The United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Affairs recently released a major report on the State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples.  Click here to download the UN State of Indigenous peoples summary of the 250 page report.  Go to the link below to download the full document.

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http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/unpfii/en/sowip.html

State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples

Indigenous peoples contribute extensibly to humanity’s cultural diversity, enriching it withmore than two thirds of its languages and an extrordinary amount of its traditional knowledge.

There are over 370 million indigenous people in some 90 countries, living in all regions of the world. The situation of indigenous peoples in many parts of the world is critical today. Poverty rates are significantly higher among indigenous peoples compared to other groups. While they constitute 5 per cent of the world’s population, they are 15 per cent of the world’s poor. Most indicators of well-being show that indigenous peoples suffer disproportinately compared to non-indigenous peoples. Indigenous peoples face systemic discrimination and exclusion from political and economic power; they continue to be over-represented among the poorest, the illiterate, the destitute; they are displaced by wars and environmental disasters; indigenous peoples are dispossessed of their ancestral lands and deprived of their resources for survival, both physical and cultural; they are even robbed of their very right to life.

In more modern versions of market exploitation, indigenous peoples see their traditional knowledge and cultural expressions marketed and patented without their consent or participation.

Of the some 7,000 languages today, it is estimated that more than 4,000 are spoken by indigenous peoples. Language specialists predict that up to 90 per cent of the world’s languages are likely to become extinct or threatened with extinction by the end of the century.

Although the state of the world’s indigenous peoples is alarming, there is some cause for optimism. The international community increasingly recognizes indigenous peoples’ human rights, most prominently evidenced by the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Indigenous peoples themselves continue to organize for the promotion of their rights. They are the stewards of some of the world’s most biologically diverse areas and their traditional knowledge about the biodibversity of these areas is invaluable. As the effects of climate change are becoming clearer, it is increaslingly evident that indigenous peoples must play a central role in developing adaptation and mitigation efforts to this global challenge.

The State of the World’s Indigenous Peoples is the result of a collaborative effort, organized by the Secretariat of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. The Chapters were written by independent experts.

Contents:

Foreword by Mr. Sha Zukang Under-Secretary General for Economic and Social Affairs

Introduction by the Secretariat of the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues

Chapter I: Poverty and Well Being by Joji Carino

Chapter II: Culture by Naomi Kipuri

Chapter III: Environment by Neva Collings

Chapter IV: Contemporary Education by Duane Champagne

Chapter V: Health by Myrna Cunningham

Chapter VI: Human Rights by Dalee Sambo Dorough

Chapter VII: Emerging Issues by Mililani Trask

This article in the NY Times discusses the environmental clean up issues facing the U.S. military as it begins to close bases in Iraq.   The agreement between the U.S. and Iraq says that “Both parties shall implement this Agreement in a manner consistent with protecting the natural environment and human health and safety.”  If history is a guide, the U.S. will leave behind a toxic shadow that will stretch decades, or even centuries into the future.  It will haunt generations of Iraqis, much like the toxic legacy of the Vietnam war continues to take victims.

An interesting fact reported is that since 2007, the military has closed 260 bases in Iraq.  Two hundred and sixty! How many more are there?  And how many permanent bases does the U.S. intend to leave behind?

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http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2010/01/13/13greenwire-pentagon-weighs-cleanups-as-it-plans-iraq-exit-21915.html

Pentagon Weighs Cleanups as It Plans Iraq Exit

By DINA FINE MARON of Greenwire

Published: January 13, 2010

As the U.S. military prepares to leave Iraq, the Pentagon is wrestling with questions about environmental cleanup on the bases it plans to transfer to the Iraqi Army by December 2011.

At issue on and around the bases are unexploded ordinance, depleted uranium from munitions, spilled oil and contaminated ash in burn pits.

There is no set answer about what — if anything — the military must do to mitigate environmental damage. Though there are clear environmental policies for permanent U.S. bases overseas, they do not apply to contingency operations like those in Iraq.

“There’s nothing in international law, U.S. law, or executive orders that guide [U.S.] policy” in such operations, said David Mosher, a senior policy fellow at RAND and co-author of a 2008 report for the Army on environmental considerations during contingency operations. “It’s a huge loophole,” he said. “There’s nothing in DOD policy that says anything should be done.”

The November 2008 security agreement between Iraq and the United States includes a short section referring to U.S. environmental responsibilities, but it has no specifics. It merely says, “Both parties shall implement this Agreement in a manner consistent with protecting the natural environment and human health and safety.”

Historically, war zones have been left strewn with unexploded bombs, chemical weapons and herbicides. While there have been serious public health consequences in some instances and lawsuits for damages, countries rarely volunteer to pay for the environmental fallout from their operations.

After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, for example, Iraq’s neighbors submitted environmental damage claims to the U.N. Compensation Commission totaling more than $80 billion. The United Nations subsequently awarded environmental compensation amounting to more than $5 billion.

