News Releases

AP reports: “A Palestinian prisoner agreed to end his 66-day hunger strike to protest his imprisonment without charge after reaching a deal with Israel that will free him in April, the Israeli Justice Ministry said Tuesday.”

RICHARD FALK, rfalk at princeton.edu,
Just back in the U.S. from the Mideast, Falk is available for a limited number of interviews. He is the UN special rapporteur on Palestinian human rights and just wrote the piece “Saving Khader Adnan’s Life and Legacy,” which states: “It is a great relief to those millions around the world who were moved to prayer and action by Khader Adnan’s extraordinary hunger strike of 66 days that has ended due to Israel’s agreement to release him on April 17. …

“While it is appropriate to celebrate this ending of the strike as ‘a victory,’ there are several disturbing features that deserve comment. To call an arrangement that saved someone’s life a ‘deal,’ as the media consistently put it, is itself demeaning, and reveals at the very least a failure to appreciate the gravity and deep dedication of purpose that is bound up with such a nonviolent form of resistance.

“Similarly, the carelessness of the initial reactions was notable, often referring to Mr. Adnan’s ‘release’ when in fact he will be still held in administrative detention for several more weeks, and could conceivably be confined much longer, should Israeli military authorities unilaterally decide that “substantial evidence” against him emerges in this period immediately ahead. It should be noted that on matters of principle, Israel gave not an inch: even in relation to Mr. Adnan, he will remain in captivity and will be subject to the “legal” possibility that his period of imprisonment could be extended indefinitely; beyond this, Israeli authorities conceded no intention whatsoever to review the cases of the 309 other Palestinians who are presently being held under the administrative detention procedure. …

“What was entirely missing from the Israeli public discourse was some expression of compassion, even if only for the family of Mr. Adnan, which consists of two daughters of four years or younger and his articulate pregnant wife, Randa. There was not even the slightest show of respect for the dignity of Mr. Adnan’s long hunger strike or sympathy for the acute suffering that accompanies such a determined foregoing of food for an extended period.

“Instead, the Israeli commentary that was at all favorable to the arrangement stressed purely pragmatic factors. It was one more lost opportunity for Israelis of all shades of opinion to reach across the abyss of political conflict to affirm a common humanity. In contrast, the spokesperson for the Netanyahu government, Mark Regev, was only interested in deflecting criticism aimed at Israel. He parried criticism by cynically observing that other governments use administrative detention in the name of security, including the United States, and that the legality of Israel’s use of administrative detention should not be questioned as it depends on a 1946 law enacted when Britain was controlling Palestine, implying not inaccurately that Israel was the ‘colonial’ successor to the British! …

“A fitting tribute to Mr. Adnan’s hunger strike would be to put opposition to administrative detention on the top of the human rights agenda throughout the world. We should begin by refusing to use the phrase ‘administrative detention,’ rechristening it as ‘administrative torture’ or ‘lawless captivity.’”

Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University and Visiting Distinguished Professor in Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has authored and edited numerous publications spanning a period of five decades, most recently editing the volume “International Law and the Third World: Reshaping Justice.”

See “Pundits Waiting for a Palestinian Gandhi? Meet Khader Adnan” by Peter Hart.

This weekend, the AP reported: “Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul warned the U.S. is ‘slipping into a fascist system’ dominated by government and businesses as he held a fiery rally Saturday night upstaging established Republican Party banquets a short distance away.”

A Republican debate is scheduled on CNN for Wednesday evening.

HERBERT BIX, hbix at binghamton.edu
Available for a limited number of interviews, Bix won the Pulitzer prize for his book Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan. He is a professor at Birmingham University in both the history and sociology departments. While he is best known for his work on Japan, he is a scholar of international and U.S. affairs.

