Wanted – A Rigid/Flexible America-Friendly Definition of Terrorism

[It is an impossibility that the IJT could come-up with an internationally acceptable definition of "terrorism," to be used in the Hariri case, when the tribunal in that case was set in motion as a ploy to convert a false flag attack into an indictment of American and Israeli adversaries, Hezbollah.  If there is any question which definition of the term "terrorism" to pursue, the Lebanese crafted definition or the most acceptable international legal interpretation, then the jurists themselves are set on a "terroristic" path, of sorts, which has used an implied threat of international force against the Lebanon Resistance, as a means to force political submission.  The American instigated STL in Lebanon appears to work backward from the assumption of Hezbollah guilt, looking for evidence to support that assertion--none of this "innocent until proven guilty crap."  The Hariri assassination was definitely terrorism, since all political assassinations are clearly acts of terrorism-- violence or murder of high profile individuals to intimidate political underlings, "making an example" of an enemy.  All Mafia hits would fit the definition of "terrorism," by their nature, intended to intimidate and force submission from adversaries.

Lenin had a better definition than the Lebanese Criminal Code--"The purpose of terrorism is to terrorize."

There is no need to define specific acts of terror, other than simply "violence on individuals to force compliance or submission from others."  "Violence" need not be fatal or even bloody to fit the known acts of terror we have seen--poisoning, kidnapping, any suppression of individual rights against the person's will is violence, violating the person.  "Terrorism" is using such violence to overwhelm inalienable human rights.

The prosecution has proposed its own politically expedient definition that is total bullshit:

as an act by which “a substantial section of the public reasonably and significantly fears more than momentarily from the present onward, indiscriminate personal harm”. This definition says nothing about the terrorists' extortion of political goals.  The total silence about the state-sponsorship angle of all large acts of terrorism is deafening.  The goal of the prosecutors is not to produce a solid definition, but a "working tool" for future trials.  Experts contend that fixing a definition would enable the prosecution to link terrorist crimes to leaders--exactly what the Imperial side doesn't want.

Until states are willing to define the crime of terrorism clearly and concisely, eliminating all wiggle room for the Imperial wigglers, state terrorism will continue masquerading as an international war of self-defense, while eliminating groups and individuals who actually are trying to defend themselves from the scourge of humanity--State-Sponsored Terrorism.]

Wanted – A definition on terrorism

By International Justice Tribune (IJT 122)

For decades, international lawyers have wrangled over the question – What is terrorism? Is it an act designed to spread terror? Does it have a political motive? Does it involve an attack on a few people or alot of people? Since 1914, philosophers have pondered whether the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Sarajevo can be classified as an ‘act of terror’. More recently, the September 11 attacks in the US, have brought the issue of international terrorism to the forefront of debate, and with it the question of its very definition.

By Geraldine Coughlan, Leidschendam

Today, while there are a variety of definitions of terrorism in a dozen international conventions, the UN-backed Special Tribunal for Lebanon near The Hague, has taken the first step towards arriving at a single definition of the crime of terrorism.

The Court is due to rule on 16th February, on which definitions of terrorism and other crimes that it will apply. It is expected that this ruling will set a precedent for other international courts, which also want to see a universal definition of terrorism as much as they want to see their prime terrorist suspects, in the dock.

The Lebanon tribunal is the first international court with jurisdiction over the crime of terrorism, but it is grappling with how to apply Lebanese and international law, before including a terrorism charge in potential arrest warrants. As the tribunal applies Lebanese law, but has an international character, the question is – should a definition of terrorism be based on Lebanese law or international law?

In its first hearing on 7th February, the court’s lawyers and judges began thrashing out the question of what constitutes an act of terrorism and other crimes such as conspiracy and homicide, as they prepare to prosecute suspects for the assassination of the former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in 2005.

As the tribunal is based on the Lebanese Criminal Code,

which already has a definition of the crime of terrorism, the prosecution and defence have now agreed on applying that definition, which is that ‘acts of terrorism’ are acts which are intended to cause a state of alarm and are committed by means such as explosive devices, liable to pose a public threat.

The prosecution has even proposed its own definition,

as an act by which “a substantial section of the public reasonably and significantly fears more than momentarily from the present onward, indiscriminate personal harm”.

The prosecution claims there’s no need to prove political intent as a motive for a terrorist act and argues that its own definition will act as a ‘working tool’ for use in future trials.

