Noam Chomsky on U.S. Imperialism in the Middle East and Africa

Democracy Now! has reproduced the speech Noam Chomsky recently gave at the 25th anniversary celebration of the national media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting:

The U.S. and its allies will do anything they can to prevent authentic democracy in the Arab world. The reason is very simple. Across the region, an overwhelming majority of the population regards the United States as the main threat to their interests. In fact, opposition to U.S. policy is so high that a considerable majority think the region would be more secure if Iran had nuclear weapons. In Egypt, the most important country, that’s 80 percent. Similar figures elsewhere. There are some in the region who regard Iran as a threat—about 10 percent. Well, plainly, the U.S. and its allies are not going to want governments which are responsive to the will of the people. If that happens, not only will the U.S. not control the region, but it will be thrown out. So that’s obviously an intolerable result.

In the case of WikiLeaks, there was an interesting aside on this. The revelations from WikiLeaks that got the most publicity—headlines, euphoric commentary and so on—were that the Arabs support U.S. policy on Iran. They were quoting comments of Arab dictators. Yes, they claim to support U.S. policy on Iran. There was no mention of the Arab—of the Arab population, because it doesn’t matter. If the dictators support us, and the population is under control, then what’s the problem? This is like imperialism. What’s the problem if it works? As long as they can control their populations, fine. They can have campaigns of hatred; our friendly dictators will keep them under control. That’s the reaction not just of the diplomatic service in the State Department or of the media who reported this, but also of the general intellectual community. There is no comment on this. In fact, coverage of these polls is precisely zero in the United States, literally. There’s a few comments in England, but very little. It just doesn’t matter what the population thinks, as long as they’re under control.

Well, from these observations, you can conclude pretty quickly, pretty easily, what policies are going to be. You can almost spell them out. So in the case of an oil-rich country with a reliable, obedient dictator, they’re given free rein. Saudi Arabia is the most important. There were—it’s the most repressive, extremist, strongest center of Islamic fundamentalism, missionaries who spread ultra-radical Islamism from jihadis and so on. But they’re obedient, they’re reliable, so they can do what they like. There was a planned protest in Saudi Arabia. The police presence was so overwhelming and intimidating that literally nobody even was willing to show up in the streets of Riyadh. But that was fine. The same in Kuwait. There was a small demonstration, very quickly crushed, no comment.

Actually, the most interesting case in many respects is Bahrain. Bahrain is quite important for two reasons. One reason, which has been reported, is that it’s the home port of the U.S. Fifth Fleet, major military force in the region. Another more fundamental reason is that Bahrain is about 70 percent Shiite, and it’s right across the causeway from eastern Saudi Arabia, which also is majority Shiite and happens to be where most of Saudi oil is. Saudi Arabia, of course, is the main energy resource, has been since the '40s. By curious accident of history and geography, the world's major energy resources are located pretty much in Shiite regions. They’re a minority in the Middle East, but they happen to be where the oil is, right around the northern part of the Gulf. That’s eastern Saudi Arabia, southern Iraq and southwestern Iran. And there’s been a concern among planners for a long time that there might be a move towards some sort of tacit alliance in these Shiite regions moving towards independence and controlling the bulk of the world’s oil. That’s obviously intolerable.

So, going back to Bahrain, there was an uprising, tent city in the central square, like Tahrir Square. The Saudi-led military forces invaded Bahrain, giving the security forces there the opportunity to crush it violently, destroyed the tent city, even destroyed the Pearl, which is the symbol of Bahrain; invaded the major hospital complex, threw out the patients and the doctors; been regularly, every day, arresting human rights activists, torturing them, occasionally a sort of a pat on the wrist, but nothing much. That’s very much the Carothers principle. If actions correspond to our strategic and economic objectives, that’s OK. We can have elegant rhetoric, but what matters is facts.

