October 11, 2020 •
Whatever the theoretical value of the United Nations system, its agencies are a source of frequent farce. Among the worst performers is the Human Rights Council. Nominally devoted to promoting people’s basic rights, the body often protects the world’s worst human rights abusers instead. Indeed, authoritarian governments routinely sit on the 47-member body.
Over the years 117 countries have served on the Council. Among the more vicious oppressors: Bahrain, China, Burundi, Vietnam, Sudan, United Arab Emirates, Russia, Algeria, Kazakhstan, Eritrea, Cuba, Egypt, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia.
The selection of states that kill and imprison their people is no accident. Countries are elected by region. Many governments care nothing about how neighboring states treat their own people. Moreover, like any legislative body the UN is prone to log-rolling. Tyrants often band together to create a cordon sanitaire against anyone who would hold criminal regimes accountable. The Mideast is noteworthy for the high concentration of despotic regimes.
Amazingly, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, a bloody, aggressive, absolute monarchy, treats the HRC as almost a second home. The KSA joined the Council in 2006, dropped off after hitting the six-term limit, returned from 2014 to 2019, left this year for the same reason, and is now running again.
The vote occurs on Tuesday and Riyadh is a heavy favorite along with China, since only five countries are vying for four seats in the Asia-Pacific. Nepal, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan, none of them liberal democracies, follow. At least there is a contest there. Everywhere else the elections are Soviet style, with no competition.
No doubt, the Kingdom hopes to use membership to defend its reputation. Last year Australia and Iceland led multiple nations in publicly rebuking Riyadh for its many abuses. That likely came as shock to a country used to buying protection from friends, including the Trump administration, which even sought to cover up the infamous 2018 murder of U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi. Returning to the Council would allow the Saudi royals to better dampen future criticism. Warned Human Rights Watch: "Saudi Arabia and China have a history of using their seats on the Human Rights Council to prevent scrutiny of their abuses and those by their allies. Saudi Arabia has threatened to withdraw millions of dollars in UN funding to stay off the secretary-general’s annual ‘list of shame’ for violations against children."
It is impossible to overstate the ludicrous nature of its HRC candidacy. Despite Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s attempt to play social reformer, the group Freedom House rates the Kingdom as Not Free. It scores just seven on a 100-point scale. Out of almost 200 countries only North Korea, Turkmenistan, South Sudan, Eritrea, Equatorial Guinea, and Syria rank lower. (Somalia tied the KSA.)
Explained Freedom House: "Saudi Arabia’s absolute monarchy restricts almost all political rights and civil liberties. No officials at the national level are elected. The regime relies on pervasive surveillance, the criminalization of dissent, appeals to sectarianism and ethnicity, and public spending supported by oil revenues to maintain power. Women and religious minorities face extensive discrimination in law and in practice. Working conditions for the large expatriate labor force are often exploitative."
Amnesty International also detailed how the regime’s treatment of its people remained barbaric, stuck in an earlier time. Explained AI: "The authorities escalated repression of the rights to freedom of expression, association and assembly. They harassed, arbitrarily detained and prosecuted dozens of government critics, human rights defenders, including women’s rights activists, members of the Shia minority and family members of activists. Shia activists and religious clerics remained on trial before a counter-terror court for expressing dissent. The authorities used the death penalty extensively, carrying out scores of executions for a range of crimes, including drug offences. Some people, most of them members of the country’s Shia minority, were executed following grossly unfair trials."
Discrimination against women was pervasive and humiliating. Despite some reforms, "women continued to face systematic discrimination in law and practice in other areas and remained inadequately protected against sexual and other violence. The authorities granted hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals the right to work and access to education and health care, but arrested and deported hundreds of thousands of irregular migrant workers, who were exposed to labor abuses and exploitation by employers and torture when in state custody. Discrimination against the Shia minority remained entrenched."
