Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Dec 19 2006 Comment on the Electronic Intifada articles (see Dec archives)

Please leave your comments here, or use the forum:
http://www.tokyoprogressive.org/index/forums/viewthread/4/

Challenging the Democractic Hawks on Israel

by Stephen Zunes

The election of a Democratic majority in the House and Senate is unlikely to result in any serious challenge to the Bush administration’s support for Israeli attacks against the civilian populations of its Arab neighbors and the Israeli government’s ongoing violations of international humanitarian law.

The principal Democratic Party spokesmen on foreign policy will likely be Tom Lantos in the House of Representatives and Joe Biden in the Senate, both of whom have been longstanding and outspoken supporters of a series of right-wing Israeli governments and opponents of the Israeli peace movement. And, despite claims—even within the progressive press—that future House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is a “consistent supporter of human rights,” such humanitarian concerns have never applied to Arabs, since she is a staunch defender of right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his predecessor Ariel Sharon.

For example, when President George W. Bush defended Israel’s assaults on Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure this summer and defied the international community by initially blocking United Nations efforts to impose a cease-fire, the Democrats rushed to pass a resolution commending him for “fully supporting Israel.” The resolution, co-authored by Rep. Lantos, claimed that Israel’s actions were legitimate self-defense under the U.N. Charter and challenged the credibility of reputable human rights groups. Although groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch groups documented widespread attacks by Israeli forces against civilians in areas far from any Hezbollah military activity, the resolution praised “Israel’s longstanding commitment to minimizing civilian loss and welcom[ed] Israel’s continued efforts to prevent civilian casualties.” All but 15 of the House’s 201 Democrats voted in support.

Similarly, the Democrats echoed President Bush’s support for Israel’s 2002 offensive in the West Bank in another resolution co-authored by Lantos. In response to Amnesty International’s observation that the massive assault appeared to be aimed at the Palestinian population as a whole, all but two dozen Democrats went on record supporting the devastating Israeli offensive and claiming that it was “aimed solely at the terrorist infrastructure.”

In March 2003, Pelosi and other Democratic leaders signed a letter to President Bush opposing the White House-endorsed Middle East “Road Map” for peace, which they perceived as being too lenient on the Palestinians. The authors insisted that the peace process must be based “above all” on the end of Palestinian violence and the establishment of a new Palestinian leadership, not an end to Israeli occupation and colonization of Palestinian land seized in the 1967 war. Indeed, there was no mention of any of the reciprocal actions called for in the Road Map—not ending Israel’s sieges and military assaults on Palestinian population centers and not halting the construction of additional illegal settlements.. The letter also voiced opposition to the U. N. or any government other than the U.S. monitoring progress on the ground.

The Democrats have attacked the International Court of Justice for its landmark 2004 ruling calling for the enforcement of the Fourth Geneva Convention in Israeli-occupied territories. In a resolution that summer, the Democratic leadership and the overwhelming majority of Democrats in both houses also condemned the World Court’s near-unanimous advisory opinion that Israel’s separation barrier could not be built beyond Israel’s internationally-recognized border into the occupied West Bank in order to incorporate illegal settlements into Israel.

More recently, Pelosi and other Democratic leaders have condemned former President Jimmy Carter’s newly-released book criticizing Israeli violations of international humanitarian law in the West Bank. Carter’s use of the word “apartheid” in reference to Israeli policies of building Jewish-only settlements and highways on confiscated Palestinian land and allowing Palestinians to enter only as laborers with special passbooks proved particularly inflammatory to Pelosi and her colleagues. Meanwhile, they have refused to criticize this policy by any name and insist that the Israeli colonial outposts in the occupied territories—constructed in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention and a series of U.N. Security Council resolutions—are legitimate.

Ongoing talks between Fatah and Hamas for a coalition government have raised the hope that the Palestinian Authority will soon have a non-Hamas prime minister and a largely non-partisan, technocratic cabinet. However, the Democrats support Bush’s policy of refusing to resume normal relations with the PA unless the cabinet excludes members of Hamas or any party that does not recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. By contrast, no prominent Democrat has raised any concerns over Olmert’s recent appointment of Avignor Lieberman, who has called for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Israel and much of the West Bank, as a cabinet minister and his new deputy prime minister.

The Democrats have also pushed for increasing U.S. military aid to Israel and have rejected calls to condition the aid on an improvement in Israel’s human rights record. The Democrats have also pushed for an increase in economic assistance to Israel’s rightist government, already the recipient of nearly one-third of all U.S. foreign aid, despite the country’s relative affluence and the fact that Israelis represent only one-tenth of one percent of the world’s population.

The decision by Democratic members of Congress to take such hard-line positions against international law and human rights does not stem from the fear that it would jeopardize their re-election. Polls show that a sizable majority of Americans believe U.S. foreign policy should support these principles. More specifically, regarding Israel and Palestine, majorities support a more even-handed U.S. policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and oppose the blank check given by the United States to Israel.

Nor is it a matter of Democratic lawmakers somehow being forced against their will to back Bush’s policy by Jewish voters and campaign contributors. In reality, Jewish public opinion is divided over the wisdom and morality of many Israeli policies endorsed by the Democrats, recognizing that such policies actually harm Israel’s legitimate long-term security interests. Furthermore, the vast majority of Democrats who support Bush’s Middle East policies come from very safe districts where a reduction in campaign contributions would not have a negative impact on Democratic re-election. Contrary to the belief that it is political suicide to condemn the policies of the Israeli government, every single Democrat who opposed this summer’s resolution in support of the Israeli assault on Lebanon was re-elected by a larger margin than in 2004.

Perhaps more damaging than pressure from right-wing PACs has been the absence of pressure from progressive groups that oppose Israeli policies. Indeed, some of the most hard-line Democratic opponents of Israeli peace and human rights groups were endorsed by leading U.S. peace and human rights groups.

Until the progressive community seriously challenges Democratic hawks, there is little hope that the new Democratic majority can be expected to contribute anything to the cause of peace and justice in the Middle East.

Anti-Semitism Label Confines Open Debate

by Jay Bookman

Jimmy Carter may be right or he may be wrong; in fact, like the rest of us, he’s almost certainly some of both.

But Carter is not by any stretch of the imagination anti-Semitic. In fact, merely by making that ridiculous accusation, people such as Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, have proved Carter right about some of the central observations in his controversial new book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.”

In that book, and in the debate it has inspired, Carter has noted the very narrow range of acceptable opinion in this country regarding Israel and Palestine, and believes that silenced debate has hurt U.S. both the United States and Israel.

“When I go to Jerusalem or to Tel Aviv or Nazareth or anywhere in Israel, the discussions and debates are intense and constant about Israeli policies in the West Bank and whether they are advisable or not,” Carter has said. “ ... but in this country, zero.”