Most legal experts agree that it is important to define terrorism and other notions such as conspiracy and joint criminal enterprise, to make it easier to link crimes to leaders. This is one of the difficulties in cases before the ICTY and suspects could expect tougher sentences, if the definitions of these crimes were more clear and concise.

The defence, though, is against agreeing on firm definitions, claiming this would prematurely impose them on trial judges, limiting the rights of the accused.

Meantime, there is still no consensus on how the world community regards the crime of terrorism and its place in domestic and international law. The crux of the matter lies in the difference between Articles 2 and 3 of the Tribunal’s statute. Article 2 refers solely to Lebanese law, while Article 3 relies directly on international law, and so reflects the international character of the Tribunal. Does this mean there is a conflict between the definition of terrorism in the Lebanese Criminal Code and the notion of terrorism as reflected in international law? The judges are adamant that international law is relevant in determining the notion of terrorism and as Lebanon has ratified the Arab Convention on the Suppression of Terrorism, the judges believe the Lebanese definition of terrorism should be based on the norms of international law.

As the tribunal is moving into “uncharted territory in international law”, the judges are concerned about whether the public will easily be able to understand the complex legal issues involved in defining terrorism.

The presiding judge Antonio Cassese, warned that Lebanon, as a founding member of the UN, is now set on a “course of judicial accountability” in aiming to establish a common definition of terrorism, which is a common threat to us all. However, until states can agree on a single definition – it will be argued that the notion of terrorism does not actually exist.

The Doomsday Project, Deep Events, and the Shrinking of American Democracy

Peter Dale Scott

I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency [the National Security Agency] and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”

– Senator Frank Church (1975)

In recent years I have become more and more concerned with the interactions between three important and alarming trends in recent American history. The first is America’s increasing militarization, and above all its inclination, even obsession, to involve itself in needless and pernicious wars. The second, closely related, is the progressive shrinking of public politics and the rule of law as they are subordinated, even domestically, to the requirements of covert U.S. operations abroad.

The third, also closely related, is the important and increasingly deleterious impact on American history and the global extension of American power, of what I have called deep events. These events, like the JFK assassination, the Watergate break-in, or 9/11, which repeatedly involve law-breaking or violence, are mysterious to begin with, are embedded in ongoing covert processes, have consequences that enlarge covert government, and are subsequently covered up by systematic falsifications in media and internal government records.

One factor linking Dallas, Watergate, and 9/11, has been the involvement in all three deep events of personnel involved in America’s highest-level emergency planning, known since the 1980s as Continuity of Government (COG) planning, or more colloquially as “the Doomsday Project.” The implementation of COG plans on 9/11, or what I call Doomsday Power, was the culmination of three decades of such planning, and has resulted in the permanent militarization of the domestic United States, and the imposition at home of institutions and processes designed for domination abroad.

Writing about these deep events as they occurred over the decades, I have been interested in the interrelations among them. It is now possible to show how each was related both to those preceding it, and those which followed.

I would like in this essay to go further and propose a framework to analyze the on-going forces underlying all of the most important deep events, and how they have contributed to the political ascendance of what used to be called the military-industrial complex.  I hope to describe certain impersonal governing laws that determine the socio-dynamics of all large-scale societies (often called empires) that deploy their surplus of power to expand beyond their own borders and force their will on other peoples. This process of expansion generates predictable trends of behavior in the institutions of all such societies, and also in the individuals competing for advancement in those institutions. In America it has converted the military-industrial complex from a threat at the margins of the established civil order, to a pervasive force dominating that order.

President Eisenhower in his farewell address in 1961 warned that “We must guard against the unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the Military Industrial Complex.”

With this framework I hope to persuade readers that in some respects our recent history is simpler than it appears on the surface and in the media. Our society, by its very economic successes and consequent expansion, has been breeding impersonal forces both outside and within itself that are changing it from a bottom-up elective democracy into a top-down empire. And among these forces are those that produce deep events.

I am far from alone in seeing this degradation of America’s policies and political processes. A similar pattern, reflecting the degradation of earlier empires, was described at length by the late Chalmers Johnson:

The evidence is building up that in the decade following the end of the Cold War, the United States largely abandoned a reliance on diplomacy, economic aid, international law, and multilateral institutions in carrying out its foreign policies and resorted much of the time to bluster, military force, and financial manipulation.

But my analysis goes beyond that of Johnson, Kevin Phillips, Andrew Bacevich, and other analysts, in proposing that three major deep events – Dallas, Watergate, and 9/11 – were not just part of this degradation of American democracy, but played a significant role in shaping it.