Though military experts note that the environment is a victim in almost any conflict, there are steps that could be taken to lessen long-term consequences. Still, while it’s possible to craft mission plans with sustainability considerations in mind, they say, any policy that could limit military operations would be difficult to get off the ground.

As a U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) guidance put it last fall: “During combat operations environmental considerations will be subordinate to mission accomplishment and preservation of human life, but cannot be ignored.”

The guidance calls for CENTCOM to ensure that its forces clean up hazardous materials and any environmental contamination that could endanger the health and safety of its forces or the host nation. It also offers this suggestion for U.S. forces: “Develop a plan to return the area to its original or better condition that includes directions/actions required for areas that cannot be returned to original (or better) condition.”

Still, there’s no enforcement mechanism, and a guidance is not a rule. And further complicating matters is an unprecedented number of contractors performing cleanup work.

Weighing the extent of U.S. cleanup operations versus cost considerations is a “balancing act,” Mosher said. “It comes back to what we are doing there. What’s our long-term goal?”

The Defense Department’s answer: “Our goal is to return bases to the Government of Iraq in condition supporting the safe reuse of properties.”

But Col. Tim Hill, director of the Army’s “Green Warrior Initiative,” argues that future counterinsurgency strategies should incorporate environmental considerations into everything they do. His group was put together last spring to look into these issues following a review of the RAND study findings.

For Hill, the motivating factor behind incorporating environmental considerations into military operations is about more than doing the right thing. His role as director of this new task force, he said, is to “change the culture of the Army,” to find ways to fight a counterinsurgency that considers environmental and sustainability issues.

“We can use environmental considerations as tools of engagement to assist and as a means of building trust and confidence,” Hill said. “I don’t believe we can win hearts and minds [in the Middle East] … but I do believe we can build trust and confidence, which is different,” he said.

Undocumented problems

In the heat of battle, soldiers are unlikely to take note of spills in refueling operations and other environmental problems, so there are likely to be a number of undocumented environmentally damaging incidents.

But just addressing the environmental degradation the United States is aware of — and discerning what damage pre-dated 2003 — could be a large project.

Consider the military’s challenge of disposing of solid waste.

In a contingency operation, each American solider generates 9 to 12 pounds of refuse a day, according to DOD figures. That waste must be burned in incinerators or pits or trucked to landfills. Burn pits come with their own environmental and health hazards, and trucking waste outside a country can sometimes be complicated by international agreements meant to prevent developing countries from becoming dumping grounds (Greenwire, Nov. 11, 2009).

Then there are undetonated weapons. U.S. military officials estimate that 3 to 5 percent of bombs, rockets and shells fail to explode. In areas with soft sand, that rate may rise as high as 15 percent, according to the U.N. Environment Programme.

To get an idea of the scope of the potential cleanup: At the height of the Iraq conflict, the U.S. and multinational forces occupied some 300 sites that have been or will be shuttered or turned over to the Iraqi Army.

Since 2007, 260 bases and facilities have closed, according to DOD. Environmental cleanup operations such as hazardous-waste disposal and burn pit, firing range and wastewater cleanups were “performed for each base or facility depending on the environmental features present, site-specific conditions and the planned reuse for the property,” a DOD spokesman said.

Liability issues

Decades of environmental mismanagement and more than a quarter-century of conflicts destroyed vast swaths of Iraq’s landscape prior to the current war. From a liability standpoint, discerning what damage is a result of U.S. action in Iraq is another crucial part of cleanup operations.

Still, as part of the drawdown, the United States has tackled cleanup of some sites officials say predated its presence in Iraq.

U.S. troops in southern Basra, for example, cleaned an oil spill and contaminated soil around a generator at an operations center they expect to transfer to the Iraqi Army this month. The U.S. military, however, says the damage was from previous tenants at the site. The price tag to remove all the contaminated soil, transport it to a proper waste disposal facility and implement a precautionary spillage management system under the generator was $9,800, they say.

It has long been part of Pentagon doctrine for U.S. forces to conduct baseline environmental quality assessments when forces stay in an area longer than 30 days — partly to ensure the United States won’t be held responsible for environmental conditions that weren’t its fault and partly to protect service members.

However, that policy has not always been thoroughly enforced, said Tad Davis, deputy assistant secretary of the Army for environment, safety and occupational health. A policy officially calling for environmental baseline assessment was laid out around 2008, he said.

“We put out the policy, and the policy is still in the process of being implemented throughout the service,” he said. “I think that more folks are being made aware of it and have a greater appreciation of the benefits of doing it.”

Copyright 2010 E&E Publishing. All Rights Reserved.

For more news on energy and the environment, visit www.greenwire.com.

Thanks to Joseph Gerson for sharing this article with the following comments:

In the following article, Selig S. Harrison describes a Realpolitik diplomatic alternative to the destructive and self-destructive U.S.-NATO war in Afghanistan.

Please note, among other things, he identifies the Pentagon’s commitment to having massive and strategically important bases in Bagram and Kandahar as major obstacles to any negotiated end to the war.

