George Bush In India- What is Success?

BBC News

February 28, 2006

By Paul Danahar
BBC South Asia bureau editor

Politicians, like journalists, need a good crisis. Margaret Thatcher famously said of the Falklands war that it was "exciting" after "dealing with hum drum issues like the environment."

And like journalists, politicians need headlines.

In Delhi at the moment neither are having much fun because we are facing the prospect of a visit from the first Republican President since Richard Nixon that nobody will much remember.

Unlike other world figures, George Bush will not be lunging into crowds of Rajasthani villagers or addressing the parliament of the world's largest democracy.

Lunches that matter

Nor will he assume a wistful gaze at the Taj Mahal or climb on the back of an elephant.

George Bush is flying half way around the world... to have lunch.

Several lunches actually, but none that seems to promise either headlines or provoke much of a crisis, unless he collapses between courses like his father did on a state visit to Japan many years ago.

When George Junior's visit was being touted last year there was something much more exciting on the table - an "historic" deal which would allow India to gain access to US civilian nuclear technology.

The deal was clearly supposed to be in the bag long ago. Instead the negotiators have been "working on it now" in the run up to the president's arrival.

Of course the off-the-record briefers - and there are a lot of them at the moment - are busy telling us journalists that even without the deal the visit is hugely important.

But when they start talking about those "important" issues, like the environment or agriculture or "deliverables", pens start slipping off notepads.

Failure?

How, one journalist asked at a briefing, was the trip going to be sold as a success to the world with no real deal, and no big memorable event?

"Well," said the high powered briefer, "that all depends on you people." He got a laugh out of us but we got little out of him.

So the question seems to be, if the nuclear deal is not fully ironed out now is the visit a failure?

For the journalists probably yes. But for the US and India, no.

The true significance of this visit is not what comes out of it. It's not even really the deal itself.

The real significance of the negotiations about sharing nuclear technology is the fact of the negotiations.

By having them and coming here, to Delhi, the United States government is saying to India "we trust you, you're one of us, we want you to join our club".

A senior American official told me recently that the US wants to be "helpful" to India as it "emerges as a world power".

What he wouldn't be drawn on was whether he meant a world military power or a world economic power.

But sift through this year's quadrennial US defence review and you get a steer. The document is produced by deep thinkers in the Pentagon gazing into their crystal balls.

Special relationship

At the heart of the latest review is a commitment to build strategic partnerships with other countries to counter possible risks to American interests around the world, 20-30 years from now.

At the same time it seeks to insure that no other country, or collection of countries, comes close to the US in terms of military or economic power.

In the 20th century, Europe was at the heart US foreign policy. It tried to manage Europe via its "special relationship" with the UK.

With talk of this being an Asian century it would seem sensible for the US to find a similar "special relationship" there.

For most of the post-cold war period the Asia Pacific region dominated the US Asian agenda. America was the region's biggest trading partner, economic growth was also fuelled by US involvement in wars in Korea and Vietnam.

Now many countries in the region are doing more business with China. With economic clout comes political influence. The US is watching heads slowly turn away to the new economic giant.

So the candidate for another "special relationship" needs to shares all of the US's concerns about China but without the potential to become a threat itself.

And if that country also offers a chance to replace the trading opportunities siphoned off by Beijing, then even better.

India with it's hostile neighbours, global ambitions and huge aspirant middle-class would seem a perfect choice.

This trip might not produce headlines, but it may be signalling a seismic shift in relations, one that will still have an impact on the world long after this visit is forgotten.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/south_asia/4759592.stm

Published: 2006/02/28 17:33:29 GMT

© BBC MMVI

Film Festival With A Difference

BBC News

February 28, 2006

By Sanjaya Jena
In Puri, Orissa

It's a film festival with a difference.

There are no entry forms, selection procedures, competitions, juries, awards, bureaucracies. There are simply a lot of films to be shown.

Bring Your Own Film Festival is an innovative event held on the sandy beaches of Puri in the eastern Indian state of Orissa. It has been drawing droves of filmmakers from home and abroad.

Anybody who has shot a film of any type, duration or format can land up at festival every February to get their work screened before an enthusiastic crowd comprising filmmakers, film lovers, artists, painters and even lay viewers.

The festival is just three years old but it seems to have created a space for itself.

Organised by a group of maverick filmmakers, the festival could go a long way in providing a platform for young and serious filmmakers, says organiser and national award winning film maker Kapilas Bhuyan.

The festival's open exhibition policy allows any film in any format to be screened in the festival.

This throws up an obvious question - How do the organisers ensure quality?

Festival enthusiasts have their rationale.

More:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4754476.stm

Reflections From the Hot Zone: Covering Conflict

Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone

Fri, Feb 24 2006, 7:01 PM ET

Kevin Sites recently participated in a Q&A forum at the Frontline Club in London. The club, dedicated to journalists who risk their lives covering war zones, invited Kevin to share his experiences as a journalist in conflict. The talk, moderated by the BBC's Vin Ray, ranged from Kevin's start in journalism to his current assignment, Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone. Kevin also talked about a defining moment in his career as a war reporter: while embedded with the Marines in 2004, Kevin captured video of a Marine shooting a wounded, unarmed insurgent at point-blank range in a mosque during the battle for Fallujah.

More: http://hotzone.yahoo.com/

Disgrace In The Desert

Guardian

Libyan rape victims face arranged marriages or staying locked up in 'rehabilitation' centres, writes Brian Whitaker

Tuesday February 28, 2006

For 37 years since The Leader came to power, Libyans have been exposed to a daily torrent of revolutionary ideas from Colonel Muammar Gadafy. Aside from his more crazily radical adventures, though, he has also tried to enhance women's rights and has caused a good deal of mirth on his travels - as well as making a serious point - by relying on the protection of all-female bodyguards.

Whether the colonel's ideas have made much impact on the average Libyan citizen, however, is questionable. Despite some opening-up recently, the realities of daily life inside the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriyya are still very much a mystery.

One rare glimpse behind the wall comes from a report issued today by Human Rights Watch. The conclusion that might be drawn from it is that regardless of the colonel's own revolutionary fervour, Libyan society at large remains deeply imbued with tradition and, in some ways, extremely conservative.

The report concerns an issue that in Dickensian England was politely referred to as the problem of "fallen women" - those who have been cast out of their homes for "moral misconduct" or impugning their family's "honour". In some cases their only "sin" is that they have had the misfortune to be raped.

In traditional Arab societies, women who disgrace their family are often killed by their brothers in order to purge the "shame". To reduce the risk of this happening, the Libyan authorities provide refuge in "social rehabilitation" centres. That is more than some countries do, but for many of the women who go there, "rehabilitation" leads only to more suffering.

Despite their name, the rehabilitation centres have a distinctly prison-like character, Human Rights Watch says, and for all practical purposes they are indeed jails: "The women and girls sleep in locked quarters and are not allowed to leave the gates of the compound. The custodians sometimes subject them to long periods of solitary confinement, occasionally in handcuffs, for trivial reasons like 'talking back'.

"They are tested for communicable diseases without their consent upon entry, and most are forced to endure invasive virginity examinations. Some residents are as young as 16, but [the] authorities provide no education, except weekly religious instruction."

Farida Deif, a researcher for the women's rights division of Human Rights Watch commented: "How can they be called shelters when most of the women and girls we interviewed told us they would escape if they could?"

One woman detained at a centre in Tahoura told investigators: "It is as if we're criminals even though we didn't do anything wrong."

Another described how she came to be there: "My mother died in a car crash when I was two. My father married a Moroccan woman. We didn't understand each other. We had lots of problems. She'd hit and insult us. Eventually my father kicked me out. He gave me a ticket to visit my relatives. I worked in a restaurant. I didn't smoke or take drugs. A year later, my father came to pick me up because people were talking. The prosecutor told me that I could either come here [to the centre] or go home with my father."

Once taken under the "protective" arm of the state, these women and girls have no opportunity to challenge their confinement in a court of law, and typically have no legal representation, Human Rights Watch says. They can stay locked up indefinitely.

There are just two ways out: either a male relative agrees to look after her, or a woman agrees to get married - often to a total stranger.

According to one public prosecutor quoted in the report, so few families agree to take custody of these women that the "only answer" is marriage: "That is the only way to leave the [social rehabilitation] home."

Aisha Ramadan Ben Soufia, director of the home in Tajoura, described the process when a man comes to the rehabilitation centre looking for a wife: "We do our research and ask him why he's coming here. We visit his home to make sure the conditions are as he described. We verify his salary and qualifications ... He has to have a full-time job and housing. It is usually someone from outside Tripoli. We tell them [the women] his qualifications and ask the girls if they want to marry him."

In its role as governmental match-maker, the home also decides which women can be allowed to leave with a husband. "We only marry the ones without problems, the ones of good morals," the director said.

