Rahm Emanuel conducting pogroms within Obama administration and Democratic Party

WMR's White House press sources have revealed that President Obama's Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, is conducting a virtual political pogrom within the administration and the Democratic caucus in Congress. WMR has learned that the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program, once known as STELLAR WIND but changed after the classified code name was leaked to the media, is being used by Emanuel to force administration officials and Democrats in Congress to "toe the line" in their support of Obama's policies, including health care. the surge in Afghanistan, and the bail out of Wall Street.

From STELLAR WIND's successor, Emanuel and his cohorts have collected political intelligence that is either damaging or potentially embarrassing to Democratic office holders. One such member of Congress who has faced the consequences of warrantless wiretapping is House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers of Michigan. The indictment of Conyers's wife, former Detroit City Council member Monica Conyers, who was convicted of accepting a cash bribe in 2007 in return for awarding a contract to Synagro Technologies, a Houston firm. Mrs. Conyers's sentencing has been postponed by US Judge Avern Cohn, a former president of the Jewish Welfare Federation of Metropolitan Detroit, until March 10 and the threat of a long prison sentence for the House Judiciary Chairman's wife has been communicated by Emanuel to Conyers if he continues his public criticisms of Obama.

Others who have been threatened with exposure of damaging information obtained from illegal NSA wiretaps include House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles Rangel and House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman John Murtha. Emanuel has let it be known that members of Congress who sway away from the party line will "end up like Blagojevich." WMR has learned from Chicago sources that Emanuel and the US Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois Patrick Fitzgerald conspired to leak STELLAR WIND wiretaps to the media even before Fitzgerald could convince a federal grand jury to indict the later-impeached Illinois governor.

Emanuel and Fitzgerald decided to try Blagojevich in the media and the court of public opinion before Blagojevich could expose Emanuel's backroom deal to have White House adviser Valerie Jarrett appointed to fill Obama's vacant Senate seat. Jarrett was hoping to use the Senate seat to help steer the 2016 Summer Olympics to Chicago. Jarrett and her real estate friends stood to make billions of dollars from the sale of public lands to build Olympic venues. WMR has also learned that Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, Jr. was originally opposed to the Olympics in Chicago but was pressured into it by Emanuel, Jarrett, and Michael Scott, the late Chicago School Board President whose body, last November, was found floating in the Chicago River with a gunshot wound. Although Scott's death was ruled a suicide, WMR has learned from Chicago sources that Scott was eliminated because he posed a threat to Jarrett, Emanuel, and Jarrett's friend Michelle Obama.

The constant threats of exposure by Emanuel of personal information obtained from private communications has led Democrats like Senators Byron Dorgan of North Dakota and Chris Dodd of Connecticut, as well as Colorado Democratic Governor Bill Ritter, to abandon their re-election bids. Our White House sources report that some Democrats were "directly threatened and some were not, but a threat was implied."

WMR has also learned of a schism that has opened up between Obama's political team of Emanuel, Jarrett, David Axelrod, and White House pollsters and focus group specialists who meet at the White House every Wednesday and the national security team of National Security Adviser Jim Jones, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The national security team is convinced that the political team is only focused on the 2012 re-election campaign and not on pressing national security issues. Brawls have reportedly broken out between the two groups with Emanuel looking for ways to threaten Jones, Gates, and Clinton with retaliation if their criticisms of the political team continues.

The schism has resulted in a whispering campaign being started that Emanuel's time within the White House is finite. The Washington Post's Sally Quinn recently wrote that Emanuel may be leaving the White House to run for mayor of Chicago. The only part of that rumor which may be true is that the long knives are out for Emanuel by Democrats who see him as threatening the Democrats' chances of holding the Senate in this year's election. Since Mayor Daley shows no signs of declining a re-election bid and still being miffed that Emanuel was largely behind the decision not to appoint his brother William Daley as ambassador to China, Mayor Daley's relations with Emanuel are already strained.

The Inevitability of PTSD

Welcome Home, Hold Your Tongue

By BRUCE PATTERSON

The late comedian George Carlin did a bit about Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome (back then it wasn’t called a Disorder). During WW1, Carlin reminded us, we called it “shell shock.” Now those two words pack some punch, don’t they? It’s shocking language, really. So during WW2 we started calling it “combat fatigue.” As if war makes a soldier sleepy and, after a nap, milk and cookies, he’s as good as new. During Vietnam we started calling it Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Has a nice ring, doesn’t it? You’re given a choice between “trauma” and “post-trauma” — which are you going to take? Experiencing “stress” is some­thing we can all sympathize with. Getting stuck in traffic is stressful. And who knows what a “Syndrome” is? Yet it’s a pretty word that rolls off the tongue… Carlin’s riff was a lot more elaborate and entertaining, but — if memory serves me right — that was the gist of it.

Today PTS is a scientifically established Disorder. Still I intensely dislike the term and resent how it is used and abused. Nowadays getting your legs blown off by a landmine in some outrageously foreign, povertty-stricken place is like being a New York City supermodel, falling down in your bathtub and knocking your teeth out. War wounds have become every­day injuries and everyday injuries provide individuals with the opportunity to excel in the Special Olympics and star in a hometown parade.

2,600 years ago the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu wrote, “Victory in war is a funeral procession.” As a young boy in Vietnam, I won my victory and I shuffled in the procession. Beginning in the spring of 1968 I spent three months in various military hospitals and during that time I saw a ghoul’s gallery of the hide­ously wounded. I saw the psychological impacts of physical mutilation and how phony the distinction is between the two. If you wish to experience not just “trauma” but real pain and suffering, whack your thumb with a roofer’s hammer. Smash you thumb and see how that affects your psychological well-being. Now imagine taking three machine gun rounds through the belly and surviving. Imagine getting your jaw and nose blown off and surviving. When you’re young and looking forward to a lifetime of pain, disability and poverty, wearing your battlefield Badges of Honor doesn’t feel like such a privilege. Almost inevitably, PTSD is the result.

This isn’t to say that war doesn’t create plenty of purely psychological casualties. While I was in An Khe Field Hospital I saw a teenaged, round-eyed, GI nurse Breaking like a twig in a monsoon gale. The poor girl surren­dered to her pent-up agony and she ran wailing from the ward. Struck dumb, all of us bloody cot-covers felt deeply ashamed. Here we were on the wrong side of the world and we couldn’t even protect an American girl. In that instant the nurse became our mothers and sisters, neighbors, classmates, girlfriends and every­body else we’d willingly left behind. Now we couldn’t even return to them with all of our fingers and toes.

I was just passing through the hospitals but GI nurses were forced to pull full tours. What must that have done to them? I’ll never forget the blackened midnight wards echoing with delirious, drug-induced moaning, raging and begging. And I’ll never forget that American girl. Is it possible she has forgotten? If so, at what cost? At whose cost?

It’s telling that combat nurses, medics and doctors never get listed as casualties of war. Like war correspondents and combat photographers, flag-draped coffins, helpless civilians slaughtered wholesale, the massive, gold-plated “contractor” dungeons crammed with rats and illiterate, penniless native boys, the junkyard refugee camps stretching for miles and teeming with millions of the terrorized, destitute, broken and defiant — like the entire blood-drenched and despicable military history of the 20th Century — nurses and doctors are erased from public conscious­ness. “Heroes,” civilians in the mother country call them, absolutely oblivious to the fact that heroes get wasted.

We have “re-invented war for the 21st Century” by making it as bloodless as a video game or an Exxon commercial. So when an American girl walks into an ambush up in the Hindu Kush and she gets her brains sprayed on an ancient adobe wall, we don’t want to see it. When an American boy spills his intestines into the dust of a village square surrounded by shrieking, barefoot little boys and girls, don’t show us the video. Yet, when an extended family of dirt poor dirt farm­ers sits down to supper and gets blown into smoking chunks of meat by an American Predator Drone, please show us the “battle” from the robot’s perspec­tive. Show us the beautiful greenish tint of the machine’s night vision cameras, its high-tech gunsight, space age, BMW dashboard and the purifying flash of its white ball of flame. We can identify with Predator Drones.

The dirtiest little secret about war is that they are always fought for domestic political reasons. LBJ invaded Vietnam because, facing an election, he wished to cut the legs out from under his red-baiting, warmongering opponent, Barry Goldwater. George Bush junior invaded Iraq because he knew if he blamed Saddam Hussein for the attacks on 9/11, and for all sorts of other crimes and fiendish plots, then the great bulk of Americans would line up behind him like newly-hatched ducklings. Having won the hearts and minds of the American people, the Bush regime, their party and sponsors would reap a bonanza.

Regarding the “opposition party” in the Senate and House, they’d never allow themselves to be put on record as being against “preemptive” war. Nor would they ever stand up for the Charter of the UN, the Nuremburg Principles, American ideals (not prac­tices), the US Constitution or — least of all — the American Bill of Rights. The American people (think Germans, Chinese, English, etc., etc.) wouldn’t stand for it. Not when they’ve been convinced by those in the castle keep that the barbarians are at the gate.

