War Handwavium

So, an overview of the elections and protests going on in Iran at the moment.

The 2009 Iranian presidential race was between the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and a reformist challenger, Mir-Hossein Mousavi.

During the campaign, Mousavi said he wanted to allow privately owned television stations (currently all state owned), to transfer the control of law enforcement from the Supreme Leader to the President (the president is elected, the Supreme Leader is not), to dismantle Iran’s “Moral Police”, to review any laws that discriminate against women, to boost Iran’s international standing by reducing tension with other nations.

Mousavi acknowleges the facts of the Holocaust while Ahmadinejad questions whether the Holocaust really happenend.

Ahmadinejad was first elected president in 2005. He is critical of the US and Israel, and is pushing Iran’s nuclear program. Human Rights Watch reports that human rights in Iran have deteriorated since Ahmadinejad became president. Prisoners are tortured. Prisoners are held in secret prisons. They also report that Ahmadinejad shows no tolerance for peaceful protests and gatherings.

In 2006, Ahmadinejad forced numerous scientists and professors to resign or retire. It has been referred to as “second cultural revolution”. In December 2006, students protested Ahmadinejad during a speech he was giving at a university, shouting “Death to the dictator”, burning pictures of Ahmadinejad, and setting off firecrackers.

Ahmadinejad has been accused of corruption, mismanagement, and discrimination.

This isn’t to say that Mousavi is the perfect candidate, but he seems to have the possibility of improving conditions in Iran. As for America’s immediate interest, Iran’s nuclear program, both Ahmadinejad and Mousavi support the nuclear program.

Probably more importantly, though, Iran’s President is not the policy maker in Iran, the Supreme Leader is. Iran has had only two Supreme Leaders. The first started in 1979, during the Iranian Revolution, and his name was Ruhollah Khomeini, with the title Ayatollah. The Ayatollah Khomeini was supreme leader of Iran from 1979 until 1989, when he died. Ali Khamenei was then appointed Supreme Leader of Iran, and has remained in that position ever since. The Supreme Leader is considered as the ultimate head of the Iranian political and governmental establishment, above that of Iran’s president. According to the constitution, he has the last say in internal and foreign policies, control of all of the armed forces, and control of state broadcast. The head of the Judicial branch is also directly appointed by him.

Anyone hoping that Iran will radically shift in its policies if Mousavi replaces Ahmadinejad may be having too high of expectations. So long as Iran is a theocracy with a cleric being it’s non-elected Supreme Leader, Iran can only change so much.

The 12 June 2009 Iranian presidential election results were 63% of the votes for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and 34% for Mir-Hossein Mousavi. Accusations of election fraud has been thrown about. Mousavi’s supporters have slogans including “Where is my vote”. On 15 June 2009, Mousavi made his first post-election appearance with hundreds of thousands of his supporters in a rally in Tehran, despite being warned by state officials that any such rally would be illegal.

Iranian police have been cracking down on protesters, arresting more than 100 prominent anti-government figures. The police have also opened fire on protesters. As of 16 June 2009, there have been 20 confirmed deaths. The government has tried to quell the protests by blocking internet sites, including facebook, youtube, and twitter. Text messaging has been blocked. Foreign journalists have never had much access inside Iran, but since the protests, Iran has arrested a number of foreign journalists and confiscated their tapes.

Al Jazeera has described the situation as the “biggest unrest since the 1979 revolution.”

Now, I’m not sure if Mousavi won the election and Ahmadinejad stole it through election fraud, or if Ahmadinejad really did win the election. The country is an Islamic theocracy. About 77% of the population is literate. Considering that America is 99% literate and there is still a strong religious political presence in the US that pushes for Creationism to be taught in public schools, it isn’t beyond the realm of possibility that a right wing hardliner like Ahmadinejad really did get a majority of the vote. I mean, America reelected Bush in 2004, so crazy people win elections all the time.

But I’m not sure if that is the deciding factor here. In fact, I’m pretty sure it has a good chance of being completely irrelevant. It was a student revolution in 1979, among other things, that brought about the Iranian revolution against the corrupt and evil Shah of Iran. If Ahmadinejad is viewed as corrupt and evil by enough Iranians, then the election results won’t really matter. The Iranian government cracking down on protests to the point of killing protesters, shutting down communications, and arresting and black-bagging critics, certainly won’t help their standing in public opinion.

