The Ever-changing Narrative of Guantanamo: Guantanamo Suicides now Guantanamo murders?
January 20th, 2010 § 1 Comment
According to a joint investigation for Harper’s Magazine and NBC, the infamous Guantanamo suicides – or so we were told at the time- of three detainees in June 2006, were in actuality probably murders. The new investigation reveals that the deaths of 37 year old Yemeni, Salah Ahmed al-Salami and two Saudis, Talal al-Zahrani, 22, and Mani Shaman al-Utaybi, 30, most probably resulted from suffocation under conditions of harsh interrogation and torture. At the time of the event in question, the camp’s commander interpreted the deaths of these men as “an act of asymmetrical warfare”, rather than desperation.
Based on the six-month investigation, here are some of the findings that compelled Harper’s and NBC to claim that – contra to the widely accepted narrative of suicide – the evidence now points towards murder:
Tough Minds and Tender Hearts
January 20th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
by Kathy Kelley
I spent Martin Luther King, Jr’s birthday in Washington, D.C. as part of the Witness Against Torture fast, which campaigns to end all forms of torture and has worked steadily for an end to indefinite detention of people imprisoned in Guantanamo, Bagram, and other secret sites where the U.S. has held and tortured prisoners. We’re on day 9 of a twelve day fast to shut down Guantanamo, end torture, and build justice.
The community gathered for the fast has grown over the past week. This means, however, that as more people sleep on the floor of St. Stephen’s church, there is a rising cacophony of snoring. Our good friend, Fr. Bill Pickard, suggested trying to hear the snores as an orchestra, when I told him I’d slept fitfully last night.
There is a young boy in Mir Ali, a town in North Waziristan, in Pakistan, who also lies awake at night, unable to sleep. Israr Khan Dawar is 17 years old. He told an AP reporter, on January 14th, that he and his family and friends had gotten used to the drones. But now, at night, the sound grows louder and the drones are flying closer, so he and his family realize they could be a target. He braces himself in fear of an attack.
From the Belly of the Beast: An Inside look into the Israeli Justice System
January 19th, 2010 § 3 Comments
Looking mighty dangerous from where I'm standing..
“Sorry baby, I won’t be able to make it tonight, I’m in the police van.” A sentence every Israeli pro-Palestinian activist will utter soon enough, just as I have, this Friday afternoon. Already 70 activists have been wrongfully arrested during the weekly protests in Sheikh Jarrah, under the charges that we riot, conduct unlicensed demonstrations and assault officers.
Demonstrating in Israel 2010
Our day started at Al-Ma’asara village, where the army has escalated its repression of the local popular struggle [1,2]. Fortunately, this week’s demonstration was as calm as a demonstration can be, when you’re surrounded by hostile armed forces, and we were relieved that there were no incidents out of the ordinary occupation. (Unfortunately, the one week I don’t go to Bil’in, an escalation occurs, and I wasn’t there alongside my friends.) The protest was kept short and we all hopped in the cars to get to Sheikh Jarrah.
Second invitation to COFFEE WITH HEZBOLLAH
January 19th, 2010 § 2 Comments
Following is the second excerpt from my book Coffee with Hezbollah, due for release February 1, 2010 by New World Digital, Inc. The book is the product of the hitchhiking journey through Lebanon that photographer Amelia Opalinska and I conducted in the aftermath of the July 2006 war waged by Israel.
The first excerpt can be viewed here.
More excerpts to come.
For additional information about Coffee with Hezbollah or to PRE-ORDER the book, please visit: http://belenfernandez-writings.blogspot.com/.
Many thanks,
Belén Fernández (belengarciabernal@gmail.com)
EXCERPT TWO
Location: Beirut and Cuba.
Context: Amelia and I are initially hosted in Lebanon by a Syrian acquaintance, an employee of Subway Sandwiches near the American University of Beirut (AUB) who has acquired the nickname “the Islamic Revolution.”
We were transferred from Borj Hammoud to the house of another Syrian named Basel II, in Basel II’s BMW. The Islamic Revolution encouraged Amelia and me to huddle on the floor of the vehicle during transfer, either because:
- he did not want us to register our coordinates (thus according us far keener spatial sensibilities than was necessary), or
- he did not want us to see the speedometer.