When asked by researchers why men would choose to marry a woman detained in a social rehabilitation centre, he explained that their intentions vary. Men usually approach the centre because a neighbour has found a wife from there, because of religious sympathy for the woman, and in order to get a religious blessing known as "sawab".

A public prosecutor interviewed by Human Rights Watch suggested a different reason, however. It is "one of the cheap places for marriage", he said. "There are no [pre-marriage] expenses. It is not the same as [marrying] a woman with a family."

More:http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,,1720032,00.html

Livingstone Suspension Frozen By Judge

Guardian

Ros Taylor

February 28, 2006

A high court judge has frozen the four-week suspension handed down to Ken Livingstone by the Adjudication Panel, which was due to begin tomorrow.
The ruling means the London mayor can continue fighting what he describes as the "McCarthyite" decision to suspend him without having to abandon his office for four weeks.

Mr Livingstone, who was suspended after the government body ruled that he had brought his office into disrepute by comparing a Jewish Evening Standard reporter to a concentration camp guard, said earlier this morning that he would take the case to the appeal court and "most probably" the Lords, even if it cost him "hundreds of thousands of pounds". He added that he had no intention of apologising for his remarks.

"For far too long the accusation of anti-semitism has been used against anybody who is critical of the policies of the Israeli government," Mr Livingstone said in a statement delivered at City Hall today.

"The fundamental issue is not whether or not I was 'insensitive', it is the principle that those whom the people elect should only be removed by the people or because they have broken the law.

"It is because this fundamental principle is at stake that I pledge to do everything in my power to have this attack on the democratic rights of Londoners overturned."

The mayor said he had not broken the law and that he reserved the right to treat journalists with the same robustness as they treated him. "As far as I am aware there is no law against 'unnecessary insensitivity' or even 'offensiveness' to journalists harassing you as you try to go home," he said. Mr Livingstone was leaving an event at City Hall last February when Oliver Finegold tried to interview him.

He denied that his comments were influenced by alcohol: if he had been drinking, he said, it would have been much stronger.

"I treat journalists on the basis of the way I am treated by journalists," the mayor told a press conference. He said the incident had been "blown out of all proportion" and was part of a "25-year running battle I have had with Associated Newspapers", which publishes the Standard.

Mr Livingstone said the paper's editor, Veronica Wadley, "has had an irony bypass" after publishing a profile of him "in which I was described as a 'snappy, snarling brute', 'voracious', 'frightening', 'ugly', 'raging' and 'gripped by paranoia'".

The Board of Deputies of British Jews, which pursued the complaint against Mr Livingstone after members of the London assembly had already censured him, represented only a "small section of the [Jewish] community," he said. A higher proportion of Jewish Londoners had given him their first preference vote in the 2004 mayoral election than had Londoners as a whole.

Asked whether, as mayor, he should be able to behave "as he liked" within the law, Mr Livingstone replied: "That is exactly what I'm saying." He added that, unlike him, journalists had resisted pressure for an independent body to be set up to rule on complaints against them.

The mayor's deputy, Nicky Gavron, will take charge if Mr Livingstone is forced to leave his post.

The mayor said this morning that if he were eventually suspended he would use the time to take a holiday or write "something useful about the history and context of the Middle East".

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

Play About Demonstrator's Death Is Delayed

New York Times

February 28, 2006

By JESSE McKINLEY

A potential Off Broadway production of "My Name Is Rachel Corrie," an acclaimed solo show about an American demonstrator killed by an Israeli bulldozer while trying to stop the destruction of a Palestinian home, has been postponed because of concerns about the show's political content.

The production, a hit at the Royal Court Theater in London last year, had been tentatively scheduled to start performances at the New York Theater Workshop in the East Village on March 22. But yesterday, James C. Nicola, the artistic director of the workshop, said he had decided to postpone the show after polling local Jewish religious and community leaders as to their feelings about the work.

"The uniform answer we got was that the fantasy that we could present the work of this writer simply as a work of art without appearing to take a position was just that, a fantasy," he said.

In particular, the recent electoral upset by Hamas, the militant Palestinian group, and the sickness of Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, had made "this community very defensive and very edgy," Mr. Nicola said, "and that seemed reasonable to me."

The play, which received strong reviews in London, follows the story of Rachel Corrie, an idealistic American demonstrator and Palestinian-rights activist who was crushed to death in March 2003 in the Gaza Strip.

The play was written by the actor Alan Rickman, who directed the piece, and Katherine Viner, a journalist at The Guardian newspaper in London, who pieced together snippets of Ms. Corrie's journals and e-mail messages to create the script. And while the show had not been formally announced, Ms. Viner said yesterday that she and Mr. Rickman had already bought plane tickets to see the production at the workshop.

"I was devastated and really surprised," Ms. Viner said in a telephone interview from London. "And in my view, I think they're misjudging the New York audience. It's a piece of art, not a piece of agitprop."

But Mr. Nicola said he was less worried about those who saw the show than those who simply heard about it.

"I don't think we were worried about the audience," he said. "I think we were more worried that those who had never encountered her writing, never encountered the piece, would be using this as an opportunity to position their arguments."

Mr. Nicola said that he still hoped to produce the play during the 2006-7 season but that he hadn't heard back from the Royal Court yet. A call for comment to the Royal Court's general manager, Diane Borger, was not returned.

"It seemed as though if we proceeded, we would be taking a stand we didn't want to take," he said.

Copyright 2006The New York Times Company Home

Tortured Logic

New York Times

February 28, 2006

Op-Ed Contributor

By ANTHONY LAGOURANIS
Chicago

I HAVE never met Sgt. Santos Cardona or Sgt. Michael Smith, but we share similar experiences. In late 2003 and early 2004, both men used their dogs to intimidate Iraqi prisoners during interrogations at Abu Ghraib prison. They maintain that they were following legal orders. Now they both face impending court-martial.

From January 2004 to January 2005, I served in various places in Iraq (including Abu Ghraib) as an Army interrogator. Following orders that I believed were legal, I used military working dogs during interrogations. I terrified my interrogation subjects, but I never got intelligence (mostly because 90 percent of them were probably innocent, but that's another story). Perhaps, I have thought for a long time, I also deserve to be prosecuted. But if that is the case, culpability goes much farther up the chain of command than the Army and the Bush administration have so far been willing to admit.

When the chief warrant officer at our interrogation site in Mosul first told me to use dogs during interrogations, it seemed well within what was allowed by our written rules and consistent with what was being done at Abu Ghraib and other detention centers. The dogs were muzzled and held by a handler. The prisoners didn't know that, though, because they were blindfolded; if they gave me an answer I didn't like, I could cue the handler so the dog would bark and lunge toward them. Sometimes they were so terrified they'd wet their jumpsuits. About halfway through my tour, I stopped using dogs and other "enhancements" like hypothermia that qualify as torture even under the most nonchalant readings of international law. I couldn't handle being so routinely brutal.

In training, we learned that all P.O.W.'s are protected against actual and implied threats. You can never put a "knife on the table" to get someone to talk. That was clear. But our Iraqi prisoners weren't clearly classified as P.O.W.'s, so I never knew what laws applied. Instead, a confusing set of verbal and written orders had supplanted the Geneva Conventions.

When an Army investigator asked Col. Thomas Pappas, the top military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib, how intimidation with dogs could be allowed under this treaty, he gave the chilling reply, "I did not personally look at that with regard to the Geneva Convention." Colonel Pappas later testified that he was taking his cue on the use of dogs from Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who took over detainee operations in Iraq after running them in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

General Miller has denied recommending the use of guard dogs to intimidate prisoners during interrogations in Iraq. He also recently said he would not testify in the courts-martial of Sergeants Cardona and Smith, invoking his right to avoid self-incrimination. As someone who voluntarily spoke at length about my actions in Iraq to investigators, without a lawyer present, I can't have a favorable opinion of General Miller. By doing the military equivalent of "taking the Fifth," he's decided to protect himself, apparently happy to let two dog handlers take the fall — a stunning betrayal of his subordinates and Army values.

Sergeants Cardona and Smith have been accused of sick and sadistic behavior. They face the prospect of serious jail time. But they almost certainly acted believing they were following legal orders. In the military, orders are orders unless there is clear, uncluttered law transmitted from far above our commanders' rank and station. Instead of a clear message prohibiting torture, our top commanders gave us a deliberate muddying of the waters.

Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, recently shepherded a ban on torture through Congress. Then, while reluctantly signing the legislation, President Bush muddled this very clear ban on torture by stating that he would construe it "in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the president."

Those who serve in the prisons of Iraq deserve to know clearly the difference between legal and illegal orders. Soldiers on the ground need a commander in chief who does not seek strained legalisms that "permit" the use of torture. The McCain amendment, prohibiting "cruel, inhuman, or degrading" treatment in all instances, is an accurate reflection of the true values of the military and American society. We should adhere to it strictly and in all cases. I know, from personal experience, that any leeway given will be used to maximum effect against detainees. No slope is more slippery, I learned in Iraq, than the one that leads to torture.

