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Monday, March 24, 2003

a selection of important voices concerning the new war by the US

Buzzflash
enormous daily updated archive of newsitems from different angles

not in our name
youth and artists with a strong statement

Alter.net
professional alternative news service (us)

Carta
collection of alternative news archives around the world (it)

ODE
site of ODE magazine with a big archive on opinions that hardly find their way to public(nl)

Mother Jones

Disinfo
disinformation can be true in times of war(us)

radiopower
liberal radiostation collecting voices against the war (us)

Call to Conscience
a huge list of army veterans opposing the war(us)

tikkun
site by the palestine/israeli peace movement (us)

P.O.T.
collection of waropposing sites (us)
posted at 12:24 PM

Sunday, March 23, 2003

resignation letter by US diplomat
In case you've not read this yet, it is a must read. What follows is
a letter of resignation written by John Brady Kiesling, a member
of Bush's Foreign Service Corps and Political Counselor to the
American embassy in Greece. Kiesling has been a diplomat for
twenty years, a civil servant to four Presidents. The letter below,
delivered to Secretary of State Colin Powell, is quite possibly the
most eloquent statement of dissent thus far put forth regarding
the issue of Iraq. The New York Times story which reports on
this remarkable event can be found after Kiesling's letter.

U.S. Diplomat John Brady Kiesling
Letter of Resignation, to:
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell

ATHENS | Thursday 27 February 2003

Dear Mr. Secretary:

I am writing you to submit my resignation from the Foreign
Service of the United States and from my position as Political
Counselor in U.S. Embassy Athens, effective March 7. I do so
with a heavy heart. The baggage of my upbringing included a felt
obligation to give something back to my country. Service as a
U.S. diplomat was a dream job. I was paid to understand foreign
languages and cultures, to seek out diplomats, politicians,
scholars and journalists, and to persuade them that U.S.
interests and theirs fundamentally coincided. My faith in my
country and its values was the most powerful weapon in my
diplomatic arsenal.

It is inevitable that during twenty years with the State
Department I would become more sophisticated and cynical
about the narrow and selfish bureaucratic motives that
sometimes shaped our policies. Human nature is what it is, and
I was rewarded and promoted for understanding human nature.
But until this Administration it had been possible to believe that
by upholding the policies of my president I was also upholding
the interests of the American people and the world. I believe it no
longer.

The policies we are now asked to advance are incompatible
not only with American values but also with American interests.
Our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq is driving us to squander the
international legitimacy that has been America's most potent
weapon of both offense and defense since the days of Woodrow
Wilson. We have begun to dismantle the largest and most
effective web of international relationships the world has ever
known. Our current course will bring instability and danger, not
security.

The sacrifice of global interests to domestic politics and to
bureaucratic self-interest is nothing new, and it is certainly not a
uniquely American problem. Still, we have not seen such
systematic distortion of intelligence, such systematic
manipulation of American opinion, since the war in Vietnam. The
September 11 tragedy left us stronger than before, rallying
around us a vast international coalition to cooperate for the first
time in a systematic way against the threat of terrorism. But
rather than take credit for those successes and build on them,
this Administration has chosen to make terrorism a domestic
political tool, enlisting a scattered and largely defeated Al Qaeda
as its bureaucratic ally. We spread disproportionate terror and
confusion in the public mind, arbitrarily linking the unrelated
problems of terrorism and Iraq. The result, and perhaps the
motive, is to justify a vast misallocation of shrinking public wealth
to the military and to weaken the safeguards that protect
American citizens from the heavy hand of government.
September 11 did not do as much damage to the fabric of
American society as we seem determined to so to ourselves. Is
the Russia of the late Romanovs really our model, a selfish,
superstitious empire thrashing toward self-destruction in the
name of a doomed status quo?

We should ask ourselves why we have failed to persuade
more of the world that a war with Iraq is necessary. We have over
the past two years done too much to assert to our world partners
that narrow and mercenary U.S. interests override the cherished
values of our partners. Even where our aims were not in
question, our consistency is at issue. The model of Afghanistan
is little comfort to allies wondering on what basis we plan to
rebuild the Middle East, and in whose image and interests. Have
we indeed become blind, as Russia is blind in Chechnya, as
Israel is blind in the Occupied Territories, to our own advice, that
overwhelming military power is not the answer to terrorism? After
the shambles of post-war Iraq joins the shambles in Grozny and
Ramallah, it will be a brave foreigner who forms ranks with
Micronesia to follow where we lead.

