just commentary may 2015
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Vol 15, No.05 May 2015
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ARTICLES
MADE IN AMERICA
. NUCLEAR DEAL SPARKS RACE TO ENTER IRANIAN
MARKETS
BY NILE BOWIE..................................................P 7
.ENHANCING ASEAN BY CHANDRA MUZAFFAR.........................P4
.THE SCENE OF THE CRIME
BY SEYMOUR M. HERSH....................................P 9
. US INTEL STANDS PAT ON MH-17 SHOOT DOWN
BY ROBERT PARRY..........................................P 14
. THE 12TH ANNIVERSARY OF AAFIA SIDDIQUI’S
ABDUCTION
BY JUDY BELLO................................................P 17
STATEMENT
. EMPIRE AND COLONIALISM: RICH MEN IN LONDON
STILL DECIDING AFRICA’S FUTURE
BY COLIN TODHUNTER....................................P20
.INTERNATIONAL COURT, HAGUE, RULES IN FAVOUR
OF ECUADOR IN ITS CASE AGAINST U.S. OIL GIANT,
CHEVRON
BY ROBERT BARSOCCHINI.....................................P13
. OBAMA’S OUTRAGEOUS SNUB TO THE RUSSIAN
PEOPLE
BY BRYAN MACDONALD...................................P 5
As a lifetime student of classical mainline
Islamic jurisprudential school of thought called
“Sunni fiqh”, I feel saddened to note how the
Western mainstream media succumbed to the
Islamophobic propaganda of affixing the
epithet “Sunni” to the militia of the so-called
Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
I can confidently say that ISIS is not Sunni
because all that ISIS has done is to contravene
the ethical teachings of Sunni Islam.
I consider Sunni Islam as the normative Islam
practiced by the disciples of the Prophet
Muhammad, who are called Sahabah (model
companions) and the righteous caliphs “Al
KhalifahRashidun” (The Rightly Guided
Caliphs) who were democratically elected by
the whole Islamic Ummah (community).
When the Islamophobic Western media equates
ISIS barbarity and inhumanity to the normative
Islamic term “Sunni” (which literally means
followers of orthodox Islam), the Western
media is simply serving US Hegemonic
interests: by ensuring that neo-colonial and
hegemonic forces will continue unabated
the rising Islamophobia against Muslims and
by effectively maligning Sunni Islam which
is the prevalent school of Islamic
jurisprudence in the Middle East and the
rest of the Muslim world.
I can honestly attest that as per my readings
of Shariah principles of the Four Imams of
Sunni Islam (Imams Abu Hanifa, Shafi’i,
Malik and Ibn Hanbal) who were the
eminent jurisprudents of classical Sunni
Islam, I have never encountered any of
their treatise justifying barbarism and
inhumanity that are now being perpetrated
by ISIS.
In fact, these Four Imams of classical Sunni
Islam through their treatises strongly detest
the barbarity of the ISIS militia. Here are
six (6) reasons why the entire ISIS war
outfit cannot not be considered a ‘Sunni
movement” and should never be called
“Sunni” militia, and therefore Western
mainstream media should not and must
not commit Islamophobic name-calling,
and must therefore stop referring to ISIS
as “Sunni” militia:
1.) ISIS destroyed many holy shrines of
Sunni Muslims in Iraq and Syria,
including the shrine and mosque of the
Prophet Yunus (Jonah) of Ninawa
(Nineveh), Iraq and the shrine of Prophet
Ayyub (Job) in Oz, Mosul, Iraq; to
mention a few. They destroyed holy
graves of Sufi-Sunni Muslim saints in
and around Mosul and Kirkuk in Iraq and
in Damascus, Aleppo and Kobane in
Syria.
2.) The Holy Quran declares that
Muslims are forbidden to destroy places
.MEDITERRANEAN CATASTROPHES BY CHANDRA MUZAFFAR.........................P3
By Henry Francis B. Espiritu
I N T E R N A T I O N A L M O V E M E N T F O R A J U S T W O R L D
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L E A D A R T I C L E
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of worship of all religions; and particularly,
the shrines of the Ahl-ul-Kitab (literally,
“People with Sacred Scriptures”) i.e., Jews
and Christians must be held inviolable and
must even be secured by Muslims (Al-Qur-
an 22:40-41), and yet ISIS barbarically
destroyed Christian churches. Also, Islam
in the Holy Quran solemnly declares that
there should be no compulsion in religion
(Al-Qur’an 2:256), and yet this ISIS militia
are forcing Yezidis and Christians to convert
or else face death. This is very strange:
there is no news that records that Jews were
forcibly converted by ISIS and synagogues
around Mosul, Aleppo, Kirkuk and in cities
of North Iraq were never destroyed by ISIS,
even though there are resident Jews and
there are a number of synagogues in these
areas. This is a strange thing indeed! (See,
The Majlis: Council of Ulama in South
Africa; p. 8.)
3.) The Shariah Islamiyyah (Divine Law)
of classical Sunni Islam are found in the
Holy Qur’an and the Holy Qur’an clearly
says that civilians and non-combatants’ lives
are inviolable: (Al-Qur’an2:256, 5:69). As
of this juncture, to quote from the Holy
Qur’an is in order: “Allah forbids you to
fight those who did not oppress you, nor
threw you out of your homes, you ought
to show compassion on them and manifest
justice upon them. Verily Allah loves those
who are just” (60:8). The killing of innocent
non-combatants is forbidden in all Sunni
rulings concerning defensive warfare.
Sayyidina Abu Bakr al-Siddiq, the first Caliph
of Sunni Islam penned this ruling to the
armies of the Caliphate: “I instruct you in
ten matters: Do not kill women, children,
the old, or the infirm; do not cut down fruit-
bearing trees; do not destroy any town and
do not touch those who do not bear arms,
do not kill those who surrender and take
refuge in the designated places of refuge,
all who surrender to you must be safe in
your care.” (See Imam Malik’s Muwatta’,
“Kitab al-Fatawah-ul-Jihad-e-Abu Bakr
Siddiq” [The Book of Abu Bakr Siddiq on
the Proper Conduct of Warfare], pp. 37-
39.).
4.) As far as my research goes, there are
no Sunni scholars (ulama) and legitimate
Sunni muftis and fuqaha (Islamic jurists
and doctors of Islamic law) among the so-
called ISIS Caliphate to clearly establish
legitimate fatwas (Shariah rulings) on the
legitimacy of their jihad from the Sunni
Islamic perspective. There is not even an
ustadh (Islamic scholar) of eminence
among their ranks! The truth is that eminent
Sunni scholars of Iraq and Syria have
denounced ISIS for killing over 300 Sunni
imams: which effectively belied the ISIS
claim that it represents itself as the protector
of Sunnis in Iraq and Syria. Many Sunni
clerics in Iraq and the Levant declare ISIS
combatants as “outside the bounds of Islam
and are therefore excommunicated from
the Islamic faith” because of their brutality
inflicted on non-Muslims and on Sunni
Muslims
(See: www.breitbart.com/national-security/
2014/07/03/sunni-mufti-isis-and-affiliates-
have-killed-over-300-sunni-imams-and-
preachers/).
5.) Using the classical rulings of Sunni Islam
on governance as basis of legitimacy, the
so-called ISIS Caliphate is illegitimate.
Genuine and bona fide Sunni Caliphate is
established by the expressed consensus and
consent (al-mushshuw’ara al jamaah) of
the whole Islamic community by explicit
public allegiance (bay-ah) of the whole body
of Muslims. ISIS has unilaterally declared
their so-called caliph, Al-Baghdadi as
Khalifah-ul-Muslimin” (Caliph of all
Muslims) clandestinely and covertly, in
which the whole Muslim Ummah did not
participate in his election, nor choose him
to be its caliph, nor give him pledge of
allegiance!
6.) ISIS was only able to successfully
recruit combatants from Europe to wage
war in Iraq and the Levant, but it failed to
enlist the grassroot support of Iraqi and
Levantine Sunnis. Furthermore, it failed to
enlist allegiance of the Sunni Arab and
Kurdish clergies who strongly denounced
ISIS as outside the pale of the Islamic faith
(See: www.breitbart.com/national-security/
2014/07/03/sunni-mufti-isis-and-affiliates-
have-killed-over-300-sunni-imams-and-
preachers/).
In fact most of these ISIS militia are
Australians, British, Americans, Belgian,
French, German, Chechens, who mostly
came from Europe, so that most Iraqis and
Syrians regard ISIS as an alien power
forcing and imposing themselves and their
barbarity upon Arab lands with their
sophisticated weaponries and ammunition
that are mostly sourced from US, Britain
and the rest of Europe.
If ISIS is not a Sunni militia, then who are
they working for?
Who employed them to wreck havoc in
the Middle East?
Why is it that the US government and its
NATO allies cannot seriously fight ISIS in
Iraq, Syria and the rest of the Levant? ISIS
is US-made monster! ISIS Caliphate is
never an Islamic Caliphate.
It is a “U.S.-made Caliphate” that does not
have any binding authority whatsoever over
worldwide Muslims.
It is a known truth that CIA constantly
backs-up and supports all known so-called
jihadist groups from the Taliban of
Afghanistan and Pakistan, to even Jemaa
Islamiyya and Al-Qaeda in the Middle East,
and the Boko Haram of Nigeria.
That is why US will never seriously fight
these monsters it created.
US is the invisible director of all international
terrorism groups so that these monsters can
commit crimes mercilessly and with
impunity against humanity. These monsters
are made alive and sustained by American
dollars and ably, yet subtly directed by the
I N T E R N A T I O N A L M O V E M E N T F O R A J U S T W O R L D
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master of the puppetry: US invisible
hegemonic hand!
NATO is in unholy partnership with the
CIA operators who are currently training,
arming, funding and equipping thousands
of ISIS combatants from Europe to
overthrow secular and socialist Syria as
part of the CIA ploy called “Arab
Spring”—which is nothing but a covert
ideological operation to to conquer the
Middle East and Central Asia, its oil
reserves, its pipeline corridors as part of
an imperial agenda. (On The Trans-
Afghan pipeline see Michel
Chossudovsky, “America’s War on
Terrorism”, chapter 5, pp. 65-91).
Therefore, who is supporting this ISIS
militia, who is equipping them, who is
funding them so heftily?
For what purpose are they doing these
despicable acts? If they are truly
Islamic fighters bent on fighting for
the rights of Islam and the Muslims,
then why do they bomb Sunni Muslim
mosques, Sufi Muslim shrines and
Shi’ite Muslim prayer halls of their co-
religionists?
Is this about establishing a war scenario in
the Middle East so that the global weaponry
business of the US military industrial
complex is at its best and profitable business
as usual?
These are relevant questions for our sober
reflection.
19 March 2015
Henry Francis B. Espiritu is Associate
Professor of Philosophy and Asian Studies
at the University of the Philippines, Cebu
City.
Source: http://www.globalresearch.ca/
STATEMENTS
MEDITERRANEAN CATASTROPHES: TIME THAT THE PEOPLE OF
EUROPE STOOD UP
About a fortnight ago — just before
midnight on the 18th of April 2015 — the
Mediterranean witnessed one of the greatest
catastrophes that has ever occurred on its
waters. More than 800 migrants in a small
fishing boat were drowned off the coast of
Libya as a result of a collision with another
vessel.