He said today: “Ron Paul is a libertarian and he has racist baggage, but I would never label him with the epithet of isolationist — we should we should thank him for highlighting U.S. interventionism and where it has been leading us. He’s the sole exception on the national stage, and certainly among the major presidential candidates, to advocate a peaceful foreign policy and speak out against our slipping into what I would call a militarized police state. We can easily cite legislation — under both Bush and Obama — that have been constantly building and creating extensions for this militarized police state:

“The FISA statute was passed after the Watergate scandal to deal with Richard Nixon’s illegal actions. It required judicial warrants for wire tapping on Americans. Bush not only violated this and other laws, he tore down the wall between government and big business by granting immunity to the telecom giants who facilitated this law-breaking.

“The Patriot Act spawned numerous invasions of privacy, for example, the National Security Letters, which the FBI abused to forbid anyone — including librarians — who received them from disclosing that they were disclosing information about individuals. And on ten separate occasions Congress renewed without any meaningful revision, all the powers this act transferred to the executive branch.

“The Department of Homeland Security was established and that has operated to reduce civil liberties, especially of immigrants.

“In 2006, the Military Commissions Act gave the president unconstitutional powers to detain any individual he says is an enemy combatant anywhere in the world. How different was this Congressional vote from that to grant Hitler powers and do away with the Weimar Constitution? That seems like an extreme question, but in fact there has been a century of seizure of powers by presidents.

“And just this year, you had the National Defense Authorization Act, which expanded the scope of the Military Commissions Act, so the president could indefinitely detain people who had not been covered — both U.S. citizens and non-citizens — based solely on allegation or rumor. Now we have a new operational phase of the War on Terror: assassination of U.S. citizens — last year Anwar al-Awlaki and journalist Samir Khan were assassinated. This was a milestone event, a violation of the U.S. Constitution and international law.

“Additionally, you have Obama’s administration developing the tactics of torture and drone assassination. Pentagon and CIA war crimes, such as torture and the outsourcing of torture, contribute greatly to the moral degradation of American society.

“Obama has also gone further that Bush in the silencing of whistle blowers. And the courts have actually abetted the executive branch’s subversion of the Constitution because they have refused to question the executive’s claim of ‘national security’ to justify it all.

“As the power of the executive branch grows, it demands obedience through unconstitutional laws and extensions, and the whole ensemble of policies, laws and their extensions threaten freedom, constitutionalism and international law. Only Ron Paul has had the guts to put it on the national agenda.”

SUSANNE DAHLGREN, susanne.dahlgren at helsinki.fi
Dahlgren writes frequently on Yemen. She is Academy of Finland research fellow with the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies and the author of Contesting Realities: The Public Sphere and Morality in Southern Yemen. (Syracuse Univ. Press 2010). She said today: “Today Yemen will have presidential ‘elections” with only one candidate, Vice President Abd al-Rab Mansur al-Hadi from Saleh’s party. It is questionable that these elections represent a step forward, and for sure, they hardly reflect the demands of the popular uprising. In fact what we have in Yemen now is the old card trick called ‘dialogue’ Saleh has used for years to lure his opposition into bad compromises. Many Yemenis refuse to believe in Hadi’s leadership. They remember last summer when Saleh spent months hospitalized in Saudi Arabia after a rocket attack and Hadi acted as the nominal head while Saleh’s sons actually held power. The losers of Yemen’s stalemate situation are those who dared to risk their lives to demand justice and fairness, and in today’s Yemen, it is the majority of people. As one indication of the seriousness of the situation in Yemen, the government prevents foreign observers to enter the country in the manner of the Syrian regime.”

ARI BERMAN, ari at thenation.com,
Berman just wrote the piece “The .0000063% Election: How the Politics of the Super Rich Became American Politics,” which states: “At a time when it’s become a cliché to say that Occupy Wall Street has changed the nation’s political conversation — drawing long overdue attention to the struggles of the 99% — electoral politics and the 2012 presidential election have become almost exclusively defined by the 1%. Or, to be more precise, the .0000063%. Those are the 196 individual donors who have provided nearly 80 percent of the money raised by super PACs in 2011 by giving $100,000 or more each.

