10/21/05 “The Island” — — The US and its allies had a bull in a court room on Wednesday. They may have expected Saddam Hussein to stomach all the humble pie they were going to dish out in what could be described as a show trial. They were mistaken.

His reaction was a display of resilience, hubris and contempt. He defied the presiding judge’s order to identify himself. Being an Iraqi, said he, the judge knew him well. He disputed the term the judge used to describe him—‘former President of Iraq’. He insisted that he was still the President of Iraq and challenged the legality of the court which was trying him.

According to his lawyers, the offences he is said to have committed were within the bounds of the then Iraqi law and, as such, he cannot be tried under a set of new laws given retrospective effect.

Before Wednesday’s trial, Saddam had been subjected to a media trial. The western media had not only tried him but already handed down their verdict: He must be hanged!

Sadly, those media gurus who pontificate to their counterparts in the so-called developing world about neutrality, impartiality, justice and fair play, have thrown those principles to the four winds and taken up the bludgeon of partiality to make a pulp of the Iraqi despot. Some of them have lent themselves to their governments as shock troops.

Nay, it is not being argued that Saddam is an angel. He and his men belong to the same matrix as monsters like Ivan the Terrible and his black clad and black horse mounted oprichniki who dealt death and devastation to the innocent.

But his crimes could have been avoided and tens of thousands of innocent lives saved, hadn’t the West sponsored his oppressive regime and aided and abetted his crimes.

The reason given for the second invasion of Iraq, was that Saddam had in his possession Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) and this charge later turned out to be false. And the show trial appears to be the fig leaf with which the US-led allies are trying to cover their nudity.

The most serious charge against Saddam is the massacre of about 140 Shite villagers over an alleged assassination attempt in 1982. In the same year, the US, it should be recalled, removed Iraq from the list of states sponsoring terrorism! And within two years of the massacre the US restored diplomatic relations with Iraq.

Saddam used chemical weapons on both Iraqis and Iranians. The US and its allies could have nipped those attacks in the bud. Sadly, their hypocrisy wouldn’t allow them to do so. The US was the only country that voted against a UN Security Council statement in 1986 condemning the mustard gas attacks by Iraq on the Iranian forces! The US also allowed its companies to export chemicals to Iraq, which used them on humans. All chemical attacks by Saddam on the Kurds under the Anfal campaign, which left over 150,000 Kurds dead, over 1,000 Kurdish villages destroyed and about 300,000 Kurds displaced had the blessings of the West. The crop spraying helicopters used in these attacks came from the US! These massacres had no impact on the trade that Iraq had with the West. Instead, it increased! Today, we hear the West condemning those crimes against the Kurds!

The West gave the world a scare by proclaiming that Saddam was about to acquire nukes. But who helped him with his projects? He got uranium from Portugal, France and Italy and assistance for centrifuge enrichment came from Germany. The US Senate during one of its inquiries in 1995 stumbled on a startling fact: The United States had during the Iran-Iraq war, provided Saddam with samples of all the strains of germs used for making biological weapons!
informationclearinghouse.info

The special relationship between Britain and the US went south yesterday, as Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, took the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, to visit her Alabama birthplace, to draw a parallel between America’s civil rights struggle and its current ambitions to spread democracy abroad.

Ms Rice presented the trip as a new form of US diplomacy, bringing foreign counterparts to see America beyond the usual diplomatic circuit in Washington and New York. Mr Straw was the first to be invited. US and British officials rejected suggestions in the British press that the trip was aimed at burnishing Ms Rice’s credentials as a future presidential candidate.
guardian.co.uk

Nato agreed to send up to 1,000 soldiers to boost Pakistan’s overwhelmed relief effort last night as alarm grew over how to cope with a disaster now considered among the most difficult faced by the modern world.

Two weeks after an earthquake ripped across northern Pakistan an epic tragedy is unfolding. About 15,000 mountain settlements have yet to receive aid; international relief is chaotic and underfunded; and hundreds of thousands of survivors are at risk as the bitter Himalayan winter approaches.

President Pervez Musharraf yesterday described as “totally inadequate” the $600m (about £340m) in aid pledged by the international community. He estimated reconstruction costs at $5bn. But immediate worries centre on the 3.3 million people made homeless by the quake.

