Medal of Honor...
Six years into the so-called "war on terror", the USA continued to hold hundreds of people in indefinite military detention without charge or trial in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, in addition to the thousands held in Iraq.
In late April, ... President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa — Zimbabwe's influential neighbor — addressed a four-page letter to President Bush. Rather than coordinating strategy to end Zimbabwe's nightmare, Mbeki criticized the United States, in a text packed with exclamation points, for taking sides against President Robert Mugabe's government and disrespecting the views of the Zimbabwean people. "He said it was not our business," recalls one American official, and "to butt out, that Africa belongs to him." Adds another official, "Mbeki lost it; it was outrageous."
[...]
South Africa increasingly requires a new foreign policy category: the rogue democracy. Along with China and Russia, South Africa makes the United Nations impotent. Along with Saudi Arabia and Sudan, it undermines the global human rights movement. South Africa remains an example of freedom — while devaluing and undermining the freedom of others. It is the product of a conscience it does not display.
Zimbabwe is the most pressing case in point — reflecting a political argument within South Africa and a broader philosophical debate.
[...]
And this debate is clarifying a question across southern Africa: Did revolutionary parties in the region fight for liberation or for liberty? If merely for liberation from Western imperialism, then aging despots and oppressive ruling parties have a claim to power. But if for liberty, those who work for freedom in Zimbabwe must also have their day.
So far, South Africa — of all places — sides with the despots.
Washington Post | The Despots' Democracy
Reports of the existence of such a letter surfaced in the Washington Post (May 28 2008) column by Michael Gerson headlined "The Despots' Democracy". The dispatch and receipt of this letter has been confirmed by the United States Embassy in Pretoria, but knowledge of its existence has been denied by the South African President's spokesman.
I believe it is in the best interests of South Africa's battered international image and the restoration of our President's position as an impartial mediator in Zimbabwe that he both release the letter and elaborate on its contents and intentions and context.
It is with deep dismay that we note that the columnist, Michael Gerson, concludes that "South Africa — of all places — sides with the despots."
PoliticsWeb | Leon calls on Mbeki to release letter to Bush
DA Foreign Affairs spokesperson Tony "Soprano" Leon, fresh from a stint at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government (which counts PNAC co-founder and Weekly Standard editor Bill "the Bloody" Kristol among its notable professors) virtually replicates the above in his letter to President Mbeki, requesting that he make public and elaborate on his letter to George Bush.
However, absent from Leon's letter to the president is the last paragraph above, i.e. his apparent deep concern at Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson's conclusion that, as a newly categorised "rogue democracy", we are now acting in concert with Russia and China to subvert the U.N. by siding "... with the despots."
Leon, who ran the DA into the ground before Helen Zille resuscitated it, threatens again to rise to new lows in subverting our already fragile democracy. Riding on the vapid shirttails of Gerson's egregious warmongering is about as low as even he can go.
No doubt, many South Africans will read The Despots' Democracy as a serious piece by one of the Western World's most reputable papers. It's a con. Worse, it's a con paid for by American taxpayers and, as part of a broader offensive on detractors, budgeted for by their venal administration.
Michael Gerson is no respected journalist. Recruited by Machiavellian maestro Karl Rove and credited with originating the "smoking gun", "mushroom cloud", and "axis of evil" metaphors that led to a million Iraqi deaths, Mr. Compassionate Conservatism was a speechwriter and White House senior policy and strategy advisor for George W. Bush for seven years — from 1999 to 2006.
He bailed within weeks of Scott McClellan. You do remember Scott McClellan, don't you. Since then, Gerson has written for Newsweek and, from 2007, for The Washington Post.
A Christian Zionist voted ninth among "The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals In America" by Time (shading Billy Graham, he is described as "The President's Spiritual Scribe"), Gerson's resume includes a stint as senior policy advisor at the notoriously right-wing Heritage Foundation.
Today, he is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), home to many of the power elite now manufacturing consent for war with Iran.
Not all favor Gerson. "No one doubts that he did his job exceptionally well", wrote Ramesh Ponnuru of Gerson's time within Bush's inner circle. Ponnuru is a seriously twisted senior editor for National Review whose articles have appeared in neo-fascist publications including The Weekly Standard, Policy Review, and The New Republic. However, of Gerson's columns for the Washington Post, Ponnuru makes a point with which I might find myself in agreement were it not delivered from a quarter antithetical to balance and sanity:
"In Gerson’s columns, what is most important for the country to do is stand for the right moral position; actually accomplishing something is secondary. That would require empiricism, which is nearly absent from those columns."
All things considered...
In July, President George W. Bush gave the green light for the CIA's programme of secret detention and interrogation to continue. One in a long list of unlawful policies adopted by the administration as part of the "war on terror", the President's re-authorization of this programme was a clear rejection of the principles underlying the UDHR. Indeed, President Bush issued his executive order a year after two UN treaty-monitoring bodies told the US government in no uncertain terms that secret detention violates the USA's international obligations.
Not that a lack of empiricism would worry someone like Tony Leon. He appears to march in ideological lockstep with Michael Gerson. Nor should playing fast and loose with innuendo and "smear" concern Gerson or Leon. They are, in more ways than one, bagmen for the steel-eyed cynics driving the CFR. Their job is to deliver copy to the mainstream media that fits the CFR agenda.
The U.S. press, spineless-but-profitable lackeys of the military-industrial complex against which Eisenhower warned and on which the U.S. economy is based, will publish it. Remember Judith Miller? The so-called journalist whose New York Times pieces were scripted by Dick Cheney's office in the run up to the illegal invasion and obliteration of Iraq (one million dead, one million maimed, and four million internal and external refugees)?
