What does justice look like in Cambodia?
Khmer children posing in front of a mass grave in Cambodia's notorious "Killing Fields." Many children hang around this and other memorial sites while faking sad faces so that affected tourists will give them money. We asked them to act like themselves.
I was in Cambodia in 2006 working with a small, grass-roots, non-profit organization dedicated to street children. One day while heading to a village located on the outskirts of Phnom Penh (Cambodia’s capital), I passed by the massive reconstruction site of what was to become the UN backed Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC). My companion who had been living in Cambodia for the past several years scoffed at the site:
They are wasting all that money to prosecute a few old men who will be dead soon. But you’ve seen how the majority of Khmer people live today.
According to the official website, this court was created to try “serious crimes committed during the Khmer Rouge regime 1975-1979.” It became fully operational in 2007.
Orchestrated by the Pol Pot led Khmer Rouge, the Cambodian genocide resulted in the deaths of nearly 2 million Cambodians, beginning with the country’s elite and educated. Many were tortured and executed—hundreds of thousands died of starvation. Pol Pot’s vision of turning Cambodia into a peasant farming society involved herding the country’s educated and upper class citizens (although the poor were certainly not exempt if they were suspected of being enemies of the state) into the countryside to work in what later become known as the notorious “Killing Fields.” Thirty years later the United Nations has spent tens of millions of dollars on the ECCC project, which is a complex mix of international and domestic law and only composed of both international and Cambodian staff because Cambodians lobbied with the support of the French to be involved. In total the ECCC is supposed to try 5 participants, but to date only Kang Kek Iew (“Duch”) has been indicted as the other suspects are still under investigations. Some news reports paint an image of justice being served, with tear-inspiring descriptions of survivors standing beside their tormentors as they read apologies aloud, but how close is this to the reality on the ground?
Don’t repeat Vietnam in Afghanistan
A superb presentation by the great Daniel Ellsberg who suggests that the counter-insurgency plan in Afganistan is similar to Vietnam.
“Israeli Apartheid – A Beginner’s Guide”
settler graffitti in Hebron/al-Khalil
That there are striking parallels between white rule in apartheid South Africa and Zionist rule in Palestine – an analogy made by such mainstream figures as President Jimmy Carter and Archbishop Desmond Tutu – should no longer be controversial. But calling Israeli apartheid by its name will occasion the usual screams of anti-Semitism and ignorance from Zionist quarters, and for comprehensible reasons: the most politically inept American student knows that apartheid is a bad thing, a crime to be battled, not supported with weapons, vetoes in the Security Council and billions of dollars in ‘aid.’ Therefore the apartheid label must be vigorously resisted by Zionists and their fellow travellers.
Ben White’s “Israeli Apartheid – A Beginner’s Guide” begins by quoting Article II of the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, UN General Assembly Resolution 3068, which defines the crime as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.” The rest of White’s book leaves the reader in no doubt that the Zionist instance of apartheid fits the bill even better than the erstwhile South African version.
Warlord as Nobel Laureate
from Mother Jones magazine
by William Blum
“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.” — Voltaire
Question: How many countries do you have to be at war with to be disqualified from receiving the Nobel Peace Prize?
Answer: Five. Barack Obama has waged war against only Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. He’s holding off on Iran until he actually gets the prize.
Somalian civil society and court system are so devastated from decades of war that one wouldn’t expect its citizens to have the means to raise serious legal challenges to Washington’s apparent belief that it can drop bombs on that sad land whenever it appears to serve the empire’s needs. But a group of Pakistanis, calling themselves “Lawyers Front for Defense of the Constitution”, and remembering just enough of their country’s more civilized past, has filed suit before the nation’s High Court to make the federal government stop American drone attacks on countless innocent civilians. The group declared that a Pakistan Army spokesman claimed to have the capability to shoot down the drones, but the government had made a policy decision not to. (1)
Pakistan creates its own enemy
Funeral for the eight civilians killed in the Pakistani military's failed attempt to assassinate militant leader Mangal Bagh Afridi (EPA)
The following is a version of the article I wrote for Le Monde Diplomatique updated for the German edition.
On the day I arrived in Peshawar mid-September, the evening stillness was broken by nine loud explosions, each preceded by the sucking sound of a projectile as it arced into Hayatabad, the suburban sprawl west of the city. Their target was a Frontier Constabulary post guarding the fence that separates the city from the tribal region of Khyber.
When I lived here seven years ago, Hayatabad hosted many Afghan refugees; those with fewer resources lived in the slums of Kacha Garhi, along the Jamrud Road to the Khyber Pass. Many established businesses here, and dominated commerce and transport in parts of the city. Some temporarily migrated in summer to Afghanistan, where it was cooler. But Peshawar was a sanctuary, as Afghanistan was perpetually at war. Now the remaining Afghans are leaving because Afghanistan feels safer. There are checkpoints all over the city, many kidnappings, and during my visit, there were at least three suicide bombings and four rocket attacks, many of them targeting Hayatabad.
