Why Mahmoud Ahmadinejad should be allowed to speak at Columbia University

The execution by stoning of Jafar Kiani violates Iran’s obligations under international human rights treaties that it has ratified. Iran is a party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which states in Article 6 that “in countries which have not abolished the death penalty, sentence of death may be imposed only for the most serious crimes.” According to Article 7 of the covenant, “no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Human Rights Watch opposes capital punishment in all circumstances because of its cruel and inhumane nature. We find that stoning is a particularly cruel form of capital punishment. Human rights principles and protections are founded upon respect for the inherent dignity of all human beings and the inviolability of the human person.

- Human Rights Watch, July 11, 2007

The government's opponents, real or imaginary—be they secular liberals, trade unionists, campaigners for women's rights, immodestly dressed youths, disgruntled ethnic minorities, even dissenting clergymen—have recently been subjected to a string of arrests, harassment and threats.

-The Economist, Jun 28th 2007

The country’s police chief boasted that 150,000 people — a number far larger than usual — were detained in the annual spring sweep against any clothing considered not Islamic. More than 30 women’s rights advocates were arrested in one day in March, according to Human Rights Watch, five of whom have since been sentenced to prison terms of up to four years. They were charged with endangering national security for organizing an Internet campaign to collect more than a million signatures supporting the removal of all laws that discriminate against women.

-The New York Times, June 24, 2007

One woman, Nazanin, 28, was stopped last month in Vanak Square, she thought she had dressed more modestly than usual, she said. But she was told that her coat was tight and showed the shape of her body…She received a warning about her large sunglasses, her coat, her eyeliner and her socks, which the police officers said should be longer. She was allowed to go after she signed a letter, which included her name and address, saying she would not appear in public like that again. The police have said the letters will be used against violators in court if they defy the rules a second time.

-The New York Times, May 3rd 2007

From all authoritative reports I have read, it seems that the regime of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad veers between farce and tragedy. The farce of wasting the recourses of a country in the midst of an economic crisis on keeping track of how tight a woman's clothes fit, and tragedy in the brutal denial of equality to women under the law and the stifling of free speech dissenting from the ideological line of the ossified theocracy that ultimately governs the country. This is to say nothing what appears to be Teheran’s active collusion in helping to create the bloodbath that is modern-day Iraq . Being a firm supporter of the separation of church and state, of free speech, of the equality of women, and of the right to self-determination of the Iraqi people free from either American or Persian overlords, reading the accounts of the kind of government Ahmadinejad and his supporters preside over fills me with disgust.

Much controversy has swirled around the invitation to speak that Ahmadinejad received from Columbia University on Monday preceding his address to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday. Does a man who oversees such depredations, who has repeatedly called for the destruction of Israel and who questions whether or not the Holocaust ever happened really belong lecturing at one of the premier universities in the United States?

In short, if they want him, yes. The strength of pluralistic democracy when compared with throwback theocracy is that it can rationally and openly confront even the most distasteful views and practices and knock them down through the strength or argument and debate. If one has nothing to hide, one has nothing to fear from an open debate. As I wrote almost exactly one year ago on this blog, when the address of another individual whose views I disdain - Minuteman Project head Jim Gilchrist, who assembled hundreds of volunteers, some armed, to patrol the Arizona-Mexico border for illegal immigrants - was scuttled at Columbia, either campuses are places of free inquiry, where the airing of the views of the minority are given equal protection as the views of the majority, or they are not.

Mr. Ahmadinejad’s and Mr. Gilchrist’s views, as repellent as they might be, are simply no match for an informed, vigorous and intelligent debate, and I certainly hope that Mr. Ahmadinejad is subject to robust questioning and challenging during a question-and-answer session following his address by the student body and faculty at Columbia. A large protest rally against the policies of Mr. Ahmadinejad’s government, so long as it does not interrupt the address itself, would also seem to be highly desirable.

Mr. Ahmadinejad should be allowed to speak, but should be left in no doubt about how the students and faculty of Columbia University and, indeed, the citizens of New York City, view him and the practices of his government.