Harrison is an old Central Asia hand, and his analysis seems essentially correct to me. A negotiated end to the Afghanistan war is quite possible.

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http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100111/harrison

How to Exit Afghanistan

By Selig S. Harrison

This article appeared in the January 11, 2010 edition of The Nation.

With the Taliban growing steadily stronger, 30,000 more US troops will not lead to the early disengagement from the Afghan quagmire envisaged by President Obama, even in the improbable event that Hamid Karzai delivers on his promises of better governance. What is needed is a major United Nations diplomatic initiative designed to get Afghanistan’s regional neighbors to join in setting a disengagement timetable and to share responsibility for preventing a Taliban return to power in Kabul.

The timetable should provide not only for the early withdrawal of all US combat forces within, say, three years but also for the termination of US military access to air bases in Afghanistan within five years. It should set the stage, in short, for the military neutralization of Afghanistan.

A commitment to categorical disengagement has long been demanded by Taliban leaders as the condition for negotiations. It would test whether they are ready for the local peace deals that the Obama administration appears prepared to accept, or will insist on power-sharing in Kabul as the price of peace.

Even without a regional diplomatic framework, such a withdrawal timetable would be desirable and will become increasingly inescapable; but its political risks can be minimized by mobilizing regional support for the political containment of the Taliban.

Russia, India, Iran and Tajikistan all helped the United States to dislodge the Taliban in 2001. All of them, together with China, fear that a resurrected Taliban regime would pose a terrorist threat and would foment domestic Islamist insurgencies within their borders.

Russia faces nascent Islamist forces in its Muslim south. India worries that Taliban control in Kabul would lead to more Pakistan-based attacks like the 2008 one in Mumbai. The Shiite theocracy ruling Iran fears that a Sunni Taliban regime would help the Sunni Jundullah separatist movement in the Iranian part of Baluchistan and Salafi extremists in other non-Persian ethnic minority regions. Tajikistan faces Sunni extremist groups led by Hizb ut-Tahrir and is increasingly unsettled by an influx of Afghan refugees, which could grow if the Taliban return to power. China is beset by Islamist Uighur separatists in Xinjiang.

It is significant that all these neighboring countries are disturbed in varying degree by the expansion of US air bases near their borders; they recognize that no Taliban faction is likely to negotiate peace until the United States and NATO set a timetable that covers both withdrawal of their forces and closure of US bases. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s March 2009 proposal for a regional conference, revived recently by Henry Kissinger, has been ignored by potential participants because it assumes the indefinite continuance of a US military presence.

Iran and India are already giving large-scale economic aid to Kabul. Both might well increase it if US-NATO aid diminishes. New Delhi is helping to train the Afghan police and is prepared to join the United States and NATO in their faltering efforts to train the army.

China might well step up economic aid once the United States departs, as Li Qinggong, deputy secretary general of the China Institute for National Security Studies, hinted in a September 29 statement that also envisioned talks on “how to dispose of the forces of al-Qaeda” if and when the United States disengages and the possible establishment of “an international peacekeeping mission.” Beijing is investing $3 billion in Afghanistan’s Aynak copper mine and is “considering” a US request for help in police training. As members of a regional grouping known as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, all of Afghanistan’s neighbors signed a March 27 statement spelling out detailed action plans for counterterrorism and narcotics control.

The culmination of a UN-led regional diplomatic initiative would be an agreement that would not only set a timetable for military disengagement but would also bar the use of Afghanistan as a base for terrorism and seek to neutralize it as a focus of regional and major power rivalries. The agreement would be signed by the regional neighbors, the United States, NATO and others, like Saudi Arabia, that are playing a role in Afghanistan. Signatories would pledge to respect the country’s neutrality, not to provide arms to warring factions and to cooperate in UN enforcement of an arms aid ban.

Neutrality was Afghanistan’s traditional posture during the decades of the monarchy, until Soviet intervention dragged it into global power rivalries. “The best and most fruitful policy that one can imagine for Afghanistan,” said King Nadir Shah in 1931, “is a policy of neutrality.” The late Zahir Shah continued this policy and expressed his dismay to me when the Bonn Agreement of December 2001, following the ouster of the Taliban, spoke only of “non-interference” and studiously avoided references to “neutrality” and “nonalignment.”

To be sure, one of Afghanistan’s neighbors, its historic adversary Pakistan, created the Taliban and has continued to support it in the hope of establishing an anti-Indian client state in Kabul. But Islamabad would have two powerful reasons for joining in the accord and for stopping its aid. First, India, like other signatories, would be barred from operating out of Afghanistan militarily in the event of an India-Pakistan conflict and from using Afghanistan as a base for supporting Baluch and other ethnic insurgents in Pakistan. Second, the accord would be designed only to prevent the Taliban from re-establishing control in Kabul and using its local strongholds as a base for terrorist operations elsewhere, not to remove all Taliban influence in Afghanistan itself. Thus, Pakistan would still have political allies in future Afghan power struggles.

