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While the protesters were being thwarted by Mayor Gavin Newsom’s high speed game of wack-a-mole with the Olympic torch through the streets of San Francisco, the Dalai Lama was en route to Tokyo and Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was giving one of the most important speeches of his diplomatic career.

First to the Dalai Lama. In remarks this morning in Tokyo, His Holiness defended the right of protesters to voice their dissent, while returning to his calls for nonviolence:

Diarists’s note on the above YouTube: The Dalai Lama’s remarks this morning come immediately after the short clip of Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The final part of this YouTube contains a photo that has raised no small amount of controversy on the web. I include this YouTube because it was the only one I could find with His Holiness’s remarks in English. I have no thoughts regarding the veracity – or lack thereof – of the claims surrounding the last photograph other than to say that this is just one example of why an impartial, international investigation into the riots in Lhasa needs to be held, so that the truth around these events can be discovered.

Bloomberg has extended coverage of the Dalai Lama’s remarks:

The international community should look into accusations that clashes between Chinese troops and protesters killed hundreds of people, the Dalai Lama told reporters near Tokyo’s Narita airport. Authorities shouldn’t treat non-violent protesters as criminals, he said.

“I appealed to the international community to carry out a thorough investigation,” he said. “As far as we know, at least a few hundred people were killed in the Tibetan area.”

And regarding the Olympics, the Dalai Lama reiterated his stance that he does not support a boycott of the games and had this to say about the opening ceremonies:

“If things improve and the Chinese government starts to look at Tibet more realistically, I would personally want to enjoy the big ceremony,” the Dalai Lama said.

link: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/…

The Dalai Lama’s comments are made not just against the backdrop of protests of the Olympic torch relay, but also shortly after Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, at Peking University, in a speech he delivered in Mandarin called on the Chinese government to find a peaceful resolution to the situation in Tibet:

This year, as China hosts the Olympics, the eyes of the world will be on you and the city of Beijing.

It will be a chance for China to engage directly with the world, both on the sports field and on the streets of Beijing.

Some have called for a boycott of the Beijing Olympics because of recent problems in Tibet.

As I said in London on Sunday, I do not agree.

I believe the Olympics are important for China’s continuing engagement with the world.

Australia like most other countries recognises China’s sovereignty over Tibet.

But we also believe it is necessary to recognise there are significant human rights problem in Tibet.

The current situation in Tibet is of concern to Australians.

We recognise the need for all parties to avoid violence and find a solution through dialogue.

As a long-standing friend of China I intend to have a straightforward discussion with China’s leaders on this.

We wish to see the year 2008 as one of harmony, and celebration – not one of conflict and contention.

link: http://www.news.com.au/adelaid…

Al Jazeera’s report on these remarks puts into context Rudd’s “rock star” status in China:

Given Rudd’s personal popularity there, it is not surprising that the Chinese government’s censorship machine kicked into high gear after he raised the issue of human rights in Tibet:

Meanwhile, the Chinese state-run press virtually ignored Mr Rudd’s comments about human rights problems in Tibet, while lavishing praise on his knowledge of China.

“Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd enthralled his audience at Peking University with an intimate grasp of China affairs and a thorough understanding of global politics yesterday,” the China Daily wrote.

The English-language newspaper highlighted a quote from Mr Rudd expressing his opposition to a boycott of the Olympic Games, without mentioning Tibet.

The People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s main mouthpiece, also reported on Rudd’s support for the Olympics, while the Beijing Youth Daily highlighted his humorous quips.

Most papers also reported on Mr Rudd’s fluent Mandarin skills and the fact he delivered his speech in Chinese.

