"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."
~ Dante Alighieri

'Great Crime' at Abu Ghraib Enrages and Inspires an Artist
By JUAN FORERO
Published: May 8, 2005

BOGOTÁ, Colombia, May 7 - Fernando Botero, Latin America's best-known living artist, shocked the art world last year when he broke sharply from his usual depictions of small town life to reveal new works that depicted Colombia's war in horrific detail.

Now, Mr. Botero, 73, who lives in Paris and New York, has taken on an even more explosive topic: the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Forty-eight paintings and sketches - of naked prisoners attacked by dogs, dangling from ropes, beaten by guards, in a mangled heap of bodies - will be exhibited in Rome at the Palazzo Venezia museum on June 16.

"These works are a result of the indignation that the violations in Iraq produced in me and the rest of the world," Mr. Botero said by telephone from his Paris studio.

"I began to do some very fluid drawings, and then I began to paint and the results are 50 works inspired by this great crime."
Mr. Botero said the paintings and sketches, done in oils, pencil and charcoal and part of a 170-piece traveling exhibition, would also be shown at the Würth Museum in Germany in October and at the Pinacoteca in Athens next year before returning to Germany. The exhibition was first made public last month, when Diners, a Colombian magazine, published photographs of the works.
Mr. Botero's work had, until recently, not been known for making political statements. Instead, for 50 years, his paintings had been associated with the placid, pastoral scenes of the small-town Colombia of his childhood, featuring ordinary people, aristocrats, military officers and nuns, all of them extravagantly corpulent.
But last year, his paintings of Colombia's long guerrilla war, full of blood, agony and senseless violence, became a big draw in European galleries, surprising followers astonished by Mr. Botero's bold departure in substance, if not style. Mr. Botero explained that he had decided he could not stay silent over a conflict he called absurd.
Now, he said, his indignation over war and brutality may turn up increasingly in his work.

"I rethought my idea of what to paint and that permitted me to do the war in Colombia, and now there's this," he said. "And if there's something else that compels me in the future, then I will do it."
Mr. Botero, citing the Impressionists and the many works of a favorite of his, Velásquez, said he had once thought that art should be inoffensive, since "it doesn't have the capacity to change anything."

But with time, and his growing outrage, Mr. Botero said he had become more cognizant that art could and should make a statement.
He pointed to the most famous antiwar painting of the 20th century, Picasso's masterpiece that depicted the German bombing of Guernica, Spain. Had Picasso not produced "Guernica," Mr. Botero said, the town would have been another footnote in the Spanish Civil War.

He said he read about Abu Ghraib in The New Yorker, then followed European news accounts. Calling himself an admirer of the United States - one of his sons lives in Miami - Mr. Botero said he became incensed because he expected better of the American government.

His new paintings and sketches - conceived not from photographs or specific acts of torture but rather from his reading of news reports - depict gruesome scenes of prison abuse. One inmate hangs from the ceiling, a rope around his ankle. Another work shows a soldier beating a prisoner with a baton, while yet another portrays a soldier urinating on an inmate. In many of the works, inmates simply scream in pain.

Mr. Botero said the works being exhibited, and those he has continued to create on Abu Ghraib, were not for sale because it would not be proper to profit from such events.

In Europe, where sentiment against the Iraq war is strong and Mr. Botero's work is well received, news of the paintings and sketches has already generated interest. In Germany, museums in Hanover and Baden Baden want to stage exhibitions exclusively of Mr. Botero's works on Abu Ghraib.

No exhibitions in the United States are planned, though Mr. Botero said he would like nothing more.

His previous works are on display in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and many others.

"If any museum wants to show works of torture, well, I would be delighted," Mr. Botero said. "The museum that decides to show it would have to be conscious that many people would be repulsed and be against it."