How does Gerson's article, which echoes former Office of Force Transformation supremo Tom Barnett's The Americans Have Landed, fit the U.S. administration's plans for Southern Africa?
In line with the U.S.'s increasingly aggressive approach to securing Africa's resources through an AFRICOM networking from its freshly bunkered embassies and consulates, Gerson recently spent time in the region and he would surely have consulted with CFR international affairs fellow Michelle D. Gavin.
Gavin's October 2007 CFR Center for Preventive Action Special Report titled "Planning for Post-Mugabe Zimbabwe" notes that "South Africa’s influence as a leader in the global south and importance as a partner in counterterrorism efforts, make the U.S.-South Africa relationship among the most important in the region."
She goes on to offer insight (albeit superficial) into how the U.S. plans to use the Zimbabwean crisis to "... improve a somewhat strained relationship with South Africa".
Behind the fatuous language of human rights and favoring words such as "seize", "encourage", and "hasten", Gavin warns "... policymakers and advocates should recognize that the United States probably cannot compel President Mugabe and his loyalists to step aside ..." and explores ways to oust him by other means, i.e. through prescription to SADC and South Africa.
Or, as Gavin puts it, to "... hasten constructive forms of potential political change by affecting the calculus of those who are in a position to trigger a transition."
Before asking "What's wrong with a concern for human rights in Zimbabwe?", read the 370-page report on U.S. complicity in torture issued last week by the Inspector General of the U.S. Justice Department.
South Africa's president is an obstacle to U.S. expansionism in the region. While the CFR would welcome any movement of refugees from South Africa back to Zimbabwe, our facilitating China's shipment of arms to that country probably constituted a grievous, punishable error (the SAS Drakensberg is capable of abeam and astern RAS).
Noting that "... years of on-again, off-again attempts by President Mbeki to pursue his preferred approach of 'quiet diplomacy' have yielded no improvements on the ground... ", Gavin proposes 'Exposing External Support' as a Recommendation For U.S. Policy.
Behind the implicit threat of a media onslaught similar to the 'Free Tibet' campaign launched by the CIA against China, i.e. "... South Africa has no interest in seeing some version of the China Olympics/Darfur campaign being waged in conjunction with the 2010 World Cup ..." she suggests:
More naming and shaming of external supporters, and more serious efforts to put the Zimbabwe issue on the agenda at high-level meetings with governments providing direct support to Mugabe, could help increase the costs of assisting President Mugabe such that they exceed the already-dubious benefits. For example, press reports suggesting that governments in Equatorial Guinea and Angola are helping to prop up the Mugabe regime deserve more attention."Hence the Washington Post's publication of The Despots' Democracy earlier this week. It forms a shot across the bows of a South African ship of state sailing in waters over which the Americans want sovereignty.
No matter that they belong to us.
I'll say it again. Michael Gerson is no respected journalist. Like Michelle Gavin, he is a propagandist working for the Council on Foreign Relations. And that casts anything he might write in a decidedly shady light.
His article has little to do with Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, Thabo Mbeki, and human rights. It has everything to do with South Africa, the United States, and the future of our continent.
Thabo Mbeki knows this. Tony Leon obviously does not and should, like George W Bush, butt out.
Habeas corpus — the right to have a judge rule on the lawfulness of one's detention — is a fundamental principle of the rule of law. Detainees in US custody who have been denied recourse to this procedure have been subjected to enforced disappearance, secret detention and transfer, torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, and unfair trial procedures. Sixty years after the UDHR, such policies and practices are an affront to the world it envisaged.
Amnesty International Report 2008
Reading
• U.S. Department of Justice | A Review of the FBI's Involvement in and Observations of Detainee Interrogations in Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, and Iraq
• Council on Foreign Relations | Planning for Post-Mugabe Zimbabwe
• Council on Foreign Relations | A Strategic U.S. Approach Toward Africa
• Chatham House | Zimbabwe's Future
• Heritage Foundation | Annual Report 2007
• Morgan Tsvangirai | Letter to Thabo Mbeki
The report assailed the moral leadership of the United States, saying that, as "the world's most powerful state" it "sets the standard for government behavior globally." But, Amnesty International said, the United States had "distinguished itself in recent years through its defiance of international law."
International Herald Tribune | Amnesty International report assails U.S.
Note: I can't fault the CFR for their assessment of South Africa's general education and intelligence levels. The number of numbskulls that have fallen for this cheap piece of propaganda is truly frightening. Divide and Rule's stocks are riding high. Discernment's have dropped through the floor.
One wag over at The Times suggests the U.S. Department of State releases Mbeki's letter to the media. This is what it, or an office in the Bush administration, has done. With many of its members working in government, the Council on Foreign Relations' ties with the State Department have been especially strong for seventy years.
Recently, it has become uncommonly common practice — contrary to internationally accepted diplomatic protocols, for administration officials to 'feed' (rather than the now euphemistic 'leak') misinformation and disinformation through the think-tank industry to its media flunkies.
Although Lewis 'Scooter' Libby took the rap (if not the fall) for Valerie Plame's CIA cover being purposefully 'leaked' to nail her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, the order came directly from Rove or Cheney. People cannot seem to wrap their heads around the fact that these people are scum, i.e. that American politicians and power brokers have no class, style, or sophistication.
They are however, cunning, and South Africans find it as difficult to appreciate their use of think tanks to originate and give effect to state strategy through the abuse of public and private social or civil instruments.