Anthony Lagouranis served in the Army from May 2001 to July 2005.

Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

U.S Is Settling Detainee Suit in 9/11 Sweep

Ehab Elmaghraby in Alexandria, Egypt, with his parents in April 2004. Mr. Elmaghraby, detained after 9/11, said he settled his lawsuit reluctantly.

New York Times

February 28, 2006

By NINA BERNSTEIN

The federal government has agreed to pay $300,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by an Egyptian who was among dozens of Muslim men swept up in the New York area after 9/11, held for months in a federal detention center in Brooklyn and deported after being cleared of links to terrorism.

The settlement, filed in federal court late yesterday, is the first the government has made in a number of lawsuits charging that noncitizens were abused and their constitutional rights violated in detentions after the terror attacks.

It removes one of two plaintiffs from a case in which a federal judge ruled last fall that former Attorney General John Ashcroft, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other top government officials must answer questions under oath. Government lawyers filed an appeal of that ruling on Friday.

In the settlement agreement, which requires approval by a federal judge in Brooklyn, lawyers for the government said that the officials were not admitting any liability or fault. In court papers they have said that the 9/11 attacks created "special factors," including the need to deter future terrorism, that outweighed the plaintiffs' right to sue.

"A settlement like this is not a precedent, but it's a form of accountability," said Gerald L. Neuman, a law professor at Columbia University who is an expert in human rights law and was not involved in the case. "When the government finds it necessary to settle, that changes the government's incentives. It doesn't mean the government will settle future cases that it makes different calculations about," like another lawsuit, brought as a class action on behalf of hundreds of detainees, that is pending before the same judge.

A spokesman for the Justice Department said officials would not comment on the agreement. But lawyers who represent both the Egyptian, Ehab Elmaghraby, who used to run a restaurant near Times Square, and the second plaintiff, a Pakistani who is still pursuing the lawsuit, described the outcome as significant.

"This is a substantial settlement and shows for the first time that the government can be held accountable for the abuses that have occurred in Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay and in prisons right here in the United States," said one of the lawyers, Alexander A. Reinert of Koob & Magoolaghan.

The lawsuit accuses Mr. Ashcroft and the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, of personally conspiring to violate the rights of Muslim immigrant detainees on the basis of their race, religion and national origin, and names a score of other defendants, including Bureau of Prison officials and guards at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.

A 2003 report by the Justice Department's inspector general found widespread abuse of the noncitizen detainees at the Brooklyn center after 9/11, and in recent months, 10 of the center's guards and supervisors have been disciplined.

Mr. Elmaghraby, who spent nearly a year in detention, and the Pakistani man, Javaid Iqbal, held for nine months, charged that while shackled they were kicked and punched until they bled. Their lawsuit said they were cursed as terrorists and subjected to multiple unnecessary body-cavity searches, including one in which correction officers inserted a flashlight into Mr. Elmaghraby's rectum, making him bleed.

In a telephone interview from his home in Alexandria, Egypt, Mr. Elmaghraby, 38, said he had reluctantly decided to settle because he is ill, in debt and about to have surgery for a thyroid ailment aggravated by his treatment in the detention center.

"I wish I come to New York, to stay in the court face to face with these people," he said in imperfect English, adding that he had always expected the courts to uphold his claim. "I lived 13 years in New York, I see a lot of big cases on TV. I think the judges is fair."

The government had argued that the lawsuits should be dismissed without testimony because the extraordinary circumstances of the terror attacks justified extraordinary measures to confine noncitizens who fell under suspicion, and because top officials need governmental immunity to combat future threats to national security without fear of being sued.

The federal judge, John Gleeson of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, disagreed, writing in his decision last September, "Our nation's unique and complex law enforcement and security challenges in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks do not warrant the elimination of remedies for the constitutional violations alleged here."

In all, 762 noncitizens were arrested in the weeks after 9/11, mostly on immigration violations, according to government records. Mr. Elmaghraby and Mr. Iqbal were among 184 identified as being "of high interest" to investigators and held in maximum-security conditions, in Brooklyn and elsewhere, until the F.B.I. cleared them of terrorist links. Virtually all were Muslims or from Arab countries.

That in itself is not evidence of discrimination, government lawyers wrote in the brief they filed on Friday with the Appellate Division, Second Department, because "the Al Qaeda terrorists who perpetrated the Sept. 11 attacks were Muslims from certain Arab countries" who "viewed themselves as conducting a religious war."

"There were no clear judicial precedents in this extraordinary context," the appeal brief said, calling the policy of holding people until they could be cleared "a bona fide response to a national catastrophe."

Unlike the detainees covered by the class-action lawsuit, who were held on immigration violations alone, Mr. Elmaghraby and Mr. Iqbal eventually pleaded guilty to minor federal criminal charges unrelated to terrorism: Mr. Elmaghraby to credit card fraud, Mr. Iqbal to having false papers and bogus checks. But they maintain that they did so only to escape the abuse. They were deported in 2003 after serving prison terms.

Mr. Iqbal was one of several detainees who returned to New York this year to give depositions in their lawsuits under conditions of extraordinary security, including the requirement that they be in constant custody of federal marshals and not call anybody. Mr. Elmaghraby did not come because of his ill health and because the settlement was close, said one of his lawyers, Haeyoung Yoon of the Urban Justice Center.

"His circumstances made it extremely difficult for him to continue," Ms. Yoon said. "But I also feel this is really the beginning of justice for what happened in New York and the United States after Sept. 11, the mass arrests, detention and basically disappearance of an entire community."

Mr. Elmaghraby, who had a weekend flea market stand at Aqueduct Raceway in Queens, was picked up on Sept. 30, 2001, in his apartment in Maspeth, Queens, when federal agents were investigating his landlord, apparently because years earlier the landlord, also a Muslim, had applied for pilot training. Mr. Elmaghraby says his wife, an American citizen, left him after being threatened with arrest by an F.B.I. agent when she arrived at his first court hearing.

Mr. Iqbal was arrested in his Long Island apartment on Nov. 2 by agents who were apparently following a tip about false identification cards. In his apartment they found a Time magazine showing the World Trade Center towers in flames and paperwork showing that he had been in Lower Manhattan on Sept. 11, picking up a work permit from immigration services.

The inspector general's report said that little effort was made to distinguish between legitimate terrorism suspects and people picked up by chance, and that clearances took months, not days, because they were a low priority. Among the abuses described in the report — many of them caught on prison videotape — were beatings, sexual humiliations and illegal recording of lawyer-client conversations.

After the report was released, Mr. Ashcroft said he made "no apologies" for finding every legal way to protect the public. Still, officials pledged to improve the system and punish abuses.

Traci L. Billingsley, a spokeswoman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, said that its own investigation began in April 2004, after federal officials declined to prosecute.

She would not identify the 10 employees disciplined, but said that two had been fired and two demoted, and that the others had received suspensions ranging from 2 to 30 days. She listed the offenses as "lack of candor, unprofessional conduct, misuse of supervisory authority, conduct unbecoming, inattention to duty, failure to exercise supervisory responsibilities, excessive use of force, and physical and/or verbal abuse."

Because of the secrecy surrounding the cases, however, the taint of suspicion has been almost impossible for former detainees to dispel, their lawyers said. In one of the court hearings leading up to the return of the former detainees for depositions, for example, the federal magistrate asked what made them different from anyone else suing the government, "other than their ethnicity."

Ernesto H. Molina Jr., a Justice Department lawyer representing Mr. Ashcroft, replied, "That they came under the umbrella of a terrorist investigation, your honor."

Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

Guantanamo: The U.S Gulag

Los Angeles Times

February 27, 2006

By Thomas Wilner

THE American prison camp at Guantanamo Bay is on the southeast corner of Cuba, a sliver of land the United States has occupied since 1903. Long ago, it was irrigated from lakes on the other side of the island, but Cuban President Fidel Castro cut off the water supply years ago.

So today, Guantanamo produces its own water from a 30-year-old desalination plant. The water has a distinct yellow tint. All Americans drink bottled water imported by the planeload. Until recently, prisoners drank the yellow water.

The prison overlooks the sea, but the ocean cannot be seen by prisoners. Guard towers and stadium lights loom along the perimeter. On my last visit, we were escorted by young, solemn military guards whose nameplates on their shirts were taped over so that prisoners could not identify them.

Very few outsiders are allowed to see the prisoners. The government has orchestrated some carefully controlled tours for the media and members of Congress, but has repeatedly refused to allow these visitors, representatives of the United Nations, human rights groups or nonmilitary doctors and psychiatrists to meet or speak with prisoners. So far, the only outsiders who have done so are representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross — who are prohibited by their own rules from disclosing what they find — and lawyers for the prisoners.