So it is that the current President is escalating the not just losing but self-defeating wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. If the President wants voting Americans to like him enough to maybe re-elect him, he must make his bones. Peace is a filthy word when Victory means National Security.

We cling to so many illusions about war because we have learned how to lie to ourselves. We are able to sleep easy because of the vast distance we maintain between ourselves and our actions. It’s only our soldiers who get to roll around in the mud, blood and guts, and it’s only they who have no say in the matter. We have made them expendable, after all. To the extent that we can allow ourselves to even acknow­ledge their existence, we bury them under layers of self-serving rituals and myths.

Take the notion of “survivor’s guilt” and how it’s twisted out of shape. Sharing foxholes supposedly makes you a Band of Brothers and, having watched your brothers getting wasted in the most gruesome ways, the rest of your life you can never live it down. Like, why did you survive but not them? That’s a part of survivor’s guilt, sure. But it’s a very small part and it only hits you after you are back home all safe and sound. In real life, if you’re lucky enough to survive an ambush but your partner gets zapped, the first thing you think is, “better him than me.” Whether or not you are in a place where at anytime you can be killed, that’s just human nature. In combat, if your partner gets zapped, you don’t feel guilty or anything resem­bling guilty. Getting a partner zapped reinforces your hatred of the enemy. Humping around a huge load of homicidal hatred makes fighting a war a whole lot easier. Your buddy didn’t die for nothing. You’d even the score and then some if lived long enough.

Or take these pious numbskulls who declare that “there are no atheists in foxholes.” What a crock. I was an “atheist” and so were plenty of my holemates. We knew the shit we were going through was man­made. And if by some chance there was some supernatural force lurking in the bushes and swarms of bugs, it wasn’t God but the Devil. For every frontline soldier convinced that God has his back, there’s another soldier just as convinced that God has deserted the field of battle. Or — at the very least — has washed his hands of it.

While the realities of PTSD are twisted out of shape, one thing is proven: the likelihood and severity of the disorder increases according to the intensity and duration of the combat a soldier (or civilian) has endured. Since the world’s war literature has illuminated this very point for thousands of years, I don’t think these Pentagon and VA Mental Health Profes­sionals should pat themselves on their backs too hard. Now there’s MHPs getting paid hundreds of millions of tax dollars to probe the human psyche for ways to make multiple combat tours palatable. As if the exis­tence of the human conscience amounts to battlefield cowardice and, like homosexuality, pacifism and feminism, it undermines the Martial Spirit of the Manly Race. Which goes to show that for every five of America’s warmongering Bible-thumpers on the public dole, there is a least one mad scientist.

Already there are over one million American war veterans who, unlike their fathers and grandfathers, have pulled multiple combat tours. According to the VA (they lie), at least 20% of them are already suffering from PTSD. Because it is a whole lot easier to salute an upside-down rifle, an empty steel helmet and a pair of empty boots than it is to fix what you have broken, few of them will ever be made whole. Welcome home, forget, hold your tongue and join the unemployment line. How many generations of vets have gone through that? There’s no reason for today’s crop to expect any different. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

Bruce Patterson is a regular contributor to the Anderson Valley Advertiser (www.theava.com) in Boonville, California (where this article also appears). Comments can be sent via the Advertiser at ava@pacific.net..

Shooting Handcuffed Children

David Swanson on the Recent Massacre of 8 Children in Kunar Province

The occupied government of Afghanistan and the United Nations have both concluded that U.S.-led troops recently dragged eight sleeping children out of their beds, handcuffed some of them, and shot them all dead. While this apparently constitutes an everyday act of kindness, far less intriguing than the vicious singeing of his pubic hairs by Captain Underpants, it is at least a variation on the ordinary American technique of murdering men, women, and children by the dozens with unmanned drones.

Also this week in Afghanistan, eight CIA assassins (see if you can find a more appropriate name for them) were murdered by a suicide bombing that one of them apparently executed against the other seven. The Taliban in Pakistan claims credit and describes the mass-murder as revenge for the CIA’s drone killings. And we thought unmanned drones were War Perfected because none of the right people would have to risk their lives. Oops. Perhaps Detroit-bound passengers risked theirs unwittingly.

The CIA has declared its intention to seek revenge for the suicide strike. Who knows what the assassination of sleeping students was revenge for. Perhaps the next lunatic to try blowing up something in the United States will be seeking revenge for whatever Obama does to avenge the victims (television viewers?) of the Crotch Crusader. Certainly there will be numerous more acts of violence driven by longings for revenge against the drone pilots and the shooters of students.

In a civilized world, the alternative to vengeance is justice. Often we can even set aside feelings of revenge as long as we are able to act so as to deter more crime. But at the same time that the puppet president of Afghanistan is demanding the arrest of the troops who shot the handcuffed children, the puppet government of Iraq is facing up to the refusal of the United States to seriously prosecute the Blackwater assassins of innocent Iraqis. Justice will not be permitted as an alternative to vengeance — the mere idea is anti-American.

No one so much as blinks at the CIA’s avowal of vengeance for the recent suicide attack, never mind the illegality, because the entire illegal war on Afghanistan/Pakistan was launched and is still maintained as a pretended act of revenge for the crimes of 9-11. Of course, we’re not bombing the flight schools or the German and Spanish hotels. Of course , we admit that there are fewer than 100 members of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Of course we openly seek massive permanent bases and an oil pipeline. Of course, Obama’s decisions are all electoral calculations computed by the calculus of cowardice. Of course, we’re prosecuting the Butt Bomber as a criminal, just as we always used to prosecute criminals as criminals. Of course, revenge would not be a legal justification for war even if we could persuade ourselves it was a sane one. But the war is publicly understood as revenge, the resistance by its victims is understood as revenge, the escalation is understood as revenge for the resistance, and an eye for an eye slowly makes the whole world blind.

But here’s what we’ve forgotten: nothing is ever remotely as horrible as war. So, nothing can ever constitute a justification for launching or escalating or continuing a war. Dragging children out of bed and killing them is not a freak blip in the course of a war. It is war reduced to a comprehensible scale. It’s less war, not worse war. Everything we are spending our grandchildren’s unearned pay on, borrowed from China at great expense, all of it is for the murdering of human beings. And it will remain so for eternity, no matter how many times you chant “Support Duh Troops.”

I know many soldiers and mercenaries had few other options, given our failure to invest in any other industries. I know they’ve been lied to. I know they’re scared and tired. But they wouldn’t be there if we brought them home. And I support a full investment in their physical and mental and economic recovery. What I don’t support is anyone participating in these wars, and that includes every single American who is not putting every spare moment into demanding that Congress stop forking over the money.

It’s blood money. It’s payment for murder. It cannot be defended. It cannot be permitted. We must stop it now [1]. We must shut down [2] the place it comes from.

Not another dime. Not another dollar. Not another death. Not another thought of revenge.

UPDATE:

By David Swanson

Silly me. I thought I could comment on something that was in the news without proving that it was in the news. Maybe this will help:

UN says Afghans slain in troop raid were students

By DUSAN STOJANOVIC, Associated Press Writer, Thu Dec 31, 1:26 pm ET
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091231/ap_on_re_as/as_afghanistan_un [3]

KABUL – The United Nations said Thursday that a weekend raid by foreign troops in a tense eastern Afghan province killed eight local students and warned against nighttime actions by coalition forces because they often cause civilian deaths.

The Afghan government said its investigation has established that all 10 people killed Sunday in a remote village in Kunar province were civilians. Its officials said that eight of those killed were schoolchildren aged 12-14. . . .

UN special representative in Afghanistan Kai Eide said in a statement that the preliminary UN investigation showed “strong indication” that there were insurgents in the area at the time of the attack.

But, he added, “based on our initial investigation, eight of those killed were students enrolled in local schools.” . . .

Eide said the UN remained concerned about nighttime raids by coalition troops “given that they often result in lethal outcomes for civilians, the dangerous confusion that frequently arises when a family compound is invaded.” . . .

A statement issued Thursday by the Afghan National Security Directorate said the government investigation showed no Afghan forces were involved and “international forces from an unknown address came to the area and without facing any armed resistance, put 10 youth in two rooms and killed them.

“They conducted this operation on their own without informing any security or local authorities of Afghanistan,” the statement said.

___

Associated Press writer Rahim Faiez in Kabul contributed to this report.

I’ve excerpted much of the above article, but not the military denials. Go read them at the link above. Here’s the Los Angeles Times:

Western troops killed civilians, Afghan investigators say

The government investigators say eight of those killed over the weekend in a remote eastern province were boys under 18. Western military officials say there is no evidence to back the claim.
By Laura King, Los Angeles Times, December 31, 2009

Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan – Afghan government investigators asserted Wednesday that foreign troops had killed 10 civilians in a raid this week, including eight students younger than 18. Western military officials called the charge unsubstantiated and urged a joint investigation. . . .