At present, the United States is dependent on Pakistan as a conduit for shipping supplies to its forces in Afghanistan. Thus, even though Washington gives more than $1 billion a year in military hardware and cash subsidies to the Pakistani army, it has been unable to use the threat of an aid cutoff to curb Pakistan’s aid to the Taliban. Disengagement would free the United States to use its aid leverage. Pressure from China, which provides Islamabad with fighter aircraft, would also help assure Pakistani participation in a regional accord. No UN monitoring system could completely seal off arms aid to the rival Afghan factions or bring an end to the competition between India and Pakistan for influence in Kabul; but a framework for regional cooperation could prevent a return to anarchy and civil war.

The principal obstacle to a regional neutralization accord is likely to be the Pentagon’s desire to have “permanent access” to its network of Afghan bases near the borders of Russia, China, Iran and Central Asia to facilitate intelligence surveillance as well as any future military operations. Some of the seventy-four US bases in Afghanistan have been developed for counterinsurgency operations and might be expendable. But the big airfields at Bagram and Kandahar, which accounted for $425.7 million in the fiscal 2008 Pentagon military construction budget alone, are expected to expand steadily in the years ahead.

President Obama has yet to address the future of the air bases, and until he does, no diplomatic cover for US disengagement will be possible. The underlying issue that he confronts is what an “exit strategy” means and whether the United States will be using Afghanistan to further its global power projection long after he has left office and long after the Taliban and Al Qaeda are forgotten.

About Selig S.Harrison

Selig S. Harrison is the author, with Diego Cordovez, of Out of Afghanistan and author of In Afghanistan’s Shadow. He is the director of the Asia Program at the Center for International Policy and a senior scholar of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

September 4, 2009 Friday 12:42 AM EST

The Illegalities of the Bush/Obama War Against Afghanistan

Francis A Boyle

Sep. 4, 2009 (Atlantic Free Press delivered by Newstex)

by Francis A. Boyle

The “Blowhard Zone”

On September 13, I got a call from FOX News asking me to go on the O’Reilly Factor program that night, two days after the tragic events of September 11, to debate O’Reilly on War v. Peace. It is pretty clear where I stood and where he stood. I had been on this program before. I knew what I was getting in to. But I felt it would be important for one lawyer to get up there in front of a national audience and argue against a war and for the application of domestic and international law enforcement, international procedures, and constitutional protections, which I did.

Unfortunately, O’Reilly has the highest ranked TV news program in the country. I thought someone should be on there on September 13. I think most people agree that I beat O’Reilly. By the end of the show he was agreeing with me. But the next night he was saying that we should bomb five different Arab countries and kill all their people. But let me review for you briefly some of the international law arguments that I have been making almost full time since September 13. They are set forth in the introduction in my new book, The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence.

Terrorism v. War

First, right after September 11 President Bush called these attacks an act of terrorism, which they were under the United States domestic law definition at that time. However, there is no generally accepted definition of an act of terrorism under international law, for reasons I explain in my book. Soon thereafter however and apparently after consultations with Secretary of State Powell, he proceeded to call these an act of war, ratcheting up the rhetoric and the legal and constitutional issues at stake here. They were not an act of war as traditionally defined. An act of war is a military attack by one state against another state. There is so far no evidence produced that the state of Afghanistan, at the time, either attacked the United States or authorized or approved such an attack. Indeed, just recently FBI Director Mueller and the deputy director of the CIA publicly admitted that they have found no evidence in Afghanistan linked to the September 11 attacks. If you believe the government’s account of what happened, which I think is highly questionable, 15 of these 19 people alleged to have committed these attacks were from Saudi Arabia and yet we went to war against Afghanistan. It does not really add up in my opinion.

But in any event this was not an act of war. Clearly these were acts of terrorism as defined by United States domestic law at the time, but not an act of war. Normally terrorism is dealt with as a matter of international and domestic law enforcement. Indeed there was a treaty directly on point at that time, the Montreal Sabotage Convention to which both the United States and Afghanistan were parties. It has an entire regime to deal with all issues in dispute here, including access to the International Court of Justice to resolve international disputes arising under the Treaty such as the extradition of Bin Laden. The Bush administration completely ignored this treaty, jettisoned it, set it aside, never even mentioned it. They paid no attention to this treaty or any of the other 12 international treaties dealing with acts of terrorism that could have been applied to handle this manner in a peaceful, lawful way.

War of Aggression Against Afghanistan

Bush, Jr. instead went to the United National Security Council to get a resolution authorizing the use of military force against Afghanistan and A Qaeda. He failed. You have to remember that. This war has never been authorized by the United Nations Security Council. If you read the two resolutions that he got, it is very clear that what Bush, Jr. tried to do was to get the exact same type of language that Bush, Sr. got from the U.N. Security Council in the late fall of 1990 to authorize a war against Iraq to produce its expulsion from Kuwait. It is very clear if you read these resolutions, Bush, Jr. tried to get the exact same language twice and they failed. Indeed the first Security (OOTC:FRCT) Council resolution refused to call what happened on September 11 an “armed attack” – that is by one state against another state. Rather they called it “terrorist attacks.” But the critical point here is that this war has never been approved by the U.N. Security Council so technically it is illegal under international law. It constitutes an act and a war of aggression by the United States against Afghanistan.

