Iran: It's Not About *You,* People

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RJ Eskow
June 24, 2009 - Smirking Chimp

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Some Westerners have been driving themselves into a narcissistic frenzy over events in Iran, blind to the contradictions in their own behavior. John McCain's outrage over the tragic death of "Neda," a young woman who might have died under American bombs in his alternate reality, is merely one case in point. Suddenly the "clash of civilizations" crowd is finding new enthusiasm for an Islamist political party.

The President's remarks yesterday went as far as they could wisely go, but the opportunists and fantasists will both say it wasn't enough.

Why are the people who've been insisting there's a monolithic evil called "Islamofascism" suddenly backing one Iranian faction over another? As Prime Minister in the early days of the Islamic Republic , Mir-Hossein Mousavi helped orchestrate anti-American acts in Lebanon. Yet the crowd that's been demonizing the entire Muslim world is suddenly wearing green, which was adopted by Mousavi's party because it is the color of Islam. What's behind this seeming change of heart?

The behavior of pols like Lindsay Graham comes off as political expediency of the most cynical kind. They exploit American support for the brave demonstrators of Tehran by insisting the President isn't doing enough, knowing full well that to express more support than he has done would be counterproductive. It's the unattractive face of politics as usual.

For others, like McCain, it seems more genuine but no less misguided. He perceives no inconsistency as he careens from "bomb Iran" "jokes" to eulogies for those he might have bombed. He, like many Americans, is caught up in the emotions of the moment. And who can fail to be moved by the courage of the Iranian resistance? But let's not pretend that this moment is about us.

For some of us, people only become human and real when they give us an opportunity to play out our own ambitions or fantasies. That covers public figures like McCain. But it also includes bloggers who think they're commando superheroes because they're coloring their websites green and cut-and-pasting Tweets from Teheran.

To the virtual barricades, comrades!

That's exactly the kind of fantasy projection that allowed people to enthusiastically support an invasion of Iraq, against all reason. At last! A war of our own! A cause we can support, a flag we can wave, a battle that will make us the "greatest generation"!

But we're dealing with human beings, not figurines to be moved here and there on the maps of our own egos. Overzealous talk from narcissistic foreigners can get people killed. And Americans aren't the only offenders. Bernard-Henri Lévy's unsubstantiated assertion that this uprising is the "end of the Islamic republic" is equally irresponsible, playing directly into Ahmadinejad's hands by equating dissent with subversion. He may or may not be right about the outcome. Neither he nor anyone else can know right now. But either way, the Iranian people aren't helped by these sorts of grandiose pronouncements from the West.

There are several possible outcomes. Ahmadinejad and Khamenei could prevail. Or Mousavi and Rafsanjani could win out, thereby saving the Islamic Republic. Or this could be the beginning of a newly democratized Iran, with Mousavi as its Gorbachev figure.

Want to help the people of Iran reach that third outcome? Then why not start by seeing them as they are? They're people who adopted a very centrist candidate as the symbol, rather than the reality, of change. (Did I just hear some progressives mutter "that sounds familiar"? Now, now ...) In supporting a more moderate candidate they've been given a chance, but just a chance, to transform their country. Let's hope that history is with them.

Whatever the outcome, however, this is their battle. We can support the Iranian people and the principles of democracy without becoming partisans in an internal political struggle. That's a less melodramatic stance, and perhaps a less emotionally satisfying one. But it's wiser.

As much as we might like to wear green and dream that we and not they are on the front lines of history, that doesn't help anybody. Their movement is brave and important and real. But it's their movement, not ours. This is not our feel-good moment. Our play-acting is, in the end, a selfish act.

We all need to look in the mirror and remind ourselves: This isn't about you.

Amazon Uprising More Urgent Than Iran's: The Planet Depends on It

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A Fight for the Amazon that Should Inspire the World

Johann Hari
June 24, 2009 - The Independent/UK

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While the world nervously watches the uprising in Iran, an even more important uprising has been passing unnoticed - yet its outcome will shape your fate, and mine.

In the depths of the Amazon rainforest, the poorest people in the world have taken on the richest people in the world to defend a part of the ecosystem none of us can live without. They had nothing but wooden spears and moral force to defeat the oil companies - and, for today, they have won.

