April 2013
Vol 13, No.04
SPACE WARFARE AND THE FUTURE OF U.S. GLOBAL POWER By Alfred W. McCoy
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t’s 2025 and an American “triple canopy” of advanced surveillance and armed drones fills the heavens from the lower- to the exo-atmosphere. A wonder of the modern age, it can deliver its weaponry anywhere on the planet with staggering speed, knock out an enemy’s satellite communications system, or follow individuals biometrically for great distances. Along with the country’s advanced cyberwar capacity, it’s also the most sophisticated militarized information system ever created and an insurance policy for U.S. global dominion deep into the twenty-first century. It’s the future as the Pentagon imagines it; it’s under development; and Americans know nothing about it.
President Obama shot back: “Well, Governor, we also have fewer horses and bayonets, because the nature of our military’s changed... the question is not a game of Battleship, where we’re counting ships. It’s what are our capabilities.”
They are still operating in another age. “Our Navy is smaller now than at any time since 1917,” complained Republican candidate Mitt Romney during the last presidential debate.
Obama later offered just a hint of what those capabilities might be: “What I did was work with our joint chiefs of staff to think about, what are we going to need in the future to make sure that we are safe?... We need to be thinking about cyber security. We need to be talking about space.”
With words of withering mockery,
Amid all the post-debate media
chatter, however, not a single commentator seemed to have a clue when it came to the profound strategic changes encoded in the president’s sparse words. Yet for the past four years, working in silence and secrecy, the Obama administration has presided over a technological revolution in defense planning, moving the nation far beyond bayonets and battleships to cyberwarfare and the full-scale weaponization of space. In the face of waning economic influence, this bold new breakthrough in what’s called “information warfare” may prove significantly responsible should U.S. global dominion somehow continue far into the twenty-first century. While the technological changes involved are nothing less than revolutionary, they have deep historical roots in a distinctive style of American global power. It’s been evident from the moment this nation first stepped onto the world stage with its conquest Turn to next page
STATEMENTS .10 CATASTROPHES: IRAQ 10 YEARS AFTER
BY CHANDRA MUZAFFAR.................................P4
ARTICLES .ATTACKS ON ETHNIC MINORITIES CONTINUE
BY SANEN MARSHALL............................................P 6
.IRAN MEDIA BAN: ZIONIST OCTOPUS AT WORK
BY ISMAIL SALAMI..............................................P 9
.ATTACK ON CHRISTIAN HOMES IN LAHORE AND THE
MURDER OF HUMAN EMPATHY BY MARYAM SAKEENAH.........................................P 6 .PAKISTAN BEGINS CONSTRUCTION OF PAKISTAN- IRAN
GAS PIPELINE BY VILANI PEIRIS & SARATH KUMARA................P 10
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of the Philippines in 1898. Over the span of a century, plunged into three Asian crucibles of counterinsurgency — in the Philippines, Vietnam, and Afghanistan — the U.S. military has repeatedly been pushed to the breaking point. It has repeatedly responded by fusing the nation’s most advanced technologies into new information infrastructures of unprecedented power.
That military first created a manual information regime for Philippine pacification, then a computerized apparatus to fight communist guerrillas in Vietnam. Finally, during its decadeplus in Afghanistan (and its years in Iraq), the Pentagon has begun to fuse biometrics, cyberwarfare, and a potential future triple canopy aerospace shield into a robotic information regime that could produce a platform of unprecedented power for the exercise of global dominion — or for future military disaster. America’s First Information Revolution This distinctive U.S. system of imperial information gathering (and the surveillance and war-making practices that go with it) traces its origins to some brilliant American innovations in the management of textual, statistical, and visual data. Their sum was nothing less than a new information infrastructure with an unprecedented capacity for mass surveillance. During two extraordinary decades,
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American inventions like Thomas Alva Edison’s quadruplex telegraph (1874), Philo Remington’s commercial typewriter (1874), Melvil Dewey’s library decimal system (1876), and Herman Hollerith’s patented punch card (1889) created synergies that led to the militarized application of America’s first information revolution. To pacify a determined guerrilla resistance that persisted in the Philippines for a decade after 1898, the U.S. colonial regime — unlike European empires with their cultural studies of “Oriental civilizations” — used these advanced information technologies to amass detailed empirical data on Philippine society. In this way, they forged an Argus-eyed security apparatus that played a major role in crushing the Filipino nationalist movement. The resulting colonial policing and surveillance system would also leave a lasting institutional imprint on the emerging American state. When the U.S. entered World War I in 1917, the “father of U.S. military intelligence” Colonel Ralph Van Deman drew upon security methods he had developed years before in the Philippines to found the Army’s Military Intelligence Division. He recruited a staff that quickly grew from one (himself) to 1,700, deployed some 300,000 citizen-operatives to compile more than a million pages of surveillance reports on American citizens, and laid the foundations for a permanent domestic surveillance apparatus. A version of this system rose to unparalleled success during World War II when Washington established the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) as the nation’s first worldwide espionage agency. Among its nine branches, Research & Analysis recruited a staff of nearly 2,000 academics who amassed 300,000 photographs, a million maps, and three million file
