UK Judge OKs Wikileaks Cables in Chagos Islanders' Investigation

The other day, Marcy Wheeler took Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly to task for upholding "the government’s right to withhold cables already released via WikiLeaks under FOIA." She quotes the judge's ruling in the ACLU lawsuit to obtain via FOIA the State Department cables released by Wikileaks (and for which Bradley Manning has falsely been indicted for espionage):

"No matter how extensive, the WikiLeaks disclosure is no substitute for an official acknowledgement and the ACLU has not shown that the Executive has officially acknowledged that the specific information at issue was a part of the WikiLeaks disclosure."

Wheeler has been following the case for some time, noting how the government is withholding already publicly released (but not officially released!) documents that point to the government's torture cover-up, not to mention "admissions of crime, including murder, torture, and kidnapping."

What I wanted to point out is a recent news article which shows how different is Judge Kollar-Kotelly's ruling from that of UK High Justice Stanley Burton. Burton, according to a Press Association (PA) article published July 25 at Huffington Post, in a ruling regarding claims by expelled Chagos Islanders against the UK government, specifically allowed the use of Wikileaks cables by the claimants. The expulsion was, as I pointed out in an article on the subject some months back, to allow for the presence of the huge U.S. Diego Garcia naval base (where prisoners have reported to have been disappeared or tortured).

PA reported the situation:

They say their case is supported by a cable obtained by WikiLeaks, sent by the US embassy in London to the US State Department in Washington in May 2009....

The judge said: "I understand why it is the policy of HM Government neither to confirm nor deny the genuineness of leaked documents, save in exceptional circumstances, particularly where, as here, the documents in question are not those produced or received by the UK Government.

"However, the documents have been leaked and indeed widely published.

He ruled: "I do not see how the present claim can be fairly or justly determined without resolving the allegation made by the claimant, based on the WikiLeaks documents."

I hope ACLU will add this fact to any appeal they make in their FOIA. But the larger issue is how craven the U.S. judiciary has become after ten years of heightened "war against terror," having lost all common sense in the drive to protect U.S. power, no matter how brutally applied.

Sign Petition to Repatriate Chagossians Expelled for US Base at Diego Garcia

Yesterday, SPEAK Human Rights and Environmental Initiative announced a petition campaign to provide redress for the former residents of the coral atolls of the Chagos Archipelago, expelled from their homeland by the British and the US governments, after the island of Diego Garcia, part of the Chagos Archipelago, was leased by Britain to the United States. Diego Garcia had the deep-water port in the Indian Ocean the US Navy desired. What did it mean that many hundreds of people would be kicked off their land?

As Andy Worthington noted, in an article a few years ago, following upon revelations in Time Magazine that Diego Garcia had been used for rendition flights to torture, and held a black site, secret interrogation prison for "war on terror" detainees: "A British sovereign territory — albeit one that was leased to the United States nearly 40 years ago, when the islanders were shamefully discarded by the British government and exiled to face destitution and death by misery in Mauritius — Diego Garcia has long been a source of shame to opponents of modern colonial activity."

Worthington explained the revelations about Diego Garcia:

Having spoken to senior CIA officers during his research, [Swiss Senator Dick] Marty told the European Parliament, “We have received concurring confirmations that United States agencies have used Diego Garcia, which is the international legal responsibility of the UK, in the ‘processing’ of high-value detainees,” and Manfred Novak [then the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Torture] explained to the Observer that “he had received credible evidence from well-placed sources familiar with the situation on the island that detainees were held on Diego Garcia between 2002 and 2003.” The penultimate piece of the jigsaw puzzle came in May, when El Pais broke the story that “ghost prisoner” Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, whose current whereabouts are unknown, was imprisoned on the island in 2005, shortly after his capture in Pakistan — although the English-speaking press failed to notice.

As for the Chagossians, the British High Court restored their right to return to their homeland, but the UK government has never enforced that right. SPEAK has advocated for the Chagossians' case before the British Courts, the European Court of Human Rights, and the International Court of Justice.

Sign the Petition for the United States to Redress Wrongs Committed Against the Chagos Islanders
http://wh.gov/Xbb

WASHINGTON, D.C., MARCH 5, 2012—Today, SPEAK Human Rights & Environmental Initiative and the UNROW Human Rights Impact Litigation Clinic of American University launched a petition, calling on the U.S. government to provide redress to the Chagos Islanders, an indigenous population expelled from their homeland in the Chagos Archipelago more than forty years ago.

The Chagossians continue to fight for the right to return to their homeland. They were expelled when the U.K. and the U.S. governments decided that the United States would build a U.S. military base on the Archipelago’s main island, Diego Garcia. Since their expulsion, the Chagossians have lived as a marginalized community on the island nations of Mauritius and Seychelles. The recent passing of Lisette Talate, the oldest living survivor of the forced exile, underscores the urgent need for action by the U.S. and U.K. governments to redress the wrongs against the Chagossians. Ms. Talate’s dying wish was to see her homeland again before her death. We cannot let other Chagossians die without some form of redress: employment opportunities, compensation, and the opportunity to return home. Noam Chomsky, a signatory to this petition, has observed, "If people knew, they would do something about it . . .” Please do something today by signing the petition and sharing the link with friends.