A statement from the presidential palace said Karzai had offered condolences to the families of the dead, and endorsed the initial findings of an investigative panel that had traveled to Kunar at his behest.

The head of the Afghan delegation, Asadullah Wafa, said 10 males, all civilians, were taken from their homes in Ghazikhan village, in the Narang district, and then shot dead by foreign troops. The report cited the village schoolmaster as identifying eight of them as pupils between the ages of 12 and 17. . . .

Wafa, a close aide to Karzai, suggested that an informant had provided misleading information to Western forces, triggering the strike. Afghan villagers have sometimes tried to settle scores with rival clans or tribes by falsely reporting insurgent activity to the authorities. . . .

laura.king@latimes.com [4]
Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times

The above article has been dismissed by commenters on progressive websites because it was posted by the progressive website Common Dreams. Never mind that Common Dreams has been right far more often than the Los Angeles Times. Below is a collection of sources put together (and presumably thereby tarnished) by Talking Points Memo:

Afghan Children Handcuffed, Then Killed By American Soldiers
January 1, 2010, 7:38AM
Talking Points Memo
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/r/u/rutabaga_ridgepole/2… [5]

TPM starts with the Times:

From the London Times, December 31, 2009…
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/Afghanistan/article6971638.ece [6]

President Karzai sent a team of investigators to Narang district, in eastern Kunar province, after reports of a massacre first surfaced on Monday.

“The delegation concluded that a unit of international forces descended from a plane Sunday night into Ghazi Khan village in Narang district of the eastern province of Kunar and took ten people from three homes, eight of them school students in grades six, nine and ten, one of them a guest, the rest from the same family, and shot them dead,” a statement on President Karzai’s website said.

Assadullah Wafa, who led the investigation, said that US soldiers flew to Kunar from Kabul, suggesting that they were part of a special forces unit.

Mr Wafa, a former governor of Helmand province, met President Karzai to discuss his findings yesterday. “I spoke to the local headmaster,” he said. “It’s impossible they were al-Qaeda. They were children, they were civilians, they were innocent. I condemn this attack.”

In a telephone interview last night, the headmaster said that the victims were asleep in three rooms when the troops arrived. “Seven students were in one room,” said Rahman Jan Ehsas. “A student and one guest were in another room, a guest room, and a farmer was asleep with his wife in a third building.

“First the foreign troops entered the guest room and shot two of them. Then they entered another room and handcuffed the seven students. Then they killed them.”

Directly from Karzai’s website…
http://president.gov.af/Contents/91/Documents/1124/phone_talks_kunar_eng… [7]

President Karzai in a telephone contact expressed condolences and shared grief with the families of the victims of the recent attack in Kunar province.

Following the attack, President Karzai tasked a delegation on Monday led by the Chief of Complaints Commission and composed of representatives from the ministries of Defense, Interior, National Directorate of Security and the Office of Administrative Affairs for an immediate investigation of the incident.

The findings by the delegation concluded that a unit of international forces descended from a plane Sunday night into Ghazi Khan Village in Narang district of the eastern province of Kunar and took 10 people from three homes, eight of them school students in grades six, nine and 10, one of them a guest, the rest from the same family, and shot them dead.

Eight of those shot dead were confirmed as school students by the village school principle.

From the New York Times…
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/29/world/asia/29afghan.html [8]

The governor of Kunar, Fazullah Wahidi, said that “the coalition claimed they were enemy fighters,” but that elders in the district and a delegation sent to the remote area had found that “10 people were killed and all of them were civilians.”

From the United Nations…
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34644227/ns/world_news-south_and_central_asia/ [9]

The United Nations said Thursday that a weekend raid by foreign troops in a tense eastern Afghan province killed eight local students and that it warned against nighttime actions by coalition forces because they often cause civilian deaths.

That last quote is simply from the same AP story I quoted above, but posted on the MSNBC website. The UN special representative, you’ll recall, is named and quoted above.

• Peace and War

This site is maintained by a union shop at MayFirst.org

<Links:
[1] http://defundwar.org
[2] http://peaceoftheaction.org
[3] http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091231/ap_on_re_as/as_afghanistan_un
[4] mailto:laura.king@latimes.com
[5] http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/r/u/rutabaga_ridgepole/2010/01/afghan-children-handcuffed-the.php
[6] http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/Afghanistan/article6971638.ece
[7] http://president.gov.af/Contents/91/Documents/1124/phone_talks_kunar_eng.html
[8] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/29/world/asia/29afghan.html
[9] http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34644227/ns/world_news-south_and_central_asia/

* This article has been published with direct permission from the author. The original publication site: http://www.davidswanson.org/node/2385

