George W...aterboarding Bush inadvertently realises that, despite a promising start, Switzerland is a different switzer to the Swedish smörgåsbord

Swiss Miss Bush: GWB Ducks Geneva Criminal Torture Charges

by Bill Quigley

Justice for George W’s torture violations jumped much closer this weekend. Ex-President George W Bush was supposed to fly to Switzerland to speak in Geneva February 15. But his speech was cancelled over the weekend because of concerns about protests and efforts by human rights organizations asking Swiss prosecutors to charge Bush with torture and serve him with an arrest warrant.

Two things made this possible. Switzerland allows the prosecution of human rights violators from other countries if the violator is on Swiss soil and George W admitted he authorized water boarding detainees in his recent memoir. Torture is internationally banned by the Convention Against Torture.

The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, the International Federation for Human Rights, and the US-based Center for Constitutional Rights prepared criminal complaints with more than 2500 pages of supporting material to submit to the Swiss prosecutor. These criminal complaints were signed by more than 60 human rights organizations world wide and by the former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, the former UN Special Rapporteur on Independence of Judges and Lawyers, and Nobel Peace Prize recipients Shirin Ebadi and Perez Esquivel.

Amnesty International, which has repeatedly called for criminal investigation of torture by GWB, sent Swiss prosecutors a detailed legal and factual analysis of President Bush’s criminal responsibility for torture.

While some traditionalists in the human rights community scoff at the notion that GWB and others will ever be held accountable for their violations, experts disagree.

“Nobody – from those who administered the practices to those at the top of the chain of command – is under a shield of absolute immunity for the practices of secret detention, extraordinary rendition and torture,” Martin Scheinin, UN special rapporteur on human rights and professor of public international law at the European University Institute told The Guardian. ”Legally this case is quite clear. Bush does not enjoy immunity as a former head of state, and he has command responsibility for the decisions that were taken.”

Similar efforts to prosecute former President Bush, former Bush lawyers Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Federal Appeals Court Judge Jay Bybee, John Yoo, William J. Haynes II, David Addington, and Douglas J Feith are proceeding in Spain.

All of these international efforts to seek justice for the human rights violations committed by the Bush administration are possible only because the US has refused to prosecute – another disappointment by the Obama administration.

Ironically, February 7 is the ninth anniversary of the date when GWB unilaterally decided that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to enemy combatants. GWB denied, as most facing criminal charges do, that the possibility of prosecution was involved at all in the decision to cancel his trip.

The human rights community promised to pursue Bush and the other human rights violators whenever they leave the US. Katherine Gallagher and Claire Tixiere, the lead lawyers authoring the 2500 page criminal case in Geneva, stated: “The reach of the Convention Against Torture is wide – this case is prepared and will be waiting for him wherever he travels next. Torturers – even if they are former presidents of the United States – must be held to account and prosecuted. Impunity for Bush must end.”


Bill Quigley represented Pere Jean-Juste many times in Haiti along with the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux in Port au Prince and the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti. Bill is on leave from Loyola University College of Law in New Orleans serving as Legal Director of the Center for Constitutional Rights. He can be reached at: quigley77@gmail.com. Read other articles by Bill.

Understanding the Rise of China

By Martin Jacques

Policy Innovations - for a fairer globalization
TED, February 3, 2011

In this TED talk, Martin Jacques looks at some false assumptions that prevent the West from fully understanding the rise of China. With the Chinese economy on track to match the U.S. economy around 2020 and to double it by midcentury, we are entering a unique era where a developing country takes the lead.
 
Jacques believes that China and the West diverge on three major points: 1. China sees itself less in nation-state terms and more in civilizational terms with ancient roots: Confucianism, family, guanxi; 2. Chinese report a more unified concept of race: more than 90 percent identify as Han despite variation within that group; and 3. China has a more intimate and less oppositional state-society relationship with quasi-religious overtones, a patriarchal guardianship that has endured no serious rivals or challenges to authority.