With three weeks before temperatures plummet and snow starts to fall, everything they need for survival – tents, medical care and helicopter transport – is in short supply. But much of the outside world, it seems, is unaware of the scale of the emergency. By last night UN members had funded just over a quarter of the UN’s $312m aid appeal. Frustration at the slow response turned to anger.

In Muzaffarabad, the Turkish prime minister, Tayyip Erdogan, announced a $150m donation – the single largest yet – and asked why other countries were not doing more.

“By the end of 2004 the world had put one trillion US dollars into weapons. We have to ask how much the world has put aside for this disaster in Pakistan,” he said, after a helicopter tour of the devastation.

Mr Erdogan was the first foreign leader to visit the earthquake zone.

Several UN officials said privately they were unhappy with the response of their headquarters in New York. “They don’t understand what we’re dealing with here,” said one. “This is our biggest relief operation ever. It’s unprecedented in scale.”
guardian.co.uk

George Bush called last night for the UN security council to take up urgently the question of Syrian involvement in the assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister, saying the international community had to hold Damascus accountable.
Mr Bush asked Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, to call the meeting of council foreign ministers, after a UN report implicated senior Syrian officials in the February 14 murder in Beirut. “There must be some way to assure accountability,” said Ms Rice, adding that the international community would have “no real credibility” if it failed to take punitive action.

Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, travelling with Ms Rice in Alabama said the meeting “should take place as soon as possible”.

“You cannot leave a report like this … on the table,” he said. “Otherwise the international community whole influence and effectiveness is in question. If we act swiftly, we act resolutely, we act together, we can show that the international community is standing up for justice.”

Syria responded angrily to the report, which concluded that the bomb that killed Hariri “could not have been taken without the approval of top-ranked Syrian security official(s)”.

“I think the report is far from professional and will not lead us to the truth,” Syria’s information minister, Mehdi Dakhlallah, told al-Jazeera television. Syria’s ambassador to the US, Imad Moustapha, said the accusations “will only help fuel anti-American sentiment around the world”.
guardian.co.uk

Brig. Gen. Rick Baccus was removed as Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, commander in 2002 for refusing to use tougher interrogation tactics, a PBS documentary suggests.

The Frontline program, “The Torture Question,” traces how the Bush administration developed aggressive interrogation policies following the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks — policies that allowed detainees to be stripped and humiliated, The Providence (R.I.) Journal reported.

The PBS program suggests Baccus was reassigned in October 2002 because military higher-ups believed he stood in the way of tougher interrogation tactics.

Retired U.S. Army Gens. Paul Kern and Jack Keane said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was upset about the lack of information from Guantanamo prisoners.

Baccus, 53, of Bristol, R.I., would not criticize President Bush’s policies, but he said command failures led to prisoner mistreatment at Guantanamo after he departed as well as the Abu Ghraib prison torture case in Iraq.

“Those people (commanders) are the ones who need to be publicly charged. I don’t know how high it needs to go,” Baccus told the newspaper.
prisonplanet.com

Watching that Frontline report last night, it was clear that Rumsfeld was intimately involved in the running of Camp X-Ray and Abu Ghraib, that Rumsfeld replaced Baccus with Miller, who told Karpinsky at Abu Ghraib that the only way to establish control and extract info was to ‘treat them [the detainees] like dogs.’ What was also striking was the sheer number of whistleblowers interviewed for the program, and how many senior members of the military have retired in the past couple years. Any soldier who is not insane or criminal knows there is no good information to be gotten from torture. Again, it is hard to escape the conclusion that at the very least, the flames of the ‘insurgency’ are being deliberately fanned. Chaos is the policy and chaos has been achieved.

The war with Iraq has made the world a more dangerous place and London a target for terrorist attack, according to one of Britain’s most senior judges.

Lord Steyn, who retired last month as a judge sitting in the UK’s highest court, described the invasion of Iraq as “military folly” and accused the Government of “scraping the legal barrel” in trying to justify it.

The former law lord told an audience of lawyers and civil rights campaigners in London that it was wrong for the Prime Minister to have called the rule of law a “game”.

He said: “The maintenance of the rule of law is not a game. It is about access to justice, fundamental human rights and democratic values.”

He added: “After the recent dreadful bombings in London we were asked to believe that the Iraq war did not make London and the world a more dangerous place. Surely, on top of everything else, we do not have to listen to a fairy-tale.”
independent.co.uk

US soldiers in Afghanistan burnt the bodies of dead Taliban and taunted their opponents about the corpses, in an act deeply offensive to Muslims and in breach of the Geneva conventions.