He’s absolutely right: The debate about Israeli policies is far more heated and frank within Israel than here in the United States. As one telling example, consider this paragraph by Israeli columnist Larry Derfner, writing recently in the Jerusalem Post:

“Nobody and nothing in the world has an army of advocates, defenders, PR people, marketers, spin-meisters and image-polishers like Israel has. This army isn’t made up just of the government but of Jews and Judeophiles all over the world, especially in the U.S. It includes the entire alphabet soup of American Jewish organizations, right-wing ‘media watchdogs’ like CAMERA and Honest Reporting, hundreds of Jewish newspapers and Web sites, Alan Dershowitz, Binyamin Netanyahu, the Republican Party, the Christian Right, FOX News and an assortment of other forces.”

In Israel, apparently, nobody thought twice about such a statement. But those same words written here in the United States would be prima facie evidence of anti-Semitism.

Even the comparison of the situation in the Palestinian territories to South African apartheid isn’t unsayable within Israel. To the contrary, it has been an undercurrent of debate there for years.

“I’m terribly sorry, while there are important differences between the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the former apartheid regime of South Africa, after 39 years of occupation the similarities have come to outweigh the differences,” Derfner wrote recently in another column in The Jerusalem Post.

Top Israeli political figures have made the comparison as well.

“The things a Palestinian has to endure, simply coming to work in the morning, is a long and continuous nightmare that includes humiliation bordering on despair,” said Ami Ayalon, the former head of Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence agency. “Is the option of Jewish democracy with apartheid acceptable? I think not.”

And Yossi Alpher, a former senior adviser in the Israeli government, once warned that with their unwavering support for Israel’s approach to Palestine, neoconservatives in the Bush administration have encouraged Israel to create “an apartheid reality that is the very antithesis of the democratization that they preach for the region.”

Foxman professes to be most outraged by Carter’s assertion that pro-Israeli groups have helped squelch open debate about the Middle East, accusing Carter of peddling “this shameless, shameful canard that the Jews control the debate in this country, especially when it comes to the media.’’

There is indeed a shameless, shameful canard to that effect, and it is classic anti-Semitism, attributing to Jews some secret conspiratorial control of world affairs. But that is not the argument that Carter is making. Carter’s point — and Foxman proves it — is that it has become impossible to express sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians in this country without fear of being shouted down as anti-Semitic.

There is no question that anti-Semitism is alive and virulent. It is undeniable fact that Israel is unfairly targeted in the United Nations and other forums, in part because of anti-Semitism and in part because Israel is hated as a creation of the West imposed on the Arab world, a living and enduring symbol of Arab weakness.

However, Israelis also bridle when they believe their country is being held to a higher standard than other nations, and they insist that it be treated like any other normal country.

Normal countries, however, are subject to normal criticism among the community of nations. In Israel’s case, there will always be a danger that such criticism will slide into anti-Semitism, but people of good faith can surely distinguish one from the other.

Jay Bookman is the deputy editorial page editor.

© 2006 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The Sober Racism of Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto

Published on Sunday, December 17, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
The Sober Racism of Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto
by Liza Grandia

Film critics appear split on how to handle Mel Gibson’s newest production, Apocalypto. A few refuse to patronize the film in symbolic protest of Gibson’s drunken rants over the summer. Others suggest we should temporarily suspend judgment about Gibson’s anti-Semitism and judge this action film on its own merits.

Remarkably, none of the critics seem to be asking whether Mel Gibson has produced a film any less racist than his summer tirades about Jews. Hollywood seems willing to admonish Gibson for certain kinds of bigotry, while oddly excusing other kinds of racism - especially if targeted at poor, brown, and indigenous peoples.

As a cultural anthropologist who has worked for thirteen years among different Maya peoples of Mesoamerica and who speaks the Q’eqchi’ Maya language fluently, I found Apocalypto to be deeply racist. The Maya in the film bore no resemblance to the hardworking farmers, teachers, lawyers, doctors, businessmen and women of Maya descent that I know personally and consider among my closest friends.

I fear the repercussions Apocalypto will have on contemporary Maya people who continue to struggle for survival and political governments under discriminatory governments that consider them stupid, backward, and uncivilized for wanting to maintain their customs and language. Gibson’s slanderous film reinforces the same stereotypes that have facilitated the genocide of Maya peoples and the plunder of their lands starting with the Spanish invasion of 1492 and continuing through the Guatemalan civil war to the present.

Rather than quibble about Apocalypto’s many historical and archaeological inaccuracies as other academic critics have done, I focus here on four racist messages the film sends to audiences:

1. Native Americans are all interchangeable. Many critics have offered facile praise to Gibson for having filmed his bloody epic in a contemporary Maya language and employed various Native American actors. Gibson has boasted to the press how relatively cheap it was to make the film because he had pay so little to these actors and his Mexican crew. To me, these actors didn’t look or sound Maya at all. Their Yucatec diction was terrible and lacked the real lyric cadence of Maya languages. If someone exploited local labor to make a cheap film about gang-violence in Brooklyn and employed heavily-accented Australian and British actors, would critics still praise it as “authentic” simply because the actors are speaking English?

2. Mesoamerican cultures are all the same. While keeping some of the archaeological details accurate for “authenticity,” Gibson then jumbles together mass Aztec sacrifices with Maya rituals, as if they were the same. Certainly at the height of classic Maya civilization, the ruling classes made occasional human sacrifices to their gods, but nothing on the Holocaust-level scale that Gibson portrays in Apocalypto with fields of rotting, decapitated corpses that his hero, Jaguar Paw stumbles across as he attempts to escape his own execution in the city. With the advice of archaeologist Richard Hansen, Gibson seems to have researched anything the Maya might have done badly over a thousand year history and crammed it all into a few horrific days. How would the gringos look if we made a film that lumped together within one week the torture at the Abu Ghraib and Guatanamo prisons, the Tuskegee experiments, KKK lynchings, the battle at Wounded Knee, Japanese internment camps, the Trail of Tears, the Salem witch hunts, Texas death row executions, the Rodney King police beatings, the slaughter upon the Gettysburg battlefield, and the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - and made this look like a definitive statement on U.S. culture?