The result here is that modernization will not necessarily imply Westernization, and that Westerners risk being both arrogant and ignorant if they don't recognize this fact. The West will need to recapture its sense of future if it is to understand a China with many cities of more than 20 million inhabitants.

The big-picture positive Jacques sees in all this is that for several centuries humanity has been dominated by a cultural fragment of its total population. The cosmopolitan pluralism of a rising China, along with Brazil, India, and other large developing countries, thus presents itself as a global rebalancing.

A Villa in the Jungle?

by Uri Avnery / February 5th, 2011

We are in the middle of a geological event. An earthquake of epoch-making dimensions is changing the landscape of our region. Mountains turn into valleys, islands emerge from the sea, volcanoes cover the land with lava.

People are afraid of change. When it happens, they tend to deny, ignore, pretend that nothing really important is happening.

Israelis are no exception. While in neighboring Egypt earth-shattering events were taking place, Israel was absorbed with a scandal in the army high command. The Minister of Defense abhors the incumbent Chief of Staff and makes no secret of it. The presumptive new chief was exposed as a liar and his appointment canceled. These were the headlines.

But what is happening now in Egypt will change our lives.

As usual, nobody foresaw it. The much-feted Mossad was taken by surprise, as was the CIA and all the other celebrated services of this kind.

Yet there should have been no surprise at all – except about the incredible force of the eruption. In the last few years, we have mentioned many times in this column that all over the Arab world, multitudes of young people are growing up with a profound contempt for their leaders, and that sooner or later this will lead to an uprising. These were not prophesies, but rather a sober analysis of probabilities.

The turmoil in Egypt was caused by economic factors: the rising cost of living, the poverty, the unemployment, the hopelessness of the educated young. But let there be no mistake: the underlying causes are far more profound. They can be summed up in one word: Palestine.

In Arab culture, nothing is more important than honor. People can suffer deprivation, but they will not stand humiliation.

Yet what every young Arab from Morocco to Oman saw daily was his leaders humiliating themselves, forsaking their Palestinian brothers in order to gain favor and money from America, collaborating with the Israeli occupation, cringing before the new colonizers. This was deeply humiliating for young people brought up on the achievements of Arab culture in times gone by and the glories of the early Caliphs.

Nowhere was this loss of honor more obvious than in Egypt, which openly collaborated with the Israeli leadership in imposing the shameful blockade on the Gaza Strip, condemning 1.5 million Arabs to malnutrition and worse. It was never just an Israeli blockade, but an Israeli-Egyptian one, lubricated by 1.5 billion US dollars every year.

I have reflected many times – out loud – how I would feel if I were a 15 year-old boy in Alexandria, Amman or Aleppo, seeing my leaders behave like abject slaves of the Americans and the Israelis, while oppressing and despoiling their own subjects. At that age, I myself joined a terrorist organization. Why would an Arab boy be different?

A dictator may be tolerated when he reflects national dignity. But a dictator who expresses national shame is a tree without roots – any strong wind can blow him over.

For me, the only question was where in the Arab world it would start. Egypt – like Tunisia – was low on my list. Yet here it is – the great Arab revolution taking place in Egypt.

This is a wonder in itself. If Tunisia was a small wonder, this is a huge one.

I love the Egyptian people. True, one cannot really like 88 million individuals, but one can certainly like one people more than another. In this respect, one is allowed generalize.

The Egyptians you meet in the streets, in the homes of the intellectual elite and in the alleys of the poorest of the poor, are an incredibly patient lot. They are endowed with an irrepressible sense of humor. They are also immensely proud of the country and its 8000 years of history.

For an Israeli, used to his aggressive compatriots, the almost complete lack of aggressiveness of the Egyptians is astonishing. I vividly remember one particular scene: I was in a taxi in Cairo when it collided with another. Both drivers leapt out and started to curse each other in blood-curling terms. And then quite suddenly, both of them stopped shouting and burst into laughter.

