A protester outside George Washington University. Photo: Dustin Slaughter

An honorable degree?

“I am concerned that George Washington University – an American icon – is sending the wrong message to Mexicans wanting to come to this country to work hard and build a life,” Jeffrey Brewer, an Occupy D.C. Protester, says to me.

“What are George Washington University’s values? Do they want to hold up exploitation as a legitimate business model?” he adds.

About 30 protesters (a mix of Occupy participants as well as members of a coalition called Two Countries, One Voice) are outside GW University posing this question to the institution on May 11^th, 2012, while a handful meet with administrators inside. Their stated goal is convincing the university to cancel a decision to give an honorary degree to Carlos Slim, the richest man in the world, at their May 20th commencement ceremony.

Their questions and anger are valid, considering that this esteemed institution wants to honor a tycoon accused of overcharging poor and working class Mexicans to the tune of $6 billion per year in cell and landline fees. Slim has a net worth of $69 billion dollars.

Slim has amassed this unimaginable wealth by owning 90% of Mexico’s telecommunication services and over 220 companies under the corporate behemoth Grupo Carso (basically giving Slim a 7% stake in Mexico’s GDP.)

In a country where the average citizen earns $15 per day and the per capita income is a little over $14,000 a year, one might wonder what George Washington University sees in this man to bestow an honorary degree.

The university touts Slim’s philanthropy as sufficient cause for honoring him. Problematic, however, is the fact that alleged philanthropic endeavors, such as the Fundación Carlos Slim Helú, are not required by Mexican law to publish financial information, so there is no way to confirm how much of his wealth has actually gone to improving the lives of people in Mexico. Carlos Slim has been publicly critical of charitable giving from billionaires such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

George Washington University has not responded to a request for comment.

A protester implores university officials to break ties with Carlos Slim. Photo: Dustin Slaughter

Two Peoples United

“The first part of the plan is to force the university to sever ties with Slim,” Two Countries, One Voice organizer David Abrams tells me on the car ride over to the rally, “although I doubt they’re going to cancel his commencement invite. After that, we begin targeting American industries who maintain business relationships with him,” including calls for boycotts which he and others plan on carrying on long after the May 20^th event. According to him, there may be hunger strikes involved too.

Companies in which Slim has stakes include Apple, Citigroup, and even the New York Times – which borrowed $240 million from him at a whopping 14% interest rate.

What does it take to stand up to the wealthiest man in the world? This coalition may have a fighting chance. The group is composed of a wide range of organizations, such as Consejo de Federaciones Mexicanas en Norteamérica (COFEM) and Nevada’s Latin Chamber of Commerce. It is worth noting that the Chamber’s membership has some heavy hitters on its board, and may have commercial interests in any successful outcome.

Abrams’s work on the ground has also brought members of Occupy Wall Street into the fold, he tells me. “It was a pretty easy sell,” he says of the effort. “After all, Carlos Slim IS the 1%.”

Check out Salon writer Adam Clarke Estes’ comprehensive background on Carlos Slim from March 8th, 2011.

Dustin M. Slaughter is the Founder of The David and Goliath Project. Follow him on Twitter: @DustinSlaughter.

Raymond Kelly at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival. Photo/Wikimedia

I got home at 10:00 pm on the nose, and the first thing I did was take off my shoes after 14 hours of May Day marching with 30-40,000 other conscientious objectors to capitalism. My feet hurt, okay? My second priority was turning on the local news, which happened to be Fox Five New York. According to my watch, it was 10:02. I didn’t see the first few seconds of the story, but it must have have been the lead. There was Ray Kelly, the chief of police, talking about…not Occupy Wall Street?…no, it was a video of him on some talk show, warning of the apparently imminent threat of Arab terrorists “implanting” bombs in their bodies and blowing up airplanes and buildings.

The reporter, whose name I didn’t catch, showed a mug shot of a sullen swarthy Arab terrorist who had confessed to “helping” his brother implant such a bomb. The reporter then interviewed a “security expert,” whose name I also didn’t catch. As I say, my feet hurt and I wasn’t paying full attention. The security expert speculated that the most you could fit into a man’s “cavity” would be a one pound bomb, and such a weapon probably couldn’t bring down an airplane. A woman, he said, could at most fit a one-pound bomb in one cavity and a two-pound bomb in her other cavity.

The reporter wanted to know what would happen if a large number of Arab terrorists implanted many such bombs on their bodies. The security expert said that many such bombs inside many such Arab terrorists, probably looking even more sullen and swarthy than usual, would increase the likelihood that our x-ray machines and first-rate Homeland Security personnel would detect them before they could blow up the airplane.

The next story was about some Republican heavyweight endorsing Romney. Maybe it was Giuliani, the great hero of 9/11. His name came up, I remember that. To reiterate: my feet were still hurting.

The third story started with the anchor saying something like, “In other security concerns today, Occupy Wall Street marchers paraded down Broadway…” The reporter asked several non-marching pedestrians, “Are you annoyed yet?” Some said yes, some said no, which was, I thought, very fair and balanced. More than 30 marchers were arrested, she reported. Ray Kelly, she further reported, estimated that the city had spent $30 million on Occupy Wall Street security since last fall…

Click here to read the rest of this report at ThisCantBeHappening.net

News Junkie Editor in Chief Gilbert Mercier

On February 21, 2012, Gilbert Mercier, News Junkie Post Editor in Chief, suffered an Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm.. a myocardial infarction… a massive heart attack.  Gilbert was given only a 10% chance of surviving the surgery that required he be put in a comatose state in order to both repair the damage and perform a bypass.  Fortunately, due to his physical strength, as well as the indefatigable spirit and tenacious character that he brings to every challenge he faces, Gilbert has survived both that initial surgery and a subsequent surgery in early March.

Gilbert’s recovery and rehabilitation will be a long process.  He is surrounded by loving family and friends but his intense medical needs and the astronomical costs for them will continue for quite some time.  The all-too-familiar story of how the American health care system can eviscerate a person’s personal financial security, regardless of insurance, is playing itself out with a cherished member of our family.

We will be regularly featuring some of Gilbert’s thought provoking and challenging pieces over the next few months.  A donation account for Gilbert has been set up at WePay.  Donations can be made HERE. It is our hope that all of you who have been affected, educated, and challenged by Gilbert’s work will assist him in his time of need and help provide the necessary support so that he can return to his former level of activity and resume his mission of informing, agitating and engaging.

Sincere gratitude from the News Junie Post family for your donation.

TPR co-founder and editor-at-large Jason Leopold was also a co-founder of News Junkie Post.

Mohammad Ahmed Abdullah Saleh al Hanashi was a citizen of Yemen. He committed suicide at Guantánamo on June 1, 2009.

Originally published on Truthout.org

Autopsy reports released last year by the Department of Defense raise stark questions about the circumstances surrounding the deaths of two prisoners at Guantanamo. Both deaths – of Abdul Rahman Al Amri in May 2007 and Mohammad Ahmed Abdullah Saleh Al Hanashi in June 2009 – were labeled suicides by Department of Defense (DoD) investigators.

But the details in the autopsy reports show that Al Amri was found dead by hanging with his hands tied behind his back, calling into question whether he had actually killed himself. [He is referred to as Abd al-Rahman al-Umari in the report.]

Al Hanashi was found wearing standard-issue detainee clothing, the undergarments from which he supposedly used to kill himself, and not the tear-proof suicide smock issued to detainees who are actively suicidal. It remains an open question if he were in fact under suicide watch, even though he had been repeatedly banging his head on prison walls, and had made five suicide attempts in the four weeks prior to his death.

Both Al Amri, who was housed in isolation at Guantanamo’s high-security Camp 5, and Al Hanashi, who was resident at the prison’s Behavioral Health Unit, were supposed to be under constant video surveillance, and according to camp officials, someone was supposed to be checking on them every three to five minutes.

A number of outside observers had deemed both prisoners’ deaths suspicious, but the autopsy reports are the first public documentary evidence of what possibly occurred. The autopsies were declassified by the DoD a year ago, but apparently went unexamined, part of a 1,100-plus-page release of documents in response to an American Civil Liberties Union Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit.

Al Amri was a 34-year-old former member of the Saudi Arabian Army. According to his May 2006 Detainee Assessment (released by WikiLeaks), he allegedly had “knowledge about, and connections to many high-level Al-Qaida members and operations.” He was also accused of making a film about the USS Cole bombing, a charge he denied. He was reportedly considered a “high-value” detainee, and had been at Guantanamo since February 2002. Al Amri told the Combatant Status Review Tribunal that examined his case that he had not gone to Afghanistan to kill Americans, and that if it had been his intent, he would have had ample opportunity when he was in the Saudi Army.

Al Hanashi was a 31-year-old Yemeni national who, as a young man, had left Yemen to join the Taliban side in the Afghan civil war. His father is said to be the leader of the 4,000-member Hanashi tribe in Yemen. Like Al Amri, DoD claims he was affiliated with al-Qaeda, a charge al Hanashi had denied. Captured after the Qala-i-Jangi prisoner uprising at Mazar-e-Sharif, he was transferred to Guantanamo, arriving two days before Al Amri. According to one prisoner who last saw him six months before his death, Al Hanashi had agreed to be a representative for prisoners’ grievances before camp officials.

Both prisoners had been on long hunger strikes, and at times had weighed at or under 90 pounds. Each had been force-fed while on hunger strike. Both prisoners had never met with an attorney.

“They Covered Up the Crime”

Al Amri’s autopsy states that the “male civilian detainee” was “found hanging by his neck in his cell with a ligature made of braided strips of bed sheet. By report, similar fabric bound his hands loosely behind him.”

Despite the fact that Al Amri’s hands were bound behind him, the media was kept unaware of this fact. But it apparently was not unknown among some of the other detainees.

In a 2010 letter to his attorney, released as part of a court filing, longtime Guantanamo hunger striker Abdul Rahman Shalabi told his attorney, “You know what happened to (Abdul Rahman Al-Amri) who was killed in camp five two years ago, hanging while his hands were tied behind his back, and he was in solitary confinement…. When the Americans released the news of his death, they said that they found him dead in his cell and he was on hunger strike and they covered up the crime.”

Authorities consulted for this article agreed, as one source put it, that having hands tied behind one’s back in a hanging “does not necessarily indicate homicide but certainly requires additional investigation.”

Al Amri’s relatives, as well, were highly dubious about the suicide verdict and, according to a report in Arab News, demanded an inquiry into his death. A Saudi official involved in monitoring “the condition of Saudi nationals being held in Guantanamo … also ruled out the suicide theory.” A follow-up story for Arab News claimed that a Saudi Interior Ministry spokesperson had indicated “a special medical committee would do an autopsy and then prepare a report that will be sent to US authorities on any particular inquires.” No such report has ever surfaced publicly. A request for comment by the Saudi Interior Ministry had not been returned by press time.

Other Questions

There are other curious aspects to the details surrounding Al Amri’s death. Authorities state that a ligature – the rope or other cord-like devise, in Al Amri’s case possibly torn or cut-up bed sheets, used in strangulation – must be long enough for the purpose of hanging. According to the autopsy report, the ligature in Al Amri’s case was only 22 and on-half inches long, inclusive of the portion around the neck.

Curiously, the ligature also had toward its more distant end “a 4-inch area of dark soiling with attached dark hairs.” The report does not state whose hairs these are or why they are there. Since a DNA test was run to verify the prisoner’s identity, presumably the hairs could have been identified as well, but there is no indication they were so identified.

The autopsy examiners assume that altered bed sheets were used for the hanging. But according to a summarized witness statement (pg. 7) by Maj. Gen. (ret.) Mike Dunleavy, who became commander of Guantanamo’s interrogation Task Force 170 in February 2002, the sheets used at Guantanamo were “changed” under his order “to the sheets in the federal prison system so they can’t be torn or tied.”

This previously unreported fact calls into question the narrative on Al Amri’s death, as well as that of the three 2006 Guantanamo “suicides,” who were said to have fashioned nooses, in part, out of torn bed sheets. Indeed, former detainees have questioned the suicides of these prisoners, in part, because they did not have “bed sheets that could easily be constructed into a noose.” Harper’s writer Scott Horton and a team of legal investigators at Seton Hall’s School of Law’s Center for Policy and Research have each conducted critical investigations of the 2006 deaths. Another book by former Guantanamo guard Joe Hickman examining the 2006 deaths is due out later this year.

Important information appears to have been kept from Al Amri’s autopsy examiners. The examiners remark that the fact Al Amri’s hands were tied behind his back was something only known to them “by report,” but there should have been photographs taken and available to them.

The autopsy report, which does not provide a timeline for the events it describes, explains the supposed circumstances of Al Amri’s death:

“Investigation reveals that a razor blade from a razor was used to cut strips from one or more bed sheets and a ligature was fashioned by braiding these strips together…. The free end of the ligature was attached to a ventilation opening, and [redacted] likely stood on his bedroll to place the noose over his head.”

But, according to the official 2004 Camp Delta “Standard Operating Procedures” manual, razors were contraband items. Razors for shaving were allowed only during shower period, but guards were instructed to “Ensure the return of intact razors.” Moreover, detainees in “segregation” units, i.e., isolation, as was Al Amri, are not supposed to be issued razors during shower period at all, raising questions how he ever obtained a blade, if he did at all.

The autopsy report gives no explanation as to how Al Amri obtained a razor blade. It does mention a “superficial, incised wound” on the forefingers of each of his hands, and these could have come from a razor, although the autopsy report does not conclude what their source is. Neither does the report describe the ventilation opening or how the ligature was attached to it.

Finally, in the toxicology section of the report, the examiners note Al Amri was tested “for screened medications (including mefloquine) and drugs of abuse.” It is odd that screening for mefloquine is specially singled out. Mefloquine is a controversial antimalarial drug, which was mass administered to all detainees upon in-processing at Guantanamo. Over a year ago, Truthout examined the use of this drug, which may have been used for abusive purposes or as part of an illegal, secret experiment.

While no drugs were found, it is strange that Al Amri, who had been in Guantanamo for five years, mostly or entirely in solitary confinement, would be possibly thought to have mefloquine in his system. Only a small handful of Guantanamo prisoners were ever found to have malaria, and they came to the prison with the disease. Cuba is not considered to be malaria endemic, and US service personnel and contractors are not routinely administered mefloquine. Interestingly, one of the three purported Guantanamo suicides in 2006, but not the other two, was also tested for mefloquine.

“Stressors of Confinement”

The autopsy report of Guantanamo detainee number 78, Mohammad Ahmed Abdullah Saleh Al Hanashi, similarly raises serious questions about the circumstances surrounding his death. The prisoner was said to have strangled himself using elastic bands from his underwear.

The report provides details about the medical and psychiatric condition of the Yemeni detainee at the time of his death. According to the report, Al Hanashi had a “long history” of psychiatric problems at the Joint Task Force penal facility, including “adjustment disorder, anti-social personality disorder and stressors of confinement.” (Emphases added.)

The presence of psychiatric problems is consistent with a reported “history of suicide gestures and multiple failed suicide attempts” going back to 2003. The previous attempts included methods of killing oneself such as hanging, “self-inflicted sharp force injuries and frequent blunt force trauma to the head,” as well as “neck ligature,” which is the kind of self-strangulation that was the manner of death found by the autopsy examiners, whose identities were redacted in both Al Hanashi and Al Amri’s reports.

The autopsy document notes that Al Hanashi made five suicide attempts in the four weeks preceding his death. While the report’s authors describe medical authorities’ diagnoses given to the prisoner, including “anti-social personality disorder,” no diagnosis of depression is given, despite the history of serious suicidal behavior.

According to the diagnostic manual of the American Psychiatric Association, used by all government medical doctors and psychologists, a diagnosis of anti-social personality disorder is only given to individuals who show “a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others occurring since age 15 years.” It is difficult to believe that Guantanamo medical staff had this kind of information available to them, raising the possibility the diagnosis was given to taint the prisoner’s behavioral profile.

In addition, the autopsy examiners describe the presence of “dark small raised lesions” on Al Hanashi’s forehead, which they explained were “consistent with reported history of witnessed repeated self-inflicted hitting/banging of the head on the detention facility walls.”

Self-injurious and suicidal behavior are two serious psychiatric symptoms long associated with the kinds of detention conditions found in Supermax prisons, or prisons using special administrative measures, where long-term solitary confinement and forms of sensory and social deprivation are the norm.

Suicide Watch?

Despite the very recent multiple suicide attempts, it is unclear if Al Hanashi was on suicide watch at the time of his death the evening of June 1, 2009, in a cell in the Behavioral Health Unit (BHU) at Joint Task Force Guantanamo Bay. The autopsy report states he “has been on a suicide watch at BHU, where he is seen daily by medical staff.” (Emphases added.)

