After six years at Guantanamo Bay prison, the only journalist yet to be incarcerated there, Sami Al-Hadj, was released last week. The case of Mr. Al-Hadj, who was a cameraman for Al-Jazeera, has sparked renewed outrage around the world.
It’s not easy reading for an American, but a good sampling of the emotion in the Arab world over the case can be found in this article from Algeria’s French-language Le Quotidien d’Oran.
“The United States is indeed a democracy: Within its own borders, the rule of law is enshrined. But beyond its walls, only the law of the jungle prevails. Read the rest of this entry »
Hillary Clinton and John McCain, each of whom has a hundred times the family money of Barack Obama, are out there claiming he is out of touch with the poor.
After drinking boilermakers with the boys a while back, Sen. Clinton is now telling Indiana’s blue-collar voters that “politics has become too abstract, too generalized” in Obama’s elitist world.
“Most people get a lot of meaning in their life from the work that they do,” Clinton says. “People want to be seen, they want to be appreciated, they want to be acknowledged.” And she is out there acknowledging the hell out of them with girlhood tales of helping out in her father’s fabric-printing plant and, according to the New York Times, “sounding less like a Wellesley alumna than Roseanne Barr’s old sitcom character, the den mother of her factory floor.”
Meanwhile, McCain is calling Obama insensitive to poor people by not endorsing his proposal to suspend the federal tax on gasoline this summer, a refusal “to giving low-income Americans a tax break, a little bit of relief so they can travel a little further and a little longer, and maybe have a little bit of money left over to enjoy some other things in their lives.”
McCain, who is still fielding questions about using his wife’s company jet during the primary season, and Clinton, who lent her campaign $5 million from her pin money, seem determined to educate Obama on what he failed to learn as an organizer in poverty-stricken communities.
Regardless of one’s political views, some of the most engaging reads about the U.S. from the foreign press are those that drip with the most polemic, animus or even, as in this piece from Pakistan’s the Nation, unadulterated sarcasm.
Here’s a taste
President Bush has warned Iran and Syria to stop interfering in Lebanon’s affairs. Iran and Syria must know that interfering in other countries’ affairs is Bush’s exclusive prerogative. The Iran-Syria interference is a personal insult to Bush. If so far Bush has not avenged the insult by invading the interfering countries, it is all because of Bush’s generosity. But the interferers must not forget that Bush’s stock of generosity is not inexhaustible. Any moment could be the moment at which the generosity is exhausted.
According to Bush, there are two brands of weapons of mass destruction. There are weapons which are there specifically for destruction purposes and there are weapons which are there just for fun.
Does the Bush Administration have some explaining to do, after America’s combined intelligence services concluded that Iran’s nuclear weapons program has been halted since 2003? According to this op-ed article from Germany’s Frankfurter Rundschau, ‘Bush’s October speech about the danger of a Third World War was at the very least, reckless. … Then it also follows that the plan to install a missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic - which also carried an emergency stamp - was not only rationally unjustifiable, but ideologically motivated.
“It’s been clear all along that Iran had put its nuclear weapons program on ice. Can we seriously imagine that lord rulers George W. Bush and Richard Cheney didn’t know the slightest thing about it? … the Bush Administration owes its European allies an explanation.”
By Karl Grobe
Translated By Julian Jacob
December 4, 2007
Germany - Frankfurter Rundschau - Original Article (German)
With two sentences, the united spy agencies of the United States have annulled Washington’s Iran policy. First: The Teheran regime stopped developing nuclear weapons in 2003; that is four years ago. Secondly: The Iranian leadership decided to do this on the basis of a cost-benefit analysis.
The report has spent at least a year in one of Washington’s secret drawer. And it’s been clear all along that Iran had put its nuclear weapons program on ice. Can we seriously imagine that lord rulers George W. Bush and Richard Cheney didn’t know the slightest thing about it?
If they did know, then Bush’s October speech about the danger of a Third World War was at the very least, reckless. Then it also follows that the plan to install a missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic - which also carried an emergency stamp - was not only rationally unjustifiable, but ideologically motivated. And this ideological cocktail, in addition to the reasons given, had two additional ingredients: The intent to keep the Russians on the straight and narrow and a wish to dismantle bad old Europe and replace it with a good new one.
Perhaps the reference to Teheran was seen as a means to that end. But whether these policies were based on a lack of knowledge - which amounts in the end to recklessness - or whether they were taken against better judgment, is therefore hypothetical. But whatever the case, the Bush Administration owes its European allies an explanation - and not the kind of explanation Bush gave on Tuesday, claiming that his administration has been right all along.