The Lie of Law: Courts Bow to State's Raw Power

Written by Chris Floyd

Wednesday, 06 January 2010 16:47

I. It is often forgotten how "legal" the Nazi regime in Germany really was. It did not take power in a violent revolution, but entered government through the entirely "legal" procedures of the time. The "legal" vote of the "legally" elected Reichstag gave Adolf Hitler the powers to rule by decree, thus imparting strict "legality" to the actions of his government. Indeed, there were several cases when those who felt the government had overstepped the bounds of law in a particular instance actually took the Nazi regime to court, and won. Why? Because the government was bound by "the rule of law." And the fact is, almost the entire pre-Nazi judicial system of the German state remained intact and operational throughout Hitler's reign. The "rule of law" carried on. Of course, as the Nazi regime plowed forward with its racist, militarist, imperialist agenda, this "rule of law" became increasingly elastic, countenancing a range of actions and policies that would have been considered heinous atrocities only a few years before. This trend was greatly accelerated after the Regime -- claiming "self-defense" following an alleged "invasion" by a small band of raiders -- launched a war which soon engulfed the world. Naturally, in such unusual and perilous circumstances, jurists were inclined to give the widest possible lee-way to the war powers of the state. After all, as one prominent judge declared, the war had pushed the nation “past the leading edge of a new and frightening paradigm, one that demands new rules be written. War is a challenge to law, and the law must adjust." -- No, wait. I must apologize for my mistake. That last quote was not, in fact, from a German jurist during the Nazi regime, but from a ruling issued this week by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit -- one of the highest courts in the land. The quoted opinion -- written by the legally appointed Judge Janice Rogers Brown -- was part of a sweeping ruling that greatly magnified the powers of the government to seize foreigners and hold them indefinitely without charges or legal appeal. The court denied the appeal of Ghaleb Nassar al-Bihani, who has been held in captivity for more than eight years. What was his crime? He served as a non-combatant clerk for a unit on one side of the long-running Afghan civil war. This war was fought largely between factions of violent extremists; Bihani had the misfortune to be serving in the army of the "wrong" faction when the United States intervened on behalf of the opposing extremists in 2001. Jason Ditz summarizes the case well at Antiwar.com: Bihani was a cook for a pro-Taliban faction fighting against the Northern Alliance before the 2001 US invasion, and his unit surrendered during the initial invasion. The Yemeni citizen is accused of “hostilities against the United States” even though he arrived in Afghanistan nearly six months before the US invasion. Not only did his unit never fight against American forces, he was a cook who doesn’t appear to have ever participated in any combat at all. Despite this, he was declared an enemy combatant. Let's underscore the salient fact: Bihani never took up arms against the United States, was involved in no combat against the United States (or anyone else, apparently), played no part in any attack on the United States. Yet the court ruled that the United States can arbitrarily declare Bihani an "enemy combatant" and hold him captive for the rest of his life. But the eminent judges did not stop there in their entirely "legal" ruling. As the New York Times reports, they went to declare that "the presidential war power to detain those suspected of terrorism is not limited even by international law of war." And later: "the majority’s argument [is] that the president’s war powers are not bound by the international laws of war." Think of that. Let it sink in. The president's war powers cannot be constrained by the international laws of war. Whatever the Leader (no points for translating this term into German) decides to do in the course of a war is thus rendered entirely "legal." He cannot be accused of international war crimes because such things do not apply to him. With this ruling -- which is all of a piece with many more that have preceded it -- we are well and truly "past the leading edge of a new and frightening paradigm." What is most frightening, of course, is the obscene philosophy of machtpolitik -- the craven kowtowing to the demands of brute force -- that is embodied in Judge Brown's chilling words: "War is a challenge to law, and the law must adjust." Again, remember the context of this ruling. It deals with the Leader's power over foreign citizens in lands that the Leader's armies are occupying. The judicial "reasoning" expressed by Judge Brown could apply, without the slightest alteration, to the Nazi regime's various programs of mass killing and "indefinite detention" of "enemy" foreigners in occupied lands. The "resettlement" of Eastern Europe -- in order to provide for the "national security" of the German people and the preservation of their "way of life" -- did indeed require a pathbreaking advance into a "new paradigm" on the part of the law. The exigencies and challenges of the war demanded, as Judge Brown would put it, that "new rules be written." And so they were. Under the duly, officially, formally constituted German "law" of the time -- as interpreted and applied by obsequious jurists in the mold of Judge Brown and her fellow war power expander, Judge Brett Kavanaugh -- there was little or nothing that was "illegal" in the vast catalogue of Nazi wartime atrocities, including the Holocaust itself. The perpetrators were "only following orders," which had been issued by "legal" entities, acting through "legal" processes, under the direction of the "legal" executive authority, whose unrestrained war powers had been established and upheld by the "rule of law." Now this legal philosophy -- the primacy of raw, unaccountable power -- is being openly established by the highest courts of the United States. President Barack Obama, whose legal minions fought so ferociously to deny the appeal of the non-combatant captive, has been an ardent proponent and practitioner of this philosophy since his first days in office. His administration has proclaimed that the torturers of the Bush administration will not be prosecuted, because they were just following orders -- orders which had been issued by legal entities, acting through legal processes, under the direction of the legal executive authority, whose unrestrained war powers had been established and upheld by the "rule of law." II. It was not always thus. A few years ago, when writing of the "constitutional and moral issues raised by Bush's liberty-gutting 'unitary executive' dictatorship" (which Obama has enthusiastically continued and expanded), I ran across a Supreme Court ruling from December 1866 -- more than 140 years ago: Ex Parte Milligan. In this ruling, which grew out of the wartime excesses of the Lincoln Administration, the Court -- dominated by five Lincoln appointees -- was unequivocal: Constitutional protections not only apply "equally in war and peace" but also – in a dramatic extension of this legal shield – to "all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances." No emergency – not even open civil war – warrants their suspension. Even in wartime, the President's powers, though expanded, are still restrained: "he is controlled by law, and has his appropriate sphere of duty, which is to execute, not to make, the laws." As I noted earlier in the piece: It was a decisive ruling against a government that had far overreached its powers, stripping away essential liberties in the name of national security. The Justice who authored the majority opinion was a Republican, an old friend and political crony of the president who had appointed him. Even so, his ruling struck hard at the abuses set in train by his patron. He stood upon the law, he stood upon the Constitution, even in the aftermath of a shattering blow that had killed more than 600,000 Americans and almost destroyed the nation itself. This is what the Court decided: "The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances. No doctrine, involving more pernicious consequences, was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism, but the theory of necessity on which it is based is false; for the government, within the Constitution, has all the powers granted to it, which are necessary to preserve its existence." The author was Justice David Davis, an Illinois lawyer appointed by Abraham Lincoln after helping run the campaign that gave his old colleague the presidency in the fateful 1860 election. (Davis was also, by a strange quirk of history, the second cousin of George W. Bush's great-grandfather.) By the time the Court issued its ruling, Lincoln was dead, but the after-effects of his ever-expanding suspension of civil liberties during wartime were still roiling through the courts, and through America's fractured society. The Milligan ruling was, in the words of legal scholar John P. Frank, "one of the truly great documents of the American Constitution," a "bulwark" for civil liberties, expansive and exacting in the Constitutional protections it spelled out. The ruling acknowledged that there are times when the writ of habeas corpus may have to be suspended in an area where hostilities are directly taking place – but even this power, they noted, was highly circumscribed and specifically delegated to Congress, not the president. Lincoln exceeded this authority on numerous occasions, increasing the scope of his powers until the entire Union was essentially under martial law, and anyone arbitrarily deemed guilty of never-defined "disloyal practices" could be arrested or silenced – in the latter case by having their newspaper shut down, for instance. (Lincoln would sometimes – but not always – seek ex post facto Congressional authorization for these acts.) Some parts of the Union that the Lincoln administration thought particularly disloyal were officially put under martial law -- such as southern Indiana, where anti-war agitator Lambdin Milligan and four others were accused of a plot to free Confederate prisoners, and were summarily tried and sentenced to death by a military tribunal. It was this case that the Court – five of whom were Lincoln appointees – overturned in such a decided fashion. As noted, that ruling was made in a nation still reeling from a savage, titanic war fought on its own territory. Even in the midst of such turmoil, the idea that "the laws must adjust" to the exigencies of war -- even the extremity of ruinous civil war -- was considered anathema, even to conservative jurists with close ties to the government. But no longer. Although, unlike a civil war, even the worst terrorist attack imaginable would pose no existential threat to the nation, today the merest whisper of the possibility of a limited terrorist incident shakes the United States to its foundations -- and people willingly line up to be stripped naked by machines, while courts crawl on their bellies before the terrible majesty of unrestrained executive power. Be assured: the "rule of law" means nothing, protects nothing, sustains nothing. It can always be twisted and stretched by cowards, courtiers and power-seekers. Arthur Silber, as he does so often, cuts to heart of the matter in this powerful essay from 2009, "Concerning the State, the Law, and Show Trials": The law is not some Platonic Form plucked from the skies by the Pure in Heart. Laws are written by men, men who have particular interests, particular constituencies, particular donors, and particular friends. ... Laws are the particular means by which the state implements and executes its vast powers. When an increasingly authoritarian state passes a certain critical point in its development, the law is no longer the protector of individual rights and individual liberty. The law becomes the weapon of the state itself -- to protect, not you, but the state from threats to its own powers. We passed that critical point some decades ago. The law is the means by which the state corrals its subjects, keeps them under control, and forbids them from acting in ways that the overlords might perceive as threatening. In brief, today, in these glorious United States, the law is not your friend. Indeed it is not. In our "low dishonest" century, the "rule of law" has become the "lie of Authority" that Auden speaks of. It will not save us. What matters -- as always -- is moral courage in the face of power's encroachments. Sometimes this can be found within an institutional framework, as in the Supreme Court's bold expansion of legal rights to all people, "at all times, and under all circumstances" back in 1866; and of course it can be found in the lives and actions of individuals, acting singly or in concert. Auden again: Defenseless under the night Our world in stupor lies; Yet, dotted everywhere, Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages: May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust, Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair, Show an affirming flame.

A Muralha Egípcia

Lejeune Mirhan *

Na minha coluna de final de ano, quando fiz o balanço de 2009 e as perspectivas de 2010, já havia mencionado esse assunto, polêmico de toda forma. Nenhum grande jornal no Brasil o fez até agora. Como recebo artigos de várias partes do mundo e com base em pesquisas, vi que a gravidade do assunto vai ganhando maiores espaços na mídia internacional. Por isso, na primeira coluna do ano, trato do tema.

Cidade de Rafah, fronteira de Gaza com o Egito que vive apinhada de gente

Muralhas não funcionam

Esse subtítulo é de importante artigo comparativo do maior jornalista que cobre Oriente Médio da atualidade, Robert Fisk (1) onde ele compara a muralha que vem sendo construída pelo Egito na fronteira com a Faixa de Gaza, na Palestina e uma situação parecida ocorrida em sua terra, na Inglaterra e na Irlanda, no conflito entre católicos e protestantes. E estou plenamente de acordo com ele. Muralhas que separam, que segregam povos e pessoas não funcionam e nunca funcionaram. O que me estranha é que continuam a ser construídas.

Muralhas existem desde a antiguidade. A mais famosa de todas, a da China, tem sua construção iniciada 221 antes de Cristo, ou seja, há quase 2,3 mil anos. De lá para cá tivemos muitos muros e muralhas, famosas também. A de Berlim, que caiu em novembro de 1989, mas temos também o projeto de Muro Americano, que separa vários estados americanos do México e o mais vergonhoso de todos, o Muro de Israel, que divide inclusive aldeias palestinas, segrega pessoas e corta fornecimento de água potável aos palestinos. Esse Muro já foi condenado por cortes internacionais, que ordenaram a interrupção de sua construção. Mas quem disse que Israel obedece a algum organismo internacional?

Como diz Fisk, o que vemos hoje na Palestina talvez seja a última guerra colonial em curso na história da humanidade. E tal guerra é travada com o apoio integral dos EUA, país que combateu o colonialismo inglês de armas nas mãos no século XVIII e já foi tida como uma nação anticolonial. E tal colonização baseia-se em premissas sionistas falsas, mentirosas, sendo que as duas mais famosas são “uma terra sem povo, para um povo sem terra” e “israelenses farão florescer o deserto” e outras falácias.

O bombardeio da Faixa de Gaza perpetrada pela força aérea de Israel entre dezembro de 2008 e janeiro de 2009, completado um ano no último dia 27 passado, foi feito além da conivência dos EUA, com o beneplácito do Egito, nação árabe hoje completamente subjugada pelos Estados Unidos.

