Gurpreet Singh writes for Vancouver

THE recent incident involving a Sikh journalist who attacked Indian home minister P. Chidambram at a press conference has sparked an interesting debate in the Punjabi media of Metro Vancouver.

Jarnail Singh of Hindi daily Dainik Jagran copied Muntadar al Zaidi, the Iraqi reporter who threw shoes at former U.S. president G.W. Bush for attacking his country.

Jarnail Singh was upset over the minister’s position on politicians involved in the 1984 anti-Sikh pogrom. The massacre was engineered by the Congress Party following the assassination of then Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her two Sikh bodyguards, who were seeking revenge for the military operation that was launched to flush out religious extremists who had fortified the Golden Temple complex, the holiest shrine of the Sikhs. The ruling Congress Party leaders led mobs targeting Sikhs in different parts of India with the help of the police.

Two of Congress MPs who were actively involved in the crime - Jagdish Tytler and Sajjan Kumar - were seeking nomination for the upcoming parliamentary election despite being under investigation for their activities in 1984.

As soon as it was learned that Tytler was to get a clean chit from India’s Central Bureau of Investigation, Sikh organizations intensified their campaign against the Congress Party.
Jarnail Singh was upset at Chidambram’s comment that he is happy for Tytler. He became angrier when Chidambram did not answer his questions and attacked the minister with a shoe. Since it was a repetition of what Zaidi did, the incident was picked by the international media.

Subsequently, the Congress Party has been forced to dump the two controversial candidates.

While moderate Sikh journalists have described Jarnail Singh's action as unprofessional and shameful, the reporter has become a hero among media aligned with radical Sikh ideology.

In fact, the apex Sikh religious body, the SGPC, honoured him while Sikh politicians offered him rewards. However, Jarnail Singh says he regrets his action though he sticks to his stand on the issue.

Undoubtedly both Jarnail Singh and Zaidi crossed the professional line. But since the two journalists have themselves become subjects of news stories, the media should look at the bigger picture and try to examine the causes of such incidents rather than becoming apologists of the establishment.

What journalists could not do over the years by writing about the 1984 carnage, Jarnail Singh’s stroke did.

If Jarnail Singh has crossed the professional line, so too have the Indian police by first not helping the Sikhs who were slaughtered by the goons of the Congress Party and then protecting their political
masters from deserved justice. The media should question the barbarity of the state rather than being insensitive to the emotional acts of a few angry individuals.

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Obama wants the US to accept the new global realities

Dr Swaraj Singh

AFTER 100 days in the office, President Obama came out very well as far as approval of his policies is concerned. President Bush left the office with one of the lowest approval ratings, less then 30%. President Obama has about 70% approval ratings.

Bush and Obama represent two opposite extremes of philosophy. President Bush represented views of the extreme right: America is the greatest country in the World. America is the only superpower in the World. America is the policeman of the World. All the countries of the World have to agree with America. America’s rich have all the rights to make as much money as they can without worrying for what happens to the poor. The minorities should have no grievances. Human rights are only for the other countries and not for America. America has the right to lecture other countries about democracy and human rights but no country has the right to question America on these issues.

Obama does not agree with Bush on all this. He feels that time has come for America to change the policies which do not work and create more problems for us. Both the foreign and domestic policies should change. He knows that America is no longer the only superpower of the World and has to work with the other countries on more or less equal level. He is willing to listen to the other countries he showed that attitude in Europe and in Latin America. He got a very different kind of response then Bush there.

Obama wants to fix the economy which Bush left in shambles. He is aware that we can be asked to practice what we preach to others such as human rights, democracy and treat fairly all the people regardless of their race, color or national origin. Most of the Americans agree with Obama that there is need to change. Still change is not easy and will meet a lot of resistance. The extreme right segment of the society is opposed to the change. They only know one principle, America first, right or wrong. This sounds very patriotic but when we do not accept that the question of right or wrong is the fundamental question then our patriotism cannot be genuine.

Do we need to fundamentally change our policies or not? This depends upon whether the global situation has really changed. The present economic crisis has clearly shown that the engine of the World economy has shifted from America and Europe to China. Whereas, the American and the European economies are expected to shrink further in the year 2009, the Chinese economy is expected to grow more than 8% this year. The biggest sign of the shift is that Taiwan, the most trusted American ally in Asia has decided to shift its alliance. Taiwan is now looking at China to help it come out of the present recession.

For the first time mainland China will be investing in Taiwan. There will be direct flights from the main land to Taiwan and restrictions on traveling between the two will be released.

Last year China became the largest trading partner for Latin America. China has out maneuvered the West from most of the third World, Asia, Africa and Latin America. China has now more access to their natural resources than the Western countries. China continues to gain influence in the World Bank and the I.M.F. China has defeated the encirclement policy of the West. It has been able to neutralize the Western allies in Asia. India has been effectively neutralized by a nuclear Pakistan.