Here's the story of how it happened - and how we all need to pick up this fight. Earlier this year, Peru's right-wing President, Alan Garcia, sold the rights to explore, log and drill 70 per cent of his country's swathe of the Amazon to a slew of international oil companies. Garcia seems to see rainforest as a waste of good resources, saying of the Amazon's trees: "There are millions of hectares of timber there lying idle."

There was only one pesky flaw in Garcia's plan: the indigenous people who live in the Amazon. They are the first people of the Americas, subject to wave after wave of genocide since the arrival of the Conquistadors. They are weak. They have no guns. They barely have electricity. The government didn't bother to consult them: what are a bunch of Indians going to do anyway?

But the indigenous people have seen what has happened elsewhere in the Amazon when the oil companies arrive. Occidental Petroleum are facing charges in US courts of dumping an estimated nine billion barrels of toxic waste in the regions of the Amazon where they operated from 1972 to 2000. Andres Sandi Mucushua, the spiritual leader of the area known to the oil companies as Block (12A)B, said in 2007: "My people are sick and dying because of Oxy. The water in our streams is not fit to drink and we can no longer eat the fish in our rivers or the animals in our forests." The company denies liability, saying they are "aware of no credible data of negative community health impacts".

In the Ecuadorian Amazon, according to an independent report, toxic waste allegedly dumped after Chevron-Texaco's drilling has been blamed by an independent scientific investigation for 1,401 deaths, mostly of children from cancer. When the BBC investigator Greg Palast put these charges to Chevron's lawyer, he replied: "And it's the only case of cancer in the world? How many cases of children with cancer do you have in the States?... They have to prove it's our crude, [which] is absolutely impossible."

The people of the Amazon do not want to see their forests felled and their lands poisoned. And here, the need of the indigenous peoples to preserve their habitat has collided with your need to preserve your habitat. The rainforests inhale massive amounts of warming gases and keep them stored away from the atmosphere. Already, we are chopping them down so fast that it is causing 25 per cent of man-made carbon emissions every year - more than planes, trains and automobiles combined. But it is doubly destructive to cut them down to get to fossil fuels, which then cook the planet yet more. Garcia's plan was to turn the Amazon from the planet's air con into its fireplace.

Why is he doing this? He was responding to intense pressure from the US, whose new Free Trade Pact requires this "opening up", and from the International Monetary Fund, paid for by our taxes. In Peru, it has also been alleged that the ruling party, APRA, is motivated by oil bribes. Some of Garcia's associates have been caught on tape talking about how to sell off the Amazon to their cronies. The head of the parliamentary committee investigating the affair, Rep. Daniel Abugattas, says: "The government has been giving away our natural resources to the lowest bidders. This has not benefited Peru, but the administration's friends."

So the indigenous peoples acted in their own self-defence, and ours. Using their own bodies and weapons made from wood, they blockaded the rivers and roads to stop the oil companies getting anything in or out. They captured two valves of Peru's sole pipeline between the country's gas field and the coast, which could have led to fuel-rationing. Their leaders issued a statement explaining: "We will fight together with our parents and children to take care of the forest, to save the life of the equator and the entire world."

Garcia responded by sending in the military. He declared a "state of emergency" in the Amazon, suspending almost all constitutional rights. Army helicopters opened fire on the protesters with live ammunition and stun-grenades. More than a dozen were killed. But the indigenous peoples did not run away. Even though they were risking their lives, they stood their ground. One of their leaders, Davi Yanomami, said simply: "The earth has no price. It cannot be bought, or sold or exchanged. It is very important that white people, black people and indigenous peoples fight together to save the life of the forest and the earth. If we don't fight together, what will our future be?"

And then something extraordinary happened. The indigenous peoples won. The Peruvian Congress repealed the laws that allowed oil company drilling, by a margin of 82 votes to 12. Garcia was forced to apologise for his "serious errors and exaggerations". The protesters have celebrated and returned to their homes deep in the Amazon.

Of course, the oil companies will regroup and return - but this is an inspirational victory for the forces of sanity that will be hard to reverse.