But was he on suicide watch the day he died? Multiple email requests for clarification from the DoD on this issue, as well as a number of others – such as what was meant by “stressors of confinement” – have gone unanswered. A Truthout FOIA request for the Naval Criminal Investigation Service (NCIS) report on his death is pending.

A June 2008 report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) described the procedures used after some Guantanamo suicide attempts. One detainee was “stripped naked, dressed in a green plastic rip-proof suicide smock, and placed in an individual cell under constant monitoring,” after a single December 2007 suicide attempt. Nothing was allowed in his cell that could be used to injure himself. He was questioned by BHU personnel daily, and only released after two months. Another detainee on suicide watch was also dressed in the suicide smock and allowed nothing “other than a mat for sleeping, a Koran and toilet paper” in his cell.

It is not known how long Al Hanashi had been at the BHU, but if he was on suicide watch, he was not wearing the special suicide smock worn by those typically held under special suicide surveillance. The 31-year-old was discovered on the floor of his cell in a fetal position under a blanket, dressed “in khaki shirt and pants without undergarments.” According to the autopsy report, the clothes were “general issue of the detention center.”

The lack of undergarments is unexplained, but since the autopsy posits that Al Hanashi strangled himself using the elastic found in typical underwear distributed to detainees, it is possible that the undergarments are missing because they were used to construct the device by which it is said he asphyxiated himself.

Yet, there is some question about the type of underwear distributed to the detainees at this time. According to an October 17, 2007, article by Carol Rosenberg at the Miami Herald, after the three “suicides” in 2006, camp officials changed “procedures, including more careful monitoring of captives’ belongings, and the changing of captives’ underwear from more elastic briefs to cotton boxers less liable to be used in a hanging.” A Reuters report at the same time noted that after the 2006 deaths “the prisoners’ underwear was switched from briefs with wide elastic bands to boxers made of flimsier fabric that rips under stress. The report consistently refers to the underwear Al Hanashi supposedly altered as “briefs” or “white briefs.”

The autopsy does not mention any discovery of altered remnants of the undergarments. It says NCIS agents supplied the medical examiners with a replica of the “white brief” issued to the prisoners. The examiners found the ligature on Al Hanashi’s neck to be “identical to the elastic band of the examined brief.”

The autopsy states that “a civilian detainee” (Al Hanashi’s name is strangely redacted at this point in the document) “of unknown age, died from asphyxia due to ligature strangulation by tightly wrapping the elastic band of his underwear around the neck and apparently securing it with a twist on the right side of the neck and a head tilt.” Interestingly, on page 2 of the report, the autopsy examiners state the ligature was twisted “on the left side.” The method of securing the ligature is somewhat obscure.

An expert on asphyxiation, Dr. Steven Miles, told Truthout, “The description of the ligature, suggests garroting of a type that can be done by a person to themself or by another person, i.e., a rod, pen, utensil etc. is put into the ligature and given several twists and then it is removed.” The ligature marks are “consistent with but not conclusive of the use of an underwear band and quite unlike what would be seen with the use of a wire or cord.” Accordingly, along with other medical evidence as reported, Dr. Miles, who criticized the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology for “substandard investigations and reporting of prisoners’ deaths” in his 2006 book “Oath Betrayed,” concurs with the conclusions of the autopsy examiners that the cause of death for Al Hanashi was most likely suicide. He adds the phrase “stressors of confinement” in the report clearly is “a euphemism.”

Timeline Questions

The autopsy report redacts the date of death, but combining the hourly timeline provided in the report with news accounts, it is almost certain Al Hanashi died sometime in the hour prior to midnight on June 1, 2009.

According to the report, approximately 25 minutes elapsed from the time of the last observation of the prisoner to the discovery of his body on the cell floor. In the examiner’s narrative, at “approximately 2120 hours” (9:20 PM) Al Hanashi asked to speak to a nurse, asking for a “sleeping aid.” Indeed, there were two tranquilizers found in the toxicology reports done post-mortem. Both Lorazepam and the metabolite for clonazepam, two common benzodiazepine drugs commonly known as Ativan and Klonopin, were found in the dead man’s urine and blood.

However, it is not known if this is what Al Hanashi was given for sleep, or what drugs, if any, he was prescribed at this time. No other drugs are listed in the toxicology section of the report, except for acetaminophen and pseudoephedrine.

It was “10-15 minutes later,” after his request for medications, that Guantanamo personnel had their last communication with Al Hanashi. This would have been between 2130 and 2135 hours, or between 9:30 PM and 9:35 PM, when the prisoner asked the guard if he could close his “bean hole cover.” The report opines that this was a “sign he was ready to go to sleep.” (The “bean hole” was the slot through which food was given to prisoners.) According to guards, who presumably were interviewed by NCIS, Al Hanashi was in “in ‘good spirit’ and did not appear upset.”

Only “a few minutes later,” the prisoner was “viewed through the cell window and noted to not be breathing.” The report never states the exact amount of time elapsed, though the autopsy examiners report the time of discovery as “approximately 2155 hours,” or 9:55 PM. This would mean that 20 to 25 minutes elapsed before guards or medical staff checked personally on Al Hanashi in his cell, a period that seems to be more than “a few minutes.”

The efforts at resuscitation apparently lasted approximately an hour, as Al Hanashi was pronounced dead at 2259 or 10:59 PM. Medical intervention included use of an external automatic defibrillator, an endotracheal tube and the placement of a central venous line.

Whatever the timeline of the guards’ observations of Al Hanashi, press reports have stated there is “constant video surveillance” inside prisoner cells in the BHU. Furthermore, Guantanamo spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Brook DeWalt told Truthout in November 2009 that, while he couldn’t comment on whether Al Hanashi had been videotaped in his cell, no Guantanamo detainee goes more than “three minutes” without being checked, one way or another. That would be consistent with the “few minutes” noted in the autopsy report, but not with the narrative that presents a lapse of 20 minutes or more. It also tallies with what a prison doctor told journalist Naomi Wolf, who had visited the cells where Al Hanashi had been held in the day or so prior to his death. “They check on prisoners every three minutes,” he told her.

In addition, Wolf reported, “Cortney Busch of Reprieve, a British organization that represents Guantánamo detainees” told her “there is video running on prisoners in the psychiatric ward at all times, and there is a guard posted there continually, too.”

“Tougher Methods” Used on Hunger Strikers

By many accounts, Al Hanashi, like Al Amri, had participated along with other detainees in hunger strikes to protest their situation and treatment. As a result, Al Hanashi, like the other strikers, was forcibly fed at times. Indeed, the autopsy report states, “On January 2009 he started a hunger strike and has been fed enteraly,” that is, fed via a feeding tube. According to the autopsy report, Al Hanashi’s stomach was “distended with partially digested food.” The report does not say what this food could have been, or whether it was liquid food, such as would be fed through a tube. Some of this material was vomited up during the attempts to revive him.

While press reports state the Yemeni prisoner was a long-time hunger striker, Lt. Commander De Walt told reporters shortly after Al Hanashi’s death that the prisoner’s hunger strike had ended in mid-May. In an article for The Associated Press, Guantanamo attorney David Remes, who had a client in the Guantanamo BHU at the same time as Al Hanashi, told reporter David McFadden that “all the prisoners in the ward had been force-fed a liquid nutrition mix through a tube inserted in their noses and down their throats and that al-Hanashi had been the only one force-fed in a restraint chair.”

In another Associated Press article, Remes said there were seven detainees total in the BHU at the time of Al Hanashi’s death.

Guantanamo chronicler Andy Worthington noted in a 2010 article on the “shocking statistics of starvation” at the US “war on terror” Cuban camp that, up to and including Al Hanashi’s death, all the supposed suicides at Guantanamo had been hunger strikers.

A February 2006 story by Tim Golden at The New York Times noted, “tougher measures to force-feed detainees engaged in hunger strikes at Guantánamo Bay,” implemented by US authorities at the time. This includes the period when Al Hanashi was on his final hunger strike. Military authorities have maintained that force-feeding is conducted “in a humane and compassionate manner.”

Golden wrote, “In recent weeks … guards have begun strapping recalcitrant detainees into ‘restraint chairs,’ sometimes for hours a day, to feed them through tubes and prevent them from deliberately vomiting afterward. Detainees who refuse to eat have also been placed in isolation for extended periods in what the officials said was an effort to keep them from being encouraged by other hunger strikers.”

The “tougher measures” had reduced hunger strikers to only four by December 2005, suggesting that Al Hanashi was one of a handful of hunger strikers. Moreover, it means Al Hanashi initiated his 2006 hunger strike when the harsher methods were already in place. Attorney Elisabeth Gilson, who had a client on the psychiatric ward at the same time Al Hanashi was there, called the force-feeding “abusive and inhumane.”

Testimony From a Detainee Witness

One of the released Guantanamo detainees, Binyam Mohamed, told the press that Al Hanashi had been a leader among the prisoners. In a June 11, 2009, story published at the Miami Herald, he said Al Hanashi, whom he calls Wadhah, weighed only 104 lbs. the last time he saw him in January 2009.

Mohamed stated that he was “force-fed together” with Al Hanashi. According to Mohamed, he last saw Al Hanashi on January 17, 2006, when the Yemeni prisoner “was taken outside Camp 5 to meet with the Joint Task Force commander, Adm. David Thomas, and the Joint Detention Group commander, Col. Bruce Vargo.” According to Mohamed’s account, Al Hanashi had agreed to be a prisoner’s representative “on camp issues such as hunger strikes and other contentious issues.” Al Hanashi never returned to his cell, and nothing was known of his fate among the detainees outside BHU until his death was announced.

Given what is known of the six months prior to Al Hanashi’s purported suicide, we are to believe that at the same time Al Hanashi restarted his hunger strike, he also became a prisoner’s representative and met with top camp officials. At some point, he was placed in the camp’s BHU. By mid-May, he had ended his hunger strike, but had also began a series of suicide attempts, for which he was placed on suicide watch. On the night of his death, he appears to have not been on suicide watch, since he was not found wearing the regularly issued suicide smock. He was in “good spirit,” yet he supposedly killed himself minutes later, after taking two different sedating tranquilizers, all while under supposed constant or near-constant surveillance.

No medical staff, camp guard or other prison or military official has ever been disciplined for presumed failures of standard operating procedures surrounding any of the Guantanamo “suicides,” at least so far as is known.

Stress and Mental Illness at Guantanamo

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) found as early as June 2003 that the conditions of confinement at Guantanamo were “tantamount to torture,” as was documented in a “Memorandum for the Record to Major General Geoffrey Miller” on October 8, 2003. Questions about psychological torture at the Navy base prison were raised by ICRC as early as January 2003. According a New York Times article by Neil Lewis, “the Red Cross team found a far greater incidence of mental illness produced by stress than did American medical authorities, much of it caused by prolonged solitary confinement.”

The stressors of confinement at Guantanamo are many, and include the anxiety and tension associated with indefinite detention, isolation, long bouts of intense interrogation, behavioral controls of reward and punishment, periods of sleep deprivation, lack of access for years to an attorney, separation from family and loved ones, cruel treatment and at times torture.

A two-part series published at Truthout last year raised the question of whether waterboarding occurred at Guantanamo, and documented numerous occasions when similar forms of water torture was, in fact, used.

Other forms of detainee torture at Guantanamo, as documented in a 2006 report by the UN’s Commission on Human Rights, included sensory deprivation and sensory overload, exposure to cold, exposure to extreme violence and cultural and religious harassment.

One particular form of abuse that caused great controversy was the policy, still in place, of force-feeding hunger strikers. A report in the August 2007 Journal of the American Medical Association concluded, “force-feeding at Guantanamo Bay violates the Geneva Conventions, international human rights law, and medical ethics.”

Some of the Guantanamo detainees were persistently force-fed for years. The UN report noted that some forms of forced feeding, including accounts of the practice at Guantanamo, amount to torture.

Why Did Al Hanashi Die?

Whether or not Al Hanashi died a suicide, the question remains why he was driven to such a desperate measure, or why those in charge of his care failed so miserably to keep him alive. While his death may have been due to the stresses of torture and imprisonment, bringing the prisoner to despair and suicide, there may have been other, more distal causes affecting his situation.

Al Hanashi may have been singled out, along with Al Amri, as a trouble maker. Al Hanashi’s June 2008 detainee assessment, written as a memorandum for the commander of US Southern Command, labeled him a “HIGH threat from a detention perspective.” The report complained that Al Hanashi’s “overall behavior has been non-compliant and hostile to the guard force and staff.” The report, which was part of a large release of detainee files by WikiLeaks last year, listed “163 Reports of Disciplinary Infraction” up to that date, including “inciting and participating in mass disturbances, failure to follow guard instructions/camp rules, inappropriate use of bodily fluids, unauthorized communications, damage to government property, attempted assaults, assaults, provoking words and gestures, exposure of sexual organs, and possession of food and non-weapon type contraband.”

The report also describes the DoD’s version of Al Hanashi’s connections to the Taliban and al-Qaeda. While Al Hanashi admitted in a written response to a Combatant Status Review Tribunal hearing that he had associated with the Taliban, he denied any association with al-Qaeda. The DoD relied for that claim on the interrogations of two detainees known to have been repeatedly tortured, Abu Zubaydah and Sanad Ali Yislam al-Kazimi.

A November 2009 Truthout article by this author speculated whether Al Hanashi’s death had anything to do with the possibility that he was a material witness to the 2002 mass killings by Afghan Gen. Abdul Dostum, which possibly included knowledge or participation by US forces. (The Obama administration has refused to investigate the atrocity.) Al Hanashi had been imprisoned and then wounded at Qala-i-Janghi Prison, where there had been an uprising by Taliban prisoners. (His DoD assessment notes that, in interrogation, John Walker Lindh stated that Al Hanashi had helped negotiate the surrender of the prisoners.) Afterward, he was sent to Shabraghan Prison, where he spent the next four weeks or so recuperating in the prison hospital. In the hospital at the same time were survivors from the mass execution of Taliban prisoners. The bulk of the Taliban POWs had presumably been dumped in mass graves at Dasht-i-Leili.

A major news story by The New York Times on the Afghan mass graves, and a report on the forensic evidence gathered in the case was released in the month after Al Hanashi’s death. The Times report by journalist James Risen noted “several Afghan witnesses” to the slaughter “were later tortured or killed.” Had Al Hanashi talked to survivors of the massacre, and if so, what could he have said about it?

Interestingly, Dostum’s denial of any involvement in the murder of Taliban prisoners was posted just after the Times story broke at the web site for the US government-backed Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty web site, suggesting the US was actively involved in disseminating misinformation on the war atrocity.

Former detainee Binyam Mohamed, who knew Al Hanashi, found it difficult to believe he would take his own life, and felt Al Hanashi was murdered. “If he did take his life – after being forced into a BHU – what put him there?” Mohamed asked. “Who takes responsibility for making him lose hope after having held on for so many years, despite the inhumane treatment and conditions?”

Another Suicide

Al Amri’s death came almost exactly one year, and Al Hanashi’s death almost three years, to the day after three detainees were found dead on one night in June 2006. Another detainee, former British resident Shaker Aamer, was reportedly also beaten severely and suffocated by Guantanamo personnel on the same night. Aamer’s case has been a focus of British activists seeking his release.

All these deaths were called suicide by the DoD, and the investigations into them apparently proceeded with only the presumption of suicide. Even Al Amri, who had died with hands tied behind his back, was labeled a suicide by autopsy examiners only days after his death, with no indication of possible investigation into homicide.

In May 2011, a 37-year-old detainee, Inayatullah, also known as Hajji Nassim, was found dead, reportedly hanging by bed sheets, in a recreation yard at Guantanamo. Nassim’s Guantanamo detainee assessment is one of 14 missing from the WikiLeaks Guantanamo release. Nassim’s attorney, federal public defender Paul Rashkind, has told the press that his client had attempted suicide twice before at Guantanamo, and was the long-time victim of “a paralyzing psychosis” that had begun long before he was sent to Guantanamo in September 2007.

According to the US government, Nassim was “an admitted planner for Al-Qaeda terrorist operations.” Nassim’s court filings also identify him under the alias “Harun Al-Afghani” and “Mohammed Naseem.” Other reports have described him as a father of six, “the owner of a black market cellphone store in Zahedan, Iran,” and someone who, sometime after his capture, stopped cooperating with US authorities under detention because he could not “afford his fellow Afghani detainees to believe that he cooperates with US intelligence.”

Rashkind would not answer Truthout queries about his client’s case, stating, “everything is classified.”