This was the latest in a series of tragedies
of this sort. Just before the 18th April episode,
there were two other shipwrecks that left
450 people dead. In September 2014, 500
migrants drowned when the traffickers
navigating their boat rammed it in an attempt
to force the passengers on board to get into
another smaller vessel. In October 2013,
360 Africans perished when their tiny boat
caught fire within sight of the Italian coast.
There is clear evidence now to show that
migrants packed into untrustworthy boats
dying in various disasters on the
Mediterranean is increasing at an alarming
rate. This year, up to the end of April, at
least 1750 of them were killed crossing the
Mediterranean. This is 30 times more than
for the same period in 2014!
These desperate, largely poor migrants are
from different countries. Libyans, Syrians,
Iraqis, Sudanese (both North and South),
Somalians, Eritreans, Malians and even
Bangladeshis would be some of the
nationalities involved. The vast majority of
them are fleeing to Europe from the turmoil
and chaos in their countries, often typified
by unbearable violence, or are seeking to
escape grinding poverty and gnawing
hunger. The media portrays their countries
as “failed or “failing” states.
What the media does not highlight is the
role of certain Western governments in
creating the chaos and violence in a number
of these so-called failed states. In the case
of Libya for instance which now supplies
some of the traffickers and generates many
of the migrants, it was the NATO
engineered ouster of Muammar Gaddafi in
2011 that set into motion the forces that
are responsible for the current upheaval in
the country, as a consequence of which
there is no functioning government.
Gaddafi’s violent overthrow — it is worth
emphasizing over and over again — was
primarily to enable French, American and
other Western companies to control Libya’s
vast oil reserves and to nip in the bud his
plans to ensure that Africa would not be
under the sway of Western imperial
interests.
Likewise, if hundreds of thousands of
Syrians have fled their country in the last
three years, including those who are trying
to cross the Mediterranean, it is mainly
because of a brutal, violent uprising
orchestrated by the US and Israel, with the
active collusion of regional actors such as
Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey and
executed on the ground by fanatical religious
bigots like the Jabhat al-Nusra and Da’ish (
ISIL ) which seeks to eliminate Bashar al-
Assad who is a critical link in the resistance
to Western-Israeli dominance over West
Asia.Yet another example, it is the Anglo-
American invasion and occupation of Iraq
in 2003 that triggered sectarian violence
leading to the present instability which has
now conduced to a situation where a group
like Da’ish is able to control a swathe of
territory further driving Iraqis from home
and hearth. Needless to say, the principal
reasons for the imperial conquest of Iraq
were control over oil and buttressing
By Chandra Muzaffar
S T A T E M E N T
I N T E R N A T I O N A L M O V E M E N T F O R A J U S T W O R L D
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S T A T E M E N T Scontinued from page 3
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Israel’s position.
Turning to another country in the Arab world
which has produced a number of migrants
seeking refuge in Europe, it appears that by
helping to create South Sudan in pursuit of
their own agenda, Western powers and
Israel have only exacerbated an already dire
situation. Somalia is another country which
has known only perpetual instability since
the early nineties partly because of US
meddling through its proxies in the region.
The inevitable outcome of this is the exodus
of migrants as the Somali presence in a
number of boat tragedies in the
Mediterranean reveals. One can expect US
collaboration with Saudi Arabia in the latter’s
assault upon Yemen to give rise to yet
another exodus, a portion of which will find
its way to the Mediterranean.
As with Libya, Syria and Iraq, US direct
and indirect intervention in South Sudan,
Somalia, Yemen and other countries,
sometimes abetted by other Western
powers and Israel, has undoubtedly made
life much worse for the affected people
and in many instances forced them to brave
the treacherous waters of the Mediterranean
in search of security and certainty. In
looking for solutions to the tragedies
occurring in the Mediterranean, European
governments and European civil societies
should focus upon this paramount issue:
how US, Israeli and other Western agendas
aimed at control and dominance — or
hegemony — have been a fundamental
factor in creating chaos and instability thus
compelling millions of men, women and
children right across West Asia and North
Africa (WANA) to risk their lives in the
hope that they will reach other shores that
will provide them with shelter and succor.
This does not mean that there are no other
causes for the outflow of people from
WANA. Bad governance within a nation-
state, especially massive corruption,
oppression and religious and ethnic
discrimination have all contributed to the
exodus, to people fleeing the land of their
birth and ancestry. But incontrovertible
evidence convinces us that the determined
drive by the US and its allies to pursue their
hegemonic agenda in WANA and elsewhere
has been the principal — sometimes the root
— cause of people trying to cross the
Mediterranean and reach Europe for a better
life.
The people of Europe some of whom have
been deeply moved by the 18th April
catastrophe should demand that their
governments cease to support a hegemonic
power on the other side of the Atlantic or
participate in hegemonic adventures that
bring death to so many and cause so much
pain and misery to their fellow human beings.
1st May 2015
Dr. Chandra Muzaffar is the President of
the International Movement for a Just World
(JUST).
ENHANCING ASEAN
The Malaysian Minister of Foreign Affairs,
Dato Seri AnifahAman, has adopted the right
stance at the meeting of the ASEAN
Ministers of Foreign Affairs in conjunction
with the ASEAN Summit in Kuala Lumpur
by emphasizing the importance of
continuing with ASEAN’s non-
confrontational approach in dealing with
maritime disputes in the South China Sea
between certain ASEAN states and China.
A confrontational approach which forces
ASEAN as a collective entity into an
adversarial mode in its relations with China
will be detrimental to both sides. It will
undermine on-going efforts to formulate a
Code of Conduct governing ASEAN-China
relations especially in the context of the
South China Sea.
One hopes that the ASEAN Summit this
time will also facilitate the opening up of
yet another channel of communication
between ASEAN and China through think
tanks, research institutes and universities
which will explore in depth the many facets
in the interaction between the two sides.
Since the geopolitical and geo-economic
dimensions of this relationship will
undoubtedly figure prominently in an
exploration of this sort, the entities
concerned should also interface with US
think tanks and universities. A three way
interaction among ASEAN, China and the
US through this channel may make it a little
easier to surmount some of the challenges
that confront the three actors today. ASEAN
researchers and scholars should view this
interaction as an opportunity to strengthen
the cohesiveness and solidarity of ASEAN
as a distinct political community of
sovereign states that is determined to protect
its independence in the face of escalating
Sino-US rivalry.
The ASEAN Summit should also address
yet another challenge to its cohesiveness
and solidarity. The frayed relations between
segments of the Buddhist and Muslim
communities in Myanmar and Thailand call
for an earnest effort to address some of
the underlying causes of friction between
the two communities. While attempts to
overcome some immediate concerns should
continue through governments in both
states, civil society groups should also hold
substantive dialogues between Buddhists and
Muslims. It is significant that civil society
groups have been doing this for decades
below the radar screen. A platform has now
been created for Buddhist-Muslim relations
— the Buddhist-Muslim Forum established
in August 2013 — which seeks to promote
their shared values through action
programmes. The International Network of
Engaged Buddhists (INEB), the International
Movement for a Just World (JUST),
Muhammadiyah and Religions for Peace are
among the partners in this endeavour. We
have reached out to the ASEAN Secretariat
in Jakarta. The ASEAN Summit should give
a boost to this ASEAN citizens’ effort by
recognizing the importance of inter-faith
dialogue and action that goes beyond Muslim
and Buddhist communities and embraces
all the religions in the region.
Appreciating the role of civil society groups
in building bridges among communities
should be part of the larger goal of
transforming ASEAN into a people-centred
By Chandra Muzaffar
I N T E R N A T I O N A L M O V E M E N T F O R A J U S T W O R L D
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A R T I C L E S
continued from page 4
entity. Though some ASEAN governments
have long spoken of this aspiration, very
little concrete action has been taken —
outside business circles — to translate it
into reality. There are at least three areas
where this can be done. A pioneer
programme which brings together a
hundred upper secondary school students
between the ages of 15 and 17, ten from
each ASEAN country, should be launched
as soon as feasible with the eventual aim of
nurturing tens of thousands of young
people with genuine understanding of, and
real-life exposure to, ASEAN. Each student
selected for this programme should
immerse herself in a month long study
course on the various dimensions of
ASEAN, including its geography, history
and myriad cultures before she spends a
month staying in each of the other nine
ASEAN states, over a nine month period.
After she returns home, hopefully armed
with an ASEAN outlook, she would be
required to write a monograph or produce
a video on her nine month tour of ASEAN.
She should then be invited to visit secondary
schools throughout her own country to
disseminate information and knowledge
about ASEAN based upon her own
experience and her learning.Finally, student
participants and educationists in all ten
ASEAN states should do an assessment of
this pioneer programme to determine its
future.
An equally powerful arena for fostering an
ASEAN outlook and an ASEAN spirit would
be culture and entertainment. Wouldn’t it
be wonderful to popularize ASEAN
cuisines within ASEAN itself? Over time,
ASEAN citizens should be able to empathize
with ASEAN cuisines other than their own.
Could we also organize ASEAN cultural
exhibitions and shows in not only the cities
but also in the small towns that dot the
ASEAN landscape which will bring bits of
ASEAN to the remotest corners of this
region? Would it be possible to sponsor an
ASEAN –wide song contest which would
require each contestant to sing a song in
the language of her land? What about
increasing the screening of films and
documentaries from other ASEAN
countries in each and every ASEAN state?
Since the radio is still an influential medium
of communication in much of rural
ASEAN, could we expand broadcast hours
allotted to news and entertainment from our
ASEAN neighbours?
If culture and entertainment impact
upon people, so does sports. It is
somewhat surprising that ASEAN has
not established an ASEAN badminton
team, given the presence of so many
world-class badminton players in
individual ASEAN states. Such a
badminton team which could take on a
Chinese or Japanese or Danish team
would help in fostering an ASEAN
identity. The same could be done in
table-tennis or hockey or football or
basketball or netball. Even an ASEAN
athletics contingent which could
compete at the international level would
bring ASEAN citizens together.
When people are able to see ASEAN
perform as ASEAN, whether in the
sports field or the entertainment arena,
they will begin to identify with ASEAN.
Similarly, when an ASEAN
consciousness seeps into the minds of
school students, it is quite conceivable
that future generations will feel and think
ASEAN. It is at that point that ASEAN
would have become a people centred
entity, not a state based outfit.
26 April 2015.
ARTICLES
OBAMA’S OUTRAGEOUS SNUB TO THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE
Barack Obama’s decision to play political
games with the 70th anniversary of Victory
Day was probably intended as a snub to
Vladimir Putin. However, it’s actually an
outrageous insult to the Russian people.
I remember my first Russian May 9th very
well. For the simple reason that following
a rather raucous Saturday night, I plain
forgot about it. Waking up slightly the worst
for wear, I took Kris Kristofferson’s advice
and flung on my “cleanest, dirty shirt”
before heading to downtown Khabarovsk
on that Sunday morning sidewalk. The
problem was that the otherwise innocent
garment was something I’d picked up at
World Cup 2006 in Berlin. Emblazoned
across the front were the words,
“Deutschland” and on the rear “Germany”
for those who had initially missed the point.
Dozily trotting down the Far Eastern
capital’s wide central thoroughfare, Karl
Marx Street, I noticed a few strange looks
alright. By the time I passed the viewing
platform at Lenin Square, my paranoia levels
had peaked as people kept smiling at me, a
very un-Russian trait. Eventually, I reached
the Steakhouse where I’d arranged to meet
my friend Vova and his buddy Max. Seeing
my attire, they both laughed so hard that
they doubled over.