Human beings need to make far more decisions like this: to leave fossil fuels in the ground, and to leave rainforests standing. In microcosm, this rumble in the jungle is the fight we all face now. Will we allow a small number of rich people to make a short-term profit from seizing and burning resources, at the expense of our collective ability to survive?

If this sounds like hyperbole, listen to Professor Jim Hansen, the world's leading climatologist, whose predictions have consistently turned out to be correct. He says: "Clearly, if we burn all fossil fuels, we will destroy the planet we know. We would set the planet on a course to the ice-free state, with a sea level 75 metres higher. Coastal disasters would occur continually. The only uncertainty is the time it would take for complete ice sheet disintegration."

Of course, fossil fools will argue that the only alternative to burning up our remaining oil and gas supplies is for us all to live like the indigenous peoples in the Amazon. But next door to Peru, you can see a very different, environmentally sane model to lift up the poor emerging - if only we will grasp it.

Ecuador is a poor country with large oil resources underneath its rainforests - but its president, Rafael Correa, is offering us the opposite of Garcia's plan. He has announced that he is willing to leave his country's largest oil reserve under the soil, if the rest of the world will match the $9.2bn in revenues it would provide.

If we don't start reaching for these alternatives, we will render this month's victory in the Amazon meaningless. The Hadley Centre in Exeter, one of the most sophisticated scientific centres for studying the impacts of global warming, has warned that if we carry on belching out greenhouse gases at the current rate, the humid Amazon will dry up and burn down - and soon.

Their study earlier this year explained: "The Amazonian rainforest is likely to suffer catastrophic damage even with the lowest temperature rises forecast under climate change. Up to 40 per cent of the rainforest will be lost if temperature rises are restricted to C, which most climatologists regard as the least that can be expected by 2050. A 3C rise is likely to result in 75 per cent of the forest disappearing while a 4C rise, regarded as the most likely increase this century unless greenhouse gas emissions are slashed, will kill off 85 per cent of the forest." That would send gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere - making the world even more inhabitable.

There is something thrilling about the fight in the Amazon, yet also something shaming. These people had nothing, but they stood up to the oil companies. We have everything, yet too many of us sit limp and passive, filling up our tanks with stolen oil without a thought for tomorrow. The people of the Amazon have shown they are up for the fight to save our ecosystem. Are we?

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Johann Hari is a columnist for the London Independent. He has reported from Iraq, Israel/Palestine, the Congo, the Central African Republic, Venezuela, Peru and the US, and his journalism has appeared in publications all over the world.

Documents Back Saudi Royal Link to Extremists

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Eric Lichtblau
June 23, 2009

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Documents gathered by lawyers for the families of Sept. 11 victims provide new evidence of extensive financial support for Al Qaeda and other extremist groups by members of the Saudi royal family, but the material may never find its way into court because of legal and diplomatic obstacles.

The case has put the Obama administration in the middle of a political and legal dispute, with the Justice Department siding with the Saudis in court last month in seeking to kill further legal action. Adding to the intrigue, classified American intelligence documents related to Saudi finances were leaked anonymously to lawyers for the families. The Justice Department had the lawyers' copies destroyed and now wants to prevent a judge from even looking at the material.

The Saudis and their defenders in Washington have long denied links to terrorists, and they have mounted an aggressive and, so far, successful campaign to beat back the allegations in federal court based on a claim of sovereign immunity.

Allegations of Saudi links to terrorism have been the subject of years of government investigations and furious debate. Critics have said that some members of the Saudi ruling class pay off terrorist groups in part to keep them from being more active in their own country.

But the thousands of pages of previously undisclosed documents compiled by lawyers for the Sept. 11 families and their insurers represented an unusually detailed look at some of the evidence.

Internal Treasury Department documents obtained by the lawyers under the Freedom of Information Act, for instance, said that a prominent Saudi charity, the International Islamic Relief Organization, heavily supported by members of the Saudi royal family, showed "support for terrorist organizations" at least through 2006.

A self-described Qaeda operative in Bosnia said in an interview with lawyers in the lawsuit that another charity largely controlled by members of the royal family, the Saudi High Commission for Aid to Bosnia, provided money and supplies to the terrorist group in the 1990s and hired militant operatives like himself.