Well, that’s the oil-rich obedient dictators. What about Egypt, most important country, but not a center of—major center of oil production? Well, in Egypt and Tunisia and other countries of that category, there is a game plan, which is employed routinely, so commonly it takes virtual genius not to perceive it. But when you have a favored dictator—for those of you who might think of going into the diplomatic service, you might as well learn it—when there’s a favored dictator and he’s getting into trouble, support him as long as possible, full support as long as possible. When it becomes impossible to support him—like, say, maybe the army turns against him, business class turns against him—then send him off somewhere, issue ringing declarations about your love of democracy, and then try to restore the old regime, maybe with new names. And that’s done over and over again. It doesn’t always work, but it’s always tried—Somoza, Nicaragua; Shah in Iran; Marcos in the Philippines; Duvalier in Haiti; Chun in South Korea; Mobutu in the Congo; Ceausescu is one of Western favorites in Romania; Suharto in Indonesia. It’s completely routine. And that’s exactly what’s going on in Egypt and Tunisia. OK, we support them right to the end—Mubarak in Egypt, right to the end, keep supporting him. Doesn’t work any longer, send him off to Sharm el-Sheikh, pull out the rhetoric, try to restore the old regime. That’s, in fact, what the conflict is about right now. As Amy said, we don’t know where it’s going to turn now, but that’s what’s going on.

Well, there’s another category. The other category is an oil-rich dictator who’s not reliable, who’s a loose cannon. That’s Libya. And there, there’s a different policy: try to get a more reliable dictator. And that’s exactly what’s happening. Of course, describe it as a humanitarian intervention. That’s another near historical universal. You check history, virtually every resort to force, by whoever it is, is accompanied by the most noble rhetoric. It’s all completely humanitarian. That includes Hitler taking over Czechoslovakia, the Japanese fascists rampaging in northeast China. In fact, it’s Mussolini in Ethiopia. There’s hardly any exceptions. So you produce that, and the media and commentators present—pretend they don’t notice that it has no—carries no information, because it’s reflexive.

And then—but in this case, they could also add something else, which has been repeated over and over again, namely, the U.S. and its allies were intervening in response to a request by the Arab League. And, of course, we have to recognize the importance of that. Incidentally, the response from the Arab League was tepid and was pretty soon rescinded, because they didn’t like what we were doing. But put that aside. At the very same time, the Arab League produced—issued another request. Here’s a headline from a newspaper: "Arab League Calls for Gaza No-Fly Zone." Actually, I’m quoting from the London Financial Times. That wasn’t reported in the United States. Well, to be precise, it was reported in the Washington Times, but basically blocked in the U.S., like the polls, like the polls of Arab public opinion, not the right kind of news. So, "Arab League Calls for Gaza No-Fly Zone," that’s inconsistent with U.S. policy, so that, we don’t have to honor and observe, and that disappeared.

Now, there are some polls that are reported. So here’s one from the New York Times a couple days ago. I’ll quote it. It said, "The poll found that a majority of Egyptians want to annul the 1979 peace treaty with Israel that has been a cornerstone of Egyptian foreign policy and the region’s stability." Actually, that’s not quite accurate. It’s been a cornerstone of the region’s instability, and that’s exactly why the Egyptian population wants to abandon it. The agreement essentially eliminated Egypt from the Israel-Arab conflict. That means eliminated the only deterrent to Israeli military action. And it freed up Israel to expand its operations—illegal operations—in the Occupied Territories and to attack its northern neighbor, to attack Lebanon. Shortly after, Israel attacked Lebanon, killed 20,000 people, destroyed southern Lebanon, tried to impose a client regime, didn’t quite make it. And that was understood. So the immediate reaction to the peace treaty in Israel was that there are things about it we don’t like—we’re going to have to abandon our settlements in the Sinai, in the Egyptian Sinai. But it has a good side, too, because now the only deterrent is gone; we can use force and violence to achieve our other goals. And that’s exactly what happened. And that’s exactly why the Egyptian population is opposed to it. They understand that, as does everyone in the region.

On the other hand, the Times wasn’t lying when they said that it led to the region’s stability. And the reason is because of the meaning of the word "stability" as a technical meaning. Stability is—it’s kind of like democracy. Stability means conformity to our interests. So, for example, when Iran tries to expand its influence in Afghanistan and Iraq, neighboring countries, that’s called "destabilizing." It’s part of the threat of Iran. It’s destabilizing the region. On the other hand, when the U.S. invades those countries, occupies them, half destroys them, that’s to achieve stability. And that is very common, even to the point where it’s possible to write—former editor of Foreign Affairs—that when the U.S. overthrew the democratic government in Chile and instituted a vicious dictatorship, that was because the U.S. had to destabilize Chile to achieve stability. That’s in one sentence, and nobody noticed it, because that’s correct, if you understand the meaning of the word "stability." Yeah, you overthrow a parliamentary government, you install a dictatorship, you invade a country and kill 20,000 people, you invade Iraq and kill hundreds of thousands of people—that’s all bringing about stability. Instability is when anyone gets in the way.