Só temos quatro locais para ingressarmos nesse pequeno território, do tamanho da cidade do Rio de Janeiro. Três são controlados por Israel (dois por terra e um pelo mar mediterrâneo). Ocorre que a quarta localidade (entrada leste) para essa estreita faixa de terra onde moram 1,5 milhão de palestinos (uma das mais altas densidade populacional do mundo), vem pela região chamada de Rafah, cidade fronteiriça egípcia. Durante os bombardeios do ano passado, esta localidade permaneceu fechada, como tem ficado fechado, regra geral toda a fronteira egípcia com Gaza. Isso asfixia o que o mundo tem chamado de a maior prisão a ceu aberto do mundo. Dezenas de caminhões com alimentos e ajuda humanitária vindos de todos os países deveriam entrar diariamente no território, que não tem autonomia para quase nada e onde um em cada dois adultos encontram-se desempregados.

Essa muralha, vem sendo chamada de Muralha da Morte pelos palestinos. Sua construção esta sendo feita por centenas de operários egípcios, mas supervisionados diretamente pelo Corpo de Engenheiros do Exército dos Estados Unidos. As reações vêm aumentando, tanto no Egito, como em vários países e na comunidade internacional que vem levantando suas vozes contra esse cerco aos palestinos. Até em Israel vem sendo realizados protestos contra essa construção.

Mas o pior é que o projeto da Muralha é construí-la em aço muito grosso, resistente a projéteis e mísseis Qassams, usados pelos palestinos e que além de alta (uns seis metros), adentra ao subsolo outros seis metros ou ainda mais, para bloquear os túneis e as passagens subterrâneas construídas clandestinamente para o contrabando de alimentos (estima-se que existam 1,5 mil desses pequenos túneis). Israel bombardeou vários deles, mas eles continuam a existir e acabam sendo uma das poucas possibilidades da Faixa receber ajuda externa. Como os produtos – alimentos e medicamentos – entram de forma clandestina, como se fossem contrabando, eles acabam sendo muito caros, dificultando ainda mais a já sofrida vida dos palestinos. A destruição desses túneis prejudicará inclusive a economia egípcio, onde diversos negociantes dependem desse comércio.

O projeto original da Muralha Egípcia prevê o bombeamento de água para dentro desses túneis. Mas, o que é pior, essa água seria bombeada de forma envenenada. Especialistas asseguram que isso prejudicaria os palestinos ainda mais, mas prejudicaria vastas regiões da própria fronteira egípcia, impedindo a agricultura local próxima á Muralha.

Todos os pedidos de organizações humanitárias para ingressar pelo Egito de grandes comboios de caminhões lotados de alimentos e medicamentos – o maior deles, vindo da Europa com 70 caminhões trucados – vêm tendo sistematicamente seus vistos de entrada negados pelo governo egípcio, presidido por Hosni Mubarak.

É preciso registrar – e a maioria das pessoas no mundo não sabem – é que Israel vem bloqueando as três passagens para Gaza há muito tempo. Ingressam apenas e tão somente remédios essenciais e alimentos básicos. Até o simples macarrão, esta vetado da lista pelo fato que o governo de Israel considera esse alimento como não sendo essencial.

Por que o Egito vem se comportando assim?

O Egito tem seis mil anos de história. Dizem que ali surgiu a primeira civilização humana mais organizada e a primeira sociedade dividida em classes sociais, a escravista. Quando Napoleão conquistou esse país, a partir da campanha de maio de 1798, quando chega próximo às pirâmides pronuncia a famosa frase: “do alto dessas pirâmides, quatro mil anos de história vos contemplam”, em discurso aos seus soldados, para falar de respeito ao país conquistado. Errou nas contas. São mais de seis mil anos.

O Egito é o maior e mais populoso país árabe. Foi lá que, em 1954, sob o comando de jovens oficiais sob liderança de Gamal Abdel Nasser, foi criado o pan-arabismo e o nacionalismo árabe mais radicalizado (muito em baixo na atualidade). Alguns chegam a falar em “socialismo árabe”, sob influência da URSS. O Egito sempre quis a liderança do mundo árabe. E na época de Nasser praticamente a conquistou, com amplitude, com alianças e com unidade com os países vizinhos. Infelizmente, com sua morte em 1970, as coisas mudaram de rumo, quando assumiu Anuar Sadat. Também quis o Egito ser porta voz dos palestinos. Ajudou a fundar a OLP para tentar controlá-la, mas Arafat nunca aceitou essa situação. Mubarak assume com a morte de Sadat em 1981, Mubarak assume e esta até hoje (note-se a “democracia egípcia: em 56 anos o país teve três presidentes, ou seja, uma média de 18 anos por presidente...).

O que todos se perguntam hoje é o seguinte: porque o Egito impõe esse imenso sacrifício a 1,5 milhão de palestinos e faz o jogo político e militar de Israel? Algumas respostas, algumas pistas podemos explorar e quero enumerar algumas, a partir de excelente artigo, como sempre, do combativo ativista e pacifista israelense, o escritor Ury Avnery (2).

O mais sionista, reacionário e direitista que já conhecemos e estudamos chamava-se Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940). Mais até do que Herzl e Gurion. Ele foi o que primeiro defendeu uma “Muralha de Ferro” (Iron Wall). Suas ideias, consideradas extremadas até por algumas correntes sionistas, que o viam com reservas, não prosperaram (3). Como diz Avnery, ninguém imaginaria que construir um muro contra palestinos fosse implementado 86 anos depois da sua proposta original, por um “líder” árabe, no caso Hosni Mubarak. É irônico, se não for trágico.

Pelo menos três razões podem ser arroladas para tentarmos explicar o comportamento equivocado – de nosso humilde ponto de vista – para que compreendamos os reais motivos que levaram um árabe praticamente romper com a luta histórica dos palestinos e fazer o completo jogo político de Israel neste momento.

1. Descolamento dos palestinos – É uma quase unanimidade entre as lideranças palestinas mais radicalizadas, que Mubarak descolou-se da luta palestina. E o faz para manter distância em particular do grupo palestino Hamas, que tem fortes e históricos vínculos com a Fraternidade Muçulmana, maior agrupamento de oposição no Egito e maior força política hoje no parlamento e na sociedade, mas que, ainda assim, não tem mais que 20% nas “eleições” gerais do país (sempre uma farsa geral, fraudadas, pois o presidente é sempre “reeleito” com 98% dos votos, como se isso fosse possível). Isso faz com que o Egito vá ficando, a cada dia, mais isolado no mundo árabe e mesmo na comunidade internacional;

2. Apoio dos Estado Unidos – Não é só Israel que recebe bilhões de dólares todos os anos do tesouro dos Estados Unidos a fundo perdido (sem qualquer contrapartida de prestação de contas). O Egito recebe todos os anos algo como dois bilhões de dólares. Para uma economia quebrada, desaquecida (sem controle populacional, a explosão demográfica é elevada e não há empregos para todos), esses recursos pesam no orçamento do país. Assim, além do alinhamento ideológico, que Mubarak tem com os EUA (e com Israel, por ter assinado a paz em separado com esse país em 1979 nos famosos acordos de Camp David que renderam o prêmio Nobel para Anuar El Sadat e Menachem Béguin, sob os auspícios de Carter, que veio a ganhar o prêmio apenas muitos anos depois desse episódio). A situação econômica do Egito é muito ruim e isso faz com que aumente a sua dependência e vinculação política e ideológica dos Estados Unidos;

3. Os eixos do Oriente Médio – Mubarak faz uma análise geopolítica da região e das forças que estão em jogo. Deixar livre essa passagem da imensa fronteira egípcia seria acabar por fortalecer o que se chama de Eixo Damasco-Gaza (Síria e Hamas) e ainda Teerã-Hizbollah-Beirute (Irã e os xiitas libaneses), em detrimento do eixo que Mubarak se alinha que é formado por Cairo-Riad-Amã-Ramallah (Egito, Jordânia, Arábia Saudita e Fatah). Nem que para isso tenha que impor imenso sacrifício aos palestinos – como vem fazendo, impedindo entrada da carregamentos até das Nações Unidas – Mubarak aposta no enfraquecimento do grupo Hamas, no seu isolamento e, no limite, que a própria população palestina se levante contra suas lideranças nessa faixa territorial. Errará, como Israel errou, nessa estratégia, pois o Hamas, mesmo tendo sido bombardeado 22 dias seguidos ano passado, não se enfraqueceu, ao contrário, acabou se fortalecendo.

Esperemos que esse Muro e outras muralhas existentes que separam, segregam, dividem, sejam, de uma vez por todas, demolidas, destruídas e derrubadas. É nosso desejo nesta primeira coluna do ano de 2010.

Aproveito para desejar aos meus leitores que tenham um grande ano de muitas lutas e sucessos, pessoais e os coletivos de que nosso sofrido povo brasileiro e palestino, tanto precisam.

(1) A matéria pode ser lida em http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fiskrsquos-world-walls-never-work-in-the-middle-east-or-in-ireland-1855417.html

(2) A matéria pode ser lida em http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1262516758/

(3) Veja no original em inglês o artigo em http://www.marxists.de/middleast/ironwall/ironwall.htm

1 comentários

* Presidente do Sindicato dos Sociólogos do Estado de São Paulo, escritor, arabista e professor. Membro da Academia de Altos Estudos Ibero-Árabe de Lisboa e da International Sociological Association.

