August 2004

Till Klaras huvudsida

LONDON – “The moral arm of the universe is long”, Martin Luther King once said in one of his memorable speeches. “It bends towards justice”. But it is doubtful if the people of Cambodia, the site of the original “Killing Fields”, feel that this is likely. Yet their understandable cynicism may about to be confounded. Cambodia‚” National Assembly is poised to approve a government decision to ratify a treaty, over a decade in the making, that will empower a special court to try surviving leaders of the Khmer Rouge, the communist movement that was seized with a mission to refashion the social and economic structure of their country by the sword and the bullet. Cambodia incarnates the worst horrors of being caught in the crossfires of war. It was heavily bombed in secret by the Nixon administration. Then when the Vietnamese invaded in 1979 Washington had the audacity to line up...

. In our Western culture one is judged to be either fully engaged with one’s emotions and one’s deeds or one is dangerously pathological. No one has epitomized this dilemma more than Robert McNamara whose steely tenure as U.S. Secretary of Defense under both president Kennedy and Johnston is still the subject of awed conversation. Imagine the sang froid of the present incumbent, Donald Rumsfeld, and then square it. He presided over the Pentagon during both the Cuban missile crisis and during the great build up in Vietnam when he initiated the concept of “body counts” to measure the progress U.S. forces were making. He obviously did sleep at night, despite his self-confessed “moral tension”, until one day on November 2nd, 1965, a young Quaker, a father of three, burned himself to death within 40 feet of McNamara’s office window. This act, McNamara, later confessed, took him to “the breaking...

Do you wonder how the operatives of Al Qaeda sleep at night? No problem, I think. After swallowing the double narcotic of killing unbelievers and promised sensuality they sleep the peace of the just, despite the lack of approval for such beliefs in Islamic theology. A more interesting question is how George W. Bush and Tony Blair get a good night’s sleep. What have they imbibed? There are no virgins in the sky awaiting them and their wars have fallen well short of the Augustinian principles of the just war. Yet they are men of a religious conviction and it cannot be easy to switch off the light knowing one has given the orders for a greater slaughter of innocents that happened at the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001. In our Western culture one is judged to be either fully engaged with one’s emotions and one’s deeds or...

Do you wonder how the operatives of Al Qaeda sleep at night? No problem, I think. After swallowing the double narcotic of killing unbelievers and promised sensuality they sleep the peace of the just, despite the lack of approval for such beliefs in Islamic theology. A more interesting question is how George W. Bush and Tony Blair get a good night’s sleep. What have they imbibed? There are no virgins in the sky awaiting them and their wars have fallen well short of the Augustinian principles of the just war. Yet they are men of a religious conviction and it cannot be easy to switch off the light knowing one has given the orders for a greater slaughter of innocents that happened at the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001. In our Western culture one is judged to be either fully engaged with one’s emotions and one’s deeds or...

BBC NewsUN urges global action on Darfur Dawn.comEU sees no evidence of genocide in Darfur GuardianDarfur’s deep grievances defy all hopes for an easy solution Tracy McNicoll, IHTSanctions on Sudan have little chance of working Omvärldsbilder.sePå jakt efter flaskhalsen för bistånd åt Darfur Omvärldsbilder.seDarfur – folkmordet som kanske “bara” blir en humanitär katastrof John Laughland, ScoopFill full the mouth of famine Enver Masud, The Wisdom FundSudan, Oil, and African Muslim vs. African Muslim Norm Dixon, Green LeftSudan: Oil profits behind West’s tears for Darfur Samson Mulugeta, TruthoutHumanitarian Disaster in Sudan

National Nine NewsIraq war a gift to Osama: CIA Sabrina Tavernise, IHTChalabi calls Iraqi judge a U.S. puppet Kurdish MediaKurdish language banned in the Iraqi Ministry of Defence News and StarWar killed my Peter Jamie Tarabay, TruthoutIraq Issues Arrest Warrants for Chalabi, Nephew Robert Scheer, TruthoutBush’s Big Blunder: Chalabi Mike Lee, TruthoutCasualty Ward Luke Baker, TruthoutIraq Reimpoes Death Penalty Rawya Rageh, TruthoutIraqi government shuts Al-Jazeera Station Jonathan Freedland, ICHThe Failed Occupation John F. Burns, The NYTIraqi Conference on Election Plan Sinks Into Chaos Larry Chin, Global ResearchUS occupation “hands over” Iraq to lethal puppet regime