Jeffrey Kaye, a psychologist living in Northern California, writes regularly on torture and other subjects for  Truthout, The Public Record and Firedoglake. He also maintains a personal blog, Invictus. His email address is sfpsych at gmail dot com.

Investigative reporter Jason Leopold

We missed posting this announcement when the news was released late last year. TPR co-founder and Truthout’s lead investigative reporter, Jason Leopold, received an award from Project Censored for an in-depth report he published in January 2011 about a controversial spiritual fitness test the US Army required all of its active duty soldiers to take. Leopold’s story, Army’s Spiritual Fitness Test Comes Under Fire, was listed as the #7 most “underreported” story for 2012 out of a list of 25. A synopsis of the story was included in Project Censored’s 2012 book: “Censored 2012.”

Here’s an article about the awards in the Louisville Alt-Weekly.

Arshin Adib-Moghaddam

Dr. Arshin Adib-Moghaddam is a political commentator and lecturer in the comparative and international politics of western Asia at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He was born in the Taksim area of Istanbul to Iranian parents and raised in Hamburg/Germany. He studied at the University of Hamburg, American University and Cambridge. He is the author of The International Politics of the Persian Gulf: A Cultural Genealogy, Iran in World Politics: The question of the Islamic Republic and A metahistory of the Clash of Civilisations.

He is an Honorary Fellow of the University of Cambridge’s European Trust Society and he was the first Jarvis Doctorow Fellow at St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford.

His articles and commentaries have appeared on Guardian, CNN, Monthly Review, Independent, Open Democracy, Antiwar and Daily Star. His scholarly papers also have been published in “Critical Studies on Terrorism”, “Cambridge Review of International Affairs”, “Third World Quarterly” and “International Studies Journal.”

Dr. Adib-Moghaddam’s latest book “A Metahistory of the Clash of Civilisations: Us and Them Beyond Orientalism” was published in 2011 by the Hurst & Co. and Columbia University Press.

As described by Amazon.com, “Adib-Moghaddam’s investigation explains the conceptual genesis of the clash of civilizations and the influence of western and Islamic representations of the other. He highlights the discontinuities between Islamism and the canon of Islamic philosophy, which distinguishes between Avicennian and Qutbian discourses of Islam, and he reveals how violence became inscribed in western ideas, especially during the Enlightenment. Expanding critical theory to include Islamic philosophy and poetry, this metahistory refuses to treat Muslims and Europeans, Americans and Arabs, and the Orient and the Occident as separate entities.”

He joined me in an in-depth interview and answered my questions regarding the continued controversy over Iran’s nuclear program, the Western media’s black propaganda against Iran, the future of Iran-West relations and the prospect of Iran’s Green Movement.

What follows is the complete text of my interview with Dr. Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, political scientist and author.

Kourosh Ziabari: Over the past years, the United States and its European allies imposed several rounds of UN-authorized and non-authorized sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program. The general policy of West towards Iran brings to mind several questions. First of all, I would like to ask you, as a political scientist, that why is Iran singled out over its nuclear program? Who has put forward reliable evidence that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, or has the intention to do so? Does the West’s hostility toward Iran simply emanate from Iran’s nuclear program? If so, then why did the former U.S. President George W. Bush label Iran as part of an Axis of Evil under President Khatami who was a reformist and open-minded politician?

Arshin Adib-Moghaddam: You are right, and one has to stress that on every occasion, lest the lies that led to the invasion of Iraq will be repeated: There is no evidence that Iran is building a nuclear weapon. No IAEA report, not even national intelligence agencies hostile to the Iranian state such as the CIA and the Mossad in Israel have provided any evidence to that end. So the nuclear weapons allegation is a political mirage, a tactical maneuver to outflank Iran on other matters.

I think Chomsky is right when he says that it is Iran’s insistence on an independent foreign policy that is being punished. The allegation that Iran is developing nuclear weapons is a Trojan horse to legitimise the comprehensive sanctions regime and to contain Iran’s regional power. Having said that, I don’t believe that Iran is facing a coherent ‘western’ block. Even in the United States, where the image of Iran is professionally manufactured by anti-Iranian lobbying groups, there are differences of opinion on how to engage the country. There is a difference between Barak Obama and George W. Bush. In Europe too, we have been engaged in fostering a different kind of approach to Iran, one that is not reliant on myths, but the reality on the ground.

The fact remains that Iran is a regional superpower with influence in all the hotspots of the region. The sanctions policy, the policy of containment has largely failed. It has not changed Iranian behaviour on strategic matters. If anything, the politics of aggression has emboldened the rather more hawkish elements in the Iranian state, because it is them who thrive on the rhetoric of confrontation. You mention the axis-of-evil speech of George W. Bush. It came after the reformist President Mohammad Khatami made major concessions, offering support for the war against the Taliban in the aftermath of the terror attacks on 9/11. President Khatami went out of his way to offer medical support to US pilots who would be downed on Iranian territory, a major confidence building step. It was reciprocated with the axis of evil speech, one of the most disastrous and murderous foreign policy speeches in the history of the United States.

It should also be noted that Khatami suspended the enrichment of uranium in response to a deal with the European Union. But the EU, under the sway of Tony Blair and others, did not adhere to their side of the bargain. This was a major diplomatic blunder. Khatami was left with nothing. The right-wing in Iran was quick to capitalise on the situation. It was then when the Ahmadinejad faction accused the reformers of selling out the national interest of the country. With nothing to present, Khatami was robbed of a counter-case. Here he was talking about a dialogue amongst civilisation, condemning calls for the death of America in Iran, suspending the enrichment of uranium, supporting the campaign against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, reaching out to the American people on CNN, only to be demonised and placed along Saddam Hussein and Kim-Jong Il in the axis of evil.

But there is no time to reminisce or to be apathetic. The apostles of war are preaching again and they are taking their orders from Netanyahu. It is an ongoing battle. They are inventing myth in order to advocate military aggression. We are working on the truth. They wield sword and sceptre above our heads. We stick to the pen and the lectern. Theirs is a case of hate and destruction. Ours is geared to peace and reconciliation. Their conscious is pragmatic, ours is principled. We resist, they exercise power.

KZ: Israel is the sole possessor of nuclear weapons in the Middle East. Several international organizations including the Federation of American Scientists have confirmed this fact. Why doesn’t the international community, especially the United States and its European friends, take action to legalize Israel’s nuclear program and investigate its atomic arsenal? Why doesn’t Israel comply with the UNSC resolution 487 which called on Tel Aviv to put its nuclear facilities under the IAEA safeguards?

AA: From a legal perspective, there is a nuance of course. Israel, like Pakistan and India never signed the Non Proliferation Treaty. But let’s leave that aside for a moment, for it doesn’t really answer why the Israeli state is treated different than the Iranian government. It is ironic that Israel has done everything Iran is accused of: Iran is accused of terrorism; Israel openly admits that it pursues a policy of assassination all over the world. Iran is accused of meddling in the affairs of Arab countries; Israel has launched two invasions against them in the past five years killing thousands of civilians in Gaza and Lebanon. Iran has been accused and sanctioned for developing nuclear weapons without any evidence; Israel has nuclear weapons and boasts of close trade ties with the United States and the European Union. Moreover, Israel is the only country in the world that colonises territory in clear violation of international law and under the auspices of the ‘international community.’ This is called the ‘settlement policy’ in the official jargon of the Netanyahu administration. Not even the condemnation of President Obama, important in its own right, changed the situation. So Israel is what Iran is punished for. It should be said that there are many dissidents in Israel itself that disagree with the policies of Netanyahu and the strategy of colonisation of Palestinian territory.

So far Israel has been shielded from international law by successive US administrations. It is the veto of the US that prevents any serious UNSC resolution against Israel. When it comes to Israel, and consequently western Asia and North Africa, the United States continues to be hostage to the pro-Israeli lobby in the country. However, the tide is turning. There are signs of a progressive counter-discourse gaining ground. Obama and Netanyahu are at odds, let there be no doubt about this. And there is resistance to the influence of the Israeli right-wing on US domestic politics and foreign affairs. But for the moment the political elites in the US are not sufficiently independent to think in terms of their national interest in western Asia and North Africa.

I have argued in “A metahistory of the clash of civilisations” that justice in world politics is the surface effect of a series of constellations that can be manipulated towards particular ends. So justice is a product of politics and diplomacy rather than an objective value that is universally applicable. At the same time I reject the notion that world politics has to be anarchic, that the Hobbesian idea of a war of all against all is inevitable. It was Europe and then the United States that constructed and supervised this unjust order. It is not due to some kind of natural law. So it can be changed. The Israeli nuclear programme must be seen within this larger context of an unjust world order that continues to produce hypocrisies on major issues facing human kind. I mean, it is not as if we could detach from all of this. Politics affects everything we do, from birth to death, cereal to nightgown. The reform of the international institutions must do away with the hierarchy inscribed in them. One way of dealing with this would be to turn the UNSC into a rather more representative body that would reflect the emerging non-western world order.

KZ: The sanctions of the United States and European Union against Iran have targeted Iran’s medical sector, oil and gas industry, energy sector and even automobile and food industries. Ordinary Iranians are deprived of having access to the most rudimentary necessities of their daily life as a result of these crippling sanctions. Tens of patients suffering from chronic disorders die each year because the foreign firms don’t allow their products to be exported to Iran Even the reformist leaders Mehdi Karroubi and Mirhossein Mousavi have condemned the crippling sanctions of the West against Iran. What’s your idea? Aren’t these sanctions some kind of violation of human rights?

AA: There are two assumptions in the question that I would like to challenge. First, I think the Iranian economy is doing well if we take into consideration that the country has been under international sanctions for three decades now and that it is absorbing the ‘baby boom’ generation after the revolution. There are many problems of course, unemployment, inflation, economic mismanagement, etc, but the macroeconomic indicators of Iran – economic growth, foreign direct investment – are sound. Recent reports by the World Bank, UNCTAD and the IMF indicate these positive economic trends quite clearly.
After all, Iran continues to be an affluent country. From my own experience in Iran there is no shortage of medical provision and the country continues to have an intricate and wide ranging social welfare system with several foundations and institutions that are dedicated to the plight of the poor. They continue to function against all odds. To my mind the sanctions policy has largely failed. A country like Iran with the second largest gas reserves in the world and the second highest production of crude oil cannot be effectively isolated. But I take your point that economic sanctions hurt civilians rather than the state. Especially in the aviation industry the sanctions policy is killing Iranians. In that sense, it is true that they violate human dignity.

Yet I don’t think that the sanctions have in any way ‘crippled’ Iran as Hillary Clinton and others put it. The term crippling is very discriminatory and distasteful by the way, given that many US soldiers come back disabled from the many wars that the US is engaged in. It is even more disrespectful than the so called ‘carrot and stick’ policy applied to Iran, a phrase that is used for donkeys. Terms and phrases like that indicate the discursive violence enveloping Iranian-American relations. It is equally prevalent in Iran, of course, for instance the calls of death to America. To my mind, progressive independence, independence that is not only material, but psychological too, begets that Iran does away with slogans demonising or praising any country.

As for the second part of the question: In fact the Iranian opposition is by far more hawkish on the issue of nuclear negotiations, for they do not hold the responsibly of power. As you know I have never accepted the discourse of human rights as a part of the foreign policy of the state. Human rights are the prerogative of civil society. The state is merely there to execute our demands in that regard. I don’t think any of us need Nicolas Sarkozy to enlighten us about human rights. But it should be said in the same breath that the human rights situation in Iran is problematic. Again, why would we look at the representations by the ‘west’ in order to assess how we treat each other? Isn’t this a form of dependency? And does it not invite the other side into Iranian affairs? What we need is a transparent, legally grounded policy of human rights that defines the dignity of Iranians and their rights within the context of the social, religious, cultural and ethnic realities of contemporary Iran. An autonomous human rights shura, if you want, not in order to present Iran as a particularly tolerant country to the outside, that would be an automatic side effect, but in order to assess why there are so many complaints about the human rights situation in Iran by Iranians living in the country itself. The weakness of the system in this regard has serious national and international repercussions. The national security of a country starts with the nation— the citizenry which is the most precious commodity for the security of a country. The revolution was quite clear on this aspect, the centrality of the “tudeh”, “mardom”, the “ummah”. Surely, we are not saying that other countries are responsible for the dignity of the Iranian people? There is a splendid excursus by Ali Shariati on this matter, on the differences between “bashariyat” and “insaniyat” between being human in biological terms and humaneness. “Insaniyat” or humaneness requires caring for the plight of the ‘other’, the hamsay-e or neighbour with whom we literally share our shadow, “ham – saye”. I have used this differentiation of Shariati to criticise the inhumane treatment of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq by the US army. I don’t mean to sound too dramatic but I believe that we need the discourse of insaniyat in Iran today, probably more than ever.

KZ: Your articles and commentaries have appeared on several mainstream media outlets and you have been in close contact with a number of them. Don’t you believe that all of these media outlets have an anti-Iranian approach which prevents them from maintaining impartiality and objectivity? Don’t you trace the footsteps of a concerted anti-Iranian propaganda in these media? Why don’t they ever write anything of Iran’s rich and sophisticated culture? Why don’t they ever write anything about Iran’s scientific progresses? Why don’t they ever write about Iranian artists, scholars and scientists and the richness of Persian culture and literature? What we read of Iran in these media is simply confined to Iran’s alleged sponsorship of terrorism, nuclear program and violation of human rights. Why is it so?
AA: No I don’t think so. I certainly don’t see a concert of anti-Iranian propaganda. It is more of a cacophony. By that I mean that there is no government or agency that could control every aspect of the international media, otherwise the demand for some of my writings would not penetrate the mainstream as you put it. So I don’t think there is some kind of a conductor when it comes to the media concert on Iran. There is no monolithic coherence or a consensus that is all-encompassing. There is a real difference between Fox News and CNN, and there is a difference between The Sun and The Guardian of London. But it is true to say that there are many people shouting, and that the megaphones are readily available. It is surely easier to get published with a story that is anti-Iranian, rather than one that aspires to objectivity.

But the reason for that is not an all-encompassing conspiracy, but the composition of the mainstream media in the ‘west’ itself. At the margins there is room for dissent, but the bulk of the news stories have become a part of what Theodor Adorno aptly called a ‘culture industry’ decades ago. This culture industry reacts to market forces by far more than it reacts to the truth. As a current example: Here, in the UK the government of Prime Minister Cameron is currently grappling with a major corruption case involving several newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch’s company News Corporation. There have been arrests; Murdoch and his son had to appear in front of a parliamentary commission and so on. The allegations range from bribery of police officers who leaked information to journalists to the illegal hacking of phones and computers. It is a right mess. Murdoch co-owns Fox News together with the Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal. Murdoch also owns The Sunday Times, The Times, and several tabloid papers. So there is a concentration of power here that creates its own political economy of truth. This is unhealthy for a democracy and it is unhelpful to understand complex countries such as Iran.

But again, from a critical perspective, and in this case it means self-criticism, one has to ask why it is so easy to write nonsense about Iran and why it is that Iran’s image is so far removed from the reality? I don’t think that the power of the mainstream media is analytically possible without the absence of a functioning counter-discourse. Why is the international media not flooded with experts from Iran itself? How many of Iran’s cultural attaches in the embassies do their job properly? How many conferences do they organise on the media representation of Iran? How much outreach is there? And what about the media landscape in Iran in terms of its international appeal? An image can only be manipulated if the resistance to that manipulation is not sophisticated enough. To put it in simple terms: Iranians in Iran are the best authors of their narrative, highly educated, internet-savvy, most of them truly brilliant, it is just a matter of disseminating their message, so that there is a second opinion on the country.

KZ: The critics of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad believe that he isolated Iran in the international community with his harsh policies and uncompromising stance, especially with regards to nuclear issue. They say that Iran has other important priorities than nuclear program and should not sacrifice its position and prestige in the international level by insisting on enriching uranium which is a sensitive issue for the Westerners. What’s your take on that?

AA: Success in international diplomacy is not merely dependent on the demand, in this case enriching uranium on Iranian soil, but on the way that demand is packaged. It is not what is in the package that is determining the reaction, but the way it is enveloped.

President Ahmadinejad stands accused of using the wrong wrapping paper. His rhetoric, his demeanour his overall discourse has been largely anti-diplomatic and confrontational. The Supreme Leader was quite aware of this at an early stage of the Presidency which is why he nominated a foreign policy council to oversee his performance. In that sense President Ahmadinejad is quite comparable to George W. Bush who was equally inept to articulate the national interest of the United States, which is why he plunged the country into a political and economic mess. Having said that, Iran is not isolated per se. Iran continues to be supported by those countries who are preparing for a new world order that will be distinctively multi-polar and non-western. The initiative of Turkey and Brazil is indicative of the future, the emergence of China as a global player is probably the most important factor, and the Arab revolts are very consequential too.