“Oh my god! Is there a shop open, I need
to buy a new T-Shirt,” I nervously said.
“No, you don’t. It’s just funny. You are not
doing anything wrong,” Vova replied.
“Are you sure? I won’t get attacked by
Russian nationalists or anything?”
“Not unless you put über alles after the
Deutschland!”
By Bryan MacDonald
I N T E R N A T I O N A L M O V E M E N T F O R A J U S T W O R L D
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A R T I C L E S
continued from page 5In my homeland, St Patrick’s Day is a very
big deal. The Irish have a love/hate attitude
to it and many resent its association with
heavy drinking. However, it remains our
national holiday and despite the odd cringe,
we are proud of its global appeal. To be
honest, I’m not sure how safe it would be
to wear an England soccer shirt in Dublin
or a provincial Irish city on March 17. For
what it’s worth, I wouldn’t personally be
inclined to volunteer as a guinea pig either.
Russians respect Germany
The point here is that Russians, despite the
horrors of the “Great Patriotic War,” as its
known there, don’t hate Germans. In actual
fact, they quite like them. I can only give
my personal experience, but I find that when
you ask Russians which foreign country
they most admire, a few will plump for the
USA, a couple more for Japan or France
but the majority will say Germany. Back
home, I’d have to travel a long way before
I’d find an Irishman who would admit to
reverence for England.
Angela Merkel knows this too. She also
understands how much “Victory Day”
means to Russians. For that reason, despite
humungous pressure from the US, which
effectively colonizes her nation militarily, she
will visit Moscow this weekend to
commemorate the dead. The Chancellor is
skipping the army parade on the 9th and
instead will lay a wreath at the Tomb of the
Unknown Soldier with President Putin the
following day. Of course, a lot of Russians
feel she should appear at both events.
Indeed, one Vadim Raskin, a doctor from
Novokuznetsk, organized a campaign which
saw thousands write to her Berlin address
expressing dismay.
While Merkel feels that the blowback from
the Ukraine crisis means she can’t attend
the military display, she’s at least
acknowledging Russia’s gigantic war
sacrifice. Smaller NATO members, Greece
and the Czech Republic, are sending their
heads of state and Slovakia will be
represented by its Prime Minister, Robert
Fico. Many in Moscow, including President
Putin, accuse the US of coercing other
European states not to send delegations.
However, while Europe cowers under
American duress, the leaders of China, India,
Brazil and South Africa will be present in
Moscow. What should have been a day for
solemn commemoration of humanity’s
most tragic waste of life, has been turned
into an interstate ‘brannigan’, worthy of a
putative new Cold War. The man
responsible for this is Barack Obama. It’s
less the “audacity of hope” and more the
timidity of doltishness.
Obama’s own goal
Like an Englishman taking a penalty at a
World Cup, Obama has snatched defeat
from the jaws of victory and handed his
great rival, Vladimir Putin, the moral high
ground. Let me explain why the White
House’s petty snub is a major strategic
blunder and also an error of principle.
What most European and North American
commentators don’t fully understand is just
how all-consuming memories of the “Great
Patriotic War” are for Russians. Defeating
German fascism and repelling the Nazi
invasion is regarded as their finest hour as a
people. Some in the West may perceive Yuri
Gagarin’s first space flight as the crowning
glory, but the natives don’t. There’s a simple
reason for this, almost every Russian either
has a living or dead relative who fought in
the conflict. On the other hand, not many
Russians can boast of a family member who
has been to outer space.
The UK and the USA also lean heavily on
the memory of World War Two, the latter
aided by Hollywood which often re-writes
the accepted history. While both made huge
contributions to the war effort, even the
most myopic would not dare suggest that
either’s suffering was comparable to what
the USSR endured. Total Soviet deaths
numbered around 27 million.
By comparison, Britain lost 450,000 and
the USA 420,000. The main aggressor,
Germany, counted around six million
casualties. In 2004, Russian historian Vadim
Erlikhman estimated that around 14 million
of the Soviet fallen were from Russia with
other massive losses sustained by Ukraine
(6.8 million) and Belarus (2.3 million). The
central Asian countries, former Soviet
republics of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan
suffered greater loss of life than the UK or
USA. Poland was also a victim of the war.
In 1987, Dachau survivor Franciszek Proch
concluded that 3.3 million ethnic Polish and
2.5 million Polish Jews died.
Obama - hope we can’t believe in
For Barack Obama to use the specter of a
civil war in a failed, corrupt state on the
edge of Europe as an excuse to water the
graves of Russia’s war dead is an absurdity.
Especially after his own representatives
promoted the violent coup - against a freely
elected government - which created the
conditions for the conflict.
A man who likes to preach about
democracy and freedom should surely
realize that those values he, outwardly, holds
dear survive in part because of the Russian
and Soviet sacrifice 70 years ago. I actually
suspect he doesn’t acknowledge this. US
policy towards Moscow is so harebrained
that one would venture that a team of
monkeys, armed with ‘ogham’ stones,
would do a better job than the State
Department’s current Russia team.
A country that celebrates its own national
holidays with such fervor as the Americans
exhibit on Thanksgiving and the 4th of July
should be aware of how other nations feel
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about theirs. That said, Victory Day is more
than a regular national holiday. It’s living,
breathing history.
This 70th anniversary is probably the last
major milestone that a significant number
of veterans will be able to attend. The fact
that Barack Obama was unable to find it in
his heart to come to Moscow and doff his
cap to men and women who did more for
the values he purports to hold dear than he
ever will, speaks volumes about his
character. The worst American President
since Jimmy Carter has not only destroyed
relations between the White House and the
Kremlin, he may also have obliterated any
residual goodwill that still existed from the
ordinary Russian people towards America.
That’s a poisonous legacy.
6 May 2015
Bryan MacDonald is an Irish writer and
commentator focusing on Russia and its
hinterlands and international geo-politics.
Source: rt.com
NUCLEAR DEAL SPARKS RACE TO ENTER IRANIAN MARKETS
By Nile Bowie
The deal reached in Lausanne between Iran
and major world powers represents a high
point in negotiations aimed at outlining the
future of Iran’s nuclear programme.
Considerable concessions have been made
by both sides, while Hassan Rouhani’s
government in Tehran has moved closer to
freeing Iran from almost all economic and
financial sanctions, a key goal of his
administration.
Though the full details of a comprehensive
deal will not be finalized until late June and
differences remain on various technical and
legal dimensions of the programme, a
successful settlement of the nuclear issue
could open the door to a new stage in the
US-Iran relationship, the effects of which
have already begun to slowly reshape the
region’s existing strategic order.
Iran must now fulfill a number of stringent
conditions over the next six to eight months
before Western states lift the sanctions
regime placed on the country, which have
weakened the Iranian economy and
wrought widespread human suffering. The
tasks are designed to reduce Iran’s breakout
capacity, by extending the period of time
Tehran would need to produce enough
fissile material for a nuclear warhead, if it
decided to do build one.
Due to the politicized nature of the issue, it
is necessary to address several preliminary
facts about Iran’s nuclear program. Though
Iran has accelerated its capacity to enrich
uranium in recent years, assessments that
represent the consensus view of America’s
intelligence agencies have continued to
maintain since 2007 that there is no hard
evidence of Iran’s intentions to develop a
nuclear weapon.
Al Jazeera has recently published a secret
cable that demonstrates how Israeli
intelligence assessments of Iran’s nuclear
program are consistent with those of
American intelligence agencies. The
International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA), which has conducted extensive
inspections of the Iranian program for years,
also concluded that Tehran was not seeking
to weaponize its nuclear program.
The Iranian government has consistently
renounced the use of nuclear weapons, but
has steadfastly upheld its right to maintain a
peaceful nuclear program and a capacity to
enrich uranium for civilian purposes, which
it is entitled to as a signatory of the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Tehran
views the politicization of the nuclear issue
as an affront to its sovereignty and a pretext
for Western powers to enforce sanctions
to undermine and contain the Islamic
Republic.
Some of the tasks Iran must now adhere
to involve intrusive daily IAEA inspections,
a significant reduction of low-enriched
uranium stockpiles, disabling two-thirds of
installed centrifuges for a period of 10 years,
a pledge not to construct any new uranium
enrichment facilities or enrich above an
agreed percentage, among other stipulations.
Tehran must also cooperate and provide
access to the IAEA as it investigates evidence
of past work on nuclear weaponization.
Upon fulfilling these conditions, the
European Union has agreed to lift its embargo
on Iranian oil in addition to all other
economic and financial sanctions. The
Obama administration would then issue
waivers corresponding to US extra-
territorial sanctions that would deter banks
and European companies from financing
trade and investments within Iran. The
removal of economic sanctions will be a
huge boost to the Iranian economy and
mutually advantageous for western business
interests.
Global corporations view Iran as a largely
untapped market with a vast potential for
development. Swiss banks have begun
positioning themselves to prospective
investors as an alternative to European
banks that cannot conduct business with
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continued from page 7Tehran until sanctions are formally
withdrawn. Oil and gas companies,
automakers, industrial manufacturers, and
global aviation giants such as Airbus and
Boeing have the potential to profit
enormously.
Iran possesses large oilfields along its border
with Iraq, as well as the South Pars offshore
gasfield in the Gulf along the maritime border
with Qatar, one of the largest gasfields in
the world. The Rouhani administration’s
business-friendly approach, along with
Iran’s potential for large oil and gas
discoveries and low cost of production, are
indications that Iran will resume its position
as one of the world’s biggest crude
exporters once sanctions are dismantled,
placing greater downward pressure on
energy prices.
Sanctions have reduced Iranian oil exports
by half, from 2.5m barrels a day in 2012 to
1.1m a day, while sources indicate that Iran
has a large backlog of at least 30m barrels
of unsold crude being stored. Ordinary
Iranians will not immediately feel the benefits
of sharp inflows of western money and
investment, though a strengthened Iranian
economy will lift the national mood and
solidify the victory of Iran’s pragmatists,
who have secured support from political
forces that cautiously endorsed the
negotiations, such as the Islamic
Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
In Washington, the Republican-controlled
Congress has shown vociferous opposition
to the Iranian deal, echoing the hardline
stance of Israel and Saudi Arabia. While
American companies stand to gain from
access to Iranian markets, there are clearly
more strategic considerations that have
motivated the Obama administration’s policy
shift toward Tehran to favor diplomacy on
the nuclear issue, when previously the
position was narrowly reliant on sanctions,
non-engagement and the threat of use of
force.
US Needs Iran to Offset Strategic Decline
Washington’s web of contradictory alliances,
overt and covert interventions, and attempts
to consolidate a pro-American regional order
throughout the Middle East have resulted in
that region becoming more sectarian and
violently unstable than at any point in modern
history, while the strategic position of the
United States more generally is in decline. It
is in this context that strategic rapprochement
between Washington and Tehran has
become more advantageous to American
interests than a policy of non-engagement
and open support for regime change.
Though engagement and communication
between the governments in Washington
and Tehran are at their highest point since
the Islamic Revolution in 1979, there is no
understating the mutual antipathy and distrust
that both governments hold toward one
another. While there are several areas where
the interests of Washington and Tehran align,
this strategic confluence does not imply that
any US-Iran cooperation on issues outside
the nuclear deal would be direct or even
coordinated.