3. Indigenous people should remain noble savages, since attempts to build cities and more complex political organization will bring their inevitable demise. Gibson purportedly wanted to make a statement about the decay of empires in this film. However, the only clear message I could take away was that indigenous people should have remained friendly forest hunter-gatherers and never have attempted to build their own civilization. Ignoring the fact by the time of the Spanish invasion, all Maya peoples had been either urbanized or sedentary agriculturalists for hundreds of years and maintained complex trade networks, Gibson nevertheless depicts his hero’s tribe as crude but happy rainforest peoples living in isolation, blissfully ignorant of the corrupt cities neighboring them. He contrasts these noble forest savages with evil city dwellers such as slave traders, despotic politicians, psychotic priests, and sadistic head-hunters all living amidst rotting sewage, filth, disease, and general misery. Real Maya cities were places with sophisticated water and sanitation systems, great libraries, and extraordinary artwork and architecture. If Gibson wanted to make a statement about the consequences of environmental destruction, as he has claimed to the press, why not produce a film about corporate excesses at Love Canal or Three Mile Island instead of mucking up the historical reputation of the ancient Maya?

4. The Spanish arrive as if to save the Maya from themselves. After enduring two hours of horrific violence, in the last minutes of the film, we witness the miraculous rescue of the film’s hero Jaguar Paw from his stalkers by the appearance of Spanish galleons off the coast. This short, final scene shows dour Spaniards approaching the mainland in boats bearing Christian crosses across still water. After forcing his audience to endure two hours of horrific violence, Gibson uses this placid scene allow the movie-goer a sigh of relief in the hopes that these European Civilizers have arrived to make order out of the Maya mayhem. By ending his film there, Gibson ignores the far greater genocide to befall the Maya. In fact, within a hundred years of conquest, the Spanish were responsible for killing between 90 and 95 percent of the Maya population through disease, warfare, starvation, and enslavement.

To stereotype and slander ancient Maya civilization and to imply that the impending holocaust of Maya peoples by the Spanish is a “new beginning” shows how truly racist Gibson really is-whether drunk or sober.

Liza Grandia is a cultural anthropologist who has worked with Maya peoples in Guatemala and Belize since 1993 and who speaks Q’eqchi’ Maya fluently. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University, writing a book called “Unsettling” about the repeated land dispossessions and enclosures of the Q’eqchi’. 

ISRAEL: Woman CO Hadas Amit sentenced to 14 days imprisonment

Hadis AmitIsraeli conscientious objector Hadis Amit (ISR14913), a 19 year old woman CO, was today sentenced to 14 days in prison for refusing to serve. In a letter to the military authorities, announcing her refusal to perform military service, Hadas wrote:

“If I were to be recruited into the army, this would absolutely and in all respects contradict my convictions and my way in life, since violence, killing, nationalism and vandalism are not part of them. I am not willing to wear the uniform of an organisation responsible for killing and destruction, acting in a way detrimental to its environment. Every State, the State of Israel included, should act by peaceful means alone, and even if attached, not to respond with fire. In any situation, Israel’s case included, it is wrong to sustain a military force trained for war and killing - this is altogether contrary to the pursuit of peace and coexistence with our neighbours in the Middle East.”

Hadas appeared before the military Conscience Committee in November, but was rejected. Hadas reported that during her hearing she was constantly interrupted and had to suffer degrading and disrespectful comments. A member of the committee demonstratively left the room, and two other members were exchanging notes, with her sitting between them, while she was trying to answer questions directed to her.

In a statement made on the eve of imprisonment Hadas wrote:

“I refuse to enlist in the IDF [Israel Defence Forces], as the D of “IDF” symbolises nothing but killing to me. Who is it that decided that I am not seeking peace, and put me with my back to the wall? I could either lie or pay the price of my principles. It is for morality and justice and the love of humankind that I shall be sitting in prison.”

Since early 2005, women COs in Israel are referred to the same internal military Conscience Committee as male COs (despite official legal recognition of women’s right to CO), and there is no right of appeal on the Committee’s decisions. Accumulating evidence strongly suggests that the military Conscience Committee is fundamentally biased against women. It seems difficult for the members of this committee (4 men and one woman; all but one of the men are military career officers) to perceive a woman as a person with principles, with a conscientious stance, and with commitment to this stance. As a result (although official figures are not released), the committee rejects a far higher percentage of applications by women than by men, and many of the women applicants describe their committee hearings as a degrading experience.

Hadas is due to be released from prison on Friday, 29 December 2006.

War Resisters’ International calls for letters of support to Hadas Amit.

Hadas Amit
Military ID 6175691
Military Prison No. 400
Military Postal Code 02447, IDF
Israel
Fax: ++972-3-9579348

War Resisters’ International calls for letters of protest to the Israeli authorities, and Israeli embassies abroad. An email letter can be sent at http://www.wri-irg.org/co/alerts/20061218a.html.

War Resisters’ International calls for the immediate release of conscientious objector Hadas Amit and all other imprisoned conscientious objectors.

Andreas Speck
War Resisters’ International

Addresses

Mr Amir Peretz
Minister of Defence,
Ministry of Defence,
37 Kaplan st.,
Tel-Aviv 61909,
Israel
e-mail: or
Fax: +972-3-696-27-57 / +972-3-691-69-40 / +972-3-691-79-15

Commander of Military Prison No 4
Military Prison No 4
Military Postal Code 02507
IDF, Israel
Fax: +972-3-957-52-76

Commander of Military Prison No 6
Military Prison No 6
Military postal number 01860,
IDF, Israel.
Fax: +972-4-869-28-84

Commander of Military Prison No 400
Military Prison No 400
Military postal number 02447
IDF, Israel
Fax: +972-3-9579389

Addresses of Israeli embassies can be found at http://www.embassyworld.com/embassy/israel1.htm
Addresses of Israeli media:

Ma’ariv:
2 Karlibach st.
Tel-Aviv 67132
Israel
Fax: +972-3-561-06-14
e-mail:

Yedioth Aharonoth:
2 Moses st.
Tel-Aviv
Israel
Fax: +972-3-608-25-46

Ha’aretz (Hebrew):
21 Schocken st.
Tel-Aviv, 61001
Israel
Fax: +972-3-681-00-12

Ha’aretz (English edition):
21 Schocken st.
Tel-Aviv, 61001
Israel
Fax: +972-3-512-11-56
e-mail:

Jerusalem Post:
P.O. Box 81
Jerusalem 91000
Israel
Fax: +972-2-538-95-27
e-mail: or

Jerusalem Report:
Fax: +972-2-537-94-89

Radio (fax numbers):
Kol-Israel +972-2-531-33-15 and +972-3-694-47-09
Galei Tzahal +972-3-512-67-20

Television (fax numbers):
Channel 1 +972-2-530-15-36
Channel 2 +972-2-533-98-09

Archives of co-alert can be found at http://wri-irg.org/news/alerts
Support War Resisters’ International! Donate today!

