Buzz Lightyear technology," said a military officer. "This is an unprecedented amount of information in warfare."

1,600 are suggested daily for FBI's list

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 07:45:59 -0800

Walter Pincus | Washington | November 1

WaPo - Number of names on terrorist watch list at 400,000, agency says

Newly released FBI data offer evidence of the broad scope and complexity of the nation's terrorist watch list, documenting a daily flood of names nominated for inclusion to the controversial list.

During a 12-month period ended in March this year, for example, the U.S. intelligence community suggested on a daily basis that 1,600 people qualified for the list because they presented a "reasonable suspicion," according to data provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee by the FBI in September and made public last week.

FBI officials cautioned that each nomination "does not necessarily represent a new individual, but may instead involve an alias or name variant for a previously watchlisted person."

The ever-churning list is said to contain more than 400,000 unique names and over 1 million entries. The committee was told that over that same period, officials asked each day that 600 names be removed and 4,800 records be modified. Fewer than 5 percent of the people on the list are U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents. Nine percent of those on the terrorism list, the FBI said, are also on the government's "no fly" list.

New Details on Interrogations

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 06:58:21 -0700

Scott Shane & Charlie Savage | Washington | October 30

NYT - F.B.I. agents who arrived at a secret C.I.A. jail overseas in September 2002 found prisoners “manacled to the ceiling and subjected to blaring music around the clock,” and a C.I.A. official wrote a list of questions for interrogators including “how close is each technique to the ‘rack and screw,”’ according to hundreds of pages of partially declassified documents released Friday by the Justice Department.

The documents also include handwritten notes, apparently prepared by Justice Department officials, discussing the possibility of prosecuting some personnel of the Central Intelligence Agency. The notes reveal that the Justice Department considered prosecuting a C.I.A. interrogator for a previously reported incident in which a detainee was threatened with a gun and a power drill, but it says Justice officials declined to prosecute the case.

The documents were released in the latest response to several Freedom of Information Act lawsuits filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and Judicial Watch, a Washington advocacy organization. Some are new versions of documents previously released.

Newly disclosed passages from a 2008 report by the Justice Department inspector general describe what agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation saw at the C.I.A. jail where Ramzi Binalshibh, one of the plotters of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, was being questioned.

The F.B.I. agents helped C.I.A. officers prepare questions for Mr. Binalshibh but “were denied direct access to him for 4 or 5 days,” the report said. Then an F.B.I. agent, identified with the pseudonym “Thomas,” was allowed to see him and found him “naked and chained to the floor.”

The agent told the inspector general “that he obtained valuable actionable intelligence in a short time but that the C.I.A. quickly shut down the interview,” the report said.

Links to released documents at the link!

Hillary Clinton tells Pakistan it's doing too little against Al Qaeda

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 23:36:09 -0700

Paul Richter | Washington DC | October 30

LA Times - On a fence-mending visit, the secretary of State turns blunt, saying she finds it 'hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn't get them if they really wanted to.'

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, visiting Pakistan on a fence-mending tour, turned unusually blunt Thursday, accusing the government of failing to do all it could to track down Al Qaeda.

Clinton told a group of journalists in Lahore that she found it "hard to believe that nobody in your government knows where they are and couldn't get them if they really wanted to." Al Qaeda, she said, "has had a safe haven in Pakistan since 2002."

Clinton's three-day visit is her first to Pakistan since she became secretary of State, and its principal goal is to improve strained relations. On the first day of her visit, in Islamabad, she declared that she wanted to "turn a page" in the U.S.-Pakistani relationship.

But on the second day, frustration seemed to surface as Clinton, a former U.S. senator from New York, confronted the long-standing strains between the countries.

Discussing Al Qaeda, she raised the issue of Pakistan's powerful military intelligence arm, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, which has been accused of secretly supporting militant groups in Afghanistan.

"There are issues that, not just the U.S., but others have with your government and with your military security establishment," she said.