Haiti: See No Evil?
January 19th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines faced a difficult decision over whether to dock as per itinerary at Labadee Beach, Haiti after last week's tragic quake. (Daniel Morel/AP)
While people from all over the world were scrambling to get donations in to Haiti, the Guardian reports that passengers of a Florida cruise company were sunning themselves 60 miles from Port-au-Prince on Friday, at the heavily guarded private resort of Labadee. Granted, there was a notable division among passengers, some of which could not bring themselves to dislodge from the cruise in light of the recent tragedy brought on by the earthquake, but not all were so moved:
“I’ll be there on Tuesday and I plan on enjoying my zip line excursion as well as the time on the beach,” said one.
Tourism is an important source of revenue for Haiti and the author of the article mentions that Royal Caribbean International employs 230 Haitians and has even pledged 100% of the proceeds from the call to the relief effort. However, the image of vacationing tourists enjoying themselves on a private beach forbidden to the native inhabitants of a country remains a telling metaphor for the vast disparity that exists in this world we live in, especially when the leasing of the peninsula to the resort also speaks to the inequitable privatization of the impoverished country’s coastline.
Norman Finkelstein: American Radical
January 18th, 2010 § 9 Comments
During the 1980s a Jewish doctoral student from New York wrote a damning thesis on a best-selling book that many had rallied behind with their professional endorsements. In it Norman Finkelstein revealed Joan Peter’s From Time Immemorial to be a “monumental hoax” – an uncontroversial statement now, but something deemed difficult to accept at the time, given the academic community’s unabated acceptance of the arguments it put forward. In response, Princeton University delayed the granting of Finkelstein’s PhD and even after they did grant it, refused to give him professional backing. His ”factual record” was however undeniable, forcing everyone to eventually cast aside the book into a pile of embarrassing misjudgments of Zionist propaganda, while still refusing to give the investigator his well-deserved credit. So began Finkelstein’s long and arduous uphill battle in academia and in life, a battle that he has lost almost everything to except his dignity and his belief in what’s right.
David Ridgen and Nicolas Rossier’s “American Radical: the Trials of Norman Finkelstein” documents Finkelstein’s life story, from his complex relationship with his mother, to his unwillingness to sacrifice the truth for professional success. From his demolition of the factual inaccuracies of books by Zionist authors like Peters and Alan Dershowitz, to his famous debates with the likes of Wolf Blitzer and interviews where he advocates the right of violent resistance, Finkelstein has often been pushed into the spotlight by those who have been intent on destroying him. He has however remained as one long-time Palestinian friend notes in the film, incredibly “human,” continuing to speak out against Israel’s atrocities against the Palestinians as fervently as his late mother denounced those who were responsible for the suffering of millions of people during the Nazi holocaust.
America’s Quaking Racial Divide
January 18th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Martin Luther King Jr
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Andrew Oxford reflects on America’s extant racial divide and the lingering threat of white nationalism.
In the preface to his monumental study of the contemporary American white supremacist movement (1), Leonard Zeskind points to the Sarajevo Haggadah for a pertinent lesson on race and society. A Hebrew text of stories, songs, and prayers written by Spanish Jews around 1314, it arrived in the Yugo peninsula with Sephardic Jews fleeing the Inquisition. In the nineteenth century, it was entered into the Sarajevo Museum and saved from invading Germans during World War II by the Croation curator. For the duration of the war, it was guarded by Muslim clerics and it currently resides in the vaults of the Serbian National Bank while it is revered as a cultural icon of all peoples of the region. Reflecting upon the curious history of this relic, Zeskind writes:
It is useful to remember that at one time a hodgepodge of religious and ethnic groups lived together in relative harmony. Places like Sarajevo were cosmopolitan centers of learning and culture for centuries. But in a matter of a few historical seconds, the whole place went up in flames, like a refugee hostel attacked by arsonists…
The United States, unlike the former Yugoslavia, has well cemented the foundations of its federal order in the 150 years since our own Civil War, and the election of a black man, Barack Obama, has broken the white monopoly on the presidency. Nevertheless, collective identities based on race and religion have remained just under the skin of American life. As such, we will continue to be vulnerable to the machinations of … white nationalists … particularly as population demographics shift in the next few decades. For those of us who hope to protect and extend our multiracial democracy, and the cosmopolitanism of the type that preserved the Sarajevo Haggadah, we ignore this white nationalist movement at our own peril.