A Westerner coming to Egypt either loves it or hates it. The moment you set your foot on Egyptian soil, time loses its tyranny. Everything becomes less urgent, everything is muddled, yet in a miraculous way things sort themselves out. Patience seems boundless. This may mislead a dictator. Because patience can end suddenly.

It’s like a faulty dam on a river. The water rises behind the dam, imperceptibly slowly and silently – but if it reaches a critical level, the dam will burst, sweeping everything before it.

My own first meeting with Egypt was intoxicating. After Anwar Sadat’s unprecedented visit to Jerusalem, I rushed to Cairo. I had no visa. I shall never forget the moment I presented my Israeli passport to the stout official at the airport. He leafed through it, becoming more and more bewildered – and then he raised his head with a wide smile and said “marhaba”, welcome. At the time we were the only three Israelis in the huge city, and we were feted like kings, almost expecting at any moment to be lifted onto people’s shoulders. Peace was in the air, and the masses of Egypt loved it.

It took no more than a few months for this to change profoundly. Sadat hoped – sincerely, I believe – that he was also bringing deliverance to the Palestinians. Under intense pressure from Menachem Begin and Jimmy Carter, he agreed to a vague wording. Soon enough he learned that Begin did not dream of fulfilling this obligation. For Begin, the peace agreement with Egypt was a separate peace to enable him to intensify the war against the Palestinians.

The Egyptians – starting with the cultural elite and filtering down to the masses – never forgave this. They felt deceived. There may not be much love for the Palestinians – but betraying a poor relative is shameful in Arab tradition. Seeing Hosni Mubarak collaborating with this betrayal led many Egyptians to despise him. This contempt lies beneath everything that happened this week. Consciously or unconsciously, the millions who are shouting “Mubarak Go Away” echo this contempt.

In every revolution there is the “Yeltsin Moment”. The columns of tanks are sent into the capital to reinstate the dictatorship. At the critical moment, the masses confront the soldiers. If the soldiers refuse to shoot, the game is over. Yeltsin climbed on the tank, ElBaradei addressed the masses in al Tahrir Square. That is the moment a prudent dictator flees abroad, as did the Shah and now the Tunisian boss.

Then there is the “Berlin Moment”, when a regime crumbles and nobody in power knows what to do, and only the anonymous masses seem to know exactly what they want: they wanted the Wall to fall.

And there is the “Ceausescu moment”. The dictator stands on the balcony addressing the crowd, when suddenly from below a chorus of “Down With The Tyrant!” swells up. For a moment, the dictator is speechless, moving his lips noiselessly, then he disappears. This, in a way, happened to Mubarak, making a ridiculous speech and trying in vain to stem the tide.

If Mubarak is cut off from reality, Binyamin Netanyahu is no less. He and his colleagues seem unable to grasp the fateful meaning of these events for Israel.

When Egypt moves, the Arab world follows. Whatever transpires in the immediate future in Egypt – democracy or an army dictatorship – It is only a matter of (a short) time before the dictators fall all over the Arab world, and the masses will shape a new reality, without the generals.

Everything the Israeli leadership has done in the last 44 years of occupation or 63 years of its existence is becoming obsolete. We are facing a new reality. We can ignore it – insisting that we are “a villa in the jungle”, as Ehud Barak famously put it – or find our proper place in the new reality.

Peace with the Palestinians is no longer a luxury. It is an absolute necessity. Peace now, peace quickly. Peace with the Palestinians, and then peace with the democratic masses all over the Arab world, peace with the reasonable Islamic forces (like Hamas and the Muslim Brothers, who are quite different from al Qaeda), peace with the leaders who are about to emerge in Egypt and everywhere.


Uri Avnery is a peace activist, journalist, and writer. Read other articles by Uri, or visit Uri's website.

WikiLeaks nominated for Nobel

Whistleblowing website WikiLeaks has been nominated for the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize, the Norwegian politician behind the proposal said, a day after the deadline for nominations expired.