As author Michael Lind has observed, there have for a long time been two prevailing and different political cultures in America, underlying political differences in the American public, and even dividing different sectors of the American government.  One culture is predominantly egalitarian and democratic, working for the legal consolidation of human rights both at home and abroad. The other, less recognized but with deep historical roots, prioritizes and teaches the use of repressive violence against both domestic and Third World populations to maintain “order.”

To some extent these two mindsets are found in all societies. They correspond to two opposing modes of power and governance that were defined by Hannah Arendt as “persuasion through arguments” versus “coercion by force.” Arendt, following Thucydides, traced these to the common Greek way of handling domestic affairs, which was persuasion (πείθειν) as well as the common way of handling foreign affairs, which was force and violence (βία).”

Hannah Arendt

Writing amid the protests and riots of the 1960s, Arendt feared that traditional authority was at risk, threatened (in her eyes) by the contemporary “loss of tradition and of religion.” A half century later, I would argue that a far greater danger to social equilibrium comes now from those on the right who invoke authority in the name of tradition and religion. With America’s huge expansion into the enterprise of covertly dominating and exploiting the rest of the world, the open processes of persuasion, which have been America’s traditional ideal for handling domestic affairs, have increasingly tilted towards top-down violence.

This tilt towards violent or repressive power is defended rhetorically as a means to preserve social stability, but in fact it threatens it. As Kevin Phillips and others have demonstrated, empires built on violent or repressive power tend to rise and then fall, often with surprising rapidity.  Underlying the discussion in this essay is the thesis that repressive power is unstable, creating dialectical forces both within and outside its system. Externally, repressive power helps create its own enemies, as happened with Britain (in India), France (in Indochina) and the Netherlands (in Indonesia).

The Socio-dynamics of Repressive Power in Large-scale Societies

But more dangerous and destabilizing has been the conversion of those empires themselves, into hubristic mechanisms of war. The fall of Periclean Athens, which inspired Thucydides’ reflections, is a case in point. Thucydides described how Athens was undone by the overreaching greed (pleonexia) of its unnecessary Sicilian expedition, a folly presaging America’s follies in Vietnam and Iraq. Thucydides attributed the rise of this folly in the rapid change in Athens after the death of Pericles, and in particular to the rise of a rapacious oligarchy.  Paul Kennedy, Kevin Phillips, and Chalmers Johnson have described the recreation of this process in the Roman, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and British empires.  Its recurrence again in recent American history corroborates that there is a self-propelling dynamic of power that becomes repressive.

It is useful to be reminded of the historical division between two cultures in America, which both underlay and predated the Civil War. But these two cultures have evolved and been reinforced by many factors. For example urbanization in America’s South and West worked for most of the 20^th century to meld the two cultures, but after about 1980 the increasing disparity of wealth in America tended to separate them to an extent recalling the Gilded Age of the 19^thcentury.

More importantly, postwar U.S. history has seen the institutions of domestic self-government steadily displaced by an array of new institutions, like the CIA and Pentagon, adapted first to the repressive dominance and control of foreign populations abroad, and now increasingly dominant domestically. The manipulative ethos of this repressive bureaucracy promotes and corrupts those who, in order to be promoted, internalize the culture of repressive dominance into a mindset.

The egalitarian mindset is widely shared among Americans. But Washington today is securely in the hands of the global repressive dominance mindset, and a deepening of the military-industrial complex into what in my most recent book I call the American war machine. This transformation of America represents a major change in our society. When Eisenhower warned against the military-industrial complex in 1961 it was still a minority element in our political economy. Today it finances and dominates both parties, and indeed is now also financing threats to both parties from the right, as well as dominating our international policy. As a result, liberal Republicans are as scarce in the Republican Party today as Goldwater Republicans were scarce in that party back in 1960.

That change has been achieved partly by money, but partly as a result of deep events like the JFK assassination, the Watergate break-in, and 9/11. As a rule, each of these deep events is attributed by our government and media to marginal outsiders, like Lee Harvey Oswald, or the nineteen alleged plane hijackers.

I have long been skeptical of these “lone nut” explanations, but recently my skepticism has advanced to another level. My research over four decades points to the conclusion that each of these deep events

1) was carried out, at least in part, by individuals in and out of government who shared and sought to promote this repressive mindset;

2) enhanced the power of the repressive mindset within the U.S. government;

3) formed another stage in a continuous narrative whose result has been a transformation of America, into a social system dominated from above, rather than governed from below.