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Rendition Victim Mamdouh Habib Sues Omar Suleiman for Torture

Cross-posted at Firedoglake/MyFDL

The other day I wrote about the fight back by former Guantanamo detainee David Hicks regarding the lies told about him by the Detainee Assessment Brief released as part of large and ongoing document leak by Wikileaks. Another Australian also previously incarcerated at Guantanamo, and even more horrifically tortured, if that's possible, by the U.S. and its allies, has filed suit in an Egyptian court against his tormenter, former Egyptian Vice President Omar Suleiman, who for 15 years or more was chief of intelligence in that country. Habib's JTF-GTMO summary is also available at the Wikileaks site.

The summary states that Habib admitted "under extreme duress" various terrorist activities and knowledge while under interrogation in Egypt, where he was sent via the U.S. program of "extraordinary rendition." Habib recanted these confessions once at Guantanamo. This didn't keep intelligence officials of labeling him as of "high" intelligence value, maintaining that Habib had knowledge of Al Qaeda financing, safe houses, training and tactics, operations in Thailand and Singapore, along with associations with the 9/11 German terrorist cell. All of these were lies, induced by torture.

While Mr. Habib has not released a fact sheet to answer these charges, he has been aggressively pursuing a redress for the lies and crimes done to him. His lawsuit against the powerful Suleiman, who until recently was fully supported by the Obama administration during the Egyptian uprising, goes along with articles, speaking engagements, and his own book on his life and treatment in the U.S. gulag, My Story: the Tale of a Terrorist Who Wasn't. Mubarak's son, Gamal, is also named in the suit.

Habib has now spoken out on the claims cited in his Guantanamo assessment brief, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Referring to claims that he was planning the hijacking of a Quantas airplane, and other assertions in the Guantanamo document, the ABC article says:

Mr Habib, who was released from Guantanamo Bay without charge in 2005, says it is possible he admitted to things he did not do because Egyptian interrogators drugged him.

But he says he would not have said he was going to hijack a Qantas plane, because it is not true and he was being set up.

"Maybe some stuff happened by me under drugs, I'm not aware of it, to be honest," he said.

"But as to a wake up person, I'm talking as very awake and I know, I'm knowledge, what's going on, I never admit to anything, no."

What follows is a little from that book, from the section where he was tortured by Suleiman:

He [Suleiman] continued, 'If you tell us you knew about the attacks on the Trade Center on September 11th -- that you were involved and that you were planning further attacks when you were picked up -- if you tell us this, we can sell this information to the Americans for 10 million dollars. We'll give you 4 million and we'll keep the rest. You will then be under a witness-protection program...'

At this time, all I knew was that the World Trade Center in New York had been hit, but I had no idea about the other hit on the Pentagon and the failed hit on the White House. I had no idea of the immensity of 9/11...

I was sitting in a chair, hooded, with my hands handcuffed behind my back. He came up to me. His voice was deep and rough. He spoke to me in Egyptian and English. He said, 'Listen, you don't know who I am, but I am the one who has your life in his hands. Every singles person in this building has his life in my hands. I just make the decision.'

I said, 'I hope your decision is that you make me die straight away.'

'No, I don't want you to die now. I want you to die slowly.' He went on, 'I can't stay with you; my time is too valuable to stay here. You only have me to save you. I'm your saviour. You have to tell me everything, if your want to be saved. What do you say?'

'I have nothing to tell you'....

Then they took me to another room, where they tortured me relentlessly, stripping me naked and applying electric shocks everywhere on my body. The next thing I remember was seeing the general again. He came into a room with a man from Turkistan; he was a big man but was stopped over, because his hands were chained to the shackles of his feet, preventing him from standing upright.

'This guy is no use to us anymore. This is what is going to happen to you. We've had him for one hour, and this is what happens.

Suddenly, a guy they called Hanish, which means snake, came at the poor man from behind and gave him a terrible karate kick that sent him crashing across the room. A guard went over to shake him, but he didn't respond. Turning to the general, the guard said, 'Basha, I think he's dead.'

'Throw him away then. Let the dogs have him.'

They dragged the dead man out. [pp. 111-114]

The "New" Egypt: "Virginity Tests" for Protesters

Originally posted at MyFDL/Firedoglake

While I've little time to blog today, this particular story seemed especially worthy of promotion. Amnesty International has sent the following mailing to its supporters (emphasis in original):

The Egyptian military may have just hit a disturbing, new low: at least 18 women who were arrested during a peaceful protest in Tahrir Square on March 9 said they were forced to take "virginity tests".