The difference between this event and the 1979 revolution, though, is that there is no political power vacuum yet. In 1979, the Shah was out of Iran when the revolution happened, and the military and police did not oppose the revolution. As of now, the police are cracking down on dissidents, Ahmadinejad is still president, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is still the Supreme Ruler, and the theocracy is still in power.

The question is whether or not the current supporters of Mousavi can create enough of a sea-change in Iran to make any lasting change in Iran’s political landscape. I don’t have the answer to that question. It certainly looks like it is possible. At this point, I think all we can do is watch and cross our fingers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_presidential_election,_2009

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Ahmadinejad

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mir-Hossein_Mousavi

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/06/2009613181040285185.html

Obama is pushing to stop the release of torture photos. He says it’s because the photos will be a recruiting poster for terrorists and American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan will be killed.

CQPolitics has an article today (16 June 2009) that questions this claim with evidence. The Abu Ghraib photos were first seen on “60 Minutes” on 28 April 2004. The image above shows American deaths in Iraq over time. For 2004, the numbers of dead/wounded are:

January: 47/188
February: 19/150
March: 52/323
April: 136/1214
28 April 2004: Photos appear on “60 Minutes”
May: 80/757
June: 42/589
July: 54/552

The one thing these numbers show is that the number of deaths and wounded drop after the photos are released. It is doubtful that the photos caused the numbers to drop, but to say the photos caused the number of attacks to rise would first require the numbers to actually be higher from before to after, and second would require that the photos were what actually caused the rise in numbers.

Since the numbers actually fell after the photos were made public, one cannot assert that the release of photos would cause attacks to rise without disregard to the historical evidence to the contrary.

The CQ Politics article states:

Defense Department data and independent experts confirm there is no clear link between the Abu Ghraib scandal and violence in Iraq.

Drawing a connection between the Abu Ghraib photos and the lethal violence that occurred afterward in Iraq “is opinion, not analysis,” said Anthony H. Cordesman, a military expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Simpler reasons exist for why Obama does not want the photos of Americans torturing Iraqi prisoners to be released than the fabrication that it will cause more attacks. Americans might finally demand that Obama prosecute Americans who committed torture and the Bush administration people who authorized torture. And Obama has said repeatedly that he wants to “look forward, not back” on torture. He has made clear that he doesn’t want to investigate criminal activity.

And though Obama says he doesn’t want the photos released because of attacks, the facts don’t support that notion. So, it might be more accurate to say that Obama doesn’t want to release the photos so he doesn’t have to prosecute the people who committed and authorized torture.

http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?docID=news-000003143986&cpage=1

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/iraq_casualties.htm

Netahyahu has just made a speech conceding to the theoretical possibility of a future Palestinian state. He then refused to back down on a key issue that will hinder a two-state solution from becoming real by refusing to stop Israel’s expansion of illegal Jewish settlements on Palestinian land.

Netanyahu also stated his demand for Israel to control all of Jeruselum, despite the fact that the road-map for peace originally agreed to by Israel and Palestinians left Jeruselum an international city.

Netanyahu also stated that Palestinians must recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, signaling that he has no intention of allowing Palestinians to return to their homes lost inside Israel.

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who brokered the landmark 1979 treaty between Egypt and Israel, criticized key points in the speech — Netanyahu’s intention to keep all of Jerusalem and his demand for recognition of Israel as a Jewish state. Carter reserved his harshest words for settlements. “If Israeli continues to expand the settlements,” he said, “then the prospects for peace will be greatly diminished, if not made almost impossible.”

Netanyahu currently has a coalition government in Israel. Israel’s government works by having a number of seats (120), and each seat gets to pick who they want to support as Prime Minister of Israel. Currently, Israel’s government is filled with hard-right nationalists and fascists, and it is these seats (65 of the 120) that Netanyahu built his coalition government on. If Netayahu does anythign that the people holding these seats don’t like, they can withdraw their support, and if the support drops far enough, a contender can call for a vote of confidence, possibly causing Netanyahu to lose his job as Prime Minister.