Manuel Valenzuela, ICHThe Ghost of Orwell is Upon us  Alexander Cockburn, ICHBush v. Kerry? Not Even a Dime’s Worth of Difference Ray McGovern, ICHNot scared yet? Try connecting these dots J. Stanton, News InsiderKings of Pain: Britain, United States and IsraelRelated Feature Collections Who is George W. Bush? – October 27, 2004 US Presidential Elections – August 16, 2004 US Presidential Elections – October 24, 2004 The US Empire – what future, what end? – November 1, 2004 Ronald Bruce St. John, FPFHigh Time Bush Defines the Enemy William Rivers Pitt, TruthoutFabricating Terror Paul Krugman, TruthoutBush’s Own Goal Waging PeaceUS Presidential Candidate Report Card: Turn the Tide in US Nuclear Policy

National Nine NewsIraq war a gift to Osama: CIA Sabrina Tavernise, IHTChalabi calls Iraqi judge a U.S. puppet Kurdish MediaKurdish language banned in the Iraqi Ministry of Defence News and StarWar killed my Peter Jamie Tarabay, TruthoutIraq Issues Arrest Warrants for Chalabi, Nephew Robert Scheer, TruthoutBush’s Big Blunder: Chalabi Mike Lee, TruthoutCasualty Ward Luke Baker, TruthoutIraq Reimpoes Death Penalty Rawya Rageh, TruthoutIraqi government shuts Al-Jazeera Station John F. Burns, The NYTIraqi Conference on Election Plan Sinks Into Chaos Larry Chin, Global ResearchUS occupation “hands over” Iraq to lethal puppet regime

We know that medical personnel have failed to report to higher authorities wounds that were clearly caused by torture and that they have neglected to take steps to interrupt this torture. In addition, they have turned over prisoners’ medical records to interrogators who could use them to exploit the prisoners’ weaknesses or vulnerabilities. We have not yet learned the extent of medical involvement in delaying and possibly falsifying the death certificates of prisoners who have been killed by torturers. A May 22 article on Abu Ghraib in the New York Times states that “much of the evidence of abuse at the prison came from medical documents” and that records and statements “showed doctors and medics reporting to the area of the prison where the abuse occurred several times to stitch wounds, tend to collapsed prisoners or see patients with bruised or reddened genitals.” http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/080604J.shtml#16 According to the article, two doctors who...

Nuclear weapons occupy the highest rung on the ladder of military cowardice. They are long-distance devices of mass annihilation. They destroy indiscriminately &endash; men, women and children. They draw no lines between soldiers and civilians. Those who make the weapons, who deploy them, who order their use and who press the buttons to send the missiles on their way have virtually no connection with the victims. They are simply human instruments in a chain of activities leading to massive devastation. The only arguably sane use of nuclear weapons is deterrence, and deterrence is largely an unproven theory. General George Lee Butler, a former commander-in-chief of the United States Strategic Command, who was in charge of all US nuclear weapons, has expressed his deep concerns about deterrence. “Nuclear deterrence,” he wrote, “was and remains a slippery intellectual construct that translates very poorly into the real world of spontaneous crises, inexplicable motivations,...

LONDON – If all the world were like Sweden there would be no news to report. The last time that Sweden hit the front page was when its foreign minister, Anna Lindh, was knifed to death by a madman last year on the eve of a referendum on Swedish entry into the Euro zone. The time before that was in the distant past. But news and truth, as Walter Lippmann observed, should never be confused. The truth is, as a recent report by the United Nations showed, that Sweden is probably the most successful country in the world – that is if you factor in not just national income, but the longevity of its people, low infant mortality and high levels of education. Moreover, a new study by Professor Richard Florida of Carnegie Mellon university which measures the kind of creativity most useful to business – talent, technology and tolerance...