Those women were threatened with charges of prostitution if they "failed" the tests. One woman, who said she was a virgin but whose test supposedly proved otherwise, was beaten and given electric shocks.

Journalist William Fisher at The Public Record rightly notes, "I know this sounds like something out of Torquemada in the 15th Century or Mengele in the 20th. But it’s neither. It’s post-Mubarak Egypt in the second decade of the 21st Century."

Twenty-year-old Salwa Hosseini told Amnesty International that after she was arrested and taken to a military prison in Heikstep, she was made, with the other women, to take off all her clothes to be searched by a female prison guard, in a room with two open doors and a window. During the strip search, Hosseini said male soldiers were looking into the room and taking pictures of the naked women.

The women were then subjected to ‘virginity tests’ in a different room by a man in a white coat....

According to information received by Amnesty International, one woman who said she was a virgin but whose test supposedly proved otherwise was beaten and given electric shocks.

‘Virginity tests’ are a form of torture when they are forced or coerced.

Amnesty International is asking people to write to Hillary Clinton to get her "to use her influence to demand immediate action." I am less sanguine that she will either a) do that, or b) really give a damn.

Those who thought the "revolution" was over don't understand that it's hardly begun, and can easily be derailed onto the same old paths. The military in Egypt is not to be trusted, and those who think it will reform that country are terribly mistaken. What will it take to end illusions in such ideas?

Guardian Reports on Egyptian Torture of Anti-Government Protesters

From Steven Soldz, who caught an important article by the UK Guardian. The seeming U.S. uncertainty over how to proceed on their Egyptian "crisis" is a cover for the organization of the repressive apparatus, caught off guard by the rebellion, and now aiming its counter-revolutionary terror forces at those who would protest dictatorship. I promise, you will see no U.S. protest over reports of Egyptian torture. Hell, Obama and Clinton support putting chief torturer Omar Suleiman in charge of the whole country!

Egyptian military torturing protesters, Guardian reports

The Egyptian military is using some of the billions given it by the US to arrest and torture the brave protesters, the Guardian reports. Perhaps the Obama administration wants an “orderly transition” in order to make sure to not disrupt the military and intelligence services torture capabilities, which have proven so useful to the US.

These accounts destroy the image of the wonderful army, strictly maintaining its neutrality. When observers aren’t looking, the army is brutalizing protesters.

Rather than an “orderly” transition, everything must be done to hasten the departure of this entire vile regime. Every day of delay is another day for the torturers to ply their trade.

Egypt’s army ‘involved in detentions and torture’

Military accused by human rights campaigners of targeting hundreds of anti-government protesters


By Chris McGreal

The Egyptian military has secretly detained hundreds and possibly thousands of suspected government opponents since mass protests against President Hosni Mubarak began, and at least some of these detainees have been tortured, according to testimony gathered by the Guardian.

The military has claimed to be neutral, merely keeping anti-Mubarak protesters and loyalists apart. But human rights campaigners say this is clearly no longer the case, accusing the army of involvement in both disappearances and torture – abuses Egyptians have for years associated with the notorious state security intelligence (SSI) but not the army.

The Guardian has spoken to detainees who say they have suffered extensive beatings and other abuses at the hands of the military in what appears to be an organised campaign of intimidation. Human rights groups have documented the use of electric shocks on some of those held by the army.

Egyptian human rights groups say families are desperately searching for missing relatives who have disappeared into army custody. Some of the detainees have been held inside the renowned Museum of Egyptian Antiquities on the edge of Tahrir Square. Those released have given graphic accounts of physical abuse by soldiers who accused them of acting for foreign powers, including Hamas and Israel.

Among those detained have been human rights activists, lawyers and journalists, but most have been released. However, Hossam Bahgat, director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights in Cairo, said hundreds, and possibly thousands, of ordinary people had “disappeared” into military custody across the country for no more than carrying a political flyer, attending the demonstrations or even the way they look. Many were still missing.

