Silenced by the Men in White Socks
Shut them up. Accuse them. Imprison them. Stop them talking. Why is it that this seems to have become a symbol of the Arab - or Muslim - world? Yes I know about our Western reputation for free speech; from the Roman Empire to the Spanish inquisition, from Henry VIII to Robespierre, from Mussolini and Stalin to Hitler, even - on a pitiable scale - to Mr Anthony Blair. But it’s getting hard to avoid the Middle East.
When Egyptian women cry “Enough!”, they are sexually abused by Mubarak’s cops. When Algerians demand to know which policemen killed their relatives, they are arrested for ignoring the regime’s amnesty. When Benazir Bhutto is murdered in Rawalpindi, a cloak of silence falls over the world’s imams. Pontificating about the assassination in Pakistan, Shaikh es-Sayed, who runs one of Canada’s biggest mosques, expressed his condolences to “families of beloved brothers and sisters who died in the incident [sic]”. Asked why he didn’t mention Bhutto’s name, he replied: “Why? This is not a political arena. This is about religion. That’s politics.” Well, it certainly is in Syria. George Bush - along with M. Sarkozy - has been berating Damascus for its lack of democracy and its human rights abuses and its supposed desire to gobble up Lebanon and “Palestine” and even Cyprus. But I always feel that Syria had a raw deal these past 90 years.
First came the one-armed General Henri Gouraud, who tore Lebanon off from Syria in 1920 and gave it to the pro-French Christians. Then Paris handed the Syrian coastal city of Alexandretta to the Turks in 1939 - sending survivors of the 1915 Armenian genocide into exile for a second time - in the hope that Turkey would join the Allies against Hitler. (The Turks obliged - in 1945!) Then in the Six Day War, Syria lost the Golan Heights - subsequently annexed by Israel. Far from being expansionist, Syria seems to get robbed of land every two decades.
On the death of Hafez al-Assad in 2000 - it’s extraordinary how, like Sharon now that he is comatose, we come to like these old rogues once they’ve departed - we were told there was to be a “Damascus Spring”. I always thought this a bit dodgy. I’d experienced the Lebanon Spring and read about the Ukraine Spring and I’m old enough to remember the Prague Spring, which ended in tears and tanks. And sure enough, the Damascus Spring presaged no golden summer for Syria.
Instead, we’ve gone back to the midnight knock and the clanging of the cell door. Why - oh why - must this be so? Why did the Syrian secret police have to arrest Dr Ahmed Thoma, Dr Yasser el-Aiti, Jabr al-Shufi, Fayez Sara, Ali al-Abdulla and Rashed Sattouf in December, only days after they - along with 163 other brave Syrians - had attended a meeting of the Damascus Declaration for Democratic Change? The delegates had elected Dr Fida al-Hurani head of their organisation. She, too, was arrested, and her husband, Dr Gazi Alayan, a Palestinian who had lived in Syria for 18 years, deported to Jordan.
The net spread wider, as they say in police reports. The renowned Syrian artist Talal Abu Dana was arrested up in Aleppo, his studio trashed and his paintings destroyed. Then on 18 February, Kamel al-Moyel from the lovely hill town of Zabadani, on the steam train route from Damascus, was picked up by the boys in white socks. A point of explanation here. Almost all Middle East Moukhabarat men - perhaps because a clothing emporium has won a concession for the region’s secret policemen - wear white socks. The only ones who don’t are the Israeli variety, who wear old baseball hats.
Needless to say, the Syrian prisoners were not ignored by their regime. A certain Dr Shuabi, who runs a certain Data and Strategic Studies Centre in Damascus, appeared on al-Jazeera to denounce the detainees for “dealing with foreign powers”. Dr al-Hurani suffered from angina and was briefly sent to hospital before being returned to the Duma jail. But when the prisoners were at last brought to the Palace of Justice, Ali al-Abdulla appeared to have bruises on his body. Judge Mohamed al-Saa’our - the third investigative judge in Damascus, appointed by the ministry of interior - presided over the case at which the detainees were accused of “spreading false information”, forming a secret organisation to overthrow the regime, and for inciting “sectarian and racist tendencies”. The hearing, as they say, continues.