But none of the major newspapers mentioned Rudd’s more controversial comments on Tibet.

link: http://www.abc.net.au/news/sto…

My two cents on where we’re at right now regarding the geopolitics in play. The United States – although compromised on this issue by the well-known actions of the Bush administration in Iraq and Gitmo – still has some cache to speak out on human rights. I am pleased that the US House passed a resolution against the Chinese government’s “disproportionate and extreme” response to the riots in Tibet. I’m heartened that Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton have made forceful statements in support of the Tibetan people and the Dalai Lama, and have asked Bush to not attend the opening ceremonies in Beijing. I am also encouraged by Barack Obama’s reasoned response to this situation as it keeps a boycott of the opening ceremonies on the table, and I appreciate Republicans of good will like Dick Lugar and John McCain speaking out to ensure that this issue does not become mired in political partisanship.

These are all good measures, and appropriate actions for leaders of a democratic country to engage in.

However, sometimes as Americans we have to realize that it may be more effective for us to follow someone else’s lead instead of trying to fill that role ourselves. It goes against our cultural grain to do so, but hopefully the seriousness of the cause will give us the humility we need to accept that back seat.

This is such a cause.

In Kevin Rudd we have an experienced diplomat who understands China, Chinese politics and who – literally – speaks their language. In Australia we have a consistent ally who shares many of our traditions and cultural values. Working in concert with Prime Minister Rudd, therefore, would seem to make the most sense in our attempts to ultimately help not just the Tibetan people but the overall cause of human rights in China.

Kevin Rudd is the right person, at the right place, at the right time to be an agent of change and find a peaceful resolution between China and Tibet, and China and the rest of the world. We would do well to support – and not contradict – the efforts he is making in this area.

Please keep all sides of this conflict in your thoughts, prayers and meditations.

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The New York Times this morning is reporting that Afghanistan is holding secret trials for dozens of Afghan men who were formerly detained by the US in Gitmo and Baghram:

Dozens of Afghan men who were previously held by the United States at Bagram Air Base and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are now being tried [in Afghanistan] in secretive Afghan criminal proceedings based mainly on allegations forwarded by the American military.

The prisoners are being convicted and sentenced to as much as 20 years’ confinement in trials that typically run between half an hour and an hour, said human rights investigators who have observed them. One early trial was reported to have lasted barely 10 minutes, an investigator said. /snip

Witnesses do not appear in court and cannot be cross-examined. There are no sworn statements of their testimony.

Instead, the trials appear to be based almost entirely on terse summaries of allegations that are forwarded to the Afghan authorities by the United States military. Afghan security agents add what evidence they can, but the cases generally center on events that sometimes occurred years ago in war zones that the authorities may now be unable to reach.

“These are no-witness paper trials that deny the defendants a fundamental fair-trial right to challenge the evidence and mount a defense,” said Sahr MuhammedAlly, a lawyer for the advocacy group Human Rights First who has studied the proceedings. “So any convictions you get are fundamentally flawed.”

Join me below.

According to the Times, since 2002 the Bush administration has been trying to get various countries to prosecute Gitmo prisoners as part of their “repatriation.”  Britain and other countries have refused because they say that US evidence won’t hold up in their courts.  But not Afghanistan:

the Afghan authorities have now tried 82 of the former prisoners since last October and referred more than 120 other cases for prosecution.

Of the prisoners who have been through the makeshift Afghan court, 65 have been convicted and 17 acquitted, according to a report on the prosecutions by Human Rights First that is to be made public on Thursday.

What does the US government say about these remarkable, civilized, reliable, fair trials?  Please refrain from scoffing:

United States officials defended their role in providing information [and the defendants] for the Afghan trials as a legitimate way to try to contain the threats that some of the more dangerous detainees would pose if they were released outright.

“These are not prosecutions that are being done at the request or behest of the United States government,” said Sandra L. Hodgkinson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detention policy. “These are prosecutions that are being done by Afghans for crimes committed on their territory by their nationals.”

Ms. Hodgkinson said the United States had pressed the Afghan authorities “to conduct the trials in a fair manner,” and had insisted that lawyers be provided for the prisoners after the first 10 of them were convicted without legal representation. But she did not directly reject the criticisms raised in the Human Rights First report, adding, “These trials are much more consistent with the traditional Afghan justice process than they are with ours.”

