Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one
Author: Idrees Ahmad
I am a Lecturer in Digital Journalism at the University of Stirling and a former research fellow at the University of Denver’s Center for Middle East Studies. I am the author of The Road to Iraq: The Making of a Neoconservative War (Edinburgh University Press, 2014). I write for The Observer, The Nation, The Daily Beast, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Al Jazeera, Dissent, The National, VICE News, Huffington Post, In These Times, Le Monde Diplomatique, Die Tageszeitung (TAZ), Adbusters, Guernica, London Review of Books (Blog), The New Arab, Bella Caledonia, Asia Times, IPS News, Medium, Political Insight, The Drouth, Canadian Dimension, Tanqeed, Variant, etc. I have appeared as an on-air analyst on Al Jazeera, the BBC, TRT World, RAI TV, Radio Open Source with Christopher Lydon, Alternative Radio with David Barsamian and several Pacifica Radio channels.
Update: Dawn reports that the ranks of the lawyers movement have also been swollen by the presence of a large number of students. This is significant, since students, especially middle-class ones, have generally been apolitical and to the extent that there has been any student politics in Pakistan, it is mostly dominated by the squabbles between the youth wings of the different national parties.
Pakistan's PM has ordered all lawyers and political activists arrested this week to be freed (EPA)
Pakistan’s government has announced the reinstatement of Iftikhar Chaudhry, the deposed chief justice, in a bid to defuse the country’s political crisis and end a protest march that was threatening to turn into a violent confrontation.
Yusuf Raza Gilani, the prime minister, said Chaudhry would be reinstated as Pakistan’s supreme court chief justice on March 21, the day his replacement was due to retire.”I announce the restoration of all deposed judges ,including Mr Iftikhar Chaudhry, according to a promise made by the president of Pakistan and myself,” Gilani said on Monday in a televised address to the nation.
He also ordered all lawyers and political activists arrested over the past week to be freed immediately.
To the extent that it exists Pakistan’s sovereignty is diminishing. The price of political power has been to trade it away incrementally. First it was under Leghari that Aimal Kansi was captured and handed over the Americans, then it was Musharraf who gave away airbases, and scores of innocents in order to consolidate his power, and now it is Zardari — Mr. 10 percent — who is transferring the ‘security’ of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal into the hands of US personnel. Here is Richard Sale writing on Col. Patrick Lang’s blog. (The notion that Pakistan’s nuke’s would fall into the hands of ‘Taliban sympathizers’ is bunk, but has been a useful talking point amongst doom-mongers within and without).
With Pakistan’s political instability spreading, nervous concern has mounted over the fate of Islamabad’s nuclear arsenal should Taliban sympathizers gain power within the Pakistan military, but under the terms of secret agreements, U.S. personnel have been stationed in Pakistan whose sole function is to guarantee and secure the safety of Islamabad’s nuclear arsenal and keep it out of the hands of terrorists, according to several serving and former U.S. officials.
In any case, in the opinion of several former and serving U.S. officials, Pakistan’s nukes are currently secure, “They are for now,” said one.
AMY GOODMAN: The US government has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into the US economy in the wake of the financial crisis. But what steps are being taken to address the crisis on a global scale? On Sunday, the World Bank warned of the first global recession since World War II, with the world economy set to shrink for the first time since the 1940s. The bank also cautioned that the cost of helping poorer nations in crisis would exceed the current financial resources of multilateral lenders. The economic crisis is projected to push around 46 million people into poverty this year.
The financial crisis is forcing some to rethink the neoliberal policies widely blamed for the financial collapse. On Monday, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called for a new international fund to support poorer countries during the global recession. He also acknowledged richer Western nations have often imposed economic policies on poorer countries that they haven’t followed themselves. Continue reading “Economist Ha-Joon Chang on the Financial Crisis”
Nick Davies coined a fabulous new term in his book Flat Earth News to describe the kind of filler-fluff that very often passes for journalism in US and UK. Here is the latest example from the Independent. Some clown named Guy Adams who is apparently based in Los Angeles does a hatchet-job on Hugo Chavez and by extension Sean Penn, Oliver Stone, Harry Belafonte and Danny Glover for their links to the popular Venezuelan leader, and he can’t find anything better to rely on than a quote from the ageing Hollywood has-been Maria Conchita Alonso with ties to the right-wing Cuban exiles in Miami. ‘In normal circumstances, Alonso’s interview might have been brushed under the carpet’, he correctly points out. But clearly not when it lands in the hands of the Independent’s celebrity gossip extraordinaire who goes on to tell ‘left-wing luvvies’ in the movie business to wake up because their hero had the temerity to describe Hollywood as ‘a medium of American “cultural imperialism”‘.