Please note that I am talking about the result of this continuous narrative, not about its purpose. In saying that these deep events have contributed collectively to a major change in American society, I am not attributing them all to a single manipulative “secret team.” Rather I see them as flowing from the workings of repressive power itself, which (as history has shown many times) transforms both societies with surplus power and also the individuals exercising that surplus power.

We are conditioned to think that the open institutions of American governance could not possibly provide a milieu for plots like 9/11 against public order. But since World War Two covert U.S. agencies like the CIA have helped create an alternative world where power is exercised with minimal oversight, often at odds with public agencies’ proclaimed policy objectives of law and order, and often in conjunction with lawless and even criminal foreign and domestic elements.

The expansion of this covert world has occurred principally in Asia. There covert U.S. decisions were made to build up drug-financed armies in Burma, Thailand, and Laos, in a series of aggressive actions that by the 1960s involved America in a hot Indochina War. This war, like the related wars that ensued later in Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan, was initiated by America for a mix of geostrategic and economic reasons, above all the desire to establish a dominant U.S. presence an important region of petroleum reserves.

Air America at Sam Thong, Laos, 1961

The country most deeply affected by the succession of Asian Wars has been America itself. Its expansive forces, backed by powerful interest groups, are now out of control, as our managers, like other empire managers before them, have “come to believe that there is nowhere within their domain – in our case, nowhere on earth – in which their presence is not crucial.”⁷

To illustrate this, loss of control, let us look for a moment at a milieu which I believe to have been an important factor in all of America’s major domestic deep events: the CIA’s ongoing interactions with the global drug connection.

Unaccountable Power: The CIA and the Return of the Global Drug Connection

Since World War Two the CIA has made systematic use of drug trafficking forces to increase its covert influence — first in Thailand and Burma, then in Laos and Vietnam, and most recently in Afghanistan.⁸ With America’s expansion overseas, we have seen more and more covert programs and agencies, all using drug traffickers to different and opposing ends.

In 2004 Time and USA Today ran major stories about two of the chief Afghan drug traffickers, Haji Juma Khan and Haji Bashir Noorzai, alleging that each was supporting al-Qaeda, and that Khan in particular “has helped al-Qaeda establish a smuggling network that is peddling Afghan heroin to buyers across the Middle East, Asia and Europe.”⁹ Later it was revealed that both traffickers were simultaneously CIA assets, and that Khan in particular was “paid a large amount of cash by the United States,” even while he was reportedly helping al-Qaeda to establish smuggling networks.¹⁰

There is no longer anything surprising in the news that large U.S. payments were made to a drug trafficker who was himself funding the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The arrangement is no more bizarre than the CIA’s performance during the U.S. “war on drugs” in Venezuela in the 1990s, when the CIA first set up an anti-drug unit in Venezuela, and then helped its chief, Gen. Ramon Guillén Davila, smuggle at least one ton of pure cocaine into Miami International Airport.¹¹

It would be easy to conclude from these reports that the CIA and Pentagon intentionally use drugs to help finance the enemy networks that justify their overseas operations. Yet I doubt that such a cynical Machiavellian objective is ever consciously voiced by those responsible in Washington.

More likely, it is an inevitable consequence of the U.S. repressive style of conducting covert operations. Great emphasis is put on recruiting covert assets; and in unstable areas with weak governance, drug traffickers with their own ample funds and repressive networks are the most obvious candidates for recruitment by the CIA. The traffickers in turn are happy to become U.S. assets, because this status affords them at least a temporary immunity from U.S. prosecution.¹²

In a nutshell: I am describing a development that is not so much intentional, as a consequence of repressive dynamics. A related example would be the CIA’s recurring use of double agents, again for the reason just suggested. In the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya, the chief planner was a double agent, Ali Mohammed, who surveyed the Embassy and reported to Osama bin Laden in 1993, just months after the FBI had ordered the Canadian RCMP to release him from detention.¹³ In the Mumbai terrorist attack of 2008, the scene was initially surveyed for the attackers by a DEA double agent, David Headley (alias Daood Sayed Gilani) whom “U.S. authorities sent … to work for them in Pakistan…despite a warning that he sympathized with radical Islamic groups.”¹⁴

David Headley in court

The central point is that expansion beyond a nation’s borders engenders a pattern of repressive power with predictable results — results that transcend the conscious intentions of anyone within that repressive power system. Newly formed and ill-supervised agencies spawn contradictory policies abroad, the net effect of which is usually both expansive and deleterious – not just to the targeted nation but also to America.