Let us briefly review the trial options for Afghani prisoners in Gitmo: indefinite detention without trial and without habeas review by the US courts (depending on pending US Supreme Court decisions) and possibly with interrogations torture, OR possibly torture and then a show trial by a US military commission without confrontation of witnesses, possibly resulting in a death sentence, OR possibly torture followed by a second, illegal extradition to Afghanistan and a “trial” without a record or review that results in decades of confinement in an Afghani prison.  Spam, egg, spam, spam, bacon and spam.

Pardon me for being overly fastidious about the trial rights of the accused, but that’s an extremely disgraceful, embarrassing list of options.

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crossposted from dailykos at the suggestion of Jay Elias

The second paragraph of Nick Kristof’s piece, after recognizing Condoleeza Rice’s correct observation that we cannot simply invade a 3rd Muslim country, reads as follows:

But this week marks the 14th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide – the last time we said “never again.” And while Ms. Rice is right that we can’t send in American ground troops, there are concrete steps that President Bush can take if he wants to end his shameful passivity

I am no expert in this part of the world, nor in military and diplomatic affairs.  I am also a Quaker, and prefer the use of diplomacy to that of force.  But I also refuse to stand silently by in the face of slaughter.  And I think Kristof’s Memo to Bush on Darfur should be mandatory reading, and the starting point of serious discussions.   Let me explain why.

I would go back further than Rwanda, whose anniversary should shame the entire world.  And in a time when we are seeing the possibility of ethnic obliteration of Tibet, genocide of a culture if you will, the unwillingness of the world to intervene raise the real possibility of yet another group abusive treatment of whom can have catastrophic consequences.

In the context of the current presidential campaign, we need to remember the failure of the world to act when cultural genocide and mass slaughter was taking place in Europe, in Bosnia.  Srbenica by itself should be a stain on the moral conscience of the civilized world, one only exacerbated by Rwanda.  

Kristof has been a consistent albeit almost solitary voice attempting to rouse the world on what has been happening in Darfur.   And given his dedication to this cause, his travels to the region, his extensive conversations with experts, I am inclined to give great weight to his suggestions.

There are 8.  Each of the sentences after the numbers will be quotes from Kristof, even though I will not place in blockquotes, only in bold.  The rest of the words will be mine.

1. Work with France to end the proxy war between Sudan and Chad and to keep Sudan from invading Chad and toppling its government.  We cannot afford to see the disruption in the Darfur region spread, nor can we afford to see the Sudanese government extending its brutal reach outside of its own borders, lest we see other brutal regimes – and not just in Africa – see this as an example for them to follow.  And we should remember that Chad has itself been through turmoil and disruption with tragic consequences.  Now that Chad is semi-stable, we would not want the gains and stability that ahve been achieved to be destroyed as quickly as they would by Sudanese incursions across their border, perhaps even before a bull-blown invasion.  The tragic humanitarian consequences, starting with the thousands of refugees who would die, are something the world should contemplate only as movivation to act now to prevent such from happening.

2. Broaden the focus from “save Darfur” to “save Sudan.”  Darfur is part of a larger conflict between the northern and southern parts of Sudan, and while one can argue whether the national boundaries make any more sense than many of the other artificial boundaries left in Africa and the Middle East by the former colonial powers, for now maintaining a civilly united  nation may be the only means of preventing an ongoing conflict that would not only kill thens of thousands but also prevent humanitarian aid from alleviating the extant suffering.

3. Right before or after this summer’s G-8 summit, President Bush should convene an international conference on Sudan, inviting among others Mr. Sarkozy, Gordon Brown of Britain, Hu Jintao of China, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Sudanese leaders themselves. The conference should be convened in Kigali, Rwanda, so that participants can reflect on the historical resonance of genocide.  I can see how touchy this might be, but I also see the wisdom of including China.  They hae more leverage on Sudan than any major power. And perhaps if they see the world’s willingness to act in cases of genocide, it might be possible to persuade them to be somewhat less chauvinistic in their treatment of their own ethnic groups on the fringes of their nation – Tibetans are not the only group who have been repressed and suppressed by the Han Chinese.  