L E A D A R T I C L E cards, which they deployed in an information system via “indexing, cross-indexing, and counter-indexing” to answer countless tactical questions. Yet by early 1944, the OSS found itself, in the words of historian Robin Winks, “drowning under the flow of information.” Many of the materials it had so carefully collected were left to molder in storage, unread and unprocessed. Despite its ambitious global reach, this first U.S. information regime, absent technological change, might well have collapsed under its own weight, slowing the flow of foreign intelligence that would prove so crucial for America’s exercise of global dominion after World War II. Computerizing Vietnam Under the pressures of a neverending war in Vietnam, those running the U.S. information infrastructure turned to computerized data management, launching a second American information regime. Powered by the most advanced IBM mainframe computers, the U.S. military compiled monthly tabulations of security in all of South Vietnam’s 12,000 villages and filed the three million enemy documents its soldiers captured annually on giant reels of bar-coded film. At the same time, the CIA collated and computerized diverse data on the communist civilian infrastructure as part of its infamous Phoenix Program. This, in turn, became the basis for its systematic tortures and 41,000 “extra-judicial executions” (which, based on disinformation from petty local grudges and communist counterintelligence, killed many but failed to capture more than a handful of top communist cadres). Most ambitiously, the U.S. Air Force spent $800 million a year to lace southern Laos with a network of 20,000 acoustic, seismic, thermal, and ammonia-sensitive sensors to pinpoint continued next page
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Hanoi’s truck convoys coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail under a heavy jungle canopy. The information these provided was then gathered on computerized systems for the targeting of incessant bombing runs. After 100,000 North Vietnamese troops passed right through this electronic grid undetected with trucks, tanks, and heavy artillery to launch the Nguyen Hue Offensive in 1972, the U.S. Pacific Air Force pronounced this bold attempt to build an “electronic battlefield” an unqualified failure. In this pressure cooker of what became history’s largest air war, the Air Force also accelerated the transformation of a new information system that would rise to significance three decades later: the Firebee target drone. By war’s end, it had morphed into an increasingly agile unmanned aircraft that would make 3,500 topsecret surveillance sorties over China, North Vietnam, and Laos. By 1972, the SC/TV drone, with a camera in its nose, was capable of flying 2,400 miles while navigating via a low-resolution television image. On balance, all this computerized data helped foster the illusion that American “pacification” programs in the countryside were winning over the inhabitants of Vietnam’s villages, and the delusion that the air war was successfully destroying North Vietnam’s supply effort. Despite a dismal succession of short-term failures that helped deliver a soul-searing blow to American power, all this computerized data-gathering proved a seminal experiment, even if its advances would not become evident for another 30 years until the U.S. began creating a third — robotic — information regime. The Global War on Terror As it found itself at the edge of defeat
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in the attempted pacification of two complex societies, Afghanistan and Iraq, Washington responded in part by adapting new technologies of electronic surveillance, biometric identification, and drone warfare — all of which are now melding into what may become an information regime far more powerful and destructive than anything that has come before.
After six years of a failing counterinsurgency effort in Iraq, the Pentagon discovered the power of biometric identification and electronic surveillance to pacify the country’s sprawling cities. It then built a biometric database with more than a million Iraqi fingerprints and iris scans that U.S. patrols on the streets of Baghdad could access instantaneously by satellite link to a computer center in West Virginia. When President Obama took office and launched his “surge,” escalating the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan, that country became a new frontier for testing and perfecting such biometric databases, as well as for full-scale drone war in both that country and the Pakistani tribal borderlands, the latest wrinkle in a technowar already loost by the Bush administration. This meant accelerating technological developments in drone warfare that had largely been suspended for two decades after the Vietnam War. Launched as an experimental, unarmed surveillance aircraft in 1994, the Predator drone was first deployed
L E A D A R T I C L E in 2000 for combat surveillance under the CIA’s “Operation Afghan Eyes.” By 2011, the advanced MQ-9 Reaper drone, with “persistent hunter killer” capabilities, was heavily armed with missiles and bombs as well as sensors that could read disturbed dirt at 5,000 feet and track footprints back to enemy installations. Indicating the torrid pace of drone development, between 2004 and 2010 total flying time for all unmanned vehicles rose from just 71 hours to 250,000 hours. By 2009, the Air Force and the CIA were already deploying a drone armada of at least 195 Predators and 28 Reapers inside Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan — and it’s only grown since. These collected and transmitted 16,000 hours of video daily, and from 20062012 fired hundreds of Hellfire missiles that killed an estimated 2,600 supposed insurgents inside Pakistan’s tribal areas. Though the second-generation Reaper drones might seem stunningly sophisticated, one defense analyst has called them “very much Model T Fords.” Beyond the battlefield, there are now some 7,000 drones in the U.S. armada of unmanned aircraft, including 800 larger missile-firing drones. By funding its own fleet of 35 drones and borrowing others from the Air Force, the CIA has moved beyond passive intelligence collection to build a permanent robotic paramilitary capacity. In the same years, another form of information warfare came, quite literally, online. Over two administrations, there has been continuity in the development of a cyberwarfare capability at home and abroad. Starting in 2002, President George W. Bush illegally authorized the National Security Agency to scan countless millions of electronic messages with its top-secret “Pinwale” database. Similarly, the FBI started an continued next page
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Investigative Data Warehouse that, by 2009, held a billion individual records. Under Presidents Bush and Obama, defensive digital surveillance has grown into an offensive “cyberwarfare” capacity, which has already been deployed against Iran in history’s first significant cyberwar. In 2009, the Pentagon formed U.S. Cyber Command (CYBERCOM), with headquarters at Ft. Meade, Maryland, and a cyberwarfare center at Lackland
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Air Base in Texas, staffed by 7,000 Air Force employees. Two years later, it declared cyberspace an “operational domain” like air, land, or sea, and began putting its energy into developing a cadre of cyber-warriors capable of launching offensive operations, such as a variety of attacks on the computerized centrifuges in Iran’s nuclear facilities and Middle Eastern banks handling Iranian money.
