May 2015
Vol 15, No.05
MADE IN AMERICA
By Henry Francis B. Espiritu
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.
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:
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.
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.
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
2.) The Holy Quran declares that Muslims are forbidden to destroy places Turn to next page
STATEMENT BY CHANDRA MUZAFFAR.........................P3 BY CHANDRA MUZAFFAR.........................P4
.MEDITERRANEAN CATASTROPHES .ENHANCING ASEAN
ARTICLES . OBAMA’S OUTRAGEOUS SNUB
TO THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE BY BRYAN MACDONALD...................................P 5 . NUCLEAR DEAL SPARKS RACE TO ENTER IRANIAN MARKETS BY NILE BOWIE..................................................P 7
.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
.INTERNATIONAL COURT, HAGUE, RULES IN FAVOUR
. EMPIRE AND COLONIALISM: RICH MEN IN LONDON
OF ECUADOR IN ITS CASE AGAINST U.S. OIL GIANT,
STILL DECIDING AFRICA’S FUTURE BY COLIN TODHUNTER....................................P20
CHEVRON BY ROBERT BARSOCCHINI.....................................P13
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continued from page 1 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-Quran 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. SayyidinaAbu 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 fruitbearing 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. 3739.).
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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 socalled 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-affiliateshave-killed-over-300-sunni-imams-andpreachers/). 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
L E A D A R T I C L E ISIS as outside the pale of the Islamic faith (See: www.breitbart.com/national-security/ 2014/07/03/sunni-mufti-isis-and-affiliateshave-killed-over-300-sunni-imams-andpreachers/). 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 continued next page
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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 TransAfghan pipeline see Michel
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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 coreligionists? Is this about establishing a war scenario in
S T A T E M E N T 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 EUROPE STOOD UP
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By Chandra Muzaffar 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 alAssad who is a critical link in the resistance to Western-Israeli dominance over West Asia.Yet another example, it is the AngloAmerican 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 continued next page
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Israel’s position. Turning to another country in theArab 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 SaudiArabia 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,
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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.
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.
This does not mean that there are no other causes for the outflow of people from WANA. Bad governance within a nationstate, especially massive corruption, oppression and religious and ethnic
1st May 2015
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.
Dr. Chandra Muzaffar is the President of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST).
ENHANCING ASEAN By Chandra Muzaffar
The Malaysian Minister of Foreign Affairs, Dato SeriAnifahAman, 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 nonconfrontational 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. TheASEAN 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 continued next page
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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
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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 anASEAN 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?
A R T I C L E S 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
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By Bryan MacDonald 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.
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.
my attire, they both laughed so hard that they doubled over.
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
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
“No, you don’t. It’s just funny. You are not doing anything wrong,” Vova replied.
“Oh my god! Is there a shop open, I need to buy a new T-Shirt,” I nervously said.
“Are you sure? I won’t get attacked by Russian nationalists or anything?” “Not unless you put über alles after the Deutschland!” continued next page
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continued from page 5 In 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
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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
A R T I C L E S 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 continued next page
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continued from page 6 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
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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
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A R T I C L E S 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
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 extraterritorial 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 continued next page
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Tehran 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
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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, SaudiArabia. 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 antiAssad 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
A R T I C L E S 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 continued next page
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continued from page 8 – 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,
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which has notoriously strained relations with the White House, thus allowing Washington to reap the aforementioned benefits of a strategic rapprochement with Iran.
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
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
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 thirtytwo-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 continued next page
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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.
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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.”
“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
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
A R T I C L E S soldier recounted, Meadlo and a fellowsoldier “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. continued next page
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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
A R T I C L E S 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 continued next page
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and 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
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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 seventythree children were executed, including fifty-six infants. Sixty older men died. The museum’s accounting included another
A R T I C L E S 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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INTERNATIONAL COURT, HAGUE, RULES IN FAVOR OF ECUADOR ITS CASE AGAINST U.S OIL GIANT, CHEVRON
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By Robert Barsocchini 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.
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
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
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 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 MalaysiaAirlines 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.
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 Russiadid-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.
A Lightning Rod Last July, the MH-17 tragedy quickly became a lightning rod in a storm of antiRussian 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
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 continued next page
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continued from page 14 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.
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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-toair 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-toair missile systems, downing more than a dozen aircraft in the months prior to the MH17 tragedy, including two large transport aircraft.”
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
A R T I C L E S 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
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
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 continued next page
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Lysenko, spokesman for Ukraine’s Security Council, using Kiev’s preferred term for the rebels.
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Shoot-down Scenario Shifts”and “Was Putin Targeted for Mid-air Assassination?”]
A R T I C L E S government had satellite surveillance that revealed exactly where the supposed ground-to-air missile was launched and who fired it.
German Claims 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 antiRussian oligarchs. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Flight 17
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.
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 antiaircraft missile batteries only a few miles away).
And, the BND disputed Russian government claims that a Ukrainian fighter jet had been flying close to MH17, 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.”]
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 MH17 shoot-down since five days after the tragedy.
When the Dutch Safety Board investigating the crash issued an interim report in mid-October, it answered few questions, beyond confirming that MH17 apparently was destroyed by “highvelocity objects that penetrated the aircraft from outside.” The 34-page Dutch report was silent on the “dognot-barking” issue of whether the U.S.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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 next page
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continued from page 18 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.
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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 wellpublicized 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 wellknown 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?
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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
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COLONIALISM: RICH MEN IN LONDON STILL DECIDING AFRICA’S FUTURE By Colin Todhunter
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
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 facilitate this. The notion of ‘development’ has become hijacked by rich corporations and the concept of poverty depoliticised and separated from structurally embedded power relations.
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,
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, fertiliser 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
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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 list 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
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(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 neocolonialist 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 cherrypick 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 profitability 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
A R T I C L E S 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 stringsattached 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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