We have a coalition still, a good one. The loyalty of many of
our friends is impressive, a tribute to American moral capital
built up over a century. But our closest allies are persuaded less
that war is justified than that it would be perilous to allow the U.S.
to drift into complete solipsism. Loyalty should be reciprocal.
Why does our President condone the swaggering and
contemptuous approach to our friends and allies this
Administration is fostering, including among its most senior
officials. Has "oderint dum metuant" really become our motto?

I urge you to listen to America's friends around the world.
Even here in Greece, purported hotbed of European
anti-Americanism, we have more and closer friends than the
American newspaper reader can possibly imagine. Even when
they complain about American arrogance, Greeks know that the
world is a difficult and dangerous place, and they want a strong
international system, with the U.S. and EU in close partnership.
When our friends are afraid of us rather than for us, it is time to
worry. And now they are afraid. Who will tell them convincingly
that the United States is as it was, a beacon of liberty, security,
and justice for the planet?

Mr. Secretary, I have enormous respect for your character and
ability. You have preserved more international credibility for us
than our policy deserves, and salvaged something positive from
the excesses of an ideological and self-serving Administration.
But your loyalty to the President goes too far. We are straining
beyond its limits an international system we built with such toil
and treasure, a web of laws, treaties, organizations, and shared
values that sets limits on our foes far more effectively than it ever
constrained America's ability to defend its interests.

I am resigning because I have tried and failed to reconcile my
conscience with my ability to represent the current U.S.
Administration. I have confidence that our democratic process is
ultimately self-correcting, and hope that in a small way I can
contribute from outside to shaping policies that better serve the
security and prosperity of the American people and the world we
share.

John Brady Kiesling

NOIN-statement
Belofte tot verzet

Wij als bevolking van de Verenigde Staten, geloven dat het onze verantwoordelijkheid is verzet te bieden tegen het onrecht,
begaan door onze regering in onze naam

Niet in onze naam zal je een oorlog voeren zonder eind
er mogen niet meer doden bij
geen transacties meer van bloed voor olie

Niet in onze naam zal je landen binnenvallen
burgers bombarderen, meer kinderen vermoorden
en de geschiedenis haar gang laten gaan over de graven van de naamlozen

Niet in onze naam zal je de vrijheid aantasten, waarvoor je beweerde te strijden

Niet onze handen zullen wapens leveren en fondsen spekken voor de verwoesting van families op vreemde gronden

Niet onze monden zullen verstommen van angst

Niet onze harten zullen toestaan dat hele volkeren en landen versleten worden voor het grote kwaad

Het is niet gewenst
Niet in onze naam

We beloven verzet
We beloven solidariteit met hen die onder vuur zijn komen te liggen door het uitspreken van verzet tegen de oorlog of voor hun religie of etniciteit

We beloven ons te verbinden met mensen uit de hele wereld om te zorgen voor gerechtigheid, vrijheid en vrede

Een andere wereld is mogelijk en we beloven deze te verwezenlijken

(by NOIN)

George Monbiot
Tuesday March 25, 2003
The Guardian

One rule for them

Five PoWs are mistreated in Iraq and the US cries foul. What about Guantanamo Bay?

Suddenly, the government of the United States has discovered the virtues of international law. It may be waging an illegal war against a sovereign state; it may be seeking to destroy every treaty which impedes its attempts to run the world, but when five of its captured soldiers were paraded in front of the Iraqi television cameras on Sunday, Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, immediately complained that "it is against the Geneva convention to show photographs of prisoners of war in a manner that is humiliating for them".

He is, of course, quite right. Article 13 of the third convention, concerning the treatment of prisoners, insists that they "must at all times be protected... against insults and public curiosity". This may number among the less heinous of the possible infringements of the laws of war, but the conventions, ratified by Iraq in 1956, are non-negotiable. If you break them, you should expect to be prosecuted for war crimes.

This being so, Rumsfeld had better watch his back. For this enthusiastic convert to the cause of legal warfare is, as head of the defence department, responsible for a series of crimes sufficient, were he ever to be tried, to put him away for the rest of his natural life.

His prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, in Cuba, where 641 men (nine of whom are British citizens) are held, breaches no fewer than 15 articles of the third convention. The US government broke the first of these (article 13) as soon as the prisoners arrived, by displaying them, just as the Iraqis have done, on television. In this case, however, they were not encouraged to address the cameras. They were kneeling on the ground, hands tied behind their backs, wearing blacked-out goggles and earphones. In breach of article 18, they had been stripped of their own clothes and deprived of their possessions. They were then interned in a penitentiary (against article 22), where they were denied proper mess facilities (26), canteens (28), religious premises (34), opportunities for physical exercise (38), access to the text of the convention (41), freedom to write to their families (70 and 71) and parcels of food and books (72).

They were not "released and repatriated without delay after the cessation of active hostilities" (118), because, the US authorities say, their interrogation might, one day, reveal interesting information about al-Qaida. Article 17 rules that captives are obliged to give only their name, rank, number and date of birth. No "coercion may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever". In the hope of breaking them, however, the authorities have confined them to solitary cells and subjected them to what is now known as "torture lite": sleep deprivation and constant exposure to bright light. Unsurprisingly, several of the prisoners have sought to kill themselves, by smashing their heads against the walls or trying to slash their wrists with plastic cutlery.

The US government claims that these men are not subject to the Geneva conventions, as they are not "prisoners of war", but "unlawful combatants". The same claim could be made, with rather more justice, by the Iraqis holding the US soldiers who illegally invaded their country. But this redefinition is itself a breach of article 4 of the third convention, under which people detained as suspected members of a militia (the Taliban) or a volunteer corps (al-Qaida) must be regarded as prisoners of war.

Even if there is doubt about how such people should be classified, article 5 insists that they "shall enjoy the protection of the present convention until such time as their status has been determined by a competent tribunal". But when, earlier this month, lawyers representing 16 of them demanded a court hearing, the US court of appeals ruled that as Guantanamo Bay is not sovereign US territory, the men have no constitutional rights. Many of these prisoners appear to have been working in Afghanistan as teachers, engineers or aid workers. If the US government either tried or released them, its embarrassing lack of evidence would be brought to light.

You would hesitate to describe these prisoners as lucky, unless you knew what had happened to some of the other men captured by the Americans and their allies in Afghanistan. On November 21 2001, around 8,000 Taliban soldiers and Pashtun civilians surrendered at Konduz to the Northern Alliance commander, General Abdul Rashid Dostum. Many of them have never been seen again.

As Jamie Doran's film Afghan Massacre: Convoy of Death records, some hundreds, possibly thousands, of them were loaded into container lorries at Qala-i-Zeini, near the town of Mazar-i-Sharif, on November 26 and 27. The doors were sealed and the lorries were left to stand in the sun for several days. At length, they departed for Sheberghan prison, 80 miles away. The prisoners, many of whom were dying of thirst and asphyxiation, started banging on the sides of the trucks. Dostum's men stopped the convoy and machine-gunned the containers. When they arrived at Sheberghan, most of the captives were dead.

The US special forces running the prison watched the bodies being unloaded. They instructed Dostum's men to "get rid of them before satellite pictures can be taken". Doran interviewed a Northern Alliance soldier guarding the prison. "I was a witness when an American soldier broke one prisoner's neck. The Americans did whatever they wanted. We had no power to stop them." Another soldier alleged: "They took the prisoners outside and beat them up, and then returned them to the prison. But sometimes they were never returned, and they disappeared."

Many of the survivors were loaded back in the containers with the corpses, then driven to a place in the desert called Dasht-i-Leili. In the presence of up to 40 US special forces, the living and the dead were dumped into ditches. Anyone who moved was shot. The German newspaper Die Zeit investigated the claims and concluded that: "No one doubted that the Americans had taken part. Even at higher levels there are no doubts on this issue." The US group Physicians for Human Rights visited the places identified by Doran's witnesses and found they "all... contained human remains consistent with their designation as possible grave sites".

It should not be necessary to point out that hospitality of this kind also contravenes the third Geneva convention, which prohibits "violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture", as well as extra-judicial execution. Donald Rumsfeld's department, assisted by a pliant media, has done all it can to suppress Jamie Doran's film, while General Dostum has begun to assassinate his witnesses.

It is not hard, therefore, to see why the US government fought first to prevent the establishment of the international criminal court, and then to ensure that its own citizens are not subject to its jurisdiction. The five soldiers dragged in front of the cameras yesterday should thank their lucky stars that they are prisoners not of the American forces fighting for civilisation, but of the "barbaric and inhuman" Iraqis.

www.monbiot.com
posted at 8:43 AM

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