This is especially true of covert agencies, whose practice of secrecy means that controversial policies proliferate without either coordination or review. Asia in particular has been since 1945 the chief area where the CIA has ignored or overridden the policy directives of the State Department. As I document in American War Machine, CIA interventions in Asia, especially those that escalated into the Laotian, Vietnam, and Afghan wars, fostered an ongoing global CIA drug connection, or what I have called elsewhere a dark quadrant of unaccountable power.

This drug connection, richly endowed with huge resources and its own resources of illegal violence, has a major stake in both American interventions and above all unwinnable wars to aggravate the conditions of regional lawlessness that are needed for drug trafficking. Thus it makes perfect sense that the global drug connection has, as I believe, been an ongoing factor in the creation of an overseas American empire that most U.S. citizens never asked for. More specifically, the dark quadrant has contributed to all the major deep events – including Dallas, Watergate, and 9/11, that have helped militarize America and overshadow its public institutions.

Doomsday Power and the Military Occupation of America

I have said that, underlying the surface of America’s major deep events, there has been a pattern of conflict between two mindsets – that of openness and that of repressive dominance – dating back to the Civil War and the Indian wars of the mid-nineteenth century (and before that to the American Revolution).¹⁵ But it would be wrong to conclude from this on-going pattern of conflict that there is nothing new in our current situation. On the contrary, America is in the midst of a new crisis arising from this very old antagonism.

Since World War Two, secrecy has been used to accumulate new covert bureaucratic powers under the guise of emergency planning for disasters, planning known inside and outside the government as the “Doomsday Project.” Known more recently (and misleadingly) as “Continuity of Government” (COG) planning, the Doomsday Project, under the guiding hands in the 1980s of Oliver North, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and others, became the vehicle on 9/11 for a significant change of government. This package of extreme repressive power accumulated under the guise of the Doomsday Project can be referred to as Doomsday Power. In concrete terms, the repressive power developed to control the rest of the world is now, to an unprecedented extent, treating America itself as an occupied territory.

What I mean by “doomsday power” is the package of repressive mechanisms (which I have discussed elsewhere under their official name of “continuity of government” or COG plans), that was prepared over two decades by the elite COG planning group, and then implemented beginning on 9/11. The package includes 1) warrantless surveillance, 2) warrantless detention, (including unprecedented abridgments of the right to habeas corpus), and 3) unprecedented steps towards the militarization of domestic security enforcement and shrinking of the posse comitatus acts.

One recent development of Doomsday power, for example, has been the deployment since 2008 of a U.S. Army Brigade Combat Team to be stationed permanently in the United States. A major part of its dedicated assignment is to be “called upon to help with civil unrest and crowd control.”¹⁶ Many people seem to be unaware that Americans, together with this Brigade, have lived since 2002 under a U.S. Army Command called NORTHCOM.¹⁷ Yet if nothing is done to change the present course of events, historians may come some day to compare the stationing of this brigade in 2008 CE to the date, in 49 BCE, when Caesar, along with his legion, crossed the Rubicon.

And I believe that the forces that have worked for decades to create Doomsday power have, like the global drug connection, been involved in every one of the deep events, from Dallas to 9/11, that have helped bring us here.

 

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Drugs Oil and War, The Road to 9/11, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War. His most recent book is American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection and the Road to Afghanistan.

His website, which contains a wealth of his writings, is here.

Recommended citation: Peter Dale Scott, The Doomsday Project, Deep Events, and the Shrinking of American Democracy, The Asia-Pacific Journal Vol 9, Issue 4 No 3, January 24, 2011.

Notes

¹ Chalmers Johnson, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 217. Cf. Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan/Henry Holt, 2004).

² Michael Lind, Made in Texas: George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 143.

³ Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought(New York: Penguin Books, 1993), 93. Adapting Arendt’s distinction, Jonathan Schell made a Gandhian case in support of nonviolent persuasive or community power as a means of challenging top-down violent power and thus reforming the world. I developed this case myself in The Road to 9/11 (Jonathan Schell, The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People [New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2003], 227-31; Peter Dale Scott, Road to 9/11, 249-66, 269).

⁴ Kevin Phillips, Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich(New York: Broadway Books, 2002), 171-200.

⁵ Carl A. Huffman, Archytas of Tarentum: Pythagorean, philosopher, and mathematician king (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 207: “In Diodotus’ speech in the Mytilenian debate, wealth is particularly identified as producing arrogant “overreaching” (pleonexia –iii.45.4). Thus pleonexia seems to be associated with the abuse of power by either a tyrant or a wealthy oligarchy.”