Her comments came on a day when she took questions from students at Government College University in Lahore who made it clear that they are deeply suspicious of the United States' intentions in both Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Speaking to a group of business executives, Clinton also criticized Pakistan for its low rate of tax collection, which reflects rampant tax evasion and, critics say, undermines the country's efforts to address poverty.

"At the risk of sounding undiplomatic, Pakistan has to have internal investment in your public services and your business opportunities," she told the executives. The U.S. government taxes "everything that moves and everything that doesn't, and that's not what we see in Pakistan."

The U.S.-Pakistani relationship has recently been under strain. Many Pakistanis believe U.S. strikes by drone aircraft in the western tribal areas are an infringement of Pakistani sovereignty, and there has been an outcry over U.S. legislation providing $7.5 billion in new aid, which many Pakistanis see as American meddling in their government.

A U.S. official said Clinton's comments about Al Qaeda were not part of a prepared message she had intended to deliver, but reflected her own heartfelt views.

"She has very deeply held views about Al Qaeda," said the official, who declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject. "You've got to remember, she was a senator from New York on 9/11."

Daniel Markey of the Council on Foreign Relations said he was surprised that Clinton would raise the issue of Pakistan's efforts on Al Qaeda, given the current fragility of the civilian government.

"It seems like an odd time to come in and send this one across the bow," said Markey, a former State Department official just returned from a trip to Pakistan. "It's a little bit surprising."

Clinton's comments on Al Qaeda could ruffle feathers in Pakistan, where the army is engaged in a ground offensive in the militant haven of South Waziristan, begun at the strong urging of the United States.

A Pakistani official predicted that Clinton's comments would make some people in Pakistan angry, "some perhaps violently so." But he said that in his view, Clinton's candor was a sign that the relationship was maturing.

Clinton has earned a reputation for sometimes speaking with candor more closely associated with senators than chief diplomats.

On her first trip to Asia, early this year, she upset human rights advocates by saying China's intransigence on human rights should not affect the Washington-Beijing relationship on other issues.

Last spring, when insurgents invaded Pakistan's Swat Valley and appeared headed for the capital, Islamabad, she bluntly warned leaders that they might be risking the country's existence by failing to act against the insurgents.

Pakistani media have been skeptical about the earnestness of Clinton's trip. This morning, an editorial in the Nation newspaper called the visit "a PR exercise aimed at winning over hearts and minds. But with what? A few sanitized meetings with selected media people, students and the 'right' civil society members?"

Loosening of F.B.I. Rules Stirs Privacy Concerns

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 20:01:14 -0700

Charlie Savage | Washington | October 28

NYT - After a Somali-American teenager from Minneapolis committed a suicide bombing in Africa in October 2008, the Federal Bureau of Investigation began investigating whether a Somali Islamist group had recruited him on United States soil.

Instead of collecting information only on people about whom they had a tip or links to the teenager, agents fanned out to scrutinize Somali communities, including in Seattle and Columbus, Ohio. The operation unfolded as the Bush administration was relaxing some domestic intelligence-gathering rules.

The F.B.I.’s interpretation of those rules was recently made public when it released, in response to a Freedom of Information lawsuit, its “Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide.” The disclosure of the manual has opened the widest window yet onto how agents have been given greater power in the post-Sept. 11 era.

In seeking the revised rules, the bureau said it needed greater flexibility to hunt for would-be terrorists inside the United States. But the manual’s details have alarmed privacy advocates.

One section lays out a low threshold to start investigating a person or group as a potential security threat. Another allows agents to use ethnicity or religion as a factor — as long as it is not the only one — when selecting subjects for scrutiny.

“It raises fundamental questions about whether a domestic intelligence agency can protect civil liberties if they feel they have a right to collect broad personal information about people they don’t even suspect of wrongdoing,” said Mike German, a former F.B.I. agent who now works for the American Civil Liberties Union.

Global Rise in Makeshift Bombs Worries U.S.

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 19:41:43 -0700

Thom Shanker | Washington | October 28

NYT - American military officers are expressing concern over the spreading use of makeshift bombs beyond the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan to other countries in the region, as well as in East Asia and South America.