The clown then proceeds to offer this acute insight:
Penn, who since his Oscar-winning performance in Milk has become a vociferous gay rights activist, is also open to allegations of hypocrisy. The Venezuelan leader’s political hero, Fidel Castro, imprisoned and executed gay men, and once declared: “In this country [Cuba] there are no homosexuals.”
Talk about six-degrees-of separation. I bet this cat can prove that everyone who claims to abhor rape is a hypocrite since through a mere separation of 6 people everyone has ties to a rapist.
Nora Barrows-Friedman, Senior Producer and co-host of the excellent Flashpoints Radio, on direct action across the international spectrum (I am one of the people mentioned in this article). This article first published in Arabic in al-Haq al-Awda.
Linking arms through metal tubes and jamming the doorways with steel bicycle locks, dozens of pro-justice activists blocked the entrance to the Israeli consulate in downtown San Francisco on January 15th — Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday — at the height of Israel’s siege on Gaza, on a day when its military killed at least forty Palestinian men, women and children in a series of attacks that also decimated several mosques, schools and an UNRWA building. 24 hours before, in Los Angeles, protesters chained themselves to their local Israeli consulate and unfurled a banner reading “The Israeli consulate has been closed for war crimes.”
As Israel’s destruction of Gaza raged on, carried out by the Middle East’s only nuclear superpower against an entrapped, occupied and virtually defenseless population, so did countless actions across the world. Protests, marches and demonstrations were called by the usual peace and justice organizations — hundreds of thousands came to express their dissent in major international cities — but smaller, more direct actions were being taken with little to no media fanfare. And some of these quieter operations, activists say, have begun to make an impact.
‘Any recourse to international law in seeking to bring Israeli officials to book must be carefully considered,’ writes Azmi Bishara.
It is not my intention to discuss the definitions of resistance, the legitimacy of resistance or the laws of war in general. Nor will I delve into the definition of war crimes, the relevant articles in international conventions, the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, the duties and obligations of its member states, the powers of its prosecutor and the difference between this court and those that were established for the prosecution of war crimes and crimes against humanity in specific countries, such as the International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia. All these subjects have been treated extensively in numerous other publications. My purpose here is to shed light on some possibly unfamiliar aspects of the notion of appealing to this form of international arbitration.
All such tribunals and conventions have derived their impetus from the will on the part of powerful nations to bring war criminals to account and from the ability of these powerful sovereign nations not only to draw up the law but to put it into effect when they want. Given this, it is fundamentally erroneous to liken international law to the rule of law in sovereign countries. International law does not prevail internationally, is not applied around the globe as though the world was a single sovereign country, and has no executive authority to put it into effect apart from powerful nations. It is thus subject to political aims and interests. Above all, the principle of equality before the law that applies in democratic countries does not exist in international law, either practically or theoretically.
Today on Flashpoints: Internationally-renowned Middle East reporter Robert Fisk talks to Dennis Bernstein about Afghanistan, Iraq and the recent attacks in Gaza and the way in which the Western press continues to fail in covering these stories
Open Lens Media & The Media Education Foundation presents A film by Miguel Picker & Chyng Sun Associate Producer: Robert Wosnitzer The Price of Pleasure: Pornography, Sexuality & Relationships Coming to DVD Fall 2008 http://www.thepriceofpleasure.comhttp://www.mediaed.org
Nick Davies coined a fabulous new term in his book Flat Earth News to describe the kind of filler-fluff that very often passes for journalism in US and UK. Here is the latest example from the Independent. Some clown named Guy Adams who is apparently based in Los Angeles does a 
P U L S E 