⁶ Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987); Phillips, Wealth and Democracy; Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire.

⁷ Johnson, Blowback, 221.

⁸ Scott, American War Machine, 63-142, 239-53. The Karzai regime in Afghanistan is only the latest of CIA client governments to struggle to maintain itself with support from drug traffickers. Cf. Peter Dale Scott, “Can the US Pacify the Drug-Addicted War in Afghanistan? Opium, the CIA and the Karzai Administration”, The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, April 5, 2010; Ryan Grim, “Karzai Releasing Scores Of Drug Traffickers In Afghanistan, WikiLeaks Cables Show,” Huffington Post, December 31, 2010.

⁹ Tim McGurk, Time, August 2, 2004; cf. USA Today, October 26, 2004.

¹⁰ James Risen, New York Times, December 11, 2010. Both traffickers were ultimately arrested by DEA officials: Noorzai in 2005, and Khan in 2008. The U.S. probably came to prefer Khan over Noorzai, because he was more closely allied to Abdul Wali Karzai, another drug trafficker and CIA asset, as well as a central figure in the power apparatus of his brother Hamid Karzai, the U.S. client president of Afghanistan.

¹¹ Time, November 29, 1993; Scott, American War Machine, 14-15; Tim Weiner,New York Times, November 23, 1996.

¹² It is too early to report the ultimate fate of Noorzai and Khan after their arrest and indictment by the United States. But it is clear that Guillén Davila’s arrest and indictment never led to conviction or imprisonment. On the contrary, he appears to have continued to enjoy CIA favor in Venezuela.  (Scott, American War Conspiracy, 14-15).

¹³ Scott, Road to 9/11, 152-58.

¹⁴ “D.E.A. Deployed Mumbai Plotter Despite Warning,” New York Times, November 8, 2009; cf. Scott, American War Machine, 246-47. In another essay I will develop the thesis that what I call surplus repressive power – power developed exclusively by one society for the repressive dominance of others — is doomed, in this and other ways, to encourage the proliferation of its enemies. My point here is a more modest and general one. Maybe save the sentence for the later work?

¹⁵ Cf. Peter Dale Scott, “Atrocity and its Discontents: U.S. Double-Mindedness About Massacre,” in Adam Jones, ed. Genocide, War Crimes and the West: Ending the Culture of Impunity (London: Zed Press, 2004).

¹⁶ “Brigade homeland tours start Oct. 1,” Army Times, September 30, 2008.

¹⁷ Scott, Road to 9/11, 241-42.

Protesters hold ground in Bahrain, Clashes in Yemen, roadblocks in Jordan

A funeral procession for Ali Abdulhadi Mushaima, 21, who was killed in Monday’s protests, moves through Jidhafs, Bahrain, on Tuesday. / HASAN JAMALI/Associated Press

A protester, center, shouts slogans while he and others are blocked by police during an anti-government protest Tuesday in Yemen’s capital of Sanaa. HANI MOHAMMED/Associated Press

Protesters hold ground in Bahrain

Clashes in Yemen, roadblocks in Jordan

By BRIAN MURPHY

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Thousands of protesters took over a main square in Bahrain’s capital Tuesday, carting in tents and raising banners in a bold attempt to copy Egypt’s uprising and force high-level changes in one of the key U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf.

The move by demonstrators capped two days of clashes across the tiny island kingdom that left at least two people dead. Parliament was cast into limbo by an opposition boycott, and the king made a rare address on national television to offer condolences for the bloodshed.

Security forces — apparently under orders to hold back — watched from the sidelines as protesters chanted slogans mocking the nation’s ruling sheiks and called for sweeping political reforms and an end to monarchy’s grip on key decisions and government posts.

Meanwhile, Russia’s foreign minister said that the U.S. and Western allies should not stir up pro-democracy protests in the Middle East.

After meeting Tuesday with members of Britain’s government, Sergey Lavrov warned against any attempts by other nations to fuel public dissent.

“We are convinced that calls for revolutions are counterproductive. We have had more than one revolution in Russia, and we believe that we don’t need to impose revolutions on others,” Lavrov told reporters.

The political mutinies in the Arab world show the wide reach of the calls for change spurred by the toppling of regimes in Tunisia and Egypt.

In Yemen, police and government supporters battled nearly 3,000 marchers calling for the ouster of President Ali Abdullah Saleh in a fifth straight day of violence. Yemen is seen as a crucial partner in the U.S. fight against a network inspired by al-Qaida.