Suffice it to say, Netanyahu’s power is from the most radical, right-wing nationalistic and fascist elements in Israel, and he must appease them or lose power. There are more moderate elements in Israel, and in the government, but with the current coalition government built the way it is, there is no way that America or anyone else in the world can reasonably expect Netanyahu to voluntarily make peace with the Palestinians. Israel, and Netayahu, will have to be dragged kicking and screaming to make peace with the Palestinians.

And if Obama doesn’t start dragging, then there is no hope for any peace while Obama is still in office.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090615/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_israel_palestinians

17 Chinese prisoners held in Guantanamo for years, having been declared innocent by the American military’s own review system back in 2005, were finally released to the island nation of Palau in 2009.

The prisoners were Uighur (Uhghur), an ethnic group in central Asia. The Chinese government has often referred to Uyghur nationalists as “terrorists”. None of the Uyghurs wanted to be returned to China for fear of being executed. The United States declined to grant the Uyghurs political asylum, or to allow them parole, and instead continued to imprison them at Guantanamo for years after declaring them innocent. The US had transferred some Uighur’s to Albania. But China threatened Albania and Albania said it would not take any more Uighurs.

So the United States promised the tiny island nation of Palau a lot of money 200 million dollars in exchange for Palau taking 17 of the Uighur from Guantanamo. The entire population of Palau is 20,000 people. Two hundred million dollars is a lot of money for a country that small. Not surprisingly, on 10 June 2009, Palau agreed to take the Uighurs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_captives_in_Guantanamo

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2009/06/2009610224138374759.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_people

Khalid El-Masri was a German citizen when he was detained on 31 December 2003 by Macedonian officials because his name was on a terrorist list. American security officials, described as a “black snatch team”, renditioned El-Masri on 24 January 2004.

El-Masri alleges that they beat him, stripped him naked, drugged him, and gave him an enema. He was then dressed in a diaper and a jumpsuit, and flown to Baghdad, then immediately to “the salt pit”, a covert CIA interrogation center in Afghanistan. El-Masri states that he was beaten and sodomized while in American custody.

In March, 2004, El-Masri went on a hunger strike to demand that he be given due process. He managed to get a meeting with the prison director and a CIA officer known as “The Boss”. They conceded he should not be imprisoned but refused to release him.

28 May 2004, El-Masri was released in the middle of the night on a desolate road in Albania with no funds to get home.

December 2005, El-Masri described an account of this whole experience in the Los Angeles Times.
http://articles.latimes.com/2005/dec/18/opinion/oe-masri18

December 2005, the ACLU helps El-Masri file suit in the USA against former CIA director George Tenet and the owners of the private jets, leased to the US government, that the CIA used to transport him. May 2006, Federal District Judge T.S. Ellis, III dismissed the lawsuit, invoking the “state secrets privilege”. June 2007 the ACLU filed a petition for certiorari at the U.S. Supreme Court. October 2007, the petition was denied by the Supreme Court without comment.

The “state secret” that the government is apparently protecting? The fact that America kidnaps and tortures people.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khaled_el-Masri

I succumbed to Bush’s war handwavium without realizing it. The Bush administration refused to use the term “prisoners” because it would tie into the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war. Instead, Bush and his pals invented a non-existent class of humans called “detainees” who were not Geneva Convention “prisoners” of war. Thereby justifying through legal handwavium that these human beings captured during a time of war and held in American prisons were not prisoners of war.

It is similar in concept to the way Israel refuses to refer to the West Band and Gaza Strip as “occupied territories” because the Geneva Convention also has requirements as to how a military force must treat civilians in an occupied territory. Israel doesn’t want to follow these requirements, and indeed, has not followed these requirements since it captured and occupied these territories since the 1967 war. So Israel calls them “disputed” territories, not “occupied”, because they don’t want the linguistic connection to the Geneva Convention. Because they haven’t been following the Geneva Convention.

But today, I realized I have been duped. I’ve been referring to people being held in Guantanamo as “detainees” rather than “prisoners”. So, going forward, I will be refering to the people held in Guantanamo, and the even larger number of people held in Bagram, Afghanistan, as “prisoners”. It is an effort to remove the war handwavium put in place by the Bush administration and continued by Obama.