The puppets are falling and the puppet-master is running out of characters. The shah, Ben-Ali, Mubarak, their primary sin was that they were considered to be subservient to external demands. It was their colonial mindset, the notion that they simply can’t do it on their own that sealed their fate. The Iranian revolution has to be seen as a step in the direction of a multi-polar world order because it offered an alternative to superpower politics. In fact, the Cold War in Iran ended with the revolution.

KZ: The United States and Israel have long advocated a regime change in Iran and used every opportunity to sabotage Iran’s security by supporting terrorist groups such as PJAK and MKO or assassinating Iranian scientists and high-profile politicians. Don’t you believe that those Iranians living in Diaspora who support these American-Israeli efforts are betraying the cause of their compatriots living in Iran?

AA: To my mind, those fanatical opposition activists who cheer everything that is going wrong in Iran are delusional. They deserve compassion, not vitriol. Exile has a strange effect on the mind. It creates a dangerous duality. In terms of their mental habitat, many exiles continue to live in Iran. Yet because they are not there, everything that happens there appears in slow motion to them. They can’t keep up. You can take the individual from Iran, but you can’t take Iran out of the individual. Iran is like a magnetic nodal point that draws you in. It is really difficult to escape the lure of the country. Now if the duality of the exiled mind is not tempered with a good dose of reason, it creates a split personality, cultural schizophrenia in Dariush Shayegan’s words.

The idea that “they” have taken away “my” country from “me” turns into the idea that I have the right to take it back now. Iran is traded as a commodity that can be owned, rather than a bond that we all have to invest in, in order to yield results that are non-discriminatory. I don’t think, however, that any Iranian condones the murder of innocent scientists in their homeland.

There aren’t many of those delusional opposition activists left really, apart from the handful who have set up their satellite TV stations in their basement and who don’t really have serious influence on anything that is being said and written about Iran. But ideally, even they would be included in an extended parenthesis behind the meaning of contemporary Iran which would safeguard the right to contribute to the future of the country. Such a vast parenthesis would encompass all of those who identify themselves as Iranian, irrespective of political orientation, ethnic background, religious loyalties etc.

You are an Iranian if you say so, who am I to deny you the right to be one? Such an understanding of Iran as an open ended idea has a central function: It turns the politics of the country, including the dialectic between the Diaspora and Iranians living in Iran, from an antagonistic mode to an agonistic process of mutual acceptance, from the zero-sum politics of today, to the positive-sum policies of tomorrow, from the vilification of the political enemy to the acceptance of him/her as a legitimate competitor. The Iranian self, the “khodi” has always been cosmopolitan and politically promiscuous. Unless this reality is accepted, the politics of the country will be decided on a limited ground that does not encompass the transnational vastness of the meaning of Iran. After all, Iran transcends, that much we can all agree upon. Hence, a politics of transcendence, the maximal autonomisation of the meaning of Iran is merited.

KZ: The European Union has recently taken the name of MKO off its list of terrorist organizations. Moreover, MKO was legalized in the United Kingdom on 24 June 2008, six months after winning a court battle over its legality. The U.S. congressmen are also making efforts to persuade the government to remove MKO from its terror list. What’s your estimation of this action? Isn’t it contrary to the claims of the American and European politicians who usually boast of their loyalty to the Iranian people and their support for the freedom and democracy movement in the country?

AA: Of course it is. The MKO is a terrorist sect with rigid organisational structures that would make any fascist rise in applause. But why is the case against Iran easier to build than the case against other countries, for instance Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia or Nicaragua, states that are allied to Iran? This is the real question that the political elites in Iran need to address. And then there is a second responsibility for what is happening: The primary reason why the MKO can act is the vacuum left behind by Iranian diplomacy in the last years. We can’t start the analysis with the effect. We have to look at the causes. Where are the cultural attaches protesting against the activities of the MKO? Where are their outlines for concerted PR campaigns that would reveal the atrocities that the MKO committed? How many international conferences have been organised on the links between the MKO and Saddam Hussein? Why is this little organisation an issue in the first place?
What is needed in order to safeguard Iran’s national interest is a politics of friendship and reconciliation that stretches as far as possible to the realms of international diplomacy: state to state, state to society, and most importantly civil society to civil society. The dialogue between societies encapsulates the true essence of the term dawat that was so central to the libertarian aspects of the Islamic revolution. Inviting the ‘Other’ to listen is a virtue. Obviously an invitation requires a language that is empathetic rather than confrontational. As a Persian proverb has it: betamarg, beshin and befarma all mean sit down, but the polite befarma will probably yield the best reaction.

KZ: And my final question is about the prospect of Green Movement in Iran. I strongly believe that the United States and European countries betrayed the Green Movement by explicitly supporting it and giving the hardliners an excuse to associate this reformist movement with the U.S. and Israel. The Western mainstream media also played their own role in this betrayal by portraying Mirhossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi as opposition leaders, while they were simply reformist candidates who wanted to implement soft reforms within Iran’s current political establishment, not opposition leaders who wanted to subvert the regime. What’s your idea?

AA: I don’t see the causal link between western policies and/or media representations and events in Iran. The politics of the country has its own dynamics. There is too much focus on what the media in the ‘west’ says, as if a journalist in New York has more power to decide the future of Iran than a university student in Tehran. Here, I disagree with post-colonial theorists and the Radical Left who keep telling us that imperial power is all-encompassing. To believe that, is not only analytically flawed but it creates a dangerous self-fulfilling prophecy. As for the Green Movement: it is the reincarnation of previous reform outfits such as the Second Khordad movement named after the date Mohammad Khatami was elected President.

It is the surface effect of the demands of Iranian civil society which will continue to be articulated beyond personalities such as Mousavi and Karroubi who themselves are merely the effects of those demands for reform. And you are right to say that these are calls for reforms to the Islamic Republic and not for a fundamentally new order. At the height of the demonstrations I wrote that they did not amount to a revolution. Most people disagreed. When it comes to the Iran story the degree of hypocrisy and opportunism is staggering, sometimes it is depressing. But one shouldn’t feel helpless in the face of the colossal lies that are being printed about Iran. There is room to resist and to fight for the truth. To my mind, this is primarily an intellectual jihad which requires research, patience and a good dose of cross-cultural empathy. It is not enough to speak truth to power from the outside any anymore. It is necessary to perfect resistance strategies that penetrate power from within. And isn’t this what the brave activists from Tahrir Square in Cairo to Syntagma Square in Athens are demanding as we speak?

Kourosh Ziabari is an Iranian freelance journalist and writer and a member of World Student Community for Sustainable Development.

Articles and commentaries by Jeremy R. Hammond have been published on a variety of newspapers and websites including Palestine Chronicle, Dissident Voice, Counter Punch, Global Research, World News Trust, Turkish Weekly Journal, Pakistan Daily and Atlantic Free Press.

He has written extensively on subjects such as war, terrorism, media and propaganda, culture, society, energy, environment, U.S. foreign policy, Middle East, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Turkey.

Over the past years, Jeremy has been running Foreign Policy Journal which has gained a reputation as a reliable and prestigious news website consisted of a team of veteran journalists and political analysts who write on a variety of issues pertaining to foreign relations and international developments.

Jeremy R. Hammond took part in an in-depth interview with me and answered my questions regarding Iran’s nuclear standoff, the renewed war threats of Israel and the United States against Iran, the prospect of Iran-West relations and also Israel’s underground nuclear program.

What follows is the complete text of my interview with Jeremy R. Hammond, political journalist and the editor of Foreign Policy Journal.

Kourosh Ziabari: The past decade has been witness to unending and unremitting clash between Iran and the West over Tehran’s nuclear program. The West has constantly accused Iran of trying to build nuclear bombs while Tehran has persistently denied the allegation. What do you think about the nature of Iran’s nuclear program? Why has it become so controversial and contentious? We already know that there are four nations in the world, who are not signatories of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but nobody in the international community pressures them to halt their nuclear program and nobody investigates their nuclear arsenals. Why Iran is being singled out?

Jeremy R. Hammond: What I think about the nature of Iran’s nuclear program is that it is a peaceful program, the right to which is guaranteed under the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, of which Iran is a signatory. I don’t know as an absolute fact that Iran doesn’t have a nuclear weapons program, but that’s what the evidence– the lack thereof, rather– tells us. The legal standard that the West has applied to Iran is that it must prove itself innocent of attempting to produce a nuclear weapon. Like Iraq, Iran is being punished for failing to prove that it isn’t guilty of the charges the U.S. and its western partners accuse it of, like Iraq, without evidence. This policy persists despite the fact that the U.S.’s own intelligence community assessed in a 2007 National Intelligence Estimate that Iran had no active nuclear weapons program, and as Seymour Hersh just very recently reported in the New Yorker, an updated 2011 NIE reiterates that judgment.

The reason Iran’s nuclear program has become so controversial, therefore, has nothing to do with nuclear nonproliferation, any more than the war on Iraq had anything to do with weapons of mass destruction or terrorism. The problem with Iran is the same as that posed by Iraq, which is that it is too independent, too willing to defy orders from Washington, D. C. The U.S. used to support Iran’s nuclear program, when the country was under the Shah’s regime. The U.S. installed the Shah in 1953 after the CIA coup that overthrew the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq for nationalizing Iran’s oil industry, for standing up to the West and saying that Iran’s oil belonged to the Iranian people.

Iran is singled out because it defies Washington. Israel is the only country in the region that actually possesses nuclear weapons. Unlike Iran, it is not a member of the NPT. The Western media constantly repeats that Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons is a threat to the region, and that its nuclear program risks sparking a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. Israel’s nuclear weapons, for some inexplicable reason, do not threaten to spark a nuclear arms race.

For example, the fact that Saddam Hussein’s decision to pursue a nuclear weapon was a direct consequence of Israel’s decision to destroy Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981, which had been under the monitoring and supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the nuclear watchdog that enforces the NPT, is just completely irrelevant. It can be forgotten, tossed down the Memory Hole. Never mind that the U.N. Security Council condemned the attack in a resolution that noted that Iraq’s nuclear program had been legal and that Israel’s attack threatened the very framework of the international non-proliferation regime. Never mind that U.S. intelligence assessed that Israel’s attack, along with its own possession of nuclear weapons, could spark an arms race and intensify efforts by Saddam Hussein and other Arab leaders to seek a nuclear deterrent to Israeli aggression.

You can on very rare occasions actually read about Israel’s attack on Osirak in U.S. political commentary. If it’s mentioned, it’s cited as an example of how effective the use of force is in deterring Israel’s neighbors in the region from obtaining nuclear weapons. I mean, it’s just an Orwellian fiction that turns reality completely on its head. So if it’s mentioned, it’s in that context. Otherwise, you can just forget it. Nothing to see there, no lessons to learn; down the Memory Hole.

Relevant facts just have no place in any discussion of Iran’s nuclear program, just as the fact that the IAEA had declared Iraq’s nuclear program totally dismantled had no place in the discussion in the mainstream media in the run-up to the war on Iraq, because the issue has nothing to do with non-proliferation. As with Iraq, that’s just the pretext under which the U.S. government justifies its policy, which is really a policy of regime change. This also explains why the U.S. government and media engaged in a propaganda disinformation campaign in an attempt to characterize Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s victory in Iran’s 2009 presidential election as having been fraudulent, not only without evidence, but contrary to all evidence indicating that Ahmadinejad legitimately won.

KZ: Over the past years, the United Nations Security Council, under the pressure of the United States and its European allies, imposed four rounds of crippling economic sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program. These sanctions targeted Iran’s oil and gas sector, aviation industry,  health and medicine sector, consular affairs and in a nutshell, every aspect of the daily life of the Iranian citizens who had been trying to rise from the ashes of the devastating war with Iraq in 1980s. What do you think about these sanctions and their impact on the life of the Iranian citizens? Don’t these sanctions resemble some kind of human rights violation? Iranian people are deprived of having access to the most essential commodities of their daily life as a result of these sanctions. What’s your take on that?

JRH: The sanctions are a violation of the U.N. Charter and Iran’s rights under the NPT. The NPT obliges member nations to accept the safeguards regime of the IAEA, which the treaty explicitly states shall implement its duties without hampering Iran’s economic or technological development.  Article IV of the NPT states explicitly that nothing within it may prejudice Iran’s right to develop, research, and use nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, including uranium enrichment.

The U.N. sanctions originate from U.N. Security Council resolution 1996 of 2006, which expressed concern that Iran had not taken certain steps requested of it by the IAEA and called on Iran to suspend enrichment activities. Iran had previously suspended its uranium enrichment on a voluntary basis, as a show of good faith to the West, and to go out of their way to create an atmosphere conducive to negotiations with the European Union. Part of that agreement was that the EU would offer Iran security guarantees. Yet the EU failed to fulfill its obligation and the U.S. and Israel continued to threaten Iran with military force. The West also stalled on negotiations, with the Bush administration refusing to engage Iran diplomatically and instead issuing the ultimatum that Iran must end enrichment as a precondition to talks—which would, of course, defeat the whole point of negotiating for Iran.

As result, Iran ended its voluntary cessation of enrichment activities and resumed research.
The IAEA then called upon Iran to once again implement a voluntary cessation. That IAEA resolution in fact did not find Iran to be in violation of any of its obligations under the NPT, and in fact explicitly recognized Iran’s inalienable right under the NPT to develop, research, and produce nuclear energy, without prejudice. It merely expressed concern that Iran had been disinclined to acquiesce to the agency’s requests that it once again voluntarily suspend enrichment. It’s important to emphasize again that this was not a legal obligation under the NPT, but a voluntary unilateral action demonstrating good faith on Iran’s part. That IAEA resolution is the legal foundation for U.N. Resolution 1696 and subsequent resolutions imposing sanctions on Iran. In other words, the U.N. sanctions against Iran have no legal basis whatsoever. On the contrary, they are themselves a violation of the U.N. Charter and the NPT.

This is further illustrated by the fact that Resolution 1696 was passed under Article 40 of Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter. It states that the Security Council may call upon parties to comply with provision measures as it deems necessary, but only under two conditions. The first is in cases where the Council has determined that a threat to the peace exists, which the U.N. has not done in the case of Iran. The second condition is that if a threat to the peace is determined to exist, any measures the U.N. takes shall be without prejudice to the rights, claims, or position of Iran. That includes Iran’s “inalienable right” under the NPT to enrich uranium.

KZ: With their sophisticated intelligence apparatus, the United States and its European allies should have come to the conclusion that Iran does not have the intention of building nuclear bombs nor does it have the capability to build one. Iran has repeatedly stated that it will publicly announce once it decides to build an atomic bomb because it is afraid of nobody. Is the pressure on Iran over its nuclear program part of an agenda to derail Iran’s status as a regional superpower and isolate it internationally, or is it really a matter of ignorance and unawareness on the side of the West?

JRH: In fact, U.S. intelligence has judged that Iran has no active nuclear weapons program, in both its 2007 and 2011 NIEs, as I mentioned before. But facts like that just don’t matter, as far as U.S. policy is concerned, because the policy has nothing to do with non-proliferation. It’s partly a matter of ignorance, but it’s willful ignorance. Take, for example, the claim that has long been virtually obligatory for any U.S. mainstream commentary on Iran’s nuclear program, that Ahmadinejad has threatened Israel with a nuclear holocaust. This claim stems in part from the claim that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, and also from the claim that Ahmadinejad threatened to “wipe Israel off the map”. But that claim is false.

First, it’s a dubious translation of a comment Ahmadinejad made in a speech in October 2005. Professor Juan Cole and journalist Jonathan Steele, among others, pointed out at the time that what he actually said would be better translated as “the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the pages of time”, or something more akin to that. Second, Ahmadinejad was quoting Ayatollah Khomeini. Third, the context of the quote is not irrelevant. He was talking about the need for oppressive regimes to come to an end. He cited three examples. The first was the Shah’s regime in Iran. The second was Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. The third was the Zionist regime in Israel, which had been occupying Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, for four decades.

It’s perfectly well understood among knowledgeable western commentators that the “nuclear holocaust” claim is pure fiction, nothing more than a fabrication for Western propaganda purposes, misquoted and taken completely out of context. So you have the BBC acknowledging that there’s no direct translation for the English expression “to wipe” something “off the map”, but insisting on using that translation anyhow. And so you have the New York Times acknowledging that Juan Cole’s and Jonathan Steele’s translations are actually more accurate, that he said “regime occupying Jerusalem”, not “Israel”, and that he said “pages of time or history”, and not “map”, but insisting that it was nevertheless right and proper to say he threatened “to wipe Israel off the map”, which is, needless to say, the way the New York Times and the rest of the U.S. mainstream media have reported it ever since, often in the same sentence as the claim that Iran is attempting to build a nuclear bomb. This is virtually obligatory in the U.S. media. So, yes, there is ignorance, but it’s willful ignorance.

