|
Most democratic candidates duck
death penalty issue
By Haider Rizvi
New York, New York, Jan. 14 (IPS)— When George Ryan, the Republican
governor of Illinois, told 156 inmates last January that they would
no longer face execution, those demanding the abolition of the death
penalty in the United States hoped it might encourage the Democratic
Party to take a firm stand on the issue in the next presidential race.
But to their dismay, while the campaign is in full swing for the November
election, few of the major candidates for the Democratic presidential
nomination seem willing to vigorously oppose the death penalty. Only
Al Sharpton, Dennis Kucinich and Carol Moseley Braun have taken that
stand.
The Republican Party’s opposition to the abolition of capital punishment
is well known.
Though skeptical about the workings of the death penalty system, Democratic
candidate Howard Dean says he is in favor of capital punishment. However,
in a bid to attract liberal voters, he says he wants the penalty only
for extreme and heinous crimes, “such as terrorism or the killing
of police officers or young children.”
John Kerry, Wesley Clark, and John Edwards have expressed similar views
during their campaigns, while Joseph Lieberman and Dick Gephardt are
staunch supporters of capital punishment.
“This is sad,” says Robert Deans, of the Death Penalty Information
Center, about the stance of most Democratic candidates. “They don’t
want to be seen as being soft on crime,” he added in an interview.
“We are disappointed,” adds Kathleen Jones of the National
Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, an umbrella organization representing
a number of civil rights groups.
Both Deans and Jones think the Democrats’ reluctance to take a
firm stand on the death penalty issue is caused by fear of being seen
as soft on crime. This is reflected in recent statements and speeches
made by some candidates.
“The liberal, criminal rights-oriented theories I took with me
from law school ran smack into the reality of violent crime and street
crime in my New Haven neighborhood,” said Lieberman, quoted in
a recent article in New York’s “Village Voice.”
“I knew people who were victims of violent crime and muggings;
my house was broken into twice. Fear of crime was constricting freedom
and stifling growth, so I began to propose tougher criminal laws, including
the death penalty.”
The Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington-DC-based non-profit
group that tracks death penalty cases in the United States, says there
are now 26 people in various US prisons who are scheduled to be executed
this year.
Since 1977, when the death penalty was reintroduced, more than 800 men
and women have been executed in the United States.
Opponents of capital punishment argue that it is applied disproportionately
to African Americans and poor people. About 42 percent of inmates on
death row are African Americans, although they comprise only 14 percent
of the US population.
According to Dennis Kucinich, one of the three Democratic hopefuls against
the death penalty, 75 percent of all people on death row today are non-white.
Death penalty opponents say a vast majority of death row prisoners cannot
afford their own lawyers. “I simply cannot support a policy that
is so unfairly and unevenly applied,” says Kucinich.
When he announced the suspension of death sentences in Illinois, Ryan
said he was acting because he was unsure the convictions were just.
“The (state) penalty system is arbitrary, capricious ... and therefore
immoral,” he said.
Another presidential hopeful, Al Sharpton, agrees with Kucinich. In
a recent interview, Sharpton said that after viewing one Texas execution,
George W. Bush (then governor) “stood before the cameras and said,
‘this is a great day for justice’. Justice? How do we celebrate
killing people?”
But both Kucinich and Sharpton have been written off by pollsters as
having no chance of winning the nomination to run for president.
Pollsters also continue to project that the US public supports the death
penalty. In 1965, only 38 percent of people endorsed capital punishment,
but by 1997 that had increased to 72 percent, according to a Harris
poll.
Recent surveys suggest more than 60 percent are still for the death
penalty.
For years, international human rights groups, including London-based
Amnesty International (AI), have been voicing their concern over the
use of the death penalty in the United States, where it has been used
against mentally retarded inmates and youth under 18 years of age.
The center says that 82 inmates are now on death row for crimes they
committed as juveniles.
AI says that as of November last year, more than 70 countries had abolished
the death penalty, yet over 1,500 people were executed worldwide. In
2002, 81 percent of all known executions took place in the United States,
China, and Iran.
“These calculated killings are casting a growing shadow on the
United States in an increasingly abolitionist world,” said Amnesty
in a recent statement.
“The USA’s political leaders should be promoting abolition
in their country too. Their failure turns to hypocrisy when they trumpet
the United States as global human rights champion.”
O’Neill’s claims supported
by 1998 memo
By Jason Leopold
Jan. 14-- Anyone who doubts former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill’s
recent claims that President Bush misled the public and secretly planned
the Iraq war eight months before the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11 needs
to read the two letters sent to then President Bill Clinton in 1998
and Speaker of the House Trent Lott by current members of the Bush administration
urging Clinton to launch a preemptive strike against Iraq.
Back then, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz
and other pro-war hawks lobbied Clinton and Gingrich to remove former
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein from power using military force and indict
him as a “war criminal.” Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, both of whom
were working in the private sector at the time, were affiliated with
the right-wing think tank Project for a New American Century (PNAC),
which was founded by Weekly Standard editor William Kristol in 1997
to promote America’s foreign and defense policies.