* Opiniões aqui expressas não refletem necessáriamente as opiniões do site.

The Contradictions of Cuban Blogger and CIA Asset, Yoani Sanchez

by Salim Lamrani

On November 7, 2009, the Western media devoted ample space to the Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez. The news from Havana about the dispute between the dissident and Cuban authorities circled the world and overshadowed the rest of the news.¹

Sanchez recounted her mishap in detail on her blog and in the press. In doing so, she declared that she had been detained together with three friends by "three burly strangers" during an "afternoon full of blows, shouting and insults."²

She later explained her story, which resembles a real ordeal:

The 'aggressors' themselves called for a police car that took my other two companions away [. . .] I refused to get in the shiny Geely and [. . .] received a barrage of blows, shoves, they carried me with my head down and tried to shove me into the car. I held onto the door, blows on the knuckles, I managed to grab a piece of paper that one of them had in his pocket and I stuck it in my mouth. Another flurry of punches so that I would give the document back to them.

Orlando was already inside, immobilized by a karate hold that kept his head glued to the floor. One of them put his knee in my chest and the other, from the front seat, hit me in the kidneys and punched me in the head so that I would open my mouth and spit out the paper. For a moment I felt as though I would never get out of that car. 'This is it, Yoani,' 'The clowning around is over,' said the one seated in front who was pulling my hair. In the back seat a rare spectacle ensued: my legs in the air, my face reddening from the pressure and my body in pain, while Orlando was pinned by a professional thug on the other side. I just managed to grab his testicles, through his pants, in an act of desperation. I sunk in my fingernails, imagining that he was going to continue to smash my chest until the very last breath. 'Kill me already,' I yelled, with my last remaining breath, and the one in the front seat told the younger one, 'Let her breathe.'

I was listening to Orlando panting and the blows continued to rain down upon us, I considered opening the door and jumping out, but there was no handle to open from the inside. We were at their mercy and hearing the voice of Orlando gave me encouragement. Later he told me that it was the same for him with my choking words . . . which told him, 'Yoani is still alive'. They left us in pain on a street in Timba, a woman approached, 'What's happened?' . . . 'A kidnapping', I managed to say. We cried in each other's arms in the middle of the sidewalk, I was thinking about Teo, for God's sake how will I explain all these bruises to him. How am I going to tell him that he lives in a country where this happens, how am I going to look at him and tell him that his mother, for writing a blog and putting her views into kilobytes, has been brutalized on a public street. How will I describe for him the despotic faces of those who forced us into that car, their evident pleasure as they beat us, lifting my skirt and dragging me half naked to the car?³

The United States -- where 34-year-old Cuban citizen Yosvanis Valle had been executed 48 hours earlier, bringing the number of executions in 2009 to 42⁴ -- declared its "deep concern", through State Department spokesman Ian Kelly. "We continue to be concerned about the personal health and access to medical care of Yoani Sanchez."⁵

Contradictions

Yoani Sanchez's words are terrifying and immediately arouse the reader's sympathy and compassion towards the victim. Nevertheless, it is essential to point out some contradictions that cast a shadow over the credibility of this tale.

The first surprise for journalists as expressed by the BBC's Havana correspondent Fernando Ravsberg: Despite the "blows and shoving," the "blows to the knuckles," the new "flurry of punches," the "knee in [her] chest," the "blows to the kidneys and [. . .] the head," "hair" pulled, the "face reddened by the pressure and body aching," the "blows [that] continued to rain down" and "all these bruises" that the Cuban blogger described,⁶ Ravsberg noted that Sanchez "has no bruises, marks or scars."⁷ Images from the U.S. channel CNN, which also interviewed the blogger, confirmed the words of the British journalist. In addition, the CNN correspondent took oratorical precautions and emphasized Sanchez's "apparent" suffering (using a crutch to move around).⁸ According to Agence France Presse, which related the story with caution, clarifying that this is Sanchez's version, and using the title "Cuba: the Blogger Yoani Sanchez Says She Was Beaten and Briefly Detained," the blogger "was not injured."⁹

Questioned about this by the BBC, Yoani Sanchez tried to explain this contradiction. According to her, the marks and bruises on her face and body really existed, but had disappeared. "Throughout the whole weekend I had a swollen cheekbone and eyebrow." All the marks had disappeared by Monday morning with the arrival of the first foreign journalist. However, bruises and "several marks" remained, she said, but . . . "particularly on the buttocks, unfortunately I cannot show them," she explained.¹⁰

Sanchez did not specify the reasons why she did not photograph the bruises and marks right after the incident, when they were visible, which would have provided irrefutable evidence of police violence against her. With regard to the hair pulled out, which is not visible at all in the photos and videos, her explanation is simple: "I lost a lot of hair but with this thick head of hair you can't tell."¹¹

In her blog and in a radio interview, Sanchez spoke of "the worst sort of Sicilian gang-style kidnapping," giving the impression that she was detained for several hours.¹² But in her interview with the BBC, when the journalist insisted and asked for clarification, the blogger confessed that in fact the incident lasted in all "25 minutes." Furthermore, Sanchez asserts that the detention occurred "in broad daylight, in front of a bus stop full of people." Nevertheless, the Western press failed to find a single witness, not even anonymous, to confirm the words of the blogger and thereby certify the veracity of her statements.¹³ Similarly, none of the people accompanying Yoani Sanchez were willing to respond to requests for interviews with the Western media, directing them to the blogger in charge of speaking on behalf of all of them.

Beyond all this, it seems surprising and illogical that the authorities in Havana would have decided to publicly mistreat such a media-savvy dissident as Yoani Sanchez, knowing for absolute certainty that such an act would unleash an immediate international scandal. A priori, there are other much more efficient and discreet ways to intimidate opponents.

Finally, Sanchez sinks into new contradictions when she tries to clarify some vague areas of her testimony. Thus, she explained that her resistance was due to the fact that the plain-clothed agents "did not show anything identifying them as authorities, I would have acted differently had they been in uniform. I asked them to get a police officer, they called and a police car arrived that took the other two girls and left me and Orlando in the hands of these others."¹⁴ However, in her blog, she says the police arrived at the beginning of the situation, but that would not have prevented her from resisting what seems more and more to be an identity check carried out by plainclothes police officers rather than a public lynching.

In short, there is no evidence corroborating the words of Yoani Sanchez, no other available testimony, not even of the people who accompanied her. Therefore we have to rely only on the blogger's version, which is full of contradictions. Given these factors, it is impossible not to doubt the statements of the famous Cuban blogger.

It is necessary to make a comparison. The Western press granted, in just 72 hours, more space to Yoani Sanchez and her incident with the authorities than to all the crimes committed (more than a hundred murders, a similar number of cases of disappearances, and countless acts of torture and violence) by the military dictatorship led by the coup leader Roberto Micheletti since June 27, 2009. Decidedly, Sanchez is not a simple critical blogger as she pretends.

The Yoani Sanchez Phenomenon

Yoani Maria Sanchez Cordero is a "Habanera" born in 1975, apparently having graduated in Philology in the year 2000, according to her blog. There remains doubt about this fact in that during her stay in Switzerland two years later, when she enrolled with the consular authorities, she declared a "pre-university" level education, as shown by the records of the consulate of the Republic of Cuba in Bern.¹⁵ So, after working in the field of publishing and giving courses in Spanish to tourists, she decided to leave her homeland with her son. On August 26, 2002, after marrying a German named Karl G., she emigrated to Switzerland with a "foreign trip permit" valid for eleven months, in the face of the "disenchantment and economic suffocation" that prevailed in Cuba.¹⁶

Interestingly, we learn that after fleeing "an immense prison with ideological walls,"¹⁷ to use the words she uses to refer to the country of her birth, she decided two years later during the summer 2004 to leave the Swiss paradise, one of the richest nations on earth, to return to the "leaky boat on the verge of sinking" as she metaphorically describes the island.¹⁸ Faced with this new contradiction, Sanchez explains that she chose to return home -- where the "cries of the despot" reign¹⁹ and where "beings from the shadows, like vampires, feed on our human happiness and inoculate us with fear by means of blows, threats, blackmail"²⁰ -- "for family reasons and against the advice of acquaintances and friends."²¹

When reading Yoani Sanchez's blog, where the Cuban reality is described in such an apocalyptic and tragic manner, one gets the impression that purgatory is, by comparison, a seaside resort and that only the sweltering heat of the antechamber of hell can provide an idea as to the daily life of Cubans. No positive aspect of Cuban society is portrayed. Only aberrations, injustices, contradictions, and difficulties are presented. Consequently, the reader struggles to understand how a young Cuban woman decided to leave wealthy Switzerland to return to live in what she likens to Dante's inferno where "pockets were emptying, frustrations growing, and fear proliferating."²² In her blog, the comments of her foreign supporters abound in respect to this: "I do not understand your return. Why didn't you give your son a better future?" and "Dear friend, I would like to know why you decided to return to Cuba."²³

By contrast, some of her compatriots who live abroad, disappointed by the western lifestyle, have also expressed their desire to return to live in Cuba: "I will return." "I have lived in Miami for 7 years [. . .] and sometimes I question whether the physical exile has been was worth it." "I need my people [. . .] Someday I will return home with my German husband, another fool who wants to apply for residency there." "Why did you go back? . . . Loneliness, nostalgia, longing? [Then, referring to the western world] Strange faces, people sad and fed-up with the rest of mankind without knowing why, equally corrupt politicians and many gray days? No need to explain anything. As of 14 years ago there are no suns on my map of time." "I again sent [the information] to my dad who lives outside of Cuba, and who has plans to return."²⁴

One of two possibilities -- either Yoani was not in her right mind in deciding to leave the Pearl of Europe and return to Cuba, or life on the island is not as dramatic as the picture she paints.