They are prisoners, not “detainees”.

The ACLU is starting a campaign to restore the rule of law in America. They’ve brought together numerous documents showing the extent that Americans committed torture and the suspension of rule of law to cover up that torture.

http://aclu.org/accountability/

They have a massive list of torture documents obtained through the Freedom Of Information Act.

http://aclu.org/accountability/released.html

They have a list of all the high level Bush administration officials who had a hand in creating America’s torture program.

http://aclu.org/accountability/tortureprogram.html

And they have a list of things that citizens can do to help restore the rule of law in America.

http://aclu.org/accountability/action.html

Good stuff.

As always, you can write your representatives here:

http://www.congress.org/congressorg/officials/congress/?lvl=C

After more than 7 years, Lakhdar Boumediene was released from Guantanamo on May 15, 2009.

He had worked in Sarajevo for a humanitarian organization when he was picked up by the Bosnians in October of 2001. The US had told the Bosnians that he and five other Algerians were planning to bomb the US embassy. Bosnians said that U.S. officials exerted heavy pressure to round up suspects, threatening to withdraw U.S. peacekeeping troops if Bosnian officials didn’t act. After 3 months of investigations, the Bosnian supreme court said there was no evidence of any bombing and ordered their release. The six were picked up by US personel and transferred to Guantanamo.

In late 2004, the six men were sent before Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) of three military officers. The CSRTs concluded that the six men were properly classified as “enemy combatants” based on classified evidence, which justified their contineud detention at Guantanamo. In 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008, US military tribunals declared that Boumediene and the other five men were still a threat and needed to be kept as prisoners.

Three British prisoners at Guantanamo described how the Algerians were treated:

They were treated particularly badly. They were moved every two hours. They were kept naked in their cells. They were taken to interrogation for hours on end. They were short shackled for sometimes days on end. They were deprived of their sleep. They never got letters, nor books, nor reading materials. The Bosnians had the same interrogators for a while as we did and so we knew the names which were the same as ours and they were given a very hard time by those. They told us that the interrogators said if they didn’t cooperate that they could ensure that something would happen to their families in Algeria and in Bosnia.

In 2006, The Washington Post wrote an article about the Algerian Six, stating that the original allegations about the embassy attack have been discredited and dropped but that the men were still being held. U.S. officials have pressed Algeria to take back the prisoners on the condition that they be confined or kept under surveillance there. The Post reports that the Pentagon knows the men are not guilty but is unwilling to let them go free because that would be an acknowledgment of a grave error.

At one point, the US military accused one of the Algerian Six of assisting Bin Ladin in Tora Bora in December of 2001. But he was being held by the Bosnian police at the time. Later, the US accused him of having ties to Hamas because of the ring he wore. But it was an anniversy ring common to Bosnian muslims.

The Defense Department declined to answer specific questions about the case, saying that some evidence against the men remains classified.

In 2005, when Bosnia asked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to have the six men returned to Bosnia, Rice replied that it was not possible to free the six Algerians because “they still possess important intelligence data” and pose a threat to the security of the United States.

What is important to note here is how much the US government used the “We have evidence to prove their guilt, but we can’t show you because it’s classified, so you’ll just have to trust us” approach to justify keeping these six innocent men in prison for over 7 years. What’s important to note is that the military “tribunals” that were claimed to be superior to civilian courts year after year declared these men to be a threat and insisted on their continued imprisonment. What’s important to note just how much of a nightmare the US created simply becaues bureaucrats and military personel were willing to imprison innocent men simply to cover their own asses.

And why this is important to note is because Obama is using the exact same excuses today to justify keeping people imprisoned in Guantanamo. We cannot convict these men in any court of law that has any requirement for real evidence, so Obama tells us we must create a different kind of system that doesn’t need evidence to keep human beings imprisoned indefinitely. Trust us, Obama says, this is a different kind of extra-judicial process. Trust us, Obama says, we won’t imprison anyone who is innocent. And yet, these exact same excuses were used to justify torturing hundreds of innocent people at Guantanamo for years and years.