L E A D A R T I C L E The second part of this article will appear in the May 2013 issue of the JUST Commentary. Alfred W. McCoy is the J.R.W. Smail Professor of History at the University of WisconsinMadison. A TomDispatch regular, he is the lead author of ‘Endless Empire: Spain’s Retreat, Europe’s Eclipse, America’s Decline’ (University of Wisconsin, 2012)
8 November, 2012 End of Part I
Source: TomDispatch.com
STATEMENT 10 CATASTROPHES: IRAQ 10 YEARS AFTER
10 years after the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq a number of analysts have come to the tragic conclusion that the most immoral and unjust war in recent years has generated nothing but a series of catastrophes. The 10 catastrophes that we have outlined below represent only a small portion of a horrendous tragedy that continues to unfold to this day. Catastrophe no. 1 While the figure on the total number of deaths associated directly or indirectly with the invasion varies, it is held that there were 1.5 million deaths from 20 March 2003 to 31st December 2011 when US and allied combat brigades withdrew from Iraq. If we included the number who died as a result of the earlier Kuwait War in 1991 and the sanctions imposed upon the people of Iraq from August 1990 to
March 2003, the total would increase dramatically by 1.9 million. Of these 3.4 million deaths, a huge percentage would be children killed by the sanctions in the first phase of the assault on Iraq and those that died after the invasion from occupation related causes. Catastrophe no. 2 The death of children in Iraq correlates strongly with “contamination from depleted uranium (du) munitions and other military related pollution — suspected of causing a sharp rise in congenital birth defects, cancer cases, and other illnesses throughout much of Iraq.” According to Iraqi government statistics, prior to the Kuwait War of 1991, “the rate of cancer cases in Iraq was 40 out of 100,000 people. By 1995, it had increased to 800 out of 100,000, and by 2005, it had doubled
to at least 1,600 out of 100,000 people. Current estimates show the increasing trend continuing.” Of particular significance in this regard is the situation in Fallujah which was subjected to a massive bombardment by US troops in 2004. A 2010 study has shown “a 12-fold increase in childhood cancer in Fallujah since the 2004 attacks.” The study has also revealed that “ the sex ratio had become skewed to 86 boys born to every 100 girls, together with a spread of diseases indicative of genetic damage ¯ similar to, but of far greater incidence than Hiroshima.” Catastrophe no. 3 Though there are some improvements here and there, the average Iraqi continues to struggle to make ends meet. It is estimated that 27 continued next page
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to 60% of Iraqis are unemployed or under-employed. Inflation hovers around 75%! Catastrophe no. 4 The invasion destroyed Iraq’s infrastructure. A nation which once had superb amenities from clean water and regular supply of electricity to excellent hospitals and well-run schools has now been reduced to shambles. The US has made good the threat that the former US Secretary of State, James Baker, conveyed to the then Iraqi Foreign Minister, Tariq Aziz, in 1991 that the US would bomb Iraq back to the stone age. Catastrophe no. 5 The invasion and occupation could have cost the US and its allies over 3 trillion dollars. This does not include the money spent on the treatment of injured soldiers or the rehabilitation of war veterans. In a sense, the 6,000 veterans from the Kuwait and Iraq wars who commit suicide every year also constitute a cost factor. Catastrophe no. 6 Many companies have also profiteered from post invasion Iraq. Oil corporations from a few countries have been given access to Iraq’s oil fields. Other companies have been involved in providing support services to US and allied military operations. One such company is the Houston based engineering and construction firm KBR, Inc, which was spun off from its parent firm, Halliburton Co. KBR, it is alleged, was “given 39.5 billion in Iraq-related
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contracts over the past decade.” Catastrophe no. 7 The invasion and occupation of Iraq was, right from the outset, a blatant violation of international law. The United Nations was pushed aside and the US, Britain and some of their other allies embarked upon a war of aggression whose real motives were to advance their imperial interests visa-vis oil, strategic routes and Israel. For Israel itself, the war fought on its behalf decimated a leadership vehemently opposed to its occupation of Palestine and other Arab lands and was therefore a bonanza. Catastrophe no. 8 This illegal war is the principal reason why law and order has broken down in many parts of Iraq today. Gangs and hoodlums control various cities and villages. Crime is rampant. Kidnappings and murders have become routine. Fear and a general feeling of insecurity grip many Iraqi citizens. Catastrophe no. 9 The occupation of Iraq was inextricably intertwined with the manipulation and exploitation of sectarian sentiments. In the initial phase, the occupiers and their underlings manipulated the resentment of the Shia majority against the Sunni minority. Later, when influential elements within the democratically elected Shia government demonstrated that they were inclined to the Shia leadership in Iran, Sunni feelings of deprivation were exploited to the hilt. Playing Sunnis against Shias and vice-