“Their range is very wide, from people who were at the protests or detained for breaking curfew to those who talked back at an army officer or were handed over to the army for looking suspicious or for looking like foreigners even if they were not,” he said. “It’s unusual and to the best of our knowledge it’s also unprecedented for the army to be doing this.” (more…)

Egyptian Workers Hold Key to Uprising, New Union Association Issues Call for General Strike

Originally posted at Firedoglake/MyFDL

While much analysis has focused on the youth-social network driven aspects of the recent uprising in Egypt, or on diplomatic and political maneuvers that thus far have left President Mubarak in office, and given even more power to the state repressive apparatus through the appointment of Intelligence Chief Omar Suleiman to the Vice Presidency, it is the Egyptian working class that holds the future of its country in its hands.

While the organized workers movement saw its unions gutted by state privatization and the gutting of union independence though the hated Law No. 100, which guaranteed that union representation would be strongly controlled by the state, recent events, particularly in strategic Suez, have shown that when the social weight of the workers is thrown into the balance, even all the machinations of Hillary Clinton's State Department will not be able to patch together Mubarak's state apparatus. The question then will be, what will follow it?

End of Hated Anti-Union Law No. 100 Preceded Uprising

Barely reported in the West, among the crowds at Tahrir Square last Sunday, a new trade union confederation was announced, the Federation of Egyptian Trade Unions (FETU), which immediately issued a call for a general-strike. The call has been widely taken up, and many reports now link the uprising to unity with the workers, particularly in Suez, where the battle has been fought most intensely with state police. The new confederation has the support of the International Trades Union Confederation and the AFL-CIO.

The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that the general strike call initiated from workers in Suez. Whoever initiated it, the new trade union organizations are jumping on board.

Law No. 100 has regulated union internal activities since 1993, by setting quotas for attendance for elections to union offices, and putting judicial controls on unions that cannot meet the stringent requirements. The FETU leadership includes the head of the Real Estate Tax Authority Workers union, or RETA, the first independent union in Egypt in over 50 years. RETA itself is not recognized by the Egyptian state. The Center for Trade Union and Workers Services (CTUWS), also a part of the new FETU, had its headquarters closed by the government in 2007, and was only allowed to reopen in July 2008.

In a judicial action that threw Egyptian union politics into turmoil, the Egyptian Gazette reported on Jan. 6 of this year that Egypt's Constitutional Court had recently thrown out Law No. 100, "citing legal and logical reasons for its verdict."

The annulment of the law, however, has stirred up a hornet’s nest in the professional unions as some members called for the cancellation of the latest election results in their associations, while others stuck firmly to these election results and said the law could not be applied in retrospect.

“Law No. 100 was so bad that the professional unions suffered extreme stagnation because of it,” said Mohamed Abul Nour, a veteran Bar Association member.

“The law did away with all chances for holding fair elections inside these unions,” he told The Egyptian Gazette in an interview. [Due to the fact that Internet access to the Gazette site appears blocked, I am relying on Google cache pages, which may become outdated in the near future.]

Meanwhile, layoffs of Egyptian workers in the Suez industrial zone have been increasing of late, with international companies replacing these workers with foreign imported workers from India and Thailand, causing much resentment, and even supposed notice from the Egyptian government. Now, companies are starting to pull foreign workers out of the area, as the uprising and protest in Egypt does not appear to be dying down and thousands of foreign workers and other foreign nationals, including from the U.S., are crowding Cairo airport trying to get out of the country before a feared explosion.

Suez Center of Workers Protests

The contradictions of Egyptian society are most intense in the port city of Suez, home to the Suez Canal, and a major industrial center. As a recent Associated Press story put it:

... Mostafa Khaled, 21, said he wasn't looking forward to graduating from school this year, even in a city where 100 factories produce everything from steel to fabrics, generating $5 billion a year in tax revenue for the national government.

"Suez brings in the highest profit of all the cities in Egypt to the country and yet look at us - we are close to begging. We have no jobs, we scrounge to feed our families," Khaled said. "We don't want Mubarak, we don't want this government, we want our basic human rights."

While some are looking to the new Egyptian unions to lead the way, their linkages to the AFL-CIO may amount to an attempt to rein in or control militancy among workers, especially as news accounts note the presence of leftists, and not just Islamists, among the protesters. The purges of the Egyptian unions themselves were meant to limit the influence of not just the Muslim Brotherhood or other Islamist groups, but of radicals in the union movement.

U.S. Military in Close Contact with Egyptian Officers

The situation in Egypt is quite fluid, and the U.S. government is certain to be a major player in events, or try to be. The L.A. Times reported yesterday that "top Pentagon officials" were in close telephone contact with "their Egyptian counterparts." It is not out of the question that sooner or later the U.S. will call upon their Egyptian military associates to forcibly quell the demonstrators and lockdown the society, either under Mubarak, or under some other new puppet leader, possibly Suleiman himself.

