Iran entered its final day of campaigning before its presidential elections tomorrow. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s challengers held rival protests in the city, criticizing the president for his crackdowns on personal freedoms and his troubles managing Iran’s struggling economy.
Several media have noted that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s challengers, mostly the reformists Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, once appeared pretty weak but seem to have gained momentum in recent weeks. It remains to be seen, of course, whether any of the challengers stands a chance of unseating the president. Some analysts have predicted that Mousavi and Karroubi will split the reformist vote, undermining one another.
The New York Times reports the state of the Iranian economy has emerged as a defining issue ahead of the vote.
EurasiaNet has an analysis arguing that Ahmadinejad may be trying to foment a “revolution within the Islamic Revolution” in hopes of establishing a “neoconservative dictatorship with the blessing of the country’s spiritual leader.” The problem, the article says, is that Ahmadinejad’s opponents are stronger than the Iranian president once thought.
Foreign Policy has a special report on the elections questioning whether a new revolution might be taking place.
U.S. Representatives Adam Schiff (Democrats – California) and Mike Pence (Republicans – Indiana), recently introduced legislation in the U.S. Congress to highlight and promote freedom of the press worldwide.
The legislation will establish an annual State Department report on the status of press freedom in every country in the world and create a grant program aimed at broadening and strengthening the independence of journalists and media organizations.
“I can think of no better way to honor the memory of Daniel Pearl,” Pence said. “This legislation takes valuable steps in highlighting and supporting the critical work of investigative journalism, while putting on notice those countries who choose to ignore the freedom of the press…”
Five years after photos initially surfaced of prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib detention center in Iraq, the photos taken at the camp are again at issue after a former U.S. army major general alleged to the British paper the Telegraph that additional, unreleased photos show U.S. soldiers raping inmates.
President Barack Obama has reversed his initial position that he would release all remaining photos, saying that the photos are graphic and would put U.S. and British troops in danger.
Editor of The Paris Review and former staff writer of The New YorkerPhilip Gourevitch, writing in the New York Times, argues that Obama’s decision not to release the photos should be viewed differently from the George W. Bush administration’s initial denials of torture at Abu Ghraib.
Yesterday the political battles in Washington D.C. over the closure of Guantanamo detention center heated up. President Barack Obama has reinforced his call to shut down the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, saying its flaws have weakened national security. But opponents say the camp has made the United States safer and predict legislative obstacles on transferring detainees.
President Barack Obama delivered a speech laying out in general terms his plan to close Guantanamo and his argument for balancing transparency with national security. Former Vice President Richard B. Cheney immediately followed up in a speech at the neoconservative think tank American Enterprise Institute (AEI), suggesting one aspect of Obama’s plan – bringing Guantanamo prisoners to U.S. soil – may never pass congressional muster. The speeches came in the wake of a recent decision by Senate Democrats refusing to release funds for the closure of Guantanamo.
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Here is President Barack Obama’s speech.
THE WHITE HOUSE – Office of the Press Secretary
______________________________________________________
For Immediate Release May 21, 2009
REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT ON NATIONAL SECURITY
National Archives, Washington D.C., 10:28 A.M. EDT
THE PRESIDENT: Good morning, everybody. Please be seated. Thank you all for being here. Let me just acknowledge the presence of some of my outstanding Cabinet members and advisors. We’ve got our Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton. We have our CIA Director Leon Panetta. We have our Secretary of Defense William Gates; Secretary Napolitano of Department of Homeland Security; Attorney General Eric Holder; my National Security Advisor Jim Jones. And I want to especially thank our Acting Archivist of the United States, Adrienne Thomas.
I also want to acknowledge several members of the House who have great interest in intelligence matters. I want to thank Congressman Reyes, Congressman Hoekstra, Congressman King, as well as Congressman Thompson, for being here today. Thank you so much.
These are extraordinary times for our country. We’re confronting a historic economic crisis. We’re fighting two wars. We face a range of challenges that will define the way that Americans will live in the 21st century. So there’s no shortage of work to be done, or responsibilities to bear.
And we’ve begun to make progress. Just this week, we’ve taken steps to protect American consumers and homeowners, and to reform our system of government contracting so that we better protect our people while spending our money more wisely. The – it’s a good bill. The engines of our economy are slowly beginning to turn, and we’re working towards historic reform on health care and on energy. I want to say to the members of Congress, I welcome all the extraordinary work that has been done over these last four months on these and other issues.
In the midst of all these challenges, however, my single most important responsibility as President is to keep the American people safe. It’s the first thing that I think about when I wake up in the morning. It’s the last thing that I think about when I go to sleep at night.
And this responsibility is only magnified in an era when an extremist ideology threatens our people, and technology gives a handful of terrorists the potential to do us great harm. We are less than eight years removed from the deadliest attack on American soil in our history. We know that al Qaeda is actively planning to attack us again. We know that this threat will be with us for a long time, and that we must use all elements of our power to defeat it.
Already, we’ve taken several steps to achieve that goal. For the first time since 2002, we’re providing the necessary resources and strategic direction to take the fight to the extremists who attacked us on 9/11 in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We’re investing in the 21st century military and intelligence capabilities that will allow us to stay one step ahead of a nimble enemy. We have re-energized a global non-proliferation regime to deny the world’s most dangerous people access to the world’s deadliest weapons. And we’ve launched an effort to secure all loose nuclear materials within four years. We’re better protecting our border, and increasing our preparedness for any future attack or natural disaster. We’re building new partnerships around the world to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda and its affiliates. And we have renewed American diplomacy so that we once again have the strength and standing to truly lead the world.
These steps are all critical to keeping America secure. But I believe with every fiber of my being that in the long run we also cannot keep this country safe unless we enlist the power of our most fundamental values. The documents that we hold in this very hall – the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights – these are not simply words written into aging parchment. They are the foundation of liberty and justice in this country, and a light that shines for all who seek freedom, fairness, equality, and dignity around the world.
I stand here today as someone whose own life was made possible by these documents. My father came to these shores in search of the promise that they offered. My mother made me rise before dawn to learn their truths when I lived as a child in a foreign land. My own American journey was paved by generations of citizens who gave meaning to those simple words – “to form a more perfect union.” I’ve studied the Constitution as a student, I’ve taught it as a teacher, I’ve been bound by it as a lawyer and a legislator. I took an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution as Commander-in-Chief, and as a citizen, I know that we must never, ever, turn our back on its enduring principles for expedience sake.
I make this claim not simply as a matter of idealism. We uphold our most cherished values not only because doing so is right, but because it strengthens our country and it keeps us safe. Time and again, our values have been our best national security asset – in war and peace; in times of ease and in eras of upheaval.
Fidelity to our values is the reason why the United States of America grew from a small string of colonies under the writ of an empire to the strongest nation in the world.
It’s the reason why enemy soldiers have surrendered to us in battle, knowing they’d receive better treatment from America’s Armed Forces than from their own government.
It’s the reason why America has benefitted from strong alliances that amplified our power, and drawn a sharp, moral contrast with our adversaries.
It’s the reason why we’ve been able to overpower the iron fist of fascism and outlast the iron curtain of communism, and enlist free nations and free peoples everywhere in the common cause and common effort of liberty.
From Europe to the Pacific, we’ve been the nation that has shut down torture chambers and replaced tyranny with the rule of law. That is who we are. And where terrorists offer only the injustice of disorder and destruction, America must demonstrate that our values and our institutions are more resilient than a hateful ideology.
After 9/11, we knew that we had entered a new era – that enemies who did not abide by any law of war would present new challenges to our application of the law; that our government would need new tools to protect the American people, and that these tools would have to allow us to prevent attacks instead of simply prosecuting those who try to carry them out.
Unfortunately, faced with an uncertain threat, our government made a series of hasty decisions. I believe that many of these decisions were motivated by a sincere desire to protect the American people. But I also believe that all too often our government made decisions based on fear rather than foresight; that all too often our government trimmed facts and evidence to fit ideological predispositions. Instead of strategically applying our power and our principles, too often we set those principles aside as luxuries that we could no longer afford. And during this season of fear, too many of us – Democrats and Republicans, politicians, journalists, and citizens – fell silent.
In other words, we went off course. And this is not my assessment alone. It was an assessment that was shared by the American people who nominated candidates for President from both major parties who, despite our many differences, called for a new approach – one that rejected torture and one that recognized the imperative of closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay.
Now let me be clear: We are indeed at war with al Qaeda and its affiliates. We do need to update our institutions to deal with this threat. But we must do so with an abiding confidence in the rule of law and due process; in checks and balances and accountability. For reasons that I will explain, the decisions that were made over the last eight years established an ad hoc legal approach for fighting terrorism that was neither effective nor sustainable – a framework that failed to rely on our legal traditions and time-tested institutions, and that failed to use our values as a compass. And that’s why I took several steps upon taking office to better protect the American people.
First, I banned the use of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques by the United States of America.
I know some have argued that brutal methods like waterboarding were necessary to keep us safe. I could not disagree more. As Commander-in-Chief, I see the intelligence. I bear the responsibility for keeping this country safe. And I categorically reject the assertion that these are the most effective means of interrogation. What’s more, they undermine the rule of law. They alienate us in the world. They serve as a recruitment tool for terrorists, and increase the will of our enemies to fight us, while decreasing the will of others to work with America. They risk the lives of our troops by making it less likely that others will surrender to them in battle, and more likely that Americans will be mistreated if they are captured. In short, they did not advance our war and counterterrorism efforts – they undermined them, and that is why I ended them once and for all.
Now, I should add, the arguments against these techniques did not originate from my administration. As Senator McCain once said, torture “serves as a great propaganda tool for those who recruit people to fight against us.” And even under President Bush, there was recognition among members of his own administration – including a Secretary of State, other senior officials, and many in the military and intelligence community – that those who argued for these tactics were on the wrong side of the debate, and the wrong side of history. That’s why we must leave these methods where they belong – in the past. They are not who we are, and they are not America.
The second decision that I made was to order the closing of the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay.
For over seven years, we have detained hundreds of people at Guantanamo. During that time, the system of military commissions that were in place at Guantanamo succeeded in convicting a grand total of three suspected terrorists. Let me repeat that: three convictions in over seven years. Instead of bringing terrorists to justice, efforts at prosecution met setback after setback, cases lingered on, and in 2006 the Supreme Court invalidated the entire system. Meanwhile, over 525 detainees were released from Guantanamo under not my administration, under the previous administration. Let me repeat that: Two-thirds of the detainees were released before I took office and ordered the closure of Guantanamo.
There is also no question that Guantanamo set back the moral authority that is America’s strongest currency in the world. Instead of building a durable framework for the struggle against al Qaeda that drew upon our deeply held values and traditions, our government was defending positions that undermined the rule of law. In fact, part of the rationale for establishing Guantanamo in the first place was the misplaced notion that a prison there would be beyond the law – a proposition that the Supreme Court soundly rejected. Meanwhile, instead of serving as a tool to counter terrorism, Guantanamo became a symbol that helped al Qaeda recruit terrorists to its cause. Indeed, the existence of Guantanamo likely created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained.
So the record is clear: Rather than keeping us safer, the prison at Guantanamo has weakened American national security. It is a rallying cry for our enemies. It sets back the willingness of our allies to work with us in fighting an enemy that operates in scores of countries. By any measure, the costs of keeping it open far exceed the complications involved in closing it. That’s why I argued that it should be closed throughout my campaign, and that is why I ordered it closed within one year.
The third decision that I made was to order a review of all pending cases at Guantanamo. I knew when I ordered Guantanamo closed that it would be difficult and complex. There are 240 people there who have now spent years in legal limbo. In dealing with this situation, we don’t have the luxury of starting from scratch. We’re cleaning up something that is, quite simply, a mess – a misguided experiment that has left in its wake a flood of legal challenges that my administration is forced to deal with on a constant, almost daily basis, and it consumes the time of government officials whose time should be spent on better protecting our country.
Indeed, the legal challenges that have sparked so much debate in recent weeks here in Washington would be taking place whether or not I decided to close Guantanamo. For example, the court order to release 17 Uighurs – 17 Uighur detainees took place last fall, when George Bush was President. The Supreme Court that invalidated the system of prosecution at Guantanamo in 2006 was overwhelmingly appointed by Republican Presidents – not wild -eyed liberals. In other words, the problem of what to do with Guantanamo detainees was not caused by my decision to close the facility; the problem exists because of the decision to open Guantanamo in the first place.
Now let me be blunt. There are no neat or easy answers here. I wish there were. But I can tell you that the wrong answer is to pretend like this problem will go away if we maintain an unsustainable status quo. As President, I refuse to allow this problem to fester. I refuse to pass it on to somebody else. It is my responsibility to solve the problem. Our security interests will not permit us to delay. Our courts won’t allow it. And neither should our conscience.
Now, over the last several weeks, we’ve seen a return of the politicization of these issues that have characterized the last several years. I’m an elected official; I understand these problems arouse passions and concerns. They should. We’re confronting some of the most complicated questions that a democracy can face. But I have no interest in spending all of our time relitigating the policies of the last eight years. I’ll leave that to others. I want to solve these problems, and I want to solve them together as Americans.
And we will be ill-served by some of the fear-mongering that emerges whenever we discuss this issue. Listening to the recent debate, I’ve heard words that, frankly, are calculated to scare people rather than educate them; words that have more to do with politics than protecting our country. So I want to take this opportunity to lay out what we are doing, and how we intend to resolve these outstanding issues. I will explain how each action that we are taking will help build a framework that protects both the American people and the values that we hold most dear. And I’ll focus on two broad areas: first, issues relating to Guantanamo and our detention policy; but, second, I also want to discuss issues relating to security and transparency.
Now, let me begin by disposing of one argument as plainly as I can: We are not going to release anyone if it would endanger our national security, nor will we release detainees within the United States who endanger the American people. Where demanded by justice and national security, we will seek to transfer some detainees to the same type of facilities in which we hold all manner of dangerous and violent criminals within our borders – namely, highly secure prisons that ensure the public safety.
As we make these decisions, bear in mind the following face: Nobody has ever escaped from one of our federal, supermax prisons, which hold hundreds of convicted terrorists. As Republican Lindsey Graham said, the idea that we cannot find a place to securely house 250-plus detainees within the United States is not rational.
We are currently in the process of reviewing each of the detainee cases at Guantanamo to determine the appropriate policy for dealing with them. And as we do so, we are acutely aware that under the last administration, detainees were released and, in some cases, returned to the battlefield. That’s why we are doing away with the poorly planned, haphazard approach that let those detainees go in the past. Instead we are treating these cases with the care and attention that the law requires and that our security demands.
Now, going forward, these cases will fall into five distinct categories.
First, whenever feasible, we will try those who have violated American criminal laws in federal courts – courts provided for by the United States Constitution. Some have derided our federal courts as incapable of handling the trials of terrorists. They are wrong. Our courts and our juries, our citizens, are tough enough to convict terrorists. The record makes that clear. Ramzi Yousef tried to blow up the World Trade Center. He was convicted in our courts and is serving a life sentence in U.S. prisons. Zacarias Moussaoui has been identified as the 20th 9/11 hijacker. He was convicted in our courts, and he too is serving a life sentence in prison. If we can try those terrorists in our courts and hold them in our prisons, then we can do the same with detainees from Guantanamo.
Recently, we prosecuted and received a guilty plea from a detainee, al-Marri, in federal court after years of legal confusion. We’re preparing to transfer another detainee to the Southern District Court of New York, where he will face trial on charges related to the 1998 bombings of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania – bombings that killed over 200 people. Preventing this detainee from coming to our shores would prevent his trial and conviction. And after over a decade, it is time to finally see that justice is served, and that is what we intend to do.
The second category of cases involves detainees who violate the laws of war and are therefore best tried through military commissions. Military commissions have a history in the United States dating back to George Washington and the Revolutionary War. They are an appropriate venue for trying detainees for violations of the laws of war. They allow for the protection of sensitive sources and methods of intelligence-gathering; they allow for the safety and security of participants; and for the presentation of evidence gathered from the battlefield that cannot always be effectively presented in federal courts.
Now, some have suggested that this represents a reversal on my part. They should look at the record. In 2006, I did strongly oppose legislation proposed by the Bush administration and passed by the Congress because it failed to establish a legitimate legal framework, with the kind of meaningful due process rights for the accused that could stand up on appeal.
I said at that time, however, that I supported the use of military commissions to try detainees, provided there were several reforms, and in fact there were some bipartisan efforts to achieve those reforms. Those are the reforms that we are now making. Instead of using the flawed commissions of the last seven years, my administration is bringing our commissions in line with the rule of law. We will no longer permit the use of evidence – as evidence statements that have been obtained using cruel, inhuman, or degrading interrogation methods. We will no longer place the burden to prove that hearsay is unreliable on the opponent of the hearsay. And we will give detainees greater latitude in selecting their own counsel, and more protections if they refuse to testify. These reforms, among others, will make our military commissions a more credible and effective means of administering justice, and I will work with Congress and members of both parties, as well as legal authorities across the political spectrum, on legislation to ensure that these commissions are fair, legitimate, and effective.
The third category of detainees includes those who have been ordered released by the courts. Now, let me repeat what I said earlier: This has nothing to do with my decision to close Guantanamo. It has to do with the rule of law. The courts have spoken. They have found that there’s no legitimate reason to hold 21 of the people currently held at Guantanamo. Nineteen of these findings took place before I was sworn into office. I cannot ignore these rulings because as President, I too am bound by the law. The United States is a nation of laws and so we must abide by these rulings.
The fourth category of cases involves detainees who we have determined can be transferred safely to another country. So far, our review team has approved 50 detainees for transfer. And my administration is in ongoing discussions with a number of other countries about the transfer of detainees to their soil for detention and rehabilitation.
Now, finally, there remains the question of detainees at Guantanamo who cannot be prosecuted yet who pose a clear danger to the American people. And I have to be honest here – this is the toughest single issue that we will face. We’re going to exhaust every avenue that we have to prosecute those at Guantanamo who pose a danger to our country. But even when this process is complete, there may be a number of people who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, in some cases because evidence may be tainted, but who nonetheless pose a threat to the security of the United States. Examples of that threat include people who’ve received extensive explosives training at al Qaeda training camps, or commanded Taliban troops in battle, or expressed their allegiance to Osama bin Laden, or otherwise made it clear that they want to kill Americans. These are people who, in effect, remain at war with the United States.
Let me repeat: I am not going to release individuals who endanger the American people. Al Qaeda terrorists and their affiliates are at war with the United States, and those that we capture – like other prisoners of war – must be prevented from attacking us again. Having said that, we must recognize that these detention policies cannot be unbounded. They can’t be based simply on what I or the executive branch decide alone. That’s why my administration has begun to reshape the standards that apply to ensure that they are in line with the rule of law. We must have clear, defensible, and lawful standards for those who fall into this category. We must have fair procedures so that we don’t make mistakes. We must have a thorough process of periodic review, so that any prolonged detention is carefully evaluated and justified.