Online: http://wri-irg.org/en/donate-en.htm
Help WRI to support conscientious objectors!
Send your donation:

* online by credit or debit card (in GBP, Euro, or US Dollar) at http://wri-irg.org/en/donate-en.htm;
* by cheque in GBP, Euros, or US$, payable to WRI
* by giro transfer to War Resisters’ International
* in Euros to Bank of Ireland, IBAN IE91 BOFI 9000 9240 41 35 47
* in GBP to Unity Trust Bank, IBAN GB11 CPBK 0800 5150 07 32 10

Post your co-alert information online at http://www.wri-irg.org/co/pfpform.htm
or send an email to:

Snapshots from School

This is from Z Magazine. To subscribe go here:
https://www.zmag.org/store/Subscriptions/Subscriptions.cfm

To help Z even more:
http://www.zmag.org/Commentaries/donorform.htm

==================================

ZNet Commentary
Snapshots from School December 12, 2006
By Cynthia Peters

“Don?t go to the Parent-Teacher Council meeting,” advised my daughter, who is a 9th-grader at a large urban high school. “They’ll only try to scare you.”

I shouldn’t have been too surprised at how accurately she summed up at least one salient aspect of the culture at her school. After two days at the orientation for new students, she commented on the school’s basic M.O., “I’ve figured out that they use fear a lot.”

We wondered what she meant. Wasn’t the school using the orientation as an opportunity to help the kids get to know each other, get acquainted with the school, and gain a measure of comfort before entering the big, scary secondary grades? No, apparently not. What were they doing?

“Well, they explained how we would get an F. And that if we got an F, we would get expelled. But if we got an F+, we could go to summer school to make it up.”

The next day, they handed out candies to kids (keep in mind that these are 9th graders) who finished their math worksheets. And so the flip side of punishment made itself apparent, that is, reward.

I suppose it should not be too surprising that a traditional, inner-city school operating on low resources would have too much in its motivator tool box beyond the usual carrot and stick. The accepted mentality about learning, working, or doing just about anything besides watching TV is that it’s a bitter pill that must be swallowed. The idea that kids (and adults) might find joy in learning or feel inherent gratification in their work seems to have been beaten out of us by a society that holds out consumption as the main source of satisfaction. A popular radio station in Boston plays music “to help your work day fly by.” And that about sums it up. The workday and the school day are something that have to be tolerated, gotten through, survived.

My family has taken an unusual approach to schooling in the past (both of our kids have homeschooled for most of their lives), and so we are naïve in this new environment. This commentary is personal and anecdotal—a reflection on schooling from a family that is new at it.

At back-to-school night, held soon after classes started, we learned something about the way fear and stress operate in schools. Not only were mundane stress-causing devices in place (the mis-firing bell ringing at arbitrary times, which teachers simply talk over; the public broadcasting system mistakenly airing some angry conversation; the limited time between classes—three minutes in a school that is the size of a very large city block), but the teachers and administrators took every opportunity to raise the specter of failure.

The range of ways you could fail was enormous—from failing to fill out the proper paperwork to failing to secure a scholarship. Inducing anxiety about the mundane along with the potentially life-changing results in pure anxiety about everything. It’s hard to keep perspective about what matters and what doesn’t. The school uses back-to-school night to ask parents to ally themselves with teachers against the child.

One guidance counselor, who acted like she was reporting from a subdivision of the police force, held up a piece of paper. “Do you see this?” she asked all the now (and formerly) petrified parents. “This is your paycheck.” We stared back blankly. “This is the report card schedule. It will tell you how much you’re getting paid. Your child’s report card, you see, is the return you’ll be getting on your investment. You’ve invested a lot in your children, and now it’s pay-back time!”

She waved the report card schedule with a flourish while the parents waited obediently to try to make sense of what she was saying. I, for one, kept trying to reconcile everything-my-daughter-means-to-me with the idea that the flimsy letter grades that will some day be coming home on a flimsy piece of paper are somehow a form of compensation—something she owes me.

Years ago, Paulo Freire criticized the banking model of education, whereby teachers treat students like a passive vault that holds knowledge. Teachers put the knowledge in and then get it back out in the form of tests or homework. But the guidance counselor on back-to-school night brought the banking model of education to a whole new level. “You’ll be getting a good return on your investment,” she said, “if your child brings home As and Bs. But if your child is bringing home Cs,” and here, I swear, she wagged her finger at us, “you are not getting the paycheck you deserve.”

I don’t even believe in grades, and I’m not too fond of traditional schooling, but this lady was scaring me. All the ways I know my kid and feel confidence in her were getting crowded out by fear. People are judged by letter grades, after all, and what if hers aren’t good? What if she doesn’t get into college? What if she doesn’t get a scholarship? What if she fails? What if we fail her by not instilling enough fear in her about her potential failure? What will we do? What will we do? When we got home, I asked to see her notebooks. “The teachers all say we’re supposed to be checking your notebooks once a week to ensure you’re not getting behind in anything.”

She indicated her backpack loaded with binders and 10-pound textbooks. “Feel free,” she said nonchalantly, but I could tell she was surprised. We had never checked her work before. We just trusted she was doing her best and would ask if she needed help. This system was working fine. It didn’t feel good to change gears and perform this policing function. Nor did I relish the fact that in subsequent weeks, I was starting to ask, “So, how’d you do on that test? How’s your grade in biology?” No wonder she didn’t want me to go to the Parent-Teacher Council meeting. She could see I was not immune to their fear-inspiring tactics. After years of homeschooling and being outside of traditional, fear-based schooling, her armature against these tactics was perhaps in better condition than mine.

When you participate in an institution, you start traveling down the pathways that the institution offers you. You speak the language because otherwise you won’t be understood. The institution of school prepares you for the institution of work and passive citizenship—key ingredients to maintaining the current power structure. Fear limits your creativity; swinging back and forth between punishment and reward keeps you oriented toward external motivators; arbitrary authority acclimates you to subservience; severe boredom dulls your mind, lowers your expectations, and teaches you how to tolerate life rather than be an agent in it.

Many of the kids graduating from this school will end up in jobs—either white-collar or blue, where they carry out orders. Perhaps a few will be in positions of power where they make important decisions and give orders. But all will have been trained to think that there is no other way it could be. They will learn, too, that the parameters of the institution allow for occasional random acts of kindness (the next generation’s selfless teachers) at one end and extreme acts of evil at the other (the next generation’s abusive cops). Systemic evils (war, profiteering, racism, sexism, etc.) will go largely unnoticed because they are the roads we walk, the language we speak, the walls we live inside of everyday. That’s what schools teach: the parameters are set. You must operate within them. There’s no point in contesting them. Get used to it.

When my daughter failed to note her section number in the designated spot on her art project, she received an F, and the teacher threw the piece away. I emailed the teacher, expressing respect for the challenges of having so many students, but also registering our concern about how demoralizing his tactics were. He did not write back, but he told Zoe the next day that he would give her partial credit for her work. “What does partial credit mean?” I found myself asking her...as if that is what mattered. It’s not what matters, but there’s no other way to engage with her teacher, and so you use the language that is best understood—that of grades and credit, rather than what matters much more, i.e., creativity, expression, critical thinking, collective engagement, and effort.