What to do in Iraq

A recent Op-Ed in the Economist, a magazine that I respect even though it occasionally seems to err on the side of having contributors who can tell good gin from bad gin as opposed to those who have genuinely in-depth knowledge of the countries they are reporting on, made an argument for the continued presence of United States and other forces in Iraq.

Titled “Why they should stay,” the editorial posited the following:

If America removes its forces while Iraq remains in its present condition, the Iraqi future is indeed likely to be disastrous. For that reason above any other, and despite misgivings about the possibility of even modest success any time soon, our own view is that America (and Britain) ought to stay in Iraq until conditions improve.

It is a horrendously thorny issue, with those on both sides of the issue, the neocons safe in Washington and much of the anti-war movement, safe behind their computer screens, arrogantly sure that they know the ONLY right path by which to succeed, while the Iraqi people themselves are aught up in a terrible whirlwind of violence, as typified by the recent murder of Sheikh Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha and the recent attack on Shiite villages north of Baghdad, both of which were apparently carried out by Al Qaeda-linked elements. Add to this the killing of nine people by private U.S. security contractors in Baghdad itself and you have only the tip of the iceberg of the suffering the Iraqis have had to endure over the last four years.

Regarding the Economist piece, a British acquaintance here in Paris wrote that “It's too late to avoid earthshaking regional consequences and the US or the UK are the last people to be able to head them off. The damage has been done, but like any imperial leadership, the US (which hasn't learned from the earlier antics of the UK, USSR, France) can't lose face and admit this.”

An American friend of mine, a fluent Arabic speaker who has spent a fair bit of time in Iraq, responded to the argument for a continued American and British presence in Iraq (in part) with the following:

I'm definitely scared of what will happen when we pull out, but as the article observes, it's already been happening. I think pulling out sooner rather than later would be a good idea, not because it would be a good thing, but I think things will get worse if we stay and the best thing to do at the moment would be to admit in a very dramatic fashion our total ignobility in this enterprise and to acknowledge that all of the chaos, sectarian violence, criminal mayhem, and civilian suffering and death is our fault and particularly the fault of this administration. Then hopefully either the situation in Iraq would improve or if, more plausibly, it deteriorated rapidly, Iran and Syria would have a newfound freedom to contain the situation which would probably have a better chance of restoring law and order . People here are obviously distrustful of both Iran and Syria, particularly Iran, but I'd trust Iran insofar as it has a much more direct and urgent need for a stable Iraq than we do.

For it’s part, in the Guardian, one columnist, Timothy Garton Ash, writes on the invasion of Iraq that “the likely consequences of Iraq range from the bad to the catastrophic. Looking back over a quarter-century of writing about international affairs, I can not recall a more comprehensive and avoidable man-made disaster.”

Another columnist from the same paper, Simon Jenkins, compared the Congressional grilling of America's senior commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, and the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, to Britain’s own often seemingly mute junior-partner status in the Iraq adventure.

“Britain should be so lucky,” Jenkins wrote. “A top general grilled on the Iraq war by skeptical representatives of the people. An ambassador summoned to explain his policy before the cameras. Three detailed reports challenging the official line submitted to Congress. A nation in a ferment of debate. Americans may have blundered into the Iraq morass, but they will retreat from it with political guns blazing.”

For my part, my thoughts on the matter (formed, like those of most people, from afar, without having ever set foot in Iraq) are roughly the following.

The invasion of Iraq was a terribly misguided affair from the beginning, undertaken with a willful deception of the public, an ignoring of expert advice, an almost magic-realist view of the likely consequences of U.S. military action and no desire or ability on the part of the Bush administration to face up to the cauldron of violent forces that toppling Saddam Hussein let lose on the country until it was too late.

That said, now that the U.S. and U.K. helped set into motion a multifront civil war, I think it would be immoral to say "Whoops, sorry we destroyed your country" and then depart to leave the Iraqis at the mercies of the Iranians, the Syrians, the Turks and Al Qaeda.

Unless one subscribes to a theory that news organizations across the board a conspiring to slant the news in favour of the now-thoroughly discredited Bush administration, articles written by journalists on the ground, in Iraq suggest that, however unpalatable the U.S. and U.K. presence in Iraq is (and for me, it definitely is), the alternative at present is far worse.