“These political action committees, spawned by the Supreme Court’s 5-4 Citizens United decision in January 2010, can raise unlimited amounts of money from individuals, corporations, or unions for the purpose of supporting or opposing a political candidate. In theory, super PACs are legally prohibited from coordinating directly with a candidate, though in practice they’re just a murkier extension of political campaigns, performing all the functions of a traditional campaign without any of the corresponding accountability. …

“The Wesleyan Media Project recently reported a 1,600 percent increase in interest-group-sponsored TV ads in this cycle as compared to the 2008 primaries. Florida has proven the battle royal of the super PACs thus far. There, the pro-Romney super PAC, Restore Our Future, outspent the pro-Gingrich super PAC, Winning Our Future, five to one. In the last week of the campaign alone, Romney and his allies ran 13,000 TV ads in Florida, compared to only 200 for Gingrich. Ninety-two percent of the ads were negative in nature, with two-thirds attacking Gingrich, who, ironically enough, had been a fervent advocate of the Citizens United decision.

“With the exception of Ron Paul’s underdog candidacy and Rick Santorum’s upset victory in Iowa — where he spent almost no money but visited all of the state’s 99 counties — the Republican candidates and their allied super PACs have all but abandoned retail campaigning and grassroots politicking. They have chosen instead to spend their war chests on TV.”

Berman wrote the piece for TomDispatch.com and is a contributing writer for the Nation magazine and author of “Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics.”

GARETH PORTER, porter.gareth50 at gmail.com,
Porter is an investigative journalist and historian specializing in U.S. national security policy. He just wrote the piece: “A Dangerous Game on Iran.” He said today: “There are clearly drumbeats for war in U.S. media coverage of Iran, largely fueled by the Israeli propaganda blast suggesting an array of Iranian assassination attempts with no discernible factual basis. The indications are that there will be a new round of negotiations with Iran relatively soon. What’s being ignored is the fact that Iran was ready to negotiate with the United States on a fuel swap deal that would reduce its stock of enriched uranium and indicated it would cease its enrichment to 20 percent if the Western countries assured it of a supply of fuel for its Tehran Research Reactor. The U.S. should take advantage of that offer.”

MUHAMMAD SAHIMI, moe@usc.edu,
Sahimi is a professor at the University of Southern California and lead political columnist for the website PBS/Frontline/Tehran Bureau. He said today: “The attempts to assassinate Israeli diplomats are presumably a blowback by Iran against Israel’s covert war against Iran. Israel has been the culprit behind the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists, has supported Iranian terrorist groups to carry out terrorist operations in Iran and is suspected of having a hand in several explosions in important Iranian military and civilian facilities. At the same time, the Israel lobby in the U.S. has been the primary force for imposing tougher sanctions on Iran…”

See Juan Cole: “Indian Investigators do not Suspect Iran in Israel Embassy Blast.”

ADRIENNE PINE, pine at american.edu
Pine is an assistant professor at American University who has been researching violence in Honduras for 15 years. She is the author of Working Hard, Drinking Hard: On Violence and Survival in Honduras.

She said today: “The fire that killed over 300 prisoners early Wednesday morning in the Honduran city of Comayagua occurs in a context of police militarization which has been posited by the post-coup government and U.S. State Department as a solution to ‘security’ problems in Honduras, despite strong opposition from Honduran citizens. Honduras is currently the most dangerous country in the world, with a murder rate of 82 per 100,000 residents, a position to which it plunged following the unresolved 2009 military coup. Prisoners trapped by this morning’s fire were killed when firefighters were unable to rescue them, although the fire occurred close to the U.S. military base Soto Cano, which houses a large, fully-equipped firefighting squad.”

OSCAR ESTRADA, oscarlestrada at gmail.com
Estrada is a Honduran journalist, lawyer, and documentary filmmaker. His film “El Porvenir” traces the murder of 69 gang members in a prison in the city of Ceiba. He said today: “Today’s prison fire also appears to share many characteristics with the Honduran prison fires of 2003 and 2004, which killed 69 and 104 prisoners, respectively. In previous fires, police complicity was proven to be a primary cause of prisoners’ death; prisoners interviewed today have stated that rather than opening the gates, police shot into them. Numerous Honduran media have also reported that police and military have fired bullets and tear gas into a crowd of grieving family members outside the Comayagua prison. Overcrowding, a problem President Lobo resolved to fix in 2004 as president of Congress following the two fires, was also a factor: 900 prisoners were housed in the prison, which had a capacity of 400. This fire can be seen as a reinvigorated post-coup effort at social cleansing; the killing off the most vulnerable members of society in the context of a weak, undemocratic state with an increasingly powerful and unchecked military.”