I am one of those lawyers. I represent six Kuwaiti prisoners, each of whom has now spent nearly four years at Guantanamo. It took me 2 1/2 years to gain access to my clients, but now I have visited the prison camp 11 times in the last 14 months. What I have witnessed is a cruel and eerie netherworld of concrete and barbed wire that has become a daily nightmare for the nearly 500 people swept up after 9/11 who have been imprisoned without charges or trial for more than four years. It is truly our American gulag.

On my most recent trip three weeks ago, after signing a log sheet and submitting our bags to a search, my colleagues and I were taken through two tall, steel-mesh gates into the interior of the prison camp.

We interviewed our clients in Camp Echo, one of several camps where prisoners are interrogated. We entered a room about 13 feet square and divided in half by a wall of thick steel mesh. On one side was a table where the prisoner would sit for our interviews, his feet shackled to a steel eyelet cemented to the floor. On the other side were a shower and a cell just like the ones in which prisoners are ordinarily confined. In their cells, prisoners sleep on a metal shelf against the wall, which is flanked by a toilet and sink. They are allowed a thin foam mattress and a gray cotton blanket.

The Pentagon’s files on the six Kuwaiti prisoners we represent reveal that none was captured on a battlefield or accused of engaging in hostilities against the US. The prisoners claim that they were taken into custody by Pakistani and Afghan warlords and turned over to the US for bounties ranging from $5,000 to $25,000 — a claim confirmed by American news reports. We have obtained copies of bounty leaflets distributed in Afghanistan and Pakistan by US forces promising rewards - “enough to feed your family for life” — for any “Arab terrorist” handed over.

The files include only the flimsiest accusations or hearsay that would never stand up in court. The file on one prisoner indicated that he had been seen talking to two suspected Al Qaeda members on the same day — at places thousands of miles apart. The primary “evidence” against another was that he was captured wearing a particular Casio watch, “which many terrorists wear.” Oddly, the same watch was being worn by the US military chaplain, a Muslim, at Guantanamo.

When I first met my clients, they had not seen or spoken with their families for more than three years, and they had been questioned hundreds of times. Several were suspicious of us; they told me that they had been interrogated by people who claimed to be their lawyers but who turned out not to be. So we had DVDs made, on which members of their families told them who we were and that we could be trusted. Several cried on seeing their families for the first time in years. One had become a father since he was detained and had never before seen his child. One noticed his father was not on the DVD, and we had to tell him that his father had died.

Most prisoners are kept apart, although some can communicate through the steel mesh or concrete walls that separate their cells. They exercise alone, some only at night. They had not seen sunlight for months - an especially cruel tactic in a tropical climate. One prisoner told me, “I have spent almost every moment of the last three years, and eaten every meal, here in this small cell which is my bathroom.” Other than the Holy Quran, prisoners had nothing to read. As a result of our protests, some have been given books.

Every prisoner I’ve interviewed claims to have been badly beaten and subjected to treatment that only could be called torture, by Americans, from the first day of US captivity in Pakistan and Afghanistan. They said they were hung by their wrists and beaten, hung by their ankles and beaten, stripped naked and paraded before female guards, and given electric shocks. At least three claimed to have been beaten again upon arrival in Guantanamo. One of my clients, Fayiz Al Kandari, now 27, said his ribs were broken during an interrogation in Pakistan. I felt the indentation in his ribs. “Beat me all you want, just give me a hearing,” he said he told his interrogators.

Another prisoner, Fawzi Al Odah, 25, is a teacher who left Kuwait City in 2001 to work in Afghan, then Pakistani, schools. After 9/11, he and four other Kuwaitis were invited to dinner by a Pakistani tribal leader and then sold by him into captivity, according to their accounts, later confirmed by Newsweek and ABC News.

On Aug. 8, 2005, Fawzi, in desperation, went on a hunger strike to assert his innocence and to protest against being imprisoned for four years without charges. He said he wanted to defend himself against any accusations, or die. He told me that he had heard US congressmen had returned from tours of Guantanamo saying that it was a Caribbean resort with great food. “If I eat, I condone these lies,” Fawzi said.

At the end of August, after Fawzi fainted in his cell, guards began to force-feed him through tubes pushed up his nose into his stomach. At first, the tubes were inserted for each feeding and then removed afterward. Fawzi told me that this was very painful. When he tried to pull out the tubes, he was strapped onto a stretcher with his head held by many guards, which was even more painful.

By mid-September, the force-feeding had been made more humane. Feeding tubes were left in and the formula pumped in. Still, when I saw Fawzi, a tube was protruding from his nose. Drops of blood dripped as we talked. He dabbed at it with a napkin.

We asked for Fawzi’s medical records so we could monitor his weight and his health. Denied. The only way we could learn how Fawzi was doing was to visit him each month, which we did. When we visited him in November, his weight had dropped from 140 pounds to 98 pounds. Specialists in enteral feeding advised us that the continued drop in his weight and other signs indicated that the feeding was being conducted incompetently. We asked that Fawzi be transferred to a hospital. Again, the government refused.

When we saw Fawzi in December, his weight had stabilized at about 110 pounds. The formulas had been changed, and he was being force-fed by medical personnel rather than by guards.

When I met Fawzi three weeks ago, the tubes were out of his nose. I told him I was thankful that after five months he had ended his hunger strike. He looked at me sadly and said, “They tortured us to make us stop.” At first, he said, they punished him by taking away his “comfort items” one by one: his blanket, his towel, his long pants, his shoes. They then put him in isolation. When this failed to persuade him to end the hunger strike, he said, an officer came to him on Jan. 9 to announce that any detainee who refused to eat would be forced onto “the chair.” The officer warned that recalcitrant prisoners would be strapped into a steel device that pulled their heads back, and that the tubes would be forced in and wrenched out for each feeding. “We’re going to break this hunger strike,” the officer told him.

After less than two weeks of this treatment, the strike was over. Of the more than 80 strikers at the end of December, Fawzi said only three or four were holding out. As a result of the strike, however, prisoners are now getting a meager ration of bottled water.

The government continues to deny that there is any injustice at Guantanamo. But I know the truth. —Dawn/Los Angeles Times Service

The writer is a partner at Shearman & Sterling, which has been representing Kuwaiti prisoners in Guantanamo since early 2002.

The Next Iraqi War? Sectarianism and Civil Conflict

International Crisis Group

Middle East Report N°52
27 February 2006
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY AND RECOMMENDATIONS

The bomb attack on a sacred Shiite shrine in Samarra on 22 February 2006 and subsequent reprisals against Sunni mosques and killings of Sunni Arabs is only the latest and bloodiest indication that Iraq is teetering on the threshold of wholesale disaster. Over the past year, social and political tensions evident since the removal of the Baathist regime have turned into deep rifts. Iraq’s mosaic of communities has begun to fragment along ethnic, confessional and tribal lines, bringing instability and violence to many areas, especially those with mixed populations. The most urgent of these incipient conflicts is a Sunni-Shiite schism that threatens to tear the country apart. Its most visible manifestation is a dirty war being fought between a small group of insurgents bent on fomenting sectarian strife by killing Shiites and certain government commando units carrying out reprisals against the Sunni Arab community in whose midst the insurgency continues to thrive. Iraqi political actors and the international community must act urgently to prevent a low-intensity conflict from escalating into an all-out civil war that could lead to Iraq’s disintegration and destabilise the entire region.

2005 will be remembered as the year Iraq’s latent sectarianism took wings, permeating the political discourse and precipitating incidents of appalling violence and sectarian “cleansing”. The elections that bracketed the year, in January and December, underscored the newly acquired prominence of religion, perhaps the most significant development since the regime’s ouster. With mosques turned into party headquarters and clerics outfitting themselves as politicians, Iraqis searching for leadership and stability in profoundly uncertain times essentially turned the elections into confessional exercises. Insurgents have exploited the post-war free-for-all; regrettably, their brutal efforts to jumpstart civil war have been met imprudently with ill-tempered acts of revenge.

In the face of growing sectarian violence and rhetoric, institutional restraints have begun to erode. The cautioning, conciliatory words of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the Shiites’ pre-eminent religious leader, increasingly are falling on deaf ears. The secular centre has largely vanished, sucked into the maelstrom of identity politics. U.S. influence, while still extremely significant, is decreasing as hints of eventual troop withdrawal get louder. And neighbouring states, anxious to protect their strategic interests, may forsake their longstanding commitment to Iraq’s territorial integrity if they conclude that its disintegration is inevitable, intervening directly in whatever rump states emerge from the smoking wreckage.

If Iraq falls apart, historians may seek to identify years from now what was the decisive moment. The ratification of the constitution in October 2005, a sectarian document that both marginalised and alienated the Sunni Arab community? The flawed January 2005 elections that handed victory to a Shiite-Kurdish alliance, which drafted the constitution and established a government that countered outrages against Shiites with indiscriminate attacks against Sunnis? Establishment of the Interim Governing Council in July 2003, a body that in its composition prized communal identities over national-political platforms? Or, even earlier, in the nature of the ousted regime and its consistent and brutal suppression of political stirrings in the Shiite and Kurdish communities that it saw as threatening its survival? Most likely it is a combination of all four, as this report argues.