In a posting on her blog in July 2007, Yoani recounted in detail the story of her return to Cuba. "Three years ago [. . .] in Zurich [. . .] I decided to go home and remain in my country", she said, emphasizing that it was "a simple story of an immigrant's return to her homeland." "We bought round trip tickets" for Cuba. So Sanchez decided to stay in her country and not return to Switzerland. "My friends thought I was joking, my mother refused to accept that her daughter no longer lived in the Switzerland of chocolate and milk." On August 12, 2004, Sanchez showed up at the provincial immigration office in Havana to explain her case. "What a tremendous shock when they said to me, go to the end of the line of 'the returnees' [. . .] That is how I encountered all of a sudden other "crazies" like me, each with their own horrifying story of return."²⁵

Indeed, Sanchez's case is far from being an isolated case, as illustrated by this story and the comments left on her blog. More and more Cubans who chose to emigrate, after facing many difficulties in adapting and discovering that the western "El Dorado" does not glitter as much as they had imagined and that the privileges they had enjoyed at home do not exist anywhere else, decide to return to live in Cuba.

However, Yoani Sanchez fails to give the real reasons that led her to return to Cuba, beyond the "family reasons" that she evoked (reasons that her mother apparently did not share, given her surprise). The Cuban authorities granted her favorable treatment on humanitarian grounds, allowing her to recover her permanent resident status in Cuba, even though she had been out of the country for more than 11 months.

In reality, the stay in Switzerland was far from as idyllic as she had anticipated. Sanchez discovered a western lifestyle completely different from what she was used to in Cuba, where, despite the daily difficulties and vicissitudes, all citizens have a relatively balanced diet despite the ration card and the hardships, access to free health care and education, free culture and entertainment, a house and an atmosphere of safety (the island's crime rate is very low). Cuba is perhaps the only country in the world where you can live without working (which is not always something positive). In Switzerland, Sanchez had enormous difficulties finding work and living decently and so, in desperation, decided to return home and explain the reasons why to the authorities. According to them, Sanchez had begged, crying to the immigration services to be granted an exceptional waiver "to revoke her immigration status," and they granted it.²⁶

Yoani Sanchez has decided to carefully conceal this fact.

"Cyber-dissidence"

In April 2007, Yoani Sanchez decided to join the world of the Cuban opposition and founded her blog, Generation Y. Forgetting the magnanimity of the authorities towards her when she returned to Cuba in 2004, she thus became a staunch critic of the government in Havana. Her criticisms are harsh, unnuanced, one-sided. She presents an apocalyptic view of the Cuban reality and accuses the authorities of being responsible for all its ills. She never evokes, not even for an instant, the unique geopolitical circumstances in which Cuba has found itself since 1959. There are hundreds of blogs in Cuba. A number of them complain incisively aberrations in Cuban society. But their approach is much more nuanced and the information less partisan. Nevertheless the Western media has chosen the black-and-white blog of Sanchez.²⁷

According to this blogger, in Cuba, "the process, the system, the expectations, the illusions have shipwrecked. A complete shipwreck," before concluding with this lapidary metaphor: "The ship has sunk." To her, it is clear that Cuba must change course and change governments: it is necessary to "change the helmsman and the entire crew"²⁸ in order to develop "sui generis capitalism."²⁹

Sanchez is an astute person who has understood perfectly well that she could prosper quickly with this type of discourse so valued by the Western press. She has worked out a tacit agreement with the communications and information transnationals. For the Western media to grant one the status of "independent blogger," and to enjoy some media space, it is essential to speak out against the system and the government and to demand radical change, more specifically the return to private enterprise capitalism, and not to content oneself with just denouncing some aberrations in the system.

How can the assertion of collusion between Sanchez and the media powers be corroborated? In light of the facts. Just a few weeks after the birth of her blog, the Western press launched an extraordinary campaign to promote it, presenting her as the blogger who has dared to challenge the regime and restrictions on freedom of expression. Once again, the Western media are not afraid of their own contradictions. On the one hand, they continue to repeat that it is absolutely impossible for any Cuban to undertake a heterodox discourse on the island and that making any criticism about the government or even straying from the official line is prohibited under penalty of prison. On the other hand, they praise the ingenuity of Yoani Sanchez whose main activity is to harshly criticize government policy with a freedom of tone that would be the envy of opponents throughout the world, without the authorities harassing her.³⁰

Thus, after barely a year of existence, while there are dozens of blogs older and no less interesting than Sanchez's, the Cuban blogger won the Ortega y Gasset Prize for Journalism, worth 15,000 euros, on April 4, 2008, awarded by the Spanish daily El Pais. Customarily, this award is given to prestigious journalists or writers who have long literary careers. This is the first time a person with the profile of Sanchez has received it.³¹ Likewise, the Cuban blogger was chosen among the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine (2008), in company with George W. Bush, Hu Jintao, and the Dalai Lama.³² Her blog was included in the list of 25 best blogs in the world by CNN and Time magazine (2008) and also won the Spanish Bitacoras.com prize as well as The Bob's (2008).³³ On 30 November 2008, the Spanish daily El Pais included her in its list of the 100 most influential Latin American personalities of the year (a list which features neither Fidel Castro nor Raúl Castro).³⁴ Foreign Policy magazine went further in December 2008, by including her among the 10 leading scholars of the year.³⁵ The Mexican magazine Gato Pardo did the same in 2008.³⁶ The prestigious Columbia University of the U.S. awarded her the Maria Moors Cabot Prize.³⁷ And the list is long.³⁸

However, Yoani Sanchez candidly acknowledges: "Time magazine has put me together with ninety-nine famous people in its list of influential people of 2008. Me, who has never stepped onto a stage or a podium, and whose own neighbors do not know if 'Yoani' is written with an "h" in the middle or an 's' at the end. (. . .) Now I have just enough vanity to imagine that the others on the list may be wondering, who is this unknown Cuban blogger on the list with us?"³⁹ Unwittingly, Sanchez created a giant contradiction for Time magazine: How can a blogger unknown to her own neighbors be included among the 100 most influential people in the world? Here, it is undeniable that the U.S. magazine employed political and ideological criteria in including Sanchez, which casts a shadow over the credibility of the classification. This applies to the other awards as well.

The Living Conditions of Yoani Sanchez

The umpteenth contradiction. The Western press, in recounting the words of Sanchez, never stops repeating that Cubans have no internet access, without an explanation as to how this blogger can write daily at her blog from Cuba. Great was the surprise of the 200 international journalists accredited to the International Tourism Fair in Cuba when, on Wednesday, May 6, 2009, they spotted Yoani Sanchez calmly installed in the foyer of the most luxurious tourist establishment on the island, the Hotel Nacional, accessing the Internet, when the price of the connection is prohibitive even for a foreign tourist.⁴⁰

Two questions inevitably arise: How can Yoani Sanchez connect to the Internet in Cuba when the Western press keeps repeating that there is not access to it? Where does the money come from that allows her to live a lifestyle that no other Cuban can afford, when officially she has no other source of income?