No doubt many commentators actually believe their own propaganda, but it’s the same way many government officials and analysts believed that Iraq had WMD, which was a conclusion that could only be arrived at by dismissing all the relevant facts and willfully choosing not to make any effort whatsoever to actually seriously examine the claims made. I mean, anyone who knows how to use an internet search engine can find this stuff out for themselves. Anyone can Google it. But facts are just irrelevant.

Again, the situation is comparable to that of Iraq prior to the invasion, such as the claim that Iraq had sought aluminum tubes to manufacture centrifuges to enrich uranium for a nuclear bomb. The IAEA said they couldn’t be used for such a purpose, but were rather intended for a conventional rocket program. The U.S.’s top experts at the Department of Energy said they couldn’t be used for centrifuges, but were intended for an existing rocket program that just so happened to use tubes of the exact same dimensions. The State Department’s intelligence bureau agreed with the assessment of the DOE. Yet you had government officials like National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice or President George W. Bush publicly declaring that the tubes were intended for centrifuges, that they couldn’t possibly have any other purpose, and that we couldn’t wait for the “smoking gun” that Iraq was pursuing the bomb to come “in the form of a mushroom cloud”. There is ignorance, yes, but it’s willful ignorance. The facts just don’t matter, no matter how uncontroversial they may actually be. The truth gests too much in the way of the policy.

KZ: Israel is said to be the sole possessor of nuclear weapons in the Middle East. With a declared policy of deliberate ambiguity, it has prevented the international community from investigating its arsenals, and the global organizations such as the UNSC in turn have shown little interest in focusing on Israel’s dossier. Why can Israel enjoy immunity from international law and be exempted from being held accountable before the public opinion?

JRH: I’ve already briefly touched on that, but to reiterate, it’s the same reason Israel can enjoy immunity from international law in regard to its ongoing occupation of the Palestinian territories and illegal settlement activity. Or the same reason Israel can enjoy immunity from international law in regard to its continued violence against the Palestinians, such as its 22-day full-scale military assault on Gaza from December 27, 2008 to January 18, 2009.

The narrative in the U.S. basically stated that Hamas committed a coup against the Palestinian government, had incessantly fired rockets at Israeli towns, and had violated a ceasefire with Israel. Thus, Israel responded to defend itself against the Hamas terrorist attacks. The truth is that the U.S. and Israel conspired to overthrow the democratically elected Hamas government by financing and arming Fatah, the party of P.A. President Mahmoud Abbas. Hamas’s takeover of the Gaza Strip was a consequence of the fact that the U.S. illegally financed Fatah’s election campaign, pressured Abbas to illegally dismiss the Hamas government, and armed Fatah to use force to overthrow Hamas and expel them from government. So that was what was called the “Hamas coup” in the Western media. All of this is completely uncontroversial.

On June 19, 2008, Israel and Hamas began a 6-month ceasefire, under which Israel was supposed to lift its siege on Gaza, which it implemented to collectively punish the Palestinians for having Hamas as their leadership. Israel perpetually violated the ceasefire. It refused to lift the siege. Israeli soldiers shot across the border at Palestinian farmers attempting to reach their own land.

Two elderly men were injured in such attacks in June, and an unarmed 18-year old was killed in July. Israel stepped up operations against Hamas and other militant groups in the West Bank, provoking limited rocket fire from groups in Gaza, which Hamas actively pressured to abide by the ceasefire, including by making arrests.

On November 4, Israel launched an airstrike and ground incursion against Gaza, killing half a dozen members of Hamas. Up until that time, Hamas had fired not a single rocket at Israel, but had strictly observed the ceasefire. Israel’s violation effectively ended the ceasefire. Its official end came on December 19, the expiration of the six-month period. Hamas offered to extend the truce if Israel would lift the siege, but Israel refused the offer and instead proceeded to launch a full-scale military operation it had been planning since before the truce had gone into effect.

Again, all totally uncontroversial. So it just isn’t mentioned. The New York Times, for example, reported the November 4 Israeli violation at the time, but in subsequent accounts employed euphemisms like just saying that the ceasefire “broke down” in early November, without any further discussion as to why it “broke down”, which was because Israel violated it. As a simple thought experiment, had Hamas been the one to violate the ceasefire, the Times would never have reported that it just “broke down”. It would have been absolutely obligatory to note that Hamas had violated it. But the opposite truth is just too inconvenient, so it just isn’t mentioned.

That was “Operation Cast Lead”, which targeted the civilian population of Gaza. Israel targeted homes, mosques, schools, hospitals, and U.N. facilities. It used white phosphorus munitions over civilian areas. It leveled entire areas of Gaza and killed about 1,400 Palestinians, mostly civilians, including around 300 children. The devastation was wrought by U.S.-provided F-16s, Apache helicopters, Hellfire missiles, and white phosphorus munitions. It was bought and paid for by the U.S. taxpayers through over $3 billion in annual military grants to Israel, which is in addition to billions in loan guarantees the U.S. provides, which basically means that if Israel were to ever default on a loan, the U.S. taxpayers would be liable to cover the debt.

The condemnation of Israel’s actions was universal. The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and numerous U.N. reports stated the prima facie case that Israel’s conduct had been in violation of international law. The U.N. launched an investigation headed up by Richard Goldstone, which found both Israel and Hamas guilty of war crimes and made recommendations on how to obtain justice for the victims. The U.S. stood alone in condemning not Israel, but the U.N. report, and proceeded to act to block its findings and recommendations from being adopted by the Security Council.

So this is just one illustration of why Israel can enjoy immunity. It’s because the U.S. unconditionally supports Israeli crimes, financially, militarily, and diplomatically. This is why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict persists. This is why the international consensus on a two-state solution is not implemented, because the U.S. and Israel stand against the entire rest of the world in rejecting and blocking it.

KZ: During the recent years, Israel has been incessantly threatening Iran against a nuclear strike and a preemptive war. The United States also has chanted the same slogans with a different frequency. Don’t these threats exemplify violation of the UN Charter and Geneva Convention? Do you take seriously these threats? Overall, do you think that either of these two stalwart allies will finally attack Iran?

JRH: The U.N. Charter is explicit in forbidding member nations, which includes both the U.S. and Israel, from not only the use of force, but threatening the use of force in international relations. There are only two circumstances under which a resort to the use of force is considered legitimate under international law. The first is the use of armed force in self-defense against an armed attack. The second is if there is explicit authorization for the use of force under an explicit mandate from the U.N. Security Council. So every time a U.S. or Israeli government official threatens Iran with a military attack against its nuclear program, that is in fact a violation of international law, of the U.N. Charter.

The threats should be taken very seriously. It’s a serious threat, not to be taken lightly. It may just be posturing by the U.S. and Israel, but both nations have repeatedly shown a willingness to reject diplomacy and use military force to pursue their respective policies. The illegality and the question of morality aside, there are plenty of reasons for the U.S. and/or Israel not to attack Iran, and such considerations are certainly a factor in policymakers’ decision making. I don’t think either country will attack Iran in the near future, but it’s an ongoing threat. The threat is real, and it is serious.

KZ: Some critics of the foreign policy of President Ahmadinejad administration believe that he isolated Iran in the international stage with his radical policies toward the West. They also say that he failed to direct Iran’s nuclear program in the right path and thus lost many opportunities including a cordial and amiable relation with the United States and Europe. Do you agree with them?

JRH: No, I don’t agree with them, because that entire narrative is based on fiction, as I’ve already discussed, such as the false claims about Ahmadinejad’s threats to “wipe Israel off the map”, and so on. It’s not uncommon for U.S. media commentators to state that Ahmadinejad has openly declared his intention to obtain the bomb. Ahmadinejad has in fact constantly reiterated that it is Iran’s policy not to seek a nuclear weapon. He has repeatedly urged the U.S. and the rest of the western community to cooperate on the creation of a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East, for another example. But that would mean Israel would need to be disarmed and join the NPT regime. So you can forget it. It’s off the table, and Iran must be punished for its insolence for making such outrageous proposals.

KZ: What do you think of the prospect of Iran’s nuclear standoff? Will the upcoming U.S. Presidential elections have a serious impact on the course of events related to Iran’s nuclear program? Some critics of Iran’s foreign policy believe that Iran was lucky that Barack Obama won the 2008 elections because every other candidate would certainly attack Iran if won the elections. What’s your viewpoint?

JRH: The upcoming election could have a serious impact if Ron Paul were to be voted into office, but short of that, I don’t foresee any change in the U.S. policy towards Iran. Obama talked a lot different than Bush, but rhetoric aside, his actual policy towards Iran is exactly the same as his predecessor’s. Obama’s main opponent, John McCain, was certainly even more radical in his position on Iran. On one occasion, he thought it was funny to sing “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann”, and his tune was pretty much the same when he was being perfectly serious. So there may be some truth to the argument that if Obama hadn’t won, the U.S. would have bombed Iran by now.

But it has to be emphasized that Obama’s policy is not meaningfully different than Bush’s. The difference is semantic. So Bush refused to have negotiations with Iran unless they stopped enriching uranium as a precondition. Obama’s stated position early in his term in office was that the U.S. would talk to Iran, but Iran would have to accept that the end result would be its cessation of uranium enrichment. Okay, so that’s the difference between Bush’s policy and Obama’s policy. In other words, the two policies are virtually indistinguishable, apart from the meaningless rhetoric. Aside from Ron Paul, I don’t know of any candidates who have rejected that ongoing policy and offered a more reasonable alternative, like actually sitting down with Iranians and having a serious and mutually respectful and non-prejudicial discussion about the concerns of the international community over Iran’s nuclear program, with the purpose of also listening to and trying to meet Iran’s needs and legitimate aspirations.

Kourosh Ziabari is an Iranian freelance journalist and writer. He has interviewed numerous prominent individuals, including former Mexican President Vicente Fox, and linguist and political commentator Noam Chomsky. His work has been published in Tehran Times, Global Research, Foreign Policy Journal, Turkish Weekly Journal and Eurasia Review and on Press TV. Mr. Ziabari is a member of World Student Community for Sustainable Development.

Katsiaficas has a Ph.D. of sociology from the University of California, San Diego. Since 1990, he has taught sociology at the Wentworth Institute of Technology’s Department of Humanities and Social Sciences. During the period between 2006 and 2008, he was an Associate in Research at the Harvard University and Korea Institute.

He specializes in social movements, Asian politics, the U.S. foreign policy, comparative and historical studies and has written numerous books in these fields.

In 2003, he won the American Political Science Association’s Special Award for Outstanding Service and in 2008, received the Fulbright Senior Scholar Research Fellowship.

Among his major books are “The Battle of Seattle” by the New York’s Soft Skull Press, “Liberation, Imagination and the Black Panther Party” by New York’s Routledge Press and “South Korean Democracy: Legacy of the Gwangju Uprising” by London’s Routledge Press.

What follows is the complete text of interview with Dr. George Katsiaficas on the recent uprising in the Arab world, its impacts on the international developments and its implications for the United States and its European allies.

Kourosh Ziabari: After Tunisia and Egypt in which the revolutionary forces and people on the ground succeeded in ousting the U.S.-backed puppets, several other Arab nations joined them and staged massive street demonstrations to call for civil liberties, improved living conditions, freedom and democratic governments. Now the whole Arab world is in a state of turmoil and unrest and the U.S.-backed dictators are facing the bitter reality that their autocracies are about to fail and collapse. What factors led to the extension of anti-government protests to the whole Arab world? Can we interpret this collective uprising a result of the explosion of strong pan-Arabist sentiments?

George Katsiaficas: No one could have predicted that the suicide of a vegetable vendor in rural Tunisia would unleash long pent-up frustrations on such a scale. If we take a long historical view, the Arab world went into a steep decline after Europeans discovered how to round Africa and established direct trade with the East. While oil has provided a huge stimulus for recovery in the 20th century, its effects have been drastically mitigated by elite corruption. The Arab people are finally awakening from a long slumber. The masses of ordinary Arabs today know in their hearts that they are more intelligent than their rulers. They know that they could all live better lives if they could get rid of the corrupt and often stupid elites trampling on their freedoms and hogging the money that rightfully belongs to everybody.

The phenomenon of uprisings spreading from place to another and drawing in ever more sectors of the population is one that I first uncovered when I studied the global movement of 1968. Unlike armed insurrections of the early part of the 20th century, the New Left involved a rapid proliferation of popular unarmed revolts—historically a new phenomenon. As I pulled together my empirical studies, I was stunned by the spontaneous spread of revolutionary aspirations in a chain reaction of uprisings and the massive occupation of public space—the sudden entry into history of millions of ordinary people who acted in a unified fashion, intuitively believing that they could change the direction of their society. Although they were not united by any centralized organization or even loosely tied together by any coordinating body, everyone was inspired by the heroic struggle of Vietnam. All over the world—from Paris to Prague, Chicago to Mexico City, and Dhaka to Beijing—people’s revolutionary aspirations and actions were not only synchronized, but they were also remarkably similar to each other in their international solidarity and desire for self-government.

After analyzing the proliferation of the global movement, especially the strikes of May 1968 in France and May 1970 in the US, I coined the term the “eros effect” to explain the rapid emergence of global solidarity and love. From my case studies, I came to understand how in moments of the eros effect, universal interests become generalized at the same time as the dominant values of society are negated (such as national chauvinism, hierarchy, and individualism). At that time, for example, opinion polls consistently showed that Ho Chi-minh was more popular than Richard Nixon on American college campuses. See The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968 (Boston: South End Press, 1987.)

At first glance, the current revolt appears to be confined to the Arab world, but in fact, it has already had a much wider effect: Gabon, Iran, and China have all felt the tremors from the rising in Egypt. Even workers in Wisconsin, who are fighting cutbacks in their standard of living, expressed admiration for, and inspiration from, the Egyptian uprising. Certainly pan-Arab sentiments are a driving force, yet they are not essential. People feel in their bones that change is possible—and not only in the Arab world.

KZ: Many Iranians believe that the uprisings of Tunisia and Egypt have been inspired by Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1979. They compare the overthrowing of U.S.-backed Mubarak and Ben Ali to the dissolution of Mohammad Reza Shah’s government which was unconditionally supported by the United States and its European allies. Do you find such a relationship between these revolutions which took place during an interval of 32 years?

GK: Revolutions and popular uprisings have unexpected results—and not necessarily immediate ones. Even generations later, people’s memories and psyches assimilate lessons from previous eaves of struggles. The courage of Iranians in 1979, their withstanding of ferocious repression by the Shah and his forces, was evident for people all over the world, and inspired Haitians and Filipinos to overthrow their dictators. In 1987, I wrote that, “In the epoch after 1968, popular movements have internalized the New Left tactic of the occupation of public space as means of social transformation, and this tactic’s international diffusion led to the downfall of the Shah, Duvalier, and Marcos…the significance of the eros effect and the importance of synchronized world-historical movements will only increase.”

KZ: In your recent article, you’ve compared the new Middle East revolutions to the Korea’s 1987 June Uprising when after 19 consecutive days of massive street demonstrations, people could finally bring down the 26-year autonomy of military forces and hold direct presidential elections. In what ways are these movements similar to each other?

GK: In both cases, people basically fought with bare hands against mighty police forces and defeated them. Thousands of ordinary citizens claimed the right to remain together in public and refused to go home when ordered to do so. Small informal leadership circles emerged in the course of popular struggles, drawn initially from extant activist circles but also porous enough to admit many newcomers from a variety of constituencies. Most significantly, both revolts were quickly ended by the peaceful retirement of the incumbent president and vague promises made by the military—which in both cases remained in power as the uprising subsided. It took South Koreans another five years of struggle before the first civilian was elected president, and it took until 1996 to put the previous dictators in prison. While one agreed to the order to return some US$300 million that he had stolen from the public, Chun Doo-hwan famously testified he had less than $100 to his name—thereby losing his honor but keeping a fortune of perhaps $700 million. Both sums pale in comparison to the estimated fortune amassed by Mubarek. It remains to be seen how much of the Mubarek family holdings will be recovered—or, more importantly, whether or not Egypt will move toward substantive democracy. The longer people adopt a “wait and see” attitude, the less chance there is of change. Millennia of pharonic rule and dictatorships are not easily undone.