No Declaration of War

Now in addition Bush, Jr. then went to Congress to get authorization to go to war. It appears that Bush, Jr. tried to get a formal declaration of war along the lines of December 8, 1941 after the Day of Infamy like FDR got on Pearl Harbor. Bush then began to use the rhetoric of Pearl Harbor. If he had gotten this declaration of war Bush and his lawyers knew full well he would have been a Constitutional Dictator. And I refer you here to the book by my late friend Professor Miller of George Washington University Law School, Presidential Power that with a formal declaration of war the president becomes a Constitutional Dictator. He failed to get a declaration of war. Despite all the rhetoric we have heard by the Bush, Jr. administration Congress never declared war against Afghanistan or against anyone. There is technically no state of war today against anyone as a matter of constitutional law as formally declared.

Bush, Sr. v. Bush, Jr.

Now what Bush, Jr. did get was a War Powers Resolution authorization. Very similar to what Bush, Sr. got. Again the game plan was the same here. Follow the path already pioneered by Bush, Sr. in his war against Iraq. So he did get from Congress a War Powers Resolution authorization. This is what law professors call an imperfect declaration of war. It does not have the constitutional significance of a formal declaration of war. It authorizes the use of military force in specified, limited circumstances.

That is what Bush, Sr. got in 1991. It was to carry out the Security Council resolution that he had gotten a month and one-half before to expel Iraq from Kuwait. But that is all the authority he had – either from the Security Council or from Congress. And that is what he did. I am not here to approve of what Bush, Sr. did. I do not and I did not at the time. But just to compare Bush, Jr. with Bush, Sr. So Bush, Jr. got a War Powers Resolution, which is not a declaration of war.

Indeed, Senator Byrd, the Dean of the Senate, clearly said this is only a War Powers authorization and we will give authority to the president to use military force subject to the requirements of the War Powers Resolution, which means they must inform us, there is Congressional oversight, in theory, (I do not think they are doing much of it), controlled funding, and ultimately we decide, not the Executive branch of the government – we are the ones who gave the authorization to use force.

Again very similar to what Bush, Sr. got except the Bush, Jr. War Powers Resolution is far more dangerous because it basically gives him a blank check to use military force against any state that he says was somehow involved in the attack on September 11. And as you know that list has now gone up to 60 states.

So it is quite dangerous, which led me to say in interviews I gave at the time this is worse that the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Better from our perspective than a formal Declaration of War, but worse constitutionally and politically than the Tonkin Gulf resolution. But still subject to the control of Congress and the terms of the War Powers Resolution. Indeed you might be able to use that War Powers Resolution and the authorization in litigation that might come up. Keep that in mind.

No War Against Iraq!

For example, on Iraq. Right now they cannot use that War Powers Resolution to justify a war against Iraq. There is no evidence that Iraq was involved in the events on September 11. So they are fishing around for some other justification to go to war with Iraq. They have come up now with this doctrine of preemptive attack. Quite interesting that argument, doctrine was rejected by the Nuremberg Tribunal when the lawyers for the Nazi defendants made it at Nuremberg. They rejected any doctrine of preemptive attack.

Nazi Self-Defense

Then what happened after failing to get any formal authorization from the Security Council, the U.S. Ambassador Negroponte – who has the blood of about 35, 000 people in Nicaragua on his hands when he was U.S. Ambassador down in Honduras – sent a letter to the Security Council asserting Article 51 of the U.N. Charter to justify the war against Afghanistan. And basically saying that we reserve the right to use force in self-defense against any state we say is somehow involved in the events of September 11. Well, the San Francisco Chronicle interviewed me on that and asked what is the precedent for this? I said that the precedent again goes back to the Nuremberg Judgment of 1946 when the lawyers for the Nazi defendants argued that we, the Nazi government had a right to go to war in self-defense as we saw it, and no one could tell us any differently. Of course that preposterous argument was rejected by Nuremberg. It is very distressing to see some of the highest level of officials of our country making legal arguments that were rejected by the Nuremberg Tribunal.

Kangaroo Courts

Now let me say a few words about the so-called military commissions. I have a little handout out there called “Kangaroo Courts.” It would take me a whole law review article to go through all the problems with military commissions. I have been interviewed quite extensively. I have some comments on it in my book.

Professor Jordan Paust, a friend and colleague of mine at the University of Houston, just published an article in the Michigan Journal of International Law which I would encourage you to read. It goes through the major problems. But basically there are two treaties on point here that are being violated at a minimum.

First, the Third Geneva Convention of 1949. I will not go through all of the arguments here but it is clear that just about everyone down in Guantanamo (not counting the guys who were picked up in Bosnia and basically kidnapped) but all those apprehended over in Afghanistan and Pakistan would qualify as prisoners of war within the meaning of the Third Geneva Convention of 1949, and therefore have all the rights of prisoners of war within the meaning of that convention.

