zondag 13 januari 2013

'Deskundigen' 81


Soldiers Wheel a Prisoner to Interrogation in Camp X-Ray
GEERT MAK HOOPT DAT OBAMA WINT
'Het is beter voor Nederland en de internationale gemeenschap dat Obama de verkiezingen wint.' Dat stelt Geert Mak, hij schreef het boek 'Reizen zonder John' over zijn reis door de VS.

Nu de werkelijkheid zoals beschreven door kritische Amerikanen:

Presidential war making: Are there any limits to the president’s war powers in the so-called ‘war on terror’? Contrary to expectations, Obama has broadened the Bush administration’s view that the congressional resolution authorizing the pursuit of Al Qaeda after 9/11 gives the president the right to attack any suspect group in any country as long as there are terrorists—in other words, forever. That prerogative is said to include the power to kill anyone (including US citizens) that the president decides poses a terrorist threat to the United States.

Op zijn beurt schrijft de voormalige New York Times-correspondent en bestseller auteur Chris Hedges:

Over the past year I and other plaintiffs including Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsberg have pressed a lawsuit in the federal courts to nullify Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). This egregious section, which permits the government to use the military to detain U.S. citizens, strip them of due process and hold them indefinitely in military detention centers, could have been easily fixed by Congress. The Senate and House had the opportunity this month to include in the 2013 version of the NDAA an unequivocal statement that all U.S. citizens would be exempt from 1021(b)(2), leaving the section to apply only to foreigners. But restoring due process for citizens was something the Republicans and the Democrats, along with the White House, refused to do. The fate of some of our most basic and important rights—ones enshrined in the Bill of Rights as well as the Fourth and Fifth amendments of the Constitution—will be decided in the next few months in the courts. If the courts fail us, a gulag state will be cemented into place.

Tegelijkertijd meldt Amnesty International over de Obama-regering:

Guantánamo: In his second term Obama must correct human rights failure

President Barack Obama must revisit the promise he made in 2009 to close the Guantánamo detention facility and this time commit the USA to releasing the detainees or bringing them to fair trial, Amnesty International said ahead of the 11th anniversary of the first detainee transfers to the US naval base in Cuba and just days before his re-inauguration as president…
 
‘The USA’s claim that it is a champion of human rights cannot survive the Guantánamo detentions, the military commission trials, or the absence of accountability and remedy for past abuses by US personnel, including the crimes under international law of torture and enforced disappearance,’ said Rob Freer, USA researcher at Amnesty International.
 
After first taking office in January 2009, President Obama pledged to resolve the Guantánamo detentions and close the facility within a year.
 
He also ordered an end to the Central Intelligence Agency’s use of ‘enhanced’ interrogation techniques and long-term ‘black sites’.
 
But President Obama adopted the USA’s unilateral and flawed ‘global war’ paradigm and accepted indefinite detentions under this framework
 
Then, in 2010, his administration announced that it had decided that four dozen of the Guantánamo detainees could neither be prosecuted nor released, but should remain in indefinite military detention without charge or criminal trial. The administration also imposed a moratorium on repatriation of Yemeni detainees and said that 30 such detainees would be held in ‘conditional’ detention based on ‘current security conditions in Yemen’. This moratorium is still in place.
 
The Obama administration has blamed its failure to close the Guantánamo   detention facility on Congress, which has repeatedly blocked the USA from meeting its human rights obligations in this context. On 2 January 2013, President Obama nevertheless signed the National Defense Authorization Act, while criticizing provisions in the Act which once again placed obstacles in the way of resolving Guantánamo detainee cases.

Details of where such detainees were held in CIA custody and how they were treated continues to be classified at the highest levels of secrecy.
 
Last month the military judge overseeing the ‘9/11’ trial signed a protective order to prevent disclosure of such details during proceedings, purportedly on national security grounds. Information concerning gross violations of human rights or serious violations of international humanitarian law should never be kept secret on national security grounds.  
 
Further pre-trial proceedings in all six cases are scheduled to take place at Guantánamo later this month.

For further information, see:
USA: Truth, justice and the American way? http://bit.ly/UCIoXG

USA: Guantánamo: A decade of damage to human rights http://bit.ly/vAEA35  

Guantánamo: 10 years of human wrongs http://bit.ly/T96OGC



De onafhankelijke Amerikaanse website AlterNet concludeert:

President Obama now has power that Bush never had. Foremost is he can (and has) order the killing of U.S. citizens abroad who are deemed terrorists. Like Bush, he has asked the Justice Department to draft secret memos authorizing his actions without going before a federal court or disclosing them. Obama has continued indefinite detentions at Gitmo, but also brought the policy ashore by signing the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, which authorizes the military to arrest and indefinitely detain anyone suspected of assisting terrorists, even citizens.