S T A T E M E N T versa has become a dangerous and violent game. Thousands have been killed in these sectarian conflicts which feed upon centuries of distrust and suspicion. They continue to this day even though formal military occupation ended in December 2011. Indeed, observers of Iraqi politics are beginning to wonder whether the Sunni-Shia conflict will lead very soon to an all-out civil war. Such a prospect has unfathomable regional implications since there are Sunnis and Shias in different proportions in Lebanon, Syria, Bahrain, Kuwait and a few other Arab states. The two sects are also found in Turkey and Iran — apart from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Catastrophe no. 10 The culprits behind all these catastrophes, those who were at the helm of the US and Britain in 2003 — George Bush and Dick Cheney, on the one hand, and Tony Blair, on the other — have not been convicted in any court of law as war criminals. It is only NGO sponsored tribunals in different parts of the world who have found them and others guilty of invading and occupying Iraq and condemned them on behalf of humanity. 10 years after committing an unconscionable act of wanton aggression, they remain free — a shameful blot on the collective conscience of the human family. Dr. Chandra Muzaffar, President, International Movement for a Just World (JUST). 25 March, 2013
To All JUST Commentary Readers If you are receiving a hardcopy of the Commentary but prefer to receive your copy via email alert please inform comment@just-international.org
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ARTICLES ATTACKS ON ETHNIC MINORITIES CONTINUE By Sanen Marshall It is a worrying sign that as Myanmar begins to open up, the Government continues to persevere with armed aggression against ethnic minorities seeking autonomy within, or independence from, the Myanmar state. While it is true that few governments have traditionally interpreted the human rights principle of ‘self-determination’ as referring to the right to secede, in the case of Myanmar it is the repressive nature of the State that continues to fuel ethnic nationalism. It is also regrettable that while Aung San Suu Kyi remains an important force for political change, the treatment of her person by the Government is now viewed internationally as the key indicator of liberalisation. She has been free from house arrest for more than two years now. There have also been several processes and laws that have been enacted that make Myanmar look like it is on the road to democratisation. Sadly, this is not reflected in on-theground realities for the Kachin, Karen, Shan and other ethnic minorities in the State. Ceasefires have been contracted and broken, mainly through the wanton
actions of the Myanmar military operating in the remote regions where some of these ethnic minorities live. The situation is therefore desperate. Some segments of these populations have persevered in the path of armed resistance against the Myanmar State. But their capabilities are largely defensive and, even then, not very effective against the power of a conventional army. An estimated 100,000 Kachin have been displaced since the collapse of a 17-year old truce between the Kachin Independence Army and Government forces in 2011. Many Kachin refugees have been holed up in the mountains for over a year now, waiting for peace, so that they can return home. Refugee camps suffer from the cold, the squalor of dilapidated housing and poor sanitation. In the Arakan state, it is reported that 100,000 people have been displaced by inter-ethnic violence between the Arakan and Rohingya. This has been partially fuelled by repressive Government policies. All this has passed under the radar of the international community which is more intent on watching developments at the centre of the Myanmar state than at its
periphery. Tourist arrivals are also up, with many believing that Myanmar has taken the road to democracy at last. These two realities of a democratising centre and a militarised periphery do not match. But it is only the former that tourists see. It is therefore incumbent on the international community to selectively withhold their engagement with the state of Myanmar until Myanmar’s ethnic minorities are allowed to return to their homelands and the Government returns to the negotiating table. This selective disengagement would go a long way to refocussing global attention to the militarised periphery of Myanmar and not just its touristy centre. Since the international community holds Aung San Suu Kyi in high regard, it should pay heed to her calls for an end to the aggression. In January this year, she declared ‘we, as well as the government, have to ask ourselves whether we understand the goals of the ethnic people and whether we can help them fulfil their goals.’ 15 March, 2013 Sanen Marshall is a Member of JUST
ATTACK ON CHRISTIAN HOMES IN LAHORE AND THE MURDER OF HUMAN EMPATHY By Maryam Sakeenah Following the reprehensible attack on Christian homes in Lahore, a spinechilling, grotesque image of an arsonist cheering over the burning flames went viral. One wonders what sort of man thumps his chest over destroying innocent lives and how human beings can become capable of such naked, audacious sadism that seeks justification in a faith that decrees ‘Whosoever harms a non Muslim
citizen of a Muslim state, I shall be the complainant against him on the Day of Judgement.’ (Sahih Bukhari) Throughout history human beings have shown themselves to be capable of wreaking terrible destruction and causing great suffering- from burning ‘witches’ at the stake, crucifying God’s noble messengers, butchering refugees in sacred precincts, gassing Jews at
Auschwitz, to the nationalistic wars of the twentieth century, the liquidation of millions in nuclear destruction and poisoning of the biosphere through relentless commercial-industrial activity. Yet Jeremy Rifkins in his phenomenal book ‘The Empathic Civilization’ insists that human beings continued next page