But I would caution that any Western leader entering into such discussions had better be prepared to acknowledge the historical misdeeds of his own nation – in our case of the Native American nations – lset we be accused of hypocrisy.  We should be prepared to say we understand the damage such things can do to the soul of a nation.  And I would remind the President that as he sought the office he now holds he promised a foreign policy that had some humility to it.  That might include some acknowledgment that our judgment as a nation has not always been perfect.

4. The conference should aim to restart a Darfur peace process, because the only way the slaughter will truly end is with a peace agreement.  Kristof suggest a figure of stature such as Kofi Annan to lead such a process.  While I am not committed to any one person, whoever assumes such a responsibility will need to devote full time to the endeavor.  here I think of the kinds of shuttle diplomacy that Ralph Bunche did to help end a conflict in the former Palestine in the 1940’s.  After he replaced his assassinated superior, Count Bernadotte of Sweden, Bunche’s efforts succeeded in obtaining an armistice between Israel and its neighbors, a achievement so monumental he was awarded the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize.

5. The U.N. and U.S. should take South Sudan up on its offers in 2004 and 2005 to provide up to 10,000 peacekeepers for Darfur. South Sudanese peacekeepers wouldn’t need visas or interpreters.  Of course, even though such peacekeepers could walk into Darfur, this could represent a tilt in the N-S conflict withing Sudan, but it is also necessary to provide some level of ethnic and linguistic comfort for those who have been under such attack.

6. The U.S. should impose a no-fly zone over Darfur from the air base in Abeche, Chad (or even from our existing base in Djibouti).  Kristof is not expecting aircraft constantly in the air.  Rather, if the no-fly zone is violated, we should take out a Sudanese bomber on the ground.  He acknowledges that this potentially could pose some risk to the current humanitarian efforts, with the Sudanese cutting off access.  He thinks a follow-up warning that any attempt to restrict access for humanitarian relief efforts would result in the destruction of further aircraft, and this might be a sufficient warning to the Khartoum government.

7. We should warn Sudan that if it provokes a war with the South, attacks camps for displaced people or invades a neighboring country, we will destroy its air force.  There are those who believe that the Sudanese are responsive to CREDIBLE threats.

8. The central reason for our failure in Sudan is that we haven’t proffered meaningful sticks or carrots.   The no-fly zone is the stick.  And the carrot, offered when Sudan is totally responsive to what the world must demand, is to normalize relations, to lift sanctions and to remove Sudan from the list of nations sponsoring terrorism.

I would hope that people with access to all three presidential campaigns would ensure that they are made aware of Kristof’s “Memo.” Too often we talk about the horrors in the world, but that is all we do – talk – and maybe again wring our hands and bewail the cruelty we observe.

Many of our young people do not understand how we can not intervene and then claim to be moral as a nation and a society.  And when that issue comes up, as it sometimes does, with my students, I cannot adequately answer them, not when yet again we stand by and do nothing meaningful.

My last name is Bernstein.  I had cousins in Bialystok when the ghetto in that city was liquidated.  The world knew what was happening, but did not intervene in a meaningful way in the buildup to the Holocaust.  Despite clear voices on the left – Joan Baez – and the right – Bill Buckley – we sat by as the Khmer Rouge murdered millions of its own people, a slaughter stopped only when the Vietnamese intervened with force.

There are many things about which we need to be concerned.  if we claim that part of the reason we have to remain in Iraq is stop the possibility of genocide, how can this administration remain passive in the face of actual genocidal action?

Let me end with Kristof’s final words:

If President Bush takes all these steps, will they succeed in ending the genocide? We don’t know, but pretending that there is nothing more that we can do is as dishonest as it is disgraceful.

Peace?