Improvised explosive devices, as the military calls them, have been the largest killer of American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, showing up with devastating effect in Pakistan and India, but also with less notice in Thailand, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Colombia, Somalia and parts of North Africa.

Even Russian security forces have faced the devices in the republics of Ingushetia and Dagestan, although attacks in Chechnya have fallen.

“There is a robust and constant I.E.D. effort among violent extremists who are using it as their weapon of choice,” said Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz, director of the Pentagon’s organization in charge of seeking ways to counter improvised explosives. “That won’t change for decades. We are in this fight for a long time.”

No one could have predicted...

F.B.I. Raid Kills Islamic Group Leader in Michigan

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 19:02:25 -0700

Nick Bunkley | Detroit | October 28

NYT - Federal authorities fatally shot a man they described as the leader of a violent Sunni Muslim separatist group in Detroit and took six others into custody during three raids on Wednesday.

The leader, Luqman Ameen Abdullah, 53, was killed after he refused to surrender and began firing at officers from a warehouse in Dearborn, Mich., according to a statement from the Federal Bureau of Investigations and the United States Attorney’s office in Detroit. An F.B.I. dog also was killed in the gun battle.

Mr. Abdullah, the authorities said, led a faction of a group called the Ummah, meaning “the brotherhood,” which advocates the establishment of a separate nation within the United States governed by Islamic laws. He was one of 11 men from Detroit and Ontario whom the authorities on Wednesday charged with conspiracy to commit federal crimes.

Some of the men also were charged with crimes including theft from interstate shipments, mail fraud to obtain the proceeds of arson, illegal possession and sale of firearms, and tampering with vehicle identification numbers. No one was charged with terrorism.

“The 11 defendants are members of a group that is alleged to have engaged in violent activity over a period of many years, and known to be armed,” the statement said.

[...]

Federal authorities spent three years investigating the group in Detroit, according to the complaint. During that time, Mr. Abdullah is said to have told informants that “America must fall” and that if police ever tried to apprehend him, he would “just strap a bomb on and blow up everybody.” To obtain bulletproof vests for protection, he allegedly told followers they should “shoot a cop in the head, and take their vest,” the complaint states.

Rather narrow translation of "Ummah"...

FBI kills leader of radical Muslims; 6 held in raids

Detroit Free Press, By Ben Schmitt, Niraj Warikoo & Robin Erb, October 28

The leader of what federal authorities describe as a fundamentalist group was shot and killed today during a series of raids in Dearborn and Detroit that resulted in federal charges against a dozen men.

Luqman Ameen Abdullah, 53, also known as Christopher Thomas, was gunned down after refusing to surrender and opening fire when the FBI raided a Dearborn warehouse, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

“The eleven defendants are members of a group that is alleged to have engaged in violent activity over a period of many years and known to be armed,” according to a joint statement from the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Office.

An FBI dog was also killed during one of the raids.

Abdullah and 10 others were charged in a complaint with conspiracy to commit several federal felony crimes, including illegal possession and sale of firearms and theft from interstate shipments.

A 12th man, A.C. Pusha, was arrested late Wednesday in connection with the investigation. Three of the men who were charged still were at large tonight. One was already in prison.

Federal authorities' news release on FBI raids
Criminal Complaint

Detroit mosque leader killed in FBI raids

The Detroit News, By Paul Egan, October 28

Detroit -- The leader of a black separatist Detroit mosque was shot and killed Wednesday during a series of FBI raids that resulted in charges against 12.

At least six of those charged -- who face conspiracy, weapons, and stolen goods charges but not terrorism charges -- were in federal custody late Wednesday afternoon.

The case involves the Joint Terrorism Task Force and prosecutors from the national security unit of the U.S. Attorney's Office.

A complaint filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Detroit names Luqman Ameen Abdullah, imam of the Masjid Al-Haqq mosque in Detroit, as "a highly placed leader of a nationwide radical fundamentalist Sunni group." He was killed in a gun battle during one of the raids, according to a joint statement by federal officials.