Japan and South Korea will be neutralized by a nuclear North Korea and Israel will be neutralized by Iran.

Obama represents the last hope of accepting changes peacefully. If America does not want to accept the changing global realities then the only alternative is a Third World war and internal chaos. Most of the Americans are willing to give Obama a chance to avoid that.

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Senate report casts grim light on Bush era
Shocking unending tales from the ruthless Bush regime

William Fisher writes from New York for IPS

PENTAGON interrogators continuously ramped up their abusive techniques against prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and in Iraq and Afghanistan in a vain attempt to establish a link between the former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the al Qaeda attacks on the U.S. on Sep. 11, 2001.

This is among the principal conclusions of a long-awaited report released last week by the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee.

The report also concluded that health professionals played a key role in helping the U.S. Defence Department to introduce waterboarding and other illegal interrogation techniques months before these practices were "justified" by Justice Department lawyers and approved by their superiors in the administration of former President George W. Bush.

The report says that the Defence Department was using harsh interrogation techniques long before they were "justified" by Justice Department lawyers and approved by their Bush administration superiors.

The report quotes a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist as saying that the Bush administration put "relentless pressure" on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence an al Qaeda-Hussein link.

This kind of information would have provided a foundation for one of Bush's main arguments for invading Iraq in 2003, the report says. No evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and Hussein’s regime.

The report says that senior Bush administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, CIA Director George Tenet, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and Attorney General John Ashcroft, were all aware of the development and use of the abusive interrogation techniques.

Despite warnings from military personnel that the use of these techniques on Guantanamo detainees could backfire, 15 specific techniques were sanctioned by Rumsfeld on Dec. 2, 2002, the report said.

What followed was "an erosion in standards dictating that detainees be treated humanely", it said.

The report said, "That these techniques had been endorsed became known by U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, setting the stage for the abuses that took place at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere."

The report also notes that the use of brutal interrogation techniques started in early 2002, up to eight months before Justice Department lawyers approved the use of waterboarding and nine other harsh methods, Senate investigators found.

Michigan Democratic Senator Carl Levin, the committee chairman, said, "The report represents a condemnation of both the Bush administration's interrogation policies and of senior administration officials who attempted to shift the blame for abuse - such as that seen at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and Afghanistan - to low-ranking soldiers."

Claims that detainee abuses could be chalked up to the unauthorised acts of a "few bad apples" were simply false, he said.

"A few bad apples" is how Rumsfeld described the low-level soldiers shown in photos around the world abusing detainees at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. Several of these military personnel were convicted and sentenced to prison terms, but a series of Pentagon investigations found no evidence that prisoner abuse was a policy that came from the Pentagon’s civilian leadership.

"The paper trail on abuse leads to top civilian leaders, and our report connects the dots." He said it shows a paper trail going from Rumsfeld’s authorisation of abusive interrogation techniques "to Guantánamo to Afghanistan and to Iraq."

Human rights advocates hailed the Levin report. Caroline Fredrickson, director of the Washington legislative office of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said, "Once again, we are presented with clear-cut evidence that the Bush administration’s highest ranking officials were not only complicit in the use of torture, but were actively engaged in its implementation. It is now time to act on this evidence."

The report also documents how a secretive military training programme called Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) became the foundation of the interrogations by both the Pentagon and the CIA.

SERE was developed many years ago as a way to give U.S. military personnel some sense of the treatment they might face if they were captured by China, the Soviet Union or other Cold War adversaries.

The committee’s report notes that the CIA also drew on the SERE programme for harsh methods it used in secret overseas jails for Qaeda suspects. The CIA has said it used waterboarding, a method of near-drowning used in the SERE programme, on three captured terrorism suspects in 2002 and 2003.

Cheney and others who advocated the use of sleep deprivation, isolation, stress positions, and waterboarding insist they were legal. On Tuesday, Cheney asked the Justice Department to declassify and release documents he says will show that these techniques produced valuable intelligence.

Media accounts also report that a secretive government contractor played a key role in developing the Bush administration’s interrogation methods. The company, Mitchell Jessen & Associates, is named after the two military psychologists who founded it, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. Beginning in 2002, they trained interrogators in brutal techniques, including waterboarding, sleep deprivation and pain. The psychologists, based near Spokane in the state of Washington, reportedly "reverse-engineered" the tactics taught in SERE training for use on prisoners held by the U.S.

The declassified torture memos released last week reportedly relied heavily on their advice. In one memo, Justice Department attorney Jay Bybee wrote, "Based on your research into the use of these methods at the SERE school and consultation with others with expertise in the field of psychology and interrogation, you do not anticipate that any prolonged harm would result from the use of the waterboard."

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), a not for profit advocacy group, is calling for the psychologists who justified, designed, and implemented torture for the CIA and Department of Defense to" lose their professional licenses and to face criminal prosecution."

