Battlestar Galactica Meets with UN

President Roslyn and Admiral Adama with cast of Battlestar.
Image: SciFi.com
As the popular show on SciFi heads towards its final episode Friday, President Laura Roslyn and Admiral William Adama met with a panel of United Nations officials last night (this is true) for a discussion of humanitarian issues.

This comes not a moment too soon. It's about time the United Nations embraced some new ideas that can overcome the permanent state of negotiation and lack of regulatory teeth in their General Assembly and Security Council Resolutions.

I don't know what issues were under discussion, but I can only imagine the topics included something like the following:

*Using FTL drives to transport emergency supplies into Darfur region despite President al-Bashir's decision to expel all relief workers.

*How Kamala Extract induced visions can be useful for predicting future crises and might also be fun at state dinners.

*Suggesting "cylon goo" as a means for the United States to repair its estimated $2.2 trillion in ailing infrastructure.

*How Israelis and Palestinians can be induced to get along by eliminating their "Resurrection Ship" that makes both think they can live forever.

*Encouraging embattled world leaders to adopt Admiral Adama's approach of binge drinking during times of crisis. Proven useful for overcoming such difficulties as: working with sworn enemies, handling the deterioration of your only means of defense, overcoming the death of a loved one, or just to let people know that you're really sad despite your permanently stern demeanor. The Japanese Finance Minister and French President have already led the way (not to mention the famous boozer Richard Nixon).

*How it's about time to tell the distinguished delegate from the great country of North Korea to go frak himself.

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Death for Blasphemy in Kabul

A student in Afghanistan has been sentenced to death for passing out an article about women's rights in Islam.

The student, Parwiz Kambakhsh, 24, from northern Afghanistan, was arrested in 2007 and sentenced to death for blasphemy after accusations that he had written and distributed an article about the role of women in Islam. Kambakhsh has denied having written the article and said he had downloaded it from the Internet. His family and lawyers say he has been denied a fair trial.

And this wasn't some minor court in the mountains of Tora Bora, this was the Supreme Court in Kabul that made the decision. This is only the latest in a series of assaults against freedom of speech in Karzai's government.

An Afghan journalist, Javed Ahmad, 23, who worked for the Canadian broadcaster CTV, was shot and killed Tuesday evening in the center of the southern city of Kandahar, the second killing of an Afghan journalist in southern Afghanistan in nine months. Abdul Samad Rohani, a journalist in Helmand Province, was shot and killed last year, in an attack thought to be connected to his investigation of police involvement in the drug trade.

Three other well-established journalists have left Kandahar in recent months after receiving threats from Taliban insurgents over their coverage of events.

Another journalist, Ghows Zalmai, has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for blasphemy after publishing a Dari translation of the Koran that hard-line clerics disputed, said Human Rights Watch, based in New York.

Western diplomats and human rights organizations have expressed concern that despite Karzai's assurances of press freedom and freedom of speech, journalists and civilians are under increasing threat from both insurgents and conservative religious clerics allied with the government. Karzai, his critics say, is reluctant to move against the clerics in an election year.

Afghanistan is now at the center of a perfect storm involving three disastrous elements: religious fundamentalism, a corrupt government backed by Western powers largely indifferent to human rights (or anything other than targeting "insurgents") and an economy based on being the world's largest supplier of heroin.

Meanwhile, the brave women of RAWA continue to work for peace and justice. They need economic, medical and legal support. Not increased militarism. That road will only strengthen the corrupt system that has been put in place.

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Talking Turkey: or, Kurds and Ways

Kurdish language and identity is under attack by our closest ally in the Middle East.
Image: Kurdish Film Festival
The Turkish government is in an uproar over a lawmaker's choice to speak Kurdish before his country's parliament today. His comments were in honor of International Mother Language Day, a UN designated holiday to celebrate the diversity of languages. Ahmed Turk had diplomatic immunity from arrest even though speaking Kurdish is against the law. A previous activist was not so lucky.

In 1991, Leyla Zana spoke her native language when she was sworn in as a deputy. She had immunity as a lawmaker, but it was later stripped and she served 10 years in prison on other Kurdish-related charges.