KZ: The Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi is said to have deposited $90 billion in Italian and other European banks. Since 1990s, the European states moved towards normalizing their ties with the dictator and supported him both politically and financially. Now, these Western states with which the Libyan dictator was once a close friend are calling for a unified international action against him. The old friend has now become a bitter enemy. Isn’t this an exercise of double standards by the Western governments?

GK: This double standard is nothing new. The US has a long history of riding on the backs of dictators in Third World countries and then tossing them away like a used car once they have outlived their usefulness. Longtime Philippines president Ferdinand Marcos was ousted with US approval in 1986; the CIA maintained real time connection to the rebels and provided them with invaluable intelligence information. Much earlier, in 1961, Rafael Trujillo, who had ruled the Dominican Republic with an iron fist for decades, was assassinated. Many people suspect the CIA provided the assassins with the weapons they used. In 1963, Ngo Dinh Diem, who had faithfully served US interests in South Vietnam from 1956 to 1963, was overthrown in a military coup about which the US had advance knowledge, and US refusal to assist him led to his assassination. Many people believe long-time US ally Park Chung-hee, ruler of South Korea from 1961 to 1979, was killed with advance US approval.

KZ: The media have reported that the mercenaries of Colonel Gaddafi have so far killed more than 6,000 protesters in Tripoli and other cities of Libya. What’s your prediction for the political future of Libya? Gaddafi has vowed to remain in power and “die as a martyr”; however, the protesters, despite the large-scale crackdown by the government haven’t retracted from their stance and are still calling for the ouster of the old dictator. What will be the outcome of these tumultuous clashes in Libya? Will the revolution finally end in the overthrowing of Muammar Gaddafi?

KZ: That is a life and death question for thousands of Libyans. It is too early for us to tell whether or not the armed revolt will prevail. With the US and NATO already overextended in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Joints Chiefs are resisting the call by conservatives here to implement a no-fly zone and come to the assistance of the rebels. We should not forget that Gaddafi has played ball with the US in recent years, and he is certainly calling in every favor he is owed. In 1980, the US encouraged Korean General Chun Doo-hwan to suppress the democratic popular uprising in Gwangju. There can be no doubt that it may well stand by and watch as Gaddafi crushes those opposed to his rule.

KZ: Prof. Rashid Khalidi believes that the recent uprisings in the Arab countries have transformed and changed the mainstream media’s portrayal of the Muslim world. The people that were once introduced as fanatic terrorists and extremists are now being called freemen who sacrifice their lives for the sake of achieving freedom and liberty. Do you agree with this viewpoint? Has the communal uprising of the Arab world changed the public’s viewpoint regarding the Arabs and Muslims?

GK: In my view, US public opinion has not really shifted much. The self-organization of armed resistance to Gaddafi astounds American journalists. American young people note with amusement that soccer and dating web sites were used by young Libyans to organize their uprising, but my students complain that they feel burdened by the region’s peoples looking to the US for help.

I suspect the change in Arabs’ own self-understanding is far more significant. For too long, the role of public opinion and the importance of ordinary people has been disregarded in the region, especially by insurgencies, which instead of seeking to stimulate popular movements and raise consciousness, instead pinned their hopes on elites or organized armed commando actions. The first and most influential shift occurred with the first Palestinian intifada in the late 1980s. The people’s uprising was ruthlessly crushed—remember Yitzhak Rabin’s orders to break bones of unarmed children—but the spirit of popular resistance was kindled throughout the region.

KZ: We already know that the authoritarian regimes of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan, Yemen, Bahrain and Libya are among the major human rights violators in the world; however, the United States and its European cronies who frequently boast of their concerns about the preservation of human rights and freedom have been long indifferent to the persecution of political activists, incarceration of journalists and bloggers and other abuses of human rights in these countries. On the other hand, the superpowers have always employed the excuse of human rights for pressuring the independent and non-aligned nations such as Iran. What do you think about this dualistic approach?

GK: From the very beginning, US human rights policy has been self-serving and duplicitous. In the name of democracy and enlightenment, the US exterminated millions of Native Americans. The US government broke nearly every treaty it ever signed with native peoples, a sad history known as the “Trail of Broken Treaties.” It would be laughable if it were not so tragic that a country based upon enslavement and murder of millions of Africans and genocide against Native Americans, a country that killed at least three million Koreans and more than two million Indochinese, a country that today is massacring thousands more in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, could seek to instruct anyone on “human rights.” Yet it is precisely a self-righteous belief in American freedom and superiority that motivates continuing genocide.

President Jimmy Carter, with whom the modern version of human rights policy is thought to originate, collaborated with Indonesian generals in the bloody invasion of East Timor. Carter approved the suppression of the Gwangju Uprising at the cost of hundreds of lives. Years later, when evidence of his actions could be assembled, a Peoples Tribunal found Carter and 7 other high US officials guilty of “crimes against humanity for violation of the civil rights of the people of Gwangju.” Five months afterwards, Carter was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. The hypocrisy continues unabated. Obama enlarges the war in Afghanistan and attacks Pakistan, and he, too, is awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. Should we be surprised that an award named after the inventor of dynamite provides international legitimation of Western imperialism and aggression?

KZ: As my final question, what’s your prediction for the future of Arab countries which have been engulfed by the waves of popular upsurge in the recent weeks? Will the autocratic regimes of the Persian Gulf region finally yield to the demands of the protesting revolutionaries?

GK: Unfortunately, my prognosis is that the region will continue to be burdened by corrupt elites, but also that existing rulers will have to permit larger circles of economic innovators to emerge and grant people a wider range of civil liberties. With a population of 90 million, Egypt barely managed to manufacture what Costa Rica (population 900,000) could produce. Historically speaking, uprisings have opened the doors to subsequent economic development, as we readily see today in East Asia.

I suspect that substantive democracy in the Arab world (nor practically anywhere else for that matter) is not in the cards—at least for now. Elections may well be permitted but, as in the US, candidates will reflect the dominant parties, not any meaningful alternative. Military spending will continue to be lavish and result in enormous waste of resources. Militarized nation-states armed with weapons of mass destruction, although widely understood as historical anachronisms, will continue to reign supreme. Ordinary people’s dreams of a world at peace reveals a wisdom that far surpasses their rulers’ capacity to think, yet the resultant contradiction requires a globally synchronized effort to result in real change.

In my view, the synchronicity of revolts and occupation of public space that began in 1968 is continually widening its circles. Besides the overthrow of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, we saw a wave of uprisings after Gwangju that spread in six years from 1986 to 1992 through the Philippines, Burma, Tibet, China, Taiwan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Thailand. This most recent emergence of the eros effect in the Arab world indicates that popular movements are building to an even more intense climax, to a global uprising that might finally bring an end to the scandalous control of humanity’s collective wealth by a handful of billionaires.

Kourosh Ziabari is an Iranian freelance journalist and writer. He has interviewed numerous prominent individuals, including former Mexican President Vicente Fox, and linguist and political commentator Noam Chomsky. His work has been published in Tehran Times, Global Research, Foreign Policy Journal, Turkish Weekly Journal and Eurasia Review and on Press TV. Mr. Ziabari is a member of World Student Community for Sustainable Development.

Anthony DiMaggio

Anthony DiMaggio is a university professor, writer, political commentator and media expert. He is the author of numerous books, including Mass Media, Mass Propaganda (2008), When Media Goes to War (2010), and Crashing the Tea Party (2011).  He has taught U.S. and Global Politics at Illinois State University, and published articles and commentaries in a number of publications, including Z Magazine, Counterpunch, Truthout, Common Dreams, Alternet, Monthly Review, and Black Agenda Report.

Together with Paul Street, he co-edits the “Media-ocracy”, an online journal which describes itself as “committed to combating the entrenched media system.” Media-ocracy “caters to progressive intellectuals and activists, and is devoted to the study of mass media, public opinion, and social discourse.”

DiMaggio has taken part in an elaborate, in-depth interview with me to discuss the recent developments in the Middle East, the popular uprising of the people of Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Bahrain, Syria and the impacts of these developments on the political future of the United States and Israel. We have also discussed the U.S. foreign policy with regards to the Middle East and the double standards of the Western superpowers on human rights, democracy and freedom.
What follows is the complete text of my in-depth interview with Anthony DiMaggio, university professor and political analyst.

Kourosh Ziabari: as you may admit, the Egyptian revolution of 2011 began and progressed quite unexpectedly and unpredictably. After decades of U.S.-backed dictatorship under Hosni Mubarak, the people of Egypt took to the streets of Cairo and Alexandria all of a sudden and called for the dismissal of the dictator and the installation of a democratically-elected president. They successfully overthrew the tyrannical government of Mubarak and his allies in less than 20 days. What were the motives behind this revolution? What have been the motivations that laid the groundwork for the victory of Egyptian nation’s revolution?

Anthony DiMaggio: I think it’s fair to say that the Egyptian revolution took most people in the U.S., including myself, by surprise. In hindsight, it’s not entirely clear why this should have been the case, considering the multitude of factors that came together to establish a critical mass against the status quo.  I can’t speak authoritatively about the specific motivations of those who planned the Egyptian revolt since I haven’t had contact with them, but I think it’s fair to say that it’s not difficult to find the major reasons after a bit of critical investigation.

Any discussion of the rebellion in Egypt should concede that many forces came together at the same time to create the conditions needed for the successful overthrow of Mubarak. One important factor was the onset of the global economic crisis, which greatly contributed to growing poverty and desperation in Egypt and throughout the rest of the world. Other factors include the revolution in Tunisia. Reports on the ground in Egypt clearly showed that protestors were drawing inspiration from Tunisians’ success in overthrowing Ben Ali’s repressive government; a success that was readily broadcast through the immensely popular Arab news outlet Al Jazeera. Clearly, the success there has helped initiate a sort of contagion effect, as demands for democratization against U.S. and Western sponsored dictators have taken hold throughout much of the Arab-Muslim world. Furthermore, the technological revolution via developments such as the growth of Al Jazeera and growing public access to satellite communications, in addition to increased access to online networking groups like Facebook and Twitter have also played a key role in Egypt’s success and in challenging traditional communication systems dominated by repressive, centralized governments. Reliance on these networks greatly aided organizing efforts, and culminated in protests of the Egyptian regime that garnered more than one million people in the streets of Cairo in early 2011. These social networks clearly allowed activists to more easily coordinate demonstrations against the Mubarak regime.

Far more important in terms of long term grievances and causes of the rebellion, however, is the growing poverty and declining standard of living in Egypt, largely as a result of economic liberalization and government corruption, cronyism. Egypt is in a dire state with regard to unemployment. Dealing with a massive “youth bulge,” the country is unable to provide enough jobs for the young (60 percent of the population is under 25). Even the well educated are not immune, as the unemployment rate is ten times higher for college graduates as compared to those with an elementary school education. Each year in Egypt, 700,000 new college graduates seek employment in a country in which just 200,000 jobs are available.

Egypt’s revolt is not new; it has been ongoing for many years. The country experienced more than 3,000 labor protests from 2004 through the end of the decade, as a social movement emerged that was dedicated to challenging growing unemployment and poor working conditions, benefits that coincided with the rise of the privatization and neoliberalization of Egypt’s economy over the last twenty years.

Neoliberalism has had disastrous consequences for the masses. Mandated by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, and embraced by Mubarak, neoliberalization included the mass privatization of formerly public assets and services, in addition to mass layoffs in an effort to increase profitability in newly privatized companies, strong wage controls which amounted to pay cuts for workers in light of inflation, and a wholesale assault on basic food subsidies, cash transfers, and other government subsidies that were once the norm prior to the onset of “structural adjustment” (a.k.a. “free marketization”) under the IMF and World Bank in 1991.

This privatization is widely associated with the emergence of a small, super-wealthy group of political elites tied to the former Mubarak regime. Mubarak and his sons alone were said to be worth between $15 to 30 billion, with the vast majority of that wealth thought to be tied to the corrupt siphoning off of public funds in relation to privatization schemes in recent decades. Egypt’s masses continued to suffer as Mubarak and his cronies got rich, with the poor unable to pay even for food in light of the 17 percent increase in food prices from 2010 to 2011 alone.  Average incomes declined for years, while Mubarak implemented deep cuts in the social welfare safety valve.

Basic food and fertilizer subsidies, cash transfers, and other government aid to the poor fell dramatically in the last two decades in Egypt. Available World Bank data verified this trend, with subsidies as a percent of GDP falling by 11 percent from 1982 to 1995. By 1995, food subsidies specifically had declined to one-third of the level allocated during the 1980s. As a percent of total government spending, food subsidies fell from 19.5 percent in the early 1980s to less than seven percent by 1997. The effects of these cuts were not hard to foresee, considering that Egypt also burst into riots in the late 1970s following major cuts to bread subsidies for the masses. Such riots are common throughout the third world, where the poor rely on these subsidies to survive.

Supporters of “free markets” have made much of Egypt’s seven percent annual economic growth. What they consistently ignore is that the masses have not shared in the material benefits of this growth under neoliberalization. The minimum wage has been frozen at four pounds since the early 2000s. By the end of 2010, more than 40 percent of Egyptians, 80 million people, were living in poverty, on less than $2 a day (compared to twenty percent who earned as much in 1991). At the same time, the wealthy have seen their incomes increase dramatically. In 2004, Mubarak instituted a new tax cut that dropped the top tax rate from 42 to 20 percent of personal income essentially instituting a flat tax in which the country’s poorest paid the same proportion of their incomes as that paid by millionaires. In short, “free market” reforms in Egypt have produced fabulous wealth for the opulent few, at the direct expense of the masses.

Much of the anger at Mubarak was also understandably based on his government’s suppression of anyone who tried to do anything about these developments. Attacks on labor were routine. The Egyptian government closed the offices of numerous trade union services dedicated to advising workers over their rights to organize and protest in support of increased wages and benefits. Protests were regularly met by government violence. Such attacks against labor have been labeled “a serious blow to Egyptian civil society and workers’ rights” by human rights advocates.

Of course, the violation of human rights hardly stops with labor. Mubarak’s repression included many other infringements on basic civil and human rights. The country has suffered under a martial law “state of emergency” for decades, with the government free to make arbitrary arrests and hold citizens without charge.  An estimated 10,000 people, as of the late 2000s, remained in prolonged detention without charge. Police regularly relied on false confessions, gained through torture against suspected “enemies” of the state. Egypt itself served as one of a number of sites for secret torture interrogations of U.S. and allied detainees in the “War on Terror.”  National press have been censored by a government law that allowed for the detainment of any reporters who criticized Mubarak or friendly foreign leaders, while the government had essentially declared war on the homeless and street children.

These children have typically committed no crimes, yet they are regularly and arbitrarily detained under the charge of “being vulnerable to delinquency,” and faced, according to human rights reporting, “beatings, sexual abuse, and extortion by police and adult suspects, and police [who] at times deny them access to food, bedding, and medical care.” Torture had been growing worse in recent years.As Gasser Abdel Razek of Human Rights Watch explained about the country’s problem with police-sponsored torture: “fifteen years ago, we used to say that this or that police station is bad, or if that you were an Islamist and you got picked up after a bombing, you could count on being tortured. Today, I can’t name a single police station that’s good.  And the victims are middle-class, they’re educated, they’re homeless. It doesn’t make any difference.”

KZ: After Tunisia and Egypt, in which the revolutionary forces and people on the ground succeeded in ousting the U.S.-backed puppets, several other Arab nations joined them and staged massive street demonstrations to call for civil liberties, improved living conditions, freedom and democratic governments. Now the whole Arab world is in a state of turmoil and unrest and the U.S.-backed dictators are facing the bitter reality that their autocracies are about to fail and collapse. What factors led to the extension of anti-government protests to the whole Arab world? Can we interpret this collective uprising a result of the explosion of strong pan-Arabist sentiments?

AD: I think it’d be naïve to deny the role of pan-Arabist sentiment in fueling rebellions throughout the Middle East at a time when Egyptians’ solidarity extends as far as Madison, Wisconsin. I was proud to have participated in those protests, which were directed at a similar, although relatively less extreme, type of repression of labor as led by the Republican Party and business interests in the U.S. and aided greatly by Democrats.

In the case of Egypt, there is of course the now famous statement of Kamal Abbas, general coordinator for Egypt’s Center for Trade Unions and Workers Services, in which he indicated about Wisconsin’s protests: “We want you to know that we stand on your side. Stand firm and don’t waiver. Don’t’ give up on your rights. Victory always belongs to the people who stand firm and demand their rights.”