Is it reasonable to charge Donald Rumsfeld with torture? According to this news item from France’s Rue 89, with Rumsfeld visiting Paris this week, a coterie of human rights groups in Europe and the United States filed a complaint with Paris prosecutors. According to the article, “under French law, owing to the universal jurisdiction defined under the 1984 United Nations Convention Against Torture, his presence there obliges France to act unless she rejects the complaint.”
“Legally speaking, few complaints are as irrefutable as this one. Then there is the political aspect: this touches on the Bush Administration … But there should be impunity for no one.”
– Patrick Baudoin, French Lawyer Who Filed the Complaint
By Julien Martin
Translated by Andrew Levine
October 26, 2007
France - Rue89 - Original Article (French)
At three pages and with twenty-seven appendixes, the French complaint filed on Thursday by four human rights organizations against Donald Rumsfeld is detailed and damning. The former American Secretary of Defense from 2001 to 2006 is accused of torture, in particular with respect to the prisoners of Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
This is the fifth complaint against the man considered one of the architects of the Iraq War. Two criminal complaints were dismissed in Germany (the second, however, will be appealed next week) and two more have been filed, one in Argentina and one in Sweden.
But for the first time, Donald Rumsfeld has been legally assaulted while in the country in which the complaint was filed. Arriving in Paris on Thursday, he gave a lecture on Friday morning, without specifying the duration of his stay. Owing to the universal jurisdiction defined under the 1984 United Nations Convention Against Torture and enshrined in French law ten years later, his presence here obliges France to act unless she rejects the complaint.
In the French complaint, which Rue89 has obtained a copy of, the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues, the French League for the Defense of the Rights of Human and Civil Rights, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights intend, “to take all preliminary measures to ensure that this person is detained or else kept on French territory.”
Testimony from former detainees and American troops fills out the complaint, which lists the alleged interrogation methods: two-day-long periods of sleep deprivation, 20-hour interrogations, sexual humiliation, and religion-related threats, among others.
Even in the seventh year of the Age of Bush, I still don’t want to believe that my country is being led by an intellectual, ethical and moral lightweight in the thrall of dangerous power mongers whose views are inimical to what my mother told me that the U.S. of A. is supposed to stand for.
Then I wake up and realize that Our Long National Nightmare rages on.
I also have come to understand something else of perhaps greater consequence. I’ll cut right to the chase for those of you who won’t read the entire post, let alone the snappy joke at the end.
George Bush and his Merry Bunch of Enablers deserve the lion’s share of the blame for these toxic times, but let’s reserve plenty of blame for a feckless news media, a Supreme Court newly packed with justices who are conservative except when it comes to activism, a compliant Congress and emergent Democratic majority that has talked the talk but largely failed to walk the walk.
But you, my fellow American, share a big dollop of blame as well.
That is unless you speak out at forums like this one, write to your congressfolk, show up at the rare demonstration or plan to vote in the next election and encourage others, especially those who aren’t registered, to do so. Praying for America’s salvation also counts, even if you don’t do it in front of others.
But while one or more of the above certainly disqualifies you as a silent lamb by my calculus, doing nothing qualifies you as a “Good German,†as Frank Rich puts it so powerfully. Why? Because we are inching ever closer to the shocking realization that analogies to the silent citizens of the Third Reich no longer seem so extreme.
The typical response of Bush sycophants has been to accuse people like myself of suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome. But with the destruction that the president has wrought as obvious as the nose on your face and his hard-core supporters dwindling to a lonely few, that pejorative seems as quaint as an archaic expression like “Gag me with a spoon.”
Let’s briefly recap some of the highlights of Year Seven . . .
You don’t have to suffer from Bush Derangement Syndrome to believe that some seriously nasty things have happened in Washington over the last six-plus years. But when historians take stock of The Age of Bush it is likely that they will find there is no darker stain on that presidency — and on America at the start of the new millennium — than the top-down approval of the use of torture.
Almost as abhorrent is this secrecy-obsessed administration’s systematic efforts to justify the use of torture on the one hand while denying that it approved its use on the other.
That is the crux of a New York Times’ investigative report this week that found while the Justice Department publicly declared torture to be “abhorrent” in a 2004 legal opinion it then issued a secret opinion a few months later that endorsed the CIA’s use of head-slapping, waterboarding and being confined naked in frigid cells, among other hard-core techniques that the intelligence agency had cherrypicked from the cookbooks of Soviet and Saudi dungeon masters.
It is a testament to how far this administration has slipped from the moorings of common decency — let alone the belief of suckers like myself that the U.S. never would succumb to acting like terrorists in fighting back against terrorists — that the Times story actually made me feel dirty.
![[Al-Hayat, U.K.]](http://cartoons.courrierinternational.com/illustrations/dessin/2007/12/i804371205Haddad.jpg)
