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THIS IS AN ACTION ALERT BASED VILLAGE. SO CHECK OUT THE POSTED ACTION ALERTS AND CLICK ON SEND IF YOU'RE SATISFIED.
Here one of us who has found an offensive a. article in a newspaper or magazine b. comment on radio c. unfair portrayal on the news or TV or talk show can post it as a Journal to bring it to our attention.
This also includes Political issues so that we can write letters to our President or Congressmen/women about issues of concern.
This can be done through the action alert feature on the village through which one person drafts a letter, and all others can with just a click of the button send it on to the person's email who it is directed towards. This may be the best way to channel our productive energies on naseeb to voice our concerns and make a difference.
The key is to get as many people to write as possible on any given issue to influence change iA and so they hear the previously silent Muslim voice!
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P.S. naseeb doesn't have a feature where the action alerts can be sent out to you as a notice each time there is a new one. so you can either add it to your watch list which picks up when new JOURNAL entries are posted, and i can make a JE for the alerts OR you can regularly check this village.
It's really easy. someone has already drafted the letter to make it easy for people who don't have time or know who to write to. you can make any changes you want to it or no changes at all. Just make sure to write your name at the bottom of the letter, add a subject, then simply click on 'Send'.
(Once you send it, your name comes on the side bar to the right as having sent it. It's nice positive feedback to know people are doing it.)
Note: although sending these emails is a good thing to do on naseeb as part of political activism, political staffpple that I have met at conferences have said 1. phone calls are the best (the phone numbers are provided in the alerts too) 2. letters sent via snail mail and then 3. email.
Recent Village Updates
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has added a new journalJUST when you think Uncle Sam's war has no more surprises to spring on an unsuspecting world, he comes up with yet another gem.
Take the case of Dr Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani neuroscientist who grew up in the US and went to top universities including the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The woman who had been a star student and a topper throughout a remarkable career had to leave the US when the authorities began harassing her and her husband for their charity activities in the wake of September 11 upheavals.
The family settled down in Karachi and was never involved in any illegal activities. One day in March 2003, this talented young woman went missing with her three children when she was on her way to Karachi airport.
Dr Siddiqui resurfaced this week after five years in a New York court as a 'top Al Qaeda terrorist'. She was barely able to walk and speak, which was not surprising given the fact she had been recently involved in a 'gun fight with FBI agents' in Afghanistan. The US authorities claim Dr Siddiqui was captured near the governor's offices in Ghazni, Afghanistan last month with a bag full of 'suspicious liquids in tubes.'
If you think this is an incredible yarn, here's some more food for thought. We are told Siddiqui assaulted a team of US troops and FBI officials with a highly sophisticated weapon when they went to quiz her in Afghanistan.
And where did she get the weapon? Somebody had of course placed it near her rather conveniently. She is said to have fired several rounds with the hi-tech weapon.
Interestingly, while all those alleged rounds of firing with the alleged weapon failed to wound or injure America's brave soldiers, Siddiqui herself has ended up with a bullet wound in her chest.
Even though one has never been enamoured of the Bushies' extraordinary intellectual powers, this cock and bull tale is an insult to the intelligence of American people as well as the rest of the world.
I mean they could have at least employed more ingenuity of thought and imagination in cooking up this incredibly bizarre case against a lone, defenceless, half-dead woman who seems to have no clue where she is or what she is accused of.
There are some basic questions that an ordinary mind like mine just can't seem to figure out.
First, where was Aafia Siddiqui hiding or hidden all these years ? since she went missing in Karachi in March 2003? How did she turn up in the remote Ghazni province in Afghanistan, of all the God-forsaken places? And what happened to her three children?
Second, if the MIT-educated neuroscientist was indeed an Al Qaeda mastermind, why wasn't she presented in a court of law all this while? Even today when she is facing the US law, she is not being tried on terrorism charges but for allegedly assaulting the US officials. So what's her original crime, if she has indeed committed a crime?
Third, why wasn't the Pakistani government informed about her detention in Afghanistan and her subsequent deportation to the US? Or are Pakistan's Enlightened and Moderate leaders also involved in this international enterprise against a 31-year old mom of three?
There are so many gaping holes in this 'case' that the US constitution, Magna Carta and the UN human rights charter can all go through them at the same time.
You abduct a completely innocent, married woman with a family and put her away for five years to conveniently discover her now as a terrorist in the lawless Afghanistan.
Elaine Whitfield Sharp, Siddiqui's lawyer, believes she has been put on trial now because she has 'become a terrible embarrassment' to the US and Afghan authorities.
The question is why has she been reinvented now? It is quite possible that Siddiqui has been FOUND now because of a relentless campaign by British journalist Yvonne Ridley. Ridley herself had been a prisoner of the Taleban regime for 11 days just before the US invasion in 2001 and converted to Islam after her strange experience in Afghanistan.