I know that creating such a system poses unique challenges. And other countries have grappled with this question; now, so must we. But I want to be very clear that our goal is to construct a legitimate legal framework for the remaining Guantanamo detainees that cannot be transferred. Our goal is not to avoid a legitimate legal framework. In our constitutional system, prolonged detention should not be the decision of any one man. If and when we determine that the United States must hold individuals to keep them from carrying out an act of war, we will do so within a system that involves judicial and congressional oversight. And so, going forward, my administration will work with Congress to develop an appropriate legal regime so that our efforts are consistent with our values and our Constitution.
Now, as our efforts to close Guantanamo move forward, I know that the politics in Congress will be difficult. These are issues that are fodder for 30-second commercials. You can almost picture the direct mail pieces that emerge from any vote on this issue – designed to frighten the population. I get it. But if we continue to make decisions within a climate of fear, we will make more mistakes. And if we refuse to deal with these issues today, then I guarantee you that they will be an albatross around our efforts to combat terrorism in the future.
I have confidence that the American people are more interested in doing what is right to protect this country than in political posturing. I am not the only person in this city who swore an oath to uphold the Constitution – so did each and every member of Congress. And together we have a responsibility to enlist our values in the effort to secure our people, and to leave behind the legacy that makes it easier for future Presidents to keep this country safe.
Now, let me touch on a second set of issues that relate to security and transparency.
National security requires a delicate balance. One the one hand, our democracy depends on transparency. On the other hand, some information must be protected from public disclosure for the sake of our security – for instance, the movement of our troops, our intelligence-gathering, or the information we have about a terrorist organization and its affiliates. In these and other cases, lives are at stake.
Now, several weeks ago, as part of an ongoing court case, I released memos issued by the previous administration’s Office of Legal Counsel. I did not do this because I disagreed with the enhanced interrogation techniques that those memos authorized, and I didn’t release the documents because I rejected their legal rationales – although I do on both counts. I released the memos because the existence of that approach to interrogation was already widely known, the Bush administration had acknowledged its existence, and I had already banned those methods. The argument that somehow by releasing those memos we are providing terrorists with information about how they will be interrogated makes no sense. We will not be interrogating terrorists using that approach. That approach is now prohibited.
In short, I released these memos because there was no overriding reason to protect them. And the ensuing debate has helped the American people better understand how these interrogation methods came to be authorized and used.
On the other hand, I recently opposed the release of certain photographs that were taken of detainees by U.S. personnel between 2002 and 2004. Individuals who violated standards of behavior in these photos have been investigated and they have been held accountable. There was and is no debate as to whether what is reflected in those photos is wrong. Nothing has been concealed to absolve perpetrators of crimes. However, it was my judgment – informed by my national security team – that releasing these photos would inflame anti-American opinion and allow our enemies to paint U.S. troops with a broad, damning, and inaccurate brush, thereby endangering them in theaters of war.
In short, there is a clear and compelling reason to not release these particular photos. There are nearly 200,000 Americans who are serving in harm’s way, and I have a solemn responsibility for their safety as Commander-in-Chief. Nothing would be gained by the release of these photos that matters more than the lives of our young men and women serving in harm’s way.
Now, in the press’s mind and in some of the public’s mind, these two cases are contradictory. They are not to me. In each of these cases, I had to strike the right balance between transparency and national security. And this balance brings with it a precious responsibility. There’s no doubt that the American people have seen this balance tested over the last several years. In the images from Abu Ghraib and the brutal interrogation techniques made public long before I was President, the American people learned of actions taken in their name that bear no resemblance to the ideals that generations of Americans have fought for. And whether it was the run-up to the Iraq war or the revelation of secret programs, Americans often felt like part of the story had been unnecessarily withheld from them. And that caused suspicion to build up. And that leads to a thirst for accountability.
I understand that. I ran for President promising transparency, and I meant what I said. And that’s why, whenever possible, my administration will make all information available to the American people so that they can make informed judgments and hold us accountable. But I have never argued – and I never will — that our most sensitive national security matters should simply be an open book. I will never abandon – and will vigorously defend – the necessity of classification to defend our troops at war, to protect sources and methods, and to safeguard confidential actions that keep the American people safe. Here’s the difference though: Whenever we cannot release certain information to the public for valid national security reasons, I will insist that there is oversight of my actions – by Congress or by the courts.
We’re currently launching a review of current policies by all those agencies responsible for the classification of documents to determine where reforms are possible, and to assure that the other branches of government will be in a position to review executive branch decisions on these matters. Because in our system of checks and balances, someone must always watch over the watchers – especially when it comes to sensitive administration – information.
Now, along these same lines, my administration is also confronting challenges to what is known as the “state secrets” privilege. This is a doctrine that allows the government to challenge legal cases involving secret programs. It’s been used by many past Presidents – Republican and Democrat – for many decades. And while this principle is absolutely necessary in some circumstances to protect national security, I am concerned that it has been over-used. It is also currently the subject of a wide range of lawsuits. So let me lay out some principles here. We must not protect information merely because it reveals the violation of a law or embarrassment to the government. And that’s why my administration is nearing completion of a thorough review of this practice.
And we plan to embrace several principles for reform. We will apply a stricter legal test to material that can be protected under the state secrets privilege. We will not assert the privilege in court without first following our own formal process, including review by a Justice Department committee and the personal approval of the Attorney General. And each year we will voluntarily report to Congress when we have invoked the privilege and why because, as I said before, there must be proper oversight over our actions.
On all these matters related to the disclosure of sensitive information, I wish I could say that there was some simple formula out there to be had. There is not. These often involve tough calls, involve competing concerns, and they require a surgical approach. But the common thread that runs through all of my decisions is simple: We will safeguard what we must to protect the American people, but we will also ensure the accountability and oversight that is the hallmark of our constitutional system. I will never hide the truth because it’s uncomfortable. I will deal with Congress and the courts as co-equal branches of government. I will tell the American people what I know and don’t know, and when I release something publicly or keep something secret, I will tell you why.
Now, in all the areas that I’ve discussed today, the policies that I’ve proposed represent a new direction from the last eight years. To protect the American people and our values, we’ve banned enhanced interrogation techniques. We are closing the prison at Guantanamo. We are reforming military commissions, and we will pursue a new legal regime to detain terrorists. We are declassifying more information and embracing more oversight of our actions, and we’re narrowing our use of the state secrets privilege. These are dramatic changes that will put our approach to national security on a surer, safer, and more sustainable footing. Their implementation will take time, but they will get done.
There’s a core principle that we will apply to all of our actions. Even as we clean up the mess at Guantanamo, we will constantly reevaluate our approach, subject our decisions to review from other branches of government, as well as the public. We seek the strongest and most sustainable legal framework for addressing these issues in the long term – not to serve immediate politics, but to do what’s right over the long term. By doing that we can leave behind a legacy that outlasts my administration, my presidency, that endures for the next President and the President after that – a legacy that protects the American people and enjoys a broad legitimacy at home and abroad.
Now, this is what I mean when I say that we need to focus on the future. I recognize that many still have a strong desire to focus on the past. When it comes to actions of the last eight years, passions are high. Some Americans are angry; others want to re-fight debates that have been settled, in some cases debates that they have lost. I know that these debates lead directly, in some cases, to a call for a fuller accounting, perhaps through an independent commission.
I’ve opposed the creation of such a commission because I believe that our existing democratic institutions are strong enough to deliver accountability. The Congress can review abuses of our values, and there are ongoing inquiries by the Congress into matters like enhanced interrogation techniques. The Department of Justice and our courts can work through and punish any violations of our laws or miscarriages of justice.
It’s no secret there is a tendency in Washington to spend our time pointing fingers at one another. And it’s no secret that our media culture feeds the impulse that lead to a good fight and good copy. But nothing will contribute more than that than a extended relitigation of the last eight years. Already, we’ve seen how that kind of effort only leads those in Washington to different sides to laying blame. It can distract us from focusing our time, our efforts, and our politics on the challenges of the future.
We see that, above all, in the recent debate – how the recent debate has obscured the truth and sends people into opposite and absolutist ends. On the one side of the spectrum, there are those who make little allowance for the unique challenges posed by terrorism, and would almost never put national security over transparency. And on the other end of the spectrum, there are those who embrace a view that can be summarized in two words: “Anything goes.” Their arguments suggest that the ends of fighting terrorism can be used to justify any means, and that the President should have blanket authority to do whatever he wants – provided it is a President with whom they agree.
Both sides may be sincere in their views, but neither side is right. The American people are not absolutist, and they don’t elect us to impose a rigid ideology on our problems. They know that we need not sacrifice our security for our values, nor sacrifice our values for our security, so long as we approach difficult questions with honesty and care and a dose of common sense. That, after all, is the unique genius of America. That’s the challenge laid down by our Constitution. That has been the source of our strength through the ages. That’s what makes the United States of America different as a nation.
I can stand here today, as President of the United States, and say without exception or equivocation that we do not torture, and that we will vigorously protect our people while forging a strong and durable framework that allows us to fight terrorism while abiding by the rule of law. Make no mistake: If we fail to turn the page on the approach that was taken over the past several years, then I will not be able to say that as President. And if we cannot stand for our core values, then we are not keeping faith with the documents that are enshrined in this hall.
The Framers who drafted the Constitution could not have foreseen the challenges that have unfolded over the last 222 years. But our Constitution has endured through secession and civil rights, through World War and Cold War, because it provides a foundation of principles that can be applied pragmatically; it provides a compass that can help us find our way. It hasn’t always been easy. We are an imperfect people. Every now and then, there are those who think that America’s safety and success requires us to walk away from the sacred principles enshrined in this building. And we hear such voices today. But over the long haul the American people have resisted that temptation. And though we’ve made our share of mistakes, required some course corrections, ultimately we have held fast to the principles that have been the source of our strength and a beacon to the world.
Now this generation faces a great test in the specter of terrorism. And unlike the Civil War or World War II, we can’t count on a surrender ceremony to bring this journey to an end. Right now, in distant training camps and in crowded cities, there are people plotting to take American lives. That will be the case a year from now, five years from now, and – in all probability – 10 years from now. Neither I nor anyone can stand here today and say that there will not be another terrorist attack that takes American lives. But I can say with certainty that my administration – along with our extraordinary troops and the patriotic men and women who defend our national security – will do everything in our power to keep the American people safe. And I do know with certainty that we can defeat al Qaeda. Because the terrorists can only succeed if they swell their ranks and alienate America from our allies, and they will never be able to do that if we stay true to who we are, if we forge tough and durable approaches to fighting terrorism that are anchored in our timeless ideals. This must be our common purpose.
I ran for President because I believe that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together. We will not be safe if we see national security as a wedge that divides America – it can and must be a cause that unites us as one people and as one nation. We’ve done so before in times that were more perilous than ours. We will do so once again.
Thank you, God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.
END at 11:17 A.M. EDT
***
Here is former Vice President Richard B. Cheney’s speech.
***
REMARKS BY RICHARD B. CHENEY
by former Vice President Richard B. Cheney
American Enterprise Institute, Washington D.C., May 21, 2009
Thank you all very much, and Arthur, thank you for that introduction. It’s good to be back at AEI, where we have many friends. Lynne is one of your longtime scholars, and I’m looking forward to spending more time here myself as a returning trustee. What happened was, they were looking for a new member of the board of trustees, and they asked me to head up the search committee.
I first came to AEI after serving at the Pentagon, and departed only after a very interesting job offer came along. I had no expectation of returning to public life, but my career worked out a little differently. Those eight years as vice president were quite a journey, and during a time of big events and great decisions, I don’t think I missed much.
Being the first vice president who had also served as secretary of defense, naturally my duties tended toward national security. I focused on those challenges day to day, mostly free from the usual political distractions. I had the advantage of being a vice president content with the responsibilities I had, and going about my work with no higher ambition. Today, I’m an even freer man. Your kind invitation brings me here as a private citizen – a career in politics behind me, no elections to win or lose, and no favor to seek.
The responsibilities we carried belong to others now. And though I’m not here to speak for George W. Bush, I am certain that no one wishes the current administration more success in defending the country than we do. We understand the complexities of national security decisions. We understand the pressures that confront a president and his advisers. Above all, we know what is at stake. And though administrations and policies have changed, the stakes for America have not changed.
Right now there is considerable debate in this city about the measures our administration took to defend the American people. Today I want to set forth the strategic thinking behind our policies. I do so as one who was there every day of the Bush administration who supported the policies when they were made, and without hesitation would do so again in the same circumstances.
When President Obama makes wise decisions, as I believe he has done in some respects on Afghanistan, and in reversing his plan to release incendiary photos, he deserves our support. And when he faults or mischaracterizes the national security decisions we made in the Bush years, he deserves an answer. The point is not to look backward. Now and for years to come, a lot rides on our President’s understanding of the security policies that preceded him. And whatever choices he makes concerning the defense of this country, those choices should not be based on slogans and campaign rhetoric, but on a truthful telling of history.
Our administration always faced its share of criticism, and from some quarters it was always intense. That was especially so in the later years of our term, when the dangers were as serious as ever, but the sense of general alarm after September 11, 2001 was a fading memory. Part of our responsibility, as we saw it, was not to forget the terrible harm that had been done to America . . . and not to let 9/11 become the prelude to something much bigger and far worse.
That attack itself was, of course, the most devastating strike in a series of terrorist plots carried out against Americans at home and abroad. In 1993, terrorists bombed the World Trade Center, hoping to bring down the towers with a blast from below. The attacks continued in 1995, with the bombing of U.S. facilities in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; the killing of servicemen at Khobar Towers in 1996; the attack on our embassies in East Africa in 1998; the murder of American sailors on the USS Cole in 2000; and then the hijackings of 9/11, and all the grief and loss we suffered on that day.
9/11 caused everyone to take a serious second look at threats that had been gathering for a while, and enemies whose plans were getting bolder and more sophisticated. Throughout the 90s, America had responded to these attacks, if at all, on an ad hoc basis. The first attack on the World Trade Center was treated as a law enforcement problem, with everything handled after the fact–crime scene, arrests, indictments, convictions, prison sentences, case closed.
That’s how it seemed from a law enforcement perspective, at least – but for the terrorists the case was not closed. For them, it was another offensive strike in their ongoing war against the United States. And it turned their minds to even harder strikes with higher casualties. Nine-eleven made necessary a shift of policy, aimed at a clear strategic threat – what the Congress called “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.” From that moment forward, instead of merely preparing to round up the suspects and count up the victims after the next attack, we were determined to prevent attacks in the first place.
We could count on almost universal support back then, because everyone understood the environment we were in. We’d just been hit by a foreign enemy – leaving 3,000 Americans dead, more than we lost at Pearl Harbor. In Manhattan, we were staring at 16 acres of ashes. The Pentagon took a direct hit, and the Capitol or the White House were spared only by the Americans on Flight 93, who died bravely and defiantly.
Everyone expected a follow-on attack, and our job was to stop it. We didn’t know what was coming next, but everything we did know in that autumn of 2001 looked bad. This was the world in which al-Qaeda was seeking nuclear technology, and A. Q. Khan was selling nuclear technology on the black market. We had the anthrax attack from an unknown source. We had the training camps of Afghanistan, and dictators like Saddam Hussein with known ties to Mideast terrorists.
These are just a few of the problems we had on our hands. And foremost on our minds was the prospect of the very worst coming to pass – a 9/11 with nuclear weapons.
For me, one of the defining experiences was the morning of 9/11 itself. As you might recall, I was in my office in that first hour, when radar caught sight of an airliner heading toward the White House at 500 miles an hour. That was Flight 77, the one that ended up hitting the Pentagon. With the plane still inbound, Secret Service agents came into my office and said we had to leave, now. A few moments later I found myself in a fortified White House command post somewhere down below.
There in the bunker came the reports and images that so many Americans remember from that day – word of the crash in Pennsylvania, the final phone calls from hijacked planes, the final horror for those who jumped to their death to escape burning alive. In the years since, I’ve heard occasional speculation that I’m a different man after 9/11. I wouldn’t say that. But I’ll freely admit that watching a coordinated, devastating attack on our country from an underground bunker at the White House can affect how you view your responsibilities.
To make certain our nation country never again faced such a day of horror, we developed a comprehensive strategy, beginning with far greater homeland security to make the United States a harder target. But since wars cannot be won on the defensive, we moved decisively against the terrorists in their hideouts and sanctuaries, and committed to using every asset to take down their networks. We decided, as well, to confront the regimes that sponsored terrorists, and to go after those who provide sanctuary, funding, and weapons to enemies of the United States. We turned special attention to regimes that had the capacity to build weapons of mass destruction, and might transfer such weapons to terrorists.
We did all of these things, and with bipartisan support put all these policies in place. It has resulted in serious blows against enemy operations: the take-down of the A.Q. Khan network and the dismantling of Libya’s nuclear program. It’s required the commitment of many thousands of troops in two theaters of war, with high points and some low points in both Iraq and Afghanistan – and at every turn, the people of our military carried the heaviest burden. Well over seven years into the effort, one thing we know is that the enemy has spent most of this time on the defensive – and every attempt to strike inside the United States has failed.
So we’re left to draw one of two conclusions – and here is the great dividing line in our current debate over national security. You can look at the facts and conclude that the comprehensive strategy has worked, and therefore needs to be continued as vigilantly as ever. Or you can look at the same set of facts and conclude that 9/11 was a one-off event – coordinated, devastating, but also unique and not sufficient to justify a sustained wartime effort. Whichever conclusion you arrive at, it will shape your entire view of the last seven years, and of the policies necessary to protect America for years to come.
The key to any strategy is accurate intelligence, and skilled professionals to get that information in time to use it. In seeking to guard this nation against the threat of catastrophic violence, our Administration gave intelligence officers the tools and lawful authority they needed to gain vital information. We didn’t invent that authority. It is drawn from Article Two of the Constitution. And it was given specificity by the Congress after 9/11, in a Joint Resolution authorizing “all necessary and appropriate force” to protect the American people.
Our government prevented attacks and saved lives through the Terrorist Surveillance Program, which let us intercept calls and track contacts between al-Qaeda operatives and persons inside the United States. The program was top secret, and for good reason, until the editors of the New York Times got it and put it on the front page. After 9/11, the Times had spent months publishing the pictures and the stories of everyone killed by al-Qaeda on 9/11. Now here was that same newspaper publishing secrets in a way that could only help al-Qaeda. It impressed the Pulitzer committee, but it damn sure didn’t serve the interests of our country, or the safety of our people.
In the years after 9/11, our government also understood that the safety of the country required collecting information known only to the worst of the terrorists. And in a few cases, that information could be gained only through tough interrogations.
In top secret meetings about enhanced interrogations, I made my own beliefs clear. I was and remain a strong proponent of our enhanced interrogation program. The interrogations were used on hardened terrorists after other efforts failed. They were legal, essential, justified, successful, and the right thing to do. The intelligence officers who questioned the terrorists can be proud of their work and proud of the results, because they prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people.
Our successors in office have their own views on all of these matters.
By presidential decision, last month we saw the selective release of documents relating to enhanced interrogations. This is held up as a bold exercise in open government, honoring the public’s right to know. We’re informed, as well, that there was much agonizing over this decision.
Yet somehow, when the soul-searching was done and the veil was lifted on the policies of the Bush administration, the public was given less than half the truth. The released memos were carefully redacted to leave out references to what our government learned through the methods in question. Other memos, laying out specific terrorist plots that were averted, apparently were not even considered for release. For reasons the administration has yet to explain, they believe the public has a right to know the method of the questions, but not the content of the answers.