And it’s not the teacher’s fault either. He has about 150 students—Boston public high schools having a 31-student-per-class maximum. And he functions in the same overly stressed environment with insufficient resources. On the same day he slammed my kid with the F, he had been yelling at the class for wasting paint. Maybe he had hit the wall himself, dealing with the contradictions of being an art teacher in an overcrowded school with not enough money for paint and the asinine job of assigning grades to students’ work.

Everyone, then, is required to function according to the norms of the institution. Teachers, too, deal with arbitrary authority (from administrators, state and city budget decisions, work rules, and standardized tests). Then they turn around and dish it out. More examples: Zoe’s A in Latin got significantly reduced when the teacher discovered her binder was not properly organized. She almost got a zero on an English test because she had left one question blank. Why? Because she didn’t understand the question. But then she heard the teacher announce that leaving any blanks would result in a zero, so she went back to her desk and made up something that she thought would fit. She received full credit, thus learning an important lesson in bullshitting.

Maybe it’s not so bad to learn how to bullshit. And maybe we could all use some experience dealing with arbitrary authority and rigid institutional requirements. They are key survival skills. But as parents we should watch out for the ways we help do the school’s dirty work. One parent I know got upset because her kid’s biology teacher was not keeping up with the assigned pace for moving through the textbook. How would her child do on the mandatory citywide biology test at the end of the year if the teacher didn’t keep up? What gets the parent’s attention is the teacher’s failure to stick to norms. But is anyone asking if the norms make sense?

I find myself feeling appalled at the content in her textbooks. And then I feel appalled that the schools are so underfunded that they don’t have enough of them. How contradictory is that? “These textbooks suck, and you should get more of them.”

How many other parents, are out there pushing schools to live up to their norms without questioning those norms in the first place?

How many parents are abiding by the terms set by the school system and agreeing to play enforcer at home?

The only teacher I really learned anything from in high school was my AP U.S. history teacher who never made it past the Rosenbergs. He got stuck there because it was a powerful moment in history and it really mattered. I remember how he challenged us to think and how I could tell that that mattered to him more than anything else did. Students were upset with him for failing to put them through their paces. Their AP scores would surely suffer. But I remember—even at the time—feeling grateful that he expected me to think. And to think hard.

There is pleasure in thinking hard and using your mind to solve problems you are interested in. That’s what I want for my kid—and for every kid. Not just for its liberatory aspects, but because the survival of the planet probably depends on it.

My daughter is no doubt getting something positive from her school. Many of her teachers genuinely care about the kids and their ability to learn. But the requirements of the institution include the fundamental lessons: Do what you’re told. Don’t ask why. Accept arbitrary punishment and reward. Reduce your expectations. Nobody said life was fair or fun. You can hold on until the weekend, the next holiday, graduation, a week’s vacation from your job, and finally retirement. We all know what happens after that. You die. And the best you can hope for is that it all flew by, like the radio station promises?

Monday, December 11, 2006

Post-9/11 Fiction:  Exiles in America by Christopher Bram

By Michael Bronski

This is from Z Magazine. To subscribe go here:
https://www.zmag.org/store/Subscriptions/Subscriptions.cfm

To help Z even more:
http://www.zmag.org/Commentaries/donorform.htm

It is rare for contemporary art to grapple with the political realities of our lives. Of course, the reason for this is often that the making of a film or writing of a novel does not happen quickly and artists looking to take the longer view and make larger statements about the politics de jour may not have the same resonance two years later. However, in the past year we have seen a growing body of work that deals with the murderous excesses of the current administration’s response to 9/11 and the conflicts in the Middle East. These have been mostly documentaries—such as Jehane Noujaim’s Control Room and Danny Schechter’s WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception—but there have also been terrific fictional attempts to portray life in post-9/11 America. For instance, Danny Leiner’s feature film The Great New Wonderful looks at the complicated lives of some New Yorkers in September 2002 and manages to explicate the effects of physical and political trauma on everyday life.

But Exiles in America by Christopher Bram (William Morrow) sets a new standard for the political novel, not just because the author deals with sex, desire, and art in relation to international politics, but because he does so with a perception and a psychological nuance that is rare.

Bram is one of today’s most exciting and challenging novelists who consistently writes on gay themes. Sure, he is usually listed as a “gay writer.” While that is accurate enough, it is a shame that we live in a culture in which this term doesn’t illuminate an author’s work, but rather immediately limits it. Since 1987, with the publication of Surprising Myself, Bram has published 9 major novels in 19 years—a great run for any novelist. Bram’s record is particularly amazing when you realize that each of his novels has been very different from those before and after it.

From the sophisticated coming out story of Surprising Myself, Bram produced a WWII sex thriller in Hold Tight (1989); one of the first novels about AIDS with In Memory of Angel Clare (1989); and a novel about contemporary international politics in Almost History (1992). Father of Frankenstein (1995), which became the awardwinning film Gods and Monsters, was about the life of Hollywood director James Whale; the 1997 Gossip was a murder mystery about ACT UP and secrets on the Beltway rumor mill; The Notorious Dr. August: His Real Life; and Crimes was a splendid recreation of a 19th century novelized memoir that moved from the Civil War to the birth and death of vaudeville culture as seen through the intersections of race and sex, and the 2003 Lives of the Circus Animals was a novel about contemporary New York theater. All of these novels featured gay male protagonists, as well as various gay communities, and each portrayed themes that reflected the complicated, complex worlds in which they took place.

Exiles in America is also completely different from his earlier work. Zack Knowles, a psychiatrist, and his lover Daniel Wexler, a painter, have been together for over 20 years and while deeply in love, have fallen out of sex. They live in Williamsburg where Daniel teaches art at the College of William and Mary. Their lives are suddenly unsettled by the arrival of a visiting faculty artist, Abbas Rohani, his wife Elena, and their two children. Abbas is Iranian and Elena Russian. Shortly after they become friends, Abbas and Daniel begin a casual affair that later becomes more serious, in different ways, for both of them. In reaction Zack and Elena become confidants.

Bram’s explication of this roundelay of complicated relationships is splendid. Not only does he pinpoint the breath and life of how gay male lovers relate to one another—the silences, emotional hesitations, and unsaid love and resentments—but his portrayal of Abbas and Elena’s relationship (even more complicated than Zack and Daniel’s) is credible and illuminating.

Exiles in America takes on the big questions brought on by 9/11: what does it mean to be safe? How are people defined by their religion? By their culture? How does society hold itself together? How far can society go to protect itself before it destroys itself? Who is an exile? What is the very nature of “exile” and what happens to those people who are exiled? What happens to those who exile them?