Today, however, the more significant and pressing question is what still can be done to halt Iraq’s downward slide and avert civil war. Late in the day, the U.S. administration seems to have realised that a fully inclusive process – not a rushed one – is the sine qua non for stabilisation. This conversion, while overdue, is nonetheless extremely welcome. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad’s intensive efforts since late September 2005 to bring the disaffected Sunni Arab community back into the process have paid off, but only in part. He is now also on record as stating that the U.S. is “not going to invest the resources of the American people to build forces run by people who are sectarian”. Much remains to be done, however, to recalibrate the political process further and move the country on to a path of reconciliation and compromise.

First, the winners of the December 2005 elections, the main Shiite and Kurdish lists, must establish a government of genuine national unity in which Sunni Arab leaders are given far more than a token role. That government, in turn, should make every effort to restore a sense of national identity and address Iraqis’ top priorities: personal safety, jobs and reliable access to basic amenities such as electricity and fuel. It should also start disbanding the militias that have contributed to the country’s destabilisation. The U.S. has a critical role to play in pressuring its Iraqi war-time allies to accept such an outcome. States neighbouring Iraq as well as the European Union should push toward the same goal.

Secondly, substantive changes must be made to the constitution once the constitutional process is reopened one month after the government enters office. These should include a total revision of key articles concerning the nature of federalism and the distribution of proceeds from oil sales. As it stands, this constitution, rather than being the glue that binds the country together, has become both the prescription and blueprint for its dissolution. Again, the U.S. and its allies should exercise every effort to reach that goal.

Thirdly, donors should promote non-sectarian institution building by allocating funds to ministries and projects that embrace inclusiveness, transparency and technical competence and withholding funds from those that base themselves on cronyism and graft.

Fourthly, while the U.S. should explicitly state its intention to withdraw all its troops from Iraq, any drawdown should be gradual and take into account progress in standing up self-sustaining, non-sectarian Iraqi security forces as well as in promoting an inclusive political process. Although U.S. and allied troops are more part of the problem than they can ever be part of its solution, for now they are preventing – by their very presence and military muscle – ethnic and sectarian violence from spiralling out of control. Any assessment of the consequences, positive and negative, that can reasonably be anticipated from an early troop withdrawal must take into account the risk of an all-out civil war.

Finally – and regrettable though it is that this is necessary – the international community, including neighbouring states, should start planning for the contingency that Iraq will fall apart, so as to contain the inevitable fall-out on regional stability and security. Such an effort has been a taboo, but failure to anticipate such a possibility may lead to further disasters in the future.

RECOMMENDATIONS

To the Winners of the December 2005 Elections:

1. Strongly condemn sectarian-inspired attacks, such as the bombing of the al-Askariya shrine in Samarra but also reprisal attacks, and urge restraint.

2. Establish a government of national unity that enjoys popular credibility by:

(a) including members of the five largest electoral coalitions;

(b) dividing the key ministries of defence, interior, foreign affairs, finance, planning and oil fairly between these same lists, with either defence or interior being given to a respected and non-sectarian Sunni Arab leader, and the other to a similar leader of the United Iraqi Alliance;

(c) assigning senior government positions to persons with technical competence and personal integrity chosen from within the ministry; and

(d) adopting an agenda that prioritises respect for the rule of law, job creation and provision of basic services.

3. Revise the constitution’s most divisive elements by:

(a) establishing administrative federalism on the basis of provincial boundaries, outside the Kurdish region; and

(b) creating a formula for the fair, centrally-controlled, nationwide distribution of oil revenues from both current and future fields, and creating an independent agency to ensure fair distribution and prevent corruption.

4. Halt sectarian-based attacks and human rights abuses by security forces, by:

(a) beginning the process of disbanding militias, integrating them into the new security forces so as to ensure their even distribution throughout these forces’ hierarchies, at both the national and local levels;

(b) continuing to build the security forces (national army, police, border guards and special forces, as well as the intelligence agencies) on the basis of ethnic and religious inclusiveness, with members of Iraq’s various communities distributed across the hierarchies of those forces as well as within the governorates;

(c) ensuring that the ministers of defence and interior, as well as commanders and senior officers at both the national and local level are appointed on the basis of professional competence, non-sectarian outlook and personal integrity; and

(d) establishing an independent commission, accountable to the council of deputies, to oversee the militias’ dismantlement and the creation of fully integrated security forces.

5. In implementing de-Baathification, judge former Baath party members on the basis of crimes committed, not political beliefs or religious convictions, and establish an independent commission, accountable to the council of deputies, to oversee fair and non-partisan implementation. Both former Baathis and non-Baathis suspected of human rights crimes or corruption should be held accountable before independent courts.

To the Government of the United States:

6. Press its Iraqi allies to constitute a government of national unity and, in particular, seek to prevent the defence and interior ministries from being awarded to the same party or to strongly sectarian or otherwise polarising individuals.

7. Encourage meaningful amendments to the constitution to produce an inclusive document that protects the fundamental interests of all principal communities, as in recommendation 3 above.

8. Assist in building up security forces that are not only adequately trained and equipped, but also inclusive and non-sectarian.

9. Engage Iraq’s neighbours, including Iran, in helping solve the crisis by taking the measures described in recommendation 11 below, and actively promote the reconciliation conference agreed to in Cairo in November 2005, encouraging representatives of all Iraqi parties and communities, as well as of governments in the region, to attend.

To Donors:

10. Allocate funding to ministries and government projects, as well as civil society initiatives, strictly according to their compliance with principles of inclusiveness, transparency and competence.

To States Neighbouring Iraq:

11. Help stabilise Iraq by:

(a) expressing or reiterating their strategic interest in Iraq’s territorial integrity;

(b) encouraging the winners of the December 2005 elections to form a government of national unity and accede to demands to modify the constitution (as outlined in recommendation 3 above);

(c) strengthening efforts to prevent funds and insurgents from crossing their borders into Iraq; and

(d) promoting, and sending representatives to, the planned reconciliation conference in Baghdad.

Amman/Baghdad/Brussels, 27 February 2006

Report:

http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?l=1&id=3980

India Rising

Newsweek

Messy, raucous, democratic India is growing fast, and now may partner up with the world's richest democracy—America.

By Fareed Zakaria

March 6, 2006 issue - Every year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, there's a star. Not a person but a country. One country impresses the gathering of global leaders because of a particularly smart Finance minister or a compelling tale of reform or even a glamorous gala. This year there was no contest. In the decade that I've been going to Davos, no country has captured the imagination of the conference and dominated the conversation as India in 2006.

It was not a matter of chance. As you got off the plane in Zurich, there were large billboards extolling incredible India. Davos itself was plastered with signs. world's fastest growing free market democracy! proclaimed the town's buses. When you got to your room, you found an iPod Shuffle loaded with Bollywood songs, and a pashmina shawl, gifts from the Indian delegation. When you entered the meeting rooms, you were likely to hear an Indian voice, one of the dozens of CEOs of world-class Indian companies. And then there were the government officials, India's "Dream Team," all intelligent and articulate, and all selling their country.

More: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11571597/site/newsweek/

Amazing Journey

Salon.com

A Central American boy named Enrique traveled 12,000 miles across continents to find his mother. There are thousands of others like him.

By Sarah Karnasiewicz

Feb. 27, 2006 Early in "Enrique's Journey," author Sonia Nazario explains that she was drawn to the young man who became the subject of her book because he was so "average." Indeed, of the nearly 48,000 children who migrate alone to "el Norte" through Central America and Mexico each year, three-quarters are -- like Enrique -- in search of a single mother who has left them behind. According to the Department of Homeland Security, the median age of such child migrants is 15, and the majority of them are male; at 17, Enrique falls comfortably within the average. But statistics aside, it seems almost impossible to fathom a world in which Enrique's trek -- across four countries, through miles of treacherous train tracks and dozens of lonely nights -- could be considered anything less than extraordinary.

Though a condensed version of "Enrique's Journey" was published in 2003 as part of a remarkable Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles and photos for the Los Angeles Times, the seed for Nazario's book was planted almost a decade ago. In 1997, over coffee in her California kitchen, the journalist learned that Carmen, her Guatemalan housekeeper, had left four young children behind during her migration north a decade earlier. But what moved Nazario even more than her housekeeper's personal saga -- and eventually prompted her to embark on years of intensive reporting -- was the realization that Carmen's experience was unexceptional; with divorce spreading across Latin America and families disintegrating, the face of migration has undergone a dramatic change.

In the introduction to "Enrique's Journey" Nazario explains, "In Los Angeles ... 82 percent of live-in nannies and one in four housecleaners are mothers who have at least one child in their home country." Once a fraternity dominated by Mexican braceros, America's shadow community of illegal immigrants has been joined by an influx of women. And millions of single mothers in Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico, alone and unable to shelter and feed their children, find themselves facing an unimaginable choice: set out for the States alone, but with the hope of earning enough money to pull their children out of poverty -- or stay put, their family intact but doomed to destitution.