Another witness in Afghanistan said in a sworn statement that in 1998 he had witnessed an emissary for a leading Saudi prince, Turki al-Faisal, hand a check for one billion Saudi riyals (now worth about $267 million) to a top Taliban leader.

And a confidential German intelligence report gave a line-by-line description of tens of millions of dollars in bank transfers, with dates and dollar amounts, made in the early 1990s by Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz and other members of the Saudi royal family to another charity that was suspected of financing militants' activities in Pakistan and Bosnia.

The new documents, provided to The New York Times by the lawyers, are among several hundred thousand pages of investigative material obtained by the Sept. 11 families and their insurers as part of a long-running civil lawsuit seeking to hold Saudi Arabia and its royal family liable for financing Al Qaeda.

Only a fraction of the documents have been entered into the court record, and much of the new material is unknown even to the Saudi lawyers in the case.

The documents provide no smoking gun connecting the royal family to the events of Sept. 11, 2001. And the broader links rely at times on a circumstantial, connect-the-dots approach to tie together Saudi princes, Middle Eastern charities, suspicious transactions and terrorist groups.

Saudi lawyers and supporters say that the links are flimsy and exploit stereotypes about terrorism, and that the country is being sued because it has deep pockets and was home to 15 of the 19 hijackers.

"In looking at all the evidence the families brought together, I have not seen one iota of evidence that Saudi Arabia had anything to do with the 9/11 attacks," Michael Kellogg, a Washington lawyer representing Prince Muhammad al-Faisal al-Saud in the lawsuit, said in an interview.

He and other defense lawyers said that rather than supporting Al Qaeda, the Saudis were sworn enemies of its leader, Osama bin Laden, who was exiled from Saudi Arabia, his native country, in 1996. "It's an absolute tragedy what happened to them, and I understand their anger," Mr. Kellogg said of the victims' families. "They want to find those responsible, but I think they've been disserved by their lawyers by bringing claims without any merit against the wrong people."

The Saudi Embassy in Washington declined to comment.

Two federal judges and the Second Circuit Court of Appeals have already ruled against the 7,630 people represented in the lawsuit, made up of survivors of the attacks and family members of those killed, throwing out the suit on the ground that the families cannot bring legal action in the United States against a sovereign nation and its leaders.

The Supreme Court is expected to decide this week whether to hear an appeal, but the families' prospects dimmed last month when the Justice Department sided with the Saudis in their immunity claim and urged the court not to consider the appeal.

The Justice Department said a 1976 law on sovereign immunity protected the Saudis from liability and noted that "potentially significant foreign relations consequences" would arise if such suits were allowed to proceed.

"Cases like this put the U.S. government in an extremely difficult position when it has to make legal arguments, even when they are the better view of the law, that run counter to those of terrorist victims," said John Bellinger, a former State Department lawyer who was involved in the Saudi litigation.

Senior Obama administration officials held a private meeting on Monday with 9/11 family members to speak about progress in cracking down on terrorist financing. Administration officials at the meeting largely sidestepped questions about the lawsuit, according to participants. But the official who helped lead the meeting, Stuart A. Levey, the under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, has been outspoken in his criticism of wealthy Saudis, saying they have helped to finance terrorism.

Even if the 9/11 families were to get their trial in the lawsuit, they might have difficulty getting some of their new material into evidence. Some would most likely be challenged on grounds it was irrelevant or uncorroborated hearsay, or that it related to Saudis who were clearly covered by sovereign immunity.

And if the families were to clear those hurdles, two intriguing pieces of evidence in the Saudi puzzle might still remain off limits.

One is a 28-page, classified section of the 2003 joint Congressional inquiry into the Sept. 11 attacks. The secret section is believed to discuss intelligence on Saudi financial links to two hijackers, and the Saudis themselves urged at the time that it be made public. President George W. Bush declined to do so.

Kristen Breitweiser, an advocate for Sept. 11 families, whose husband was killed in the World Trade Center, said in an interview that during a White House meeting in February between President Obama and victims' families, the president told her that he was willing to make the pages public.

But she said she had not heard from the White House since then.