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates spoke to Egyptian Defense Minister Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, said Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell, who would not provide details of their conversation.

Adm. Michael G. Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also spoke with Lt. Gen. Sami Hafez Enan, the chief of staff of the Egyptian armed forces.

In the 10-minute call, "both men reaffirmed their desire to see the partnership between our two militaries continue," said Capt. John Kirby, Mullen's spokesman.

The U.S. has been a primary economic and military backer of Mubarak's government, seeing it as a central pillar of its Middle Eastern policy, even if that meant turning a mostly blind eye, or making perfunctory complaints about human rights abuses. Perfunctory they certainly were, because the U.S. itself utilized Egyptian torturers as part of the rendition program involved in the interrogation and torture of hundreds, if not thousands, of "war on terror" prisoners caught by the U.S. and its allies.

The last thing the U.S. wants to see is the rebirth of a strong and fully-independent workers movement in the Middle East. In this they may be joined by the autocrats of the other regimes, including the rulers of Saudi Arabia, where trade unions and strikes are banned. Nor, despite some cheering from afar, would trade union leaders in the United States like to see any kind of union militancy spill back past U.S. borders, where the complacency and unimaginative leadership of the U.S. labor movement has presided over the long-term decline in workers salaries and standard of living, as overall union membership continues to shrink.

As we watch events unfold in Egypt, watch closely what happens in the labor movement. While the "street" may move according to news from Twitter and other social networking sites, the only social force with both the economic and social leverage to combat the military, given the power of the latter, is the labor movement, which has the potential to provide leadership to the workers in the oil fields, the factories, the ports, and the Canal itself.

The leadership of that movement was eviscerated by the government over many years, but that may mean that new leaders and forces, ones dedicated to completely rooting out the brutal, torture-loving dictatorship once and for all, can come to the fore.

Al Jazeera English: Live Stream for News on Egyptian Uprising

Al Jazeera English: Live Stream

The U.S. media has largely boycotted AJE. See Ryan Grim's story at Huffington Post: 

Other than in a handful of pockets across the U.S. - including Ohio, Vermont and Washington, D.C. - cable carriers do not give viewers the choice of watching Al Jazeera. That corporate censorship comes as American diplomats harshly criticize the Egyptian government for blocking Internet communication inside the country and as Egypt attempts to block Al Jazeera from broadcasting.

The result of the Al Jazeera English blackout in the United States has been a surge in traffic to the media outlet's website, where footage can be seen streaming live. The last 24 hours have seen a two-and-a-half thousand percent increase in web traffic, Tony Burman, head of North American strategies for Al Jazeera English, told HuffPost. Sixty percent of that traffic, he said, has come from the United States.

British Jews Decry Israel's Holocaust-like Attack

From Stephen Soldz's blog, which has switched into high-gear coverage of the criminal and ongoing attack by Israeli military forces on the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip:

The Guardian has published an important letter from over 70 British Jews objecting to the war on Gaza and making the natural connection with the Warsaw Ghetto. They call for “a programme of boycott, divestment and sanctions”:

We the undersigned are all of Jewish origin. When we see the dead and bloodied bodies of young children, the cutting off of water, electricity and food, we are reminded of the siege of the Warsaw Ghetto. When Dov Weisglass, an adviser to the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, talked of putting Gazans “on a diet” and the deputy defence minister, Matan Vilnai, talked about the Palestinians experiencing “a bigger shoah” (holocaust), this reminds us of Governor General Hans Frank in Nazi-occupied Poland, who spoke of “death by hunger”.

The real reason for the attack on Gaza is that Israel is only willing to deal with Palestinian quislings. The main crime of Hamas is not terrorism but its refusal to accept becoming a pawn in the hands of the Israeli occupation regime in Palestine.

The decision last month by the EU council to upgrade relations with Israel, without any specific conditions on human rights, has encouraged further Israeli aggression. The time for appeasing Israel is long past. As a first step, Britain must withdraw the British ambassador to Israel and, as with apartheid South Africa, embark on a programme of boycott, divestment and sanctions.