"Enrique's Journey" is an intimate, and ultimately inspiring, look at the complex circumstances that push women like Carmen and Enrique's mother, Lourdes, to leave -- and an unsparing confrontation of the consequences their families face as a result. Writing from the perspectives of the various characters in her book, Nazario weaves a narrative that, though tirelessly reported, reads more like a fable than a newspaper story. She describes Enrique's seventh trip north, as he rides the train out of the Mexican state of Chiapas after being repeatedly brutalized and arrested: He watches as "mountains draw closer. Plantain fields soften into cow pastures ... and monarch butterflies flutter alongside, overtaking his car." She recounts how Lourdes, her optimism buoyed by glittering images of el Norte glimpsed on telenovelas and in glossy magazines, swore to her family that within one year she would earn enough money either to return home or to send for her children to join her, only to learn that border economics can be cruel. Caring for a child in Beverly Hills, Lourdes asks herself, "Do my children cry like this? I'm giving this child food instead of feeding my own children." "To get the girl to eat," Nazario writes, "Lourdes pretends the spoon is an airplane. But each time the spoon lands in the girl's mouth, [she] is filled with sadness." Her jobs allow Lourdes to faithfully wire $50 home to Enrique each month, but after years of cleaning houses and caretaking, sleeping only four hours a night -- her family is still no closer to a reunion.

When Nazario first meets Enrique in May 2000, at a church shelter on the U.S. border in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, 12 years have passed since he last saw his mother. After years of shuttling through the homes of aunts, uncles and grandmothers, tangling himself up in drugs, and ditching school, Lourdes has come to symbolize everything he wants, everything he loves, and everything he has lost. "Enrique fears he will end up on the streets or dead," Nazario writes. "Only his mother can help him. She is his salvation. 'If you had known my mom, you would know she's a good person,' he says to his friend Jose. 'I love her.'"

Enrique will attempt the journey north seven times, traveling for a total of 122 days and more than 12,000 miles. Before he is by Lourdes' side again, he will be beaten by gangs, endure extreme exposure to the ice and sun, suffer repeated arrests at the hands of corrupt police and immigration officials, spend weeks begging for food and drink, and hang from the speeding freight trains that migrants call el Tren de la Muerte, or "the train of death." As it is for the thousands of other young Latin American men and women who migrate to the United States each year, the lure of his mother's love is so intoxicating that nothing short of the grave will deter him.

Nazario's descriptions of fetid boxcars, nefarious smugglers, and arrogant "migra" agents, make it clear that her work is like her subject's single-minded quest to find his mother: It is the result of both years of dedication and, more often than not, blind faith. To authentically replicate the conditions facing Enrique and others like him, she too must spend months living by her wits, in grave danger and in the sorts of unsanitary conditions that most of her middle-aged American peers live their whole lives trying to avoid. When Nazario meets Enrique in northern Mexico, he has been robbed of his only link to Lourdes: a scribbled note containing her phone number. To earn money to call back to Honduras and retrieve the number, Enrique must wash cars day and night for weeks. So, Nazario waits too. When he is finally ready for the last leg of his journey, across the border into the United States, journalist and subject part ways. They rejoin later in North Carolina, where Enrique lives with Lourdes, her boyfriend and young daughter. From there, knitting together weeks of intensive interviews with mother and son, Nazario flies to Honduras, to take up her own sort of surrogate journey, using Enrique's memories to retrace the migrant trail through Guatemala and Mexico.

In spite of Nazario's occasionally gonzo methods, "Enrique's Journey" strikes an evenhanded balance between advocacy and ethical discipline. The brutal poverty she witnesses clearly moves her. Yet, like her contemporaries Adrian Nicole LeBlanc and Alex Kotlowitz, Nazario is careful not to interfere in her subject's lives, choosing instead to let her stories speak for themselves. While not shying from the brutalities children like Enrique face, Nazario balances them with delicate descriptions of kindnesses offered by strangers. There is a field hand who rescues a bloodied and broken Enrique after he has been robbed by thugs. There are migrants who scribble the names of fellow travelers in the margins of their worn Bibles and kneel on the train top to offer them blessings. There are Oaxacan peasants who, though they are malnourished themselves, still gather to toss bundles of bread and fruit to travelers as they pass.

In "Enrique's Journey" Nazario has crafted a contemporary fairy tale, complete with fire-breathing freighters, tattooed villains and absent mothers. And it is those timeless human concerns -- of longing for home, of aching for family, of connections craved -- that elevate her story out of the thorny politics of migration legislation and immigration reform. To readers raised on Disney flicks, perhaps that sounds like a dismissal, but it's meant as nothing of the sort. Since the brothers Grimm, the most enduring fairy tales have been formed from human suffering, striving and sacrifice. It matters little that in "Enrique's Journey" the characters are Latino housekeepers and not Parisian princesses. Nazario's storytelling is itself is a magical act, one that illuminates the invisible -- like phantoms -- in front of our eyes.

-- By Sarah Karnasiewicz

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2006/02/27/nazario/print.html

Court Hears Balkans Genocide Case

BBC News
February 27, 2006

The first trial of a state charged with genocide has opened in The Hague, where Bosnia-Hercegovina will accuse Serbia and Montenegro of war crimes.

Bosnia says Belgrade was responsible for crimes of genocide on its territory during the early 1990s Bosnian war.

Belgrade denies its intention was to wipe out Muslims in eastern Bosnia.

The EU is also exerting pressure on Serbia, as foreign ministers threaten to freeze association talks unless it co-operates over war crimes suspects.

They have set a March deadline for the handover of fugitive suspect Ratko Mladic, accused of genocide and other crimes during the Bosnia war.

The ministers warned that negotiations with Serbia scheduled for April could be postponed if the former Bosnian Serb general was not surrendered to the UN war crimes tribunal.

Compensation

The genocide case against Serbia and Montenegro is being heard at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), also in The Hague.

Bosnian Muslims hope Serbia will be made to pay damages

On Monday, hundreds of survivors of the war held a vigil outside the court and read out the names of Bosnian Muslims killed by Serb forces.

The hearings at the ICJ or World Court, which mediates in disputes between states, are scheduled to run until 9 May, but a ruling is not expected until the end of the year.

The BBC's Geraldine Coughlan says if Bosnia wins the genocide case, it will seek compensation from Serbia, which could run into billions of dollars.

Phon van den Biesen, one of the lawyers acting for Bosnia, said: "They really destroyed important parts of each and every town which would be relevant for a comeback of the non-Serb population.

"So the destruction which has been brought about after the actual takeovers of cities and towns is enormous."

Historic challenge

Serbia will deny that the state - rather than a group of individuals - had the specific intent to wipe out the Muslim population of eastern Bosnia.

Bosnia's case will focus on the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, already established as genocide by the International War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

Proving the Serbian nation's responsibility for the most serious war crime of genocide is an historic challenge for the Bosnian legal team, says our correspondent.

The hearings have been delayed for over a decade, since Belgrade filed a series of counter-claims and disputed the court's authority.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/4753874.stm

Published: 2006/02/27 12:19:51 GMT

© BBC MMVI

The Freshman

The New York Times Magazine

February 26, 2006

By CHIP BROWN

Sometimes walking up College Street, when the bells were ringing in Harkness Tower and the light on the gabled dorms and leafy quads made the whole campus seem part of some Platonic dream, he could almost forget that there were people back home who would be happy to kill him.

His formal introduction to the terrain of the Western mind came in July at the start of the summer term; most of the class of '09 would not arrive until the fall term. He was glad for the chance to get his bearings. The direction of Mecca he knew from the compass on his watch. For local attractions he had a map of the campus; he got a cellphone, a Yale e-mail account. His student ID card admitted him to lots of campus dining halls, where at first it seemed he was free to choose anything he liked as long as it was pasta. He took to drinking milk with the pasta, but milk didn't agree with him any more than pasta did, and he dropped 15 pounds over the summer. It wasn't until the fall that one of his new friends, Fahad, a Pakistani, tipped him off to the kosher meat at Slifka, the Jewish dining hall.

His room was more than he could afford, but he had his hands full with his classes: ENGL 114, Reading and Writing Argument, with Prof. Deborah Tenney; and PLSC 114, Introduction to Political Philosophy, with Prof. Peter Stillman. He got a pair of B's, and B+'s on papers. ("B positives" he thought they were called.) Because his official education ended in the fourth grade, the marks eased some of his anxiety about passing muster at Yale. He spoke English well, but it was still his fourth language after Pashto, Urdu and Persian and a headache to write even for natives. What he had to learn initially was how to learn. You didn't have to read everything the professors assigned, but you had to pay close attention to the closing minutes of class, when they recapped material likely to appear on the exam. People thought he was kidding when he asked what the difference was between a test and quiz. Dude, you're a student at Yale, and you don't know the difference between a test and a quiz?