While Bram at first concerns himself with the puzzles of sex and relationships at home, Exiles in America soon explodes into international politics when Abbas’s brother, an important Iranian politician, visits his relatives, imploring them to consider their roots, especially in light of the war in Iraq and a possible war against Iran. His visit is noticed by the FBI, which has concerns, fears, prejudices, and plots of their own. Soon the question of open relationships, homosexuality, “homeland,” and safety are all played out on a dangerous international stage.

The trauma of 9/11 is ever present in Exiles in America, mentioned sometimes by Zach’s patients, more often by Abbas and Elena when trying to explain why they feel like exiles in America. But Bram is also interested in what the evolving myth of 9/11 is doing to U.S. culture—our sense of self, ideas of normalcy, sexuality, sense of personal and national isolation. Obviously, the “exiles” in the title refer not only to Abbas and Elena but also to the sexual “deviants” Zach and Daniel, as well as anyone who does not easily fit into the new post-9/11 mindset. What Bram has done is show how defensive, isolationist, nationalist thinking seeps into all parts of our lives and begins to shape people from the inside. Not only does non(hetero)normative sexuality become suspicious in this climate, the very idea of “open relationships”—so natural to gay male culture and enjoyed by both couples here—becomes a suspect category, unAmerican and untrustworthy. Bram exposes how the post-9/11 demand for a strong nation at all costs affects our humanity and how the rhetoric of safety and security shapes our lives and thoughts even as we resist them.

It is tempting to call Exiles in America Bram’s best novel. Not only is it a major “gay novel”— however you want to define that—but it is also one of the new works of contemporary fiction that grapples with the unending complexity of world politics in ways that are both empathetic, enlightening, politically savvy, and emotionally sophisticated. 

Michael Bronski teaches women and gender studies and Jewish studies at Dartmouth College. His last book was Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps (St. Martin’s Press, 2003). 

Misogyny Marketing:  (1) Got Milk?  Got Desperation?  -and- (2) Another Wonder Drug?

By Martha Rosenberg

This is from Z Magazine. To subscribe go here:
https://www.zmag.org/store/Subscriptions/Subscriptions.cfm

To help Z even more:
http://www.zmag.org/Commentaries/donorform.htm

If you’ve ever doubted the dictum that the ads people like best don’t sell just look at the Got Milk campaign. The longer it runs, the more people quote it, the more B-list celebrities it poses with hokey props and sight gags—the less milk actually sells. In fact, teenagers drink 50 percent less milk today than 30 years ago, according to the milk industry’s own figures.

Of course, some fault lies with the product itself. Many simply won’t drink it—kids, dieters, athletes, health food eaters, ethnic minorities, allergics, drinkers, smokers, vegans, the lactose intolerant—and that’s before we get to the product’s underside of downers, veal calves, Monsanto bovine growth hormone, and pollution so bad dairy farms are called environmental crack houses.

But the advertising itself hasn’t helped either. Because underneath the celebrity rubber necking and twee copy is sloppy marketing and sloppy science, buttressed by heath-care professionals on the dairy dole.

Remember the “does a body good”/strong bones campaign, which told young women milk prevented osteoporosis? Turned out young women didn’t care about getting osteoporosis. They cared about calories and milk has more calories than a lot of other appealing foods. And it wasn’t true. Dairy calcium doesn’t prevent bone fractures in scientific studies and was correlated with increased fractures in the definitive Nurses’ Health Studies. Oh well.

Then there was the milk-as-Midol campaign, which showed husbands rushing to the store to get a milk fix for their PMSing women. Again it wasn’t true—dairy worsens PMS— and the sight of hubby’s insipid peace offering just made women madder.

Earlier this year, there was the 24/24 milk diet—“drink 24 ounces every 24 hours as part of your reduced-calorie diet”—whose scientific claims, tautologically, derive from studies funded by the dairy industry.

Full color ads with photos of soccer star David Beckham, American Idol Carrie Underwood, skater Sasha Cohen, and New York Yankee Alex Rodriguez are appearing in Sports Illustrated for Kids, Spin, Electronic Gaming, CosmoGirl, Blender, and Seventeen. Teenagers are urged to visit bodybymilk.com where they can win prizes like Baby Phat and Adidas items—and their schools can bid on sports gear, classroom supplies, and music equipment.

Now the milk industry is taking on soft drinks. “Soft drinks and other sweetened beverages are now the leading source of calories in a teen’s diet and these nutrient-void beverages are increasingly taking the place of milk,” says the press release. “Some studies have found that teenage girls who drink adequate amounts of milk and few soft drinks tend to weigh less and have less body fat than those who don’t.”

But there are a few wrinkles in the new campaign. Like the dangers inherent in “not as bad as X” marketing. If sugary sodas are bad, does that make milk good? What about sugar free soda? What about high fat or flavored milk? What about neither one? When it comes to marketing, the enemy of your enemy isn’t your friend. 

Another Wonder Drug

The screaming woman in the ad is right out of Friday the 13th Part 2 or Halloween. Face contorted, mouth in an impossible shape, she looks like she’s being murdered—or doing the murdering.

Is it the remake of the remake of Psycho that everyone’s been waiting for? No, it’s the latest disease big pharma is trying to sell to justify a drug—a perfectly good drug that just needs people to take it. As everyone who remembers HRT marketing knows, the quickest way to sell a drug is to show out of control women (see: fear mongering; misogyny).

“Are there periods of time when you have racing thoughts? Fly off the handle at little things? Spend out of control?” asks the ad.  “Need less sleep? Feel irritable? You may need treatment for bipolar disorder.”

Of course, you may also have had too much coffee or a bad day at the office. But mental illness makes a lot more money. Especially if you decide to take AstraZeneca’s Seroquel. Created in 1988 by tweaking an existing antipsychotic compound enough to merit a patent, Seroquel (quetiapine fumarate) has the three things big pharma loves most in a drug—a short time from R&D to sales, a daily ad infinitum dosage, and a high price: $11.82 a day or $4,300 a year. It was approved in 1997 for schizophrenia.

At first it was a blockbuster, accounting for one dollar in nine of AstraZeneca revenue. But then in 2005 that cheeky New England Journal of Medicine found that Seroquel and other atypical anti-psychotics (except one) had no advantage over older anti-psychotics like Haldol and Thorazine in 2005 (except price), including the putative reduction in rigidity and tremors that was their selling point.

The finding, part of a six-year National Institutes of Health comparative drug study, provided “a comprehensive set of data that were obtained independently of the pharmaceutical industry,” commented principal investigator Jeffrey Lieberman, adding insult to injury.