"Where is the justice of political power if it executes the murderer and jails the plunderer, and then itself marches upon neighboring lands, killing thousands and pillaging the very hills?"
~ Kahlil Gibran

U.S. leads global attack on human rights -Amnesty
By Jeremy Lovell

25 May 2005 10:00:45 GMT

LONDON, May 25 (Reuters) - Four years after the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington, human rights are in retreat worldwide and the United States bears most responsibility, rights watchdog Amnesty International said on Wednesday.

From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe the picture is bleak. Governments are increasingly rolling back the rule of law, taking their cue from the U.S.-led war on terror, it said.
"The USA as the unrivalled political, military and economic hyper-power sets the tone for governmental behaviour worldwide," Secretary General Irene Khan said in the foreword to Amnesty International's 2005 annual report.

"When the most powerful country in the world thumbs its nose at the rule of law and human rights, it grants a licence to others to commit abuse with impunity," she said.
London-based Amnesty cited the pictures last year of abuse of detainees at Iraq's U.S.-run Abu Ghraib prison, which it said were never adequately investigated, and the detention without trial of "enemy combatants" at the U.S. naval base in Cuba.

"The detention facility at Guantanamo Bay has become the gulag of our times, entrenching the practice of arbitrary and indefinite detention in violation of international law," Khan said.

She also noted Washington's attempts to circumvent its own ban on the use of torture.
"The U.S. government has gone to great lengths to restrict the application of the Geneva Convention and to 're-define' torture," she said, citing the secret detention of suspects and the practice of handing some over to countries where torture was not outlawed.

U.S. President George W. Bush often said his country was founded on and dedicated to the cause of human dignity -- but there was a gulf between rhetoric and reality, Amnesty found.

"During his first term in office, the USA proved to be far from the global human rights champion it proclaimed itself to be," the report said, citing Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay.

BLURRED DISTINCTION
But the United States was by no means the sole or even the worst offender as murder, mayhem and abuse of women and children spread to the four corners of the globe, Amnesty said.

"The human rights abuses in Iraq and Afghanistan were far from being the only negative repercussions of the response to the terrible events of Sept. 11, 2001.

"Since that day, the framework of international human rights standards has been attacked and undermined by both governments and armed groups," Amnesty said.
The increasingly blurred distinction between the war on terror and the war on drugs prompted governments across Latin America to use troops to tackle crimes traditionally handled by police, the report said.

In Asia too, the war on terror was blamed for increasing state repression, adding to the woes of societies already worn down by poverty, discrimination against minorities, a string of low-intensity conflicts and politicisation of aid, it added.

Africa too remained riven by regional wars and political repression, and the abject failure of the international community to take concerted action to end the slaughter in Sudan's vast Darfur region was a cause of shame.

Khan also condemned the United Nations Commission on Human Rights for failing to stand up for those supposedly in its care.

"The U.N. Commission of Human Rights has become a forum for horse-trading on human rights," she said. "Last year the Commission dropped Iraq from scrutiny, could not agree on action on Chechnya, Nepal or Zimbabwe and was silent on Guantanamo Bay."

"If they do it, it's terrorism; if we do it, it's fighting for freedom."
~ Anthony Qlighieri
U.S. Ambassador to Nicaragua, 1984

EDITORIAL

Patterns of Abuse
Published: May 23, 2005

President Bush said the other day that the world should see his administration's handling of the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison as a model of transparency and accountability. He said those responsible were being systematically punished, regardless of rank. It made for a nice Oval Office photo-op on a Friday morning. Unfortunately, none of it is true.

The administration has provided nothing remotely like a full and honest accounting of the extent of the abuses at American prison camps in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. It has withheld internal reports and stonewalled external inquiries, while clinging to the fiction that the abuse was confined to isolated acts, like the sadistic behavior of one night crew in one cellblock at Abu Ghraib. The administration has prevented any serious investigation of policy makers at the White House, the Justice Department and the Pentagon by orchestrating official probes so that none could come even close to the central question of how the prison policies were formulated and how they led to the abuses.

But a two-part series in The Times by Tim Golden provides a horrifying new confirmation that what happened at Abu Ghraib was no aberration, but part of a widespread pattern. It showed the tragic impact of the initial decision by Mr. Bush and his top advisers that they were not going to follow the Geneva Conventions, or indeed American law, for prisoners taken in antiterrorist operations.