But why? Well, back on 4 December, George Bush met at the White House - the rendezvous was initially kept secret - the former Syrian MP Mamoun al-Homsi (who currently lives, dangerously perhaps, in Beirut) with Amar Abdulhamid, a member of a think thank run by a former Israeli lobbyist, and Djengizkhan Hasso, a Kurdish opposition activist. Nine days later, an official “source” leaked the meeting to the press. Which is about the time the Syrian Moukhabarat decided to pounce. So whose idea was the meeting? Was it, perhaps, supposed - once it became public - to provoke the Syrian cops into action?
The Damascus newspaper Tichrine - the Syrian equivalent of Private Eye’s Rev Blair newsletter - demanded to know why Washington was showing such concern for human rights in Syria. Was not the American-supported blockade of one and a half million Gaza Palestinians a violation of the rights of man? Had not the Arabs seen all too clearly Washington’s concern for the rights of man in Abu Ghraib and Guanatanamo? All true. But why on earth feed America’s propaganda machine (Syria as the centre of Hamas/ Hiz-bollah/Islamic Jihad terror, etc) with weekly arrests of middle-aged academics and even, it transpires, the vice-dean of the Islamic studies faculty at Damascus University?
Of course, you won’t find Israel or the United States engaged in this kind of thing. Absolutely not. Why, just two months ago, the Canadian foreign minister, Maxime Bernier, discovered that a confidential document sent to Canadian diplomats included a list of countries in which prisoners risked being tortured - and the names of America and Israel were on the list! Merde! Fortunately for us all, M. Bernier knew how to deal with such pernicious lies. The document, he announced, “wrongly includes some of our closest allies. It doesn’t represent the opinion or the policy of the (Canadian) government”. Even though, of course, the list is correct.
But M. Bernier managed to avoid and close down the truth, just as Mr Mubarak does in Cairo and President Bouteflika does in Algiers and just as the good Shaikh es-Sayed did in Toronto. Syria, according to Haitham al-Maleh, a former Syrian judge, claims there are now almost 3,000 political prisoners in Syria. But how many, I wonder, are there in Algeria? Or in Egypt? Or in the hands - secret or otherwise - of the United States? Shut them up. Lock them up. Silence.
–Robert Fisk
©independent.co.uk
It’s as clear as daylight that so far as Syria is concerned, Bush is up to no good. Therefore, any Syrian meeting with Bush in private has got to be a CIA asset or an Israeli spy. Also, anyone, Syrian or not, talking with Bush about democracy and freedom has got to be insane. They all should be locked up and the key thrown away.
It’s interesting to hear the details of this intrigue in the Middle East. The web of power plays of families alliances and remnants of past and new colonialism seems like a political, economic, corporate Rubiks cube.
This is an illuminating article, though I think I’ll just continue with my dumbed down verse rants…hence:
It’s a go..
It’s a go..
The empire based on bases
Is a go
It’s a go,
The empire of the Corpirates
It’s a go.
The empire of managed malfeasance
It’s a go.
The empire of eternal war’s
It’s a go.
It’s time for every one to know,
We who live what’s called the ‘good life’,
Fuddled by Corpirates newspeak.
Is to believe we may be just!..
as we leave less than a crust for most of us.
while more of us join the poor and weak.
That’s progress in newspeak.
For it’s a go
Annually we need to spend a trillion dollars
For eternal war’s so
It’s a go..
PNAC
It’s a go..
That’s our managed Corpirates and their puppets,…
who are our leaders,.. tell us our safety lies
in eternal wars.
So it’s a go
Our safety means
Eternal wars so…
It’s a go..
Exponential debt.
It’s a go.