Over on the left wing of the president’s party, there appears to be little curiosity in finding out what was learned from the terrorists. The kind of answers they’re after would be heard before a so-called “Truth Commission.” Some are even demanding that those who recommended and approved the interrogations be prosecuted, in effect treating political disagreements as a punishable offense, and political opponents as criminals. It’s hard to imagine a worse precedent, filled with more possibilities for trouble and abuse, than to have an incoming administration criminalize the policy decisions of its predecessors.
Apart from doing a serious injustice to intelligence operators and lawyers who deserve far better for their devoted service, the danger here is a loss of focus on national security, and what it requires. I would advise the administration to think very carefully about the course ahead. All the zeal that has been directed at interrogations is utterly misplaced. And staying on that path will only lead our government further away from its duty to protect the American people.
One person who by all accounts objected to the release of the interrogation memos was the Director of Central Intelligence, Leon Panetta. He was joined in that view by at least four of his predecessors. I assume they felt this way because they understand the importance of protecting intelligence sources, methods, and personnel. But now that this once top-secret information is out for all to see – including the enemy – let me draw your attention to some points that are routinely overlooked.
It is a fact that only detainees of the highest intelligence value were ever subjected to enhanced interrogation. You’ve heard endlessly about waterboarding. It happened to three terrorists. One of them was Khalid Sheikh Muhammed – the mastermind of 9/11, who has also boasted about beheading Daniel Pearl.
We had a lot of blind spots after the attacks on our country. We didn’t know about al-Qaeda’s plans, but Khalid Sheikh Muhammed and a few others did know. And with many thousands of innocent lives potentially in the balance, we didn’t think it made sense to let the terrorists answer questions in their own good time, if they answered them at all.
Maybe you’ve heard that when we captured KSM, he said he would talk as soon as he got to New York City and saw his lawyer. But like many critics of interrogations, he clearly misunderstood the business at hand. American personnel were not there to commence an elaborate legal proceeding, but to extract information from him before al-Qaeda could strike again and kill more of our people.
In public discussion of these matters, there has been a strange and sometimes willful attempt to conflate what happened at Abu Ghraib prison with the top secret program of enhanced interrogations. At Abu Ghraib, a few sadistic prison guards abused inmates in violation of American law, military regulations, and simple decency. For the harm they did, to Iraqi prisoners and to America’s cause, they deserved and received Army justice. And it takes a deeply unfair cast of mind to equate the disgraces of Abu Ghraib with the lawful, skillful, and entirely honorable work of CIA personnel trained to deal with a few malevolent men.
Even before the interrogation program began, and throughout its operation, it was closely reviewed to ensure that every method used was in full compliance with the Constitution, statutes, and treaty obligations. On numerous occasions, leading members of Congress, including the current speaker of the House, were briefed on the program and on the methods.
Yet for all these exacting efforts to do a hard and necessary job and to do it right, we hear from some quarters nothing but feigned outrage based on a false narrative. In my long experience in Washington, few matters have inspired so much contrived indignation and phony moralizing as the interrogation methods applied to a few captured terrorists.
I might add that people who consistently distort the truth in this way are in no position to lecture anyone about “values.” Intelligence officers of the United States were not trying to rough up some terrorists simply to avenge the dead of 9/11. We know the difference in this country between justice and vengeance. Intelligence officers were not trying to get terrorists to confess to past killings; they were trying to prevent future killings. From the beginning of the program, there was only one focused and all-important purpose. We sought, and we in fact obtained, specific information on terrorist plans.
Those are the basic facts on enhanced interrogations. And to call this a program of torture is to libel the dedicated professionals who have saved American lives, and to cast terrorists and murderers as innocent victims. What’s more, to completely rule out enhanced interrogation methods in the future is unwise in the extreme. It is recklessness cloaked in righteousness, and would make the American people less safe.
The administration seems to pride itself on searching for some kind of middle ground in policies addressing terrorism. They may take comfort in hearing disagreement from opposite ends of the spectrum. If liberals are unhappy about some decisions, and conservatives are unhappy about other decisions, then it may seem to them that the President is on the path of sensible compromise. But in the fight against terrorism, there is no middle ground, and half-measures keep you half exposed. You cannot keep just some nuclear-armed terrorists out of the United States, you must keep every nuclear-armed terrorist out of the United States. Triangulation is a political strategy, not a national security strategy. When just a single clue that goes unlearned, one lead that goes unpursued, can bring on catastrophe – it’s no time for splitting differences. There is never a good time to compromise when the lives and safety of the American people are in the balance.
Behind the overwrought reaction to enhanced interrogations is a broader misconception about the threats that still face our country. You can sense the problem in the emergence of euphemisms that strive to put an imaginary distance between the American people and the terrorist enemy. Apparently using the term “war” where terrorists are concerned is starting to feel a bit dated. So henceforth we’re advised by the administration to think of the fight against terrorists as, quote, “Overseas contingency operations.” In the event of another terrorist attack on America, the Homeland Security Department assures us it will be ready for this, quote, “man-made disaster” – never mind that the whole Department was created for the purpose of protecting Americans from terrorist attack.
And when you hear that there are no more, quote, “enemy combatants,” as there were back in the days of that scary war on terror, at first that sounds like progress. The only problem is that the phrase is gone, but the same assortment of killers and would-be mass murderers are still there. And finding some less judgmental or more pleasant-sounding name for terrorists doesn’t change what they are – or what they would do if we let them loose.
On his second day in office, President Obama announced that he was closing the detention facility at Guantanamo. This step came with little deliberation and no plan. Now the President says some of these terrorists should be brought to American soil for trial in our court system. Others, he says, will be shipped to third countries. But so far, the United States has had little luck getting other countries to take hardened terrorists. So what happens then? Attorney General Holder and others have admitted that the United States will be compelled to accept a number of the terrorists here, in the homeland, and it has even been suggested US taxpayer dollars will be used to support them. On this one, I find myself in complete agreement with many in the President’s own party. Unsure how to explain to their constituents why terrorists might soon be relocating into their states, these Democrats chose instead to strip funding for such a move out of the most recent war supplemental.
The administration has found that it’s easy to receive applause in Europe for closing Guantanamo. But it’s tricky to come up with an alternative that will serve the interests of justice and America’s national security. Keep in mind that these are hardened terrorists picked up overseas since 9/11. The ones that were considered low-risk were released a long time ago. And among these, we learned yesterday, many were treated too leniently, because 1 in 7 cut a straight path back to their prior line of work and have conducted murderous attacks in the Middle East. I think the President will find, upon reflection, that to bring the worst of the worst terrorists inside the United States would be cause for great danger and regret in the years to come.
In the category of euphemism, the prizewinning entry would be a recent editorial in a familiar newspaper that referred to terrorists we’ve captured as, quote, “abducted.” Here we have ruthless enemies of this country, stopped in their tracks by brave operatives in the service of America, and a major editorial page makes them sound like they were kidnap victims, picked up at random on their way to the movies.
It’s one thing to adopt the euphemisms that suggest we’re no longer engaged in a war. These are just words, and in the end it’s the policies that matter most. You don’t want to call them enemy combatants? Fine. Call them what you want–just don’t bring them into the United States. Tired of calling it a war? Use any term you prefer. Just remember it is a serious step to begin unraveling some of the very policies that have kept our people safe since 9/11.
Another term out there that slipped into the discussion is the notion that American interrogation practices were a “recruitment tool” for the enemy. On this theory, by the tough questioning of killers, we have supposedly fallen short of our own values. This recruitment-tool theory has become something of a mantra lately, including from the President himself. And after a familiar fashion, it excuses the violent and blames America for the evil that others do. It’s another version of that same old refrain from the Left, “We brought it on ourselves.”
It is much closer to the truth that terrorists hate this country precisely because of the values we profess and seek to live by, not by some alleged failure to do so. Nor are terrorists or those who see them as victims exactly the best judges of America’s moral standards, one way or the other.
Critics of our policies are given to lecturing on the theme of being consistent with American values. But no moral value held dear by the American people obliges public servants ever to sacrifice innocent lives to spare a captured terrorist from unpleasant things. And when an entire population is targeted by a terror network, nothing is more consistent with American values than to stop them.
As a practical matter, too, terrorists may lack much, but they have never lacked for grievances against the United States. Our belief in freedom of speech and religion, our belief in equal rights for women, our support for Israel, our cultural and political influence in the world – these are the true sources of resentment, all mixed in with the lies and conspiracy theories of the radical clerics. These recruitment tools were in vigorous use throughout the 1990s, and they were sufficient to motivate the nineteen recruits who boarded those planes on September 11, 2001.
The United States of America was a good country before 9/11, just as we are today. List all the things that make us a force for good in the world–for liberty, for human rights, for the rational, peaceful resolution of differences–and what you end up with is a list of the reasons why the terrorists hate America. If fine speech-making, appeals to reason, or pleas for compassion had the power to move them, the terrorists would long ago have abandoned the field. And when they see the American government caught up in arguments about interrogations, or whether foreign terrorists have constitutional rights, they don’t stand back in awe of our legal system and wonder whether they had misjudged us all along. Instead the terrorists see just what they were hoping for – our unity gone, our resolve shaken, our leaders distracted. In short, they see weakness and opportunity.
What is equally certain is this: The broad-based strategy set in motion by President Bush obviously had nothing to do with causing the events of 9/11. But the serious way we dealt with terrorists from then on, and all the intelligence we gathered in that time, had everything to do with preventing another 9/11 on our watch. The enhanced interrogations of high-value detainees and the terrorist surveillance program have without question made our country safer. Every senior official who has been briefed on these classified matters knows of specific attacks that were in the planning stages and were stopped by the programs we put in place.
This might explain why President Obama has reserved unto himself the right to order the use of enhanced interrogation should he deem it appropriate. What value remains to that authority is debatable, given that the enemy now knows exactly what interrogation methods to train against, and which ones not to worry about. Yet having reserved for himself the authority to order enhanced interrogation after an emergency, you would think that President Obama would be less disdainful of what his predecessor authorized after 9/11. It’s almost gone unnoticed that the president has retained the power to order the same methods in the same circumstances. When they talk about interrogations, he and his administration speak as if they have resolved some great moral dilemma in how to extract critical information from terrorists. Instead they have put the decision off, while assigning a presumption of moral superiority to any decision they make in the future.
Releasing the interrogation memos was flatly contrary to the national security interest of the United States. The harm done only begins with top secret information now in the hands of the terrorists, who have just received a lengthy insert for their training manual. Across the world, governments that have helped us capture terrorists will fear that sensitive joint operations will be compromised. And at the CIA, operatives are left to wonder if they can depend on the White House or Congress to back them up when the going gets tough. Why should any agency employee take on a difficult assignment when, even though they act lawfully and in good faith, years down the road the press and Congress will treat everything they do with suspicion, outright hostility, and second-guessing? Some members of Congress are notorious for demanding they be briefed into the most sensitive intelligence programs. They support them in private, and then head for the hills at the first sign of controversy.
As far as the interrogations are concerned, all that remains an official secret is the information we gained as a result. Some of his defenders say the unseen memos are inconclusive, which only raises the question why they won’t let the American people decide that for themselves. I saw that information as vice president, and I reviewed some of it again at the National Archives last month. I’ve formally asked that it be declassified so the American people can see the intelligence we obtained, the things we learned, and the consequences for national security. And as you may have heard, last week that request was formally rejected. It’s worth recalling that ultimate power of declassification belongs to the President himself. President Obama has used his declassification power to reveal what happened in the interrogation of terrorists. Now let him use that same power to show Americans what did not happen, thanks to the good work of our intelligence officials.
I believe this information will confirm the value of interrogations–and I am not alone. President Obama’s own Director of National Intelligence, Admiral Blair, has put it this way: “High value information came from interrogations in which those methods were used and provided a deeper understanding of the al-Qaeda organization that was attacking this country.” End quote. Admiral Blair put that conclusion in writing, only to see it mysteriously deleted in a later version released by the administration–the missing twenty-six words that tell an inconvenient truth. But they couldn’t change the words of George Tenet, the CIA Director under Presidents Clinton and Bush, who bluntly said: “I know that this program has saved lives. I know we’ve disrupted plots. I know this program alone is worth more than the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the National Security Agency put together have been able to tell us.”
If Americans do get the chance to learn what our country was spared, it’ll do more than clarify the urgency and the rightness of enhanced interrogations in the years after 9/11. It may help us to stay focused on dangers that have not gone away. Instead of idly debating which political opponents to prosecute and punish, our attention will return to where it belongs – on the continuing threat of terrorist violence, and on stopping the men who are planning it.
For all the partisan anger that still lingers, our administration will stand up well in history – not despite our actions after 9/11, but because of them. And when I think about all that was to come during our administration and afterward–the recriminations, the second-guessing, the charges of “hubris”–my mind always goes back to that moment.
To put things in perspective, suppose that on the evening of 9/11, President Bush and I had promised that for as long as we held office–which was to be another 2,689 days–there would never be another terrorist attack inside this country. Talk about hubris – it would have seemed a rash and irresponsible thing to say. People would have doubted that we even understood the enormity of what had just happened. Everyone had a very bad feeling about all of this, and felt certain that the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and Shanksville were only the beginning of the violence.
Of course, we made no such promise. Instead, we promised an all-out effort to protect this country. We said we would marshal all elements of our nation’s power to fight this war and to win it. We said we would never forget what had happened on 9/11, even if the day came when many others did forget. We spoke of a war that would “include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success.” We followed through on all of this, and we stayed true to our word.
To the very end of our administration, we kept al-Qaeda terrorists busy with other problems. We focused on getting their secrets, instead of sharing ours with them. And on our watch, they never hit this country again. After the most lethal and devastating terrorist attack ever, seven and a half years without a repeat is not a record to be rebuked and scorned, much less criminalized. It is a record to be continued until the danger has passed.
Along the way there were some hard calls. No decision of national security was ever made lightly, and certainly never made in haste. As in all warfare, there have been costs – none higher than the sacrifices of those killed and wounded in our country’s service. And even the most decisive victories can never take away the sorrow of losing so many of our own – all those innocent victims of 9/11, and the heroic souls who died trying to save them.
For all that we’ve lost in this conflict, the United States has never lost its moral bearings. And when the moral reckoning turns to the men known as high-value terrorists, I can assure you they were neither innocent nor victims. As for those who asked them questions and got answers: they did the right thing, they made our country safer, and a lot of Americans are alive today because of them.
Like so many others who serve America, they are not the kind to insist on a thank-you. But I will always be grateful to each one of them, and proud to have served with them for a time in the same cause. They, and so many others, have given honorable service to our country through all the difficulties and all the dangers. I will always admire them and wish them well. And I am confident that this nation will never take their work, their dedication, or their achievements, for granted.
An op-ed on Durban II by Saad Eddin Ibrahim, Egyptian dissident and Harvard scholar
The Wall Street Journal, April 24, 2009
In 1948, the United Nations recognized the “inherent dignity” and “the equal and inalienable rights” of all human beings when it ratified the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Though this week’s U.N. conference in Geneva claimed to stand for these noble values, the world’s dictators were the real winners.
Too many official country delegates didn’t come to Geneva to stand up for the oppressed. They came to condemn the “colonial powers” of the West and Israel. In so doing, they sought to guard against exposing their own regimes’ human-rights records. While the delegates met in the official conference hall, the true defenders of human rights – civil society organizations and dissidents – gathered at their own conference where they examined today’s most pressing human-rights issues.
The deep divide between those who seek to expose human-rights abuses and those who only use the language of human rights as a shield is not new. It started during Rio’s Earth Summit in 1992, where, for the first time, the U.N. agreed to host two forums: one for government representatives and one for NGOs. The divide between government and NGOs, and between the Third World and the West, reached an apex in Durban, South Africa, in 2001. The central wedge issue was the treatment of the state of Israel.
Eight years ago, the Durban Declaration and Plan of Action (DDPA) singled out Israel for the harshest rebuke of any country. It was not that Israel was totally innocent of charges about its continued occupation of the Palestinians. But the vehemence with which the delegates issued this condemnation, and their manner of voting on it – the delegates cheered “Down With Israel” – led many to conclude that the DPPA bordered on anti-Semitism.
What compounded this sentiment is that most of the governments that pile on to condemn Israel and the so-called “neocolonial” West have terrible human-rights records. These include tyrannical regimes such as Zimbabwe, Myanmar, Libya, Iran, Syria and Egypt (my home country). Their atrocious violations have been widely reported by organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
But members of like-minded voting blocs – such as the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the Organization of African Unity and the League of Arab States – comprise more than two-thirds of the U.N. membership votes. Together, they can railroad through any resolution, no matter how absurd. It was this Afro-Islamic-Arab bloc that made sure Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would be the keynote speaker in the opening session of this year’s U.N. World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance.
Rightly anticipating that the Geneva conference would be a forum for anti-Western and anti-Israel propaganda, the U.S. and a score of Western democracies boycotted the conference entirely. More countries – such as Britain, Germany and Holland – walked out of the conference when Mr. Ahmadinejad delivered his usual anti-Israel tirade, calling the Jewish state a “most cruel and racist regime.”
Unfortunately, lost in this circus were the real victims who suffer at the hands of autocratic and theocratic regimes. The most vulnerable groups – the poor, women, children, migrant and stateless people – were ignored this week in Geneva.
Though the decision to boycott the conference was understandable, I believe it was a mistake. The U.S. and other democracies should have attended and fought back. An overwhelming majority of mankind would have applauded their moral courage.
I spent three years alone in an Egyptian prison for the crime of “tarnishing Egypt’s reputation.” Today, prisoners like Roxana Saberi in Iran languish in jails for crimes they did not commit. It is the job of true human-rights advocates to strengthen such victims by standing up to dictators.
Rather than letting Mr. Ahmadinejad steal the headlines, I would have liked to have seen the universally popular President Barack Obama take on the hypocrites who speak in the name of Islam and want to sacrifice such basic rights as freedom of speech by outlawing “Islamophobia.” Mr. Obama could have rescued the human-rights agenda from those who have hijacked it.
Though it didn’t happen in Geneva, I look forward to a campaign, led by Mr. Obama, to return the cause of human rights to its rightful owners.
Mr. Ibrahim was incarcerated by the Mubarak regime from 2000 to 2003. He is now a visiting professor at Harvard.
Cuba’s former President Fidel Castro, in a new article published in Granma, says U.S. President Barack Obama misinterpreted comments from Fidel’s brother, Cuban President Raul Castro. Fidel Castro repelled the idea that Cuba is ready to free political prisoners or lower taxes on remittance payments.
ABC News‘ White House correspondent discusses what Fidel’s comments might suggest for U.S.-Cuba talks in a blog post.
It is highly disappointing, but not surprising, that more than 100 nations attending the Durban II Racism Conference in Geneva overwhelmingly voted to approve a final declaration that is biased. In a replay of the 2001 original United Nations World Conference against Racism, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, Israel is again the only nation singled out.
The conference, which is a follow-up to the 2001 United Nations World Conference against Racism, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, was meant to address those human rights issues and their violators. However, both the Durban Review Conference and its predecessor degenerated into anti-Israel summits. The 2009 declaration reaffirms the conclusions from the original Durban conference. That document asserted that Palestinians are subject to Israeli “racism.”