The series details the killing of two Afghan prisoners at the Bagram prison camp, one of them an innocent taxi driver who was tormented to death by American soldiers. The investigative file on Bagram, obtained by The Times, showed that the mistreatment of prisoners was routine: shackling them to the ceilings of their cells, depriving them of sleep, kicking and hitting them, sexually humiliating them and threatening them with guard dogs - the very same behavior later repeated in Iraq.

This pattern should not surprise anyone by now. The same general who organized the harsh interrogation techniques at Guantánamo Bay was later sent to Iraq, as were some of the prison guard units from Bagram. Guards at the Iraq and Afghanistan prisons were sent to their duties from civilian life, with no experience and little training.

One thing they were taught at Bagram was the "common peroneal strike" - a blow to the side of the leg just above the knee that can cause severe damage. It is clearly out of bounds for a civilized army, but it was used at Bagram routinely. The taxi driver, Dilawar, died after "blunt force injuries to the lower extremities" stopped his heart, according to the autopsy report.

The trouble is, normal bounds did not apply at Bagram, because the president had muddied the water with conflicting orders. In a February 2002 memo, he spoke of giving prisoners humane treatment, but only when it suited "military necessity," and he also said members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban were not entitled to prisoner-of-war status. That led interrogators to believe that they "could deviate slightly from the rules," according to an Army Reserve sergeant who served at Bagram.

It now appears that those slight deviations included killing prisoners, and then covering up the reason they died.

"When governments state that certain events have not happened, and yet we have the victims before us to testify that they did, government loses its credibility, and it loses its authority.”
~ Bishop Carlos Felipe Ximenes Belo

The Unknown Unknowns of the Abu Ghraib Scandal
By Seymour Hersh
Saturday 21 May 2005

(...) There is much more to be learned. What do I know? A few things stand out. I know of the continuing practice of American operatives seizing suspected terrorists and taking them, without any meaningful legal review, to interrogation centres in south-east Asia and elsewhere. I know of the young special forces officer whose subordinates were confronted with charges of prisoner abuse and torture at a secret hearing after one of them emailed explicit photos back home. The officer testified that, yes, his men had done what the photos depicted, but they - and everybody in the command - understood such treatment was condoned by higher-ups.
What else do I know? I know that the decision was made inside the Pentagon in the first weeks of the Afghanistan war - which seemed "won" by December 2001 - to indefinitely detain scores of prisoners who were accumulating daily at American staging posts throughout the country. At the time, according to a memo, in my possession, addressed to Donald Rumsfeld, there were "800-900 Pakistani boys 13-15 years of age in custody". I could not learn if some or all of them have been released, or if some are still being held. (...)

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"It is never right to do wrong or to requite wrong with wrong or, when we suffer evil, to defend ourselves by doing evil in return."
~ Socrates

Karzai Demands Justice for Prisoners Abused by Americans (Abridged)
By BRIAN KNOWLTON
Published: May 22, 2005

WASHINGTON, May 22 - President Hamid Karzai today demanded justice for Afghan prisoner abuse by American interrogators, and he blamed the United States and Britain, not his government, for the slow progress of anti-drug efforts in his country. He also said he would ask President Bush for greater control over Afghan affairs as part of a longer-term strategic partnership.

Asked if he had complained to the United States about the abuse - two Afghans in United States military custody in Bagram died in December 2002 after severe beatings - he replied: "We have before, I will do it again. This is simply, simply not acceptable, we are angry about this, we want justice, we want the people responsible for this sort of brutal behavior punished and tried."

But speaking a day before he is to meet here with Mr. Bush, Mr. Karzai also portrayed the prisoner abuse as rare and atypical, the work of only one or two American soldiers. He said, in a CNN interview, that this should not reflect on all Americans, adding, "There are bad people on duty everywhere."