Boumediene says he wants to sue Bush and the others in the US government who made sure he stayed imprisoned in Guantanamo. Whether Obama has the courage to let the truth of Boumediene’s tale be known has yet to be seen. Whether Obama has the courage to the level of transparancy that would be needed to allow Boumediene to get justice in a court of law remains to be seen as well. When Obama says that now is the time to look forward, not back, he’s asking you to ignore Boumediene. He’s asking you to pretend that the US didn’t wrongly imprison and torture Boumediene for the last 7 years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakhdar_Boumediene

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algerian_Six

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/20/AR2006082000660_pf.html

For all you ignorant folks who are mad at Obama for apologizing to Iran because you don’t think we did anything wrong:

It’s called Operation Ajax. Learn about it. Deal with it.

In 1950’s, Iran had a democratically elected government. At that time, they were also under a colonial relic with the British that gave all (no, really, ALL) of Iran’s oil to Britain, and Britain paid Iran a pittance. And the Iranians decided it was their oil and they should get the money for it.

The British responded by telling the US that Iran was turning communist, which plugged into the cold war fear that gripped America in the 50’s. So, the US sent the CIA over to Iran and they purchased a revolution and installed a puppet dictator, the Shah of Iran.

The Shah ruled Iran for a quarter century. He stayed in power because America made certain that he had money and military equipment to crush any opposition. By the 1970’s, the Shah’s secret police had tens of thousands of Iranians in secret prisons and was torturing them to force their compliance and make the rest of the Iranian population think twice about opposing his rule.

In 1979, the Iranians had had enough and overthrew the Shah’s government while he was out of the country. The Iranian Revolution was supported by many Iranians across the political spectrum. The Iranians demanded that the Shah be returned to Iran to stand trial for his crimes of torture and murder. But the United States offered to host the Shah, which incensed the Iranians and reminded them of who had put the Shah in power in the first place. It was at this time that Iranians stormed the Embassy and took the Americans there hostage.

The Iranian students who stormed the embassy had three demands. The return of the Shah to Iran. That the US apologize for the 1953 overthrow of the democratic government of Iran. That the US release Iranian assets currently frozen in the US.

The US did none of those things.

The US overthrew the democratic government of Iran in 1953 and installed the ruthless dictator the Shah of Iran for 25 years. This dictator radicallized the Iranian people and eventually sparked the Iranian Revolution which overthrew the Shah. The resulting power vacuum was eventually filled by the Ayatollah Khomeini and the radical religious extremists that followed him.

This is what America did. This is the mess that America created. If you don’t think America should apologize for these actions and you don’t think Iran should need an apology, just imagine if our worst enemy came into America in 1953, overthrew our goverment, installed a dictator who tortured tens of thousands of people over 25 years. Just imagine that the Soviet Union somehow sent KGB spies who managed to overthrow Eisenhower and install a puppet government. Do you think Americans might be a little mad after 25 years of oppression? Do you think Americans might be a little mad if some foreign country was taking all our oil and paying us nothing for it?

The founding fathers fought the British back around 1776 because they were taxing our tea. Originally, there was a large portion of “loyalists”, people loyal to Britain, in the colonies. In earlier times, the “revolution” against the British was called “Boston’s fight” by colonialists in other parts of the land who wanted to remain British subjects. The Boston Massacre, an incident in which British troops killed 5 colonialists, radicalized a huge swath of the colonies against Britain.

The difference was that we were luckier than the Iranians after our revolution. The original constitutional convention was mostly a fight between state’s power and federal power. The constitution is mainly a functional document about who has power and how they get it. The Bill of Rights wasn’t added until later when some states refused to sign without it. There were some mention of our first president, George Washington, becoming the next “King George”. And our constitution wasn’t exactly the great document of freedom that we like to think of today: white male land owners had the political power. Women couldn’t vote. Blacks couldn’t vote. The instutition of slavery was codified into the Constitution as “other persons”.

It took America another hundred years to finally face the immorality of slavery, and even then, it took a civil war because half the country didn’t want to give it up. It took another hundred years before blacks had anything resembling true equality. Women didn’t get to vote until 1920.

America had a direct hand in overthrowing the democratic government of Iran in 1953. If you think the Iranian’s were supposed to just roll over and accept that, you don’t even know how our own nation began.

I think it contains every single excuse used by a torture apologist.

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2009/06/torture-apologia-chart-by-batocchio-it.html