With regard to the issue of a regional Arab-Muslim rebellion, the cause appears to be driven by the obvious culprit: U.S. supported repression on the part of regional dictatorships. Public animosity against these governments has been in the making for decades. Much of my work in the area of U.S. foreign policy has been dedicated to elaborating upon the long-standing grievances of those living in the Middle East, expressed against the United States and its preferred dictators. A number of recent and important books have also explored this point in detail, including James Zogby’s Arab Voices, Juan Cole’s Engaging the Muslim World, and Steven Kull’s Feeling Betrayed. As should now be apparent to all, the primary anger throughout the Arab-Muslim world is with the U.S. and its client dictators’ complete contempt for democracy.

Support for renewed democratization appears in surveys done across the region.  A 2010 poll by the Global Pew Research Center found that majorities throughout every Muslim country surveyed with the exception of Pakistan find democracy to be preferable to competing types of government. Of course most throughout the region think that a primary hindrance to freedom is the United States. A 2007 poll by the Program on International Policy Attitudes found that 79 percent of those in Muslim countries surveyed felt that “the U.S. goal is to divide and weaken the Muslim world.”  The most common reasons given by survey respondents were: the positioning of U.S. bases in holy lands such as Saudi Arabia, support for Israeli Zionism, which excludes Palestinian Israelis from full citizenship rights, and consistent U.S. and allied attacks on Muslim majority countries/nations such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and Palestine. Polling from the Gallup organization has similarly found that most surveyed throughout the Arab-Muslim world “simply don’t think that the U.S. and the nations of the West have respect for Arabs or for Islamic culture of religion. The people of these Islamic cultures say that the West pays little attention to their situation, does not attempt to help these countries, and makes few attempts to communicate or to create cross-cultural bridges.”  U.S. support for brutal dictators is also a common source of frustration, as found in a 2004 Pentagon Defense Science Board study of Arab-Muslim opinion concluded that “Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom,’ but rather they hate our policies…when American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy” in light of the U.S. record of blocking democracy in the region.

KZ: Many Iranians believe that the uprisings of Tunisia and Egypt have been inspired by Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1979. They compare the overthrowing of U.S.-backed Mubarak and Ben Ali to the dissolution of Mohammad Reza Shah’s government which was unconditionally supported by the United States and its European allies. Do you find such a relationship between these revolutions which took place during an interval of 32 years?

AD: As someone who is not an expert on Iran and recent developments there, including the 2009 uprising and mass protests against the government of Khamenei, I can’t do much but speculate on this question. My initial thoughts were that the uprisings in Iran in 2009 and this year can be viewed very much as fitting comfortably within the other protests throughout the Arab-Muslim world, in terms of resisting repressive governments seen as widely unresponsive to the public.  Iran’s government retains a detestable human rights record, as documented in great detail by human rights groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Recent developments in Iran have seen a resurgence of demonstrations against the government, with thousands taking to the streets this year in protest of President Ahmadinejad and the established order. Reports of police brutality as directed against the protestors in the form of beatings, use of tear gas, and other attacks have no doubt increased public animosity, although I can’t speak with any authority about the extent to which this year’s protests are supported by the larger Iranian public.

I think there is room to argue that there is a role for the Iranian 1979 revolution with regard to the recent uprising in the broader context of U.S. responsibility. The Shah of Iran and his repressive secret service (SAVAK) were widely detested by the Iranian people, considering the role both played in the torture and murder of thousands. U.S. installation of, and longstanding support for this dictator contributed greatly to Arab and Muslim ill-will against the United States. That ill-will is now being manifested again in the uprisings across the region, which is intimately driven by a distrust of the U.S. and its favored dictators. In this sense, then, I think you can definitely make a connection between the events of 1979 and current protests.

KZ: Professor Rashid Khalidi believes that the recent uprisings in the Arab countries have transformed and changed the mainstream media’s portrayal of the Muslim world. The people that were once introduced as fanatic terrorists and extremists are now being called freemen who sacrifice their lives for the sake of achieving freedom and liberty. Do agree with this viewpoint? Has the communal uprising of the Arab world changed the public’s viewpoint regarding the Arabs and Muslims?

AD: There is a long-known axiom in the study of U.S. media that goes as such: the spectrum of views observed in the mass media is directly dependent upon the spectrum of views expressed in Washington. I’ve documented this connection for years, highlighting the many ways in which critical points of view are only embraced in the mass media after they are first accepted by elites holding political and economic power.

My impression of coverage of the Egyptian uprising is that the U.S. media has generally framed the people as rising up against a corrupt dictator. In this sense, I would agree with Khalidi that there has been a change in coverage. In the past, this type of reporting and framing of Egyptian politics would not have been embraced in the U.S. media.  But it’s important to consider the reason for why this message has been sustained today.  The repression and corruption emanating from Mubarak’s regime had become so extreme that it could no longer be denied in light of the massive protests throughout Egypt.  Recognizing this basic fact, American officials realized their support for this butcher was no longer sustainable or logical.  At the point in which the regime’s downfall appeared imminent, Obama and company then switched from their long-standing policy of supporting this dictator to calling for major reforms and for his ouster.  The mass media has simply responded to this change in the official line by echoing the switch-over in official policy.

Notice there hasn’t been any corresponding transformation in U.S. reporting on rebellions in other friendly states which haven’t reached the critical mass and success of Egypt yet, as seen in examples such as Saudi Arabia and Bahrain but not in an “enemy” state like Syria, in which critical coverage of government repression is to be expected, and in fact, is commonplace in reporting. U.S. reporters have remained largely silent on the dramatic disparity between U.S. “support for democracy” in Egypt and active U.S. military and logistical support for repression against democratic change in other corrupt oil monarchies in the Middle East. I don’t hear any reporters or pundits calling for a change in policy in terms of opposing or replacing these regimes. Scarcely anything critical has been said about the Obama administration’s cynical new policy of “regime alteration,” rather than regime change, as intended to apply to favored U.S. dictators who remain in firm power. Of course, the “alteration” has proven to be little more than cosmetic, as the U.S. continues to rhetorically call for greater moderation of human rights violations as practiced by Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, while concurrently supporting that repression behind the scenes. As one administration official describes Obama’s “new” “regime alteration” policy, the U.S. will continue on a path “toward emphasizing stability [a euphemism for support for corrupt dictators] over majority rule.”

With regard to the American public, I don’t know that public opinion about the uprisings changed opinion dramatically, although more people certainly seem to be paying attention today. Most Americans appeared to genuinely hope that something like democracy would eventually emerge in the case of Iraq during the time when the U.S. was escalating its occupation, although when surveyed they also explained that they felt that “democracy promotion” in and of itself was an insufficient justification for going to war.  More recently, the Program on International Policy Attitudes found in their 2011 survey that 65 percent of Americans feel it would be “mostly positive” for the U.S. “if the countries of the Middle East become more democratic.”

Importantly, 57 percent felt that they “would want to see a country [in the region] become more democratic even if this resulted in the country being more likely to oppose U.S. policies,” which (at least theoretically) bodes well for the idea of regional independence from the U.S.

KZ: We already know that the authoritarian regimes of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Tunisia, Jordan, Yemen, Bahrain and Libya are among the major human rights violators in the world; however, the United States and its European cronies who frequently boast of their concerns about the preservation of human rights and freedom have been long indifferent to the persecution of political activists, incarceration of journalists and bloggers and other abuses of human rights in these countries. On the other hand, the superpowers have always employed the excuse of human rights for pressuring the independent and non-aligned nations such as Iran. What do you think about this dualistic approach?

AD: The dualistic approach is a reflection of the conflict between U.S. rhetoric and reality. As with all political leaders, their promises typically contradict their observed behavior. The U.S. has one standard when it comes to human rights: it prefers countries that suppress their populations in the name of providing the U.S. with cheap access to raw materials and resources and a favorable investment climate for American businesses. U.S. leaders will never openly admit this, but on some level – whether it’s conscious or subconscious is irrelevant – they understand that the U.S. cannot succeed in controlling global resources without supporting some very unsavory characters, or by engaging in atrocities themselves.  The Iraq war was a classic example of such brutality, with the U.S. openly engaging in collective punishment in the name of “pacifying” communities such as Fallujah and Ramadi, so as to actively turn them against the insurgency.  The notorious “Salvador Option,” in which the U.S. trained Iraqi death squads to target suspected sympathizers with the insurgency and engage in torture and murder of these individuals, was a powerful example of active U.S. contempt for basic human rights.  Predictably, the implications of these actions for human rights in Iraq were consistently ignored by U.S. intellectuals, journalists, and political/business elites.

One can’t maintain an empire without engaging in some very unpleasant and nasty actions against the world’s poor and downtrodden. This was openly conceded by Bush near the end of his administration and as he celebrated the “surge” of U.S. troops and U.S. counter-insurgency violence and announced that a withdrawal from Iraq was unacceptable because of the U.S. interest in retaining unimpeded control over Iraq’s oil resources.

Of course, rationalizations of state violence are always a part of the equation. I have no doubt that Bush and other imperialists justified using violence to control Iraqi oil under the assumptions that privatization and “free markets” would inevitably create a rising tide that lifts all boats, and that the U.S. could be better trusted than the “terrorists” to control this vital resource. We’ve seen the poverty of these claims, in reality, in light of the widespread understanding of Iraqis (revealed continuously in polls) that they saw the U.S., rather than foreign Islamists or insurgency members, as the primary threat to Iraqi and regional peace.  We’ve also seen such rationalizations thoroughly debunked in the case of Egypt, which has witnessed living standards for the masses rapidly deteriorate under a neoliberal regime.  Regardless of the justification, the larger point is that you don’t become the most powerful military and economic force in the world without repressing local populations.  Most people, after all, tend to opposed to occupations, violent domination, and neoliberal cronyism/extortion, as exercised by the U.S. and its preferred dictators. The only way to get them to go along is through violence and coercion.

I don’t think the U.S. is “indifferent” to abuses in Saudi Arabia and other friendly states, but actively supportive of, and committed to those abuses. In the case of Saudi Arabia, it is granted carte blanche to engage in human rights violations and terrorism, so long as it continues to provide the U.S. with cheap oil.  Its actions, as you correctly suggest, are repulsive. It’s been the consistent recipient of U.S. military, economic, and political aid despite its recent outlawing of protest, its violent attacks on peaceful protesters, and its longstanding attacks on human rights. Of course, U.S. leaders can plead ignorance to these transgressions, but such claims are complete absurdities. You can simply read in the Washington Post reports from on the ground in Saudi Arabia from those suffering under this medieval regime, in which Shi’ite protesters are subject to “increasing detentions, beatings, and surveillance” in the government’s war on dissent.  Then of course there’s the long record of abuses chronicled by groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. The Saudi dictatorship is notorious for its denigration of women, who are seen as third class citizens at best. Human Rights Watch reports that the government’s many practices include “arbitrary detention, torture and ill-treatment, and [reliance on] the death penalty” for those who engage in theft, homosexuality, witchcraft, prostitution, and other criminal activities, real or imagined. Saudi police are known for breaking into individuals’ homes without a warrant in relation to charges as dubious as suspected alcohol possession and engaging in non-Muslim religious worship.

Then there’s U.S. support for Saudi Arabia’s active suppression of Shi’ite majorities throughout the Arabian Peninsula. The Wikileaks revelations were extremely valuable among other findings in that they showed that U.S. diplomats were well aware of Saudi Arabia’s responsibility for bombing civilians in its counter-insurgency war in Yemen. The monarchy has also used violent intervention in Bahrain (not to mention on Saudi soil) in order to suppress Shi’ite revolts against repressive minority Sunni governments.  As Wikileaks showed, U.S. diplomats largely dismissed Saudi responsibility for killing civilians in Yemen under the claim that the regime was allegedly doubling its efforts to minimize collateral damage. Such rationalizations are largely disingenuous in light of the United State’s own responsibility for the deaths of tens to hundreds of thousands in Iraq due to U.S. bombing and military operations in Iraq, all also pursued under the promise of minimizing “collateral damage”, and in light of Saudi Arabia’s escalation of human rights violations on its own soil. It’s been easy for the U.S. to ignore the unpleasantness of U.S. and allied policies. When confronted with the ugly consequences of their “bombing for democracy” campaign, George Bush’s response was simply to dismiss the figures suggesting U.S. responsibility in mass killing as irrelevant and unfounded, despite the fact that those who engaged in these studies used widely recognized statistical methods ranging from collecting news reports on the dead to engaging in cluster survey sampling, as is typically done when estimating wartime casualties. He could count on a compliant media to promptly drop the issue, considering the complete refusal of Democrats and fellow Republicans to explore the issue.

In the end, humanitarian rhetoric is, realistically speaking, a weapon to be wielded by the powerful against their enemies, rather than a serious concern in its own right. Media scholars like Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman have performed a vital service by documenting this trend – whereby humanitarian rhetoric is used by politicians and journalists to condemn American enemies who engage in human rights violations. Conversely, U.S. allies are consistently given a pass and embraced despite their many transgressions and regular terror.  This politicization of human rights is at times manifested quite perversely, as seen when the Bush and Obama administrations’ loud public pronouncements of support for democracy and human rights, accompanied by their many efforts to court the Saudi king in public by holding hands, kissing, and bowing to him in a sign of mutual respect.

KZ: What will be the impacts of Arab world’s uprising on the power equations in the Middle East? Will the U.S., Israel and their European cronies suffer damages as a result of the Middle East revolutions? Who is the real winner of this power game?

AD: This is hard to predict, especially over the long term, without the benefit of a crystal ball. Scholars like Michael Klare predict that this new era of rebellion will represent the end of cheap oil, in light of the rising demands throughout the region for improved living standards, to be paid for through oil revenues. Of course, the end of cheap oil already appears to be over in the U.S., and this is largely due not to supply disruptions or to OPEC nations “stepping out of line” by demanding wild price increases, but due to domestic speculation on Wall Street, where investors have taken advantage of regional instability in the Middle East in order to gouge American consumers. Whether the rebellions throughout the Middle East will be successful will depend on how effective local dictators are in putting down these rebellions, how much these dictators concede to their increasing unruly subjects and on the duration and intensity of future protests. One thing, however, is certain. The U.S. is certainly not going to concede to demands for democratization without a bitter fight to the end. Any victories for democracy in the region will be long fought and the product of bottom-up pressures from the masses.

I think that it’s true that the U.S. and Israel will ultimately end up being the biggest losers in light of the uprisings. I used to speak regularly with a Palestinian friend about the deplorable state of the Middle East in the wake of the disaster known as the Iraq war. Regional tensions had become so inflamed in light of the Bush administration’s blatant contempt for popular will throughout the region, seen in the pursuit of a war of aggression, defended by bogus claims regarding Iraqi WMD, as witnessed in the coercion directed against Iran, seen in Bush’s belligerent rhetoric and saber rattling, and as observed in U.S. ongoing contempt for the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process,” which has angered Arab-Muslim masses for decades. In my discussions with my Palestinian friend, it was pretty much conceded that the region was a power-keg waiting to explode.  We predicted at the time (from 2006 to 2008) that the explosion would follow what at the time seemed like an imminent U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran.  Instead, the explosion has been far more encouraging, as seen in the mass uprisings. What seems clear is that the governments of the region can no longer afford to ignore their people in preference of siding with U.S. business, political, and military interests. This development was seen most dramatically in Iraq, where the government responded to growing public anger against the U.S. by demanding a Status of Forces Agreement (in 2008) forcing an unwilling Bush into a firm withdrawal date by the end of 2011. Growing rebellion was also evident in the Iraqi government’s refusal to auction off Iraqi oil fields to the lowest bidder, as was the U.S. plan all along under the Bush administration. These failures were hugely embarrassing to the Bush administration and its unilateral imperial approach to dealing with the Middle East. They represent hope for a renewed democratization throughout the region, putting the peoples’ demands ahead of those of U.S. investors and military planners.

KZ: Let’s talk a little about the recent developments concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was on the news that Fatah and Hamas signed an agreement to form a national unity government. How much does this conciliatory gesture jeopardize the interests of Israel? Does this unity between two fractions which have been long at odds threaten the security and existence of Israel?

AD: I think the unity government poses a very real threat to Israeli and American interests in that it will make Israel’s dominance of the Occupied Territories more difficult. The divide-and-conquer strategy pursued by the U.S. and Israeli officials, in which they long encouraged and provided arms and funding for Mahmoud Abbas and Fatah to declare war on Hamas and engage in a Palestinian civil war, appears to be backfiring.  However, the Hamas-Fatah agreement also provides new opportunities for the U.S. and Israel to continue the colonization of the West Bank, as both powers will begin to fall back on a familiar refrain that Hamas represents a “national security” and “terrorist” “threat” to Israel’s survival.  The U.S. National Security Council, for example, immediately responded to the Hamas-Fatah deal by declaring that Hamas “is a terrorist organization which targets civilians,” and that “to play a constructive role in achieving peace, any Palestinian government must renounce violence, abide by past agreements, and recognize Israel’s right to exist.”
The U.S.-Israeli attacks on the agreement will no doubt be defended by citing the fact that Hamas’ charter and its officials have called for the destruction of Israel, and considering Hamas officials’ ambiguity with regard to recognizing the Israeli state. Of course, Washington’s preferred depiction of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is complicated by the fact that the current “threat” to Israel from the Palestinian people is non-existent. There hasn’t been a single Palestinian suicide bombing undertaken against Israelis in the last three years, to put the “threat” into better perspective.