The expectation that this anti-Israel declaration would again be the outcome prompted Israel, Canada, the United States of America, Italy, Germany, Australia, Holland, New Zealand, Czech Republic, and Poland to withdraw.
Libya helped to seal the negative outcome of the conference. Chosen as the chair of the conference, despite a long history of supporting terrorism and violating human rights, Libya yesterday engineered the swift movement of the declaration from the drafting committee and adoption of the preparatory document of last week.
Any hope for a better outcome document was dashed with an address to the conference by one who calls for the destruction of and supports terrorism against the State of Israel, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Many nations walked out in protest on April 20, 2009, in the face of his hateful, anti-Semitic, anti-Israel tirade.
The 23 European Union nations delegates walked out during Ahmadinejad speech, in which he said that the foundation of the State of Israel rendered “an entire nation homeless under the pretext of Jewish suffering” in order “to establish a totally racist government in occupied Palestine.”
***
Quotes from Ahmadinejad’s speech in Geneva [source: BBC News]
“The victorious powers [of the world wars] call themselves the conquerors of the world, while ignoring or down-treading the rights of other nations by the imposition of oppressive laws and international arrangements.”
“Following World War II, they resorted to making an entire nation homeless on the pretext of Jewish suffering. They sent migrants from Europe, the United States and other parts of the world in order to establish a totally racist government in the occupied Palestine. In compensation for the dire consequences of racism in Europe, they helped bring to power the most cruel and repressive racist regime in Palestine.”
“It is all the more regrettable that a number of Western governments and the United States have committed themselves to defending those racist perpetrators of genocide, whilst the awakened consciences and free-minded people of the world condemn aggression, brutality and the bombardment of civilians of Gaza.”
“[Conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan were] a clear example of egocentrism, racism, discrimination or infringement upon the dignity and independence of nations. Today, the human community is facing a kind of racism which has tarnished the image of humanity. In the beginning of the third millennium, the word Zionism personifies racism. [It] falsely resorts to religion and abuses religious sentiments to hide hatred.”
“Efforts must be made to put an end to the abuse by Zionists and their supporters of political and international means…Governments must be encouraged and supported in the fight aimed at eradicating this barbaric racism and moving towards reforming the current international mechanisms.”
“You are all aware of the conspiracy of some powers and Zionist circles against the goals and objectives of this conference… It should be recognized that boycotting such a session is a true indication of supporting the blatant example of racism.”
A statement by Anne Bayefsky at the Third Substantive Preparatory Meeting of the Durban Review Conference.
April 17, 2009
United Nations, Palais des Nations, Geneva, Switzerland
The eyes of millions of victims of racism, xenophobia and intolerance are upon YOU, the representatives of states and the United Nations. And instead of hope you have given them despair. Instead of truth you have handed them diplomatic double-talk. Instead of combating anti-Semitism you have handed them a reason for Jews to fear UN-driven hatemongering on a global scale.
The Durban conference – allegedly dedicated to combating racism, anti-Semitism and other forms of intolerance – will open April 20th on the anniversary of the birth of Adolf Hitler without agreement on even so much as remembering the Holocaust and the war against the Jews. Your draft words on the Holocaust – the very foundation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – have been narrowed to the barest mention from previous versions. And if the minor reference survives at all – it will be a testament to your interest in Jews that died 60 years ago, while tolerating and encouraging the murder of Jews in the here and now.
Furthermore, the draft before you demonizes the Jewish state of Israel and then has the audacity to pretend to care about anti-Semitism in a single word buried among 17 pages. Anti-Semitism means discrimination against the Jewish people. Since it is evident that almost none of you have the courage to say it, the face of modern anti-Semitism IS the UN – your – discrimination against Israel, the embodiment of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination.
Over and over again we have heard a massive misinformation campaign about the content of these proceedings and the draft before you. We have heard the tale that this draft does not single out Israel, that the hate has been removed, that the fault of the anti-Semitism at Durban I was that of NGOs while states and the UN were blameless.
Perhaps you think that journalists and victims will not bother to read for themselves the Durban Declaration adopted by some governments. There is only one state mentioned in it – Israel. There is only one state associated with racist practices in it – Israel. And yet the very first thing that this draft before you does is to reaffirm that abomination, abomination for Jews and Arabs living in Israel’s free and democratic society, and for all the victims of racism ignored therein. Lawyers call it incorporation by reference when they hope nobody reads the small print. The propaganda stops here. We have read it. We understand the game. And we decry the ugly effort to repeat the Durban agenda to isolate and defeat Israel politically, as every effort to do so militarily for decades has failed.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Chair of this Preparatory Committee also told us this week that the Durban Declaration in all its aspects is a consensus text. Perhaps they are unfamiliar with the Canadian reservations made in Durban in 2001 which state categorically that the Middle East language was outside the conference’s jurisdiction and not agreed. Perhaps they failed to notice that one of the world’s greatest democracies, the United States, voted with its feet and walked out of the Durban I hatefest. The Durban Declaration has never represented a global consensus among free and democratic nations. When the head of the Islamic conference treats Durban as a bible, in their words, it is more accurately a defamation of religions.
This week you decided which states ought to serve in a leadership role at next week’s conference. Among them are some of the world’s leading practitioners of racism, not those interested in ending it. You have also decided to hand a global megaphone to the President of a state which advocates genocide and denies the Holocaust.
So in a state of shock and dismay we address ourselves not to the human rights abusers that glorify the Durban Declaration or its next incarnation, but to democracies – and we ask: Will Germany sit on Hitler’s birthday and listen to the speech of an advocate of genocide against the Jewish people and grant legitimacy to the forum which tolerates his presence? What about the United Kingdom, the birthplace of the Magna Carta? Or France that helped to ship last generation’s Jews to crematoriums?
You could have fought racism. You chose instead to fight Jews. You could have promoted the universal standards against racism already in existence. You chose instead to diminish their importance in the name of alleged cultural preferences. You could have protected freedom of expression. You chose instead to undermine it by twisted concepts of incitement. You could have brought victims of racism together in a common cause. You chose instead to pit victims against each other in an ugly struggle for meager recognition.
For those democracies that remain under these circumstances you are ultimately responsible for what can only be called an appalling disservice to real victims of racism, xenophobia and related intolerance around the world.
About the author: AnneBayefsky holds a B.A., M.A. and LL.B. from the University of Toronto and an M.Litt. from Oxford University. She is a barrister and solicitor of the Ontario Bar, and senior fellow at the Hudson Institute as well as professor at Columbia University Law School in New York, where her areas of expertise include international human rights law, equality rights, and constitutional human rights law. Visit her website here.
10th session of the Human Rights Council (Geneva, March 2009)
Thank you, Mr. President.
Racism is evil. How can we truly fight it?
For starters, by clearing up three myths about next month’s conference.
Myth Number One: that the new draft removes all pernicious provisions.
The truth is that many were removed – thanks only to the credible threat of an E.U. walk-out – but red lines continue to be breached:
Articles 10, 30 and 132 encourage the Islamic states’ campaign to ban any criticism of religion.
Articles 60 to 62 demonize the West, addressing only its sins of slavery, yet saying nothing of the massive Arab trade in African slaves, thereby politicizing that which should never be politicized.
Article 1 breaches President Obama’s red line by reaffirming what his government called the quote, “flawed 2001 Durban Declaration”, a text that stigmatized Israel with false accusations.
Myth Number Two: that going to the conference means dialogue.
In truth, we’ve been negotiating non-stop since August 2007. Going to the conference means endorsing a particular text, and risks legitimizing the greatest perpetrators of racism.
Ironically, many who now claim to support dialogue, are Mideast states belonging to the Arab Boycott Office in Damascus, or radical left campaigners who call for equally bigoted boycotts in the West.
Myth Number Three: that Durban 2 will help millions of victims.
But can anyone name a single victim of racism who was helped by the 2001 conference and countless follow-up committees?
Did Durban help a single victim of Sudan’s racist campaign of mass killing, rape and displacement against millions in Darfur?
Did it help the women of Saudi Arabia subjected to systematic discrimination?
Did it help gays executed by Iran, even as President Ahmadinejad says there are no gays in Iran?
Did it help the 2 million black African migrants in Libya, who, as we read in last week’s International Herald Tribune, say they are treated like slaves and animals?
To truly fight racism, we need to hold perpetrators to account. Tragically, Durban 2 does the opposite.
Leon Edward Panetta, the new director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, said yesterday in a message to CIA employees that the agency would shut down its remaining secret prisons overseas, The New York Times reports.
Statement to Employees by Director of the Central Intelligence Agency Leon E. Panetta on the CIA’s Interrogation Policy and Contracts
April 9, 2009
As you know, there is continuing media and congressional interest in reviewing past rendition, detention, and interrogation activities that took place dating back to 2002. I have also been asked about contract interrogators and detention facilities. Today, I sent a letter to our Congressional oversight committees outlining the Agency’s current policy regarding interrogation of captured terrorists, including the policy on the use of contractors in the process.
CIA’s aggressive global pursuit of al-Qaida and its affiliates continues undiminished. Agency officers are working tirelessly – and successfully – to disrupt operations in strict accord with the President’s Executive Order of January 22, 2009, concerning detention and interrogation.
CIA officers, whose knowledge of terrorist organizations is second to none, will continue to conduct debriefings using a dialog style of questioning that is fully consistent with the interrogation approaches authorized and listed in the Army Field Manual. CIA officers do not tolerate, and will continue to promptly report, any inappropriate behavior or allegations of abuse. That holds true whether a suspect is in the custody of an American partner or a foreign liaison service.
Under the Executive Order, the CIA does not employ any of the enhanced interrogation techniques that were authorized by the Department of Justice from 2002 to 2009.
No CIA contractors will conduct interrogations.
CIA no longer operates detention facilities or black sites and has proposed a plan to decommission the remaining sites. I have directed our Agency personnel to take charge of the decommissioning process and have further directed that the contracts for site security be promptly terminated. It is estimated that our taking over site security will result in savings of up to $4 million.
CIA retains the authority to detain individuals on a short-term transitory basis. None have occurred since I have become Director. We anticipate that we would quickly turn over any person in our custody to U.S. military authorities or to their country of jurisdiction, depending on the situation.
CIA’s focus will remain where the American people expect it to be-on the mission of protecting the country today and into the future. We will do that even as we cooperate with Congressional reviews of past interrogation practices. Officers who act on guidance from the Department of Justice – or acted on such guidance previously – should not be investigated, let alone punished. This is what fairness and wisdom require.
CIA will continue to honor the law as we defend the United States as we have done since the beginning of this program. That is what the men and women of this Agency demand. Together, we can, and will, do no less. Thank you for your service and dedication to protecting this nation.
Finally, let me take this opportunity to wish you and your families a Happy Easter and Passover.
The U.N. Human Rights Council is wholly owned and operated by Islamic states that legitimize Hamas and Hezbollah terrorism, supported by an automatic majority from China, Cuba, and other repressive regimes. Canada, now the true America, is the only country in the world that has been willing to stand up and resist Orwellian resolutions that are destroying the true principles of human rights.
The resolutions of the U.N. Human Rights Council failed to address human rights violations of Muslim countries, notably Iran’s persecution of Baha’is, Saudi Arabia’s banning of all religious practice aside from Islam, and the persecution of Christian communities in Egypt, Pakistan and Iraq. Instead of this, the U.N. Human Rights Council recommended to criminalize the defamation of Islam.
Hillary Rodham Clinton in Geneva tomorrow: Will she stop Swiss nomination of U.N.’s leading anti-American and anti-Israel official?
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton meets in Geneva tomorrow with Swiss Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey, whose government has just nominated Jean Ziegler – a former Swiss politician notorious for his anti-American books, giving a prize to a French Holocaust denier, and apologetics for Libyan’s Qaddafi regime – to a U.N. human rights post. Jean Ziegler is a longtime Socialist party confidante of Ms. Calmy-Rey.
Calmy-Rey’s government nominated Ziegler for re-election to the advisory committee of the UN Human Rights Council, as the only candidate of the council’s Western group. When Western states elect a notorious apologist of dictators and one of the world’s most virulent promoters of hatred against their own embattled civilization, they signal defeatism in the wrong place and at the worst time. Ziegler’s latest French-language best-seller is entitled Hatred of the West. The U.N. vote is scheduled for March 25, 2009.
Apologist for some of the worst human rights criminals of our time.
After Fidel Castro imprisoned 70 journalists, Ziegler proclaimed “total support for the Cuban revolution.” During an official visit to the Communist island in October 2008, Ziegler hailed the virtues of Castro regime even while he refused to meet Cuban dissidents.
Only pressure from U.S. Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton, supported by other voices of reason, can stop Swiss Foreign Minister Calmy-Rey from pursing this outrageous nomination.
Die Deutsch-Israelische Gesellschaft (DIG) ruft die Bundesregierung zur Nichtteilnahme an der Durban II-Konferenz auf.
In einer heute dazu veröffentlichten Pressemitteilung heißt es:
“Der Präsident der Deutsch-Israelischen Gesellschaft Dr. h.c. Johannes Gerster hat die Bundesregierung erneut aufgefordert, die Durban Review Conference im April in Genf (Durban II) jetzt endgültig zu boykottieren.
Gerster: Bereits am 15. Dezember 2008 hat die DIG darauf hingewiesen, dass auch Durban II die Ziele der UN missbraucht und die Hasstiraden gegen Israel eine Neuauflage erfahren. Obwohl sich Antirassismus – eines der vorgegebenen Ziele dieser UN-Konferenz – und Hasstiraden eigentlich ausschließen müssten, wird wiederum Hass gegen Israel geschürt und Israel stigmatisiert. Alle Warnungen konnten die Bundesregierung noch nicht veranlassen, ihre Teilnahme am bevorstehenden Tribunal gegen Israel abzusagen.
Wer es zulässt, dass sich Staaten – wie die Islamische Republik Iran – in denen die Verletzung der Menschenrechte zum Alltag gehören, zu Richtern über demokratische Staaten – wie Israel – auf internationaler Bühne aufschwingen, verhöhnt die religiösen Minderheiten und unterdrückte Frauen im Iran und ermuntert diejenigen, für die Menschenrechtsverletzungen Routine sind, ihr mieses Handwerk weiter auszuüben. Alle, denen die überstaatlichen und überparteilichen Menschenrechte am Herzen liegen, müssen dem Missbrauch der Menschenrechte zur Durchsetzung eigener politischer und ideologischer Ziele laut und deutlich widersprechen. Sie dürfen sich nicht zu Handlangern machen lassen.
Die deutsche Bundesregierung ist mehr noch als die bisher boykottierenden Regierungen Kanadas, der USA und Israels aus historischen, politischen und moralischen Gründen verpflichtet, das sich abzeichnende üble Schauspiel Durban II zu boykottieren.
Wenn das Existenzrecht Israels Teil der deutschen Staatraison ist, dürfte die Zeit der Prüfung, des Nachdenkens und der Entscheidung ausgereicht haben, um zu einer klaren Absage zu kommen.”
Location: Presse- und Besucherzentrum, Room 4, Presse- und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung, Entrance Reichstagufer 14, 10117 Berlin
In 2001, the “UN World Conference against Racism” took place in Durban, South Africa. This event turned into a platform of hateful agitation against Israel and the jews while the world’s dictatorships attested each other clean records.
The “Durban Review Conference”, announced for April 2009, will do justice to its name. This time we shall not only witness the usual demonization of Israel (”apartheid”) but also more and more attacks on the freedom of speech, freedom of press and freedom of expression. Human rights are twisted step by step to work as a means of oppression in the name of religion.
Democratic states are seriously challenged by these dangerous reinterpretations. The foundations of an open society must not be put up for negotiations! In the light of this new push, an unambiguous reaction is more than necessary. The initiators and the subscribers of the petition call Germay and other states of the European Union to boycott the “Durban 2″ conference and to push forward a comprehensive reform of the United Nation’s Human Rights Council.
The initiative “Boycott Durban II”
Last year, French novelist and essayist Pascal Bruckner with his call to boycott “Durban II” gave the idea to this initiative. More than 30 journalists, authors, scientists and artists, In Europe, the United States and the Middle East have joined Bruckner’s petition, among them Lars Gustafsson, Jeffrey Herf, Benny Morris, Peter Schneider, Seyran Ates, Necla Kelek, Matthias Küntzel, Sharon Adler, Prof. Arno Lustiger and Ralph Giordano. More than 1,000 people signed the petition which will be handed over to the German Federal Government and to other EU member state governments.
To mark the end of the campaign, a press conference will be held at with Caroline Fourest and other speakers will reaffirm the necessity of a boycott.
Participants of the press conference:
- Caroline Fourest, Author/Publisher, Paris
- Nasrin Amirsedghi; Publisher, Mainz
- Alex Feuerherdt; Journalist, Bonn
- Klaus Faber; Secretary of State (ret.), Potsdam
- Anetta Kahane; Chair of the Amadeu-Antonio-Stiftung, Berlin
Moderation: Thierry Chervel; Chief Editor of the online cultural magazine Perlentaucher, Berlin
Cooperation partners: Koordinierungsrat deutscher Nicht-Regierungsorganisationen gegen Antisemitismus; Group of 25th of November u. Föderation unabh. NGOs, Suleymaniya, Kurdistan/Nordirak; Mideast Freedom Forum Berlin e.V. (MFFB)
Ort: Presse- und Besucherzentrum, Raum 4, im Presse- und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung, Eingang Reichstagufer 14, 10117 Berlin
Im Jahre 2001 fand im südafrikanischen Durban die „UN-Weltkonferenz gegen Rassismus” statt. Die Veranstaltung entwickelte sich zu einer Plattform hasserfüllter Agitation gegen Israel und die Juden, während die Diktaturen dieser Welt sich gegenseitig blütenreine Westen attestierten.
Die für April 2009 angekündigte „Durban Review Conference” wird ihrem Namen als Folgekonferenz leider mehr als gerecht werden. Neben der üblichen Dämonisierung Israels („Apartheid”) werden nunmehr auch Angriffe auf die Presse-, Meinungs- und Redefreiheit an Bedeutung gewinnen. Unter dem Vorwand des Kampfes gegen religiöse Intoleranz (und zwar nur gegenüber dem Islam) werden die Menschenrechte Schritt für Schritt pervertiert und in ein Unterdrückungsinstrumentarium im Namen der Religion umfunktioniert.
Diese gefährlichen Umdeutungen stellen demokratische Staaten vor große Herausforderungen. Die Grundlagen der offenen Gesellschaft dürfen nicht zur Disposition stehen! Angesichts des neuen Vorstoßes von Durban II wäre eine unmissverständliche Reaktion überfällig. Daher fordern die Initiator/inn/en und Unterzeicher/innen des Aufrufs die Bundesregierung und Regierungen anderer EU-Staaten auf, Durban II zu boykottieren.
Zur Initiative „Boykottiert Durban II!”