During the summer, he made some friends, including a nice guy from Texas, but it was not until the fall that he fell in with a bunch of foreign-born undergraduates and expats with whom he could speak Pashto and Urdu. They took him to the Harvard-Yale game; he clapped, he cheered, he had a great time, albeit without any idea what was going on. His friends taught him how to play cricket. They introduced him to weight lifting at the Payne Whitney gym. When he turned 27 in November, they gave a party, only the second time in his life anyone had ever celebrated his birthday. Friendships helped assuage the ache he felt for his wife, Asyah, and their daughter, Suraya, who was 5, and their 4-year-old son, Suleman, who was born the day after 9/11. They were all living in the Pakistan border city of Quetta with his parents. His parents fled Afghanistan after the 1979 Soviet invasion and then became refugees again when the United States began bombing in October 2001. He telephoned his family at least once a week, but the pictures he sent of himself at college seemed to have gotten lost, as did the toys he had mailed, a Thomas the Tank Engine for Suleman, a fluffy stuffed dog for Suraya. Suleman couldn't understand why his father, with a single-entry United States visa, couldn't come home for a visit during the semester break.

More: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/26/magazine/26taliban.html

What Does Islam Look Like?

The New York Times

February 26, 2006

By HOLLAND COTTER

THE West and Islam are on a cultural collision course. That's the best-selling fiction that many people — politicians, religious leaders and the media on both sides of the equation — are working overtime to turn into fact. Actually, it's a very old story, and art is routinely pulled into it.

Always, we hear Islamic art talked about in the way something called the "Islamic world" is talked about, as if it were unitary, unchanging, inscrutable and over there. We hear that Islamic art is, by definition, religious art, and we hear about its hostile relationship to the human image.

We got an earful of this with the furor over Danish cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad. The fact is, images of the Prophet abound in Islamic art and culture; the Metropolitan Museum has several examples in its Islamic collection. But unlike the cartoons, such images are not caricatures.

The cartoon issue isn't primarily an art story, any more than the destruction of the mosque at Ayodhya in India was an architecture story, or the censure of "The Satanic Verses" was a story about contemporary fiction. It's a political story, an ancient and universal one, about how an image, and almost any image will do, once it is fused to cultural identity — Islam, in this case — can end up being used as a weapon.

As it happens, at the same time that intense partisan heat is being generated around the topic of popular images and Islam, we are getting a number of exhibitions of contemporary work to which the name "Islamic" is attached. Some shows approach the Islamic connection hesitantly; others embrace it. Together they tell us very different things about the reception of a cultural category called "Islam" in the West.

By far the most prominent exhibition of contemporary art on the subject yet seen in New York opens today at the Museum of Modern Art. You would never guess that subject, though, from its title — "Without Boundary: Seventeen Ways of Looking" — in which the word Islam does not appear.

All but three of the featured artists were born in some part of the so-called Islamic world: Algeria, Egypt, India, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Palestine and Turkey. But they all live and work in the West and have made their careers in the mainstream international art scene, which means in Europe and the United States. Despite their Western positioning, they are routinely tagged as Islamic artists by an art world addicted to marketable categories. The question posed by the show's curator, Fereshteh Daftari, an assistant curator at the Modern who was herself born in Iran, is "How 'Islamic' is their art?"

Most of these artists are tagged Islamic because of their backgrounds. Yet much of their work is far less about Islam itself, as a religion or culture, than about their relationship to Islam — in some cases it is close and positive; in other cases, distant and critical. But in most instances, it is ambivalent — the opposite of how Islam is treated these days in the larger world.

In these works, images and forms associated with Islam, far from being sacrosanct, are invitations to individualistic and unorthodox experimentation, to examine and play with Islamic identity without being confined to it.

Several artists, for example, tap into miniature painting, a primarily secular tradition. Raqib Shaw, born in 1974 in Calcutta, raised in Kashmir, and educated in London, produced astonishingly ornate, cloisonné-style paintings that borrow from Persian miniatures, but also from Hieronymus Bosch, Jackson Pollock and Kashmiri shawl patterns, to create a realm of subaqueous eroticism.

Another example are the immaculately executed paintings of Shahzia Sikander, who was born in 1969 to a Muslim family in Pakistan. They combine courtly Mughal and Rajput themes — portraits of rulers and dancers — with images of fighter jets, oil rigs, mosque domes, predatory animals and paradise gardens, as if telescoping related, destructive histories.

Ms. Sikander studied miniature painting in art school in Lahore, and radically transformed the medium after moving to the United States, adding personal and political content. Her new work met with disapproval in Pakistan, where she was accused of, among other things, pandering to Western taste. Yet a number of younger Pakistani artists have recently followed her lead.

Six of them are showing at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Conn., (through March 12) as a collective called Karkhana, which the artists formed as an activist gesture in response to the political and religious aggression worldwide after Sept. 11. Only one lives in Lahore now. The others are in Chicago, New York and Melbourne, Australia.

They collaborate by mail, each artist adding new elements to paintings when they receive them. The images include Mughal dress patterns; New York subway maps; amorous couples; Western politicians as clowns and Islamic clerics as satyrs; outtakes from colonial photographs; images of nature (birds, flowers, trees) and of violence (daggers, bullets, guns), interspersed with calligraphy and scribbles.

Calligraphy is the sovereign, definitively Islamic art form, one with inherent religious connotations as the medium through which the Koran is transcribed in Arabic. It is also the one Islamic art that shares nothing with Western art, though certain Western-based artists, including some at the Modern, make it their own.

Shirazeh Houshiary, born in Iran, based in London, paints single words — she doesn't tell us what words — over and over until they dissolve into an unreadable glow. Is her art calligraphy or Western-style abstraction? Both. Rachid Koraichi, raised in a Sufi family in Algeria and now living in Paris, invents "calligraphic" texts with Arabic characters, Chinese-style ideograms and talismanic signs, and embroiders them in gold on silk banners to create banners for a new, universal language.

Shirin Neshat, born in Iran, turns the written word — as distinct from calligraphy, with its very particular skills — into a quasi-revolutionary instrument in a series of 1996 studio photographs of young women who are dressed in traditional black veils but carry guns and have passages from erotic poetry and paeans to religious martyrdom written in Persian on their faces and hands. The artist seems to be symbolically placing political power in the hands of the kinds of veiled women who are automatically assumed by many Westerners to be oppressed victims of Islamic religious law, but who don't necessarily see themselves that way at all.

A pair of photographs by Jananne Al-Ani, who was born in Kirkuk, Iraq, of an Iraqi father and Irish mother, does the same thing in another way. The pictures are of the artist, her mother, her two sisters sitting side by side in progressive degrees of veiling. The veiling decreases from full to none if you read the pictures in the left-to-right direction of written English, and increases from none to complete if you read in the right-to-left direction of written Arabic.

It is possible to read the work as critical of orthodox Islamic custom. But Ms. Al-Ani's historical reference is to European colonial photographs of "exotic" Muslim women, which she turns into a visual essay on the artificiality of Western and Islamic identities.

The artificiality of a fixed identity is the exhibition's critical argument. And in the context of the present, violent, real-world standoff between two artificial constructions known as the West and the Islamic world, it certainly makes sense. Yet other exhibitions in the past year have successfully approached the subject of Islam in art more organically. They struck a better balance between the personalized approach of the work at the Modern and the images of communal "Muslim fury" spilling from the media.


"Nazar: Photographs from the Arab World" at the Aperture Foundation in Chelsea last year was a truncated version of a larger Dutch survey that combined images of the Islamic world — here called the Arab world — by photographers from that area and from outside it. Only the "native" photographers were in the New York edition, and then only some of them, but the variety of styles and themes was tremendous.

Collectively, they created a picture of a multifaceted, multicultural Islamic world that was intensely complex without being arcane. It is secular and religious (Christian and Jewish as well as Islamic); politically fraught, but also everyday-ordinary. People get up, go to work, have lunch, come home, turn on the evening news and see insanity happening out there.

Sometimes, these days, that insanity is happening right down the block. And if the Aperture show felt unrealistically pacific to viewers whose reality is shaped by CNN, "Edge of Desire: Recent Art in India" at the Asia Society and the Queens Museum of Art last spring surely did not. Much of the art in that show addressed the terrible post-Ayodhya Hindu and Muslim violence of the last decade.

But rather than laying the cause of violence at the door of ethnicity, it pointed to upper-level political forces, including those in the media, which created a Hinduism and an Islam that could be set at war.

Further expanding the "Islam world" picture were a handful of New York gallery shows. Apex Art in TriBeCa opened one window with a show of five young artists, laconically titled "Too Much Pollution to Demonstrate: Soft Guerrillas in Tehran's Contemporary Art Scene." Kashya Hildebrand in Chelsea opened another with a survey of popular culture in Iran that made it completely unrecognizable as the land of burqas and mullahs of Western lore.