We call on President Obama to respect the human rights of the Chagossians. The Obama administration will respond to petitions that receive 25,000 signatures in 30 days. The petition closes on April 3, 2012.

Please join the effort to bring this important issue before the Obama administration.

Sign the petition now at http://wh.gov/Xbb

As Christian Nauvel wrote in a legal paper (PDF) on the "Chagossians and their struggle", "The right to remain in one’s own country is a basic human right that has existed in one form or another since the times of King John and the Magna Carta."

Before the arrival of the B-52s and aircraft carriers, the Chagos was a peaceful cluster of islands whose inhabitants (known as the “Chagos Islanders” or “Chagossians”) lived on Diego Garcia and two other atolls: Peros Banhos and Salomon. The exact number of Chagossians who resided there is still disputed to this day, but estimates range from 800 to 1500. They lived simple lives, dividing their time between fishing and working on the coconut plantations where copra was produced. Though none of them owned any land, they had been in the Chagos for two, three or even four generations. It therefore came as a shock to most Chagossians when, on an otherwise normal morning in 1971, they were suddenly informed that they would be required to permanently leave their homes in order to make way for the U.S. military base. The majority of those living on Diego Garcia were shipped to Mauritius against their will, within days of receiving the news. By 1973, even the islands of Peros Banhos and Solomon had been completely evacuated.

But just as the US has eviscerated that other great right dating from the Magna Carta, the right of habeas corpus, they show little inclination to preserve these other rights in their headlong rush to control the world under the auspices of a never-ending "war on terror."

There may be little we can do to support the Chagossians, but one very simple way would be to sign the petition described above, and to support organizations like SPEAK, who are speaking up for some of the most powerless people on earth.

For more information on the plight of the Chagossians and the work SPEAK Human Rights and Environmental Initiative has done on their behalf, click here.

Twilight of the Bushites

Aus des Rheines Gold ist der Reif geglüht.

Watching a DVD of the New York Metropolitan Opera's version of Richard Wagner's Götterdämmerung (or Twilight of the Gods [TOG]) the other day, I was struck at how prescient the otherwise reactionary composer was in anticipating the destruction of the voracious classes. (One should not find it odd that in Wagner one finds mixed the most progressive and the most reactionary of views and trends, as in this he is the exemplar of the age, which mixes reason and progress with vile reaction, destruction, and mass murder.)

Dick Cheney, who is Alberich in my analogy with Wagner's opera, was on the stump beating war tom-toms against Iran during a 35-minute talk at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), which The New York Times calls "a research organization". In reality, WINEP is a well-known right-wing pro-Israel lobby. While praised by liberal dreamboat Al Gore as "Washington's most respected center for studies on the Middle East", according to Right Web:

its WINEP's Board of Advisers includes: Warren Christopher, Lawrence S. Eagleburger, Alexander Haig, Max M. Kampelman, [the late] Jeane Kirkpatrick, Samuel W. Lewis, Edward Luttwak, Michael Mandelbaum, Robert McFarlane, Martin Peretz, Richard Perle, James Roche, George P. Shultz, Paul Wolfowitz, James Woolsey, and Mortimer Zuckerman. Wolfowitz and Roche resigned from the board when they entered the Bush administration in 2001, although WINEP still proudly lists them....

in April 2004 WINEP published Policy Focus #47, The West Bank Fence: A Vital Component in Israel's Strategy of Defense, written by Maj. Gen. Doron Almog of the Israel Defense Forces.

Okay. I think you kind of get the idea. This crowd will be quite receptive to Cheney's rant, and following Bush's "World War III" warning (and Bush is Hagan, in my TOG comparison), it would have to be quite a speech. And Cheney didn't let us down.

Cheney, the War God

As reported by the NYT, Cheney is definitely threatening war:

“The Iranian regime needs to know that if it stays on its present course, the international community is prepared to impose serious consequences,” Mr. Cheney said, without specifying what those might be. “The United States joins other nations in sending a clear message: We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon"....

...Mr. Cheney reserved his harshest language for Iran. Calling it “the world’s most active state sponsor of terrorism,” he said, “our country, and the entire international community, cannot stand by as a terror-supporting state fulfills its most aggressive ambitions.”

That language is not radically different from what Mr. Cheney has used in the past. But people at the conference said that, placed in the context of Mr. Bush’s remarks, it represented a significant step toward increasing pressure on Iran. The speech seemed to lay the groundwork for the threat of military action — either because the administration actually intends to use force or because it wants to use the threat of force to prod Europe into action.

The press has been awash in articles noting the build up to war with Iran. Seymour Hersh's article in The New Yorker earlier this month laid out pretty clearly what was up, with Herr Cheney firmly in charge.

This summer, the White House, pushed by the office of Vice-President Dick Cheney, requested that the Joint Chiefs of Staff redraw long-standing plans for a possible attack on Iran, according to former officials and government consultants. The focus of the plans had been a broad bombing attack, with targets including Iran’s known and suspected nuclear facilities and other military and infrastructure sites. Now the emphasis is on “surgical” strikes on Revolutionary Guard Corps facilities in Tehran and elsewhere, which, the Administration claims, have been the source of attacks on Americans in Iraq. What had been presented primarily as a counter-proliferation mission has been reconceived as counterterrorism.