The US support for Turkish repression against the Kurds has been an ugly stain on our government's claim to promote democracy and freedom in the Middle East. The think tank, Foreign Policy in Focus, has an excellent "Brief History" highlighting this bipartisan support for human rights abuses throughout the last three decades.

I found the following phrase in Kurdish: Yek ziman her bes nabê. It translates to "One language is never enough."

Please feel free to e-mail it to the US Ambassador to Turkey, James F. Jeffery, at: webmaster_ankara@state.gov. You can also contact the Turkish Ministry of Tourism in Washington, D.C. at: info.dc@tourismturkey.org.

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Clinton: Human Rights? Show Me the Yuan!

Protestors in China beaten and arrested during pro-Tibet demonstration.
Image: Associated Press
Clinton today tells reporters that human rights in China will not be a concern for Obama's State Department, citing the economic crisis as paramount.

From the Washington Post:

But human rights groups say those goals do not negate the gravity of the abuse allegations they have lodged against Beijing in the past year. Among them: branding those who believe the western region of Xinjiang should be independent as terrorists, as an excuse to detain and silence them; introducing repressive martial law-type curfews, military patrols and questioning in Tibet; and trying to bully or buy off parents angry about the shoddy schools that led to the deaths of thousands of children during last year's earthquake in Sichuan Province.

Over the past two months, Chinese police have been aggressively questioning several hundred of the more than 8000 people who have signed a pro-democracy manifesto called Charter 08 that has been circulated on the Internet. At least one man who is thought to have helped write the document--Liu Xiaobo--has been detained, prompting an international cry for his release.

This shouldn't come as much of a surprise considering that Clinton's husband pushed for China's entry into the World Trade Organization despite their atrocious human rights abuses throughout the 1990s. Their now favored status as our primary source of lead flavored children's toys and poison dog food (available now at Wal-Mart) has allowed this "acceptable" totalitarian regime to become an economic powerhouse. Now that China holds our economic future by the short and curlies -- owning $1 out of every $10 in US public debt -- they're not taking orders from anyone.

Ironically, this month marks the 37th anniversary of the US economic embargo against Cuba. It will be amusing to watch the State Department claim that Cuba's human rights record is the reason they won't lift the sanctions.

Also see: Human Rights Watch profiles Liu Xiaobo and many of the other heroic defenders of liberty in China.

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A Natural History of Anarchy - Part I

Evolution, Cooperation and Social Change

“If the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature,
but by our institutions, great is our sin.”

- Charles Darwin
All political and economic philosophies are based on fundamental assumptions about human nature. Early assumptions were based on the premise that a supernatural entity fashioned man in His image but that this creation was flawed. As a result, while we may strive for perfection, the harmony we seek is unattainable without embracing the Supreme Being and His law. Throughout recorded history, all-too-human tyrants have used such views to their political advantage.

Even in the Republican systems that emerged out of the Enlightenment, the premise that there must be a class of rulers and a class to be ruled is the established norm (the modification being that the ruler is approved first by the populace rather than chosen through nepotism). Totalitarian regimes are predicated on the assumption that humans are innately selfish and easily swayed by rival factions thus requiring a unitary executive that, through his singular and enlightened moral vision, will fashion social life in the public’s best interests. [1] State communism (as implemented by Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong or Pol Pot) followed many of these totalitarian illusions and further assumed that human beings were infinitely malleable and thus able to be forged anew through “reeducation camps” that would benefit society by molding human will around the interests of the state. [2]

Only the political philosophy of anarchism assumes that human nature is basically rational and compassionate, leading to a just society through the free association and participation of all citizens. [3] Anarchy, while assumed by most people to be synonymous with chaos, is actually from the Greek root arkhos, or rulers, and is therefore defined simply as “no rulers.” Modern political classifications place anarchy as Libertarian Socialism, libertarian in the sense of limited or no government influence and socialist in the economic view of equitable distribution of resources and the direct confrontation of oppression.