The GFM, Palestinian Non-Violence and International Solidarity
January 18th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Writer, graduate student and organizer Max Ajl was in Cairo earlier this month along with 1,300 other activists who had gathered from all over the world to protest the illegal blockade of Gaza. The following is an article written by Ajl which includes his reflections on the Gaza Freedom March (he was a principal organizer) and the concept of international solidarity and non-violence in the Palestinian context.
I’m going to discuss the utility of non-violent resistance as it applies to resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict and, specifically, the occupation and blockade of the Gaza strip. Even more specifically, I’m going to discuss the Gaza Freedom March (GFM), of which I’m one of the organizers. But before discussing Palestinian non-violence, several things must be clarified. One is that no one — least of all me, a Jewish kid from Brooklyn — has the slightest right to dictate to the Palestinians how to end the blockade or resist the occupation. Another is the need to avoid the nearly inevitable antiseptic air to talk by Westerners discussing Palestinian non-violence. Antiseptic, because it is cleansed of the complicating grit of the occupation within which non-violence must take place. There’s also usually a tacit subtext, usually a four-word question: Where Is Their Gandhi? That question could not be more in error. I hope to show why.
Riz Khan Interviews Amy Goodman
January 18th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Last Thursday Riz Khan discussed why US foreign policy coverage by American mainstream news outlets has been in decline with Professor John Maxwell Hamilton and long-time independent media veteran Amy Goodman. They also examined the question of why the majority of Americans don’t appear to be as interested in international news events as they are in local affairs, and discussed the extent to which “junk news” and tabloidism dominate news outlet output. Khan also put forward the following viewer question which speaks to much of the rest of the world’s perception of Americans’ knowledge of the world outside their borders:
A wise man said, “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.” Now that America has war on multiple fronts — soon to add Yemen and Nigeria — is it safer to quiz an American on geography?
Today many Americans express dissatisfaction after being lied to about Afghanistan and Iraq, but who helped get the lies to them in first place? If mainstream media has proven itself to be unreliable when it comes to providing accurate, unbiased perspectives on issues as important as war, then why aren’t more Americans embracing independent media while working to enforce more accountability at the same time? Unfortunately, the Rupert Murdoch owned Fox News Channel has the largest viewership among American news outlets, but as we speak even liberal media is attempting to warm Americans to the idea of going to war with Iran by misrepresenting the country as a threat to the ‘free world.’ In many ways we are hearing the same lies and misinformation spread about Iran as we heard during the runup to America’s invasion of Iraq. How will Americans respond this time?
You are invited to COFFEE WITH HEZBOLLAH
January 17th, 2010 § 5 Comments
Following is an excerpt from my book Coffee with Hezbollah, due for release February 1, 2010 by New World Digital, Inc. The book is a satirical political travelogue about the 2-month hitchhiking journey through Lebanon that photographer Amelia Opalinska and I conducted in the aftermath of the July 2006 war inflicted by Israel. It includes episodes from Turkey, Syria, and Jordan, as well as relevant anecdotes from previous hitchhiking expeditions in Latin America and Europe.
I will be posting additional excerpts from the book in the coming days.
Coffee with Hezbollah can be pre-ordered now at http://belenfernandez-writings.blogspot.com/.
Many thanks,
Belén Fernández (belengarciabernal@gmail.com)
EXCERPT ONE
Location: Tyre, south Lebanon.
Context: Our newly-acquired friend Samir—a jack of all trades who picked us up hitchhiking outside Beirut—has been lending his services to the demining NGO Norwegian People’s Aid, whom he refers to as “the Norwegians.”
Samir had just finished commissioning a taxi to take the Norwegians to breakfast and was now organizing a post-breakfast real estate tour. The Norwegians had a temporary headquarters in downtown Tyre but had requested a villa; Samir had located one outside of town that was owned by a Lebanese man from Senegal. Amelia and I enrolled in the tour.