"Long before Justice Department lawyers were tasked to justify torture, U.S. psychologists were busy actually perpetrating it," said Steven Reisner, PhD, advisor on psychological ethics at PHR. "These individuals must not only face prosecution for breaking the law, they must lose their licenses for shaming their profession’s ethics."

He told IPS, "The conclusion that these interrogation techniques cause no lasting harm is the equivalent of psychological malpractice." He said the proponents of these techniques "cherry-picked the research to reach a foregone conclusion. How can you compare U.S. soldiers who volunteered for SERE training, and could have stopped their interrogations at any time, with the effects on a prisoner who has been ‘disappeared’, is in fear for his life, and believes he will never see his family again?"

He added that the CIA’s own research into the effects of SERE training showed that it produced "extreme and lasting effects to the point of psychosis."

In October 2008, the American Psychological Association approved a landmark measure banning members from taking part in interrogations of prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, Afghanistan and all of the secret CIA black sites. The American Medical Association has passed a similar measure.

The Armed Services Committee report was released amid growing calls for an independent inquiry into abusive interrogation techniques and the people responsible for them. Proposals range from a "truth commission" to the appointment of an independent prosecutor by the Obama Justice Department.

President Obama has consistently said he is more inclined to look forward rather than backward. Earlier this week, he visited CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and told agency employees there would be no prosecutions of operatives who carried out the abusive interrogation techniques because they believed they were acting in accordance with legal rulings from the Justice Department.

But a day later, he said he would not oppose either an independent commission investigation or appointment of a special prosecutor. He left these decisions to Congress and to the Attorney General, Eric Holder. [Courtesy IPS]

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Krishna Iyer’s plea on behalf of Binayak Sen

THE text of a letter written by Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer, former Supreme Court Judge, to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, dated April 17, 2009:

I would like to bring to your attention a case of grave injustice which is a cause of much shame to Indian democracy: that of Dr. Binayak Sen, the well known paediatrician and defender of human rights.

This good doctor has been incarcerated in a Raipur jail for nearly two years now under the Chhattisgarh State Public Security Act, 2005. Among the charges against Dr. Sen, who is renowned worldwide for his public health work among the rural poor, are “treason and waging war against the state.”

Chhattisgarh State prosecutors claim that Binayak, as part of an unproven conspiracy, passed on a set of letters from Narayan Sanyal, a senior Maoist leader who is in the Raipur jail, to Piyush Guha, a local businessman with allegedly close links to the left-wing extremists. He was supposed to have done this while visiting Sanyal in prison both in his capacity as a human rights activist and as a doctor treating him for various medical ailments.

The trial of Dr. Sen, which began in a Raipur Sessions Court late April 2008, has, however, not thrown up even a shred of evidence to justify any of these charges against him. By March 2009, of the 83 witnesses listed for deposition by the prosecution as part of the original charge-sheet, 16 were dropped by the prosecutors themselves and six declared ‘hostile’, while 61 others have deposed without corroborating any of the accusations against Dr. Sen. Irrespective of the merits of the case against Dr. Sen, there are very disturbing aspects to the way the trial process has been carried out so far.

As if all this were not enough, Dr. Sen has also been repeatedly denied bail by the Bilaspur High Court (in September 2007 and December 2008). And the Supreme Court of India rejected his special leave petition to have the bail application heard before it (in December 2007).

Given the paucity of evidence in the trial of Dr. Sen so far, in all fairness the Raipur court should have dismissed the case against him altogether by now. Certainly the weakness of the prosecution’s position should entitle him to at least grant of bail. Dr. Sen is a person of international standing and reputation, with a record of impeccable behaviour throughout his distinguished career. In May 2008, in an unprecedented move 22 Nobel Prize winners even signed a public statement calling him a ‘professional colleague’ and asking for his release.

Normally bail is refused only in cases where courts believe an accused can tamper with evidence, prejudice witnesses or run away. In Dr. Sen’s case none of these apply, as shown by the simple fact that at the time of his arrest he chose to come to the Chhattisgarh police voluntarily and made no attempt to abscond despite knowing about his possible detention.

Today Dr. Sen, a diabetic who is also hypertensive, is himself in urgent need of medical treatment for his deteriorating heart condition. In recent weeks his health has worsened and a doctor appointed by the court to examine him recommended that he be transferred to Vellore for an angiography and perhaps, if needed, an angioplasty or coronary artery bypass graft without further delay.

Instead of recognising their social contributions, the Indian state, by wrongly branding Dr. Sen and many other human rights defenders like him as ‘terrorists’, is making a complete mockery of not just democratic norms and fair governance but its entire anti-terrorist strategy and operations.

The repeated denial of bail which results in ‘punishment by trial’ constitutes an even graver threat to Indian society. The sheer injustice involved will only breed cynicism among ordinary citizens about the credibility and efficacy of Indian democracy itself. [Courtesy The Hindu]

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