Marietta Hedges (l) yells at volunteer torture victim as human rights activists demonstrate waterboarding in front of the Justice Department in Washington, Nov. 7.

Judge Michael Mukasey admits waterboarding is repugnant, but refuses to say whether it amounts to torture. Yet Democratic Sens. Charles Schumer and Dianne Feinstein voted for his confirmation as U.S. attorney general anyway.
Mukasey, Schumer and Feinstein should talk to French journalist Henri Alleg. An editor of a paper in Algeria, he was waterboarded by the French military in 1957, when the French were trying to crush the Algerian independence movement.
The 86-year-old journalist spoke to me from his home in Paris:
“I was put on a plank, on a board, fastened to it and taken to a tap [water faucet]. And my face was covered with a rag. Very quickly, the rag was completely full of water. You have the impression of being drowned. And the water ran all over my face. I couldn’t breathe. It’s a terrible, terrible impression of torture and of death, being near death.“
Journalist Stephen Grey, whose documentary “Extraordinary Rendition“ airs on PBS stations this week, told me: “I, like many journalists, should issue a correction, an apology really, because we all reported waterboarding as a simulated drowning. It is clear from those who did it, this is actual drowning É this is something that shocks the conscience and therefore is torture.“
In a remarkable demonstration of commitment to his job, former acting Assistant Attorney General Daniel Levin, according to ABC News, underwent waterboarding when tasked by the White House to rework its official position on torture in 2004.
Concluding that waterboarding is torture, he was forced out of his job.
On Monday, Nov. 5, anti-torture activists engaged in an actual demonstration of waterboarding outside the Department of Justice. Twenty-six-year-old actor Maboud Ebrahimzadeh volunteered to be the victim. After the session, he was near tears: “It is the most terrifying experience I have ever had. And although this is a controlled environment, when water goes into your lungs and you want to scream and you cannot, as soon as you do you will choke.“
Four retired military judge advocates general wrote a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy stating, “Waterboarding is inhumane, it is torture, and it is illegal.“ Twenty-four former intelligence agents and analysts agreed with the JAGs, adding, “Whether or not the practice is currently in use by U.S. intelligence, it should in fact be easy for him to respond.“
Yet Mukasey told the Senate Judiciary Committee, “I don’t know what’s involved in the technique, if waterboarding is torture.“
In the Judiciary hearing when the votes were cast, Leahy said: “No senator should abet this administration’s legalistic obfuscations by those such as Alberto Gonzales, John Yoo and David Addington by agreeing that the laws on the books do not already make waterboarding illegal. We have been prosecuting water torture for more than 100 years.“
U.S. soldiers have been prosecuted for participating in waterboarding in the Philippines in 1901 and Vietnam in 1968. The U.S. imprisoned a Japanese officer in 1947 for using waterboarding against U.S. troops in World War II.
Sen. Edward Kennedy added: “Make no mistake about it: Waterboarding is already illegal under United States law. It is illegal under the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit ’outrages upon personal dignity,’ including cruel, humiliating and degrading treatment. It is illegal under the Torture Act, which prohibits acts ’specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering.’ It is illegal under the Detainee Treatment Act, which prohibits ’cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.’ And it violates the Constitution.“ He went on: “Waterboarding is slow-motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of blackout and expiration-usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. For the uninitiated, it is horrifying to watch, and if it goes wrong, it can lead straight to terminal hypoxia. When done right, it is controlled death.“
Republican Sen. Arlen Specter, who voted for Mukasey’s confirmation, said Congress should pass a law forbidding waterboarding, having received assurances from Mukasey that he would uphold such a law.
What if President Bush vetoed the law, or if he issued one of his signing statements used to sidestep bills he signs into law?
Despite all this, Schumer’s and Feinstein’s votes for Mukasey mean the Judiciary Committee has voted 11 to 8 to recommend his appointment as attorney general to the full Senate. From war funding to torture, you have to ask, If the Republicans were in the majority, would there be any difference?
Now only the full Senate can block Mukasey’s appointment. Maybe at least one senator will step up and filibuster the confirmation, just long enough for Mukasey to research and announce his opinion on whether waterboarding amounts to torture.
Amy Goodman
ZMAG.ORG