In Jordan, hundreds of Bedouin tribesmen blocked roads to demand the government return lands they once owned.

Saudi activists are seeking to form a political party in a rare challenge to the near-absolute power of the pro-Western monarchy.

In Tehran, Iran, hard-line lawmakers demanded Tuesday that the country’s opposition leaders face trial and be put to death, a day after clashes between protesters and security forces left two people dead and dozens injured.

ISI, Defence and Interior ministries hauled to court in missing persons’ cases

From ANI

Peshawar, Feb 16(ANI): The Peshawar High Court (PHC) has reissued notices to Pakistan’s premier spy agency Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the Defence Ministry and the Interior Ministry in connection with a number of missing persons’ cases.

A division bench of the PHC issued a notice to the regional head of the ISI in a missing person’s case, directing him to explain his position about the whereabouts of one Abdul Aziz on March 8- the date fixed for the next hearing of the case, the Daily Times reports.

A Lower Orakzai Agency resident had filed a habeas corpus petition, claiming that security forces’ personnel had picked up his brother Aziz from the Peshawar Airport on October 19, 2009, when he was leaving for Saudi Arabia to perform Hajj.

In another missing person’s case, the bench issued notices to the Defence and Interior ministries, directing them to expedite their efforts to search for him with the assistance of the spy agencies working under them.

A resident of Nowshera District had filed a habeas corpus petition in the court, claiming that police and security agencies’ personnel had picked up her son Sajid Ali Shah on October 7, 2010.

The woman told the court that the security agencies had brought her missing son for treatment at Peshawar’s Lady Reading Hospital on January 12, and that he was shifted to an unknown location after the medical treatment.

At this, the bench issued notices to the Defence and Interior ministries, directing them to submit written replies in this regard.

The bench gave more time to the Defence Ministry in the third case of a missing person- Ghuncha Gul of Peshawar- directing it to submit a written reply till March 9.
Copyright Asian News International/DailyIndia.com

The cost of covert war

Rafia Zakaria

AS the world has been basking in the euphoria of the Egyptian revolution, an event on the streets of Lahore has evolved into an international relations nightmare.

Last month, while international news coverage was solidly focused on the streets of Cairo, a US consulate employee, was allegedly accosted by two men. Within minutes, two men were dead and Raymond Davis was in police custody.

Ensuing days have added to the grim details of the incident, with the wife of one of Davis’s victims committing suicide. In the following days, Pakistan’s foreign minister was denied his post after cabinet resignations, leaving no one to deal with American requests to release Davis on the basis of diplomatic immunity.

Meanwhile, the court ordered his continued detention. Immediately following this development, trilateral talks between Afghanistan, Pakistan and the US scheduled for the last week of February were indefinitely delayed, pointing to an alarming escalation of tensions between Pakistan and the US.

Another crucial point to note is that drone attacks in Pakistani territory taking place at the rate of two or three a week appear to have decreased since the incident.

Much has been said about the legal dimensions of diplomatic immunity in recent days, with Pakistani analysts carefully dissecting the provisions of the Vienna Convention and examining these against the demands of justice. The details of these discussions, most of which rely on examples of ills afflicting previous cadres of diplomats, Pakistanis, Americans or others who have found themselves on the wrong side of the law while serving at a foreign mission, deflect attention away from the particularities of the issue in the Pakistan-American context.

In the current situation, the Davis case mirrors the misgivings in the relationship between two circumstantial allies. Just as the case is with the countries themselves, it is challenging to find the good guy in the skirmish.

The Pakistani men in question, even in the rendition of some rabid anti-American anchors on Pakistani news channels, were in the process of committing a crime, one to which many hapless Pakistani citizens are daily subjected on the streets of Lahore and Karachi. Their victim in this instance turned out to be armed and trigger-happy.

For many, save for the fact that an innocent bystander perished, the incident was largely a confrontation of villains, each side equally sullied by the weight of unclear motives.

The murky details of the Davis case, and the rapidly changing nature of facts presented to substantiate one or the other version correlate exactly to the legal obscurities on which both Pakistan and the US have routinely relied as part of their partnership.

The issue of drone attacks is a case in point, even while UN officials like Philip Alston and other legal scholars have drawn attention to the illegality of such extra-judicial warfare, neither Pakistan nor the US have expended any effort on bringing such acts within the legal ambit.