Meanwhile, in the hall of the Gibichungs -- I mean, Congress -- Democratic Congressional leaders Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are doing... what? Pelosi supposedly told Arianna Huffington that she wouldn't let a funding bill on the Iraq War come to a vote unless it carried a timeline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops. Never mind that she has promised that before. Who believes her now, except kiss-up bloggers and media hounds?

And Harry Reid! According to Congressional Quarterly (via a story at TPM Muckraker), he's plotting to spike the hold Sen. Chris Dodd put on the shameful FISA wiretapping bill/capitulation, which will allow retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies for all its breaches of customer privacy in the years since 9/11 (if not before). Is this how a party leader is supposed to act, knifing one of his own in the back, and furthering the Bush totalitarian agenda?

Democratic supporters seem to be suspended between shocked awe and craven paralysis. Then there are those who are circling the wagons around idiot electoralism, placing all hope that the Ring of Power will be placed into the hand of their standard bearer in 2008.

The Sun Never Sets on Bushland

As Wagner understood, the Ring is cursed, and the power it brings is only destructive. In Götterdämmerung, his last installment of his monumental opera, The Ring of the Niebelung, Wagner portrayed a world where the quest for ultimate power had perverted all relationships, negated all contracts, and turned beauty and truth itself into a distorted mirror of its opposite. And so it is now, with the founding ideals of America -- life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness -- mutated into death, indefinite detention, and the pursuit of barbarism. Bush and Cheney's dark torture prisons extend like a sinister web even unto the farthest regions of the planet, as the recent stories about Diego Garcia reveal.

From satellite pictures, Diego Garcia looks like paradise.

The small, secluded atoll in the Indian Ocean, with its coral beaches, turquoise waters and vast lagoon in the centre, is 1,600 kilometres from land in any direction....

The little-known British possession, leased to the United States in 1970, was a major military staging post in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. It continues to be, in effect, a floating aircraft carrier, housing 1,700 personnel who call it Camp Justice.

But intelligence analysts say Diego Garcia's geographic isolation is now being exploited for other, darker purposes.

They claim it is one in a network of secret detention centres being operated by the Central Intelligence Agency to interrogate high-value terrorist suspects beyond the reach of American or international law.

These prisoners are known as "ghost detainees" or the "new disappeared," and they're being subjected to treatment that makes the abuses at the military-run Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad and Guantanamo Bay camp in Cuba look small-time, say intelligence analysts.

Tropical hideaways turned into torture chambers. "Research organizations" become centers of war propaganda. Opposition politicians acting like agents of the party in power. "Democracy" transmuted from ideal into bombing runs on innocent populations.

The Limits of Metaphor, and the Need for Societal Resurrection

As a petit-bourgeois artist of the 19th century, Wagner could see no way out for humanity, unless it consume itself in its inner contradictions, in a fiery twilight of the gods that brings down all civilization with its doomed quest for power, only to (perhaps) rise again and begin the whole process over again, endlessly through time.

Wagner, following some of the Eastern philosophies of his time, may yet prove right. But, the people in his music dramas, the Gibichungs of TOG, were passive bystanders, helpless except to view in horror the destruction that rained upon them. We do not have to be the same. But it will mean a quantum leap in consciousness, especially for the American people, who are tied to the myth of the progressivism of the Democratic Party, like flies to a rotting corpse.

In any healthy party, the clamoring to remove Pelosi and Reid would be deafening by now. But when one of the disgruntled few dared to speak the truth the other day, as Congressman Pete Stark did, the Democrats rushed to denounce him, the better to keep their oath of blood-brotherhood with the Bushites.

Stark told the GOP that Bush was vetoing a $35 billion dollar bill to fund children's health care because he needed the cash "to blow up innocent people if we can get enough kids to grow old enough for you to send to Iraq to get their heads blown off for the president's amusement".

For, in my analogy with Wagner's opera, Stark plays the strange role of the Rhinemaidens, who, confronting the hero with a final chance to return the Ring to its primeval owners and destroy once and for all its curse, with all the dangerous questing after power it entails, are met with stony rejection and ridicule... just as Pelosi denounced Stark.

At the end of Götterdämmerung, it is Brunnhilde who renounces the ring out of love, and returns the cursed gold to the forces of nature, from whence it came. I'm afraid there is no redemption via love for our society. And Hillary Clinton is no Brunnhilde (she, like Pelosi, is a Gutrune figure).

But for love and not from fear change may yet come. If we truly love our children, if we truly love this planet and all life upon it, then we must come to terms with our own fears, and take dedicated action to remove those who would promote American imperium from power. And this is not only America's problem, because in each country the people must take the same stand. Or we face the tragic fate of Siegfried in Wagner's opera, destroyed by those we believe we serve, stabbed in the back because we thought we could live for love, for good times, in peace and happiness, while in fact all around us swirled dark clouds of hate and dreams of vengeful conquest.