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The National Lawyers Guild has issued a press release calling for University of California at Berkeley’s Boalt Hall law school to fire Professor John Yoo. The NLG calls for the rescission of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 provisions that allow immunity and the prosecution of Yoo as a war criminal. Meanwhile, yesterday, Judiciary Chairman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) threatened to subpoena John Yoo to testify about the memo at a May 6 hearing of the House Judiciary Committee.

The declassification and release of Yoo’s memorandum to William Haynes, General Counsel of the Department of Defense, written in March 2003, has caused a firestorm in the press. Yoo’s memo is the smoking gun for those looking for evidence of how the Bush Administration flouted basic human rights law, the UN Convention Against Torture, and the U.S. War Crimes Act to initiate a campaign of torture against detainees swept up in the aggressive U.S. military and covert campaigns that followed 9/11.

The NLG nicely summarizes much of what is outrageous about Yoo’s memo. But as an excellent article in the current Vanity Fair, Philippe Sands’ “The Green Light,” explains, the torture began before Yoo’s memo was even written.

Starting in late 2002 a detainee bearing the number 063 was tortured over a period of more than seven weeks….

The Bush administration has always taken refuge behind a “trickle up” explanation: that is, the decision was generated by military commanders and interrogators on the ground. This explanation is false. The origins lie in actions taken at the very highest levels of the administration-by some of the most senior personal advisers to the president, the vice president, and the secretary of defense. At the heart of the matter stand several political appointees-lawyers-who, it can be argued, broke their ethical codes of conduct and took themselves into a zone of international criminality, where formal investigation is now a very real option.

Yoo’s memo sought to give the legal justification to the worst kind of physical and psychological torture. The NLG memo and the press have not fully plumbed the significance of what doors were opened by Bush and his co-conspirators. Jeff Stein, at Congressional Quarterly, tied the Yoo memo to an increase of drug use on detainees. The use of drugs — from marijuana to LSD to PCP to sodium amytal — in interrogations was a hallmark of the CIA’s MKULTRA research program in the 1950s-1960s.

There can be little doubt now that the government has used drugs on terrorist suspects that are designed to weaken their resistance to interrogation. All that’s missing is the syringes and videotapes.

Another window opened on the practice last week with the declassification of John Yoo’s instantly infamous 2003 memo approving harsh interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects.

Yoo advised top Bush administration officials that interrogators could employ mind-altering drugs if they did not produce “an extreme effect” calculated to “cause a profound disruption of the senses or personality.”

Yoo had first rationalized the use of drugs in a 2002 memo for top Bush administration officials….

“The new Yoo memo, along with other White House legal memoranda, shows clearly that the policy foundation for the use of interrogational drugs was being laid,” says Stephen Miles, a University of Minnesota bioethicist and author of “Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror”…. “The use of these drugs was anticipated and discussed in the memos of January and February 2002 by DoD, DoJ, and White House counsel using the same language and rationale. The executive branch memos laid a comprehensive and reiterated policy foundation for the use of interrogational drugs.”

Stein also cites the CIA/Rand Corp./American Psychological Workshop in 2003 that looked at use of “pharmacological agents” on interrogation subjects as part of an attack on prisoner attempts at deception. The full story on this “workshop”, which also included work on sensory overload mechanisms to “overwhelm the senses” of detainees, was first broken by me last year.

The heat is on the administration on torture yet again. But I warn all my readers that NONE of the crimes of the Bush Administration have yet met any legal consequences. The relevant governing bodies seem to have no stomach for actually prosecuting any top war criminals, much less taking Bush, Cheney, and their mob on politically. The news media of record, the New York Times, the Washington Post, etc., bluster about the outrages, but have yet to call for any prosecution or impeachment. It seems likely that little of consequence will come from the latest expose over Yoo’s 2003 memo. One can’t help but feel that in America the government can declare they will pull the fingernails out of your children, and there still will be no action taken.

Is it fear? Is it laziness? What is it?