Is amnesia an integral part of politics? When it comes to the treaty to reform the European Union’s institutions, which will be finalized this month, recent events suggest that amnesia does play a central role.
Let’s examine the “illness“ that leads certain EU leaders with questionable scruples to forget even the recent past.
Busy with domestic political affairs, they do not hesitate to use Europe as a scapegoat to avoid breaking bad news to their fellow citizens. Some display separatist tendencies that worry, and frustrate, their electorates.
No surprise, then, that many EU citizens refuse, or at least hesitate, to embrace the European cause.
This form of political racketeering may win elections, but it sabotages any opportunity to experience, or to perceive, politics as a process that can contribute to global development.
Consider Gordon Brown, Britain’s new prime minister, according to whom globalization strips the European project of any meaning, a form of political autism that in fact will prevent the EU from adapting to change and from being able to find solutions to globalization’s challenges.
Fortunately, openly anti-European political programs are not the norm, at least not yet. In fact, if, on the eve of the 2009 European Parliament elections, the new Reform Treaty enters into force, each member country will be forced to clarify and justify its position.
The Treaty will be essential not only to the proper functioning of Europe’s institutions, but also to their further “deepening“--something that many call for without necessarily really wanting to achieve.
Thanks to “reinforced cooperation,“ recalcitrant states will no longer hinder those seeking to make progress, and could even resort to an “opt-out“ process and “liberate“ themselves from the EU, perhaps by means of a referendum.
Then there are those who believe that EU enlargement has prevented greater “deepening“ and who, with scant regard for the past or the future, argue that pursuing the latter requires abandoning the former.
But who can reasonably claim to know what shape the EU will need to take to meet the challenges of the next 50 or 100 years?
Already, issues like climate change and energy supply demonstrate the futility of isolated national action and the critical importance of both deepening and enlarging the EU.
Having suffered from disruptions in oil and gas supplies following disputes between Russia and Ukraine and then Belarus, EU members have finally understood that their survival depends on their capacity to diversify their energy sources.
Further EU enlargement is undoubtedly in Turkey’s interest, and in Europe’s, too. In addition to the constructive role that Turkey could play, especially in the Middle East, its membership is vitally important in terms of energy.
Moreover, admitting Turkey would demonstrate the EU’s political consistency, while representing a qualitative step forward in the European project.
For politicians like French President Nicolas Sarkozy, such considerations may be meaningless. But what if Turkey were to abandon its European ambitions and align itself strategically with Russia ? The consequences for European security would be severe.
Then there is Britain’s political leadership, for whom enlargement is a way to avoid deepening and, indeed, to dissolve political Europe. While such ideas are not for everyone, certain Continental countries secretly prefer Britain’s disjointed scenarios, with some heads of governments even considering their countries’ commitments reversible.
What, for example, should we make of Poland’s governing Kaczynski brothers? The quick-tempered twins took issue with the reform treaty’s proposed voting system for the Council of Ministers, and then stole the limelight from the papacy with their own homophobic declarations, proclamations that seem to exclude any possibility of integrating the EU’s Charter of Rights into Poland’s domestic law.
Russian President Vladimir Putin may be the only one who welcomes this desertion from Europe’s community of values.
What we Europeans now need most of all is to embark on precisely the opposite course. Only by enlarging the scope of EU decision-making, backed by the commitment of equally responsible partners, can Europe meet the shared challenges of a common future.
Daniel Cohn-Bendit
JAPANTIMES.CO.JP

International peacekeeping soldiers from Australia guard a street in Dili, East Timor, Aug. 8.