The Obama administration sees Iran as a
potential tool that it can leverage to protect
American interests and investments in Iraq,
force Israel into greater restraint and
compliance, and reduce dependence on its
traditional Gulf ally, Saudi Arabia. However,
this would not imply that Washington would
scale back its attempts to curtail Iranian
influence in areas where it suits US strategic
interests, such as through support for anti-
Assad militias in Syria and Saudi intervention
in Yemen to reinstall a pro-American regime.
The Saudi monarchy feels deeply insecure
about US-Iran rapprochement after being
kept in the dark about the establishment of
diplomatic backchannels between
Washington and Tehran, while being
subsequently excluded from the nuclear
negotiations. Riyadh’s opposition to a
Western détente with Tehran is grounded in
the fear of competing with an economically
dynamic, energy-rich rival, which would
reduce its own strategic importance and
increase the vulnerability of the regime.
Increased US shale production and Iran’s
re-entry into global energy markets
weakens Riyadh’s leverage with
Washington, which may be beginning to
harbor doubts about the long-term durability
of the Saudi gerontocracy’s continued
control over the reins of state power. The
Obama administration undertook its policy
reversal on Iran because it almost certainly
sees the potential for the Saudi monarchy
to become a growing liability, an impression
that has been spurred on by policy
differences with regard to intervention in
Syria.
While the United States aided and abetted
Saudi Arabia’s export of weapons and
radical Salafism to fuel the insurgency
against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad,
the autonomy of the Islamic State (ISIS)
group and its expansion into Iraq threatens
US interests and energy investments in the
semi-autonomous Kurdish region, as well
as Saudi national security. Moreover, Iran
believes that the US is insincere about
fighting terrorist groups like ISIS because
it has enabled the rise and condoned the
conduct of similar groups in Syria – with
the goal of containing Iranian influence –
before they turned their guns against
Western interests.
Iran is widely seen as the only force
capable of defending Iraq from ISIS
through its ability to bring together Kurdish
troops, the Iraqi Army and the Shiite
militias into a coherent force. Iran’s military
involvement in Iraq has indirectly protected
American interests in Baghdad and Erbil
without the US having to deploy troops to
engage ISIS in direct combat. In other
words, Washington stands to gain by
letting Iran clean up the mess created by
US-Saudi policies that intended to constrain
Iranian influence.
Israel, like Saudi Arabia, is principally
opposed to Iran normalizing diplomatic and
business relations with the Western world
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– not over any fantastic existential threat
posed by Iran against the Jewish people –
because doing so would shift the regional
balance of power and constrain Israeli
impunity. Tel Aviv is well aware that a
nuclear deal that verifies Tehran’s peaceful
compliance serves to erode any justification
it could have to launch a military operation
against Iran’s nuclear facilities.
The Obama administration is clearly
aware that Iran poses no substantial
threat to Israel, which maintains an
undeclared nuclear arsenal that is entirely
unmonitored by the international
community. Therefore, the strategic
basis of the nuclear deal has more to do
with constraining the actions of Benjamin
Netanyahu’s government in Tel Aviv,
which has notoriously strained relations
with the White House, thus allowing
Washington to reap the aforementioned
benefits of a strategic rapprochement
with Iran.
Furthermore, the Obama administration
was inclined to reverse its policy on Iran
to avoid Russia and China displacing
American business interests as they
increasingly deepen strategic relations
with Tehran. Washington sees the
pragmatism of the Rouhani government
and its desire to open to the global
economy as the best bet of ensuring the
unimpeded flow of oil through the Strait
of Hormuz, at a time when the US is
drawing down its military presence in
the region. As long as the strategic utility
of cooperation with Iran remains greater
than the strategic utility of hostility, the
United States can be expected to
cautiously continue on its current
trajectory vis-à-vis Tehran.
11 April 2015
Nile Bowie is a Singapore-based political
commentator and columnist for the
Malaysian Reserve newspaper. His
articles have appeared in numerous
international media outlets, including
Russia Today (RT) and Al Jazeera, and
newspapers such as the International
New York Times, the Global Times and
the New Straits Times. He is a research
associate with the International
Movement for a Just World (JUST).
Source: RT.com
A SCENE OF THE CRIME
By Seymour M. Hersh
A reporter’s journey to My Lai and the
secrets of the past.
(This is the first part of a three part article.
The remaining two parts will appear in
subsequent issues of the Commentary …
Editor)
Part 1
There is a long ditch in the village of My
Lai. On the morning of March 16, 1968, it
was crowded with the bodies of the dead—
dozens of women, children, and old people,
all gunned down by young American
soldiers. Now, forty-seven years later, the
ditch at My Lai seems wider than I
remember from the news photographs of
the slaughter: erosion and time doing their
work. During the Vietnam War, there was
a rice paddy nearby, but it has been paved
over to make My Lai more accessible to
the thousands of tourists who come each
year to wander past the modest markers
describing the terrible event. The My Lai
massacre was a pivotal moment in that
misbegotten war: an American contingent
of about a hundred soldiers, known as
Charlie Company, having received poor
intelligence, and thinking that they would
encounter Vietcong troops or sympathizers,
discovered only a peaceful village at
breakfast. Nevertheless, the soldiers of
Charlie Company raped women, burned
houses, and turned their M-16s on the
unarmed civilians of My Lai. Among the
leaders of the assault was Lieutenant
William L. Calley, a junior-college dropout
from Miami.
By early 1969, most of the members of
Charlie Company had completed their tours
and returned home. I was then a thirty-
two-year-old freelance reporter in
Washington, D.C. Determined to
understand how young men—boys,
really—could have done this, I spent weeks
pursuing them. In many cases, they talked
openly and, for the most part, honestly with
me, describing what they did at My Lai
and how they planned to live with the
memory of it.
In testimony before an Army inquiry, some
of the soldiers acknowledged being at the
ditch but claimed that they had disobeyed
Calley, who was ordering them to kill. They
said that one of the main shooters, along
with Calley himself, had been Private First
Class Paul Meadlo. The truth remains
elusive, but one G.I. described to me a
moment that most of his fellow-soldiers, I
later learned, remembered vividly. At
Calley’s order, Meadlo and others had fired
round after round into the ditch and tossed
in a few grenades.
Then came a high-pitched whining, which
grew louder as a two- or three-year-old
boy, covered with mud and blood, crawled
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continued from page 9
his way among the bodies and scrambled
toward the rice paddy. His mother had likely
protected him with her body. Calley saw
what was happening and, according to the
witnesses, ran after the child, dragged him
back to the ditch, threw him in, and shot
him.
The morning after the massacre, Meadlo
stepped on a land mine while on a routine
patrol, and his right foot was blown off.
While waiting to be evacuated to a field
hospital by helicopter, he condemned Calley.
“God will punish you for what you made
me do,” a G.I. recalled Meadlo saying.
“Get him on the helicopter!” Calley shouted.
Meadlo went on cursing at Calley until the
helicopter arrived.
Meadlo had grown up in farm country in
western Indiana. After a long time spent
dropping dimes into a pay phone and calling
information operators across the state, I
found a Meadlo family listed in New
Goshen, a small town near Terre Haute. A
woman who turned out to be Paul’s mother,
Myrtle, answered the phone. I said that I
was a reporter and was writing about
Vietnam. I asked how Paul was doing, and
wondered if I could come and speak to
him the next day. She told me I was
welcome to try.
The Meadlos lived in a small house with
clapboard siding on a ramshackle chicken
farm. When I pulled up in my rental car,
Myrtle came out to greet me and said that
Paul was inside, though she had no idea
whether he would talk or what he might
say. It was clear that he had not told her
much about Vietnam. Then Myrtle said
something that summed up a war that I
had grown to hate: “I sent them a good boy
and they made him a murderer.”
Meadlo invited me in and agreed to talk. He
was twenty-two. He had married before
leaving for Vietnam, and he and his wife
had a two-and-a-half-year-old son and an
infant daughter. Despite his injury, he
worked a factory job to support the family.
I asked him to show me his wound and to
tell me about the treatment. He took off his
prosthesis and described what he’d been
through. It did not take long for the
conversation to turn to My Lai. Meadlo
talked and talked, clearly desperate to regain
some self-respect. With little emotion, he
described Calley’s orders to kill. He did not
justify what he had done at My Lai, except
that the killings “did take a load off my
conscience,” because of “the buddies we’d
lost. It was just revenge, that’s all it was.”
Meadlo recounted his actions in bland,
appalling detail. “There was supposed to
have been some Vietcong in [My Lai] and
we began to make a sweep through it,” he
told me. “Once we got there we began
gathering up the people . . . started putting
them in big mobs. There must have been
about forty or forty-five civilians standing
in one big circle in the middle of the village.
. . . Calley told me and a couple of other
guys to watch them.” Calley, as he recalled,
came back ten minutes later and told him,
“Get with it. I want them dead.” From about
ten or fifteen feet away, Meadlo said, Calley
“started shooting them. Then he told me to
start shooting them. . . . I started to shoot
them, but the other guys wouldn’t do it. So
we”—Meadlo and Calley—”went ahead
and killed them.” Meadlo estimated that he
had killed fifteen people in the circle. “We
all were under orders,” he said. “We all
thought we were doing the right thing. At
the time it didn’t bother me.” There was
official testimony showing that Meadlo had
in fact been extremely distressed by Calley’s
order. After being told by Calley to “take
care of this group,” one Charlie Company
soldier recounted, Meadlo and a fellow-
soldier “were actually playing with the kids,
telling the people where to sit down and
giving the kids candy.” When Calley returned
and said that he wanted them dead, the soldier
said, “Meadlo just looked at him like he
couldn’t believe it. He says, ‘Waste them?’
“ When Calley said yes, another soldier
testified, Meadlo and Calley “opened up and
started firing.” But then Meadlo “started to
cry.”
Mike Wallace, of CBS, was interested in
my interview, and Meadlo agreed to tell his
story again, on national television. I spent
the night before the show on a couch in
the Meadlo home and flew to New York
the next morning with Meadlo and his wife.
There was time to talk, and I learned that
Meadlo had spent weeks in recovery and
rehabilitation at an Army hospital in Japan.
Once he came home, he said nothing about
his experiences in Vietnam. One night,
shortly after his return, his wife woke up
to hysterical crying in one of the children’s
rooms. She rushed in and found Paul
violently shaking the child.
I’d been tipped off about My Lai by
Geoffrey Cowan, a young anti-war lawyer
in Washington, D.C. Cowan had little
specific information, but he’d heard that
an unnamed G.I. had gone crazy and killed
scores of Vietnamese civilians. Three years
earlier, while I was covering the Pentagon
for the Associated Press, I had been told
by officers returning from the war about
the killing of Vietnamese civilians that was
going on. One day, while pursuing Cowan’s
tip, I ran into a young Army colonel whom
I’d known on the Pentagon beat. He had
been wounded in the leg in Vietnam and,
while recovering, learned that he was to be
promoted to general. He now worked in
an office that had day-to-day responsibility
for the war. When I asked him what he
knew about the unnamed G.I., he gave me
a sharp, angry look, and began whacking
his hand against his knee. “That boy Calley
didn’t shoot anyone higher than this,” he
said.