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are ‘Homo Empathica’, that is, defined and distinguished for the ability to empathize. He writes, ‘Human beings are soft-wired to experience others’ plight as if we were experiencing it ourselves.’ Empathy allows us to stretch our sensibility to another so we can cohere into larger social groups. It is curbed and limited by defining these social groups through narrow, parochial banners of ethnicity, nationalism, race and creed so that the empathic drive does not extend to the out-group . The Prophet (SAW) said: “He is not one us who calls for `Asabiyah’, (prejudiced, parochial association” (Abu Daud.) The out-group is then ‘otherized’, made out of the reach of our empathy. This creates indifference and apathy towards the suffering of people belonging to a different classification. However, a more severe form of limiting and deflecting the empathic impulse is dehumanization of the other ‘as flies to the wanton boys’, often institutionalized by the social superstructure: state and government, media, education, religion. Through stereotyping, essentialism, ethnocentrism, prejudice and propaganda as well as censorship and selective relaying of information to the public, minority groups and those whose interests clash with or threaten one’s own are systemtically dehumanized and even demonized to appear less than human, despicable, lower-order bestial ‘others’ whose eradication may not be of any great loss to human civilization. In the process we forget that as members of the human family, we all share a common, precarious existential predicament- our ‘little lives rounded with a sleep’- on a little finite planet in the mystifying universe. Der Spiegel carried a report last year on the psychology of American drone
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operators whose button-clicking while reclining in plush chairs in airconditioned offices decrees death to anonymous distant targets. The method of modern technological warfare seems to be designed to keep empathy at bay- the victim is invisible and remote, represented by a red dot on a laser screen, annihilated by a light, single click. Drone pilot Vanessa Meyer said, “ When the decision had been made, and they saw that this was an enemy, a hostile person, a legal target that was worthy of being destroyed, I had no problem with taking the shot.” (Nicola Abe: ‘Dreams in Infrared’) Gitta Sereny writes of Fratz Stangl, the annihilator of thousands at a Nazi camp: “ Prisoners were simply objects. Goods. “That was my profession,” he said. “I enjoyed it. It fulfilled me. And yes, I was ambitious about that, I won’t deny it.” When Sereny asked Stangl how as a father he could kill children, he answered, “I rarely saw them as individuals. It was always a huge mass. … [T]hey were naked, packed together, running, being driven with whips. …” (Chris Hedges: The Careerist) Few and far between, there may be those whose empathy grows militant and unkillable. Brandon Bryant was able to humanize his victims in his drone operations_ he noticed the details of their lives and patterns of behaviour akin to his own. “I got to know them. Until someone higher up in the chain of command gave me the order to shoot.” He felt remorse because of the children, whose fathers he was taking away. “They were good daddies,” he says . He felt ‘disconnected from humanity’ while at his job, going through terrible unease and remorse. Having quit his job, he wrote in his diary, “On the battlefield there are no sides, just bloodshed. Total war. Every horror witnessed. I wish my eyes would rot.” (Nicola Abe: ‘Dreams in Infrared’)
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Perhaps the most integral parts of this institutionalized dehumanization embedded in the superstructure of modern industrial society are the ‘Careerists’- the good men and women efficient at their jobs that make the system function. Chris Hedges describes them as ‘... armies of bureaucrats serving a corporate system that will quite literally kill us. They are as cold and disconnected... They carry out minute tasks. They are docile. Compliant. They obey. They find their self-worth in the prestige and power of the corporation, in the status of their positions and in their career promotions. It is moral schizophrenia. They erect walls to create an isolated consciousness. They destroy the ecosystem, the economy and the body politic... They feel nothing. And the system rolls forward. The polar ice caps melt. The droughts rage over cropland. The drones deliver death from the sky. The state moves inexorably forward to place us in chains. The sick die. The poor starve. The prisons fill. And the careerist, plodding forward, does his or her job.’ In Pakistan religion is increasingly used as one of the most powerful means of deflecting empathy from those outside the faith and sectarian affiliation. Religious intolerance in a culture of violence and anger is a fatal mix and has gone on a bloody rampage. While the causes, factors and agents responsible for the ongoing madness are complexly intertwined, the continued next page
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resistance, rejection, counternarrative and healing that ought to have come from the representatives of religion in this part of the world has been inadequate, half-hearted, ambiguous and equivocal. The voice of condemnation from the pulpit is faltering, and this has been extremely damaging in a number of ways. The contemporary discourse of political Islam in Pakistan is heavily lopsided, selectively highlighting the plight of victims of American, Israeli and Indian misdemeanours (which certainly are important human rights issues), while keeping mum or issuing periodic enfeebled and rhetorical statements of condemnation over the plight of minorities and other innocent victims of those committing violence in the name of religion.