A few months ago, attempts by a Pakistani attorney Shahzad Akhter to bring charges against American government officials on behalf of drone attack victims including journalist Karim Khan were denounced by the US as a ploy to destroy the cover of their chief CIA operative in Islamabad. And if the US has been uncooperative and dismissive, the Pakistani government was hardly a source of respite refusing to release any details about the attacks or the basis of their tacit agreement with the US that allowed for incursions into Pakistani territory.

The absence of clearly delineated rules was judged on both sides to be beneficial to the task of waging a covert war.

This lack of rules is now incurring a cost for both sides. According to former officials from the United States Foreign Service, the issue of diplomatic immunity is one decided prior to the deployment of an official. A list exchanged between missions includes the names of officials that possess immunity on either side.

Those not on the list, often contract workers, may have diplomatic passports but do not necessarily enjoy diplomatic immunity. But the question of whether or not Davis possesses diplomatic immunity is in fact a largely superfluous detail in the current impasse. The legacy of legal uncertainty, promoted by the persistence of drone attacks, extra-judicial killings and surreptitious rendition have all coalesced to make Davis himself the scapegoat of all sins past.

His acts, even while provoked by his victims, have become a crude allegory for the acts of the US itself with his vanquishing imagined as ultimate revenge against the devaluation of Pakistani lives so easily sacrificed in the course of a conflict largely perceived as America’s alone.

To many minds, both he and his victims represent the darkest side of their respective worlds: a mercenary contract soldier hailing from a society that wants perfect safety and young men committing crimes on city streets paved with despair suddenly cast in the fluid roles of victim and victimiser.

In the game of strategic necessity where both sides have revelled in the absence of explicit rules, Raymond Davis is collateral damage, the unfortunate target of the hatred of a population seething at the lack of recourse for crimes committed against them.

Davis, his victims and the bystander who died may have been brought together by a coalition of chance and circumstance but the action that day has now become magnified into a power struggle between two countries brought together by just as unlikely a collusion of history, geography and strategic necessity.Amid these realities, whetted by mistrust and fuelled by anger, the possibility of justice seems remote leaving only the stark lesson that covert warfare produces unlikely and unfair casualties on both sides.

The writer is a US-based attorney teaching constitutional history and political philosophy.

rafia.zakaria@gmail

Video shows police interviewing Raymond Davis after shootings of 2 Pakistanis

http://www.9news.com Denver

Video shows police interviewing Raymond Davis a…, posted with vodpod

One Religion–Many Faces

Brahmanism: This is the sum of duty: Do naught unto others which would cause you pain if done to you.: Mahabharata 5:1517

Christianity: All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.: Matthew 7:12

Islam: No one of you is a believer until he desires for his brother what which he desires for himself. Sunnah

Buddhism: Hurt not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful.: Udana Varga 5:18

Judaism: What is hateful to you, do not to your fellowmen. That is the entire Law; all the rest is commentary.: Talmud, Shabbat 31:a

Confucianism: Surely it is the maxim of loving-kindness: Do not unto others that you would not have them do unto you.: Analects 15:23

Taoism: Regard your neighbor’s gain as your own gain, and your neighbor’s loss as your own loss.: T’ai Shag Kan Ying P’ien

Zoroastrianism: That nature alone is good which refrains from doing unto another whatsoever is not good: for itself. : Dadistan-i-dinik 94:5

“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us, “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.” : Albert Einstein – (1879-1955) Physicist and Professor, Nobel Prize 1921

–E.

Preparing Candidate Petraeus

NATO chief Petraeus to leave post by end of year

LONDON: US war commander General David Petraeus will leave his post as chief of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan before the end of the year, the Times newspaper reported on Wednesday.

US President Barack Obama plans to replace Petraeus, who was only appointed eight months ago, as part of a broad reorganisation of senior US officials in Afghanistan, according to the British paper.

“General Petraeus is doing a brilliant job but he’s been going virtually non-stop since 9/11 (and) he can’t do it for ever,” Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, told the newspaper.

“This is a heck of a demanding job, he will have to be rotated out at some point,” he added.

Morrell said that Obama and Defence Secretary Robert Gates were “already thinking about that.”

As part of the restructuring, Karl Eikenberry, the US ambassador in Kabul and four other top diplomats will return home, the paper claimed.

Marc Grossman was earlier this week appointed as Obama’s special envoy to the region, and has been tasked with repairing US-Pakistani relations.

Petraeus took up his current position in June last year when Obama fired General Stanley McChrystal for making unflattering remarks during an interview.

- AFP/fa