Ridley has been running a campaign called Cage Prisoner for the release of a mysterious female prisoner who has been held at the Bagram airbase in Afghanistan in total isolation and regularly tortured for five years.
The unknown female prisoner, known as the Prisoner No. 650 or the Grey Lady of Bagram, was brought to the world attention after Ridley read about the woman in a book by fellow Briton Moazzam Begg, a former Gitmo and Bagram prisoner. In his book, Enemy Combatant, Beg talks of a woman's endless screams for help as she was tortured. Beg first thought he was imagining his wife's screams.
'We now know the screams came from a woman who has been held in Bagram for some years. And she is Prisoner No. 650,' Ridley disclosed at a recent Press conference in Pakistan.
And I strongly suspect that Prisoner No. 650 is none other than Dr Aafia Siddiqui. It is quite possible that her captors decided to end her isolation after the Pakistani Press and activists like Yvonne Ridley began increasingly talking about the Prisoner No. 650 and how she was tortured and abused physically, mentally and sexually for the past four years.
I find it hard to believe all this can happen in this age and time. When one read Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel laureate who died last week, years ago and his first person account of the Soviet gulag and how they turned living human beings into humanity's refuse, one thought it could never happen in our age and time. But one is not so sure now.
If they could do this to a gifted, US-educated and trained scientist, I shudder to think of the fate of illiterate and impoverished men and women summarily picked up in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
The Aafia Siddiqui case may have come to the world's attention because of some conscientious activists. But what about all those innocent individuals, who have just vanished down the black hole called the Guantanamo Bay, without a trial and without anyone looking for them? And who knows how many such gulags are out there and how many innocents they have sucked into their belly?
This war has turned the whole world into a big gulag where there are no borders, no rule of law, no courts, no justice and no rights whatsoever. But, the neocons reassure us, all this is necessary to promote Democracy and Human Freedom of course.
Whatever happened to the America of Jefferson and Lincoln, the country that we all loved once and turned to for inspiration?
Aijaz Zaka Syed is a senior editor and columnist of Khaleej Times. Write to him at [email protected]
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has added a new journalWrite to DePaul.
www.normanfinkelstein.com ar=1070
Please post this journal on your profile and get a movement going.
Let us make a difference.
Humanitarian
thanks for posting . this village has been quiet for too long. however the link isn't taking me to any text. it states that it is finkelstein's page . what should we be looking for? jak.
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has added a new journalSalaams!
Please check out the newest action alert. It is a letter to the US President regarding the situation in Lebanon/Middle East.
Do edit & personalize as you see fit.
JazakAllahkhair for your time & may Allah reward all our efforts.
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has added a new journal "Too High a Price" , a comment on The Nation.
With the spreading violence in Lebanon and Gaza, the Israeli doctrine of absolute security and massive retaliation--the notion that any attack or threat of attack on Israel will be met with a disproportionate response--is again proving counterproductive to Israel's own security as well as to the larger stability of the region. It makes no sense for Israel to destroy the civil infrastructure of the Palestinians and of Lebanon in response to the kidnapping of its soldiers, or to further weaken the capacity of the governments of Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority while at the same trying to hold them accountable for the actions of groups and militias they cannot reasonably control. This collective punishment of the Palestinian and Lebanese people is not only inhumane and should be condemned but also leads to more radicalization and to more chaos.
That was the lesson of the Israeli siege of the Palestinian Authority in 2002, which severely weakened its ability to govern, helping to pave the way for the political success of Hamas....
Read more : www.thenation.com
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Its an informal comment, but comes from an educated and informed person. It strikes a chord and most people can crank out something like it or even better. If the govt. is trying to brainwash the nation into thinking that Israel is right and there is 'logic' to this madness, www.cnn.com) then we have the obligation to inform everyone about the obvious ramifications of this madness. Like the author of this comment does so. The pen is mightier than the sword and truth is self-evident. We must expedite that process.
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has added a new journalTruly saddening*
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - Three Guantanamo Bay detainees hanged themselves with nooses made of sheets and clothes, the commander of the detention center said Saturday. They were the first reported deaths among the hundreds of men held at the base for years without charge.
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The suicides, which military officials said were coordinated, triggered further condemnation of the isolated detention center, which holds some 460 men on suspicion of links to al-Qaida and the Taliban. Only 10 have been charged with crimes and there has been growing international pressure on the U.S. to close the prison.
Two men from Saudi Arabia and one from Yemen were found dead shortly after midnight Saturday in separate cells, said the Miami-based U.S. Southern Command, which has jurisdiction over the prison. Attempts were made to revive them, but they failed.