For Islamist groups, the cost of this silence has been and will be crushingly enormous. The disappointment felt by members of the civil society and educated youth over a criminal silence and inability of the religious leaders and scholars to rise to the occasion and give clarity to the public with a single voice has been shattering. This has not only alienated scores of good, intelligent people belonging to Pakistan’s educated urban middle and upper classes from Islamic groups and organizations but in many cases from the faith itself. A colleague posted the picture of the gleeful arsonist with the comment, ‘Happy mob rightfully burns down Christian homes. Another great day for Islam. Another victory against the
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forces of evil.’ While this is an extreme reaction showing inability to draw a line between despicable, crazed fanatical elements and the faith itself, but it increases the onus on spokespeople of religion to address the burning issues that blur the lines. Going to college in Pakistan shortly after the U.S declared all-out ‘war on terror’ and invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, I witnessed scores of young people around me turning to Islam, primarily out of empathy for the Muslim victim, the underdog. In this country, the Islamist persona has now understandably metamorphosed into a perpetrator devoid of compassion, rationality and empathy, and this has alienated and repelled hundreds of thousands, resulting in a completely opposite trend that I, now an educator, see around me: a clear de-Islamization of Pakistan’s urban educated youth. While there also is a swing in the opposite direction, but the deIslamization trend is clearly on the rise, understandably fuelled by the aforementioned. Islamists in Pakistan are not cognizant of this terrible loss as they perceive themselves to be locked up in a crusade against the onslaught of the West, the secularists, the Zionists et al. Any voice calling for the need to provide clarity, answers and solutions is dismissed as ‘Westernized’, ‘secularized’, ‘liberalized,’ hence misguided and insincere, unworthy of serious consideration. The narrative in Pakistan needs a rethink: the ethos of the Quran is the extension of identity to embrace the human race as fellow sojourners held together by a common human nature and destiny: ‘Mankind is but a single nation, yet they disagree.’ (2:213) Secondarily, we are taught to understand our responsibility towards those outside the faith fraternity not
A R T I C L E S merely through divine directive but lived example and established paradigm. In 628 C.E. Prophet Muhammad (s) granted a Charter of Privileges to the monks of St. Catherine Monastery in Mt. Sinai: “This is a message from Muhammad ibn Abdullah, as a covenant to those who adopt Christianity, near and far, we are with them. Verily I, the servants, the helpers, and my followers defend them, because Christians are my citizens; and by Allah! I hold out against anything that displeases them. No compulsion is to be on them. Neither are their judges to be removed from their jobs nor their monks from their monasteries. No one is to destroy a house of their religion, to damage it, or to carry anything from it to the Muslims’ houses. Should anyone take any of these, he would spoil God’s covenant and disobey His Prophet. Verily, they are my allies and have my secure charter against all that they hate. No one is to force them to travel or to oblige them to fight. The Muslims are to fight for them. If a female Christian is married to a Muslim it is not to take place without her approval. She is not to be prevented from visiting her church to pray. continued next page
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Their churches are to be respected. They are neither to be prevented from repairing them nor the sacredness of their covenants. No one of the nation (Muslims) is to disobey the covenant till the Last Day (end of the world).” Empathy humanizes and civilizes. Its suppression intensifies secondary drives like narcissism, materialism, violence and aggression. The task of religion, education and the media must be to bring out the empathic sociability stretching out to all of humanity and
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prepare the groundwork for what Rifkins has called an ‘empathic civilization.’ Mercy and gentleness, said the Prophet (SAW), are defining traits of believers: ‘ Allah is gentle, and He loves those who are gentle.’ (Sahih Muslim) Mercy and gentleness beautify the spirit: “Whenever kindness is in a thing it adorns it, and whenever it is removed from anything, it disfigures it.” [Muslim] Empathy is engraved into the core of our consciousness as human beingsthat softest part inspired from the Divine Ruh (Spirit). Those who confine
A R T I C L E S or deflect it are on the wrong side of humanity and history. In the long run, their narrative will lose out and history’s merciless verdict against them shall be ineradicable. 11 March, 2013 Maryam Sakeenah is a Pakistanbased independent researcher and freelance writer on International Politics, Human Rights and Islam. She also authored a book ‘Us versus Them and Beyond’ analyzing the Clash of Civilization Theory and the role of Islam in facilitating intercultural communication. Source: Countercurrents.org
IRAN MEDIA BAN: ZIONIST OCTOPUS AT WORK By Ismail Salami It seems that the West is sloughing over its established definition of freedom of expression when the Iranian channels HispanTV and Press TV come under brutal censorship by the Israel-friendly satellite companies in Europe.