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I had a name. In a local library, I found a
brief story buried in the Times about a
Lieutenant Calley who had been charged
by the Army with the murder of an
unspecified number of civilians in South
Vietnam. I tracked down Calley, whom the
Army had hidden away in senior officers’
quarters at Fort Benning, in Columbus,
Georgia. By then, someone in the Army had
allowed me to read and take notes from a
classified charge sheet accusing Calley of
the premeditated murder of a hundred and
nine “Oriental human beings.”
Calley hardly seemed satanic. He was a
slight, nervous man in his mid-twenties,
with pale, almost translucent skin. He tried
hard to seem tough. Over many beers, he
told me how he and his soldiers had engaged
and killed the enemy at My Lai in a fiercely
contested firefight. We talked through the
night. At one point, Calley excused himself,
to go to the bathroom. He left the door partly
open, and I could see that he was vomiting
blood.
In November, 1969, I wrote five articles
about Calley, Meadlo, and the massacre. I
had gone to Life and Look with no success,
so I turned instead to a small anti-war news
agency in Washington, the Dispatch News
Service. It was a time of growing anxiety
and unrest. Richard Nixon had won the
1968 election by promising to end the war,
but his real plan was to win it, through
escalation and secret bombing. In 1969, as
many as fifteen hundred American soldiers
were being killed every month—almost the
same as the year before.
Combat reporters such as Homer Bigart,
Bernard Fall, David Halberstam, Neil
Sheehan, Malcolm Browne, Frances
FitzGerald, Gloria Emerson, Morley Safer,
and Ward Just filed countless dispatches
from the field that increasingly made plain
that the war was morally groundless,
strategically lost, and nothing like what the
military and political officials were
describing to the public in Saigon and in
Washington. On November 15, 1969, two
days after the publication of my first My
Lai dispatch, an anti-war march in
Washington drew half a million people. H.
R. Haldeman, Nixon’s most trusted aide,
and his enforcer, took notes in the Oval
Office that were made public eighteen years
later. They revealed that on December 1,
1969, at the height of the outcry over Paul
Meadlo’s revelations, Nixon approved the
use of “dirty tricks” to discredit a key witness
to the massacre. When, in 1971, an Army
jury convicted Calley of mass murder and
sentenced him to life at hard labor, Nixon
intervened, ordering Calley to be released
from an Army prison and placed under
house arrest pending review. Calley was
freed three months after Nixon left office
and spent the ensuing years working in his
father-in-law’s jewelry store, in Columbus,
Georgia, and offering self-serving
interviews to journalists willing to pay for
them. Finally, in 2009, in a speech to a
Kiwanis Club, he said that there “is not a
day that goes by that I do not feel remorse”
for My Lai, but that he was following
orders—”foolishly, I guess.” Calley is now
seventy-one. He is the only officer to have
been convicted for his role in the My Lai
massacre.
In March, 1970, an Army investigation filed
charges ranging from murder to dereliction
of duty against fourteen officers, including
generals and colonels, who were accused
of covering up the massacre. Only one
officer besides Calley eventually faced
court-martial, and he was found not guilty.
A couple of months later, at the height of
widespread campus protests against the
war—protests that included the killing of
four students by National Guardsmen in
Ohio—I went to Macalester College, in St.
Paul, Minnesota, to give a speech against
the war. Hubert Humphrey, who had been
Lyndon Johnson’s loyal Vice-President, was
now a professor of political science at the
college. He had lost to Nixon, in the 1968
election, partly because he could not
separate himself from L.B.J.’s Vietnam
policy. After my speech, Humphrey asked
to talk to me. “I’ve no problem with you,
Mr. Hersh,” he said. “You were doing your
job and you did it well. But, as for those
kids who march around saying, ‘Hey, hey,
L.B.J., how many kids did you kill today?’
“ Humphrey’s fleshy, round face reddened,
and his voice grew louder with every phrase.
“I say, ‘Fuck ’em, fuck ’em, fuck ’em.’ “
I visited My Lai (as the hamlet was called
by the U.S. Army) for the first time a few
months ago, with my family. Returning to
the scene of the crime is the stuff of cliché
for reporters of a certain age, but I could
not resist. I had sought permission from
the South Vietnamese government in early
1970, but by then the Pentagon’s internal
investigation was under way and the area
was closed to outsiders. I joined the Times
in 1972 and visited Hanoi, in North Vietnam.
In 1980, five years after the fall of Saigon,
I travelled again to Vietnam to conduct
interviews for a book and to do more
reporting for the Times. I thought I knew
all, or most, of what there was to learn
about the massacre. Of course, I was
wrong.
My Lai is in central Vietnam, not far from
Highway 1, the road that connects Hanoi
and Ho Chi Minh City, as Saigon is now
known. Pham Thanh Cong, the director of
the My Lai Museum, is a survivor of the
massacre. When we first met, Cong, a stern,
stocky man in his late fifties, said little about
his personal experiences and stuck to stilted,
familiar phrases. He described the
Vietnamese as “a welcoming people,” and
he avoided any note of accusation. “We
forgive, but we do not forget,” he said.
Later, as we sat on a bench outside the small
museum, he described the massacre, as he
remembered it. At the time, Cong was
eleven years old. When American
helicopters landed in the village, he said, he
and his mother and four siblings huddled in
a primitive bunker inside their thatch-roofed
home. American soldiers ordered them out
of the bunker and then pushed them back
in, throwing a hand grenade in after them
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continued from page 11and firing their M-16s. Cong was wounded
in three places—on his scalp, on the right
side of his torso, and in the leg. He passed
out. When he awoke, he found himself in a
heap of corpses: his mother, his three sisters,
and his six-year-old brother. The American
soldiers must have assumed that Cong was
dead, too. In the afternoon, when the
American helicopters left, his father and a
few other surviving villagers, who had come
to bury the dead, found him.
Later, at lunch with my family and me, Cong
said, “I will never forget the pain.” And in
his job he can never leave it behind. Cong
told me that a few years earlier a veteran
named Kenneth Schiel, who had been at
My Lai, had visited the museum—the only
member of Charlie Company at that point
to have done so—as a participant in an Al
Jazeera television documentary marking the
fortieth anniversary of the massacre. Schiel
had enlisted in the Army after graduation
from high school, in Swartz Creek,
Michigan, a small town near Flint, and, after
the subsequent investigations, he was
charged with killing nine villagers. (The
charges were dismissed.)
The documentary featured a conversation
with Cong, who had been told that Schiel
was a Vietnam veteran, but not that he had
been at My Lai. In the video, Schiel tells an
interviewer, “Did I shoot? I’ll say that I shot
until I realized what was wrong. I’m not
going to say whether I shot villagers or not.”
He was even less forthcoming in a
conversation with Cong, after it became
clear that he had participated in the
massacre. Schiel says repeatedly that he
wants to “apologize to the people of My
Lai,” but he refuses to go further. “I ask
myself all the time why did this happen. I
don’t know.”
Cong demands, “How did you feel when
you shot into civilians and killed? Was it
hard for you?” Schiel says that he wasn’t
among the soldiers who were shooting
groups of civilians. Cong responds, “So
maybe you came to my house and killed
my relatives.”
A transcript on file at the museum contains
the rest of the conversation. Schiel says,
“The only thing I can do now is just
apologize for it.” Cong, who sounds
increasingly distressed, continues to ask
Schiel to talk openly about his crimes, and
Schiel keeps saying, “Sorry, sorry.” When
Cong asks Schiel whether he was able to
eat a meal upon returning to his base, Schiel
begins to cry. “Please don’t ask me any
more questions,” he says. “I cannot stay
calm.” Then Schiel asks Cong if he can
join a ceremony commemorating the
anniversary of the massacre.
Cong rebuffs him. “It would be too
shameful,” he says, adding, “The local
people will be very angry if they realize that
you were the person who took part in the
massacre.”
Before leaving the museum, I asked Cong
why he had been so unyielding with Schiel.
His face hardened. He said that he had no
interest in easing the pain of a My Lai veteran
who refused to own up fully to what he
had done. Cong’s father, who worked for
the Vietcong, lived with Cong after the
massacre, but he was killed in action, in
1970, by an American combat unit. Cong
went to live with relatives in a nearby village,
helping them raise cattle. Finally, after the
war, he was able to return to school.
There was more to learn from the
comprehensive statistics that Cong and the
museum staff had compiled. The names
and ages of the dead are engraved on a
marble plaque that dominates one of the
exhibit rooms. The museum’s count, no
longer in dispute, is five hundred and four
victims, from two hundred and forty-seven
families. Twenty-four families were
obliterated—–three generations murdered,
with no survivors. Among the dead were a
hundred and eighty-two women, seventeen
of them pregnant. A hundred and seventy-
three children were executed, including
fifty-six infants. Sixty older men died. The
museum’s accounting included another
important fact: the victims of the massacre
that day were not only in My Lai (also
known as My Lai 4) but also in a sister
settlement known to the Americans as My
Khe 4. This settlement, a mile or so to the
east, on the South China Sea, was assaulted
by another contingent of U.S. soldiers,
Bravo Company. The museum lists four
hundred and seven victims in My Lai 4 and
ninety-seven in My Khe 4.
The message was clear: what happened
at My Lai 4 was not singular, not an
aberration; it was replicated, in lesser
numbers, by Bravo Company. Bravo was
attached to the same unit—Task Force
Barker—as Charlie Company. The
assaults were by far the most important
operation carried out that day by any
combat unit in the Americal Division,
which Task Force Barker was attached
to. The division’s senior leadership,
including its commander, Major General
Samuel Koster, flew in and out of the
area throughout the day to check its
progress.
There was an ugly context to this. By
1967, the war was going badly in the
South Vietnamese provinces of Quang
Ngai, Quang Nam, and Quang Tri, which
were known for their independence from
the government in Saigon, and their
support for the Vietcong and North
Vietnam. Quang Tri was one of the most
heavily bombed provinces in the country.
American warplanes drenched all three
provinces with defoliating chemicals,
including Agent Orange.
*An earlier version of this article
misstated the organization for which Neil
Sheehan was a reporter.
27 March 2015
Seymour M. Hersh wrote his first piece
for The New Yorker in 1971 and has
been a regular contributor to the magazine
since 1993.
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By Robert Barsocchini
INTERNATIONAL COURT, HAGUE, RULES IN FAVOR OF ECUADOR IN
ITS CASE AGAINST U.S OIL GIANT, CHEVRON
Telesur:
The International Court of Justice (CIJ)
ruled Thursday a prior ruling by an
Ecuadorean court that fined the U.S.-
based oil company Chevron US $9.5
billion in 2011 should be upheld.
The money will benefit about 30,000
Ecuadorians, most of them indigenous.
Background from Amazon Watch:
In 1964, Texaco (now Chevron),
discovered oil in the remote northern
region of the Ecuadorian Amazon,
known as the Oriente; the East. The
indigenous inhabitants of this pristine
rainforest, including the Cofán, Siona,
Secoya, Kichwa and Huaorani tribes,
lived traditional lifestyles largely
untouched by modern civilization.
They had little idea what to expect or
how to prepare when oil workers
moved into their backyard and founded
the town of Lago Agrio, or “Sour
Lake”, named after the town in Texas
where oil company Texaco was
founded.