I don't know if any of the armchair commentators such as myself really have the answer for this mess, though some opinion writers certainly seem to think they do. I certainly don't have the answer, aside from hanging on a little while longer with Congress pushing the Bush administration to try and put Iraq back together again. I just more or less have always adhered to the "you broke it, you bought it" school of foreign affairs and, as such, feel that it would be wrong the throw the Iraqis to the wolves any more than they have shamefully been already. Hopefully, some day, the Bush administration. will be hauled into the dock to answer for all of this, but as disorganized and spineless as the Democrats often show themselves to be, I doubt it.

For further reading on the subject, I suggest two books: The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq by New Yorker staff writer George Packer and Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War by a Lebanese-American (and Arabic-speaking) Washington Post correspondent Anthony Shadid,

The first, written by someone who was a moderately pro-invasion left-winger, examines how, in the wake of September 11th and given Saddam Hussein's record - the invasions of Iran and Kuwait, the al-Anfal Campaign against the Kurds, the tens of thousands of Shiites murdered in the wake of the first Gulf War, the everyday brutality and monstrousness of the regime and behaviour of the two maniac sons he intended to bequeath it to - some rather decent folks such as Kanan Makiya and Ayad Rahim were able to justify supporting the invasion on humanitarian grounds (an ironic turn of phrase) and how that support was used by some of the most cynical, corrupt and least visionary political operators Washington has ever seen in mustering an agenda for the ultimately disastrous enterprise. I don't know if I have ever read a more scathing critique of the administration or its policy, its ignoring of its own Middle East experts and military planners or the fantasy of the neocons thinking they would remake the Middle East in their own image.

The second book paints a devastating picture of the effects that the war and its aftermath had on the lives of ordinary Iraqis, of whom Shadid appears to have interviewed hundreds. It is really reportage in the finest tradition and it gives a despairing picture of the human cost of the endeavour.

In the meantime, if anyone has any suggestions or thoughts on the subject, please do comment away.

Shukran, Team Iraq

Yesterday, in Jakarta, Indonesia, a football squad comprised of Sunnis, Shias, Kurds and Turkomans gave a great gift to their fellow Iraqis when they defeated the favored Saudi Arabia team 1-0 to win the final match of the 2007 Asian Cup.

Perhaps the most eloquent commentary of the joy that reportedly followed in Iraq I read appeared in today's Guardian, where a 25-year-old computer programmer named Taha Mahmoud said the following:

"In 90 minutes, 11 men on a soccer pitch thousands of miles away have made millions of Iraqis happy while 250 MPs, our government, the mullahs, imams and warlords can't provide us with a single smile. I hope this is a turning point for our country."

Insha'allah, let it be so.

Please sign in protest of Du'a Khalil's murder

The below was forwarded to me. MD.

Du'a Khalil Aswad, a 17 year old girl from the town of Bashiqa, in Iraqi Kurdistan, was stoned to death on April 7, 2007.

She came from a family of Yazidi faith, and was snatched from her home by Yazidi men who had discovered that she was in love with a Muslim Arab man and had visited him. In front of hundreds of people, including local police, they dragged her to the center of town, and viciously beat and stoned her to death. Towns people watched and even filmed this barbaric act. The killers, obviously well knownin the community, are still free.

Please join in signing this petition to demand that the Iraqi Governmentand Kurdistan Regional Government condemn this un-Islamic, brutal act and bring the killers to justice, and that they outlaw honor killings, as well as all violence and oppression of women.

Follow this link to sign on here.

Alex Gibney’s Taxi to the Dark Side

I was fortunate enough on Saturday night to be in the audience at the Tribeca Film Festival here in New York for a screening of Taxi to the Dark Side, the new documentary by director Alex Gibney. The film is a damning and impassioned examination of use of torture by the United States on suspected terrorists after the September 11th attacks, stretching from Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba to Iraq. Gibney, whose 2005 documentary on the Enron fiasco, The Smartest Guys in the Room, was nominated for an Academy Award, has constructed a viscerally powerful examination of the way the Bush administration’s use of torture, often though by no means always obscured behind wink-and-nod acceptance and convoluted legalese, has devastated that lives of many of those on the front lines of recent military actions by the United States, both in terms of the local inhabitants of conflict zones and U.S. soldiers on the ground themselves.