Other familiar names on PNAC’s roster of supporters include Richard
Armitage, currently Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Perle, one of
the architects of the Iraq war and former chairman of the Pentagon’s
Defense Policy Board, and Robert Kagan, a former Deputy for Policy in
the State Department’s Bureau for Inter-American Affairs during
the Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Kagan is also co-chair of PNAC.
PNAC has been instrumental in helping the Bush administration shape
its defense policies. Since Bush has been in office, PNAC has succeeded
in getting Rumsfeld to scrap the multibillion-dollar Army Crusader Artillery
Program and also advising the Defense Secretary to request a $48 billion
one-year increase for national defense, both of which were written about
extensively in reports posted on PNAC’s web site before Rumsfeld
was approached by the group.
However, one of PNAC’s first goals when it was founded in 1997
was to urge Congress and the Clinton administration to support regime
change in Iraq because Saddam Hussein was allegedly manufacturing chemical
and biological weapons, claims that today have turned out to be untrue.
“Only ground forces can remove Saddam and his regime from power
and open the way for a new post-Saddam Iraq...” PNAC founder Kristol
wrote in a 1997 report. Kristol’s Weekly Standard magazine is owned
by News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch, who also owns the Fox News Channel,
considered by many media critics to be the mouthpiece of the Bush administration.
A year after Kristol’s report, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Armitage,
and other PNAC members sent a letter to Clinton, repeating much of what
Kristol said in his report a year earlier.
“We urge you to turn your Administration’s attention to implementing
a strategy for removing Saddam’s regime from power,” says
the letter sent to Clinton. “This will require a full complement
of diplomatic, political and military efforts. Although we are fully
aware of the dangers and difficulties in implementing this policy, we
believe the dangers of failing to do so are far greater. We believe
the US has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary
steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the
Gulf. In any case, American policy cannot continue to be crippled by
a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council.”
However, in an ironic twist, Clinton rebuffed the advice saying his
administration was focusing on the worldwide threat posed by the terrorist
group al-Qaeeda and it’s leader Osama Bin Laden, who was responsible
for the 9/11 terrorist attack and who Iraq war critics say the Bush
administration should have been focusing on after 9/11 instead of Saddam
Hussein.
The 1998 letters to Clinton and Gingrich seem to back up the revelations
made by O’Neil in the book “The Price of Loyalty” that
the Iraq war was, in fact, planned in the days after Bush was sworn
into office -- possibly even earlier -- if you consider that between
1998 and late 1999, when Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, the chief architects
of the Iraq war, spent nearly two years lobbying Congress to use military
force to overthrow Saddam Hussein from power.
When Clinton refused, Rumsfield, Wolfowitz and others from PNAC wrote
another letter on May 29, 1998, to Gingrich and Senate Republican Majority
Leader Trent Lott, saying that the United States should “establish
and maintain a strong US military presence in the region and be prepared
to use that force to protect our vital interests in the Gulf -- and,
if necessary, to help remove Saddam from power.”
“We should take whatever steps are necessary to challenge Saddam
Hussein’s claim to be Iraq’s legitimate ruler, including indicting
him as a war criminal,” says the letter to Gingrich and Lott. “US
policy should have as its explicit goal removing Saddam Hussein’s
regime from power and establishing a peaceful and democratic Iraq in
its place. We recognize that this goal will not be achieved easily.
But the alternative is to leave the initiative to Saddam, who will continue
to strengthen his position at home and in the region. Only the US can
lead the way in demonstrating that his rule is not legitimate and that
time is not on the side of his regime.”
All of the Iraq “war” letters are posted on PNAC’s web
site, www.newamericancentury.org
The letters offered no hard evidence that Iraq was in possession of
weapons of mass destruction but it did say that with Saddam Hussein
in power “a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil
will all be put at hazard . . .”
Source: CounterPunch
US stars hail Iraq war whistleblower
By Martin Bright
Jan. 18— She was an anonymous junior official toiling away
with 4,500 other mathematicians, code-breakers, and linguists at the
British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham.
But now Katharine Gun, an unassuming 29-year-old translator, is set
to become a transatlantic cause célèbre as the focus of
a star-studded solidarity drive that brings together Hollywood actor-director
Sean Penn and senior figures from the US media and civil rights movement,
including the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Gun appears in court tomorrow
accused of breaching the Official Secrets Act by allegedly leaking details
of a secret US “dirty tricks” operation to spy on UN Security
Council members in the run-up to war in Iraq last year. If found guilty,
she faces two years in prison. She is an unlikely heroine and those
who have met her say she would have been happy to remain in the shadows,
had she not seen evidence in black and white that her government was
being asked to cooperate in an illegal operation.
The leak has been described as “more timely and potentially more
important” than The Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg, the celebrated
whistleblower who leaked papers containing devastating details of the
US involvement in Vietnam, in 1971. Ellsberg has been vocal in support
of Gun. She was arrested last March, days after The Observer first published
evidence of an intelligence “surge” on UN delegations, ordered
by the GCHQ’s partner organization, the US National Security Agency.