The extraordinary safety within Israel has been quietly acknowledged by U.S. officials.  As Wikileaks recently revealed, just one year after the last Palestinian suicide bombing in 2008, U.S. diplomats were already concluding that “Israelis are enjoying the best security situation since the outbreak of the Second Intifada, the result of Israeli intelligence successes in destroying the suicide bombing network in the West Bank as well as good security cooperation with the Palestinian Authority’s security forces.”  In short, even U.S. leaders now admit that the entire “Israel is under assault” paradigm is unsustainable.

Hamas officials have at times suggested or implied that they are willing to recognize Israel within the 1967 Israeli-Palestinian borders, and in fact have already recognized Israel despite Israeli officials’ own contempt for these borders. Of course, Hamas has also continued to reiterate its resistance to an Israeli state, as expressed in the recent comments made by the group’s leader Khaled Mashaal as he arrived in Cairo to sign a Fatah-Hamas unity agreement. Probably the best interpretation of these seemingly conflicting developments is to recognize that Hamas has indicated a potential willingness to recognize Israel (or at least promote long-term peace), contingent upon Israeli recognition of a Palestinian state. Whether Hamas is serious with regards to such an agreement is not known for sure since Israel has worked at every turn over the last forty years to ensure that an independent Palestinian state will never emerge. Furthermore, Israel and the U.S. have refused to take Hamas up on its 10-year peace offer (tied to the establishment of a Palestinian state). This refusal ensures that peace will be impossible short of the systematic annihilation of Hamas. Ironically, U.S. politicians and pundits refused to criticize Israel for demanding the complete destruction of Hamas, while Hamas has consistently been derided by these same people for “obstructing peace,” despite its repeated peace offerings.

I’ve written at length in the past on Israel’s complete contempt for a Palestinian state, as seen in its stubborn refusal to dismantle the illegal colonies in the West Bank, its dismissal of negotiations on the right of return for Palestinian refugees, its opposition to negotiations on the sharing of Jerusalem as an international capital for both Israel and Palestine, its rejection of efforts to dismantle the Israel “security wall” which illegally annexes upwards of ten percent of the West Bank, its opposition to dismantling the roads and “security” checkpoints that connect the illegal colonies in the West Bank and which create a series of Bantustans that ensure the indefinite cantonization of Palestine, and finally Israel’s refusal to negotiate in favor of a Palestinian state that would exercise full control over its borders, airspace, land, and allow Palestine to maintain its own armed forces.  Such features are basic prerequisites of any real state, and Israel’s refusal to agree to these terms is an indication of its contempt for Palestinian statehood.

There is no reason to think that long-standing Israeli contempt for a Palestinian state will change following the Hamas-Fatah agreement.  
The major change is likely to be rhetorical, with Israeli and American leaders no longer even pretending to be interested in the peace process as based on a two-state solution.  Defense Minister Ehud Barak announced after the agreement that “Hamas is a terrorist organization that fires rockets at Israeli towns,” suggesting that Israel will continue to use the Hamas “threat” in order to impede peace and prevent a renewed freeze on illegal colony construction in the West Bank. The Obama administration has refused (during official negotiations at least) to even follow through with the Bush administration’s rhetorical promises to recognize Israel and Palestine within their pre-1967 borders. This should leave little doubt about American and Israeli plans for the future.

Regardless of how the agreement plays out, Israeli-American rejectionism of a Palestinian state will continue unabated.  The Bush administration gained infamy under the recently released “Palestine Papers” for its complete contempt for the right of return for Palestinian refugees to Israel, with Condoleezza Rice suggesting that these refugees should be sent to South America instead.  The papers also revealed Rice’s blatant contempt for dismantling illegal colonies in the West Bank.  With regard to the West Bank colony of Ma’ale Adumim, Rice went on record warning a Palestinian peace negotiator that Palestinians “won’t have a state” unless there are willing to concede that no “Israeli leader is going to cede” that colony. Rejectionism was further reinforced by Israeli officials, such as former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who the Palestine Papers recorded as stating that “The Israel policy is to take more and more land day after day and that at the end of the day we’ll say that [a withdrawal of the colonies] is impossible, we already have the land and we cannot create the [Palestinian] state.”

KZ: You are well aware of the influence of Zionist lobby on the U.S. administration, congress and senate. All of the decisions which may to some extent contradict the interests of Israel will be stifled and no politician with an anti-Zionist mindset is allowed to come to power as a congressman, lawmaker or president. What is the source of this enormous power which the Zionist lobby possesses? How does Israel control and direct the long-term foreign policy of the United States?

AD: The Israel-Zionist lobby does exercise significant power in the U.S. in its attacks on the few political leaders and academics who dare to offer substantive criticisms of Israel or U.S. foreign policy toward Israel.  I had the privilege of researching the origins of the American-Israeli relationship for a number of years when I was in graduate school, although I was explicitly advised against pursuing this research agenda any further (at least at the scholarly level) by sympathetic peers and mentors nonetheless. The concern was pragmatic, as they worried that I would be the subject of unfair and vicious attacks (a la Norman Finkelstein) if I decided to publish and speak publicly on this issue.

Having said this, I have continued to speak about the issue in progressive media, although I abandoned any possibility of trying to publish in professional academic settings on these issues.  My findings were pretty illuminating with regard to the origins of the U.S.-Israeli relationship, if for no other reason than because they cast doubt on the long-held notion on the left that the U.S. government is the “occupied territory” of the Israel lobby.

To sum up those findings here: the source of Israel’s privileged position in receiving U.S. support and aid largely arises from its strategic value in pursuing U.S. material interests throughout the Middle East.  In aiding the U.S. secure military control of the region and more importantly, control over the region’s oil, Israel has been awarded great latitude in its activities in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.  These lands traditionally have little strategic value for U.S. leaders, hence the Israel lobby’s impressive power in intimidating any potential critics with regard to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

None of the privilege enjoyed by Israel, however, can be divorced from its vital status as a U.S. proxy military force in the Middle East.  The importance of Israel as a regional “cop on the beat” (the Nixon administration’s preferred term for describing Israel) has been reiterated regularly by U.S. presidents.  Those interested in this policy record can look more closely at my historical review of U.S. presidential and national security policy planning documents, which go into more detail on the issue. (Anthony DiMaggio, “A Strategic Relationship: Obama and the Israel Lobby, Part II,” Z Magazine, 13 August 2009, http://www.zcommunications.org/a-strategic-relationship-by-anthony-dimaggio)

Other problems also remain with regard to the theory that the Israel lobby is all powerful in U.S. politics independent of its services to U.S. military interests in the Middle East. As I describe in great detail in my previous empirical research, there is no statistically significant correlation between campaign contributions from members of the Israel lobby and favorable voting toward Israel on issues arising in the U.S. Congress.  Furthermore, contributions from the Israel lobby amount to a miniscule portion (.1 percent) of all contributions provided to members of Congress in the period I examined (post-2000). Even those officials most reliant on contributions from the Israel lobby receive a very small percentage of their contributions on average one to three percent from the group.  Monetarily, then, the case for the Israel lobby’s power as based upon campaign contributions and lobbying is extremely weak.

On another level, my research found that there was no systematic relationship between Jewish population concentrations by state and favorable voting on pro-Israel legislation in Congress. In short, those states that have the largest size Jewish populations are no more likely to see their Senators or Representatives vote in favor of pro-Israel legislation when compared to states with smaller Jewish populations.  This makes short work of the claim that constituency forces play a role in pressuring Congressmen/women to support Israel.

On the other hand, my historical analysis did find a strong, statistically significant relationship between Israeli aggression (against neighboring countries and people) and increases in U.S. foreign aid.  Reinforcing the notion that the U.S.-Israeli relationship is strategic in origin, I found that the U.S.-Israeli relationship materialized largely during the Cold War, specifically during the late 1960s through the early 1970s.  A close examination of these years finds that annual increases in aid to Israel immediately followed attacks made by Israel against surrounding Arab states deemed to be hostile to U.S. strategic interest.  The five largest increases in U.S. aid from 1960 to 2008 measured in the percent increase in aid from one year to the next are described in more detail in my original study, but clearly indicate that the institutionalization of the U.S.-Israeli relationship was largely a function of Israel’s strategic-military value to the U.S. (Anthony DiMaggio, “Origins of Power: Obama and the Israel Lobby, Part I,” Z Magazine, 12 August 2009, http://www.zcommunications.org/origins-of-power-by-anthony-dimaggio)

KZ: The United States has long put a lethal pressure on Iran over what is claimed to be Tehran’s violation of human rights and its pursuance of a nuclear weapon. At the same time, the staunch allies of the United States in the Persian Gulf, namely Bahrain, Yemen and Saudi Arabia, which have the blackest human rights records in the region, are massacring their own people and executing their opponents. Israel is also said to be the sole possessor of nuclear weapons in the Middle East. How is it possible to justify these double standards?

AD: I don’t think it is possible to justify this hypocrisy, as I argued above. U.S. leaders, however, will always find a way to rationalize their opposition to democracy and human rights. The only question remaining, in my mind, is whether Americans and those throughout the Middle East will continue to put up with U.S. propaganda, misinformation, and deceptions. Clearly, U.S. propaganda is rejected by the vast majority of those throughout the Middle East and has been for decades.

Such propaganda is increasingly questioned in the U.S. as well. The Iraq war was opposed by the majority of Americans as early as late 2004, due to public concerns over American lives lost, anxiety over the destructiveness of the counter-insurgency campaign, and due to the incredible costs of the war in light of a worsening economic crisis. The war in Afghanistan has also been incredibly unpopular, rejected by the majority of Americans for a number of years.  By the time of the “humanitarian intervention” in Libya this year, Americans were preemptively expressing overwhelming skepticism of even a limited military campaign.  A March 2011 poll from the Pew Research Center found that just 27 percent of Americans supported a U.S. intervention in Libya, compared to 63 percent who were opposed.  Majority support was barely reached for sanctions (51 percent supported them), while minorities supported more intense interventions such as implementing a no-fly zone (supported by just 44 percent), sending arms to rebels (23 percent), bombing Libyan air defenses (16 percent) or sending troops (just 13 percent).  As should be expected during the onset of war, support for Obama grew substantially once the U.S. actually started to engage in military operations against Qaddafi.  Support, however, remains tepid at best.  As of April 2011, just 39 percent of Americans supported Obama’s handling of the Libyan conflict.  Fifty-six percent supported the implementation of the no-fly zone, which most seem to think is necessary as a means of preventing full blown humanitarian disaster.  At the same time, however, just 18 percent support increasing U.S. military involvement in Libya by further escalating U.S. military activities.

Political scientists have long spoken of the “Vietnam Syndrome,” in which Americans are increasingly unwilling (post-Vietnam) to commit large numbers of troops to bloody and costly long term conflicts with uncertain outcomes.  The recent growth in public suspicion of foreign wars represents a major progression in the intensity of the Vietnam Syndrome.  If public opposition continues to grow as it has, it will be very difficult for the U.S. to escalate another military conflict anytime in the near future.  I think this growth in skepticism is obvious on a very basic level.  Most people I talk to are simply fed up with the endless “War on Terror.”  They see that we have dramatic problems at home, and in light of the recent U.S. assassination of Osama bin Laden, are ready to see the “War on Terror” come to a close.

Kourosh Ziabari is an Iranian freelance journalist and writer. He has interviewed numerous prominent individuals, including former Mexican President Vicente Fox, and linguist and political commentator Noam Chomsky. His work has been published in Tehran Times, Global Research, Foreign Policy Journal, Turkish Weekly Journal and Eurasia Review and on Press TV. Mr. Ziabari is a member of World Student Community for Sustainable Development.

Psychiatrists in Iran have prescribed several drugs for my friend and he has been taking them over the past years; however, when I met him a few weeks ago, he informed me of a shocking, unanticipated incident which I’m still unable to believe. My friend told me that the Canadian and Italian manufacturers of his medicines have ceased exporting their products to Iran following the imposition of United Nations Security Council’s fourth round of sanctions against Iran and it’s possible that they refuse to export their other pharmaceutical products to the country as a result of the sanctions, as well. He told me that his psychiatrists are not able to prescribe the high-quality, original medicines for him anymore and this may seriously jeopardize his mental health and even put his family life into risk.

My instinctive reaction to what my friend told me was nothing but perplexity and confusion. I couldn’t understand the relationship between a set of sanctions which are aimed at what is claimed to be Iran’s “controversial” nuclear program and the mental health of thousands of patients who are suffering from different kinds of psychoses all around the country.

At the first glance, what should be noted is that the four rounds of sanctions which were imposed on Iran by the UNSC so far are entirely illegal, unfounded and baseless as the International Atomic Energy Agency has repeatedly pointed out in its reports that Iran has never diverted toward enriching uranium to the extent that is utilizable in the atomic weapons;. The reports of intelligence services in the United States also confirm that Iran has never had the intention of producing nuclear weapons and thus should not be penalized with sanctions and other punitive measures. The National Intelligence Estimate report of the November 2007 has clearly expressed that Iran does not have a nuclear arsenal and is not moving towards producing nuclear weapons; therefore, bringing up Iran’s nuclear dossier in Security Council and imposing several rounds of crippling sanctions against its people has been merely politicizing Iran’s case which should have been investigated from a legal and scientific viewpoint, not a political one.

However, what is of high importance is the hypocritical and inhuman approach of the United States and its allies concerning Iran’s nuclear program which is turned into an opportunity to confront with the Iranian nation and curb its scientific and political developments.

We have been witness to the fact that, under the pretext of abiding by the UNSC sanctions, several countries in Europe, Asia and Northern America have adopted a counterproductive stance toward Iran and ceased their ordinary financial transactions with Tehran.

Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea and EU member states are among the countries which imposed unilateral, extra-resolution sanctions against Iran and caused several problems for the Iranian nation. Refusing to refuel the Iranian planes in the European airports, suspending the accounts of Iranians in foreign banks and financial institutions, delaying the issuance of visas for the Iranians who want to travel abroad, banning the Iranian students from studying certain fields in the foreign universities and ceasing the exportation of vital goods including foodstuff, medical facilities, fruits and medicines to Iran are among the belligerent policies which these countries have adopted against the people of Iran.

With this unconstructive approach, however, the belligerent countries who have stood against the nation of Iran demonstrated their dishonesty and proved that are not worthy of being trusted. First and foremost, they showed that their claims of being a friend of Iranian nation are entirely futile and pointless. They demonstrated that their “Nowrouz” greeting messages and stretched hands are fake and deceitful. They can not come to terms with the Iranian nation and are fated to be the enemies of Iran, because it’s in their interests to spread animosity and hostility to retain their influence and power.

Secondly, these countries have clearly demonstrated that they have the least respect for human rights and what they claim to be their exclusive realm. A country that deprives the mental patients of another country, which is in dire need of high-quality medication to meet its pharmaceutical needs, of its medical products cannot be called a defender of human rights. Thousands of innocent civilians are suffering here in Iran, and they should be punished by the supercilious, arrogant powers simply because these powers favor being at odds with the independent and self-determining nations.

Canadian Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon regularly lashes out at other countries for what he claims to be their abuses of human rights; however, his own country, with a long period of abusing the rights of its ethnic minorities, refuses to export medicines to Iran because it wants to “abide by the UNSC resolutions.” It might be interesting to know Mr. Cannon’s viewpoints regarding human rights and the way his country glorifies the humankind. Thousands of mental patients are suffering in a remote country and those who promote themselves as the harbingers of human rights, deprive these “humans” from their most essential right which is a proper medication. How is it possible to justify the Canadian style of respecting the human rights, we don’t know!

This was only a simple instance of how the pioneers of human rights fail to respect and venerate what they consider to be their first and foremost social value. Who knows about the real, on-the-ground abuses of human rights by them?

Kourosh Ziabari is an Iranian freelance journalist and writer. He has interviewed numerous prominent individuals, including former Mexican President Vicente Fox, and linguist and political commentator Noam Chomsky. His work has been published in Tehran Times, Global Research, Foreign Policy Journal, Turkish Weekly Journal and Eurasia Review and on Press TV. Mr. Ziabari is a member of World Student Community for Sustainable Development.