Trash the land
Corporations can self regulate
Yah
It’s a go..
It’s a go..
It’s we the Corporations
One nation under God
It’s we the Corporations
MIC led bottom fed
It’s a go.
Go exponential
While we the Corpos milk the sweat shop
of the third world,…
So,.. It’s a go..
It’s we the Corpse to be
One Corporate nation under God
It’s we the Corporations
MIC led bottom fed
The empire that sheds it’s commons.
As we the marks,.. buy the newspeak
and celebrate our poisoned home.
For It’s a go.. renew the nukes
Onward Christian’s thank god your straight
Onward Christian soldiers
Spread more depleted U in the holy land
For it’s a go
Exponential carnage it’s a go
While the Corporate puppet leader of the free world,
leads us to that final blow.
For it’s a go.
Geeze, now I know why my wife is always after my case when I ware white socks — from now on I am a “man in black”!
But serious — secrecy sux.
I don’t care about the reason, security or whatever, in the end secret organization will always devolve into thuggery and worse. In the end, at the best, secret agencies become mafiose.
You can read this in the 4th level derivatives of Hari Seldon’s psycho-historical formulas.
Such Byzantine logic is all Greek to me.
Ever since that Saudi Samson pulled down the axis mundi of the corporate palace I have enough trouble following Phaethon drive our nation into the sea of debt and despair.
What difference does anything make? The oligarchy says that the world’s sole superpower creates it’s own reality.
Wrong, the oligarchy creates it’s own hell. That sad part is that they create it not just for themselves but for all of us. The claimed “superpower” status rather stands at odds with the fact that the US is a paper tiger, with so much debt printed all over it, that it can reasonably be viewed as on its last legs. I doubt that the US will survive the damage inflicted upon it by George Bush, though I hope it does.
I sympathize with those who suffer, and applaud Robert Fisk for bring them to our attention, but anyone who thinks that they can profit by shaking George Bush’s hand at this stage in the game is a fool. Everything that man touches, or attempted to do, both above board, and perhaps even more so below board, turns to sh*t. I’m amazed that there are still people out there who do not understand this is the “reality” George Bush creates. Even George Bush, at this point in his reign must surely grasp in his heart of heart that he has proved to be the most incompetent leader not just the US but arguably the world has ever known. Perhaps in 2300 this will be something people can laugh about but right now it is just plain tragic.
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/04/gaza200804
IJDAVIS: I think Bush sees himself as a symbol of power for the number of persons history books will associate with his power to annihilate. He was obviously a sadist when presiding as governor of Texas and NEVER granting clemency to any prisoner on death row, even those who had pitifully delinquent legal representation. Now he’s the world’s biggest fan of torture, and has never met a bomb design he didn’t think worthy of investing precious dollars in. He wants to be # 1 as the most heinous killer cum “leader” of all time. That a SUPREME court gave him the position to do so is beyond criminal, and as another article today related, MUST BE HELD to account.
Chuck Cliff: Completely in agreement there.
Even down to the pathetic secrets ratified by law of local governments. If indeed governments pass law not as our rulers but as our agents, then what right do they have to keep secrets from us?
I’ve heard it argued that it is justified because for them to entice corporations to enter into agreements with them, that this is necessary to do. C’mon, as if the massive financial lure of government contracts would not outweigh the reluctance of corporations to compete for government contracts.
Secrecy, when it comes to government, is fertile soil for corruption to breed.
That’s why we need open and accountable government.
Open and accountable government? Not while humans are involved! Penguins might have some chance of forming one. Or gazelles.
Not, I repeat, not humans. Not ever!
The Jews can go to hell. They scream that they have the right to defend themselves while they steal West bank land.
They are dogs, out for the kill. They care nothing for their neighbors, it’s the jews that won’t get along in the middle east, they are dogs.
http://www.democracynow.org/2007/11/20/homegrown_terrorism_prevention_act_raises_fears
We are going to be seeing the same here in the US
Germar Rudolf