Right now however, as you know, all those rights are being denied. This is a serious war crime. And unfortunately President Bush, Jr. himself has incriminated himself under the Third Geneva Convention by signing the order setting up these military commissions. Not only has he incriminated himself under the Third Geneva Convention, but he has incriminated himself under the U.S. War Crimes Act of 1996 or so, signed into law by President Clinton and making it a serious felony for any United States citizen either to violate or order the violation of the Four Geneva Conventions of 1949.

The Federalist Society Cabal

I am not personally criticizing President Bush. He is not a lawyer. He was terribly advised, criminally mis-advised, by the cabal of Federalist Society lawyers that the Bush administration has assembled at the White House and the Department of Injustice under Ashcroft. President Bush, Jr., by signing this order, has opened himself up to prosecution anywhere in the world for violating the Third Geneva Convention, and certainly if there is evidence to believe that any of these individuals have been tortured, which is grave breach, let alone at the end of the day executed. So this is a very serious matter.

I did not vote for President Bush, Jr. But I certainly think it is a tragedy that these Federalist Society lawyers got the President of the United States of America, who is not a lawyer, to sign the order that would incriminate him under the Geneva Conventions and United States Domestic Criminal Law. This is what happened.

Jeopardizing U.S. Armed Forces

Moreover, by us stating we will not apply the Third Geneva Convention to these people we opened up United States armed forces to be denied protection under the Third Geneva Convention. And as you know, we now have U.S. armed forces in operation in Afghanistan, Georgia, the Philippines, in Yemen and perhaps in Iraq. Basically Bush position will be jeopardizing their ability to claim prisoner of war status. All that has to happen is our adversaries say they are unlawful combatants and we will not give you prisoner of war status. The Third Geneva Convention is one of the few protections U.S. armed forces have when they go into battle. Bush, Jr. and his Federalist Society lawyers just pulled the rug out from under them.

U.S. Police State

In addition the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights clearly applies down in Guantanamo. It applies any time individuals are under the jurisdiction of the United States of America. Guantanamo is a colonial enclave, I will not go through its status any further. But clearly those individuals are subject to our jurisdiction and have the rights set forth therein – which are currently being denied.

If and when many of these Bush, Ashcroft, Gonzalez police state practices make their way to the U.S. Supreme Court, we have to consider that a five to four majority of the Supreme Court gave the presidency to Bush, Jr. What is going to stop that same five to four majority from giving Bush, Jr. a police state? The only thing that is going to stop it is the people in this room.

Mr. Francis A. Boyle is a Professor in International Law.

Newstex ID: ATFR-0001-37729315

Copyright 2009 Newstex LLC

Copyright 2009 Atlantic Free Press

http://www.truthout.org/1012091

The Myth of “America”

Monday 12 October 2009

by: Dahr Jamail and Jason Coppola, t r u t h o u t | Feature

Happy Columbus Day

Columbus sailed the ocean blue in Fourteen Hundred and Ninety Two …

May the spirit of adventure and discovery always be with you.

Wishing you a great Columbus Day

– Columbus Day greeting card

To mark Columbus Day In 2004, the Medieval and Renaissance Center in UCLA published the final volume of a compendium of Columbus-era documents. Its general editor, Geoffrey Symcox, leaves little room for ambivalence when he says, “This is not your grandfather’s Columbus…. While giving the brilliant mariner his due, the collection portrays Columbus as an unrelenting social climber and self-promoter who stopped at nothing – not even exploitation, slavery, or twisting biblical scripture – to advance his ambitions…. Many of the unflattering documents have been known for the last century or more, but nobody paid much attention to them until recently. The fact that Columbus brought slavery, enormous exploitation or devastating diseases to the Americas used to be seen as a minor detail – if it was recognized at all – in light of his role as the great bringer of white man’s civilization to the benighted idolatrous American continent. But to historians today this information is very important. It changes our whole view of the enterprise.”

But does it?

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“They … brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells,” Christopher Columbus wrote in his logbook in 1495. “They willingly traded everything they owned…. They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features…. They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane…. They would make fine servants…. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want. Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.”

Catholic priest Bartolome de las Casas, in the multi-volume “History of the Indies” published in 1875, wrote, “… Slaves were the primary source of income for the Admiral (Columbus) with that income he intended to repay the money the Kings were spending in support of Spaniards on the Island. They provide profit and income to the Kings. (The Spaniards were driven by) insatiable greed … killing, terrorizing, afflicting, and torturing the native peoples … with the strangest and most varied new methods of cruelty.”

This systematic violence was aimed at preventing “Indians from daring to think of themselves as human beings. (The Spaniards) thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades…. My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write.”

