20:50 Jan 09 2009
Times Read: 769
women abuse, Advertising Standards Authority, advertising, anti-abuse campaigns, PEOPLE : Charlize Theron
dictator, crime, PEOPLE : Idi Amin, Charles Taylor
ANC crisis, PEOPLE : Jacob Zuma, Kgalema Motlanthe, Jessie Duarte, Blade Nzimande, Zwelinzima Vavi, Gwede Mantashe, Mosiuoa Lekota, Mluleki George, Mbhazima Shilowa, Baleka Mbete
HIV/Aids, Catholic Church, PEOPLE : Desmond Tutu
Catholic Church
Pope John Paul II
20:40 Jan 09 2009
Times Read: 771
Zimbabwean crisis, PEOPLE : Robert Mugabe, Thabo Mbeki
Beijing Olympics, Tibet, human rights, Amnesty International
Beijing Olympics, sports, doping, corrupion, pollution, environment
Russia-Georgia conflict, Iran, Afghanistan, PEOPLE : George Bush
PEOPLE : Michael Moore, George Bush
Hijacked election 2000, illegal president with help from Jeb Bush
Hijacked election 2004 by fear
George Bush, Michael Moore
United States, president, brains , colonoscopy, Iraq, war, George Bush
TAGS : Cabinet, government, PEOPLE : Jacob Zuma, Zwelinzima Vavi, John Hlophe, Julius Malema, Blade Nzimande
18:31 Jan 09 2009
Times Read: 773
Obama’s disdain sends Mugabe to Russia; China revisited ?
In June of last year Barack Obama, soon to be inaugurated as the next president of the United States, declared Robert Mugabe’s regime illegitimate and lacking in credibility. Then Senator for Illinois, Obama expressed the view that “If fresh elections prove impossible, the US and other countries should tighten “targeted sanctions” and “pursue an enforceable, negotiated political transition in Zimbabwe that would end repressive rule”.
Subsequently the USA has made it clear that, as far as they are concerned, Mugabe has to go before any support will be forthcoming from that quarter. Indeed yesterday’s influential Washington Post carried an article “In Zimbabwe, a cancer called Mugabe.
While Obama is primarily focused on the financial crisis prior to his becoming president on January 20, Mugabe can be in no doubt that, if anything, the squeeze on his regime will be tightened after the new president arrives in the White House.
So Bob figured that seeing as he wasn’t doing anything anyway he might as well pop down to Moscow for a visit.
“Mugabe will use the trip, details of which are shrouded in secrecy, to seek closer strategic ties with Moscow, a senior government official told New Zimbabwe.com.
With a power sharing agreement signed with the opposition stalled amid calls from Western powers, particularly Britain and the United States, for him to step down, Mugabe “will seek a new alliance with Russia that will secure Zimbabwe’s sovereignty and provide a new front for combating economic sanctions that have created nothing but misery for ordinary people”, according to the official.
The source added, without elaborating, that the “new front” is linked to the “exploitation of a strategic resource that God has given to Zimbabwe and which could be used to give the country a much-needed new lease of life”.
A well-structured injection of between US$5-billion and US$10-billion, Mugabe’s aides believe, can stabilise the country’s economic decline and give the 84-year-old leader some breathing space to pursue an elusive political settlement that he has been battling to forge with the two MDC formations.
Without confirming a date of Mugabe’s imminent visit, the official said the trip was of “strategic necessity” and a direct response to British and US efforts to isolate Zimbabwe through a combination of sanctions and diplomatic pressure.” (New Zimbabwe.com)
Now far be it for me to criticize Bob for trying to do the right thing for himself … er, I mean his cronies,…,er, I mean the people of Zimbabwe but we saw the exact same stunt pulled with the Chinese in 2005 whereby Bob got his mansion, Grace went shopping, the cronies got cars and houses and the people of Zimbabwe … the right to starve and die at an ever increasing rate from abuse, starvation and disease.
In these articles from the Weekly Standard’s Richard Bate UK Telegraph’s Christopher Booker and EU Referendum’s Richard North we learn of Bob’s trading substantial Zimbabwean mineral rights to China in return for financial assistance.
Subsequent to 2005 Bob and his cronies have done very nicely thank you very much and the people of Zimbabwe have become substantially poorer and the country has turned into a sewage farm not fit for humans to inhabit.
Little wonder that China blocked any UN intervention in Zimbabwe — can’t allow genocide to interfere with business. Of course these are the same Chinese who are asking the planet to hold off on prosecuting the genocide in Darfur, also related to their vested interests there.
Along with China, Russia vetoed the UN resolution and I would imagine that Bob is now off to sell a further substantial proportion of the Zimbabwean birthright to maintain his expensive habits. Very little, if any, of the proceeds to find a way to the masses as the Chinese adventure demonstrated.
Zimbabweans’ heritage and God given resources being traded away so that one man and a handful of cronies can live like kings.
But who are we to argue?
The real danger is after all Western imperialism, not so?
Shame.
09:16 Jan 09 2009
Times Read: 777
Bush and his cronies must face a reckoning
by JONATHAN FREEDLAND - Dec 24 2008 08:13
'Tis the night before Christmas and the season of goodwill. The mood is forgiving. Our faces warm with mulled wine, our tummies full, we're meant to slump in the armchair, look back on the year just gone and count our blessings -- woozily agreeing to put our troubles behind us.