How Obama Became a Civil Libertarian's Nightmare
Obama has expanded and fortified many of the Bush administration's worst policies.

When Barack Obama took office, he was the civil liberties communities’ great hope. Obama, a former constitutional law professor, pledged to shutter the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and run a transparent and open government. But he has become a civil libertarian’s nightmare: a supposedly liberal president who instead has expanded and fortified many of the Bush administration’s worst policies, lending bipartisan support for a more intrusive and authoritarian federal government.
Torture and the War on Terror 
Toch blijft de mainstream in de polder vasthouden aan het beeld van de VS als ‘ordebewaker.’ De grote schrijver Heinrich Heine schijnt ooit eens het volgendende te hebben opgemerkt: Als het einde van de wereld gekomen is, ga ik naar Nederland, want daar gebeurt alles 50 jaar later.’ Maar dat was nog voordat de atoombom was uitgevonden. Omdat ook President Obama  crimes under international law of torture and enforced disappearance,’ sanctioneert en zelfs moord is sprake van regressie. Todorov heeft gelijk wanneer hij stelt dat 

Subjugating a country after bombarding it, killing thousands, leaving tens of thousands homeless, practicing arbitrary imprisonment, brutality and torture, are simply ways of exporting ‘Western values’ that compromise them permanently.

Dit geweld is niet alleen immoreel maar ook contraproductief.  Todorov:

Let me remind the reader in a few words of the kind of treatments inflicted on prisoners that ‘do not amount to torture,’ as reported in the international press. In prisons scattered throughout countries outside the US, the detainees have been regularly raped, hung from hooks, immersed in water, burned, attached to electrodes, deprived of food, water or medicine, attacked by dogs, and beaten until their bones are broken. On military bases or on US territory, they have been subjected to sensory deprivation and to other violent sensory treatments – forced to wear headphones so they cannot hear, hoods so they cannot see, surgical masks to keep them from smelling and thick gloves that interfere with the sense of touch. They have been subjected to nonstop ‘white noise’ or to the irregular alternation of deafening noise and total silence; prevented from sleeping, either by the use of bright lights or by being subjected to interrogations that can last 20 hours on end, 48 days in a row; and taken from extreme cold to extreme heat and vice versa. None of these methods cause ‘the impairment of bodily function’ but they are known to cause the rapid destruction of personal identity.

'Het is beter voor Nederland en de internationale gemeenschap dat Obama de verkiezingen wint.'

In tegenstelling tot Mak, schrijft Tzvetan Todorov in Torture and the War on Terror op onze eigen Europese verantwoordelijkheid door erop te wijzen dat

the leaders of the European Union cannot  consider that their own responsibility is not implicated in the torture that is more or less overtly acknowleged by the US government. The secret services of their countries have actively collaborated with their American counterparts, delivering information and contacts that lead to arrests and hence eventually to torture. Such practices, even though they have been proven, have not elicited the slightest official condemnation from the French, British or Spanish governments, and the fact is that silence implies consent… And governments are not the only ones that have responsibility in this matter. Insofar as you, I, and other citizens of the countries do not speak up against torture, we become accomplices to its continued use.

En dat geldt zeker voor ‘Amerika-deskundigen’ die de VS kwalificieren als ‘ordebewaker en politieagent’ van de international ‘orde,’ maar niet onderzoeken hoe het mogelijk is dat in een democratie een totalitair instrument als martelen weer gelegaliseerd is. Dit is des te opmerkelijker omdat we hier niet te maken hebben met een futiliteit maar met een fundamentele zaak, want

If the state itself becomes the torturer, how can we believe in the civil order that it claims to bring or to sanction? Legal torture extends the scope of the destructive action that it exerts. Instead of stopping with the torturer and the victim, it spreads to all members of society, since they know that it is being practiced in their name and yet they avert their eyes and do nothing to put an end to it.

De mainstream opiniemakers in Nederland trekken zich daar niets van aan, door die terreur niet te onderzoeken en tot een issue te maken, terwijl

these same democracies can adopt totalitarian attitudes without changing their overall structure. This cancer doest not eat away at a single individual; its metastases are found in people who thought they had eradicated it in others and consider themselves immune.


Uiteindelijk komt de barbarij van binnenuit en luidt doorgaans de ineenstorting in van een beschaving. Feit is dat ‘Torture leaves an indelible mark – not only on the victim but also on the torturer.’ Aangezien wraak het enige echte motief is van folter verliest een cultuur zijn beschaving en is het weer oog om oog, het aloude lex talionis. Todorov:

When we terrorize terrorists, we indicate our willingness to become their image in the mirror and to be even more determined as terrorists than they have been.
It is in this need to punish the agents of evil that accounts for the persistence of torture throughout history. This is the real reason for the torture acknowledged by the US government and the broader reason for the support mustered among its citizens to engage in the Iraq War and to embark on a generalized ‘war on terrorism.’