An investigation by SBS’s Dateline program, to be aired tonight, filmed the burning of the bodies.

It also filmed a US Army psychological operations unit broadcasting a message boasting of the burnt corpses into a village believed to be harbouring Taliban.

According to an SBS translation of the message, delivered in the local language, the soldiers accused Taliban fighters near Kandahar of being “cowardly dogs”. “You allowed your fighters to be laid down facing west and burnt. You are too scared to retrieve their bodies. This just proves you are the lady boys we always believed you to be,” the message reportedly said.

“You attack and run away like women. You call yourself Taliban but you are a disgrace to the Muslim religion, and you bring shame upon your family. Come and fight like men instead of the cowardly dogs you are.”

The burning of a body is a deep insult to Muslims. Islam requires burial within 24 hours.

Under the Geneva conventions the burial of war dead “should be honourable, and, if possible, according to the rites of the religion to which the deceased belonged”.

US soldiers said they burnt the bodies for hygiene reasons but two reporters, Stephen Dupont and John Martinkus, said the explanation was unbelievable, given they were in an isolated area.
sydneymorning herald

SAN FRANCISCO – In an unprecedented move, a UN committee has asked human and civil rights groups to submit reports and testify on U.S. breaches of international law, filling a gap left by the U.S. government’s failure to submit its own report.

The 18-member United Nations Human Rights Committee, which reviews nations’ compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, began reviewing country reports Monday and will complete its session on October 24.

But for the third time since ratifying the treaty in 1992, the United States has failed to submit its five-year report to the committee on U.S. violations of the treaty.

The treaty, which entered into force in 1976 and has been signed by 155 countries, outlaws torture or degrading treatment, protects self-determination, and ensures that all people everywhere are treated within the law.

Without a U.S. report, the committee usually skips over discussions of U.S. compliance.

But anticipating an absent U.S. report, the Human Rights Committee took precautions this year.

Last August, the committee sent a letter to a number of U.S.-based non-governmental organizations (NGOs), including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the World Organization for Human Rights USA, requesting reports on U.S. transgressions of the treaty, to be used in case the U.S. itself failed to report.

Specifically, the committee’s letter requested documentation relating to, “the fight against terrorism following the events of 11 September 2001 and notably the implications of the Patriot Act on nationals as well as non-nationals; and problems relating to the legal status and treatment of persons detained in Afghanistan, Guantanamo, Iraq, and other places of detention outside the USA.”
commondreams.org

“SEPARATE BUT equal”–the doctrine from the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court ruling that solidified the system of racist segregation–was always a lie. The reality of schools under Jim Crow was always separate and unequal.

Now, 50 years after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that struck down “separate but equal” as inherently unfair, schoolchildren in the U.S. are again suffering the consequences of segregation–an all the more odious reality because segregation has been outlawed on paper.

In his new book Shame of the Nation, Jonathan Kozol rips the veil off of America’s “apartheid schools.”

Schools have been re-segregating for the past dozen years, Kozol explains, so that “the proportion of Black students in majority-white schools has decreased to a level lower than in any year since 1968.” Gary Orfield and the Civil Rights Project of Harvard University show that 2 million students attend these “apartheid schools” (a term Kozol uses for schools where the student body is more than 99 percent non-white). Overall, almost three-quarters of Black and Latino students attend schools that are predominantly minority.

Kozol says that “the four most segregated states, according to the Civil Rights Project, are New York, Michigan, Illinois and California. In California and New York, only one Black student in seven goes to a predominantly white school.
zmag.org

WASHINGTON, Oct. 18 – The Red Cross and federal government said Tuesday that they had been significantly overreporting the number of Hurricane Katrina evacuees in hotels. Instead of 600,000 people, 200,000 remain in hotels, the charity said.

Although the lower number means that the Federal Emergency Management Agency and cities receiving evacuees will find new housing for far fewer people, the count shows the lack of knowledge that FEMA has about the relocations and its limited oversight over the money it is committed to spend on such housing.

“FEMA still does not know any more about what it was doing last week than it was a month ago,” Representative David R. Obey of Wisconsin, the ranking Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said. “It is still, as far as I am concerned, an incompetent agency.”
nytimes.com

Faulty Hotel Tally Adds to Complaints Against the Red Cross