Ben Birnberg, Prof Haim Bresheeth, Deborah Fink, Bella Freud, Tony Greenstein, Abe Hayeem, Prof Adah Kay, Yehudit Keshet, Dr Les Levidow, Prof Yosefa Loshitzky, Prof Moshe Machover, Miriam Margolyes, Prof Jonathan Rosenhead and 65 others

Meanwhile, the latest news from Gaza continues to be terribly grim. From today's New York Times:

JERUSALEM — Israeli troops pushed into a heavily populated area of Gaza City from the south on Sunday in fierce fighting as senior Israeli officials said that they believe the Hamas military wing is beginning to crack, and that Hamas leaders inside Gaza are looking for a cease-fire....

According to Palestinian Ministry of Health figures on Sunday, nearly 900 Palestinians have died so far in the conflict, including 275 children and 93 women. The figure does not include complete figures for Hamas fighters, who have not been brought to hospitals....

Three rockets were fired from Gaza at Israel on Sunday morning, Israeli Army radio said. Two exploded near Beersheva, injuring several people. The third hit empty land....

In a press conference on Sunday, a senior United Nations official, Maxwell Gaylard, the deputy special coordinator for UNSCO, the Office of the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, said that the humanitarian situation for Gaza’s 1.5 million people is deteriorating.

“People are terrified, hungry, thirsty and traumatized,” he said. “The civilian population is caught in the middle of this conflict,” he said, and added: “This is a conflict where the civilian population has nowhere to flee.”

The near-total impotence of the forces of peace, who rely on appeals to the same criminals that either conduct the atrocities, or to those political forces that back them, especially the U.S. government, could not be clearer. Yet someone needs to do something, and the large rallies internationally opposing the Israel attack and atrocities represent a genuine effort to express outrage and some kind of attempt to do something to mobilize public opinion.

Now Reuters reports from Cairo that Egyptian police have arrested 21 members of the Muslim Brotherhood after a rally was held in protest against Israel's offensive.

The Egyptian government and security agencies have been eager to suppress protests against the Israeli attacks on Gaza, in which protesters frequently condemn the government for what they see as its complicity in the blockade of the coastal strip.

In recent days protesters have called for the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador to Cairo, and for Egypt to open its Rafah border crossing with Gaza to allow Palestinians to flee the 16-day onslaught which has killed 869 people.

Up to 40 protesters may have been arrested at rallies in London, and similar arrests have taken place in protests from Paris to Denmark. Numerous protests across the United States, from Times Square and Chestnut Hill/Boston to Los Angeles/Westwood and San Francisco, have been mostly peaceful, but controversy and tension between pro-Israeli groups or individuals and those who defend the Palestinians have broken out at times. The intensity of the conflict in Gaza, and the agony over the attack upon innocent civilians with loss of life in the hundreds, has ratcheted up feelings among concerned citizens around the world.

Protesters and political activists should add to their list of demands the release of all protesters and activists arrested for protesting Israel's criminal assault.

Another Perspective: Torture by Other Countries

Sometimes I wonder, as this is a blog dedicated to exposing and reforming the use of torture by the U.S. government, whether readers of this blog realize to what a great extent torture is practiced by countries other than the United States. The fact is that torture is practiced by many other countries. A websearch turns up the following from InformationPlease.com:

According to Human Rights Watch (www.hrw.org), the use of torture was documented in the following countries in 2004 and 2005: China, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Malaysia, Morocco, Nepal, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Syria, Turkey, Uganda, and Uzbekistan.

Amnesty International's Annual Report for 2008 lists many other countries where torture and other human rights violations occur on a not irregular basis. These include, among others, Myanmar (Burma), Sudan, Belarus, and Afghanistan (where "violations of international humanitarian and human rights law were committed with impunity by all parties, including Afghan and international security forces and insurgent groups," and where U.S. coalition forces continue to turn over prisoners to the Afghan National Directorate of Security, "despite allegations of torture and other ill-treatment by the NDS".)

One country worth examining in a bit more depth is Egypt, as it exemplifies the effects of an out of control use of torture upon the civil life of a society. A Human Rights Watch article in February 2005 reported:

Human Rights Watch interviewed several former detainees who provided credible accounts of torture they underwent at the hands of SSI [State Security Investigation service] interrogators. Others spoke of seeing fellow detainees who had been badly tortured, and hearing the screams of those being abused. Given that those most likely to have been tortured are among the hundreds if not thousands of persons still in detention, and that many of those released fear the possible consequences of meeting with independent human rights monitors, Human Rights Watch believes that torture and ill-treatment by the SSI has been widespread in connection with the investigations into the Taba attacks. [The Taba attacks concerned a terrible series of bombings of tourist areas, including the Taba Hilton hotel in near the Egyptian-Israeli border in October 2004.]