Noam Chomsky wijst erop dat de schendingen van fundamentele mensenrechten onder Obama gewoon doorgaan:

Obama has sharply increased the global assassination campaign. While it was initiated by Bush, it has expanded under Obama and it has included American citizens, again with bipartisan support and very little criticism other than some minor criticism because it was an American. But then again, why should you have the right to assassinate anybody? For example, suppose Iran was assassinating members of Congress who were calling for an attack on Iran. Would we think that’s fine? That would be much more justified, but of course we’d see that as an act of war. The real question is, why assassinate anyone? The government has made it very clear that the assassinations are personally approved by Obama and the criteria for assassination are very weak. If a group of men are seen somewhere by a drone who are, say, loading something into a truck, and there is some suspicion that maybe they are militants, then it’s fine to kill them and they are regarded as guilty unless, subsequently, they are shown to be innocent. That’s the wording that the United States used and it is such a gross violation of fundamental human rights that you can hardly talk about it.


The human toll of the U.S. drone campaign
The question of due process actually did arise, since the US does have a constitution and it says that no person shall be deprived of their rights without due process of law – again, this goes back to 13th Century England – so the question arose, ‘What about due process?’ The Obama Justice Department’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, explained that there was due process in these cases because they are discussed first at the Executive Branch. That’s not even a bad joke! The British kings from the 13th Century would have applauded. ‘Sure, if we talk about it, that’s due process.’ And that, again, passed without controversy.
Chomsky bekritiseert tevens de standrechtelijk liquidatie van Osama bin Laden:
In fact, we might ask the same question about the murder of Osama Bin Laden. Notice I use the term ‘murder’. When heavily armed elite troops capture a suspect, unarmed and defenseless, accompanied by his wives, and then shoot him, kill him, and dump his body into the ocean without an autopsy, that’s shear assassination. Also notice that I said ‘suspect’. The reason is because of another principle of law, that also goes back to the 13th Century – that a man is presumed innocent until proven guilty. Before that, he’s a suspect. In the case of Osama Bin Laden, the United States had never formally charged him with 9/11 and part of the reason was that they didn’t know that he was responsible. In fact, eight months after 9/11 and after the most intensive inquiry in history, the FBI explained that it suspected that the 9/11 plot was hatched in Afghanistan, (didn’t mention Bin Laden) and was implemented in the United Arab Emirates, Germany, and of course the United States. That’s eight months after the attack and there’s nothing substantive that they’ve learned since then that does more than increase the suspicion. My own assumption is that the suspicion is almost certainly correct, but there’s a big difference between having a very confident belief and showing someone to be guilty. And even if he’s guilty, he was supposed to be apprehended and brought before a court. That’s British and American law going back eight centuries. He’s not supposed to be murdered and have his body dumped without an autopsy, but support for this is very nearly universal. Actually, I wrote one of the few critical articles on it and my article was bitterly condemned by commentators across the spectrum, including the Left, because the assassination was so obviously just, since we suspected him of committing a crime against us. And that tells you something about the significant, I would say, ‘moral degeneration’ running throughout the whole intellectual class. And yes, Obama has continued this and in some respects extended it, but it hardly comes as a surprise. The rot is much deeper than that.
 En de consequenties van die ‘moral degeneration’ zijn vergaand. Zodra namelijk de intelligentsia is afgekocht en de bevolking schendingen van fundamentele rechtsregels als gewoon gaat beschouwen, begint het bouwwerk te wankelen. Een systeem zonder morele rechtvaardiging is ten dode opgeschreven. Geert Mak mag dan wel beweren dat ‘als je invloed en macht wilt hebben, moet je groots zijn. Dat is iets wat we in Europa van ze kunnen leren,’ Amerikaanse intellectuelen daarentegen waarschuwen voor deze zogenaamde ‘grootsheid.’ De Amerikaanse auteur Lewis Lapham, vele jaren hoofdredacteur van Harper's Magazine, zei 7 jaar geleden in een interview tegen me:
De democratie in de Verenigde Staten is snel aan het verdwijnen. Mark Twain had gelijk toen hij rond 1900 erop wees dat wij er geen imperium op na kunnen houden en tegelijkertijd een democratie blijven. Die twee sluiten elkaar uit, zoals we uit de geschiedenis weten. Eerder al, in 1821, zei president John Quincy Adams dat Amerika niet de wereld in moet trekken om ‘monsters te vernietigen,’ omdat het zichzelf anders in de nesten zou werken en ‘de dictator van de wereld’ zou kunnen worden en haar verlangen naar vrijheid zou veranderen in het streven naar macht. En hij had gelijk. Dat wisten de Romeinen al toen hun democratie veranderde in een dictatuur van de keizers.