The thread running throughout the film’s examination of culpability is the story of an Afghani taxi driver named Dilawar, seized by Afghani militiamen in December 2002 at then turned over to the U.S. military detention center at Bagram Air Base. Five days later, after being hung from a cage in chains, kept awake for days at a time and kicked until a medical examiner later described his legs as having been “pulpified,” he was dead.

The film takes its title from comments that U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney made to television host Tim Russert on NBC's Meet the Press on September 16, 2001. Asked what kind of response the United States was planning to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and Pennsylvania, Cheney answered as follows:

We also have to work sort of the dark side, if you will. We're going to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussions, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies if we're going to be successful. That's the world these folks operate in. And so it's going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.

What makes Gibney’s film so much more powerful and effective than many other recent ventures in political documentary cinema (which probably reached its nadir with Swiss director Nicolas Rossier’s smug, clueless and dilettantish attempt to whitewash Haiti’s recent political history) is the fact that Gibney never condescends to his subjects, whether they be humble Afghan farmers or the working-class military grunts who administered the beatings to Dilawar that eventually killed him. He does not excuse the actions of anyone, but he does glean insight into how a system rotten to the core makes brutal, criminal deaths such as that which happened to Dilawar not only possible but inevitable and how, while the low-level soldiers who implement policy will be held accountable in the event of public outcry, the criminals in suits and offices who wrote the policy have yet not been. The soldiers themselves, even those who administered the fatal beatings, appear quietly eloquent and terribly conflicted over what they have been party to.

“The main reason I did this film is that I wanted the truth to be told,” said one of the soldiers stationed at Bagram at the time, a hulking fellow named Damien Corsetti, who was at Saturday night’s screening. Corsetti was charged with dereliction of duty, maltreatment, assault and performing an indecent act with another person, and was later found not guilty of all charges. “The prisoners need their rights restored and we them an apology for what we did to them.”

And what of the commanders of men like Corsetti? Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld enjoys a quiet retirement, having left the Bush administration last year. His former deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, is currently clinging with his fingernails to his job as head of the World Bank, awash in scandal. John Yoo, deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel at the U.S. Department of Justice from 2001 to 2003, who co-authored a February 2002 memo advising that the U.S. military had no obligation to comply with international laws in the handling of detainees in the war on terrorism, is now a professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law. Perhaps Yoo’s most memorable commentary on the whole torture saga came in a December 2005 debate with Doug Cassel, director of Notre Dame Law School's Center for Civil and Human Rights. Asked by Cassel whether "if the president deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?"

"No treaty," Yoo responded, and going on to say "I think it depends on why the president thinks he needs to do that."

Even more recently, who can forget the words of U.S. president George W. Bush fhimself from a press conference in September of last year, when he declared that, when the U.S. government captured the Al Qaeda terrorist Abu Zubaydah “the CIA used an alternative set of procedures” to question him.

“These procedures were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution, and our treaty obligations.” Bush went on. “The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively and determined them to be lawful. I cannot describe the specific methods used -- I think you understand why -- if I did, it would help the terrorists learn how to resist questioning, and to keep information from us that we need to prevent new attacks on our country. But I can say the procedures were tough, and they were safe, and lawful, and necessary.”

One month later, Bush signed into law the Military Commissions Act of 2006, a piece of legislation which, though specifically barring acts such as murder and rape and "cruel and inhuman" treatment, gave the green light for, among other things, withholding evidence from defendants, denying defendants the right to file habeas corpus petitions, established military tribunals for terror suspects, retained the right to send detainees to secret prisons abroad and gave immunity to U.S. government agents for acts regarding their interrogation practices. The Act also broadened the definition of “enemy combatant” to include anyone who offered “material support” to a person or persons engaged in hostilities against the U.S., enabling them to be held indefinitely in military detention regardless of whether or not they took any active role in any hostilities.

Tomorrow, May 1st, organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights will be holding a Restore Habeus Day, to pressure lawmakers to restore the ability to file habeas corpus petitions to all prisoners in U.S. custody. Write or call your local congressperson and let them know that there should be no more Dilawars.