Mr. Karzai underscored cooperation with the United States, but also insisted that Afghans' sense of independence and self-reliance was growing. "No Afghan is a puppet, you know," he said in a Fox News interview. "There is a stronger ownership of the Afghan government and the Afghan people now."

It remained unclear how much his criticisms were intended for Afghan consumption, or whether his meeting with Mr. Bush might be rendered less comfortable than past such encounters, which have generally been portrayed as relaxed and amicable.

His comments, nonetheless, came at a delicate and unexpectedly contentious moment, a day after Mr. Karzai had expressed dismay over reports of abuses of Afghan prisoners - "it has shocked me thoroughly," he said Saturday in Kabul - and as Mr. Karzai's help in eradicating opium poppies in Afghanistan was being questioned by the United States.

Coming at a time of rising insecurity in Afghanistan, this left a surprising array of tensions between the two sides. At least 17 people died in recent anti-American protests in Afghanistan and other countries that some accounts linked to a Newsweek report, since retracted, that United States interrogators at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had desecrated the Koran.

"We were angry about that," Mr. Karzai said of the Newsweek report. But he suggested that the real target of the violent demonstrations was something else.
"It was directed at the peace process that we have of inviting back the thousands of the Taliban to come back to their country," he said. "It was actually against the elections in Afghanistan. So we know what was going on there." Parliamentary elections are due in autumn.

While generally praising cooperation between the United States and Afghanistan, Mr. Karzai also said it was time for American military officials to seek Afghan permission before raiding people's houses. A day earlier, in Kabul, he said he would ask Mr. Bush to release all Afghans in United States military detention to Afghan custody.
Frank differences over the poppy eradication program emerged over the weekend.
A cable sent May 13 by the United States Embassy in Kabul to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice asserted that eradication efforts were slipping partly because, "although President Karzai has been well aware of the difficulty in trying to implement an effective ground eradication program, he has been unwilling to assert strong leadership, even in his own province of Kandahar."

A copy of the memo was shown to The New York Times by an American official concerned by the pace of poppy eradication. The cable faulted Britain as well, which holds lead responsibility for counternarcotics work in Afghanistan.

" Only the winners decide what were war crimes."
~ Gary Wills

The Rumsfeld Stain (Abridged)
By BOB HERBERT
Published: May 23, 2005

How does Donald Rumsfeld survive as defense secretary?

...there is also the grotesque and deeply shameful issue that will always be a part of Mr. Rumsfeld's legacy - the manner in which American troops have treated prisoners under their control in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. There is no longer any doubt that large numbers of troops responsible for guarding and interrogating detainees somehow loosed their moorings to humanity, and began behaving as sadists, perverts and criminals.
The catalog of confirmed atrocities is huge. Consider just one paragraph from a long and horrifying story on Friday by Tim Golden of The Times about the torture and brutal deaths of two Afghan inmates at the hands of U.S. troops:
"In sworn statements to Army investigators, soldiers describe one female interrogator with a taste for humiliation stepping on the neck of one prostrate detainee and kicking another in the genitals. They tell of a shackled prisoner being forced to roll back and forth on the floor of a cell, kissing the boots of his two interrogators as he went. Yet another prisoner is made to pick plastic bottle caps out of a drum mixed with excrement and water as part of a strategy to soften him up for questioning."
These were among the milder abuses to come to light. The continuum of bad behavior that has been a hallmark of the so-called war on terror extends from this kind of activity to incidents of extreme torture and death.
Neither the troops nor the American public signed on for a war in Iraq that would last many years. And I can't believe there are many Americans who wanted their military sullied by the wanton behavior of the torture crowd.

"What is also dismaying is the way in which the [ Bush ] administration has taken every opportunity since Sept. 11, 2005, to utilize the lofty language of freedom, democracy and the rule of law while secretly pursuing policies that are both unjust and profoundly inhumane."
~ Bob Herbert

s democracy is perfected,
the office of President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people.
On some great and glorious day
the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned

by a downright
moron."

~ H. L. Mencken
(1880 - 1956)