Der französische Schriftsteller Pascal Bruckner gab im Sommer letzten Jahres mit seiner Forderung nach einem Boykott der Durban II Konferenz den Anstoß für diese Initiative, der sich mehr als 30 Journalist/inn/en, Publizist/inn/en, Wissenschaftler/innen und Künstler/innen aus Europa, den USA und dem Nahen Osten anschlossen, darunter Lars Gustafsson, Jeffrey Herf, Benny Morris, Peter Schneider, Seyran Ates, Necla Kelek, Matthias Küntzel, Sharon Adler, Prof. Arno Lustiger und Ralph Giordano. Der Boykott-Appell hat weit über 1000 Unterschriften erhalten. Er wird am 12. März der Bundesregierung und den Regierungen anderer EU-Staaten übergeben werden.
Zum Abschluss der Kampagne findet eine Pressekonferenz statt, auf der Caroline Fourest und weitere Referent/inn/en für die Notwendigkeit des Boykotts einer solchen Veranstaltung argumentieren werden.
Teilnehmer/innen der Konferenz:
- Caroline Fourest, Autorin und Publizistin, Paris
- Nasrin Amirsedghi; Publizistin, Mainz
- Alex Feuerherdt; Journalist, Bonn
- Klaus Faber; Staatssekretär a. D., Potsdam
- Anetta Kahane; Stiftungsvorstandvorsitzende (Amadeu-Antonio-Stiftung), Berlin
Moderation: Thierry Chervel; Chefredakteur des Online-Kulturmagazins Perlentaucher, Berlin
Kooperationspartner: Koordinierungsrat deutscher Nicht-Regierungsorganisationen gegen Antisemitismus; Group of 25th of November u. Föderation unabh. NGOs, Suleymaniya, Kurdistan/Nordirak; Mideast Freedom Forum Berlin e.V. (MFFB).
Dass ein Mörder lebenslang bekommt, sollte selbstverständlich sein. Dass deutsche Richter bei Straftätern mit muslimischem Hintergrund unfreiwillig ein Auge zudrücken müssen, ist auch bekannt (wer ist schon lebensmüde genug, um freiwillig unter ständigem Polizeischutz leben zu wollen?).
Im spektakulären Prozess um den brutalen Mord an der Hamburgerin afghanischerAbstammung Morsal Obeidi (am 7. September 1991 in Masar-e Scharif geboren; am 15. Mai 2008 in Hamburger Stadtteil St. Georg von ihrem Bruder mit 23 Messerstichen in den Ewigen Osten gefördert worden), die sich nur von menschenunwürdigen Traditionen befreien wollte, hat sich dennoch der Richter Wolfgang Backen von Islamisten nicht einschüchtern, und eine gerechte Strafe gegen den 24-jährigen Täter verhängen lassen.
Das Landgericht Hamburg sprach Ahmad Obeidi des heimtückischen Mordes aus niederen Beweggründen schuldig und verurteilte ihm zu lebenslanger Haft.
Der Vorsitzende Richter am Landgericht Hamburg sagte in seiner Urteilsbegründung, der Angeklagte habe aus “reiner Intoleranz getötet”. “Für den Tod Ihrer Schwester, die Sie als großer Bruder eigentlich hätten schützen sollen, müssen Sie nun die volle Verantwortung übernehmen”, fügte er hinzu.
Bei einem Prozess in Kabul wäre er “längst draußen”, unterbrach ihn der Angeklagte. “Wir sind hier aber nicht in Kabul”, erwiderte der mutige Richter.
HIRAM7 REVIEW meint dazu: Anstiftung zum Mord (gemäß §§ 212, 211 und 26 des deutschen Strafgesetzbuches) ist ein Offizialdelikt, das von der Staatsanwaltschaft bzw. vom leitenden Staatsanwalt Boris Bochnick (der vom Angeklagten nach Urteilsverkündung als “Hurensohn” verunglimpft wurde) verfolgt werden muss. Die Reaktionen der Mutter und der anderen Angehörigen vor Gericht lassen keinen anderen Schluss zu: Sie haben den Bruder angestiftet, seine Schwester zu töten, und gehören ebenso vor Gericht.
Jede Niederlage beginnt damit, dass man den Standpunkt des Gegners anerkennt. (Winston Churchill)
Und noch etwas passierte, nämlich, dass die Israelis sich selber geholfen haben, ohne die Hilfe der deutschen Linken oder der französischen Linken. Und da erkennen Sie das Wesen der Sorte Gutmenschen: Die sind nur dann für jemanden da, wenn Du ganz tief in der Scheiße sitzt oder wenn sie glauben, dass Du tief drin sitzt und sie glauben, man müsse Dir helfen. Aber jemand, der sich selber helfen kann, für den interessiert sich dieser Typ Gutmensch nicht mehr. [...] Und da haben sie die armen Palästinenser entdeckt. (Ignatz Bubis im Gespräch mit Bettina Röhl)
20 Jahre nach der vom iranischen Ayatollah Khomeini ausgesprochenen Fatwa bzw. Mordaufruf gegen den britischen Schriftsteller muslimischen Glaubens Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie, zieht Thierry Chervel – Mitbegründer des Kulturmagazins perlentaucher – eine düstere Bilanz über die Unterwerfung Europas vor der islamistischen Reaktion (Islam bedeutet Unterwerfung auf Arabisch, sprich Aufgabe der Individualität, und nicht Friede wie Multikulti-Apostel bzw. Grüne Opportunisten à la Cem Özdemir uns perfiderweise weis machen wollen) und über die Frage, was der Islamismus im Westen und der Linken seitdem angerichtet hat:
“Die Linke hat in der Auseinandersetzung mit dem Islamismus ihre Prinzipien aufgegeben. Sie stand für Loslösung von Sitte und Tradition, aber im Islam setzt sie sie im Namen von Multikulti wieder ins Recht. Sie ist stolz, die Frauenrechte erkämpft zu haben, aber im Islam toleriert sie Kopftücher, arrangierte Ehen und prügelnde Männer. Sie stand für Gleichheit der Rechte, nun plädiert sie für ein Recht auf Differenz – und damit für eine Differenz der Rechte. Sie proklamierte die Freiheit des Worts und gerät beim Islam in hüstelnde Verlegenheit. Sie unterstützte die Emanzipation der Schwulen und beschweigt das Tabu im Islam. Die fällige Selbstrelativierung des Westens nach der kolonialen Ära, die von postmodernen und strukturalistischen Ideen vorangetrieben wurde, führte zu Kulturrelativismus und Kriterienverlust.”
At last month’s emergency session of the U.N. Human Rights Council, ambassadors from the world’s dictatorships – and even some democracies – lined up to attack Israel for “targeting a U.N. school.” Canada alone voted in opposition to the grossly one-sided text.
Now a new report by Patrick Martin of Canada’s Globe and Mail reveals that, contrary to what was reported worldwide:
No Israeli shells landed in the UNRWA school compound;
No one taking refuge in the U.N. schoolyard was killed;
None of these facts prevented a U.N. agency from falsely reporting that “Israeli shelling directly hit two UNRWA schools …”
Will the Human Rights Council now apologize for having falsely condemned Israel for the targeting of facilities of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East in Gaza, including schools?
As usual when it comes to Israel, the Council was little concerned with actual facts. Egyptian representative Hisham Badr, speaking on behalf of the Arab Group, said that Israel did not distinguish between combatants and civilians, targeting United Nations schools. According to Yemen, “The attacks against schools. . . were grave crimes against humanity. Sudan spoke of the the mad attacks by Israel in Gaza, including against United Nations schools. Syria said UN schools have turned into mass graves. Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Djibouti joined the fray – as did even several Western countries. Argentina demanded an independent international investigation on the attacks on UNRWA schools. Slovenia condemned Israeli attacks on schools. Switzerland said that at least 46 civilians seeking shelter in UNRWA school were killed.
Will any of these countries issue an apology, or seek to correct the resolution’s false assertions and faulty premises? Don’t bet on it.
For the full story, see the article below.
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Account of Israeli attack doesn’t hold up to scrutiny
PATRICK MARTIN The Globe and Mail, January 29, 2009
Jabalya, Gaza Strip – Most people remember the headlines: “Massacre Of Innocents As UN School Is Shelled; Israeli Strike Kills Dozens At UN School.”
They heralded the tragic news of January 6, 2009, when mortar shells fired by advancing Israeli forces killed 43 civilians in the Jabalya refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. The victims, it was reported, had taken refuge inside the Ibn Rushd Preparatory School for Boys, a facility run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.
The news shocked the world and was compared to the 1996 Israeli attack on a UN compound in Qana, Lebanon, in which more than 100 people seeking refuge were killed. It was certain to hasten the end of Israel’s attack on Gaza, and would undoubtedly lead the list of allegations of war crimes committed by Israel.
There was just one problem: The story, as etched in people’s minds, was not quite accurate.
Physical evidence and interviews with several eyewitnesses, including a teacher who was in the schoolyard at the time of the shelling, make it clear: While a few people were injured from shrapnel landing inside the white-and-blue-walled UNRWA compound, no one in the compound was killed. The 43 people who died in the incident were all outside, on the street, where all three mortar shells landed.
Stories of one or more shells landing inside the schoolyard were inaccurate.
While the killing of 43 civilians on the street may itself be grounds for investigation, it falls short of the act of shooting into a schoolyard crowded with refuge-seekers.
The teacher who was in the compound at the time of the shelling says he heard three loud blasts, one after the other, then a lot of screaming. “I ran in the direction of the screaming [inside the compound],” he said. “I could see some of the people had been injured, cut. I picked up one girl who was bleeding by her eye, and ran out on the street to get help.”But when I got outside, it was crazy hell. There were bodies everywhere, people dead, injured, flesh everywhere.”
The teacher, who refused to give his name because he said UNRWA had told the staff not to talk to the news media, was adamant: “Inside [the compound] there were 12 injured, but there were no dead.”
“Three of my students were killed,” he said. “But they were all outside.”
Hazem Balousha, who runs an auto-body shop across the road from the UNRWA school, was down the street, just out of range of the shrapnel, when the three shells hit. He showed a reporter where they landed: one to the right of his shop, one to the left, and one right in front.
“There were only three,” he said. “They were all out here on the road.”
News of the tragedy travelled fast, with aid workers and medical staff quoted as saying the incident happened at the school, the UNRWA facility where people had sought refuge.
Soon it was presented that people in the school compound had been killed. Before long, there was worldwide outrage.
Sensing a public-relations nightmare, Israeli spokespeople quickly asserted that their forces had only returned fire from gunmen inside the school. (They even named two militants.) It was a statement from which they would later retreat, saying there were gunmen in the vicinity of the school.
No witnesses said they saw any gunmen. (If people had seen anyone firing a mortar from the middle of the street outside the school, they likely would not have continued to mill around.)
John Ging, UNRWA’s operations director in Gaza, acknowledged in an interview this week that all three Israeli mortar shells landed outside the school and that “no one was killed in the school.”
“I told the Israelis that none of the shells landed in the school,” he said.
Why would he do that?
“Because they had told everyone they had returned fire from gunmen in the school. That wasn’t true.”
Mr. Ging blames the Israelis for the confusion over where the victims were killed. “They even came out with a video that purported to show gunmen in the schoolyard. But we had seen it before,” he said, “in 2007.”
The Israelis are the ones, he said, who got everyone thinking the deaths occurred inside the school.
“Look at my statements,” he said. “I never said anyone was killed in the school. Our officials never made any such allegation.”
Speaking from Shifa Hospital in Gaza City as the bodies were being brought in that night, an emotional Mr. Ging did say: “Those in the school were all families seeking refuge. … There’s nowhere safe in Gaza.”
And in its daily bulletin, the World Health Organization reported: “On 6 January, 42 people were killed following an attack on a UNRWA school …”
The UN’s Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs got the location right, for a short while. Its daily bulletin cited “early reports” that “three artillery shells landed outside the UNRWA Jabalia Prep. C Girls School …” However, its more comprehensive weekly report, published three days later, stated that “Israeli shelling directly hit two UNRWA schools …” including the one at issue.
Such official wording helps explain the widespread news reports of the deaths in the school, but not why the UN agencies allowed the misconception to linger.
“I know no one was killed in the school,” Mr. Ging said. “But 41 innocent people were killed in the street outside the school. Many of those people had taken refuge in the school and wandered out onto the street.
“The state of Israel still has to answer for that. What did they know and what care did they take?”
Spotlight on 111th U.S. Congress with regard to Israel’s self defense war
Israel is engaged in a crucial struggle against Hamas terrorists who have been firing rockets at Israeli population centers for years, causing great suffering and posing great risk for Israel’s citizens. Israel’s decision to defend itself by surgically retaliating against Hamas has been met with criticism and condemnation from some in the international community. It is now more important than ever that the new United States admnistration publicly supports Israel’s right to defend itself from attack by Hamas and other terrorist groups.
HIRAM7 REVIEW responds to UN Security Council on Gaza
HIRAM7 REVIEW started an online petition to UN Security Council, expressing profound disappointment and concern about the statement delivered by him on December 31, 2008, with regard to the situation in the Gaza Strip.
The petition stressed that the international community needs to understand the tremendous danger that terrorist organizations like Hamas pose not only to Israel, but also to the entire world. It also observed that intergovernmental organizations like the UN should vigorously denounce the Hamas regime in the name of human rights, instead of demonizing Israel when it acts to protect its citizens, in lawful exercise of its right of self defense. There is no moral equivalence between Israel, a democracy which seeks peace and targets the terrorists, and Hamas that seeks Israel’s destruction and targets the innocent, including his own people.
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American Leaders Speak Out in Support of Israel’s Right to Self-Defense
Current & Future Administration Officials
David Axelrod, Senior Advisor to President-Elect Barack Obama
President George W. Bush
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
Congressional Leadership
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)
House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH)
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV)
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY)
U.S. Senate
Arizona
Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-AZ)
John McCain (R-AZ)
California
Barbara Boxer (D-CA)
Connecticut
Christopher Dodd (D-CT)
Joseph Lieberman (I-CT)
Florida
Bill Nelson (D-FL)
Mel Martinez (R-FL)
Georgia
Saxby Chambliss (R-GA)
Johnny Isakson (R-GA)
Illinois
Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL)
Indiana
Evan Bayh (D-IN)
Iowa
Charles Grassley (R-IA)
Louisiana
Mary Landrieu (D-LA)
David Vitter (R-LA)
Maryland
Benjamin Cardin (D-MD)
Barbara Mikulski (D-MD)
Missouri
Christopher “Kit” Bond (R-MO)
Nevada
John Ensign (R-NV)
New Hampshire
Judd Gregg (R-NH)
New Jersey
Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ)
Robert Menendez (D-NJ)
New York
Charles Schumer (D-NY)
North Carolina
Kay Hagan (D-NC)
Ohio
George Voinovich (R-OH)
Pennsylvania
Bob Casey, Jr. (D-PA)
Rhode Island
Jack Reed (D-RI)
Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI)
South Carolina
Jim DeMint (R-SC)
Lindsey Graham (R-SC)
Texas
John Cornyn (R-TX)
Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX)
U.S. House of Representatives
Alabama
Spencer Bachus (R-AL)
Mike Rogers (R-AL)
Arizona
Trent Franks (R-AZ)
Harry Mitchell (D-AZ)
California
Howard Berman (D-CA)
John Campbell (R-CA)
Dennis Cardoza (D-CA)
Jim Costa (D-CA)
Elton Gallegly (R-CA)
Wally Herger (R-CA)
Dan Lungren (R-CA)
Doris Matsui (D-CA)
Jerry McNerney (D-CA)
George Radanovich (R-CA)
Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA)
Adam Schiff (D-CA)
Brad Sherman (D-CA)
Ellen Tauscher (D-CA)
Henry Waxman (D-CA)
Colorado
Doug Lamborn (R-CO)
Ed Perlmutter (D-CO)
Connecticut
Jim Himes (D-CT)
Florida
Gus Bilirakis (R-FL)
Ginny Brown-Waite (R-FL)
Vern Buchanan (R-FL)
Kathy Castor (D-FL)
Ander Crenshaw (R-FL)
Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-FL)
Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL)
Alan Grayson (D-FL)
Alcee Hastings (D-FL)
Ron Klein (D-FL)
Connie Mack IV (R-FL)
Kendrick Meek (D-FL)
John Mica (R-FL)
Adam Putnam (R-FL)
Tom Rooney (R-FL)
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL)
Cliff Stearns (R-FL)
Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL)
Robert Wexler (D-FL)
C.W. Bill Young (R-FL)
Georgia
Paul Broun (R-GA)
Tom Price (R-GA)
Illinois
Jerry Costello (D-IL)
Phil Hare (D-IL)
Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-IL)
Mark Kirk (R-IL)
Daniel Lipinski (D-IL)
John Shimkus (R-IL)
Indiana
Mike Pence (R-IN)
Iowa
Leonard Boswell (D-IA)
Steve King (R-IA)
Kansas
Jerry Moran (R-KS)
Kentucky
Geoff Davis (R-KY)
Louisiana
Rodney Alexander (R-LA)
Bill Cassidy (R-LA)
John Fleming (R-LA)
Charlie Melancon (D-LA)
Steve Scalise (R-LA)
Maryland
Elijah Cummings (D-MD)
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD)
C.A. “Dutch” Ruppersberger (D-MD)
John Sarbanes (D-MD)
Chris Van Hollen (D-MD)
Massachusetts
Michael Capuano (D-MA)
Barney Frank (D-MA)
Edward Markey (D-MA)
James McGovern (D-MA)
Richard Neal (D-MA)
John Olver (D-MA)
Niki Tsongas (D-MA)
Michigan
Gary Peters (D-MI)
Missouri
Outgoing House Minority Whip Roy Blunt (R-MO)
Russ Carnahan (D-MO)
Ike Skelton (D-MO)
Nevada
Shelley Berkley (D-NV)
New Hampshire
Paul Hodes (D-NH)
New Jersey
John Adler (D-NJ)
Rob Andrews (D-NJ)
Scott Garrett (R-NJ)
Leonard Lance (R-NJ)
Frank LoBiondo (R-NJ)
Steve Rothman (D-NJ)
Albio Sires (D-NJ)
New York
Joseph Crowley (D-NY)
Eliot Engel (D-NY)
John Hall (D-NY)
Brian Higgins (D-NY)
Steve Israel (D-NY)
Peter King (R-NY)
Nita Lowey (D-NY)
Carolyn Maloney (D-NY)
Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY)
John McHugh (R-NY)
Michael McMahon (D-NY)
Jerrold Nadler (D-NY)
Charles Rangel (D-NY)
Edolphus Towns (D-NY)
Anthony Weiner (D-NY)
Ohio
John Boccieri (D-OH)
Marcia Fudge (D-OH)
Steven LaTourette (R-OH)
Zack Space (D-OH)
Betty Sutton (D-OH)
Oklahoma
Dan Boren (D-OK)
Mary Fallin (R-OK)
Pennsylvania
Christopher Carney (D-PA)
Charlie Dent (R-PA)
Jim Gerlach (R-PA)
Patrick Murphy (D-PA)
Allyson Schwartz (D-PA)
Joe Sestak (D-PA)
Bill Shuster (R-PA)
Rhode Island
Patrick Kennedy (D-RI)
Jim Langevin (D-RI)
Texas
Kevin Brady (R-TX)
John Culberson (R-TX)
Chet Edwards (D-TX)
Gene Green (D-TX)
Jeb Hensarling (R-TX)
Kenny Marchant (R-TX)
Pete Olson (R-TX)
Ted Poe (R-TX)
Pete Sessions (R-TX)
Lamar Smith (R-TX)
Virginia
House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-VA)
Gerry Connolly (D-VA)
Washington
Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA)
State and Local Elected Officials
Mayor Michael Bloomberg (I-NY)
Speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives Armond Budish (D-OH)
I would just like to say, how much I enjoyed Daniel Pearl’s articles in the Wall Street Journal. His insight and skill as a reporter has helped me to better understand the world. In addition to being a great journalist, he seems to have been a wonderful and caring human being filled with love for his fellow man and a true joie de vivre. I have shared so many of Daniel Pearl’s articles with my family and friends, and they have stimulated a lot of great discussion. All our hearts go out to Mariane and their unborn child, and our hopes for them. (Nathan Manwaring from Phoenix, Arizona, in a letter to the editor of The Wall Street Journal, February 27, 2002)
On November 18, 2008, Dr. Pearl was invited with Condoleezza Rice to make keynote remarks at the American Red Cross Humanitarian Prize ceremony, honoring Dr. Noam Yifrach, Chairman, Magen David Adom Israel, and Mr. Younis Al-Khatib, President of the Palestine Red Crescent, for collaborating to establish an integrated humanitarian response to the needs of Palestinians and Israelis. See full transcript of the speech below.