In a different style, Pomegranate Gallery, in SoHo, recently showed five Baghdad-based artists with work produced during, or right after, the United States invaded the city in 2003. Qasim Sabti was represented by collages he made from books from the library of the Academy of Fine Arts that he found scattered in the street.

After rubbing out the titles on the covers, he arranged the ruined volumes face down in patchwork patterns. From a distance the results look like exercises in modernist geometric abstraction. Up close, under frayed edges and through tears in bindings, you see printed words and phrases in different languages: Arabic, German, French, English. They are evidence of the cosmopolitan Islamic world that political powers, intent on creating a myth of unbridgeable divides, want to bury.

It is a vision that is both objective and embracing, materialist and devotional, made by an artist who cannot be defined narrowly as Islamic but also cannot simply be called contemporary. The two identities are intertwined. The collage is made of matter that belongs to the West and Islam equally: books, words, knowledge, poetry. It is yet another in a world of images ranged like missiles. But this is an image of vulnerability, of labels erased.

So, is there an "Islamic" to be found in the picture that all these exhibitions together create? If there is, it is capacious, multifold, fantastically detailed and, of course, still unfinished; like Western art, it's a project in progress. The political fictions that have commandeered center stage represent only a part of the picture, though it is easy — and dangerous — to take them, or their Western counterparts, for the whole. If art does nothing else, it challenges us not to look at the world too narrowly. By its very breadth it reassures us that no image is the image. That culture is, always, about change. That sometimes collision courses can turn into open highways.


Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

Exhibition of Contemporary Palestinian Art To Open in New York City on March 14, 2006

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article4506.shtml

Suicide Bomb Film Is Set to Shake Oscars

Guardian

Pressure is rising for Hollywood to disqualify a controversial movie about Palestinian jihadists

Emma Forrest in Los Angeles
Sunday February 26, 2006
The Observer

The preview posters for Paradise Now declare, 'From the most unexpected place, a bold new call for peace'. The trailer suggested the same thing: a Palestinian suicide bomber deciding not to go through with his mission.

But by the time the film was nominated for this year's Best Foreign Feature at the Oscars, certain audiences started to feel it was not as balanced as it had appeared in the trailer: the bomber's decision in the film to choose peace is actually short-lived. He goes through with the attack and, as the film's hero, his act is unarguably portrayed as heroic. It is set to give the 78th Academy Awards one of their most controversial years since the Seventies.

At the Laemmle Fairfax cinema in Los Angeles, Sarah Rosen, a self-described left-leaning Jew, exited Friday's 5pm screening shaking her head. 'I appreciated the unique touches, like a suicide bomber being put off his final video by the sight of a cameraman eating a sandwich. But it bothers me that Israel being the evil aggressor is taken as given.'

It is the subject of how to resist Israel - jihadists Said and Khaled say violence is the only way, while Suha, the daughter of a martyr, argues for peaceful protest - that allows for the grey area. In the end violence wins for numerous reasons - most explained by the bomber's back story. But the Hollywood looks of Said, played by Kasi Nashef, who is matinée idol handsome, are also causing discomfort. There is, for many, an uncomfortable implication that his less attractive friend, Khaled, played by Ali Suliman, hasn't the courage to bomb buses because he isn't a leading man. The charismatic directing and acting combine to create a kind of sexy jihad that has US Jewish groups calling for its disqualification.

The tensions are rising with a week to go before the big night, which is on track to be one of the most successful and most watched ceremonies ever. The campaign against Paradise Now is gathering pace. An internet campaign against the film has quickly gathered steam. It started with an open letter from Yossi Zur, whose 16-year-old son had been killed by a suicide bomber, asking that the Academy disqualify Paradise Now

'They have been given a seal of approval to hide behind,' he said. 'Now they can see that the world sees suicide bombing as legitimate.' The petition he inspired has received more than 25,000 signatures. The nomination probably won't be rescinded, but with 70 being the median academy voter age, and Judaism the predominant religion, it is something of a surprise, even to insiders, that the film has been nominated at all, let alone that it is a strong prospect to win.

Although the director, Hany Abu-Assad, and the female lead, Lubna Azabal, both live in Europe, the film is credited to 'Palestine', a country that does not technically exist. No foreign film entry has, in academy history, been attributed to such a place. It was filmed in Nablus, a West Bank town controlled by the Palestinian Authority. 'There is a likelihood,' said the show's producer, Gil Cates, 'that come Oscar night it will be attributed to "Palestinian territories".'

'The film is intended to open a discussion, hopefully a meaningful discussion,' says Abu-Assad. 'I hope that the film will succeed in stimulating thought.' Certainly the message boards on popular movie websites are buzzing.

Surprisingly, after Paradise Now won a Golden Globe in January, Abu-Assad took to the stage to generous applause, with no reticence or even booing. That can perhaps be attributed to the fact that the Golden Globes comprises non-US press. Come Oscar night, Abu-Assad may find a Hollywood audience less enthusiastic.

Or perhaps Hollywood's perceived allegiance to Israel has changed. There are five nominations for Munich, Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner's deeply critical take on the hunt by Israelis for the Munich Olympic killers.

Either way, the Academy must feel lucky to have as host this year the sharp-witted Jon Stewart, Comedy Central's 'fake news' anchor beloved for calling it as he sees it across the political board. He and his writers, along with Abu-Assad, could watch, as research, the tape of the 1978 Oscars when Vanessa Redgrave, a supporter of the PLO, was awarded Best Actress for Julia. She thanked Jane Fonda and condemned 'Zionist thugs'.

Giving a writing award, dramatist Paddy Chayefsky walked out on stage and said: 'There's a little matter I'd like to tidy up, at least if I expect to live with myself tomorrow morning. I'd like to suggest that winning an Academy Award is not a pivotal moment in history, does not require a proclamation and that a simple "thank you" would have sufficed.'


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

The Spy Who Bills Us

MotherJones.com

Your telephone company is most likely cooperating with federal wiretapping programs. And guess what? It's illegal.

Patrick Radden Keefe
February 24 , 2006

Article created by the The Century Foundation.

When your phone bill arrives this month, you might want to take a moment to think about how much you trust your telephone company. While the National Security Agency has gotten a lot of press since it was revealed in December that its analysts engaged in the warrantless surveillance of US citizens, the eavesdropping agency would not have been able to conduct the operation without the intimate—and likely illegal—cooperation of private telecommunications providers.

After the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the NSA adopted a bold new approach. Seeking more unfettered access to the vast communications channels that run through the country, the agency approached executives at major telecommunications companies and requested that they provide the NSA with secret backdoors into the hubs and switches through which our telephone calls and e-mails are routed. Whereas the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires spies to obtain individual warrants for each target in an investigation, the phone companies provided unfiltered access to the full current of communications—not just Al Qaeda's calls, but everyone else's as well.

One problem with this approach is that it's like drinking from a fire hose. The NSA intercepts about 650 million communications worldwide every day, and, in something of a paradox, the better the agency is at hoovering in phone calls and e-mails, the worse it is at isolating critical and timely information from the white noise. According to recent reports, few of the tips the agency generated from its wiretapping program resulted in the identification of actual terrorists or plots.

Another problem is that trolling indiscriminately through the communications stream is illegal. The mechanism for eavesdropping established by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is simple: Target first, eavesdrop second. If there are grounds to suspect that a person is a terrorist or agent of a foreign power, a warrant is granted to spy on that person. With this new program, the agency has inverted the traditional steps: Eavesdrop first, then identify targets within the stream of intercepted communications.

Thus far, administration officials have successfully resisted efforts by Congress to address the probable inefficiency and definite illegality of this procedure, but in outsourcing the logistics of the operation to private telecommunications companies, they may have made a crucial error. Employees of the president might argue that ''executive privilege" frees them from responding to congressional inquiries about sensitive national security operations, but the CEOs of the telecom companies have no such easy out. Earlier this month, USA Today reported that AT&T, MCI, and Sprint are three of the companies that secretly cooperate with the NSA. Democratic Senators Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Russell Feingold of Wisconsin have written to the companies, asking about their involvement in the program, and if the Bush administration continues to resist congressional inquiries, the senators could subpoena executives of the companies and oblige them to explain their involvement.

Times of national crisis grant a certain license to the executive branch, and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has argued, in effect, that as long as officials are endeavoring to keep the country safe, they need not answer questions about the particular means they employ to do so. Private companies have no such license, and AT&T, MCI, and Sprint should not be able to hide from the senators or from their own customers. If it is determined—as it probably will be—that the wiretapping program was illegal, then the telecom companies are guilty of violating federal law. In the meantime, it's clear that they have violated their own customer privacy policies. You might want to take another look at yours.

Patrick Radden Keefe is a program officer and fellow at The Century Foundation. He is the author of Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping.


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This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.

© 2006 The Foundation for National Progress