As in families, so in the realm of public and international affairs. And this December that feels especially true. The "war on terror" that dominated much of the decade seems to be heading towards a kind of conclusion. George Bush will leave office in a matter of weeks and British troops will leave Iraq a few months later. The first, defining phase of the conflict that began on 9/11 -- the war of Bush, Tony Blair and Osama bin Laden -- is about to slip from the present to the past tense. Bush and Blair will be gone, with only Bin Laden still in post. The urge to move on is palpable.
You can sense it in the valedictory interviews Bush and Dick Cheney are conducting on their way out. They're looking to the verdict of history now, Cheney telling the Washington Times last week: "I myself am personally persuaded that this president and this administration will look very good 20 or 30 years down the road." The once raging arguments of the current era are about to fade, the lead US protagonists heading off to their respective ranches in the west, the rights and wrongs of their decisions in office to be weighed not in the hot arena of politics, but in the cool seminar rooms of the academy.
Not so fast.
Yes, the new year would get off to a more soothing start if we could all agree to draw a line and move on. But it would be wrong. First, because we cannot hope to avoid repeating the errors of the last eight years unless they are subject to a full accounting. (It is for that reason Britain needs its own full, unconstrained inquiry into the Iraq war.) Second, because a crucial principle, one that goes to the very heart of the American creed, is at stake. And third, because this is not solely about the judgement of history. It may be about the judgement of the courts -- specifically those charged with punishing war crimes.
Less than a fortnight ago, in the news graveyard of a Friday afternoon, the armed services committee of the US Senate released a bipartisan report -- with none other than John McCain as its co-author -- into the American use of torture against those held in the war on terror. It dismissed entirely the notion that the horrors of Abu Ghraib could be put down to "a few bad apples". Instead it laid bare, in forensic detail, the trail of memos and instructions that led directly to the then defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.
The report was the fruit of 18 months of work, involving some 70 interviews. Most of it is classified, but even the 29-page published summary makes horrifying reading. It shows how the most senior figures in the Bush administration discussed, and sought legal fig leaves for, practices that plainly amounted to torture.
They were techniques devised in a training programme known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape or Sere, that aimed to teach elite American soldiers how to endure torture should they fall into the hands of pitiless enemies. The Sere techniques were partly modelled on the brutal methods used by the Chinese against US prisoners during the Korean war. Yet Rumsfeld ruled that these same techniques should be "reverse engineered", so that Americans would learn not how to endure them -- but how to inflict them. Which they then did, at Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib and beyond.
The Senate report cites the memorandums requesting permission to use "stress positions, exploitation of detainee fears (such as fear of dogs), removal of clothing, hooding, deprivation of light and sound, and the so-called wet towel treatment or the waterboard".
We read of Mohamed al Kahtani -- against whom all charges were dropped earlier this year -- who was "deprived of adequate sleep for weeks on end, stripped naked, subjected to loud music, and made to wear a leash and perform dog tricks". Approval for this kind of torture, hidden under the euphemism of "enhanced interrogation", was sought from and granted at the highest level.
And that doesn't mean Rumsfeld. The report's first conclusion is that, on "7 February 2002, President George W Bush made a written determination that Common Article 3 of the Geneva conventions, which would have afforded minimum standards for humane treatment, did not apply to al-Qaeda or Taliban detainees". The result, it says, is that Bush "opened the door" to the use of a raft of techniques that the US had once branded barbaric and beyond the realm of human decency.
For this Bush should surely be held to account. And yet there is no sign that he will, and precious little agitation that he should. A still smiling Cheney denies the Bush administration did anything wrong. Note this breathtaking exchange with Fox News at the weekend. He was asked: "If the president during war decides to do something to protect the country, is it legal?" Cheney's answer: "General proposition, I'd say yes."
It takes a few seconds for the full horror of that remark to sink in. And then you remember where you last heard something like it. It was the now immortalised interview between David Frost and Richard Nixon. The disgraced ex-president was asked whether there were certain situations where the president can do something illegal, if he deems it in the national interest. Nixon's reply: "Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal."
It is no coincidence that Cheney began his career in the Nixon White House. He has the same Nixonian disregard for the US Constitution, the same belief that executive power is absolute and unlimited -- that those who wield it are above the law, domestic and international. It is the logic of dictatorship.
But Nixon was forced from office, his vision of an unrestrained presidency rejected. If Bush and Cheney are allowed to retire quietly, America will have failed to reassert that bedrock principle of the republic: the rule of law.
This is why there must be a reckoning. Bush will do all he can to avoid it: and it is wholly possible that one of his last acts as president will be to cover himself, his vice-president and all his henchmen with a blanket pardon. Even if that does not happen, Barack Obama is unlikely to want to spend precious capital pursuing his predecessor for war crimes.
But other prosecutors elsewhere in the world should weigh their responsibilities. In the end, it was a lone Spanish magistrate, not a Chilean court, who ensured the arrest of Augusto Pinochet. A pleasing, if uncharitable, thought this Christmas, is that Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush will hesitate before making plans to travel abroad in 2009. Or indeed at any time -- ever again. - guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media 2008
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