DAPHNE WYSHAM, daphne at ips-dc.org
Wysham is the co-director or the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network project at the Institute for Policy Studies. She said today: “The good news in Obama’s 2013 budget is that he proposes ambitious initiatives on public transit, clean vehicles, energy efficiency, and renewable energy issues, and has proposed to eliminate $4 billion in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. The bad news is that he doesn’t go far enough on all fronts to ensure that the dirty energy industries of the past — including offshore oil and gas drilling, nuclear power and coal — are taken off the dole and made to clean up their messes, thereby allowing truly clean energy to compete on a level playing field.”

KAREN DOLAN, karen at ips-dc.org
Dolan is director of the Cities for Progress Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. She said today: “On the domestic side, the President’s budget has some good proposals for investments and some progressive revenue-raisers. It works well as a populist campaign document and is important as such. However, some programs for low-income families would suffer further unnecessary cuts and the President proposes, over 10 years, to reduce non-security discretionary spending from its current 3.1 percent of GDP to a 50-year low of 1.7 percent. We have to do better.”

ROBERT ALVAREZ, bob at ips-dc.org
Alvarez, a senior scholar of nuclear policy at the Institute for Policy Studies, said today: “President Obama’s proposed budget for the Environmental Protection Agency of $8.3 billion, while reduced from the previous year by $105 million, also reflects some important increases to states and Indian tribes to better enforce the Clean Air and Clear Water Acts. About 60 percent of the Department of Energy’s budget is going mostly for nuclear weapons and the cleanup of nuclear weapons sites. The single largest expenditure in DOE is for nuclear weapons, which commands 27 percent of DOE’s entire budget.”

MIRIAM PEMBERTON, miriam at ips-dc.org
Pemberton, a research fellow with Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, said today: “The preventive medicine in our security budget — including diplomacy, peacekeeping, economic development, climate stabilization — has been shortchanged for years as military spending has surged. Though the President has talked about investing more in prevention, his budget fails to do so. It leaves the extreme imbalance between military and non-military spending virtually unchanged through 2016.”

AMIR AMIRANI, a.amirani at gmail.com
Amirani is producer-director of the forthcoming documentary “We Are Many” about the February 15, 2003 global protests by millions against the impending invasion of Iraq. He said today: “In December, Time Magazine named its Person of the Year, ‘The Protestor,’ in a tribute to the Arab uprisings and the subsequent Occupy movement that swept across the U.S. and the world, writing: ‘In 2011, protesters didn’t just voice their complaints; they changed the world.’ Not only Time Magazine, but also many others now suggest that we are living in an ‘Age of Protest.’

“But if you wanted to know anything about the true origins of the momentous events of 2011, the article gave no clues — it suggested that the roots lay in 2011 alone, such as the Tunisian fruit seller, Mohamed Bouazizi, who set himself on fire in a public square, backed by social media. Indeed, in setting the context for the return of protest, it claimed that protest had been dead for at least 20 years, if not since the Vietnam War and the civil rights era.

“This is to ignore the biggest demonstration in human history, which took place on February 15, 2003. ‘We Are Many’ is the untold story of that day, and argues that this was the birth of a new kind of social movement — global, coordinated, nonsectarian, tech savvy and the most diverse in history. It was an event that took place on all seven continents, in around 800 cities, and involved up to 15 million people, some say higher. It has huge global relevance today, for citizens everywhere concerned with issues of peace, non-violence, the Middle East and civil society, not to mention globalization and the economic crisis.

“The sheer size and the utterly international character of the protest on February 15, 2003, mark it as a new phenomenon in human history. … The story of the events that led up to the day, and the day itself, and its legacy, is as dramatic and surprising as any thriller. It is a story that unfolds over a unique decade that has seen changes in our world taking place on a scale and speed never seen before.