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Remarks from Dr. Judea Pearl made at the American Red Cross luncheon presenting the 2008 Humanitarian Award to Noam Yifrach and Younis Al-Khatib
Washington DC, November 18, 2008
Thank you Mr. Bennett, Secretary Rice, distinguished guests,
I am humbled and honored by the opportunity to speak at this important event of the American Red Cross, an organization that has pioneered border-less Humanity much before it became a standard of necessity in our global society.
And I am doubly honored to direct my remarks at two champions of humanity, Noam Yifrach and Younis Al-Khatib, who are recognized today for demonstrating that courage and commitment are truly border-less and can yield magical results even in the most volatile regions of the world.
By honoring me as your guest speaker, you have honored my son Daniel, and by honoring Danny you have honored hundreds of young men and women who roam the world with laptops and cameras, so that you and I could see the world through a sharper lens, from a deeper level of understanding, and so that millions of people around the world will see themselves, not as strangers, but as partners to the blazing orbit of this planet.
These young men and women are not normally in the medical profession, and the services they provide is not normally classified as “humanitarian”. Yet they are as essential to the mission of the red cross as the Medics and Doctors in your volunteer force, for they spread understanding, tolerance, empathy and humanity before grievance turns into anger, and before anger erupts into violence, injury, ambulances and hospitals.
In other words they are the “preventive medicine” department of the great army of humanitarian aid that the red-cross has come to represent.
Danny was one of those troopers.
He lived a life that knew no geographical boundaries, with a spirit that knew no shred of prejudice. Through words and music, he communicated joy, humor, friendship and understanding in many parts of the world.
He was a bridge builder who befriended and gave voice to millions of voiceless Muslims in the Balkans, Middle East and South Asia.
A story teller who traveled the dusty roads of the Middle East with his laptop and violin, and unveiled to readers in the West the human faces behind the news.
He wrote about neighborly Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo, imaginative carpet weavers in Tehran, singing pearl divers in Baharain, Yemenites and Ethiopians quibbling on who owns the true Queen of Sheba, creative money changers in Pakistan and angry gem miners on the slopes of Mount Killemanjaro.
Six and a half years ago, in a desolate dungeon in Karachi, Pakistan, in the midst of the great madness, he was looking straight in the eyes of evil, and proclaimed his identity.
“My name is Daniel Pearl,” he said before his captor’s video camera, “I am a Jewish American journalist from Encino, California.”…
“My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am Jewish.”
“Back in the town of Bnai Brak (Israel) there is a street named after my great grandfather, Chaim Pearl, who was one of the founders of the town.
These were his last words.
And as he stood there, demanding sanity in the face of madness, his words assumed a universal dimension, and have come to symbolize not only the right of every individual to assert his faith, heritage and identity.
But also the amazing capacity of the human spirit to weave together the dignity of being different within the sanctity of being ONE.
His murderers schemed to sow fear and division among us but, remarkably, with all their technical sophistication, they made a critical miscalculation and the outcome turned against them.
How?
The respect that Daniel earned on both sides of the East/West divides, the principles by which he lived, the goodness of his smile, and the sound of his last words became iconic personal reminders to millions of principled people around this planet that the current tide of violence and hatred is not an expression of an ordinary conflict between tribes, countries or religions but threatens to erode the very fabric of civilized society.
Consequently, what emerged from Danny’s tragedy and vividly displayed on the screens of the world’s consciousness was an urgent call for people of all faiths to recognize the dangers threatening us, and to lift our common humanity above the differences that set us apart.
It was this urgent call that compelled my family and I to establish the Daniel Pearl Foundation and to take upon ourselves the task of channeling all the energy and goodwill that the tragedy had evoked into one and only one aim:
fighting the hatred that took Danny’s life.
Of course we do not have the resources to move armies or conquer territories, but we have the goodwill of millions of principled people around the world, Christians, Jews and Muslims, Pakistanis, Europeans and Americans, Israelis and Palestinians, Journalists and musicians, who are determined to form what I call “a Coalition Of The Decent” and work together to contain the rising Tsunami of anger and hatred that have swept our planet.
Yet as we looked around us, we quickly discovered a strange phenomenon. We found dozens of celebrities and philanthropist fighting diseases and natural disasters all over the world. We found Bono, Bill Gates, and Madonna competing with each other on fighting aids and malaria in Africa. These are noble causes, undeniably.
But we could not find a celebrity dedicated specifically to fighting the culture of hate that has been rising steadily in the past two decades and now threatens to heat up our planet much before global warming does.
What can we do about it?
In an open letter to the people of Pakistan, published in Karachi in July 2002, I wrote: “The loss of Danny will forever tear my heart, but I cannot think of a greater consolation than seeing your children [in Pakistan] pointing at Danny’s picture one day and saying: ‘This is the kind of person I want to be.
Like him, I want to be truthful, and friendly, open-minded and, above all, respectful of others.’”
I was in a rather imaginative mood when I wrote this letter, and I did not really envision it would materialize in my lifetime.
I was surprised therefore last week, when I received a message with the following photos from Faisalabad, Pakistan, 1. High school Lecture on “Who was Daniel Pearl”, 2. Inauguration of the World Tolerance Organization, 3. Celebration of the Daniel Pearl World Music Days.
As you probably know, the Daniel Pearl World Music Days is celebrated worldwide each year to commemorate Daniel’s birthday of October 10. This year it has embraced 1,150 concerts, in 59 countries, all united in a call for tolerance and humanity.
We registered concerts in Pakistan, as you can see in this photo, Montenegro, Jerusalem, Johannesburg, New York and of course, Washington DC. The last registration came from Kabul, Afghanistan.
What does it all represent?
It represents a tremendous undercurrent of courage and decency that is awaiting for a leader, a banner and an action to claim back this planet and restore it to an orbit of sanity.
It represents a world that is thirsty for an icon of peace, and this photo here is one such icon – there aren’t many faces around at which both a Muslim and a Western can point and say: Here goes a man of peace.
Compelled by the power of this icon, we started the Daniel Pearl Dialogue for Muslim-Jewish Understanding, a conversational road-show in which I and my partner, Professor Akbar Ahmed, travel from city to city and discuss Jewish-Muslim relationships before mixed audiences, in a town-hall setting.
It was initiated out of our joint concern for the deteriorating relationships between the two communities, and out of an unshaken belief that, these relationships could be improved by engaging in a frank, respectful and rational dialogue, based on our common Abrahamic tradition.
We see our mission in this dialogue as that of carving a path of legitimacy for on-going grass-root conversations aiming, in the best case, at achieving understanding and collaboration and, at the very least, acknowledgment of, and familiarity with each other narrative.
Neither of us is an official representatives of his community, I am not an ordained Rabbi and my friend Akbar is not an appointed Imam. Still, we are very much in tune with the sentiments of our respective communities, and we feel qualified therefore to communicate those sentiments, including grievances and sensitivities, faithfully and frankly.
Two rules guide our discussions:
1. No topic is a taboo;
2. Respect at all time.
And these I believe are the reasons that audience flock to our humble show — there aren’t many occasions for people to see their sentiments echoed and listened to with respect. TV discussions quickly deteriorate into shouting matches and conventional interfaith meetings never touch on the hot issue — participants are reluctant to spoil the cozy atmosphere.
And because we touch on the hot issues, theological, social, historical and political, we have a chance to understand the reasons that communities are angry at each others.
And, given that this meeting is about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it would be criminally dishonest if I told you that there is no anger around. Lots of anger!
Muslims are angry at Jews for supporting a state which they perceive to be an outpost of European imperialism.
And Jews are angry at Muslims for upholding this perception, namely, for failing to see that Jews are no less indigenous to the Biblical landscape than their Palestinian neighbors.
This clash is historical, not theological, which is why we are optimistic; historical clashes can be reconciled through education and communication by placing the two narratives side by side.
And this became our motto – two narratives side by side.
In this spirit, I would like to say a few words to Dr. Al-Khatib, in the name of my friends in Israel, who grew up with me in the pre-1948 years and still remember the days that we lived together side by side.
You are my brother Younis, not because we are both children of Abraham but because we played in the same sand box. I played there 2000 years ago, and you played there since, I came back in 1948 after having some rough time in other neighborhoods, and we are bound to play together in the very near future – it could be a fun sand box.
In my home town, Bnai Braq, children learned to say “peace” before they could say “give me”.
My friends and I went to schools where Arabs were considered future neighbors, despite the hostilities. I remember to this very day one of my teachers roaring in anger: “Don’t you ever let me catch you saying it about an Arab – today they are our enemies, tomorrow our neighbors.”
We grew up with folk songs in which the frequency of the word “peace” exceeded that of the words “I love you” – I dont think you can find many such cultures today.
Why am I telling you all this? Because I want to confess our weaknesses to you and to your friends in Palestine: Yes, we are afflicted with a secret addiction called “yearning for peace”.
And I implore you and your friends: take advantage of this weakness, please, exploit it.
I will end on a hopeful note, that next time we meet, we will see our two peoples playing in that old sand box again, enjoying peace and freedom in two democratic states living side by side, equally viable, equally secure, equally legitimate and, in what says it all: equally indigenous.
This year, it wasn’t difficult to identify candidates for the worst news stories. The challenge was limiting them to ten. Here’s my list:
An ethical meltdown
An Israeli prime minister compelled to leave office, on the heels of an Israeli president who was obliged to leave his post under a cloud in 2007, sent another disturbing message that all is not well in Israeli politics.
The Bernie Madoff story, embodying greed and fraud to the Nth degree, inflicted more harm this year on the Jewish world than all of our external enemies combined.
And the front-page stories on the accusations against Agriprocessors, the kosher meat plant in Iowa charged with massive labor violations, triggered shock and embarrassment.
For a people whose mission statement puts a moral code front and center, clearly, there’s remedial work to be done.
An American meltdown
For those who believe that a strong, robust United States is critical to the defense of freedom and protection of human rights worldwide, there were troubling signs in 2008.
The world’s leading nation was revealed to have major cracks in its foundation.
Wall Street is teetering and Main Street is reeling. Detroit’s car manufacturers are on the brink of collapse, while many of the nation’s bridges and roadways aren’t far behind.
America was revealed to be #1 in the rates of obesity and incarceration, and at the bottom in the rate of savings. It was strikingly absent from the top ten countries in the Human Development Index, the global barometer of quality of life.
Iran’s nuclear ambition
Iran kept brazenly marching ahead toward nuclear weapons capability. It added substantially to the number of centrifuges – last month, it claimed 5,000 – and was revealed to have enriched sufficient uranium for one nuclear bomb.
At the same time, it brandished its latest missiles with a range of more 2000 kilometers.
Various diplomatic efforts, including sending a senior U.S. official, Bill Burns, to join talks with the Iranians, came up empty.
Legitimizing evil
While Iran violates UN Security Council resolutions, many nations carried on with a business-as-usual attitude toward Tehran.
Iranian President Ahmadinejad, who has repeatedly called for a world without Israel, denied the Holocaust, and trampled on the human rights of his own citizens, visited India, Turkey, and China in 2008. Brazil extended an open invitation for him to visit.
In addition, he returned to New York for the opening of the UN session, where he was literally embraced by UN General Assembly President Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, and hosted at a dinner by Mennonite and Quaker groups.
And the reluctance of China and Russia to support toughened sanctions measures against Iran has stymied the efforts of the U.S., France, and Britain, the other three permanent members of the Security Council.
Swiss Foreign Minister Micheline Calmy-Rey traveled to Tehran in March, where she met with Ahmadinejad and was caught on camera laughing with a leader who should be a pariah.
And despite public proclamations to the contrary, many European countries actually increased their volume of commercial dealings with Iran. EU exports for the first eight months of 2008 rose 13 percent over the same period in 2007. Iran’s three largest European partners all increased their exports. Italy registered the most significant jump, followed by France and Germany.
Iran’s proxies gain ground
Hamas and Hezbollah emerged stronger in 2008. The two Iranian-backed terrorist groups are better armed, prepared, and fortified than one year ago.
In the case of Hamas, the just-ended six-month “lull” with Israel allowed it to add to its extensive tunnel network, command-and-control structure, arsenal of advanced weaponry, and training of forces, while keeping a tight grip on Gaza and holding on to kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.
Hamas believes it can have the best of both worlds – the right to attack Israel at will, while complaining about Israeli counter-measures and seeking sympathy from the international community.
In Lebanon, Hezbollah’s position was strengthened. True, UNIFIL forces deployed in southern Lebanon have prevented further fighting with Israel. But intelligence reports indicate that Hezbollah, with Syrian and Iranian help, has doubled its arsenal of missiles from 2006 and increased their range to include most, if not all, of Israel.
Child murderer honored
In a highly controversial exchange, Israel released Samir Kuntar. He was involved in a terrorist attack, in 1979, in the Israeli seaside town of Nahariya. Among his victims was a four-year-old girl, Einat Haran, whose skull was smashed.
Unrepentant, Kuntar returned to Lebanon, where he received a hero’s welcome. In fact, the country was given the day off to celebrate.
Not to be outdone, Syrian President Bashar Assad awarded Kuntar the Order of Merit, the nation’s top honor!
Anti-Semitism on the rise
In September, the highly regarded Pew Global Attitudes Project released its latest report.
Of European countries, Spain had the highest rate of negative attitudes toward Jews. By a margin of 46 to 37 percent, more Spaniards had an unfavorable image of Jews than favorable. In fact, more than twice as many Spaniards hold negative views of Jews than in 2005.
The same study revealed that, since 2004, negative views of Jews have also risen in France (from 11 to 20 percent), Germany (from 20 to 25 percent), Poland (from 27 to 36 percent), and Russia (from 25 to 34 percent).
Previous Pew studies revealed that 76 percent of Turks have a negative view of Jews, while the same figure for Lebanese is 97 percent, Jordanians 96 percent, and Egyptians 95 percent.
The Mumbai massacre
Once again, an open, multicultural society was the terrorists’ target. Once again, Jews were among those sought out for the “crime” of simply being Jewish. As a result, two-year-old Moshe Holtzberg will go through life as an orphan, his parents having been among the targeted victims.
The story is yet another reminder that Pakistan is “ground zero” in the war against radical Islamic forces.
With a weak government, nuclear arsenal, intelligence service with questionable loyalties, Saudi-funded madrassas spreading radicalism, and vast swaths of the country beyond central control, it’s not at all clear how to rein in the forces wreaking havoc in neighboring Afghanistan or plotting terrorist attacks at home and abroad.
Add places like Somalia and Sudan, also havens for jihadists, and the extent of the global challenge becomes still starker.
Russia is back
After reeling toward third-world status in the ’90s, Russia is back, its reemergence highlighted by its August conflict with Georgia.
Though largely dependent on high commodity prices to fuel its superpower ambitions, Russia has the talent and resources to be a major factor once again on the world stage. And it’s wasting no time in underscoring the point.
In 2008, Russia went ahead with providing fuel for the Bushehr nuclear reactor in Iran, after stalling for several years. And it discussed major arms deals with Iran, Lebanon, and Syria, all of which, if they go forward, will prove destabilizing in a region not known for its stability. (At the same time, ironically, Russia seeks to purchase weapons from Israel.)
And Russia’s coziness with Hugo Chavez, underscored this year by major weapons deals and warships arriving in Venezuelan ports, is a reminder of Moscow’s capacity for long-distance reach. Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela, linked by anti-American sentiment, must be joyful at Russia’s reemergence as an alternative big-power address.
Self-inflicted wounds
With all the external challenges faced by Israel and the Jewish people, it would be nice to think that internal differences could be minimized. Hardly.
Instead, the Jewish world continues to be riven by an ever-growing profusion of organizations battling each other for funds, members, publicity, and access. And in tough economic times, the atmosphere only becomes more highly charged.
Moreover, some individuals and organizations hurl charges – privately or publicly – at one another with abandon, as if anyone with an opposing perspective needs to be cut off at the knees.
But then again, what’s new? In 1914, the legendary jurist Louis Marshall, president of AJC, spoke of the threats to Jews in Europe triggered by World War I:
“Unity of action is essential. There should be no division in counsel or in sentiment. All differences should be laid aside and forgotten. Nothing counts now but harmonious and effective action.”
Ninety-five years later, despite the external challenges, we’re no closer to Marshall’s idealistic goal. If anything, we’re only further away.
What a pity!
Note: Optimists, don’t despair. The “Ten Best News Stories of 2008″ will appear next week.
For the fourth straight year, the UN General Assembly last week ignored pleas by human rights defenders and passed a resolution condemning the “defamation of religion“, especially Islam.
Optimists hailed the move by citing the shift of several “yes” votes to abstentions, but the reality is that this totalitarian initiative is spreading throughout UN bodies – and now threatens to rewrite a core human rights treaty of the post-war era.
The campaign by the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), a bloc of 56 states at the UN, began in 1999 with annual resolutions at the discredited and now-defunct Human Rights Commission. In the wake of the post-9/11 war on Islamist terror, and especially after the 2005 controversy sparked when a Danish newspaper printed cartoons of their prophet, Islamic states pursued the diplomatic battle with a vengeance.
Proponents of the latest resolution argue that its intent is to protect religious believers from discrimination, particularly Muslims living in Western countries.
In reality, the resolutions pose a major threat to the premises and principles of international human rights law and harm Muslims as much as non-Muslims. International law already protects victims of religious discrimination, with guarantees under the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as the 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The resolution is silent, though, on Saudi Arabia’s prohibition of any religious practice other than Islam; on Iran’s oppression of Baha’is; on the persecution of Christians in Egypt, Iraq, and Pakistan
Indeed, according to the UN’s own designated defender of freedom of religion, Asma Jahangir of Pakistan, existing international agreements protect against “imminent acts of violence or discrimination against a specific individual or group,” including on the basis of religion.
In other words, the OIC is not really trying to protect individuals from harm, but rather to shield a set of beliefs from question or debate and to ban any discussion of Islam that may challenge state orthodoxies or offend Islamic sensibilities.
