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Curtis Doebbler
It’s easy to condemn those who use violent means against others. Since September 11th 2001 one of the most frequent claims repeated in the United States and Europe has been that “violence can never be justified”. We recite this over and again, secure in our feeling that we must be right because violence must be wrong. The picture gets a bit more blurry, however, if we broaden our view of the world and look to how our nations, instead of our neighbours, behave. Regardless, the above-mentioned mantra is still repeated. But when we speak of others using violence against us, we might want to think about who and what we are talking about.
Jim Lobe
USA companies are exporting millions of dollars worth of equipment known to be used for torture, including selling devices to 12 countries where the USA State Department says that the use of torture is “persistent”, according to a new report by Amnesty International.
James Meek
It is almost two years since the Guantanamo prison camp opened. Its purpose is to hold people seized in the ‘war on terror’ and defined by the Bush administration as enemy combatants - though many appear to have been bystanders to the conflict. Images of Camp Delta’s orange-jumpsuited, manacled detainees have provoked international outrage. But the real horror they face isn’t physical hardship, it is the threat of infinite confinement, without trial or access to legal representation. James Meek has spent the past month talking to former inmates and some of those involved in operating the Pentagon’s Kafkaesque justice system.
Ramzy Baroud
As a token of goodwill, we shall presuppose that President George W. Bush’s ardent calls for democracy in the Arab world don’t envisage politically motivated, court determined elections, like that of his. Nor, shall we assume that the President was fervently calling for a racial/religious democracy that is maintained through exclusiveness and customary acts of ethnic cleaning, so that the demographic composition of a state might be sustained, like in the case of Israel. But goodwill alone can hardly prepare one for the paradoxes that the president’s democracy calls so starkly infuse.
One of the UK?s Leading Law Lords Speaks Out
At present we are not meant to know what is happening at Guantanamo Bay. But history will not be neutered. What takes place there today in the name of the United States will assuredly, in due course, be judged at the bar of informed international opinion. As a lawyer brought up to admire the ideals of American democracy and justice, I would have to say that I regard this as a monstrous failure of justice.
William Hardiker
There is little doubt that Iran and Syria are numbers Two and Three after Iraq, though perhaps not necessarily in that order, on the Bush neo-Cons “hit list” of “rogue states” identified for regime change in the near future. The only unknown is the manner in which the administration will accomplish policy that is undoubtedly, in diplomatic speak, ‘on the table ‘.
Naseer Alomari
There was a time after September 11th 2001 when the word terrorist meant something really bad. The term has lost its solemnity right after the Israeli government had opportunistically borrowed it and used it to describe any Palestinian child who threw a stone at an Israeli bulldozer that had just illegally demolished his house.
Gamil Mattar
We in the Arab world all learned to dream of democracy, even without making its acquaintance, even without knowing what it could do for us, but somehow, democracy never found us. Then its messengers started telling a different story. We now know that a new era is starting, an era of post-democracy, an era in which democracy is having a facelift, its norms being tailored to special needs, its laws revised.
Curtis Doebbler
The USA would like its enemies to put down their guns and trust in the good old American spirit of justice and freedom. If they would just submit to the USA?s illegal occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq everything would be alright. This may sound sensible to an American tucked away behind his enormous television set, watching other Americans make war with an increasing number of enemies as if it were a video game, cheering on cue for the president.
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