Media perspectives

The post below is a major revision of another piece on the Snowden Affair that was published in AlJazeera English recently. I have dwelled on the pursuit of Snowden because it raises such vital issues of principle, but also because so much of the public discourse has proceeded on a mistaken understanding of the applicable international law. Beyond the legal guidelines on extradition and asylum that are applicable, there are considerations of world order: protecting dissent and pluralism in a global setting in which the principal political actors are sovereign states that increasingly rely on secrecy and security rationales to constrain democratic open spaces. What Snowden did was to expose this dynamic of constraint in relation to secret surveillance programs administered by private, for profit, contractors. Also exposed was the ‘Global Big Brother’ implications of extending surveillance to foreign societies and their governments. It is these questions that should receive...

Written in Turkey, June 30, 2013 Preliminary Disclaimers As the dramatic Turkish protests subside, or declare an intermission, this is a time to take stock, but cautiously. Precisely when political reality explodes in unexpected ways, pundits come along suggesting comparisons, offering hastily constructed explanations, and cite influences and antecedents. Surprise is suppressed by most ‘experts’ who do all that they can to hide these awkward exposures of how little they knew about the explosive forces in society, which erupted without any advance notice. After the explosion these wannabe gurus step forth with undiminished confidence to tell us with learned demeanor why and how it happened, why it was almost inevitable to turn out as it did, and the most arrogant and often most influential even dare tell us what to expect next, and why it is good or bad. While appreciating this fact of public life, let us take note...

Prefatory Note: I am posting a press release of yesterday, 14 June 2013, to take note of the start of the seventh year of the Israeli blockade. After the Mavi Marmara incident, 31 May 2010 and the more recent November ceasefire agreement between Israel and the Gaza government there was an undertaking to ease the blockade with respect to the flow back and forth of people and goods, but the situation remains desperate for the civilian population of Gaza that remains essentially locked into the Gaza Strip where economic destitution has reached epidemic extremes and where the water is mostly unfit for human consumption. The international community, and its main leaders, have commented adversely on the blockade, but nothing happens! It is this sense of powerlessness that is undermining the legitimacy and relevance of the United Nations to the suffering of the Palestinian people, and with particular relevance to the...

Prefatory Note: What follows below is the text of the report presented on 10 June 2013 to the Human Rights Council. It offers an overview of the situation from the perspective of human rights and international humanitarian law in occupied Palestine. Both Israel and the United States boycotted the session, presumably to express their displeasure with the report and my role as Special Rapporteur. UN Watch distributed a defamatory resolution calling for my dismissal from the position, and the United States delegate, Ambassador Donahue, called for my resignation. No government formally endorsed the UNW resolution, and so it was never acted upon, while I took the occasion of the press conference to confirm my unwillingness to resign, and on the contrary, to continue to do my best to reflect as honestly as possible the realities confronting the Palestinian people from the perspective of international law. In the open debate the...

Today I try to honor a young woman who made an impact on me in one meeting long ago. Syrian journalist Yara Abbas’ love for her country and the soldiers who protected her in combat zones humanized these young men for me, when it was altogether so easy to write them off with the rest of the media as killing machines. I felt during our interview that she was out in the field protecting these boys as much as they were protecting her. And so she made me give them a second look. RIP. Last week Yara Abbas was killed by a sniper. Here is Sharmine Narwani’s interview with her from last year. Yara was the 38th media casualty in the Syrian conflict…

There are widespread reports circulating in the media that President Obama had not fully appreciated the political consequences of responding to a question at an August press conference that asked about the consequences of a possible future use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime. Obama replied that such a use, should it occur, would be to cross ‘a red line.’ Such an assertion was widely understood to be a threat by Obama either to launch air strikes or to provide rebel forces with major direct military assistance, including weaponry. There have been sketchy reports that Syria did make some use chemical weapons, as well as allegations that the reported use was ‘a false flag’ operation, designed to call Obama’s bluff. As the New York Times notes in a front page story on May 7th, Obama “finds himself in a geopolitical box, his credibility at stake with frustratingly few good...

/10/jonathanpower2.jpg”> China is a sitting duck. Not that long ago, as far as most of the rest of the world was concerned, it was almost a closed, mysterious, society. Now it is wide open. The bad is there for all to see. Last year the New York Times published an in-depth investigative series of long articles on the secret wealth of the family of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao. It proved that it is possible to peel off the layers and look beneath. China’s new found relative openness has allowed an open season on the shooting range. The targets are legion – corruption, nepotism, nationalism, maladministration, growing inequality, environmental degradation, over assertive foreign policy and the military build up. Western critics enjoy popping off at them. Much of what the critics say is true. But much is exaggerated. And much is ignored, in particular what is positive.

Seeing in the Dark with Victoria Brittain As with the best of journalists, Victoria Brittain has spent a lifetime enabling us to see in the dark! Or more accurately, she has shined a bright light on those whose suffering has been hidden by being deliberately situated in one or another shadow land of governmental and societal abuse, whether local, national, or geopolitical in its animus. These patterns of abuse are hidden because whenever their visibility cannot be avoided, the liberal mythologizing of the decency of the modern democratic state suffers a staggering blow. In recent years this unwanted visibility has permanently tarnished the human rights credentials of the United States due to the spectacular exposés of the horrifying pictures of prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq or various reports of grotesque treatment of Guantanomo detainees. As with Bradley Manning and Wikileaks, the U.S. Government should be embarrassed...

I have had a recurrent struggle to set boundaries on the comments section of this blog. At first, I was determined to have an open forum welcoming critical commentary on any issue, excluding only those comments that seemed struck me as clear instances of hate speech. This approach seemed to work okay except with respect to Israel/Palestine, which increasingly attracted either long argumentative comments posing a list of rhetorical questions or angry serial comment contributors that insulted me as well as others who had submitted comments that were interpreted by them as being pro-Palestinian or hostile to Israel and Zionism. There was no symmetry in the sense the blog received no serial or long provocative comments written by those who more or less supportive of the Palestinian struggle for justice. From blog readers I received mixed reactions, but I was most persuaded by those who expressed dismay about the tendency...

The Democrats who voted to support the war and rationalized that vote by making false claims about Iraq’s WMD programs – a minority of Democrats, but much over-represented in Democratic leadership councils – were responsible for allowing the Bush administration to get away with lying about Iraq’s alleged threat. Here on the tenth anniversary of the Iraq War, it is important to remember that it was not just those in the Bush White House who were responsible for the tragedy, but leading members of Congress as well, some of whom are now in senior positions in the Obama administration. Continue reading at truthout

This March 19 marks the 10th anniversary of the start of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The U.S. war and occupation has resulted in the deaths of up to half a million Iraqis, the vast majority of whom are civilians, leaving over 600,000 orphans. More than 1.3 million Iraqis have been internally displaced and nearly twice that many have fled into exile. Almost 4,500 Americans were killed and thousands more have received serious physical and emotional injuries which will plague them for the rest of their lives.

The Weekly Mirror published Mondays in Kathmandu is a remarkable mirror of the world seen from above. Prem Kumari Pant, the editor, is a Nepali in the country where Buddha was born in Lumbini. Buddhism, now 9% as against hinduism-brahmanism 80%, migrated to India, and was forced south to Sri Lanka where 5th century buddhist monks invented the Mahawamsa doctrine. They were the “chosen people”, by the Buddha, to make Sri Lanka a home for buddhism. They had not only the right but the duty to eliminate Tamil claims on a part of the land: Go home to where you came from; Sri Lanka is our homeland, language, religion; no buddhist nonviolence and compassion. Prem Kumari Pant is also chairperson of the Nepal-China society.