Snorre Valen on Wednesday said that the whistleblowing website was one of the most important contributors to freedom of speech in the 21st century.

Valen said that by disclosing information about corruption, human rights abuses and war crimes, WikiLeaks was a "natural contender" for the peace prize.

WikiLeaks, founded by Australian Julian Assange, has released hundreds of thousands of classified documents leaked to the website. The documents have included thousands of classified US diplomatic cables, as well as confidential material on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Members of parliament from all nations, political science and law professors, and previous winners may all submit nominations to the Nobel Peace Prize.

Awarding WikiLeaks the prize would likely provoke criticism of the Nobel Committee, which has courted controversy with its two most recent choices, jailed Chinese pro-democracy activist Liu Xiaobo and US President Barack Obama a few months after his election.

Assange is currently free on bail in Britain, while he fights extradition to Sweden for questioning on charges of sexual misconduct.



Source: Agencies

Goodbye to “Globalization”

by Harold James and Matteo Albanese


FLORENCE – The term “globalization” first swept the world in the 1990’s and reached its highpoint of popularity in 2000 and 2001. In 2001, for instance, Le Monde contained more than 3,500 references to mondialisation. But then the figure steadily fell – more than 80% by 2006. Since the outbreak of the financial crisis in 2007, the word’s usage in major newspapers such as the New York Times and the Financial Times has fallen still further. Globalization is on its way out.

A brief history of the concept, and a comparison with another term that also became discredited by overuse, helps to explain what happened.

The twentieth century’s two most important conceptual innovations, “totalitarianism” and “globalization,” were originally Italian. The first term defined the tumultuous middle of the twentieth century, the latter its benign ending. “Totalitarianism” finally disintegrated in 1989, and globalization prevailed.

Both terms originated as criticisms that were supposed to undermine and subvert the political tendencies they described. But both ended up being just as frequently and enthusiastically used by the respective tendencies’ proponents.

“Totalitarianism” began its conceptual life in 1923 as a criticism or parody by the liberal writer Giovanni Amendola of the megalomaniacal pretensions of Benito Mussolini’s new regime. In the course of a few years, it had become the proud self-definition of Italian fascism, endorsed by Mussolini’s education minister, Giovanni Gentile, who became the official philosopher of fascism, and then incorporated in a ghost-written article by Mussolini himself in the Encyclopedia of Fascism.

In both the hostile and the celebratory use of the word, totalitarianism was intended to describe a movement that embraced all aspects of life in what purported to be a coherent philosophy of politics, economics, and society. Fascists liked to think of themselves as imbued with total knowledge and total power.

Today, few know where the term “globalization” originated. The Oxford English Dictionary gives as the earliest reference to its current usage an academic article from 1972. The word had been used earlier, but in a rather different sense. It was a diplomatic term conveying the linkage between disparate policy areas (for example, in negotiating simultaneously on financial and security matters).

The OED etymology ignores the non-English origins of the term, which can be found in the inventive linguistic terminology of continental European student radicalism. In 1970, the radical left-wing Italian underground periodical Sinistra Proletaria carried an article entitled “The Process of Globalization of Capitalist Society,” which was a description of IBM, an “organization which presents itself as a totality and controls all its activities towards the goal of profit and ‘globalizes’ all activity in the productive process.” Because IBM, according to the article, produced in 14 countries and sold in 109, it “contains in itself the globalization (mondializzazione) of capitalist imperialism.” This obscure left-wing publication is the first known reference to globalization in its contemporary sense.

Since then, the term has had ups and downs. It became increasingly faddish in the 1990’s, but mostly as a term of abuse. In the late 1990’s and early 2000’s, anti-globalization demonstrations targeted the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Economic Forum, and McDonald’s. Globalization was seen at this time – as in the vision of the 1960’s Italian leftists – as the exploitation of the world’s poor by a plutocratic and technocratic elite.