The very term “defamation of religion” is a distortion. The legal concept of defamation protects the reputations of individuals, not beliefs. It also requires an examination of the truth or falsity of the challenged remarks — a determination that no one, especially not the UN, is capable of undertaking concerning any religion.
What is at stake? Potentially, a great deal. If the defamation resolutions are implemented worldwide, it would become impossible to legally protest violence perpetrated in the name of religion because of the risk of offending believers. “Accusations of defamation,” Jahangir wrote recently, “might stifle legitimate criticism or even research on practices and laws appearing to be in violation of human rights but which are, or are at least perceived to be, sanctioned by religion.”
Protecting Muslims
In too many countries, religion is invoked to persecute minorities, women, and homosexuals, or to justify acts of violence and terrorism. International laws should protect those who protest such crimes, and not those who justify the crimes and suppress dissent.
In addition, the resolution’s focus on the Islamic faith is discriminatory as well as misleading.
The initial Pakistani draft in 1999 was actually titled “Defamation of Islam.” Despite the broadened title, the resolution singles out “Islam and Muslims in particular” as the primary victims in need of protection, specifying no other religious faith or community.
Similarly, another of its chief concerns is that “Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism.”
The resolution is silent, though, on Saudi Arabia’s prohibition of any religious practice other than Islam; on Iran’s oppression of Baha’is; on the persecution of Christians in Egypt, Iraq, and Pakistan; on the death penalty for conversion from Islam in Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan; and on the incitement to hatred against Jews in textbooks and on television screens throughout the Arab world, including anti-Semitic images of religious-looking Jews.
The greatest victims of blasphemy laws are reform-minded Muslims, especially women. For example, 23-year-old Sayed Pevek Lambaksh languishes in an Afghan prison because he “defamed” Islam by circulating an article that criticized the status of Muslim women. Similarly, Pakistan persecutes Ahmadi Muslims by claiming that their interpretation of the faith is an invalid affront to “true” Islam. Muslims – not Danes – are the first victims of this campaign.
All of this is taking place not just at the General Assembly, but throughout the UN. Consider the past year:
In March, the Islamic-controlled Human Rights Council rewrote the mandate of the monitor on freedom of expression. Instead of scrutinizing government restrictions on free speech, he is now required to police individuals’ “abuse” of that freedom – i.e., defamation of Islam.
In June, after a NGO representative spoke in the council about the use of shari’a to justify violations of women’s rights, the council president ruled that any negative mention of shari’a law was forbidden. The activist was interrupted 16 times, with Egypt saying that Islam should not be “crucified in this council.”
In October, the UN released a draft declaration for its upcoming Durban II racism conference, replete with provisions that decry the “defamation of Muslims, their faith, and beliefs.”
What most shocked Western states, though, was last week’s proposal by a Durban II subcommittee, chaired by Algeria, to revise the Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, by introducing a ban on defamation of religion. Unlike declaratory resolutions, this would alter hard treaty law, directly affecting legal systems worldwide.
Last week the world celebrated the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. At the UN, however, its core principles are now under assault.
Revisiting a topic from the first Bradley Lecture Series in 1988-1989, Michael Novak delivered the fourth installment of The American Enterprise Institute’s twentieth-anniversary Bradley Lecture Series on December 8, 2008, at Washington, D.C.The author is a leading Catholic theologian, former U.S. ambassador, and George Frederick Jewett Chair in Religion and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute.
The Western world has never taken Islam with the full seriousness it has earned. Down through history, once Islamic armies have conquered a land, with very few exceptions, that land has remained Muslim.
A Christian will wish in vain that the great circle of Christian lands around the Mediterranean (and on up into Syria, Iraq, Iran, and northwards into Georgia) had not fallen irretrievably into Muslim hands, most of them before 732 A.D. For Christians who think that the future of the world favors movement in their direction, a study of the latent dynamism of Islam is not a little unsettling.
Edward Gibbon, finishing up his The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-78), was able to imagine how easily serene little Oxford could have been dominated by tall Islamic minarets before his birth, and the accents in its markets would have been Arabic: ” . . . the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet” .
It had been a marvel in 732 that a mere one hundred years earlier, Mohammed had launched his army from Medina, to conquer in rapid fire so many of the most glorious capital cities of Christianity – Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, Hippo, Tunis, Carthage, and then all of Spain. More amazingly still, Muslims went very quickly further into the Far East than Alexander the Great ever had.
Even today, in the eyes of influential Muslims, the expansion of Islam (although it covers a huge swathe of geography) is far from finished. The religious obligation at the heart of Islam is to conquer the world for Allah, and to incorporate it all into the great Islamic Umma. Only then will the world be at peace. Submission to Allah is the reason why the world was created.
In any case, Islam began making war on the Christian world from the very first moments of its birth. For a thousand years afterward, it fell to southern Europe, and in particular the Pope, to give active military resistance to the “Saracens” (as the Islamists came to be known in the West). From 632 A.D. until about 1292, Arab nations led the Muslim onslaught on the West. After that, the Turks established their dominion (the caliphate) over most of the Arab world. For hundreds of years a huge sea war ensued for control of the Mediterranean. But war by land was not called off.
The Turks expanded their empire in all four directions on the map. For more than a century they made attempt after attempt to take down the largest and richest of the Christian capitals, Constantinople, whose walls they finally breached in 1453. There followed great plunder, huge fires of destruction, the desecration of Christian basilicas and churches, murder, torture and thousands of Christian men, women, and children marched off in long lines toward slavery in the East.
A long line of great warrior-sultans sponsored Turkish advances in shipbuilding, gunnery, military organization, and training. By the mid 1550s, they had slowly conceived of a long-term offensive, a pincers movement first by sea and then by land, to conquer the whole northern shore of the Mediterranean. They first launched a massive sea attack in 1665 on the crossroads of the Mediterranean, the strategically placed island of Malta, and were repelled after an epic siege (which in itself is one of history’s great stories). Their penultimate aim was to take all Italy; then all Europe.
The northern pincers movement by land was aimed at an attack up through the Balkans for the onquest of Budapest and then, in a northeast arc into Slovakia and Poland. In this way, the Muslim forces would essentially encircle Italy from the North.
Because by 1540 the Reformation was separating the Christian nations of the north from Rome, the Sultans soon recognized that the Christian world would no longer fight as one. The next hundred years or so would be the most fruitful time since Mohammed to fulfill the destiny of Islam in Europe.
The Preliminary Battles on Malta (1565) and at Famagusta (1571)
Each new caliph of the Islamic empire was expected to expand the existing Muslim territories, in order to fulfill the mission given Islam, and to gain for the leader the necessary popularity and legitimacy. So it was that in the pleasant springtime of 1571, an entire Muslim fleet under Ali Pasha was ordered by the Sultan to seek out and destroy Christian dominance of the Mediterranean Sea, all the way up to Venice. During the summer, Ali Pasha raided fort after fort along the Adriatic Shore, picked up thousands of hostages as slaves, and sent at least a small squadron to blockade for two or three days the approaches to St. Mark’s Square in Venice, not least to plant a seed of terror about worse things to come.
Meanwhile, another large Muslim force soon conquered Cyprus, most practicing ritual cruelties on the defeated population of Nicosia, setting fire to churches, beheading the older women, and marching all younger Christians of both sexes into slavery. The Muslim armies then headed north for the fortress of Famagusta, the last Venetian stronghold on the island, the “extended arm” of the trading posts and protective forts of the Venetian navy in the entire eastern Mediterranean. An army of 100,000 opened the siege, against a force of 15,000 behind the walls.
Under the energetic generalship of the elderly General Marcantonio Bragadino, the small band of defenders held out for week after week, despite receiving more than 180,000 incoming cannonballs. The defenders ran so short of food that in the end they were eating cats, until they consumed their last one. The Muslim general was outraged by the length of the siege, which had already cost him 80,000 of his best men, despite the fact that Famagusta’s fate was sealed from the first days. Yet there were still long days and sometimes nights of hard hand-to-hand fighting just outside the walls. Muslim losses kept getting fully replenished by sea, and the Muslim forces grew stronger even as the Christians got down to their last six barrels of gunpowder, and had only four hundred men still able to fight.
On August 1, General Bragadino finally accepted surrender terms, which guaranteed safe passage of all his men to sail home to Venice, and safety to all citizens of the walled city. He walked with the full scarlet regalia of his office out from the walls and down to the tent of the Alfa Mustafa, the victorious commander. There the two leaders conversed. Then something went wrong, and Mustafa grew visibly angry and called for his men to behead the full complement of 350 survivors who had laid down their arms to march out with Bragadino. All 350 bleeding heads were piled up just outside Mustafa’s tent.
Mustafa then ordered Bragadino’s ears and nose chopped off, and forced the man to go down on all fours wearing a dog’s collar around his neck, to the jibes, mockery, and horror of the onlookers. Bags of earth were strapped over Bragadino’s back and he was made to carry them to the walls of the fortification, and to kiss the earth each time he passed Mustafa. As the old man grew fainter from the loss of blood from his head, he was tied to a chair, put in a rope harness and hoisted up to the highest mast in the fleet, so that all survivors of the city might see his humiliation. Then Bragadino’s chair was dropped in free-fall into the water and brought out again. The tortured Venetian was led in ropes to the town square and stripped. At a stone column (which still stands today), Bragadino’s hands were tied outstretched over his head, and an executioner stepped forward with sharp knives to carefully remove his skin, keeping it whole. Before the carver had reached Bragadino’s waist, the man was dead. His full skin was then stuffed with straw, once again raised up to the highest mast, and sailed around to various ports as a trophy of victory, and finally taken back to Istanbul for permanent exhibition.
Meanwhile, Don Juan had put the Christian fleet of some 200 vessels on course toward Lepanto, where Ali Pasha was refitting his vessels in the safe protection of an impregnable harbor. On board the Christian ships, the Spaniards were under secret orders to avoid fighting, only to keep their honor by going along, while urging reasons to turn back. By contrast, when a fast corsair dispatched from Famagusta arrived to deliver the tale of the last dishonors visited on General Bragadino and his 350 surviving soldiers, the blood of the Venetians boiled. They now allowed no question of turning back. They were determined to avenge the horrors suffered by their comrades in arms.
The young Don Juan was buoyed by this new resolve. Now he would be able to keep the vow he had made to Pope Pius V, to seek out and destroy the threatening enemy. The young admiral – he was twenty-two when he became commander of this fleet – felt confident in his battle plan. He had taken care to have his whole fleet rehearse their roles in the quiet seas of the Adriatic, just before turning toward Lepanto.
Don Juan and many of his men spent much of the night before battle in prayer. The fate of their civilization, they knew, depended on their good fortune on the morrow. The uncertainties of the changing winds and choppy seas, and the speed of the two onrushing lines of ships rapidly closing on each other, would erupt in unpredictable havoc. The odds against the Christians in ships were something like 350 ships to 250. But the Christians had a secret weapon.
The Greatest Sea Battle in History: Lepanto, October 1571
For more than three years Pope Pius V had labored mightily to sound alarms about the deadly Muslim buildup in the shipyards of Istanbul. The sultan had been stung by the surprising defeat of his overwhelming invasion force in Malta in 1565. The savagery of Muslim attacks on the coastline villages of Italy, Sicily, Dalmatia, and Greece was ratcheted upwards. Three or four Muslim galleys would offload hundreds of marines, sweep through a village, tie all its healthy men together for shipment out to become galley slaves, march away many of its women and young boys and girls for shipment to Eastern harems, and then gather all the elderly into the village church, where the helpless victims would be beheaded, and sometimes cut up into little pieces, to strike terror into other villages. The Muslims believed that future victims would lose heart and swiftly surrender when Muslim raiders arrived. Over three centuries, the number of European captives kidnapped from villages and beaches by these sea pirates climbed into the hundreds of thousands.
The reason for this kidnapping was that the naval appetite for fresh backs and muscles was insatiable. Most galley slaves lived little more than five years. They were chained to hard benches in the burning Mediterranean sun, slippery in their own excrement, urination, and intermittent vomiting, often never lying down to sleep. The dark vision that troubled the pope during the late 1560s was of even more horrible calamities to befall the whole Christian world, bit by bit. But unity in Europe was hard to find, and even more scarce was the will to fight for survival.
Finally, Don Juan of Austria, the younger brother of the King of Spain, an illegitimate son, stood erect and summoned allies to repel the much-anticipated Muslim advance. He aimed at leading a large fleet to go after the new Muslim fleet preemptively, before they could depart from their home seas. Having seen Muslim ferocity first hand, the Venetian public was eager to contribute a fleet to the task. Their support was crucial, for Venice was in those days the shipbuilding and gunnery capital of the world, producers (for a profit) of the most innovative, most versatile, stoutest, and most seaworthy armed vessels in the world. The best sea captains of Venice were the most eager to avenge their friends and fellow citizens.
For years, Venice had preferred peace with the Muslim East, in order to carry on their lucrative international trade. Now there was a cause that took precedence over the traditions of commerce. Genoa, too, contributed a fleet under their famous but now elderly Admiral Andrea Doria, these days a less bold warrior despite the glory of his earlier exploits.
The Knights of Malta, the premier sea warriors of the time, offered their small but highly skilled fleet in support of the Pope’s appeal, and agreed to work cooperatively with Don Juan.
The latter, whom his contemporaries described as a modest and humble man, characteristically set aside his own ego for the sake of the cause that engaged him. He pledged to the armada a large contingent supplied by Spain and Portugal. By the end of September 1571, eager to get their job done before winter turned the seas choppy and unfit for battle, the four distinct parts of the Christian fleet sailed past Italy, hugging the coasts, sending teams of observers to land to pick up the latest intelligence on the Muslim force. Finally, they learned that an enormous Muslim fleet, nearly 100 ships larger than their own, was sailing near to land toward the Gulf of Lepanto. No more talking, Don Juan told his leading admirals; now, battle.
Keeping the Knights of Malta in reserve just a short distance behind the main battle line, Don Juan assigned the impassioned Venetians the important left flank, with its leftmost ships close to the shore line. He himself commanded a hundred vessels at the center. In plain sight was his capitol ship, the Real, its banners of leadership visible to all. To the right flank he assigned the venerable Andrea Doria and the Genoese fleet. The plan was to hold his ships in as long and straight a line as seamanship in a besetting wind would allow, while heading directly for the Muslim line.
At his front, however, Don Juan placed a nasty surprise for Ali Pasha. Six new, taller, sturdier ships packed with cannons (especially in the bow) and heavily laden with lead and shot placed themselves a mile forward of the Christian line. They looked flat on top, like merchant ships. No one had ever seen such ships before. They lacked a bow rising up skywards, the one necessary weapon for vicious ramming. For the purpose of these new galleasses, as they were called, was not to ram oncoming ships but to blast them with an array of cannons. Their shot could carry a mile with great accuracy. When the galleasses turned sideways, they could blast with even more cannons, designed for shorter ranges, often aiming their cannon just at the waterline of their foes. They had the power to sink a smaller, lighter, faster Muslim galley with a single burst.
At first, the two fleets spotted each other on the horizon as single masts, then small numbers, and only as the two fleets closed to about two miles of each other could any one of the two hundred thousand sailors, marines, and janissaries on board catch a glimpse of the lines and dispositions of the fleets. The Muslims preferred to attack in a crescent rather than a straight line, but the winds at their back and tricky tides from the shoreline to their north forced them to straighten up their lines. Those who gazed on the massive array of ships and sails were filled with awe. On deck, one of those to be wounded in this battle, the great author Miguel de Cervantes wrote of “the most noble and memorable event that past centuries have seen.” Just over six hundred ships in two amazingly orderly lines, each stretching three miles from end to end, silently bore down on one another as the distance between them closed. The Muslim fleet outnumbered the Christian fleet by nearly a hundred ships. A sense of destiny weighed upon all who watched and waited.
The huge green battle flag of Allah – his name embroidered on it in Arabic some 29,800 times – marked out the tall capital ship Sultana, on which the fearsome young admiral Ali Pasha held command. Pasha was puzzled by the six more or less flat barges out in front of the Christian lines. His own armed soldiers were reliant mostly on clouds of arrows. His sailors had mastered the arts of ramming, and disgorging massive boarding parties onto the enemy’s slippery decks, then beating down their defenders by a sort of fierce land warfare out on the open seas. In those days, sea warfare was like land warfare, only carried out on open decks side-by-side instead of in open fields. Ship was lashed to ship, sometimes a dozen together. Hand-to-hand combat was the key.
There is no point here in giving the whole narrative of the battle. Suffice it to say that in the center the volleys from the galleasses out in front destroyed one Muslim vessel after another. Masts snapped, the oars of the galleys were shattered, and huge holes opened up the thin wooden sides of the galleys to the boiling sea. The Muslim ships that were not sunk were easily boarded by the Christian ships coming alongside, built a little higher, and amply supplied not only with boarding nets but, even more important, with ranks of the old-style predecessors to rifles – the arquebuses – directing point-blank rifle balls into the unarmored flesh of Muslim archers. It is true that in a few cases whole clouds of Muslim arrows felled many in the Christian ships, including the great Venetian admiral Marcantonio Bragadino shot in the eye. Mostly, the Christian warriors wore the latest in body armor, which often repelled wooden arrows harmlessly. Nonetheless, at least one Christian ship was later found aimlessly afloat, with every single man dead or wounded.
At the last, the two capital ships Real and Sultana clashed head-on, and Don Juan led the final boarding party which in its ferocity drove Ali Pasha to the aft poop, where he soon fell with a bullet in his eye. The Muslim admiral’s head was cut off and borne aloft on a pike to be mounted on the bow of the Real. The seas around were filled with cloaks, caps, struggling bodies, the vast wooden wreckage of battle, and large splotches of red blood.
On the Christian left, the Venetians attacked with almost blind rage and broke the line of the Muslim right with relative ease. They were aided by a revolt of the galley slaves on board a number of Muslim vessels, who in the explosions on board had their chains broken, and poured up on deck swinging their chains to left and right. So great was the Venetian fury that even after the battle, many of its sailors spent hours using their pikes to kill Muslim sailors and soldiers struggling in the sea. They tried to excuse their bloodlust by saying that they never wished to see those individuals sailing against the West again.
In four hours the battle was over. More than forty thousand men had died, and thousands more were wounded, more than in any other battle in history, more even than at Salamis or, in years to come, at the Somme. Never again did the Muslim fleets pose a grave danger to Europe from the South, although of course Muslim fleets kept busy expanding their bases on the African coast, harassing Western ships and territories across the Mediterranean. Technology, especially that pioneered by Venice and by ocean-going Portugal and Spain, had made the decisive difference. As Victor Davis Hanson writes, it was to capitalism that the victory was owed, for it was open markets that spurred competition to keep improving gunnery and ships, and it was the great merchant and commercial cities that built these new technologies. After Lepanto, the arts of gunnery replaced the arts of the bow and arrow, however deadly for many centuries those weapons had proved to be. Ships were made stouter, taller, more able to carry heavy armaments–and new methods had to be sought to replace locomotion by galley slaves.