A list of those charged follows in the article

Photographer from the News assaulted

Supreme Court to hear Uighurs' case

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 19:21:57 -0700

Robert Barnes | Washington | October 21

WaPo - Justices to consider whether judges can release them into U.S.

The Supreme Court set aside the objections of the Obama administration and said Tuesday that it will consider whether judges have the power to release Guantanamo Bay detainees into the United States if they have been deemed not to be "enemy combatants."

The case, involving a group of Chinese Muslims known as Uighurs, again thrusts the court into the jangle of policy decisions and constitutional principles involving the approximately 220 men still held at the base in Cuba. And the court's decision to hear it could further complicate plans to close the military prison in January, a deadline the Obama administration recently said it might be unable to meet.

Last year, the court ruled 5 to 4 that a Guantanamo detainee had the right to prove to a federal judge that he was being unlawfully held as an enemy combatant. The current case is a logical next step, determining what powers a judge has to release such a person, especially when sending him back to his home country is not an option.

The Obama administration, like the Bush administration, says decisions about releasing detainees are reserved for the executive branch. And both the executive branch and Congress have said that decisions about whether detainees may be shipped to the United States, if there is no other place for them, are reserved for the political branches.

But lawyers for the Uighurs said restricting what judges may do to release those who have won their freedom would make the court's 2008 decision in Boumediene v. Bush meaningless.

"It would be hard to overstate the importance of the question presented in this case -- to the rule of law and to the public," the lawyers wrote in a brief to the court.

Also:
NYT: Justices to Decide on U.S. Release of Detainees
NYT: Leader of China’s Uighur Minority Builds a Stage Across the Globe
AP: China Secretly Detained 43 Uighur Men, Group Says

Victims’ families continue fight for new 9/11 probe

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 14:54:13 -0700

New York | October 15

RT - Families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks will continue to push for a new probe into the tragedy, despite a recent court decision not to put the issue on a referendum.

Around 80,000 campaigners in New York have called for a referendum on a new investigation into the 9/11 attacks back in September 2001, but the New York State Supreme Court has ruled it out.

The NYC Coalition For Accountability Now, which include victims’ relatives, survivors, and rescue workers lead the referendum campaign for the initiative to appear on November’s mayoral ballot.

The group accuses the 9/11 commission of failing to answer 70% of questions proposed by family members.

[...]

NYC CAN won’t appeal the courts decision, but plans to take its campaign nationwide, launching a PR blitz aimed at gathering American support.

“Our next challenge is to reshape the public’s views about 9/11, because the bottom line is that the only way that politicians will do anything relating to getting accountability, whether it’s 9/11 or another issue, is if there’s public outcry, widespread public outrage,” Ted Walter said.

The Coalition is disappointed, but not surprised, by the judge’s decision. After all, in the past 25 years, only one referendum has made it to the New York City ballot. That was back in 1993, when New Yorkers voted on how long their politicians served.

US to make Blackwater-style entry into Somalia

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 14:23:25 -0700

Grand Rapids, MI | October 16

PressTV - The grounds have reportedly been established for armed American presence on Somali soil with a US security firm winning a contract in the war-ravaged country.

Michigan-based CSS Global Inc., secured the contract under the plea of 'fighting terrorism and piracy' and 'protecting' Somalia's Transitional Federal Government (TFG), reported Michigan Live citing The Grand Rapids Press newspaper.

"It is going to be a huge challenge," said Chris Frain, chief executive officer and co-owner of CSS Alliance, to which the CSS Global Inc is affiliated. "This is a brand-new government being stood up with the help of the international community."

The contractor's operations team was composed of former military and law enforcement personnel, including Special Forces, Michigan Live added.

The US firm has been involved in other African nations as well as in Iraq, where 17 civilians were killed in 2007 by a similar licentiate, Blackwater, currently known as Xe Services.

Gun Show Undercover

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 12:13:18 -0700

Great video showing illegal sales that take place at gun shows, due to the gun-show loophole. Watch as one gun seller laughs when told the buyer couldn't pass a background check, and offers that he couldn't either. And you wonder how criminals get their hands on guns....

Full Disclosure: I have consulted on this issue & am passionate about gun safety