But in the 2000’s, the meaning of globalization shifted and began to take on a semi-positive note, in large part because it increasingly looked as if the major winners of globalization included many rapidly growing emerging markets. Indeed, countries that had previously been described as “under-developed” or “Third World” were becoming incipient global hegemons. Moreover, many former critics began to recognize global connectedness as a way of solving global problems such as climate change, economic crisis, and poverty.

Historians have started to project globalization backwards. It is no longer seen only as a story of the capital-market-driven integration of the last two decades of the twentieth century, or even of an “early wave of globalization” in the nineteenth century, when the gold standard and the Atlantic telegram seemed to unite the world. Instead, the wider and deeper historical vision is of a globalization that encompasses the Roman empire and the Song dynasty, and goes back to the globalization of the human species from a common African origin.

The terms that we use to describe complex political and social phenomena and processes have odd ambiguities. Some concepts that are designed as criticisms are quickly inverted to become celebratory.

By 2011, anti-globalization rhetoric had largely faded, and globalization is thought of as not something to be neither fought nor cheered, but as a fundamental characteristic of the human story, in which disparate geographies and diverse themes are inextricably intertwined. In short, globalization has lost its polemical bite, and with that loss, its attractions as a concept have faded.


Harold James is Professor of History and International Affairs at Princeton University. Matteo Albanese is a researcher in history at the European University Institute.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2011.
http://www.project-syndicate.org/

For a podcast of this commentary in English, please use this link:
http://media.blubrry.com/ps/media.libsyn.com/media/ps/james49.mp3

Wealth gap widens between super rich and rest

By Chrystia Freeland, Global Editor-at-Large of Reuters


Alan Greenspan - the legendary chairman of the United States' Federal Reserve - is the high priest of free market capitalism.

As a young man he was even a devotee and acolyte of arch libertarian writer, Ayn Rand.
 
Keep that pedigree in mind when you consider the striking observation he made in a television interview last summer:

"Our problem basically is that we have a very distorted economy, in the sense that there has been a significant recovery in our limited area of the economy amongst high-income individuals...

"Large banks, who are doing much better and large corporations, whom you point out and everyone is pointing out, are in excellent shape. The rest of the economy, small business, small banks, and a very significant amount of the labour force, which is in tragic unemployment, long-term unemployment - that is pulling the economy apart. The average of those two is what we are looking at - that they are fundamentally two separate types of economies."

Mr Greenspan is right, of course, and not just about the US. Over the past three decades, the world economy has been reshaped by two mega-trends.

One is a surge in the size and connectedness of international markets.


Widening gap

This has created a burst of global prosperity that has lifted hundreds of millions out of absolute poverty and into the middle class, particularly in the rising Asian power-houses of China and India.

But even as the global economy has grown overall, within countries, the gap between rich and poor has increased.

This winner-take-all phenomenon has been particularly stark in the US, where, between 2002 and 2007, 65% of all income growth went to the top 1% of the population.

But the divide has also widened in Britain, Canada, Germany and Scandinavia.

It has increased in the booming emerging markets, too - communist China now has a gap between rich and poor as big as that of the laissez-faire US.

This split between the super-rich and everyone else prompted three Citigroup analysts to conclude that "the world is dividing into two blocs - the plutonomy and everyone else".

As they explained in a 2005 report: In a plutonomy there is no such animal as "the US consumer" or "the UK consumer", or indeed the "Russian consumer".


'Small bites'

There are rich consumers, few in number, but disproportionate in the gigantic slice of income and consumption they take.

There are the rest, the "non-rich", the multitudinous many, but only accounting for surprisingly small bites of the national pie.

Through my work as a business journalist, I have spent the better part of the past decade shadowing these plutocrats - attending the same exclusive conferences in Europe, conducting interviews over cappuccinos on Martha's Vineyard or in Silicon Valley meeting rooms, observing high-powered dinner parties in Manhattan.