"They hung themselves with fabricated nooses made out of clothes and bed sheets," Navy Rear Adm. Harry Harris told reporters in a conference call from the U.S. base in southeastern Cuba.
"They have no regard for human life," he said. "Neither ours nor their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation but an act of asymmetric warfare against us."
To help prevent more suicides, guards will now give bed sheets to detainees only when they go to bed and remove them after they wake up in the morning, Harris said.
Gen. John Craddock, commander of the U.S. Southern Command, said in the conference call that the three had left suicide notes, but refused to disclose the contents.
One of the detainees was a mid- or high-level al-Qaida operative, Harris said, while another had been captured in Afghanistan and participated in a riot at a prison there. The third belonged to a splinter group. Their names were not released.
Some of the evidence against detainees is classified, so they are not permitted to know of it, and are thus unable to challenge it.
"They're determined, intelligent, committed elements and they continue to do everything they can ... to become martyrs in the jihad," said Craddock.
He said all three had engaged in a hunger strike to protest their indefinite incarceration and had been force-fed before quitting the protest action. Military commanders said two were participating in the hunger strike as recently as last month, and described one of them as a long-term hunger striker who had begun the protest late last year and ended it in May.
Bush, who was spending the weekend at Camp David, expressed "serious concern" about the incident, White House press secretary Tony Snow said.
His immediate concerns were making sure that an investigation was being conducted and that the bodies were "treated humanely and with cultural sensitivity," Snow said.
In a sign of concern over the diplomatic fallout, the administration conducted an extraordinary round of global outreach within hours. Among those contacted were the United Nations, European Union member states, and Middle Eastern embassies, Snow said.
Amnesty International said the apparent suicides "are the tragic results of years of arbitrary and indefinite detention" and called the prison "an indictment" of the Bush administration's human rights record.
Barbara Olshansky of the Center for Constitutional Rights said in a telephone interview from New York that those held at Guantanamo "have this incredible level of despair that they will never get justice. And now they're gone. And they died without ever having seen a court."
Olshansky, whose group represents about 300 Guantanamo detainees, wept during the interview. She appealed to the Bush administration "for immediate action to do the right thing. They should be taken to court or released. I don't think this country wants the stain of injustice on it for many years to come."
Pentagon officials said the three men were in Camp 1, the highest security prison at Guantanamo, and none had tried to commit suicide before.
That camp was also where two detainees tried to commit suicide in mid-May, when a riot broke out. The two men, who took overdoses of an anti-anxiety medication they hoarded, were found and received medical treatment and were recovering.
The military said in a statement that "all lifesaving measures had been exhausted" in the attempt to revive the detainees. The remains were being treated "with the utmost respect." A cultural adviser was assisting the military.
Though the military termed the deaths apparent suicides, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service was investigating to establish the official cause of death.
Guantanamo Bay has become a sore subject between Bush and U.S. allies who otherwise are staunch supporters of his policies.
A U.N. panel said May 19 that holding detainees indefinitely at Guantanamo violated the world's ban on torture and the United States should close the detention center.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen and British Prime Minister Tony Blair are among those who also recently have urged the United States to close the prison.
On Friday, the prison came up during a meeting with Fogh Rasmussen at Camp David.
"We would like to end the Guantanamo ? we'd like it to be empty," Bush said. But he added: "There are some that, if put out on the streets, would create grave harm to American citizens and other citizens of the world. And, therefore, I believe they ought to be tried in courts here in the United States."
Bush said his administration was waiting for the Supreme Court to rule on whether he overstepped his authority in ordering the detainees to be tried by U.S. military tribunals.
A total of 759 detainees have been held in Guantanamo ? about 300 of them have been released or transferred.
Many claim they are innocent and there have been increasing displays of defiance from the prisoners.
Until now, Guantanamo officials have said there have been 41 suicide attempts by 25 detainees and no deaths since the U.S. began taking prisoners to the base in January 2002. Defense lawyers contend the number of suicide attempts is higher.
Some detainees have been on a hunger strike since August. The number of inmates refusing food dropped to 18 by last weekend from a high of 131. The military has at times used aggressive force-feeding methods including a restraint chair.
On May 18, in one of the prison's most violent incidents, a detainee staged a suicide attempt to lure guards into a cellblock where they were attacked by prisoners armed with makeshift weapons, the military said.
Josh Colangelo-Bryan of the Center for Constitutional Rights discovered one of his clients attempting to hang himself last year when he visited Guantanamo, and said he feared there would be more suicides.
He said one detainee recently told him: "I would simply rather die than live here forever without rights."
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Associated Press reporters Paisley Dodds in London and Jennifer Loven and Lolita C. Baldor in Washington contributed to this report.
Humanitarian
see action alert, above . please send it. jak.