Monday, November 26, 2007

Peace in the Mideast...via Annapolis?



So President Bush--after butchering the name of Palestinian authority president Mahmoud Abbas--inaugurated his bid for a Mid East peace plan in Annapolis, Maryland this week. For the record, I'm all for peace--the world could certainly use more of it. But the notion that this administration, which has engaged in a pre-emptive unjust war in Iraq, supported repression at home and abroad, backed violent military take-overs to sow renewed chaos in Somalia and is now saber-rattling daily at Iran, is now trying to promote peace seems beyond bizarre. Is this some bid for Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice to recapture her tarnished image, when just little over a year ago she allowed Israel to bomb Lebanon with near impunity--actually blocking any chance for an early end to the conflict? Does the Bush Junta think the world will suddenly have a change of heart and nominate them for a Nobel Peace Prize?

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Tuesday, November 20, 2007

What's Hardcore? Cry Somalia



So the news is reporting that the UN has named Somalia the most pressing humanitarian disaster in the world at the moment, overshadowing both more popular places of discussion like Iraq or Darfur. To date, some 1 million Somalis have been displaced as their country goes through another round of upheavals. What's most tragic about this, is that just a little over a year ago, Somalia was showing promise. An Islamist group calling itself the Islamic Courts had routed the dreaded warlords and brought peace and stability. While there were differences and controversies amongst the Islamists in their rule (some factions wanted to introduce Sharia law), for the most part they were welcomed by Somalis who had seen decades of chaos and were thankful for peace. Enter however the Bush administration. Deciding that anything with the word "Islam" in it must inherently be dangerous, the US declared the Islamic Courts "terrorists" in league with al-Qaeda. The Bush administration in fact backed the warlords--the very ones they had fought a decade ago--with money and weapons against the Islamist fighters. That gamble failed, as the Somali people chose the Islamic Courts who routed the warlords. Unable to deal with the reality on the ground, the Bush regime decided to change it.

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Thursday, November 8, 2007

Water Torture and Slaves




Since we still seem to be having a debate on whether waterboarding is actually "torture," the following excerpt of the water torture of a female slave in antebellum Georgia deserves mentioning. Notice that this act was not done to gain information (so-called "enhanced interrogation"), but merely to punish. This was the intended effect of waterboarding and other forms of water torture--whether it was used during the Spanish Inquisition on "heretic" Jews, by American troops on insurgent Philippinos, on dissenters in Pinochet controlled Chile and elsewhere. It does not extract confessions; it induces terror, plain and simple. Perhaps some of this should have been read to those Senators, Republican *and* Democrat, who voted to confirm the new Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who has yet to define waterboarding as torture.

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