In a rainforest area roughly three times
the size of Manhattan, Chevron carved
out 350 oil wells, and upon leaving the
country in 1992, left behind some1,000
open-air, unlined waste pits filled with
crude and toxic sludge. Many of these
pits leak into the water table or overflow
in heavy rains, polluting rivers and
streams that tens of thousands of
people depend on for drinking, cooking,
bathing and fishing. Chevron also
dumped more than 18 billion gallons
of toxic wastewater called “produced
water” – a byproduct of the drilling
process – into the rivers of the Oriente.
At the height of Texaco’s operations,
the company was dumping an
estimated 4 million gallons per day, a
practice outlawed in major US oil
producing states like Louisiana, Texas,
and California decades before the
company began operations in Ecuador
in 1967. By handling its toxic waste in
Ecuador in ways that were illegal in its
home country, Texaco saved an
estimated $3 per barrel of oil produced.
A public health crisis of immense
proportions grips the Ecuadorian
Amazon, the root cause of which is
massive contamination from 40 years
of oil operations. Texaco [Chevron]
dumped 18 billion gallons of toxic
wastewater directly into the region’s
rivers and streams depended upon for
drinking, cooking, bathing and fishing.
The contamination of water essential
for the daily activities of tens of
thousands of people has resulted in an
epidemic of cancer, miscarriages, birth
defects, and other ailments.
When Texaco arrived in Ecuador in
1964, the company found a pristine
rainforest environment.
This story also has relevance to the US
interest in exerting control over
Venezuela, which has some of the
world’s largest oil reserves.
Glenn Greenwald:
Venezuela is one of the very few
countries with significant oil reserves
which does not submit to U.S. dictates,
and this simply cannot be permitted
(such countries are always at the top
of the U.S. government and media list
of Countries To Be Demonized).
A study conducted by the Universities
of Portsmouth, Warwick and Essex
recently found:
…foreign intervention in a civil war is
100 times more likely when the afflicted
country has high oil reserves than if it
has none.
…hydrocarbons were a major reason for
the [US/UK/FR/CA] military intervention
in Libya … and the current US campaign
against Isis in northern Iraq.
“Before the Isis forces approached the
oil-rich Kurdish north of Iraq, Isis was
barely mentioned in the news. But once
Isis got near oil fields, the siege of Kobani
in Syria became a headline and the US
sent drones to strike Isis targets”
The major political science study on the
topic, conducted out of Cornell and
Northwestern universities,recently
found, after studying nearly 2,000 policy
issues (essentially any issue one can
imagine), that the majority of the US
population has statistically zero influence
on US policy, while the wealthiest
portions of society – ie owners of
corporations such as Chevron –
essentially dictate policy – a political
system called “oligarchy”.
15 March, 2015
Robert Barsocchini is an internationally
published researcher and writer who
focuses on global force dynamics and
also writes professionally for the film
industry.
Source: Countercurrents.org
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By Robert Parry
US INTEL STANDS PAT ON MH-17 SHOOT DOWN
Almost eight months after Malaysia Airlines
Flight 17 was shot down over eastern
Ukraine – creating a flashpoint in the
standoff between nuclear-armed Russia and
America – the U.S. intelligence community
claims it has not updated its assessment
since five days after the crash.
Despite the high stakes involved in the
confrontation between nuclear-armed
Russia and the United States over Ukraine,
the U.S. intelligence community has not
updated its assessment on a critical turning
point of the crisis – the shooting down of
Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 – since five days
after the crash last July 17, according to
the office of the Director of National
Intelligence.
On Thursday, when I inquired about
arranging a possible briefing on where that
U.S. intelligence assessment stands, DNI
spokesperson Kathleen Butler sent me the
same report that was distributed by the DNI
on July 22, 2014, which relied heavily on
claims being made about the incident on
social media.
So, I sent a follow-up e-mail to Butler
saying: “are you telling me that U.S.
intelligence has not refined its assessment
of what happened to MH-17 since July 22,
2014?”
Her response: “Yes. The assessment is the
same.”
I then wrote back: “I don’t mean to be
difficult but that’s just not credible. U.S.
intelligence has surely refined its assessment
of this important event since July 22.”
When she didn’t respond, I sent her some
more detailed questions describing leaks that
I had received about what some U.S.
intelligence analysts have since concluded,
as well as what the German intelligence
agency, the BND, reported to a parliamentary
committee last October, according to Der
Spiegel.
While there are differences in those analyses
about who fired the missile, there appears
to be agreement that the Russian
government did not supply the ethnic
Russian rebels in eastern Ukraine with a
sophisticated Buk anti-aircraft missile system
that the original DNI report identified as the
likely weapon used to destroy the commercial
airliner killing all 298 people onboard.
Butler replied to my last e-mail late Friday,
saying “As you can imagine, I can’t get into
details, but can share that the assessment
has IC [Intelligence Community]
consensus” – apparently still referring to the
July 22 report.
A Lightning Rod
Last July, the MH-17 tragedy quickly
became a lightning rod in a storm of anti-
Russian propaganda, blaming the deaths
personally on Russian President Vladimir
Putin and resulting in European and
American sanctions against Russia which
pushed the crisis in Ukraine to a dangerous
new level.
Yet, after getting propaganda mileage out of
the tragedy – and after I reported on the
growing doubts within the U.S. intelligence
community about whether the Russians
and the rebels were indeed responsible –
the Obama administration went silent.
In other words, after U.S. intelligence
analysts had time to review the data from
spy satellites and various electronic
surveillance, including phone intercepts, the
Obama administration didn’t retract its
initial rush to judgment – tossing blame on
Russia and the rebels – but provided no
further elaboration either.
This strange behavior reinforces the
suspicion that the U.S. government
possesses information that contradicts its
initial rush to judgment, but senior officials
don’t want to correct the record because
to do so would embarrass them and
weaken the value of the tragedy as a
propaganda club to pound the Russians.
If the later evidence did bolster the Russia-
did-it scenario, it’s hard to imagine why
the proof would stay secret – especially
since U.S. officials have continued to
insinuate that the Russians are guilty. For
instance, on March 4, Assistant Secretary
of State for European Affairs Victoria
Nuland fired a new broadside against Russia
when she appeared before the House
Foreign Affairs Committee.
In her prepared testimony, Nuland slipped
in an accusation blaming Russia for the
MH-17 disaster, saying: “In eastern Ukraine,
Russia and its separatist puppets unleashed
unspeakable violence and pillage; MH-17
was shot down.”
It’s true that if one parses Nuland’s
testimony, she’s not exactly saying the
Russians or the ethnic Russian rebels in
eastern Ukraine shot down the plane. There
is a semi-colon between the “unspeakable
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violence and pillage” and the passive verb
structure “MH-17 was shot down.” But
she clearly meant to implicate the Russians
and the rebels.
Nuland’s testimony prompted me to submit
a query to the State Department asking if
she meant to imply that the U.S. government
had developed more definitive evidence that
the ethnic Russian rebels shot down the
plane and that the Russians shared
complicity. I received no answer.
I sent a similar request to the CIA and was
referred to the DNI, where spokesperson
Butler insisted that there had been no
refinement in the U.S. intelligence
assessment since last July 22.
But that’s just impossible to believe. Indeed,
I’ve been told by a source who was briefed
by U.S. intelligence analysts that a great deal
of new information has been examined
since the days immediately after the crash,
but that the problem for U.S. policymakers
is that the data led at least some analysts to
conclude that the plane was shot down by
a rogue element of the Ukrainian military,
not by the rebels.
Yet, what has remained unclear to me is
whether those analysts were part of a
consensus or were dissenters within the
U.S. intelligence community. But even if
there was just dissent over the conclusions,
that might explain why the DNI has not
updated the initial sketchy report of July
22.
It is protocol within the intelligence
community that when an assessment is
released, it should include footnotes
indicating areas of dissent. But to do that
could undermine the initial certitude that
Secretary of State John Kerry displayed on
Sunday talks shows just days after the crash.
Pointing Fingers
Though the DNI’s July 22 report, which
followed Kerry’s performance, joined him
in pointing the blame at the Russians and
the ethnic Russian rebels, the report did not
claim that the Russians gave the rebels the
sophisticated Buk (or SA-11) surface-to-
air missile that the report indicated was used
to bring down the plane.
The report cited “an increasing amount of
heavy weaponry crossing the border from
Russia to separatist fighters in Ukraine”; it
claimed that Russia “continues to provide
training – including on air defense systems
to separatist fighters at a facility in southwest
Russia”; and its noted the rebels “have
demonstrated proficiency with surface-to-
air missile systems, downing more than a
dozen aircraft in the months prior to the
MH17 tragedy, including two large
transport aircraft.”
But what the public report didn’t say –
which is often more significant than
what is said in these white papers –
was that the rebels had previously only
used short-range shoulder-fired
missiles to bring down low-flying
military planes, whereas MH-17 was
flying at around 33,000 feet, far beyond
the range of those weapons.
The assessment also didn’t say that
U.S. intelligence, which had been
concentrating its attention on eastern
Ukraine during those months, detected
the delivery of a Buk missile battery
from Russia, despite the fact that a
battery consists of four 16-foot-long
missiles that are hauled around by
trucks or other large vehicles.
I was told that the absence of evidence
of such a delivery injected the first
doubts among U.S. analysts who also
couldn’t say for certain that the missile
battery that was suspected of firing the
fateful missile was manned by rebels.
An early glimpse of that doubt was
revealed in the DNI briefing for several
mainstream news organizations when
the July 22 assessment was released.
The Los Angeles Times reported, “U.S.
intelligence agencies have so far been
unable to determine the nationalities or
identities of the crew that launched the
missile. U.S. officials said it was
possible the SA-11 was launched by a
defector from the Ukrainian military
who was trained to use similar missile
systems.” [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “The Mystery
of a Ukrainian ‘Defector.’”]
The Russian Case
The Russians also challenged the rush
to judgment against them, although the
U.S. mainstream media largely ignored
– or ridiculed – their presentation. But
the Russians at least provided what
appeared to be substantive data,
including alleged radar readings
showing the presence of a Ukrainian
jetfighter “gaining height” as it closed
to within three to five kilometers of
MH-17.
Russian Lt. Gen. Andrey Kartopolov
also called on the Ukrainian government
to explain the movements of its Buk
systems to sites in eastern Ukraine and
why Kiev’s Kupol-M19S18 radars,
which coordinate the flight of Buk
missiles, showed increased activity
leading up to the July 17 shoot-down.
The Ukrainian government countered
by asserting that it had “evidence that
the missile which struck the plane was
fired by terrorists, who received arms
and specialists from the Russian
Federation,” according to Andrey
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I N T E R N A T I O N A L M O V E M E N T F O R A J U S T W O R L D A R T I C L E S
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Lysenko, spokesman for Ukraine’s
Security Council, using Kiev’s
preferred term for the rebels.
Lysenko added: “To disown this
tragedy, [Russian officials] are drawing
a lot of pictures and maps. We will
explore any photos and other plans
produced by the Russian side.” But
Ukrainian authorities have failed to
address the Russian evidence except
through broad denials.
On July 29, amid this escalating
rhetoric, the Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity, a group of
mostly retired U.S. intelligence
officials, called on President Barack
Obama to release what evidence the
U.S. government had, including satellite
imagery.