and is determined to achieve nuclear weapons capability. That Hispasat’s action triggered such an angry response in Tehran tells us all we need to know about its significance.”
Evidently spearheaded by the Zionists, Spain’s satellite provider Hispasat has ordered Overon to take Press TV and Hispan TV off the air. No wonder, the illegal move created extreme joy in the Zionist organizations such as the American Jewish Committee (AJC). “This is an important development in the worldwide effort to contain the defiant regime in Tehran, one we have been watching carefully for months and discussing with our friends in Spain,” said AJC Executive Director David Harris. “Hispasat did the right thing,” Harris continued. “No satellite company in the Western world should enable the dissemination of propaganda from an Iranian government that denies human rights, supports terror organizations
Article ten of the ACHR says, “Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. This Article shall not prevent States from requiring the licensing of broadcasting, television or cinema enterprises.” Hispasat is partly owned by Eutelsat whose French-Israeli CEO is widely believed to be the architect of attacks on Iranian media in Europe.
Overon says as the EU has blacklisted the head of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting, Hispan TV and Press TV must be taken off the air. It should be noted that Hispan TV is officially registered in Spain and operates under the country’s media laws. Besides, the EU has confirmed to Press TV that its anti-Iran sanctions do not apply to the country’s media.
Without even Michel de Rosen being the Zionist CEO of Eutelsat, the European media is so pathetically caught up in the claws of the Zionists that they would readily give in to their demands especially when they are directly aimed at dispelling the political sway of the Islamic Republic.
From a legal point of view, this move runs counter to the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR).
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that it is used as a way of emotional blackmail. This, the Europeans sadly buy and seek to make up for the ‘holocaust’, an inflated issue, a political ace in the hole for the Zionists. On the other hand, Europe is infernally prone to smother any voice coming from Iran and that which is in defense of the Islamic Republic as the Europeans are fearful of alternative channels such as Press TV, Hispan TV and RT which deliver a truthful report of the public discontent in the European community. The fact is that Europe is crumbling from within and there is no economic salvation in sight and Europe prefers media blackout. Further to that, the Zionist lobby is so powerful in Europe that the Europeans prefer to cave in to its wanton demands, ignore
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the very basic principles upon which the European Convention of Human Rights is built, and avoid withering criticism or political isolation from Washington. In point of fact, Europe is plunging into a financial abysm largely on account of its reliance on US imperialism and its support of the Zionist regime. The role these alternative channels play in raising intellectual awareness and political insight is an irrefutable reality which serves as a resounding slap in the face of Europe. To put it in better terms, these channels hold a mirror to the European audience wherein the reality is reflected as it should. And this is exactly what harrows Europe with fear and wonder. What is currently happening to the
A R T I C L E S Iranian media is not just limited to Iran or to the Iranian community. These channels and like news outlets are the inalienable rights of world citizens who are entitled to have an alternative voice different from the West. In fact, depriving the international community of these channels is stripping the people across the globe of the choice to hear. It is not ‘kosher’ and amounts to an act of intellectual abnegation. 28 December, 2012 Dr. Ismail Salami is an Iranian writer, Middle East expert, Iranologist and Iexicographer. He writes extensively on the US and Middle East issues and his articles have been translated into a number of languages. Source: Countercurrents.org
PAKISTAN BEGINS CONSTRUCTION OF PAKISTAN - IRAN GAS PIPELINE By Vilani Peiris & Sarath Kumara way to counter the crippling economic sanctions the US has imposed on it, based on unsubstantiated allegations that Iran is developing nuclear weapons.