As news of the great victory of October 7 reached shore, church bells rang all over the cities and countryside of Europe. For months, Pius V had urged Catholics to say the daily rosary on behalf of the morale and good fortune of the Christian forces, and above all, a successful outcome to the highly risky preemptive strike against the Turkish fleets. Thereafter, he declared that October 7 would be celebrated as the feast of “Mary, Queen of Victory.” A later pope added the title “Queen of the Holy Rosary” in honor of the laity’s favorite form of prayer. All over the Italian peninsula, great paintings were commissioned – whole galleries were dedicated – to honoring the classic scenes of that epic battle. The air of Europe that October tasted of liberties preserved. The record of the celebrations lives on in glorious paintings by Titian, Tintoretto, and many others.
The Northern Pincers and the Siege of Vienna, September 1683
Of necessity, our consideration of the Battle of Vienna must be briefer than our attention to Lepanto. But many of the same forces were at play as before, only this time by land, not by sea. The Protestant nations regarded the expanding Ottoman Empire as a Catholic problem. Few Catholic nations took the Muslim threat as seriously as it deserved. The French, in particular, had become used to buying off the Turks with trade and commerce, rather than resisting them in war. The French even preferred the defeat of their most dreaded rivals, the German-speaking Austrians. The nation Germany did not yet exist, only a number of smaller political units – Brandenberg, Saxony, Bavaria, and others, some Protestant and some Catholic. And so the Muslim overland advance through the underbelly of Europe seemed not only relentless but mostly unopposed.
The sultan of all Islam, Mehmet IV, spent his days in his unrivalled harems and on his huge hunting territories, some of them as large as nation-states. Thousands of mostly Slavic serfs were required to service his hunting party, in part by driving deer and other game animals his way. To uphold his obligations to Islamic expansion, however, Mehmet stirred himself to choose Kara Mustafa to be general of all his forces in the final conquest of Hungary, Slovakia, and the south of Poland – the greatest of all ventures on which the sultan’s historical reputation would rest. The sultan directly warned Mustafa not to try to take Vienna, for doing so would arouse the West to retribution. He gave Mustafa the long green cord of the Prophet to wear around his neck, both to signal the importance of his commission, and to warn him that failure meant that he must be hanged–must even hang himself.
For the drive northward, Kara Mustafa sent messengers throughout Anatolia, through Greater Syria, and out to the scores of Muslim nations from Morocco to India. He marched northwards with an ever-increasing army of more than three hundred thousand, many on horseback as cavalry to spread terror in advance of his main forces, other scores of thousands in his supply trains. This huge army took some five months to occupy Budapest, rest, and then push on northwards. They swatted resistance away like flies, and sometimes bypassed walled cities that refused instant surrender, to deal with them later with special severity.
By July 7, they were in sight of Vienna, which in those days was a walled and heavily fortified city, well designed by its military engineers to lay down fields of fire by which each strong point could assist its neighbors. Compared to today, Vienna within its walls was a small city, and yet large enough in those terrorized days to admit refugees from nearby villages who hurriedly sought safety. For the next weeks the sultan’s armies kept tightening the ring they had established on all sides of Vienna. Both Mustafa with his green cord around his neck and the leader of the Viennese defense, General Lubomirski, now knew that they were fighting to the death.
Meanwhile, the Turks launched massive engineering works, including many honeycombed tunnels beginning from long distances away, out of sight, and burrowing underneath strong points and vulnerable walls that ground troops might breach. These veteran and highly skilled sappers – the best in the world – dug all the way underground both to the wide moats at the base of the walls and still further underground to the very center of Vienna. Beginning in mid-August, without any warning, huge explosions tore gaping holes in one strongpoint after another, and sometimes beneath homes in the very center of the city. The twenty thousand or so warriors within the city fought with great determination and intelligence to drive back the screaming, bloodthirsty men who were storming through the breaches, while all around them Viennese civilians rushed to make repairs to the breaches in the walls. The Christians also sallied forth themselves, often at night, to drive far into the Turkish lines to blow up engineering devices and stockpiles of gunpowder.
Relentlessly, the Turks kept heaving up huge mounds – small mountains – of earth and sand just outside the walls, from which fire might constantly be poured down into the doomed city, from above its walls. With every Muslim attack, fewer and fewer Christian soldiers were left to repel them. In late August, supplies of meat ran out, and the population was reduced to eating horses and stray dogs. A very strict rationing of water became necessary. The elderly began to die off from starvation.
Meanwhile, the Christian relief forces were belatedly and all too slowly advancing from the north in four separate columns, from Catholic Germany and from Poland, to lift the siege. For nearly forty miles around the beleaguered city, Muslims had ravaged the land, and sent refugees fleeing by foot in all directions. Thus, making use of captured Muslim cavalrymen and foot soldiers, as well as the fleeing Christians, the Germans and the Poles picked up enough intelligence to learn that their best chances lay to the southwest, through the Vienna Wood. It would be hugely difficult terrain for cavalry, and also for quick forced marches by the infantry. But one other factor spoke for that line of attack: the supply trains and Mustafa’s luxurious tents, with their splendid harems and rich treasury, were also located on that side of Vienna. The approaching Christian generals met together to go over the plan of attack, and then rapidly set off to their southwest, far enough from the city to advance mostly undetected.
At intervals, back in Vienna, Mustafa had messages in German tied to dozens of rocks, which he had his catapults shoot over the city walls. One such message read:
Surrender now and you will be saved. Open your gates, turn your churches over to us and lay down your arms, and no one will be killed. If you resist the will of Allah, your leaders, and all of them, will be slain. Able men and women will be sold into slavery. You will be allowed no rights of worship, and your mighty walls will be thrown down. Fight and you die! Surrender and you live!
For more than four hundred years, hundreds of Christian villages and cities had received such messages. The duplicity and primitive brutality of Muslim conquerors were well known to hundreds of thousands of Christian families, through the fate of relatives in other overrun communities. Nevertheless, sometimes terror overwhelmed them and they surrendered. At Vienna, behind fearless and determined leaders, they chose to die fighting rather than to surrender. So the issue inside Vienna became whether food and gunpowder would give out before the long-promised army of relief would arrive. Dauntless messengers slipping in and out of Vienna kept hope at least flickering. The commander in Vienna promised he could hold out until September 1. The advancing army of relief replied that they would need almost two weeks more than that. Only gritted-teeth determination could bridge that gap in time.
One thing the Muslim armies were not trained to do, as were the Christian armies of that time, was to fight on two fronts – against the city ahead and against any oncoming forces that might arrive to break the siege. For this, Kara Mustafa relied on his mobile cavalry, some twenty thousand Tatars from the Asian steppes in camp about twenty miles south of Vienna. Because of the density of the Vienna Wood to the southwest of the city, this was the one region which the cavalry could cover only lightly. Still, if even small bands of mounted Tatars had infiltrated the hills and valleys of the Wood, no Christian soldiers could have made it through the narrow passes. Unaccountably, Mustafa forbade the Tatar leader to launch an attack on the Wood.
King Sobieski of Poland had drawn the privilege of advancing on the right flank, right through the heart of the Vienna Wood. His army’s double-time march through the Wood was arduous, by narrow valleys and slow but deep summer streams. Late on September 11, just as his men were making their initial contact with the Turkish outposts, and the final battle began to be joined, the King formed a resolution to attack on the morrow as swiftly and with as much surprise as possible, to overwhelm Mustafa’s bodyguard of cavalry and rush on with force as close to the supply trains as he could, and to conclude the matter on the next day. In the rough terrain where his troops broke out from the Wood on September 12, Sobieski held his famed hussars back. They were his best, his ultimate, weapon.
For hours all day long, left, center, and right flanks of the Christian army advanced far more steadily than expected, although the hand-to-hand fighting was furious, and the Turkish lines were yielding only a yard at a time. The last four hundred yards took an immense effort, but the Christian forces reached open ground with less than an hour of daylight left. This is when Sobieski made a huge gamble and boldly released his much-feared hussars. These famous horsemen wore special caps with strips of leather flying behind them in the wind, lined with feathers like the headdresses of American Indians, and the wind whistled through the leather with an eerie tone. As they charged across the open land the low, melancholy wail of the wind through their feathers frightened the Arabian horses – and their Turkish riders, too.
The sheer speed and force of the Polish hussars was too great and too surprising to be resisted. Mustafa escaped, but his tents and treasury were captured (one of his green velvet tents sits now in the Czartoryskis Museum in Krakow). The Muslim lines nearby broke, and their men began looting Mustafa’s rich supply wagons and pleasure tents on their panicky flight southward. The entire Muslim ring surrounding the city melted away, back whence it had come.
Mustafa, slowed by a bad wound to his eye, was rushed southward by his remaining bodyguards. From the first moments of crushing defeat he began plotting his reports to the sultan, shifting the blame onto one of his subordinates. Yet as the Christians pursued the once-great Muslim army down through Hungary, retaking one city after another from Muslim control, and in effect laying the groundwork for the future Austro-Hungarian Empire, the sultan’s anger against Mustafa finally exploded. Mustafa recognized what must happen. He was hanged on December 25, 1683, by the green cord that he had worn round his neck, a little more than three months after he had imagined he had Vienna in his grasp.
***
Thus, once again, this time by land, the Muslims had attempted to fulfill the Prophet’s command to spread Islam to all corners of the world decisively, with force. The sultans had long had the advantage of an enormous standing army ready for all seasons, and swiftly added to when larger ambitions demanded. This time, however, the siege-lifting battle outside the walls of Vienna marked the high-water mark of Muslim power. After September 11-12, 1683, that power kept receding, on into modern times.
Still, it should surprise no one that the date chosen to bring the new resurgence of modern Muslim ambition to the whole world’s attention was also September 11, 318 years after 1683. The announcement came in the vivid orange bursts of blossoming flame and dark black smoke from two of the tallest towers of the West’s financial capital. Muslim memory runs very deep, and so does the Muslim imperative to conquer the world for Allah, not just by force of arms but by conversion to Islam. The West has always refused to give this long and deeply rooted Muslim threat against the West’s own soul the sustained attention it requires.
Nonetheless, four centuries after Lepanto, three centuries after Vienna, today in most of the capitals of once-Christian Europe, there are more Muslims attending services in mosques on Fridays, than Christians at worship on Sundays. In some ways, the pluralism of the West is a blessing, even an advantage to the West – and yet its profoundest historical weakness lies in its own divided spirit. The ultimate issue between Islam and the West is not military force. It is the depth of intellect and engagement. In matters of the spirit, we seem always to become tongue-tied, as if lacking in spirited confidence. We do not insist on presenting better arguments in recognition of the inalienable rights to human liberty that our totalitarian opponents deny. Mere secular force will not do, when the fundamental battle is spiritual. Thus, the same movie seems to be played over and over.
That is the historical record, it seems, at least in regard to October 7, 1571, and September 11-12, 1683, after Lepanto, and after Vienna.
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In an op-ed in The Washington Post, columnist Michael Gerson urges the creation of “a capable, hard-hitting European military force, supported by the United States” to stabilize the dramatic situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
“The setting of this city is all contrast and drama – nestled along a vast, placid lake but dominated by a volcano that steams by day and glows faint and red on a clear evening. A city living in the shadow of sudden violence.
Driving north from Goma, one passes through wide lava fields – black, broken and sharp to the feet. About seven miles along the rutted road, the uniforms of the soldiers change, from the solid green of the FARDC (the Congolese military) to the camouflage of the CNDP (the rebel forces led by Laurent Nkunda). For civilians, the colors of the uniforms often matter little – all the groups are capable of pillage and rape.
Less than a mile from the front, a left turn brings you into the Kibati I camp – more than 6,000 men, women and children displaced by nearby fighting. The camps channel the problems of Congo like a storm drain after a flash food – skin diseases, worms, diarrhea and respiratory ailments. A teenage girl wears a heavy coat against her malarial chills. An 8-year-old boy named Glory smiles for the camera, even though his body is hot with fever.
When the various armies move, whole towns flee, causing spikes in sexual violence and acute malnutrition. And this individual suffering gathers into shocking statistics. Perhaps 4 million deaths related to war over the past decade.”
hiermit darf ich Sie darum bitten, dass Sie sich für die rasche Freilassung des 22-jährigen französisch-israelischen Soldaten Gilad Shalit entschlossen einsetzen. Gilad Shalit wurde vor über zwei Jahren von der mörderischen islamischen Bande Hamas entführt.
Gilad Shalit, seit dem 25.06.2006 in Gefangenschaft
Sie könnten zum Beispiel die Freilassung von Gilad Shalit an Verhandlungen über Fördergelder oder andere der (zu) vielen Leistungen der UNO binden.
Anmerkung der Redaktion: Dieser Beitrag spiegelt ausschließlich die Meinung des Herausgebers von HIRAM7 REVIEW wider. David Ben-Hame ist zwar ein höchst (ein)gebildeter FDP-naher Wichtigtuer, stolzer Zionist und einfältiger Pro-Amerikaner, aber er nimmt dennoch kein Blatt vor den Mund, wenn es darum geht, die Freiheit des Einzelnen und die Selbstbestimmung des Bürgers zu verteidigen, die er zur zivilen Religion hochstilisiert. Deshalb können wir ihn halbwegs ertragen.
The report was presented by UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer at a press briefing yesterday, attended by CNN, BBC and other media, at United Nations Headquarters in New York.
Hillel Neuer’s press conference followed separate briefings by U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay, General Assembly President Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann, former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former U.S. Secretary of Defense William Cohen, co-chairs of the U.S. Task Force on Genocide, viewable here.
PRESS CONFERENCE TO LAUNCH ‘ELEANOR’S DREAM’ REPORT ON STRENGTHENING UNITED NATIONS HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL
UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer
addresses UN press conference, Dec. 9, 2008. UN Photo: Eskinder Debebe
New York, December 9, 2008 - The Executive Director of UN Watch said today that, for proponents of human rights worldwide, tomorrow’s commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights would be marred by the “state of crisis” plaguing the United Nations Human Rights Council, which was in danger of seriously eroding the fundamental freedoms and principles it had been established to promote and protect.
“Sixty years after the founding vision of Eleanor Roosevelt, René Cassin and Charles Malik, the United Nations human rights system as a whole finds itself in a state of crisis,” Hillel Neuer, UN Watch’s Executive Director, said at a Headquarters press conference to launch the Geneva-based non-governmental organization’s new report, Eleanor’s Dream: The State of Human Rights at the United Nations, 1948-2008.
He said the two-year-old Council had been created to replace the much maligned Human Rights Commission, which had been routinely criticized for being politicized and acting arbitrarily. “Regrettably, with few exceptions, the opposite has happened.” The Council was “dominated by an alliance of repressive regimes, including China, Cuba and Saudi Arabia”, and had acted to systematically undermine core principles and effective mechanisms created by the generation of Eleanor Roosevelt and those that had followed. The body’s democratic members had failed to make better use of its innovative mechanisms, including the Universal Periodic Review and the power to convene “special sessions”.
Citing the Council’s “distressing” voting record, he noted that this year, the Geneva-based body had overturned the protection of freedom of expression — “the lifeblood of any democracy” — by revising the mandate of the expert to now police individuals who dared abuse freedom of speech and defamed religions, chiefly, Islam. That change had been sponsored by Islamic States with Cuban support and was part of the “campaign at the United Nations by the Islamic States to restrict freedom of speech in the name of prohibiting any form of expression that is deemed to offend Islamic sensitivities”. Such moves actually hurt people in the Middle East, including human rights defenders, bloggers and others who dared to oppose State orthodoxies.
In addition, he said, the Council had eliminated human rights monitors in Belarus, Cuba, Liberia, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Darfur. Moreover, UN Watch, which monitors the performance of the United Nations by the yardstick of its own Charter, feared that the mandate of the Council’s expert on Sudan — recently renewed for a mere six months — “might also be on the chopping block” in 2009.
He recalled that in March the Council had heard the expert on the Democratic Republic of the Congo report systematic abuses in the eastern part of that country, including massive human rights violations against women, and its response had been to eliminate that mandate. “Now, here we are in December and we see what has happened where hundreds of thousands of victims in the Congo have been murdered and raped.”
Mr. Neuer said: “So as we celebrate this historic day and seek to strengthen human rights, we need to acknowledge the current situation at the United Nations,” adding that the UN Watch report had found that, among other things, only 13 of the organ’s 47 members had positive voting records on resolutions speaking for victims of human rights abuses. Further, Freedom House had revealed that 24 of the 47 members, or 51 per cent, fell short of basic democracy standards. Also disturbing was the fact that 74 per cent of the Council’s membership had voted to restrict the independence of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.
He said the Council had consistently failed to address the world’s worst human rights violations, pointing out that, of the 20 worst abusers cited by Freedom House in its annual survey, only Myanmar and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea had been censured. “While it did adopt resolutions on Sudan, these were non-condemnatory, weak and ineffective.” Some had even praised Sudan for its “cooperation”.
“So it would appear that the spoilers have it,” he said, stressing that, while nearly half of the Council’s members were free democracies, only a minority of them — about a dozen — had voted consistently in defence of the values and principles that the Council was supposed to promote. “Instead, the Council has been increasingly dominated by a brazen alliance of repressive regimes seeking not only to spoil needed reforms, but to undermine the few meaningful mechanisms of UN human rights protection that already exist. Their goal is impunity for systematic abuses.”
At the same time, he said, UN Watch was also troubled that too many democracies had been “going along with the spoilers” out of loyalty to regional groups and other political alliances. About 80 per cent of the Council’s resolutions condemned Israel, and while that country needed to be held accountable for its actions, resolutions that were “egregiously one-sided and legitimize acts of terrorism are unhelpful”.
With all that in mind, he set out several recommendations, stressing that countries that cared about human rights still had mechanisms they could use, including calling the Council into special sessions to examine human rights situations. Agreement by only one third of the organ’s membership — just 16 countries — was needed to call such a session. “Democratic countries ought to be calling special sessions, especially since this is one of the innovations of the reformed Council”, as a way to turn a spotlight on abusers and provide a voice for victims.
He said the Universal Periodic Review, another innovation that offered some hope, should also be put to better use. Unfortunately, UN Watch had seen that mechanism used by Council members to praise their allies. States should use their time to pose far tougher questions to those under review about their human rights situations. While it was difficult to imagine any changes in the voting patterns of “those seeking to undermine or overturn key human rights instruments” in the near future, it was critical for those States that cared about human rights to lobby “those that are in the middle”.
Responding to questions, he said United States President Elect Barack Obama had made it clear that his Administration would be “re-examining US engagement with the Human Rights Council”. The United States had not been a member for the past two years, but under the right conditions it could take a more active role in the Council. Still, if the organ continued its current trend, the European countries might pull back their participation. The Council would undergo its five-year review in 2011 and at that time it would be critical to reaffirm commitment to human rights principles and the mechanisms for implementing them. “We cannot let human rights be forgotten or undermined.”
Asked about the possibility of amending the Universal Declaration, especially to enshrine the protection of minorities, he said that, while that might seem like a good idea, currently, no attempt to open up the Declaration would yield positive results. Indeed, if the very same text were to be introduced for adoption today, the outcome would be far from clear. While there might be one or two amendments that would be worthy, he was “gravely concerned” by the current tenor of the arguments against the Universal Declaration, the International Criminal Court and other mechanisms and instruments promoting freedom of speech and combating impunity.
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Posted by HIRAM7 REVIEW 
Posted by HIRAM7 REVIEW 
Posted by HIRAM7 REVIEW 
Gilad Shalit, seit dem 25.06.2006 in Gefangenschaft