In 2009, the U.S. Treasury Department ordered the closure of more than eighty websites related to Cuba that promoted trade and thus violated U.S. legislation on economic sanctions. Interestingly, Yoani Sanchez's site was not closed even though it proposes the purchase of her book in Italian, in fact, through Paypal, a system that no Cubans living in Cuba can use because of the economic sanctions (which prohibit, among other things, electronic commerce). Similarly, Sanchez has a copyright for her blog © 2009 Generation Y - All Rights Reserved. No other Cuban blogger can do so under the laws of the embargo. What explains this unique situation?⁴¹

Other questions also require answers. Who is behind Sanchez's desdecuba.net website whose server is hosted in Germany by the company Cronos AG Regensburg (which also hosts far-right websites) and is registered under the name Josef Biechele? It was also discovered that Sanchez registered her domain name via the U.S. company GoDaddy, whose main characteristic is anonymity. The Pentagon also uses it to register sites with all the necessary discretion. How can Yoani Sanchez, a Cuban blogger living in Cuba, register her site with a U.S. company when the economic sanctions legislation formally prohibits it?⁴²

Moreover, Yoani Sanchez's site Generation Y is extremely sophisticated, with portals to Facebook and Twitter. It also receives 14 million visits per month and is the only one available in no less than 18 languages (English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese, Russian, Slovenian, Polish, Chinese, Japanese, Lithuanian, Czech, Bulgarian, Dutch, Finnish, Hungarian, Korean, Greek). No other site in the world, including those of major international institutions such as the UN, World Bank, IMF, OECD, and the European Union, has as many language versions available. Not even the U.S. State Department web site or the CIA has such a variety.⁴³

Another surprising detail. The site hosting the blog of Sanchez has a bandwidth 60 times higher than Cuba has for all its Internet users! Other questions inevitably arise about it: Who manages these pages in 18 languages? Who pays the administrators? How much? Who pays for the translators who work daily on Sanchez's site? How much? Furthermore, the management of a flow of more than 14 million visitors monthly is extremely expensive. Who pays for that?⁴⁴

Yoani Sanchez has a perfect right to speak freely and issue virulent criticisms of the authorities in Havana -- she does not hesitate to do so -- about the difficult daily realities of Cuba. She cannot be nor should she be criticized for that. Instead, she commits a serious intellectual imposture when she presents herself as a mere blogger, saying that her sole purpose is to honestly perform her duty as a citizen.

Her meticulous viciousness in systematically obscuring reality, evoking only the negative aspects, de-contextualizing the problems, methodically ignoring the geopolitical environment in which Cuba finds itself, particularly in its relationship with the U.S. and the relentless imposition of economic sanctions which affect every Cuban's life, resorting to lies as was easily verified in the case of the alleged "aggression," all tend to discredit her. Her role first and foremost is to woo a certain audience resolutely opposed to the Cuban revolutionary process and to faithfully misrepresent the Cuban reality in its complexity.

Another unique fact: U.S. president Barack Obama responded to an interview with Yoani Sanchez. So as the U.S. sinks deeper and deeper into an unprecedented economic crisis, as the battle over healthcare reform becomes increasingly difficult, as Afghan and Iraq issues continue to heat up, in spite of the highly charged agenda of the presidency, with the extremely sensitive subject of the seven U.S. military bases installed in Colombia having raised continental disapproval, with a coup in Honduras in which Washington is seriously implicated, and with hundreds of requests from around the world for media interviews pending, Barack Obama put all that aside to answer questions from this Cuban blogger.⁴⁵

In the interview, Sanchez at no time asked for an end to the economic sanctions which affect all sectors of Cuban society starting with the most vulnerable (women, children, and elderly), which represent the main obstacle to development of the country, and which are rejected by the vast majority of the international community (187 countries in the UN vote in October 2009) because of their anachronistic, cruel, and ineffective nature. On the contrary, she takes up exactly the rhetoric of Washington: "The political propaganda tells us that we live in a besieged city, a David versus Goliath and the 'voracious enemy' that is about to pounce on us." The economic sanctions, which she describes as mere "trade restrictions" are "so clumsy and outdated"⁴⁶ not because they have dramatic consequences for the Cuban population, but because they are "used as justification both for the setbacks in productivity and to repress those who think differently."⁴⁷ These are exactly the same arguments raised by the U.S. representative to the United Nations in October 2009 to justify the continued state of siege that Washington has imposed on Cuba since 1960, without explaining why 187 countries in the world have been willing to participate each of the last 18 years in what she calls "political propaganda."⁴⁸

In light of these factors, it is impossible that Yoani Sanchez is a simple blogger denouncing the difficulties of a system. Powerful interests are hiding behind the smokescreen that is Generation Y, which represents a formidable weapon in the media war that the United States wages against Cuba. Yoani Sanchez has clearly understood that obedience to the powerful is rewarded handsomely (over $ 100,000 in total).⁴⁹ She has chosen to join the business of dissent and live the good days in Cuba.

Notes

1 Andrea Rodríguez, "Cuban Blogger Says She Is Briefly Detained," Associated Press, 7 November 2009.

2 Yoani Sánchez, "Secuestro estilo camorra," Generación Y , 8 November 2009. Accessed on 15 November 2009.

3 Ibid.

4 Agence France Presse, "Texas Executes Cuban-born Gang Member," 11 November 2009.

5 "Cuba: les USA indignés par les mauvais traitements infligés à des blogueurs," Le Monde, 10 November 2009.

6 Sánchez, "Secuestro estilo camorra," op. cit.

7 Fernando Ravsberg, "Ataque a bloguera cubana, ¿cambio de política," BBC Mundo, 9 November 20009.

8 CNN, "Yoani Sánchez golpeada en La Habana," 9 November 2009. Accessed on 15 November 2009.

9 Agence France Presse, "Cuba: la blogueuse Yoani Sanchez dit avoir été frappée et brièvement détenue," 7 November 2009.

10 Ravsberg, "Ataque a bloguera cubana, ¿cambio de política," op. cit.

11 Ibid.

12 Yoani Sánchez, "Secuestro estilo camorra," op. cit.; YouTube, "Entrevista a Yoani Sánchez tras la golpiza que recibió por parte del Gobierno Cubano," 9 November 2009. Accessed on 15 November 2009.

13 Ravsberg, «Ataque a bloguera cubana, ¿cambio de política», op. cit.

14 Ibid.

15 Correspondence with His Excellency Mr. Isaac Roberto Torres Barrios, Ambassador of the Republic of Cuba in Bern, November 17, 2009.

16 Yoaní Sánchez, "Mi perfil," Generación Y.

17 France 24, "Ce pays est une immense prison avec des murs idéologiques," 22 October 2009.

18 Yoaní Sánchez, "Siete preguntas," Generación Y, 18 November 2009.

19 Yoaní Sánchez, "Final de partida," Generación Y, 2 November 2009.

20 Yoaní Sánchez, "Seres de la sombra," Generación Y, 12 November 2009.

21 Sánchez, "Mi perfil," Generación Y, op. cit.

22 Yoaní Sánchez, "La improbable entrevista de Gianni Miná," Generación Y, 9 May 2009.

23 Yoaní Sánchez, "Vine y me quedé," Generación Y, 14 August 2007.

24 Ibid.

25 Ibid.

26 Correspondence with His Excellency Mr. Orlando Requeijo, Ambassador of the Republic of Cuba in Paris, November 18, 2009.

27 "Yoani Sánchez: Hemos naufragado; hace rato que estamos bajo el agua," Libertad Digital, 12 November 2009.

28 Ibid.

29 Mauricio Vicent, "Los cambios llegarán a Cuba, pero no a través del guión del Gobierno," El País, 7 May 2008.

30 Sánchez, Generación Y.

31 El País, "EL PAÍS convoca los Premios Ortega y Gasset de periodismo 2009," 12 January 2009.

32 Time, "The 2008 Time 100," 2008. Accessed on 25 November 2009.

33 Yoani Sánchez, "Premios," Generación Y.

34 Miriam Leiva, "La Generación Y cubana," El País, 30 November 2008.

35 Sánchez, "Premios," op. cit.

36 Ibid.

37 Ibid.

38 El País, "Una de las voces críticas del régimen cubano, mejor blog del año," 28 November 2008.

39 Yoani Sánchez, "¿Qué hago yo ahí?" Generación Y, 3 May 2008.

40 Guillermo Nova, "Bloguera cubana Yoani Sánchez descubierta escribiendo sus artículos desde el wi-fi de hoteles," Rebelión, 11 May 2009.

41 Norelys Morales Aguilera, "Si los blogs son terapéuticos ¿Quién paga la terapia de Yoani Sánchez?" La República, 13 August 2009.

42 Ibid.

43 Sánchez, Generación Y.

44 Morales, "Si los blogs son terapéuticos ¿Quién paga la terapia de Yoani Sánchez?" op. cit.

45 Yoani Sánchez, "Respuesta de Barack Obama a Yoani Sánchez," Generación Y, 20 November 2009.

46 Sánchez, "Siete preguntas," op. cit.

47 Yoani Sánchez, "Made in USA," Generación Y, 18 November 2009.

48 Sánchez, "Siete preguntas," op. cit.

49 Sánchez, "Premios," op. cit.

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Salim Lamrani is a professor at Paris Descartes University and Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée University and journalist specializing in relations between Cuba and the US. He has just published Cuba: Ce que les médias ne vous diront jamais [Cuba: What the Media Will Never Tell You] (Paris: Editions Estrella, 2009). Contact: <lamranisalim@yahoo.fr>. En español: "Las contradicciones de la bloguera cubana Yoani Sánchez." Translation by David Brookbank.

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URL: mrzine.monthlyreview.org/lamrani111209.html

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