Legal experts believe that her case is potentially more explosive for
the government than the Hutton inquiry because it could allow her defense
team to raise questions about the legality of military intervention
in Iraq. The Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, is likely to come under
pressure to disclose the legal advice he gave on military intervention
-- something he has so far refused to do. At a hearing last November,
Gun’s legal team indicated that she would use a defense of “necessity”
to argue that she acted to save the lives of British soldiers and Iraqi
civilians.
At the time Gun, who was sacked after her arrest and whose case is funded
by legal aid, said in a statement: “Any disclosures that may have
been made were justified on the following grounds: because they exposed
serious illegality and wrongdoing on the part of the US government who
attempted to subvert our own security services; and to prevent wide-scale
death and casualties among ordinary Iraqi people and UK forces in the
course of an illegal war.” She added: “I have only ever followed
my conscience.” Sean Penn and Jesse Jackson have already signed
a statement of support for Gun and a broader campaign will be launched
later this year. They are joined by Ellsberg, who is keen to travel
to Britain soon to meet Gun.
Other signatories of the statement, to be released in the coming weeks,
include Linda Foley, president of the Newspaper Guild, and Ramona Ripston
of the American Civil Liberties Union, both in their personal capacities.
The statement is a glowing tribute to the publicity-shy GCHQ mole who
has avoided all media attention since her arrest: “We honor Katharine
Gun as a whistleblower who bravely risked her career and her very liberty
to inform the public about illegal spying in support of a war based
on deception. In a democracy, she should not be made a scapegoat for
exposing the transgressions of others.” The statement also pays
tribute to the transatlantic opposition to the war in Iraq, which it
links to historical campaigns against oppression. “There has been
much talk in recent months about the ‘special relationship’
between the US and British governments, which led the world to war,
but history tells us of another ‘special relationship’ --
between people of good will in the United States and Britain who worked
together in opposition to slavery and colonialism, and most recently
against the push for war on Iraq. It is in the spirit of friendship
between our peoples in defense of democracy that we sign this statement.”
The leaked memorandum -- dated Jan. 31, 2003 -- from Frank Koza, chief
of staff of the NSA’s Regional Targets section, requested British
intelligence help to discover the voting intentions of the key “swing
six” nations at the UN. Angola, Cameroon, Guinea, Chile, Mexico,
and Pakistan were under intense pressure to vote for a second resolution
authorizing war in Iraq.
The disclosure of the “dirty tricks” memo caused serious diplomatic
difficulties for the countries involved and in particular the socialist
government in Chile, which demanded an immediate explanation from Britain
and America. The Chilean public is deeply sensitive to dirty tricks
by the American intelligence services, which are still held responsible
for the 1973 overthrow of the socialist government of Salvador Allende.
In the days that followed the disclosure, the Chilean delegation in
New York distanced itself from the draft second resolution, scuppering
plans to go down the UN route.
Opposition politicians are already increasing pressure on Tony Blair
to release Goldsmith’s legal advice. Parliamentary answers last
week to Lord Alexander of Weedon QC, the Tory head of the all-party
legal reform group Justice, show that the Government recognizes there
are precedents for disclosure.
In 1993, government legal advice in the arms-to-Iraq affair was disclosed
to the Scott inquiry and advice concerning the 1988 Merchant Shipping
Act was disclosed when Spanish fishermen argued that it breached EU
law. The government response of Baroness Amos would appear to be an
open invitation to Gun’s defense team: “In both cases, disclosure
was made for the purposes of judicial proceedings.” But she continued:
“It has been made clear in a number of parliamentary questions
that the Attorney General’s detailed advice would not be disclosed
in view of a long-standing convention, adhered to by successive governments,
that advice of law officers is not publicly disclosed. The purpose of
the convention is to enable the government, like everyone else, to receive
full and frank legal advice in confidence.”
A summary of the legal advice published on Mar. 17 last year showed
that Goldsmith believed that UN Resolution 678, which authorized force
against Iraq to eject it from Kuwait in 1990, could be used to justify
the conflict. This position has been fiercely criticized by most experts
in international law, who argue that 678 applied specifically to the
threat posed to the region by Saddam in 1990. Alexander has accused
Goldsmith of “scraping the bottom of the legal barrel” and
described the use of 678 as “risible”. When the details of
the GCHQ disclosure were published in The Observer on Mar. 2 last year,
there was considerable media speculation that Goldsmith was set to resign
over the issue of his legal advice over the war. Foreign Office legal
experts were known to be split on the issue.
A key figure could prove to be 54-year-old Elizabeth Wilmshurst, deputy
legal adviser to the British Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, who stepped
down on Mar. 21. Wilmshurst is said to have left her post because she
would not agree to Goldmith’s legal advice. Since leaving her post
she has not spoken about the crucial discussions in the British Foreign
Office last March. Many believe that a second whistleblower could prove
fatal to the British government.
Source: Observer (UK)
|