Around the same time the British Medical Journal announced that Seroquel and a similar atypical antipsychotic were ineffective in reducing agitation among Alzheimer’s patients, who constitute 29 percent of Seroquel sales. In fact, Seroquel was found to make cognitive functioning worse in the elderly patients with dementia studied.

Then there was the police blotter. Violent assault reports were increasingly mentioning Seroquel. One in Yonkers, New York in 2006 began, “The city jail guard who shot his wife before killing himself had just begun taking a powerful anti-psychotic drug that listed ‘suicide attempt’ among its possible side effects”—and lawsuits began piling up, 380 according to USA Today.

One young Seroquel patient told the Chicago Sun-Times, “It would take me anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour and a half to get out of bed each morning. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t see, and I couldn’t be me.”

There was bad financial news too. AstraZeneca’s new blood thinner and diabetes drug were both stalled due to safety concerns, and Teva Pharmaceuticals, a generic drug maker, challenged Seroquel’s patent to the FDA.

So AstraZeneca did what drug companies that put marketing before medicine always do: came up with a new use for Seroquel (bipolar disorder) and new formulation (sustained release) and yelled breakthrough. Now all it has to do is convince millions of healthy women and men they should take a major tranquilizer, an anti-psychotic for schizophrenia, because they had a bad day. That’s before it gets to the kids.

Maybe the screaming woman in the ad has just seen the AstraZeneca marketing plan.

Ellen Jane Willis

This is from Z Magazine. To subscribe go here:
https://www.zmag.org/store/Subscriptions/Subscriptions.cfm

To help Z even more:
http://www.zmag.org/Commentaries/donorform.htm

Ellen Willis was born in Manhattan, New York and grew up in Brooklyn and Queens. Her father was a lieutenant in the New York City Police Department. Willis attended Barnard College as an undergraduate and did graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley where she received a degree in comparative literature.

In the 1960s and 1970s she was the first pop music critic for the New Yorker and subsequently wrote for the Village Voice, the Nation, Rolling Stone, Slate, and Dissent (where she was also on the editorial board). She was the author of several books including Beginning to See the Light: Pieces of a Decade (1982), No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays (1992), and Don’t Think, Smile!: Notes on a Decade of Denial (1999).

In 1969, with Shulamith Firestone, author of The Dialectic of Sex (1970), Willis co-founded Redstockings, a radical women’s liberation group that pioneered consciousness raising (CR) and organized the first public speakouts on abortion, then illegal in the U.S.

After an infamous 1969 counter-inaugural and anti-war rally in Washington where male leftists shouted (at one of the two feminist speakers) things like “Rape her in a back alley,” Willis wrote about the need for feminists to break from SDS: “A genuine alliance with male radicals will not be possible until sexism sickens them as much as racism. This will not be accomplished through persuasion, conciliation, or love, but through independence and solidarity; radical men will stop oppressing us and make our fight their own when they can’t get us to join them on any other terms” (The World Split Open by Ruth Rosen, Viking, 2000).

The next year Willis started a women’s liberation group in Colorado, while working on an antiVietnam War project near a military base. In 1975 after most of the early CR groups, including Redstockings, had disbanded in the wake of the burnout and backlash that followed the ebbing of the 1960s radical tide, she got together with feminist friends to form a new group, which analyzed attacks on feminism as they emerged.

Willis said about the unexpected exhilaration women involved in CR groups felt: “What I was impressed with was that people were talking about substantive things; it wasn’t like the usual political meeting. And I also felt immediately accepted. If I made a comment, people listened to it, as if I were really in the group, which I wasn’t used to in New Left groups. I was used to feeling like an outsider” (The World Split Open).

In 1969 she wrote in her essay “Women and the Myth of Consumerism,” “Women are not manipulated by the media into being domestic servants and mindless sexual decorations, the better to sell soap and hair spray. Rather, the image reflects women as they are forced by men in a sexist society to behave.... The real evil of the media image of women is that it supports the sexist status quo.”

Throughout the 1970s she worked to halt the erosion of abortion rights, both through her writing and by joining with others to form several reproductive rights resistance groups.

In the 1980s Willis articulated a position that she defined as “prosex feminism” and helped found the Feminist Anti-Censorship Taskforce (FACT) to counter the puritanism she deplored in the anti-pornography movement.

In 1995 as an NYU professor of journalism, she founded the only cultural reporting and criticism program in the U.S.

In 2000 she organized radical feminists into the online discussion group History in Action, with members on several continents. She remained an activist, demonstrating against the Bush administration’s policies with the group Take Back the Future and was part of the Feminist Futures study group.

Carol Hanisch, who had worked in the civil rights movement in the South and then become a central organizer and writer in the New York women’s liberation movement, said about Willis: “Her writing was always forthright and serious, unencumbered by pretentious cuteness or fawning. Her forte was in exploring dark corners and adding her own light so all could see more clearly. In those crucial years, we struggled to make the left more feminist and to keep the women’s liberation movement genuinely radical.”

Willis died on November 9, 2006 from lung cancer.

Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Bush-Cheney company selling Nukes to Iran, World Bank funds Israel-Palestine wall, GM food dangers..

Stories CNN and your local newspaper may not be covering

Project Censored documents the most under-reported stories every year.  The stories so far, printed here, include:

#1 Future of Internet Debate Ignored by Media

#2 Halliburton Charged with Selling Nuclear Technologies to Iran (A Bush-Cheney company)

#3 Oceans of the World in Extreme Danger

#4 Hunger and Homelessness Increasing in the US

#5 High-Tech Genocide in Congo

#6 Federal Whistleblower Protection in Jeopardy

# 7 US Operatives Torture Detainees to Death in Afghanistan and Iraq

#8 Pentagon Exempt from Freedom of Information Act

#9 The World Bank Funds Israel-Palestine Wall

#10 Expanded Air War in Iraq Kills More Civilians

#11 Dangers of Genetically Modified Food Confirmed

#12 Pentagon Plans to Build New Landmines

#13 New Evidence Establishes Dangers of Roundup

#14 Homeland Security Contracts KBR to Build Detention Centers in the US

#15 Chemical Industry is EPA’s Primary Research Partner

#16 Ecuador and Mexico Defy US on International Criminal Court

#17 Iraq Invasion Promotes OPEC Agenda

#18 Physicist Challenges Official 9-11 Story

#19 Destruction of Rainforests Worst Ever

#20 Bottled Water: A Global Environmental Problem

#21 Gold Mining Threatens Ancient Andean Glaciers

#22 $Billions in Homeland Security Spending Undisclosed

#23 US Oil Targets Kyoto in Europe

#24 Cheney’s Halliburton Stock Rose Over 3000 Percent Last Year

#25 US Military in Paraguay Threatens Region

Charging Rumsefeld with War Crimes

‘Last Resort’ Attempted to Charge Rumsfeld, Others for War Crimes

Last Resort’ Attempted to Charge Rumsfeld, Others for War Crimes
by Michelle Chen

Nov. 15 – On Tuesday, human-rights groups appealed to the international arena to hold the architects of the so-called “war on terror” accountable for alleged crimes against humanity.