In zijn boek Waiting for the Barbarians, schreef Lapham naar aanleiding van het werk van de Romeinse historicus  Gaius Sallustius Crispus:

Sallust's description of Rome in 80 B.C. -- a government controlled by wealth, a ruling-class numb to the repetitions of political scandal, a public diverted by chariot races and gladiatorial shows -- stands as a fair summary of some of our own circumstances.

Lapham, wiens werk gezien werd als 'an exhilarating point of view in an age of conformity,' verklaarde in 2006:

Van ons Amerikaanse burgers wordt nu verwacht dat wij een groot deel van onze vrijheid opgeven en zeker de helderheid van ons denken in ruil voor het benarde wereldbeeld van die angstige, ellendige oligarchie die in Washington aan de macht is. Het hele streven achter de oorlog tegen het terrorisme is niet bedoeld om het Amerikaanse volk tegen een buitenlandse vijand te beschermen, maar om de Amerikaanse plutocratie te verdedigen tegen de Amerikaanse democratie. Het juiste woord hiervoor is natuurlijk fascisme, maar dat woord is in onbruik geraakt omdat het wordt beschouwd als een te beladen term die geassocieerd wordt met Nazi-Duitsland. Daarom zal ik een citaat geven van Franklin Roosevelt die in de jaren dertig verklaarde dat ‘de vrijheid van een democratie niet veilig is als de bevolking de groei tolereert van de particuliere macht tot het punt waarop het sterker wordt dan de democratische staat zelf. Dat is in wezen fascisme – het bezit van de regering door een individu, door een groep of door welke leidende privé macht dan ook.’ De democraat Roosevelt was zich bewust van de Amerikaanse versie van het fascisme… een fusie tussen de macht van de staat en die van de grote ondernemingen. Roosevelt herkende dit soort fascisme in de oppositie van vooraanstaande Amerikaanse kapitalisten tegen zijn New-Deal beleid. Hij was vooruitziend, want onze huidige Nationale Veiligheids Staat met zijn toenemende geheimhouding, beperking van de vrijheid van het individu, voortdurende oorlogen en verregaand corporatisme is geen democratie meer. Het is het fascisme dat de harten en geesten heeft veroverd van de generatie die nu in Washington aan de macht is. De Europeanen zouden er dan ook goed aan doen om een eigen en beter antwoord te vinden en niet het Amerikaanse model te volgen, maar te leren van onze fouten. Zie Amerika als het verleden en niet als de toekomst, Europa zal zijn eigen toekomst moeten opbouwen.

De Amerikanen proberen de toekomst niet te verdienen, maar te kopen met andermans geld. Daarin zullen ze een tijdje slagen tot het onherroepelijk fout gaat, want je kunt niet doorgaan met schulden maken. Eind vorig jaar was die schuld opgelopen tot rond de acht biljoen dollar, dat is acht maal een miljoen maal een miljoen, omgerekend is dat meer dan 26.000 dollar voor iedere inwoner van de VS. Alleen al aan rente was de Amerikaanse belastingbetaler in 2004 ruwweg 80 miljard dollar kwijt. De grootste schuldeisers zijn China en Japan, maar ook van de OPEC-landen in het Midden Oosten hebben we miljarden geleend. Wij zijn failliet en voeren oorlog. Stel dat de Arabische landen de olie in euro’s betaald willen krijgen omdat de dollar in feite niet de waarde heeft die het buitenland ervoor moet betalen. Saddam wilde dat, Iran doet het nu. Als ze allemaal overstappen op de euro is dat een ramp voor Amerika. Tot nu toe accepteert men zoveel van ons omdat de munteenheid in de wereld nog steeds de dollar is en die kunnen alleen wij drukken. Maar als dat voorbij is…Ik ben al een jaar of tien pessimistisch. Tot nu toe gaat het nog zijn gangetje en heb ik ‘t bij het verkeerde eind gehad. Toch zie ik niet dat het op de langere termijn goed kan gaan. Ik zie de cavalerie niet over de heuvel komen om ons te redden.

Morgen meer over de blindheid van de mainstream voor de werkelijkheid. Dan ook een kritiek op de volgende bewering van Geert Mak  in een EO-radioprogramma op 6 november 2012:

Amerikanen, die moeten niet zoveel van de staat hebben, niet zoveel van publieke werken… men is zich weer tegen de publieke zaak gaan afzetten.



Geen opmerkingen:

Peter Flik en Chuck Berry-Promised Land

mijn unieke collega Peter Flik, die de vrijzinnig protestantse radio omroep de VPRO maakte is niet meer. ik koester duizenden herinneringen ...