Amid US threats to impose sanctions on his country, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari joined Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in a ceremony breaking ground on construction of the Pakistani portion of a planned Iran-Pakistan pipeline on Monday. With national elections due in May, Zardari and his ruling Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP) will seek to gain electoral advantage by using the pipeline to posture as being independent from Washington. Iran sees the project as a
Pakistan faces a shortfall of 2 billion cubic of natural gas feet per day and a serious energy crisis, which has seen mass electricity riots in Lahore and other cities. Pakistan is in the dark for up to six hours a day—resulting in the loss of export revenue, the closure of tens of thousands of factories, and the loss of millions of jobs. The reactivation of the muchdelayed US$7.5 billion gas pipeline project was agreed when Zardari visited Iran in late February. Iran has almost finished its 900-kilometre portion of the pipeline. Pakistan now has to lay around 750 kilometres of pipeline. If completed, the pipeline could transport over 21.5 million cubic metres daily
from Iran’s South Pars gas field. Iran will provide $500 million of the $1.5 billion cost of building the pipeline inside Pakistan, which has to come up with the rest of the funds. At the ceremony held in Iranian border city of Chabahar, the Pakistani president declared the project was “very important” and stated it was not against any other country, the Dawn reported. His remarks seemed to be a signal to allay US concerns. In an apparent jab at Washington, Ahmadinejad declared that the “gas pipeline is a sign of show of resistance against domination.” On Monday US State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland threatened that “if this project actually goes forward, that the Iran Sanctions
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continued from page 10 Act would be triggered.” However, she expressed doubts about whether it would actually materialize: “We’ve heard this pipeline announced about 10 or 15 times before in the past.” The BBC wrote that Washington sees “a good measure of domestic Pakistan politics in all of this—elections are looming—and it may be for a future government in Islamabad to face the moment of truth: either to risk US sanctions by switching the gas on or to risk domestic criticism by being seen to cave in to US pressure.” There are some indications that Washington believes it can more effectively torpedo the project by helping Pakistan find other sources of gas. To quash plans of an Iran-Pakistan pipeline, Washington has repeatedly proposed an alternative pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan. This has proved impossible due to the fighting in Afghanistan. On Wednesday, however, Qatar announced that it would agree to supply Pakistan with natural gas at a low price of $18 per million British thermal units (mmbtu). US imperialism has repeatedly bullied countries in the region to block the Iran pipeline project, which the US sees as an obstacle to its plans to isolate Iran and dominate Central Asia. Initially dubbed the “peace pipeline,” the project aimed to carry gas from Iran to Pakistan and through Pakistan to India, thus reducing the explosive tensions between Pakistan and India. Discussion of the project began in 1994, but India withdrew from it under US pressure in 2009, a year after Washington signed a nuclear pact with New Delhi. As pipeline work started, Zardari said, “Nobody has the power to halt this project,” adding: “Pakistan is a
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sovereign and independent country that is acting in its national interests by going ahead with the pipeline.” In fact, in the run-up to the May elections, the PPP is desperate to cover up its deeply unpopular role as one of the main client regimes of the US “war on terror.” Mass opposition is directed not only at the US but also at the PPP for its backing for the NATO occupation of Afghanistan and the resulting bloodshed in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. Islamabad has sanctioned CIA drone attacks in Afghanistan-Pakistan border areas aimed at the Taliban and other anti-occupation fighters, killing thousands. The Pakistani military has carried out operations in Pakistan’s western tribal areas under US pressure, displacing millions of people and creating a desperate internal refugee crisis in Pakistan. US drone strikes in Pakistan have also provoked sharp opposition. When 24 Pakistani border guards were killed in a NATO attack in 2011, Zardari closed down US supply routes into Afghanistan in an attempt to calm public fury, promptly re-opening them a few months later. This was the result of US pressure, and of Islamabad’s financial dependence on US and International Monetary Fund (IMF) loans. Zardari is also trying to show he is serious about addressing the country’s energy problems, which have provoked both mass anger and criticisms from big business. Mentioning violent protests over power cuts, The News wrote: “Pakistan needs to enter into a serious diplomatic discourse with the US to try to convince it of how important” Iran’s gas is for Pakistan. However, the Pakistani ruling elite
A R T I C L E S above all fears US sanctions. On Monday the Karachi Stock Exchange’s benchmark 100-share index ended 2.46 percent, or 441.62 points, lower. Pakistan is mired in deep economic crisis from the impact of global economic meltdown centred in the US and Europe. The rupee has already declined 0.8 percent against the US dollar this year after declining by 7.6 percent in 2012. Pakistan’s economic growth rate is predicted to fall to 3.5 percent for this fiscal year, and then to 3 percent next year. Currently Pakistan only has enough foreign exchange reserves to pay for two months of imports. Pakistan has approached the (IMF) to obtain another loan, for $5 billion. If Washington decides to twist Islamabad’s arm to halt the gas pipeline, it will seek to use its influence at the IMF to block the loan. The US has other concerns on Pakistan, as well. The Obama administration did not publicly express concern over Pakistan’s transfer of operational control of the deep-sea port at Gwadar to China. However, Washington has in the past noted that the port was part of China’s “string of pearls” plan to increase its influence in the Indian Ocean. Iran also recently agreed to build a $4 billion oil refinery at the Gwadar port with a capacity of 400,000 barrels per day—making it Pakistan’s largest. Islamabad’s deals with China and Iran will be carefully followed in Washington, which is hostile to Beijing and Tehran, and is carrying out a socalled “pivot to Asia” to contain China.
15 March, 2013
Source: WSWS.org
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