Some of what I have learned is entirely predictable - the rich are, as F Scott Fitzgerald famously noted, "different from you and me".

What is more relevant to our times, though, is that the rich of today are also different from the rich of yesterday.

For the most part, today's plutocrats are not a leisured, landed gentry of inherited wealth.

John Stuart Mill's complaint about the super-elite of his era - that, like the Duke of Bedford, they grew rich in their sleep - does not much apply to today's nerdy, workaholic, perpetually jet-lagged plutocrats.


Modern plutocracy

Emmanuel Saez, an award winning economist who is one of the premier students of the super-elite, has found that in 1916, the richest 1% of Americans received only one-fifth of their income from paid work.

In 2004, that figure had tripled, to 60%.

Many of today's plutocrats are the beneficiaries of globalisation. And even those who made their money at home have figured out that to make more they need to embrace the global economy.

As a result, they are becoming a trans-global community of peers who have more in common with one another than with their countrymen back home.

Whether they maintain primary residences in New York or Hong Kong, Moscow or Mumbai, today's super-rich are increasingly a nation unto themselves.

One of the places where that nation meets up is in Davos, Switzerland, at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF).

But this year, even the WEF, the premier convener of the global super-elite, is worried that income inequality has grown too extreme.

"Economic disparity and global governance failures both influence the evolution of many other global risks and inhibit our capacity to respond effectively to them," the forum's Global Risks report for this year's conference notes.

"In this way, the global risk context in 2011 is defined by a 21 Century paradox: as the world grows together, it is also growing apart."

So, here lies the dilemma. In today's hyper competitive global economy we need our super rich and the innovative companies they create more than ever. But they need us too - as consumers, as employees, as fellow citizens.

But here is the lesson of history. In the long run super elites can only survive in one of two ways - by suppressing dissent, or by sharing the wealth.

I know which one I prefer.


Watch Newsnight's Rich Night on Wednesday 2 February 2011 at 10.30pm on BBC Two, and then afterwards on the BBC iPlayer and Newsnight website.

Clashes erupt amid Cairo protests

By Roger Hardy, Middle East analyst, Woodrow Wilson Center


The Arab order is crumbling. But whether it will collapse or somehow re-invent itself is far from certain.

Arab rulers, from North Africa to the Gulf, in rich countries and poor, find themselves in essentially the same boat.

Virtually without exception, they preside over corrupt autocracies with little or no legitimacy in the eyes of their people.

All of them now watch Egypt's "days of rage" with mounting trepidation. In the fate of the ailing Egyptian ruler, 82-year-old Hosni Mubarak, they see their own.

Western commentators are right to say the protests are about "them" rather than "us".

The anger of the protesters is largely directed inwards - at a bankrupt Arab order - rather than outwards at Israel, the United States or the West.

Largely, but not entirely. The West is complicit in Arab autocracy.

For decades, American and European leaders chose stability over democracy. Now the chickens are coming home to roost.

President George W Bush tried, briefly, to pursue a "freedom agenda" in the Middle East but it failed, and ageing autocrats could once again breathe freely.

Now, Western leaders including Barack Obama find themselves essentially onlookers as events move with dizzying speed towards an outcome none can foresee.

Others are spectators, too, even if they pretend otherwise.

Iran is acting as if the Arab masses are belatedly following the example of the Khomeini revolution.

In fact, if the young demonstrators have a role model - and some actively disavow one - it is democratic Turkey rather than theocratic Iran.

Also a bystander is al-Qaeda, whose pretensions to being the voice of Arab and Muslim discontent have been punctured.


Who owns the future?

Analysts would do well to exercise a little humility.

My own guess, for what it is worth, is that this is not the beginning of an Arab spring, but of something more messy and drawn-out.

The old order still has plenty of fight in it.

The battle for the Arab future is under way. Since the stakes are high, the struggle will be fierce.


Roger Hardy is a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington DC.