Father Fray Antonio de Montesino, a Dominican preacher, in December 1511 said this in a sermon that implicated Christopher Columbus and the colonists in the genocide of the native peoples:

“Tell me by what right of justice do you hold these Indians in such a cruel and horrible servitude? On what authority have you waged such detestable wars against these people who dealt quietly and peacefully on their own lands? Wars in which you have destroyed such an infinite number of them by homicides and slaughters never heard of before …”

In 1892 [DMZHawaii note: The NCC resolution “A Faithful Response to the 500th Anniversay of the Arrival of Christopher Columbus” was adopted in 1990], the National Council of Churches, the largest ecumenical body in the United States, is known to have exhorted Christians to refrain from celebrating the Columbus quincentennial, saying, “What represented newness of freedom, hope, and opportunity for some was the occasion for oppression, degradation and genocide for others.”

Yet America continues to celebrate “Columbus Day.”

That Americans do so in the face of all evidence that there is little in the Columbian legacy that merits applause makes it easier for them to avoid taking responsibility for their own actions, or the actions of their government. Perhaps there is good reason.

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In “Columbus Day: A Clash of Myth and History,” journalist and media critic Norman Solomon discusses how historians who deal with recorded evidence are frequently depicted as “politically correct” revisionists while the general populace is manipulated into holding onto myths that brazenly applaud inconceivable acts of violence of men against fellow humans.

For those of us who are willing to ask how it becomes possible to manipulate the population of a country into accepting atrocity, the answer is not hard to find. It requires normalizing the inconceivable and drumming it in via the socio-cultural environment until it is internalized and embedded in the individual and collective consciousness. The combined or singular deployment of the media, the entertainment industry, mainstream education or any other agency, can achieve the desired result of convincing people that wars can be just, and strikes can be surgical, as long as it is the US that is doing it.

Never has this process been as blatant and overt as in recent years when the time has come for America to legitimize the idea of global domination. A Department of Defense report titled Joint Vision 2020 calls for the US military to be capable of “full spectrum dominance” of the entire planet. That means total domination and control of all land, sea, air, space and information.

That’s a lot of control.

How might this become accepted as “Policy” and remain unquestioned by almost an entire population?

The one word key to that is: Myths. The explanation is that the myths the United States is built upon have paved the way for the perpetuation of all manner of violations.

Among the first of these is that of Christopher Columbus. In school we were taught of his bravery, courage and perseverance. In a speech in 1989, George H.W. Bush proclaimed: “Christopher Columbus not only opened the door to a New World, but also set an example for us all by showing what monumental feats can be accomplished through perseverance and faith.”

Never mind that the monumental feats mainly comprised part butchery, part exploitation and the largest part betrayal of host populations of the “New World.”

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On their second arrival in Hispaniola, Haiti, Columbus’s crew took captive roughly two thousand local villagers who had arrived to greet them. Miguel Cuneo, a literate crew member, wrote, “When our caravels … were to leave for Spain, we gathered … one thousand six hundred male and female persons of those Indians, and these we embarked in our caravels on February 17, 1495…. For those who remained, we let it be known (to the Spaniards who manned the island’s fort) in the vicinity that anyone who wanted to take some of them could do so, to the amount desired, which was done.”

In 1500, Columbus wrote to a friend, “A hundred castellanoes (a Spanish coin) are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten (years old) are now in demand.”

Such original “monumental feats” as were accomplished by our nation’s heroes and role models were somewhat primitive. Local inhabitants who resisted Columbus and his crew had their ears or nose cut off, were attacked by dogs, skewered with pikes and shot. Reprisals were so severe that many of the natives committed mass suicide and women began practicing abortions in order not to leave children enslaved. The population of Haiti at the time of Columbus’s arrival was between 1.5 million and 3 million. Sixty years later, every single native had been murdered.

Today, “perseverance and faith” allow us to accomplish much more and with far greater impunity. The US continues to liberate Iraq and Afghanistan with 2,000-pound bombs in civilian areas and purge Pakistan via drone attacks on weddings.

Neither case is of isolated whimsy. It was and remains policy.

In “A People’s History of the United States,” celebrated historian Howard Zinn describes how Arawak men and women emerged from their villages to greet their guests with food, water and gifts when Columbus landed at the Bahamas. But Columbus wanted something else. “Gold is most excellent; gold constitutes treasure; and he who has it does all he wants in the world, and can even lift souls up to Paradise,” he wrote to the king and queen of Spain in 1503.

Rather than gold, however, Columbus only found slaves when he arrived on his second visit with seventeen ships and over 1,200 men. Ravaging various Caribbean islands, Columbus took natives as captives as he sailed. Of these he picked 500 of the best specimens and shipped them back to Spain. Two hundred of these died en route, while the survivors were put up for sale by the archdeacon of the town where they landed.

Columbus needed more than mere slaves to sell, and Zinn’s account informs us, “… desperate to pay back dividends to those who had invested, (he) had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.

“The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed.”