“As intelligence professionals we are
embarrassed by the unprofessional use
of partial intelligence information,” the
group wrote. “As Americans, we find
ourselves hoping that, if you indeed
have more conclusive evidence, you
will find a way to make it public without
further delay. In charging Russia with
being directly or indirectly responsible,
Secretary of State John Kerry has been
particularly definitive. Not so the
evidence.”
But the Obama administration failed to
make public any intelligence
information that would back up its
earlier suppositions.
Then, in early August, I was told that
some U.S. intelligence analysts had
begun shifting away from the original
scenario blaming the rebels and Russia
to one focused more on the possibility
that extremist elements of the Ukrainian
government were responsible, funded
by one of Ukraine’s rabidly anti-
Russian oligarchs. [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “Flight 17
Shoot-down Scenario Shifts”and “Was
Putin Targeted for Mid-air
Assassination?”]
German Claims
In October, Der Spiegel reported that
the German intelligence service, the
BND, also had concluded that Russia
was not the source of the missile
battery – that it had been captured from
a Ukrainian military base – but the BND
still blamed the rebels for firing it. The
BND also concluded that photos
supplied by the Ukrainian government
about the MH-17 tragedy “have been
manipulated,” Der Spiegel reported.
And, the BND disputed Russian
government claims that a Ukrainian
fighter jet had been flying close to MH-
17, the magazine said, reporting on the
BND’s briefing to a parliamentary
committee on Oct. 8. But none of the
BND’s evidence was made public —
and I was subsequently told by a
European official that the evidence was
not as conclusive as the magazine
article depicted. [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “Germans
Clear Russia in MH-17 Case.”]
When the Dutch Safety Board
investigating the crash issued an interim
report in mid-October, it answered few
questions, beyond confirming that MH-
17 apparently was destroyed by “high-
velocity objects that penetrated the
aircraft from outside.” The 34-page
Dutch report was silent on the “dog-
not-barking” issue of whether the U.S.
government had satellite surveillance
that revealed exactly where the
supposed ground-to-air missile was
launched and who fired it.
In January, when I re-contacted the
source who had been briefed by the
U.S. analysts, the source said their
thinking had not changed, except that
they believed the missile may have been
less sophisticated than a Buk, possibly
an SA-6, and that the attack may have
also involved a Ukrainian jetfighter
firing on MH-17.
Since then there have been occasional
news accounts about witnesses
reporting that they did see a Ukrainian
fighter plane in the sky and others
saying they saw a missile possibly fired
from territory then supposedly
controlled by the rebels (although the
borders of the conflict zone at that time
were very fluid and the Ukrainian
military was known to have mobile anti-
aircraft missile batteries only a few
miles away).
But what is perhaps most shocking of
all is that – on an issue as potentially
dangerous as the current proxy war
between nuclear-armed Russia and the
United States, a conflict on Russia’s
border that has sparked fiery rhetoric
on both sides – the office of the DNI,
which oversees the most expensive and
sophisticated intelligence system in the
world, says nothing has been done to
refine the U.S. assessment of the MH-
17 shoot-down since five days after
the tragedy.
15 March 2015
Investigative reporter Robert Parry
broke many of the Iran-Contra stories
for The Associated Press and
Newsweek in the 1980s.
Source: Consortium News
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THE 12TH ANNIVERSARY OF AAFIA SIDDIQUI’S ABDUCTION: WHAT
HAPPENED TO AAFIA SIDDIQUI AND WHERE IS SHE NOW?
By Judy Bello
A Pakistani Woman named Aafia
Siddiqui was abducted from a taxi in
Karachi, Pakistan along with her 3
children 12 years ago on March 30,
2003. At the time she was vulnerable,
recently divorced from an abusive
husband; living with her mother; her
father had just died of a heart attack.
The youngest child was an infant.
Following her abduction, Aafia Siddiqui
and her children disappeared from view
for 5 years. She spent those years in
US Black Site prisons in Afghanistan
and Pakistan. One can only imagine the
torment she suffered there, in a system
created to enable the torture and abuse
of terrorism suspects. She was a
woman alone. They took her children,
and threatened them when personal
torture was not enough to gain her
acquiescence.
They say other women came and went
from Bagram and the secret prisons in
Afghanistan, but Aafia Siddiqui is the
only one whose story is known. This
is true in part because she had lived,
studied and worked in the United States
for more than a decade, but even more
so because of the devoted persistence
of her family, he mother Ismet, and
sister Fowzia, who never for one
moment ceased their efforts to find her
and bring her home. Using their
standing as an upper middle class
family in Karachi, a conservative
Muslim family, well educated, known
for their involvement in various aspects
of civil society, the Siddiqui women
engaged with the government at all
levels, engaged the press to publicize
Aafia’s disappearance and to investigate
her whereabouts and the circumstances
of her disappearance.
Ismet says that shortly after her
daughter’s disappearance, a man came
to her door and threatened her. He told
her to drop the search for her missing
daughter or ‘else’. The two women,
Ismet and Fowzia, were convinced
that Aafia and her children had been
detained by either Pakistani Intelligence
(ISI) or the CIA. This is not surprising
because Pakistani citizens were
frequently disappeared during that
period, mostly by the Pakistani Secret
Police and Intelligence forces complicit
with the American CIA and FBI who
were casting a broad net to fish for
‘terrorists’ after 9/11/2001. Thousands
were abducted and imprisoned for long
or short periods of time. A few
eventually landed in Guantanamo, but
who knows what happened to the rest?.
Many never returned. Thousands of
Muslim immigrants were rounded up
and questioned here in the United States
as well. Many of them were tortured.
Many were held for months and years
with no accessto legal aid or their
families. Many were eventually
deported despite having committed no
crime.
No, Aafia Siddiqui wasn’t the only
person rendered during the first years
of the Global War on Terror, nor was
she the only Pakistani disappeared
under the Musharraf regime. We now
know that thousands were rendered
from the streets of Pakistan and around
the globe during the first years
following the 9/11 attacks on the World
Trade Center and Pentagon. We know
that torture was ubiquitous during that
period, while brutal violence against
civilians characterized the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq. What is
extraordinary about Aafia Siddiqui’s
case is that she was a woman, and was
taken with her children. Also somewhat
unusual is the fact that she had spent
many years in the US where she went
to college and eventually obtained a
PhD from Brandeis, married a Pakistani
Doctor and had 2 children; and worked
for various charities generally leading
a conscientious life of goodwill. She
sent Qurans to prisoners, and taught
children at a Mosque in an impoverished
city neighborhood.
But after 9/11 it all fell apart. She and
her husband were not abducted, but
they were interrogated. A young Saudi
the government was pursuing had
stayed for a while in their apartment
building. Her husband had used his
credit card to buy night vision goggles,
he said for hunting. The marriage was
becoming increasingly stressed and at
times, violent. Aafia had a long scar on
her cheek from a cut caused by a baby
bottle her husband admitted to
throwing at her. Aafia took her children
and returned to her parents’ home in
Karachi. She was pregnant with their
third child when her husband divorced
her and remarried. We are told she
seemed nervous and agitated during
this period. Who wouldn’t be nervous
and agitated under those
circumstances? And then, one day she
set out for a family visit with her uncle,
got in the taxi with her children, and
disappeared.
In July of 2008, Aafia Siddiqui arrived
in Manhattan a week after abdominal
surgery to remove a couple of bullets
from her intestines, and was brought
directly into a courtroom in her
wheelchair for arraignment on charges
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of attacking US military personnel in
Afghanistan. After a highly publicized
trial during which the press
consistently referred to her as ‘Lady
al Qaeda’, she was sentenced to 86
years in prison and sent to Carswell
Medical Center, a high security federal
prison in Texas, where she remains to
this day, so we are told.
At the trial, no physical evidence was
presented by the prosecution. There
was none. Basic questions related to
context were neither asked nor
answered. Where was Aafia Siddiqui
between the time of her disappearance
5 years earlier, and her encounter with
the soldiers in Ghazni, Afghanistan?
Why wasn’t she believed when she said
she had been rendered and tortured?
Why did the Pakistani Government
allow her to be extradited from
Afghanistan, then pay a small fortune
for lawyers for her, lawyers that she
did not want or trust because,
whatever their qualifications, they had
been selected and paid for by the
Pakistani government? Why, when a
fragile woman, who was obviously
physically and mentally broken, said
that she had been tortured, did no one
investigate her story?
Between 2003 and 2008, US officials
repeatedly denied having Aafia Siddiqui
in custody. They insisted that she was
not in the system anywhere. But, when
she showed up in 2008, they had a
story all ready to tell about her
involvement with al Qaeda, conferring
with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and
some of his associates. They actually
said she was married to his nephew
Ammar al Baluchi, a charge her family
absolutely denies. She was only
recently divorced, and had just birthed
a child when she disappeared. The
specific accusation against Siddiqui
was that she had got a mailbox in
Maryland for Majid Khan, a young man
who had associated with Khalid Sheikh
Muhammed in Karachi He had allowed
his visa to lapse while he was visiting
family in Karachi, and needed a US
mailbox address to reapply for it so he
could return to the US. . Khan was
accused of plotting to commit terrorist
attacks on returning to the USA.
But this isn’t the crime Aafia Siddiqui
was tried for, just a story leaked to the
press. At the time of Aafia Siddiqui’s
trial, Majid a few weeks before Siddiqui
and her children were, but had lived in
the United States and attended high
school here. Raised in a middle class
suburb of Baltimore, he was restless
and unable to decide what to do with
his life, so he went to Karachi to visit
the extended family and married there.
Members of his family were initially
detained with him, then later released.
According to his brother, Majid Khan
was tortured and beaten during this
period, and coerced into making
unreliable and false confessions
Although he may have known KSM and
his nephew, Khan was never proven
to do anything other than talk and spin
stories. After touring the black sites and
being tortured for a couple of years,
Khan landed in Guantanamo where he
apparently continued talking and
spinning stories. Majid Khan was
eventually released from Guantanamo
in 2012 in exchange for testimony
against Khalid Sheikh Muhammad,
Ammar Al Baluchi and others. Perhaps
Siddiqui did help Majid Khan with his
immigration problem. He was a kid
who needed help. That is an
immigration violation that might keep
her from returning to the US. But we
don’t even know for sure that she even
did that. We do know that Khan told a
lot of stories in return for a plea deal in
2012 that capped his sentence at 19
years.
The government, however, claimed
that she spent the 5 years she was
missing in a terrorist cell developing
chemical and biological weapons. She
was a scientist, after all, with a PhD.
When she was arrested in Pakistan,
there were some chemicals in her bag
along with some recipes for biological
and chemical weapons written in her
handwriting and a picture of the statue
of liberty, an odd choice for someone
who had lived many years in Boston
area and Texas before that. These items
were brought into evidence. Again,
when Aafia Siddiqui explained that she
wasn’t that kind of scientist, that she
was an educator, she was ignored. Her
PhD was in neuroscience as it pertains
to learning capabilities. This is a matter
of public record at Brandeis University.
She was Dr. Aafia Siddiqui, but neither
a physician, a chemist nor even a
biologist except in a narrow tangential
sense. She said she wrote in the
documents what she was told to write
by men who threatened to harm her
children if she did not do as they
wished.