“And yet, almost no light has been shed on these titanic shifts in global politics. And just as governments largely dismiss social movements, so the voices of their leaders and the people go unheard. Until now, nobody has done the considerable journalistic spadework needed to piece together the how, what, why, who, and where of the day.

“This film will reveal the many surprising and powerful legacies of the protest, a day seen by many as the ‘Genesis Story’ of our current era. It is a powerful chronicle of the intense struggles that attended the birth of this new movement, the latest fruits of which can be seen today in the remarkable unfolding events of the Arab uprisings. Some of the people we are in contact with in Cairo referenced February 15 and the global tide of anti-war protests at that time as an inspiration, which sowed the seeds for the movements in Egypt. Many are wondering what’s next for the Occupy movement. February 15 might give the answer: Coordinated global protests might point the way forward for communities all around the world seeking social justice to reclaim their lives and fight for a better world in which they have a true stake.”

HUWAIDA ARRAF, huwaida.arraf at gmail.com
RADHIKA SAINATH, radhika.sainath at gmail.com
Arraf and Sainath are lawyers and human rights activists who, as part of the Witness Bahrain initiative, spent a week in Bahrain before being deported over the weekend. The two of them are now in New York City and were on “Democracy Now!” this morning “U.S.-Backed Bahraini Forces Arrest and Deport Two American Peace Activists Acting as Human Rights Observers.”

The group Witness Bahrain just posted a petition on its website: “The Obama administration is currently moving forward with a new set of arms sales to Bahrain despite the well-documented, egregious human rights violations perpetrated by the government against pro-democracy protesters over the past year. Since the start of Bahrain’s ongoing revolution on February 14, 2011, U.S.-manufactured and supplied weapons, including teargas, Humvees and Apache helicopters have been used by the Bahraini government to violently attack civilians. It is time to stop supplying Bahrain with the tools to kill and repress its people.

“Despite congressional opposition to a $53 million dollar arms sale to Bahrain, the Obama Administration is pushing through the sale using a legal loophole that would allow him to avoid notifying Congress and the public by breaking up the sales into small packages of under $1 million each. …”

NABEEL RAJAB, nabeel.rajab at gmail.com
Rajab is president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and is regularly tweeting.

ROBERT NAIMAN, naiman at justforeignpolicy.org
Naiman is policy director at Just Foreign Policy and just wrote the piece “What I Learned at the Airport in Bahrain,” which states: “When I came to Bahrain, it certainly wasn’t with the intention of spending my whole time in the country in the airport. I wanted to see what was going on in the country, not to see what was going on in the airport. But the Bahrain authorities would not let me enter the country. At this writing, it’s 5 p.m. local time. My flight got in at 2:15 a.m. I have been informed that the Director of Immigration has decided that I shall not have a visa to enter Bahrain…”

COSTAS PANAYOTAKIS, [in NYC] cpanayotakis at gmail.com
Panayotakis is associate professor of sociology at the New York City College of Technology at CUNY and author of “Remaking Scarcity: From Capitalist Inefficiency to Economic Democracy.” He said today: “A Greek parliament that, according to all the polls, no longer represents the views of Greek citizens has passed a new austerity package that, like the previous austerity packages dictated by the European Union and the IMF, will not only lead to the collapse of people’s living standards but also prove ineffective by adding to the Greek economy’s severe depression. The reliance, by the government of the unelected former banker, Lucas Papademos, on intense police repression did not prevent very large protests from taking place both in Athens and around Greece. Though marred by fires that burned many buildings in downtown Athens, these protests have intensified the pressure on the Greek political class, leading to over 40 deputies from the socialist and conservative parties supporting the government to vote against the new austerity package. Adding to a third party’s withdrawal of support for the government and the resignation of six cabinet members over the last few days, this latest development shows that, as the Greek economic and social crises intensify, the Greek political system is now hanging by a thread.”

See Panayotakis’ pieces: “The Eurozone Fiasco”

“Debunking the Greek (and European) Crisis Narrative”