A HRW "briefing paper" a year earlier described the terrible cost torture had wrought upon Egyptian society:

Torture in Egypt is a widespread and persistent phenomenon. Security forces and the police routinely torture or ill-treat detainees, particularly during interrogation. In most cases, officials torture detainees to obtain information and coerce confessions, occasionally leading to death in custody. In some cases, officials use torture detainees to punish, intimidate, or humiliate. Police also detain and torture family members to obtain information or confessions from a relative, or to force a wanted relative to surrender.

While torture in Egypt has typically been used against political dissidents, in recent years it has become epidemic, affecting large numbers of ordinary citizens who find themselves in police custody as suspects or in connection with criminal investigations. The Egyptian authorities do not investigate the great majority of allegations of torture despite their obligation to do so under Egyptian and international law. In the few cases where officers have been prosecuted for torture or ill-treatment, charges were often inappropriately lenient and penalties inadequate. This lack of effective public accountability and transparency has led to a culture of impunity.

The other countries that practice torture are not always outside Western Europe. Great Britain scandalously tortured IRA prisoners at Long Kesh internment camp in the 1960s-1970s, utilizing techniques such as hooding, sensory deprivation, and isolation that are remarkably similar to those practiced by the United States, as revealed in recent exposes the past five years or so. In the early 1960s, the French were charged with hideous use of torture against Algerian "insurgents".

The U.S. State Department produces Reports on Human Rights of many countries around the world -- I often utilize these reports when doing research on U.S. asylum applicants for my work -- and despite some shortcomings, the State Department reports often document human rights violations, including torture, in many countries around the world. Furthermore, they document the tremendous legal and reporting difficulties experienced by workers of NGOs [Non-Governmental Organizations] in those countries when they seek to expose or remedy these wrongs, including harassment, jailing, even disappearances of such workers.

It's important to note that despite its faults and its struggles the United States remains a country where, even if it is difficult to penetrate the mass media on this subject, journalists, bloggers, NGO organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, etc. do not experience this kind of heavy-handed governmental oppression, at least not as a normal occurrence. And then, too, despite the paucity of coverage in the U.S. press, as readers of this blog know, some important coverage does occur here, coverage that is essential in providing much of what we know about the fight against torture. Furthermore, it seems that within the military and even the intelligence agencies, there are those individuals who do not go along with the misuse of interrogation practices at Guantanamo and elsewhere. Alberto Mora is one such individual who comes to mind. Retired Major General Antonio Taguba is another.

Hence, it was an international embarrassment when some months back an internal training manual developed by the Canadian foreign affairs department labeled the United States as a country where foreigners risked torture, relying on reports of maltreatment in the U.S. prison at Guatanamo, Abu Ghraib, and "black site" prisons. The U.S. protested, and the Canadian government made moves to remove the U.S. from such a list.

The United States is also a major destination for torture victims seeking asylum from around the world. I know. I've worked personally with a fair number of these victims. While the U.S. has tightened the procedures for gaining asylum in the U.S., making them too restrictive, many thousands still find refuge in this country, sometimes from the very countries that remain U.S. allies, some of which have also been harshly criticized by the same State Department reports noted above. Making matters even stranger, many asylum refugees are torture victims fleeing the same countries to which the U.S. sent foreign prisoners in the "war on terror" via "extraordinary rendition", where they then experienced torture (such as Maher Ahar). The entire situation is so irrational, it almost seems invented by a madman trying to confuse any reasonable person into a state of insensibility.

The fight against torture is a world-wide struggle. One major outcome of that political fight was solidified with the production of the United Nations Convention Against Torture, to which the U.S. is a signatory. (The U.S. ratified the CAT with a number of reservations that unfortunately complicate the enforcement of the CAT when it concerns U.S. possible violations.)

As a statement on Worldwide Torture by Human Rights Watch puts it:

This is a critical time to insist on revelation of the full extent of torture and related abuses by U.S. authorities and to press for prosecution of those responsible. It is also a critical time to press other governments, many of which have been quick to condemn the U.S. for its actions at Abu Ghraib, to investigate and prosecute torture and mistreatment in their own holding cells, detention facilities, and prisons.