Aafia Siddiqui suffered from severe
PTSD which made it difficult for her
to present a consistently calm and
pleasant demeanor during trial. She told
the court she had been tortured during
the time she was missing, but this
testimony was dismissed as untrue and
irrelevant. The government, of course,
had denied it. She didn’t want the highly
paid lawyers hired on her behalf by the
Pakistani government because she
didn’t trust the motivation of the
Pakistani government, and she didn’t
continued from page 18
I N T E R N A T I O N A L M O V E M E N T F O R A J U S T W O R L D A R T I C L E S
19
like the way they were building her
case. But the judge chose to ignore her
protest and allowed those lawyers to
continue. Judge Berman was privately
informed of the details the US held
against Siddiqui. The story was
apparently leaked to the press as well.
But it wasn’t told in open court where
she might have refuted it. The jury
convicted despite the lack of physical
evidence on charges normally bringing
a sentence of around 15 years. They
did not convict on the charge of
premeditation, but Judge Berman added
a ‘terrorism’ enhancement to her
verdict, and sentenced Aafia Siddiqui
to 86 years in a federal prison.
Today, Aafia Siddiqui remains in the
psychiatric division of Carswell, seven
years into her 86 year sentence. She
had a hard time early on, and apparently
was beaten at one point, by the guards?
Other inmates? That we don’t know.
We do know she was in solitary after
that. She hasn’t been allowed to receive
mail.. I, myself, have sent her many
letters, all returned. Early on they came
back unopened, marked
‘undeliverable’. When I called the
prison to inquire whether I had the
wrong address, the person who
answered went off to ask advice on
what to tell me. He said, when he
returned to the phone, that she refused
her mail. A few months later when I
was in jail myself (for direct action
protest at the gate of Hancock AFB) I
received a letter from my attorney, and
realized that they have to open your
mail and inspect it before offering it to
you. After I called again to question
this issue, my letters started coming
back opened.
Aafia Siddiqui hasn’t spoken to her
family in more than a year. She has a
brother, also in Texas, but he has not
been able to see her. No one has had
contact with her for over a year now.
The last time she was given a chance
to talk to her family, to her mother and
sister, and the 2 children returned to
them after she was imprisoned in the
US, was following a national press
conference outside the Pakistani
Embassy in Washington DC and a well-
publicized protest outside Carswell
Prison. At the time, Fowzia asked her
why she was refusing her mail, and
she replied ‘What mail?”
Last year Robert Boyle, a new attorney
hired by the family, submitted a motion
to vacate to Judge Berrman, requesting
that he throw out the verdict because
Aafia’s repeated requests for an
adjournment of the proceedings so she
could find an acceptable attorney were
ignored. The motion lays out a detailed
argument that Siddiqui’s request was
sane and reasonable, and described the
potential bias of the Pakistani
government and the ways in which
their choice of attorneys, even well-
known human rights lawyers, might
not have been in her best interest. Judge
Berman called the lawyers in a few days
later and said that Aafia Siddiqui had
written a letter to him, asking that the
motion be dismissed, and that he was
therefore required to dismiss it. He went
on to say that he had, in any case, no
intention of granting the motion.
Since then, another six months have
passed with no word to anyone from
Aafia Siddiqui. It’s true she is likely
depressed. Is she sick? Is she being
heavily medicated? Is she alive? An
appeal that had earlier been rejected which
focused on procedural issues. This
motion that Judge Berman says she asked
to have dismissed very directly mirrored
her own concerns at the time of the trial.
It’s true; she may have done this out of
depression or despair. But if she was too
disturbed for the Judge to support her
initial request in the court room, why was
her current request honored without a
hearing?
Aafia Siddiqui said that she had been
tortured and raped. Why her assertion
was dismissed as a fabrication with no
investigation, and why were any
investigations into her claims treated as
collateral conspiracy theories? How did
she neatly fall into the hands of US
soldiers just as the family felt their
sources were near locating her? Why did
the Pakistani Government allow her to
be extradited if they thought she was
innocent? Where is Aafia Siddiqui now
and what is her status?
The fact is that Aafia Siddiqui’s story is
not so different than many of the other
Pakistani, Afghan and Arab men swept
up after 9/11. Why is it so unbelievable?
All of the evidence is in her favor except
for the ‘secret’ evidence and the fact that
the US denies her assertions. Would we
expect anything different from them? We
have heard the stories of others illegally
swept up in the rendition program. But
maybe we don’t want to believe they
would do that to a woman. We’ve heard
a lot of stories about horrors visited on
women by US soldiers in Iraq and
Afghanistan, in Vietnam, but maybe we
don’t want to think that might happen to
a vulnerable middle class housewife with
a PhD in Education. What would they
do to cover up committing these
atrocities against this kind, well educated,
English speaking woman who had spent
nearly half her life in the US when she
was detained? And to cover up the cover
up?
30 March, 2015
Judy Bello is a Peace and Justice activist
who has recently traveled to Syria, Iran,
Iraq and Pakistan where she spent time
with the family of Aafia Siddiqui. She is
a member of the Administrative
Committee of the United National
Antiwar Coalition.
Source: Countercurrents.org
continued next page
I N T E R N A T I O N A L M O V E M E N T F O R A J U S T W O R L D A R T I C L E S
20
By Colin Todhunter
EMPIRE AND COLONIALISM: RICH MEN IN LONDON STILL DECIDING
AFRICA’S FUTURE
Some £600 million in UK aid money
courtesy of the taxpayer is helping
big business increase its profits in
Africa via the New Alliance for Food
Security and Nutrition. In return for
receiving aid money and corporate
investment, African countries have to
change their laws, making it easier
for corporations to acquire farmland,
control seed supplies and export
produce.
Last year, Director of the Global
Justice Now Nick Dearden said:
“It’s scandalous that UK aid money
is being used to carve up Africa in
the interests of big business. This is
the exact opposite of what is needed,
which is support to small-scale
farmers and fairer distribution of land
and resources to give African
countries more control over their
food systems. Africa can produce
enough food to feed its people. The
problem is that our food system is
geared to the luxury tastes of the
richest, not the needs of ordinary
people. Here the British government
is using aid money to make the
problem even worse.”
Ethiopia, Ghana, Tanzania, Burkina
Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Mozambique,
Nigeria, Benin, Malawi and Senegal
are all involved in the New Alliance.
In a January 2015 piece in The
Guardian, Dearden continued by
saying that development was once
regarded as a process of breaking
with colonial exploitation and
transferring power over resources
from the ‘first’ to the ‘third world’,
involving a revolutionary struggle
over the world’s resources.
However, the current paradigm is
based on the assumption that
developing countries need to adopt
neo-liberal policies and that public
money in the guise of aid should
facili tate this. The notion of
‘development’ has become hijacked
by rich corporations and the concept
of poverty depoliticised and separated
from structurally embedded power
relations.
To see this in action, we need look
no further to a conference held on
Monday 23 March in London,
organised by the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation and the United States
Agency for International
Development (USAID). This
secretive, invitation-only meeting
with aid donors and big seed
companies discussed a strategy to
make it easier for these companies
to sell patented seeds in Africa and
thus increase corporate control of
seeds.
Farmers have for generations been
saving and exchanging seeds among
themselves. This has allowed them a
certain degree of independence and
has enabled them to innovate,
maintain biodiversity, adapt seeds to
climatic conditions and fend off plant
disease. Big seed companies with
help from the Gates Foundation, the
US government and other aid donors
are now discussing ways to increase
their market penetration of
commercial seeds by displacing
farmers own seed systems.
Corporate sold hybrid seeds often
produce higher yields when first
planted, but the second generation
seeds produce low yields and
unpredictable crop traits, making
them unsuitable for saving and
storing. As Heidi Chow from Global
Justice Now rightly says, instead of
saving seeds from their own crops,
farmers who use hybrid seeds
become completely dependent on the
seed, ferti l iser and pesticide
companies, which can (and has) in
turn resulted in an agrarian crisis
centred on debt, environmental
damage and health problems.
The London conference aimed to
share findings of a report by Monitor
Deloitte on developing the
commercial seed sector in sub-
Saharan Africa. The report
recommends that in countries where
continued from page 20
A R T I C L E S
21
I N T E R N A T I O N A L M O V E M E N T F O R A J U S T W O R L D
farmers are using their own seed
saving networks NGOs and aid
donors should encourage
governments to introduce intellectual
property rights for seed breeders and
help to persuade farmers to buy
commercial, patented seeds rather
than relying on their own traditional
varieties. The report also suggests
that governments should remove
regulations so that the seed sector is
opened up to the global market.
The guest l ist comprised
corporations, development agencies
and aid donors, including Syngenta,
the World Bank and the Gates
Foundation. It speaks volumes that
not one farmer organisation was
invited. Farmers have been imbued
with the spirit of entrepreneurship for
thousands of years. They have been
“scientists, innovators, natural
resource stewards, seed savers and
hybridisation experts” who have
increasingly been reduced to
becoming recipients of technical
fixes and consumers of poisonous
products of a growing agricultural
inputs industry. So who better than
to discuss issues concerning
agriculture?
But the whole point of such a
conference is that the West regards
African agriculture as a ‘business
opportunity’, albeit wrapped up in
warm-sounding notions of ‘feeding
Africa’ or ‘lifting millions out of
poverty’. The West’s legacy in Africa
(and elsewhere) has been to plunge
millions into poverty. Enforcing
structural reforms to benefit big
agribusiness and its unsustainable
toxic GMO/petrochemical inputs
represents a continuation of the neo-
colonialist plundering of Africa. The
US has for many decades been using
agriculture as a key part of foreign
policy to secure global hegemony.
Phil Bereano, food sovereignty
campaigner with AGRA Watch and
an Emeritus Professor at the
University of Washington says:
“This is an extension of what the
Gates Foundation has been doing for
several years – working with the US
government and agribusiness giants
like Monsanto to corporatize Africa’s
genetic riches for the benefit of
outsiders. Don’t Bill and Melinda
realize that such colonialism is no
longer in fashion? It’s time to support
African farmers’ self-determination.”
Bereano also shows how Western
corporations only intend to cherry-
pick the most profitable aspects of
the food production chain, while
leaving the public sector in Africa to
pick up the tab for the non-profitable
aspects that allow profitabili ty
further along the chain.
Giant agritech corporations with their
patented seeds and associated
chemical inputs are ensuring a shift
away from diversified agriculture that
guarantees balanced local food
production, the protection of people’s
livelihoods and agricultural
sustainability. African agriculture is
being placed in the hands of big
agritech for private profit under the
pretext of helping the poor. The Gates
Foundation has substantial shares in
Monsanto. With Monsanto’s active
backing from the US State
Department and the Gates
Foundation’s links with USAID,
African farmers face a formidable
force.
Report after report suggests that
support for conventional agriculture,
agroecology and local economies is
required, especially in the Global
South. Instead, Western governments
are supporting powerful corporations
with taxpayers money whose thrust
via the WTO, World Bank and IMF
has been to encourage strings-
attached loans, monocrop cultivation
for export using corporate seeds, the
restructuring of economies, the
opening of economies to the vagaries
of land and commodity speculation
and a system of globalised trade
rigged in favour of the West.
In this vision for Africa, those
farmers who are regarded as having
any role to play in all of this are
viewed only as passive consumers of
corporate seeds and agendas. The
future of Africa is once again being
decided by rich men in London
24 March, 2015
Colin Todhunter : Originally from
the northwest of England, Colin
Todhunter has spent many years in
India.
Source: Countercurrents.org
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