As a younger priest, the aforementioned De las Casas had participated in the conquest of Cuba and owned a plantation where natives worked as slaves before he found his conscience and gave it up. His first-person accounts reveal that the Spaniards “thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades. They forced their way into native settlements, slaughtering everyone they found there, including small children, old men, pregnant women, and even women who had just given birth. They hacked them to pieces, slicing open their bellies with their swords as though they were sheep herded into a pen. They even laid wagers on whether they could manage to slice a man in two at a stroke, or cut an individual’s head from his body, or disembowel him with a single blow of their axes. They grabbed suckling infants by the feet and, ripping them from their mothers’ breasts, dashed them headlong against the rocks. Others, laughing and joking all the while, threw them over their shoulders into a river, shouting: ‘Wriggle, you litle perisher.’ They slaughtered anyone on their path …”

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Full Spectrum Dominance

In a letter to the Spanish court dated February 15, 1492, Columbus presented his version of full spectrum dominance: “to conquer the world, spread the Christian faith and regain the Holy Land and the Temple Mount.”

With this radical ideology, Las Casas records, “They spared no one, erecting especially wide gibbets on which they could string their victims up with their feet just off the ground and then burned them alive thirteen at a time, in honour of our Saviour and the twelve Apostles.”

About incorporating these accounts in his book, Zinn explained to Truthout, “My point is not to grieve for the victims and denounce the executioners. Those tears, that anger, cast into the past, deplete our moral energy for the present … but I do remember a statement I once read: The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don’t listen to it, you will never know what justice is.”

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Author journalist Chris Hedges believes that glorification of (the atrocities of) Columbus is one of several myths that sustain the illusions that justify the imperial visions of the United States.

In conversation with Truthout, he said, “It’s really easy to build a holocaust museum that condemns Germans. It’s another issue to build a museum that confronts our own genocide, the genocide that was perpetrated by our own ancestors towards Native Americans or towards African-Americans. I am all for documenting and remembering the [World War II] Holocaust, but the disparity between the reality of the [World War II] Holocaust or the reality of the genocide as illustrated in the [World War II] Holocaust museum and the utter historical amnesia in the Native American museum in Washington is really frightening and shows a complete inability in a public arena for us to examine who we are and what we’ve done.”

Noam Chomsky holds a similar view. “We have [World War II] Holocaust museums all over the place about what the Germans did,” Chomsky told Truthout. “Do we have one about what we did? I mean about slavery, about the Native American population? It’s not that the people involved didn’t know about it. John Quincy Adams, a great grand strategist, who had a major role in these atrocities, in his later years when he reflected on them, referred to that hapless race of North Americans, which we are exterminating with such insidious cruelty. They knew exactly what they were doing. But it doesn’t matter. It’s us.”

Explaining how the mythology of a country becomes its historic reality, Chomsky stated, “If you are well-educated, you can internalize that and it. That’s part of what a good education is about, enabling people to live with those contradictions. And you see it very consistently. In the case of, say, the Iraq war, try to find somebody who had a principled objection. Actually you can, occasionally, but it’s suppressed.”

Historical revisionism and amnesia are critical for nation-building, opines Paul Woodward, the writer and author of the blog “War In Context”. He elaborates, “Every nation is subject to its own particular form of historical amnesia. Likewise, imperial powers have their own grandiose revisionist tendencies. Yet there is another form of historical denial particular to recently invented nations whose myth-making efforts are inextricably bound together with the process of the nation’s birth …

“Whereas older nations are by and large populated by people whose ancestral roots penetrated that land well before it took on the clear definition of a nation state, the majority of the people in an invented nation – such as the United States or Israel – have ancestry that inevitably leads elsewhere. This exposes the ephemeral link between the peoples’ history and the nation’s history. Add to that the fact that such nations came into being through grotesque acts of dispossession and it is clear that a psychological drive to hold aloft an atemporal exceptionalism becomes an existential necessity. National security requires that the past be erased.”

Robert Jensen is an author and teaches media law, ethics and politics at the University of Texas. In an essay where he justifies his decision to not celebrate Thanksgiving as a holiday, he says, “Imagine that Germany won World War II and that a Nazi regime endured for some decades, eventually giving way to a more liberal state with a softer version of German-supremacist ideology. Imagine that a century later Germans celebrated a holiday offering a whitewashed version of German/Jewish history that ignored that holocaust and the deep anti-Semitism of the culture. Imagine that the holiday provided a welcomed time for families and friends to gather and enjoy food and conversation. Imagine that businesses, schools and government offices closed on this day. What would we say about such a holiday? Would we not question the distortions woven into such a celebration? Would we not demand a more accurate historical account? Would we not, in fact, denounce such a holiday as grotesque?”

Of course we would.

But our story is different, and once again this year, on October 12, we will once again “Hail Columbus.”

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Bhaswati Sengupta contributed to this report.

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Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist, is the author of “The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan,” (Haymarket Books, 2009), and “Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq,” (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from occupied Iraq for nine months as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey over the last five years.

Jason Coppola is the director and producer of the documentary film “Justify My War,” which explores the rationalization of war in American culture, comparing the siege of Fallujah with the massacre at Wounded Knee. Coppola has worked in Iraq as well as on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.