The other evidence that may not be admissible consists of classified documents leaked to one of the law firms representing the families, Motley Rice of South Carolina, which is headed by Ronald Motley, a well-known trial lawyer who won lucrative lawsuits involving asbestos and tobacco.

Lawyers for the firm say someone anonymously slipped them 55 documents that contained classified government material relating to the Saudi lawsuit.

Though she declined to describe the records, Jodi Flowers, a lawyer for Motley Rice, said she was pushing to have them placed in the court file.

"We wouldn't be fighting this hard, and we wouldn't have turned the material over to the judge, if we didn't think it was really important to the case," she said.

Hall of Shame

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Gingrich comments on Uighurs don't sit well with some in GOP

Grace Chung
Jun 18, 2009 - McClatchy News

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Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich got into a public spat with fellow Republicans this week after he denounced the 17 Chinese Muslims who're being released from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba , military prison as "terrorists" who should be sent back to China , where they're likely to face persecution.

Gingrich, the Republican party's most prominent spokesman, is "in the Hall of Shame" for his remarks, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher , R- Calif. , said in his opening statement during a Tuesday hearing of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Human Rights. Democrats and other Republicans also piled on Gingrich for "fear-mongering" and allegedly peddling Chinese propaganda.

The Uighurs are a predominantly Muslim ethnic minority concentrated in the northwest part of China . According to the 2008 State Department Human Right's report, they've been the target of human rights abuses in China .

Rep. Bill Delahunt ,D- Mass., the committee's chairman, said that Gingrich is either misinformed or intentionally circulating false information about the 17 Uighurs to "appease the Communist Chinese," who've repeatedly asked the U.S. to return the Uighurs to China . He said the Chinese "brutally persecute and oppress the Uighur minority."

Gingrich, who heads a communications and consulting firm, couldn't be reached to comment. His office in Washington said he was on a cruise in the Baltic with his wife.

This is the latest in a series of disputes to beset the GOP in its search for a new figurehead. Although Gingrich remains the most popular leader among Republicans, his outspoken comments — such as calling Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor a "racist" — have given some in his party heartburn.

Gingrich and other Republicans, as well as some Democrats, have staunchly opposed the settlement of former Guantanamo detainees, including the Uighurs, in the U.S., making it more difficult for the Obama administration to carry out its pledge to close the prison by January.

The administration has asked at least 100 countries to take the Uighur prisoners, but so far, only Bermuda and Palau have offered to accept them.

Gingrich has staked out his position both in a television appearance, in his regular column in the Washington Examiner, a free newspaper handed out at transit stations, and on his blog.

In a Fox News interview on May 10 , Gingrich spoke critically of the Obama administration's decision to try to find a location in the U.S. for the Uighurs, and said they should be sent home. Asked by Fox News anchor Chris Wallace whether Uighurs would face a hostile reception there, Gingrich retorted: "Why is that our problem? Why are we protecting these guys? Send them to China ."

Writing in the Washington Examiner on May 21 , Gingrich said the Uighurs had been trained in "weapons, explosives and ideology of mass killing" and "instructed by the same terrorists responsible for killing 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001 ."

Rohrabacher, who'd been a speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan , is generally credited for writing the speech defining the "Reagan Doctrine" and of supporting groups that fight communism. He's been one of the most focused members of Congress on the developments in Afghanistan and issued warnings about the threat from the Taliban rule in the 1990s when few others were paying attention.

"Many if not all of the negative allegations against the Uighurs can be traced back to Chinese intelligence, whose purpose is to snuff out an independence movement that challenges the communist bosses in China ," Rohrabacher said at Tuesday's hearing.

Although Gingrich didn't respond to repeated requests for comment, his communications director, Joe DeSantis , expressed surprise at the attacks and posted a response dated June 17 on Gingrich's blog.

"A lot of disinformation and spin is being hurled about. There is no question that the human rights record of China is deplorable. The question is whether the United States should release any of these Uighur detainees into the United States ," he said.

Rohrabacher said that Gingrich had misled the public and stirred popular opposition to receiving the Uighurs on American soil.

"No one on the Republican side was arguing facts. They were arguing what was presented to them by people like Newt Gingrich ," Rohrabacher said in an interview. "I am ashamed of the leadership of my party."