Robot wars: a ‘killer’ application
With unmanned, remote-controlled drones increasingly in use from Pakistan to Palestine, as well as Iraq and Afghanistan, we are grimly reminded about the latest lethal machines from the high-tech military-industry complex and the putative robotics revolution in warfare. From Hungry Beast TV.
Addendum
It is also worth noting that the Obama administration has dramatically stepped up the drone “program” from its predecessor, sharply increasing the number of U.S. Predator and Reaper drone strikes in Pakistan. The New Yorker also has a piece on the CIA’s covert drone program, and the Real News has a video clip on the zionist entity’s “remote-control occupation”.
Part One
done
Robert Greenwald on Afghanistan
Robert Greenwald of Brave New Films speaks about Afghanistan on Bob McChesney’s excellent Media Matters.
Robert Greenwald and McChesney discuss Afghanistan
Robert Greenwald is a producer, director and political activist. Greenwald is the founder and president of Brave New Films. Under Greenwald’s direction, Brave New Films has produced a series of short political videos, including the Fox Attacks and Real McCain campaigns. Robert Greenwald’s Brave New Foundation is currently producing Rethink Afghanistan, a groundbreaking documentary being released online in real-time; the film features experts from Afghanistan, Pakistan and the U.S. discussing the United States’ flawed strategy in Afghanista
I Refuse to Buy a Poppy
Steve Bell
Yesterday five British soldiers were shot dead by an Afghan policeman. Just as they keep promising that they’ve reached ‘decisive turning points’ in their battle with the Afghan resistance, British military officials immediately vowed that the ‘rogue’ policeman would be caught. Today the Taliban reports that the policeman is safe with them, and that he’s been greeted with flowers.
Our glorious patriotic press responds. Amusingly, the Daily Mail headline wrings its hands and squawks, “What kind of war IS this?” Because some people aren’t playing by the rules, you see. Instead of sitting quietly in their villages waiting for the drone attack, or perhaps sending their kids out to accept sweets and modernity from a rosy-cheeked English lad, some barbarians are actually shooting back at the invaders. How very unBritish. (To be fair to the Mail – which has never been fair to anyone – it does seem to be taking an anti-war stance today). Other sections of the media worry about the ‘loyalty’ of Afghan troops, as if love for foreign occupiers is a realistic standard of loyalty. Still others, even more clever, psychoanalyse the policeman, wondering if an argument with his commander pushed him to a moment of madness. But it really isn’t that complicated, as anybody who disabuses themselves of imperialist delusion can see. Very simply, people don’t like foreigners striding around their streets and fields with guns and assumptions of superiority. Afghans will kill British troops as surely as Britons would kill Afghan troops if they occupied this country.
Jeremy Scahill does CNN
Earlier this week award-winning investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill appeared on CNN’s Lou Dobb’s Tonight where he debated NYU’s Patricia DeGennaro and the neoconservative Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations about Afghanistan.
Scahill has written and continues to write extensively about Iraq (he is the author of the brilliant Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army) and argues here that the US should withdraw from Afghanistan. His reporting is always immaculate and full of facts unlike much of corporate media’s censored fluff. Seeing a voice like his get airtime on a mainstream media outlet like CNN is one reason to remain hopeful. Don’t forget to support him and others like him in every way you can.
Watching “The Hurt Locker” Hurts
"The Hurt Locker" was a Box Office favorite and may become an Academy Award contender.
Alternet, November 4.
As the year winds down and Hollywood gets busy creating Oscar buzz, one unlikely contender is “The Hurt Locker,” the widely praised Iraq movie that premiered at the Venice Film Festival last year and was released in the U.S. in June 2009.
Just when I thought I’d seen enough of Iraq war movies, along comes (Hurt Locker),” an Access Hollywood film critic told USA Today in September. “If any movie about Iraq is going to break through to the academy, this is it.
Indeed, the “megabuzz-spawning film” (to quote the Modesto Bee) was nominated for its first official honor last month, by the prestigious (if relatively obscure) New York-based Independent Filmmaker Project, which tapped it for Best Feature. According to the Los Angeles Times, which has started tracking Oscar favorites, “The Hurt Locker” has been tapped by no fewer than 16 leading film pundits as a serious Academy Award contender.
Even if it skipped your radar, you’ve probably heard some beaming reviews about “The Hurt Locker” by now.
The almost unanimous acclaim it attracted from mainstream reviewers focused mainly on director Kathryn Bigelow’s suspenseful action scenes, which make up the majority of the film’s run time, and prominent reviewers agree that it’s a masterfully crafted American combat epic about three deceptively simple-looking and courageous American men making sacrifices for their country while in unfamiliar, hostile territory.