The following is the text of the NLG release, signed by Marjorie Cohn, NLG President, and Heidi Boghosian, NLG Executive Director. I’ve added bold emphases for editorial effect.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: April 9, 2008

Contact: Marjorie Cohn, NLG President, [email protected]; 619-374-6923

Heidi Boghosian, NLG Executive Director, [email protected]; 212-679-5100, x11

NATIONAL LAWYERS GUILD CALLS ON BOALT HALL TO DISMISS LAW PROFESSOR JOHN YOO, WHOSE TORTURE MEMOS LED TO COMMISSION OF WAR CRIMES

New York. In a memorandum written the same month George W. Bush invaded Iraq, Boalt Hall law professor John Yoo said the Department of Justice would construe US criminal laws not to apply to the President’s detention and interrogation of enemy combatants. According to Yoo, the federal statutes against torture, assault, maiming and stalking do not apply to the military in the conduct of the war.

The federal maiming statute, for example, makes it a crime for someone “with the intent to torture, maim, or disfigure” to “cut, bite, or slit the nose, ear or lip, or cut out or disable the tongue, or put out or destroy an eye, or cut off or disable a limb or any member of another person.” It further prohibits individuals from “throwing or pouring upon another person any scalding water, corrosive acid, or caustic substance” with like intent.

Yoo also narrowed the definition of torture so the victim must

experience intense pain or suffering equivalent to pain associated

with serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure or

permanent damage resulting in loss of significant body functions will

likely result; Yoo’s definition contravenes the definition in the Convention Against Torture, a treaty the US has ratified which is thus part of the US law under the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause. Yoo said self-defense or necessity could be used as a defense to war crimes prosecutions for torture, notwithstanding the Torture Convention’s absolute prohibition against torture in all circumstances, even in wartime. This memo and another Yoo wrote with Jay Bybee in August 2002 provided the basis for the Administration’s torture of prisoners.

“John Yoo’s complicity in establishing the policy that led to the torture of prisoners constitutes a war crime under the US War Crimes Act,” said National Lawyers Guild President Marjorie Cohn.

Congress should repeal the provision of the Military Commissions Act that would give Yoo immunity from prosecution for torture committed from September 11, 2001 to December 30, 2005. John Yoo should be disbarred and he should not be retained as a professor of law at one of the country’s premier law schools. John Yoo should be dismissed from Boalt Hall and tried as a war criminal.

The National Lawyers Guild was founded in 1937 as an alternative to the American Bar Association, which did not admit people of color, the National Lawyers Guild is the oldest and largest public interest/human rights bar organization in the United States. Its headquarters are in New York and it has chapters in every state.

Also posted at Invictus, Daily Kos, and American Torture

New York has a new budget:

After reaching an agreement late Tuesday with Gov. David A. Paterson on the last unresolved pieces of the state budget, the Legislature passed the bills on Wednesday that will complete New York’s $122 billion spending plan for the next year.

The new budget, which relies on an array of taxes and fees for smokers, banks, hair salon patrons and others to keep the state’s 200,000-person government running, comes as New York faces one of the most uncertain economic outlooks in recent years.

Among the taxes and fees New Yorkers will have to pay are a $1.25 increase in the state cigarette tax. The new budget also closes a loophole in the state’s tax law that allowed online retailers like Amazon.com to avoid charging New York State sales tax on purchases.

A plan to raise income taxes on New Yorkers who earn more than $1 million a year was not included.

Meanwhile:

Millions of dollars worth of counterfeit tax stamps were seized and a Jordanian man arrested as part of a major undercover investigation into tobacco smuggling in New York, authorities announced Wednesday.

The arrest comes as some authorities voice concern about whether New York state’s planned $1.25-per-pack hike in tobacco taxes, taking the price of a pack in the city to about $9, will fuel demand for contraband cigarettes.

Health surveys have found that more than a third of New York state smokers already regularly buy cigarettes from untaxed sources.

State Department of Taxation and Finance Commissioner Robert L. Megna said his agency has stepped up its campaign against contraband cigarette trafficking over the past year.

Stupid is as stupid does.