This makes anarchy a fusion of conservative and liberal ideals; a combination of Ronald Reagan or Ron Paul’s vision that government should be drowned in its own bathwater with the revolutionary action inherent in social justice movements from Thomas Paine and Daniel Shays to Malcolm X and Cesar Chavez. Anarchism has many forms, but advocates generally agree that an anarchist society should consist of nonhierarchical free association, self-government, workers councils (rather than bosses), participatory economics and environmental sustainability. But is such a seemingly utopian ideal consistent with a modern understanding of human nature?

According to Noam Chomsky, international bestselling author of Hegemony or Survival, "In this possibly terminal phase of human existence, democracy and freedom are more than just ideals to be valued - they may be essential to survival." The human experiment is at a crucial turning point where we have within our power the ability to choose whether we continue towards inevitable self-destruction or reconsider our actions and move towards a vision of human freedom and sustainability. As we move towards this vision it is important that we inform ourselves of our evolutionary history, of previous experiments that species have engaged in during our collective legacy.

If we are to avoid the fate of 99.99% of life on this planet (as most species that have ever existed in our 4.6 billion year history are now extinct) we must use our creativity and our wisdom to re-imagine what it means to be human and what it means to interact with our environment. We are the first species to ever be conscious of our own potential extinction. This is a source of optimism rather than despair, for while our creativity and innovation are the roots of our own destruction they are also the wellspring of a new world that merely awaits our ability to imagine.



[1] McCormick, J.P. (1994). Fear, Technology, and the State: Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and the Revival of Hobbes in Weimar and National Socialist Germany. Political Theory 22(4):619-652.
[2] Tucker, R.C. (1956). Stalin and the Uses of Psychology. World Politics 8(4): 455-483; Bracey, D.H. (1985). The System of Justice and the Concept of Human Nature in the People’s Republic of China. Justice Quarterly 2(1):139-144; Clayton, T. (1998). Building the New Cambodia: Educational Destruction and Construction Under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979. History of Education Quarterly 38(1):1-16.
[3] Gould, C. (1989). Rethinking Democracy: Freedom and Social Cooperation in Politics, Economy and Society. Cambridge University Press; Turner, S. (1998). Global Civil Society, Anarchy and Governance: Assessing an Emerging Paradigm. Journal of Peace Research 35(1):25-42.

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Outsourcing Torture

In January, 2002, our soon-to-be appointed attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, concluded that the war on terrorism "renders obsolete" the Geneva Conventions' "strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners." As such, according to a memorandum that Gonzales endorsed, interrogation would be illegal only if "equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." Everything else was fair game.

Thirty months later, as the Washington Post reported (on Jan. 4), a Defense Department panel chaired by James R. Schlesinger concluded that this legal advice played a key role in the Central Command's creation of interrogation policies for the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

The Sunday Times of London reported last November that American intelligence agencies are now flying terrorist suspects to countries that routinely use torture in their prisons. Documents obtained by the Times detailed more than 300 flights to countries such as Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Uzbekistan. Bob Baer, a former CIA operative in the Middle East, said: "If you want a serious interrogation you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear you send them to Egypt."

Two such suspects, Ahmed Agiza, 42, and Muhammed Zery, 35, who were later cleared of charges, told the Swedish press that they were beaten and tortured and received electric shocks to their genitals.

Officially the United States condemns the use of torture, and as legal counsel to President Bush, Gonzales was unlikely to have had any knowledge of a covert operation. However, the legal advice Gonzales supplied to the president stated, "We concluded that the Department of Justice could not bring a criminal prosecution against a defendant who had acted pursuant to an exercise of the president's constitutional power."

Essentially, if the president determines that torture is necessary to protect American interests, then the Constitution gives him full authority to do so. And since the Bush administration pulled out of the International Court of Justice, there's little fear of coming up on international charges.

However, not all of Bush's administration is with him on the green. In a memo objecting to Gonzales' legal counsel, Secretary of State Colin Powell stated that "U.S. credibility and moral authority" would be compromised by a directive that would "reverse over a century of U.S. policy and practice in supporting Geneva conventions and undermine the protections of the law of war for our troops."

In a world turned upside down, it takes a committed Cold Warrior to supply moral values to a bankrupt administration.

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