The US-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the Berlin-based Republican Attorneys’ Association and other rights groups filed a complaint on Tuesday in Germany charging outgoing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, and other Bush administration officials with systematic torture and abuse of detainees held in Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The allegations draw largely on witness accounts and internal government documents.

The plaintiffs include eleven Iraqi citizens who allege that US authorities subjected them to brutal and humiliating treatment at Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib prison. Another plaintiff is Mohammed al Qahtani, a Saudi national detained at Guantánamo Bay since 2002, where he has reported enduring routine psychological and physical abuse. The complaint charges Rumsfeld with explicitly authorizing Qahtani’s mistreatment, citing a December 2002 memorandum on interrogation tactics signed by the Secretary.

The US government has not formally responded to the charges.

The complaint invokes Germany’s “universal jurisdiction” law, which allows German courts to prosecute war crimes committed anywhere in the world. CCR filed a similar case in 2004, but Germany’s federal prosecutor dismissed the case last year amid diplomatic friction with the US government.

At a press conference on Tuesday, human-rights attorneys pointed out that the current complaint contains fresh evidence, including newly released government memorandums showing high-level official endorsement of extreme interrogation methods.

Berlin-based attorney Wolfgang Kaleck, CCR President Michael Ratner, and others working on the case said they hoped to push Germany to launch an investigation and place the United States government under international scrutiny. But they acknowledged it is uncertain whether the new case will move forward, and to what extent, if any, US officials would submit to an investigation.

In a statement summarizing the case, CCR called the international effort “a last resort to obtain justice” for the victims. The group noted that US officials enjoy immunity from prosecution by the Iraqi government – the result of a law passed by Iraq’s US-controlled provisional government in 2004.

Meanwhile, domestic courts have been stifled under the recently enacted Military Commissions Act, which blocks detainees’ access to US courts, narrows the scope of the federal War Crimes Act, and provides retroactive immunity for various types of past abuses.

CCR attorney Wells Dixon said another obstacle to accountability is the Bush administration’s control over the very mechanisms designed to check executive power.

“[I]t is certain that the United States would refuse to prosecute Donald Rumsfeld or the other defendants for war crimes,” he told The NewStandard. “This is especially true given that many of the defendants – like Attorney General Alberto Gonzales – are still in power and control prosecutorial authorities.”

© 2006 The NewStandard. All rights reserved. The NewStandard is a non-profit publisher that encourages noncommercial reproduction of its content. Reprints must prominently attribute the author and The NewStandard, hyperlink to http://newstandardnews.net (online) or display newstandardnews.net (print), and carry this notice. For more information or commercial reprint rights, please see the TNS reprint policy.
Send to Friends Respond to Editors or Reporter

Innocent Victim of U.S. terrorism sues in court

Rendition Survivor Appeals Case Against CIA Officials

Rendition Survivor Appeals Case Against CIA Officials
German Citizen Wants Apology for US Role in His Abduction, Torture
by Catherine Komp

Richmond, Va.; Nov. 29 – A federal appeals court heard arguments here Tuesday from civil rights advocates trying to reinstate a landmark lawsuit against the CIA over alleged human rights abuses.

Federal attorneys argued vigorously to keep the case from going to trial.

The lawsuit, originally filed last December on behalf of German citizen Khaled El-Masri, claims former CIA director George Tenet and other unnamed CIA officials violated due-process and human rights protections by facilitating his capture, torture and prolonged secret detention. Under the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program, Macedonian government agents abducted El-Masri in 2004 and eventually helped to transport him to a prison in Afghanistan, the suit alleges.

The complaint also lists unnamed US-based aviation companies that allegedly carried El-Masri during his captivity.

El-Masri says he was stripped, beaten and sodomized. At the prison, El-Masri says, masked American and foreign questioners regularly interrogated him about affiliations with terrorist groups. He says he started a hunger strike – his only form of protest – and eventually suffered forced tube-feeding at the hands of his captors.

As previously reported by The NewStandard, the suit also alleges that El-Masri’s detention and mistreatment continued, even after Tenet and other Bush administration officials discovered he was in no way connected to terrorism.

“I was kidnapped, I was beaten, I was drugged and taken to Afghanistan against my will,” El-Masri said through a translator outside the courthouse. “I was held captive for five months under deplorable conditions – I think it’s fair to say conditions not fit for human beings.” When he was finally freed, El-Masri said, his handlers dumped him “like a piece of luggage in the woods in Albania.”

El-Masri, in the United States for the first time, said all he wants is an acknowledgement that the US is responsible for his kidnapping, an explanation and an apology. The lawsuit also seeks $75,000 in damages, though El-Masri’s attorneys emphasized that the case is not about a monetary award.

The US government has refused to confirm or deny the allegations, saying that by doing so, clandestine CIA activities would be divulged. Last May, US District Judge T.S. Ellis granted the government’s request to use the “state secrets” privilege to dismiss the lawsuit. Ellis concurred with the defendants’ argument that proceeding with the lawsuit “would reveal considerable detail about the CIA’s highly classified overseas programs and operations.”

At Tuesday’s hearing, the ACLU accepted that, if the case were to go to trial, some evidence would be kept both from the plaintiffs and the public during court proceedings. But ACLU staff attorney Ben Wizner said the government is misusing the state-secrets privilege to avoid accountability for illegal activity.

“It’s not enough that [the US] made a hypothetical defense,” Wizner told the court. “They need to make a valid defense.”

Representing the Department of Justice, attorney Gregory Katsas countered that in classified evidence submitted to judges only, the defense shows that even “seemingly innocuous” information “will lead to a cascading effect of national-security harms.”

“Even disclosure of information to judges carries risk,” added Katsas.

The ACLU contends that the federal government waived its right to call the rendition program a state secret after President Bush acknowledged the secret CIA prisons in September and other top ranking officials confirmed the rendition program.

“The world is watching this case,” said Wizner, “not to learn intelligence secrets but to see if the US can give justice to an innocent victim of our anti-terror policy. The answer to that is terribly important.”

© 2006 The NewStandard. All rights reserved. The NewStandard is a non-profit publisher that encourages noncommercial reproduction of its content. Reprints must prominently attribute the author and The NewStandard, hyperlink to http://newstandardnews.net (online) or display newstandardnews.net (print), and carry this notice. For more information or commercial reprint rights, please see the TNS reprint policy.
Send to Friends Respond to Editors or Reporter