In 1975, when Indonesia invaded East Timor, beginning a 24-year occupation that cost over 200,000 Timorese lives (over a third of the population), Australia’s support for this genocidal occupation was predicated on a policy outlined in the infamous “Woolcott telegram“: that Australia’s interest in East Timor was derived from the oil and gas resources in the Timor Sea.
On Aug. 31, 1999, East Timor voted for independence in a United Nations-supervised referendum.
This was followed by a rampage of killing and destruction by Indonesian-organized militia gangs that continued for over a month until the deployment of an Australian-led United Nations military force and the withdrawal of Indonesian troops on Oct. 20.
With East Timor officially becoming independent in 2002, the United Nations military and police presence was progressively reduced and was due to cease completely in 2006.
However, in that year a new Australian-led International Stabilization Force (I.S.F.) was deployed in response to appeals from the Timorese government following mutinies and clashes between rival factions in East Timor’s police and defense forces.
Australia explains its ongoing military presence in terms of regional stability and preventing a neighbor from becoming a “failed state.“
However, Canberra’s hard-line stance in negotiations over the Timor Sea maritime boundary and resource exploitation, the meagerness of Australian development aid and its use as a bargaining chip in these negotiations, the perception of Australian and I.S.F. interference in East Timorese electoral politics, and growing evidence of Australian covert involvement in the unrest that led to the I.S.F.’s deployment, all suggest that Australian policy towards East Timor continues to be driven by the same concern as in 1975: a predatory interest in the Timor Sea oil and gas.
“We would like to see all solidarity groups calling for a withdrawal of Australian troops from East Timor. That’s really important. It’s different from the Australian presence in 1999. We really needed Australian troops then but now we don’t,“ Tomas Freitas, director of the East Timorese N.G.O. Luta Hamutuk, told Green Left Weekly.
“In East Timor, the sentiment of the people if you go and talk to them in the street is that they don’t like Australian troops É Their tanks destroy the asphalt roads in Dili. My children can’t sleep because they fly their helicopters really close to houses.“
He added that money spent by I.S.F. soldiers went straight back to Australia: “They don’t rent from the community. They don’t drink our water, they bring their own. They bring their own food É So what’s the benefit for East Timor economically? Nothing!“
In 2002, East Timor signed a treaty with Australia under which 90 percent of royalties from the Joint Petroleum Development Area (J.P.D.A.) went to East Timor. However, the J.P.D.A. lies on the East Timorese side of the median line between the two countries that would form their maritime boundary if international law, such as the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), was applied.
WORLDPRESS.ORG

The opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) leader Ichiro Ozawa played out a puzzling political drama this week by first announcing his resignation as president of the party on Sunday and then three days later by reversing his decision to step down.
The three-day political soap opera was totally unexpected. While Ozawa for now has made his position clear by announcing his resolve to build the party and lead it to success at the next general election, he has also already done huge damage to the party and has betrayed supporter’s expectations of the DPJ as a viable alternative to replace the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP).
It has become amply clear that the emergence of a much-touted two-party system in Japan remains a distant dream.
Ozawa dropped the political bombshell on Sunday after a meeting with Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda late last week in which the two leaders raised the prospect of a “grand coalition“ that would consist of the LDP and its current coalition partner, the Komeito, and the DPJ--a scenario raised in the past by some commentators including the largest-circulated Japanese newspaper the Yomiuri Shinbun, but one which very few thought the leader of the DPJ would seriously consider.
However, given Ozawa’s and his party commitment to voters at the Upper House elections in July that the DPJ would offer an alternative to the ruling LDP with some distinct policy goals, such as those on pension reforms, it was naturally expected that Ozawa would immediately reject any such proposal.
Instead he preferred to go back to his party room for consultation with senior leaders, but as was expected other party executives refused to consider forging such a coalition.
That Ozawa took the proposal back to the party room makes it abundantly clear that he was in favor of this coalition formation. Considering the rejection as the same as being tantamount to a no-confidence vote by party executives, Ozawa offered to resign as president.
The proposal of a grand coalition surfaced after the DPJ’s insistence for several months that it would not support renewal of the anti-terror law allowing Japan’s Self Defense Forces (SDF) to provide logistic support to the coalition forces in the Indian Ocean engaged in the “war against terror“ in Afghanistan. Due to the lack of support of the opposition party, the law expired at the end of October and Japanese Maritime SDF ships have since returned to Japan after serving several years in the region.
The Japanese government faces immense pressure externally, mainly from the US, to continue its refueling mission and other activities in the Indian Ocean. Fukuda is scheduled to visit the US next week where he is expected to discuss with President George W Bush prospects for a resumption of Japan’s naval mission to support US-led military operations in Afghanistan.
He would have ideally liked to have resolved the issue before his departure on November 15. For him a grand coalition could have been a way out of the current impasse.
ATIMES.COM