Even the US State Department, headquarters of Saudi sycophant Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, was forced to admit the obvious—though the agency’s human rights report was shaped to minimize the royal family’s many crimes. It began with a description of the KSA’s organization of government, lauded long-overdue social reforms, and suggested that Riyadh was the victim when the Yemenis that Saudi Arabia had been bombing and killing for years retaliated with drone and missile strikes.
However, even clever phrasing could not shield the regime from blame for its totalitarian political system. Explained State: "Significant human rights issues included: unlawful killings; executions for nonviolent offenses; forced disappearances; torture of prisoners and detainees by government agents; arbitrary arrest and detention; political prisoners; arbitrary interference with privacy; criminalization of libel, censorship, and site blocking; restrictions on freedoms of peaceful assembly, association, and movement; severe restrictions of religious freedom; citizens’ lack of ability and legal means to choose their government through free and fair elections; trafficking in persons; violence and official discrimination against women, although new women’s rights initiatives were implemented; criminalization of consensual same-sex sexual activity; and prohibition of trade unions. In several cases the government did not punish officials accused of committing human rights abuses, contributing to an environment of impunity."
Human Rights Watch also covered the Kingdom’s crimes in detail, including violations of "freedom of expression, association, and belief," criminal justice abuses, discrimination against women, and mistreatment of migrant workers. Unlike the State Department, HRW also cited Riyadh’s murderous war while privately worrying about liability for war crimes, the horrific aggressive war being waged by the KSA against Yemen.
Observed HRW: "As the leader of the coalition that began military operations against Houthi forces in Yemen on March 26, 2015, Saudi Arabia has committed numerous violations of international humanitarian law. As of June [2019], at least 7,292 civilians had been killed and 11,630 wounded, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), although the actual civilian casualty count is likely much higher. The majority of these casualties were a result of coalition airstrikes.
Since March 2015, Human Rights Watch has documented numerous unlawful attacks by the coalition that have hit homes, markets, hospitals, schools, and mosques. Some of these attacks may amount to war crimes. Saudi commanders face possible criminal liability for war crimes as a matter of command responsibility. Human Rights Watch documented five deadly attacks carried out by coalition naval forces on Yemeni fishing boats since 2018 that killed at least 47 Yemeni fishermen, including seven children, as well as the coalition’s detention of more than 100 others, some of whom say they were tortured in custody in Saudi Arabia."
The Saudis also are among the world’s most religiously intolerant and repressive states. At least North Korea has a handful of official churches. Riyadh makes no pretense of allowing any non-Muslims to worship. (The right of Shiites to practice their faith is restricted and any effort at activism is brutally repressed.)
The State Department made no attempt to hide the ugly reality: "Freedom of religion is not provided under the law. The government does not allow the public practice of any non-Muslim religion. The law criminalizes ‘anyone who challenges, either directly or indirectly, the religion or justice of the King or Crown Prince.’ The law criminalizes ‘the promotion of atheistic ideologies in any form,’ ‘any attempt to cast doubt on the fundamentals of Islam,’ publications that ‘contradict the provisions of Islamic law,’ and other acts including non-Islamic public worship, public display of non-Islamic religious symbols, conversion by a Muslim to another religion, and proselytizing by a non-Muslim."
The US Commission on International Religious Freedom was even tougher in its assessment: the KSA "continued to engage in other systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of religious freedom. The government prohibits public practice of any religion other than Islam, and no houses of worship other than mosques are allowed in the kingdom. Non-Muslims who gather in private houses are subject to surveillance and Saudi security services may break up their private worship services. … the government’s tolerance remained low for those who chose not to accept its state-endorsed version of Hanbali Sunni Islam."
Shiite Muslims fared only marginally better than non-Muslims. Wrote USCIRF: "Shia Muslims in Saudi Arabia continue to face discrimination in education, employment, and the judiciary, and lack access to senior government and military positions. The building of Shia mosques is restricted outside majority-Shia Muslim areas in the Eastern Province, and Saudi authorities often prohibit use of the Shia Muslim call to prayer in these areas. Authorities arrest and imprison Shia Muslims for holding religious gatherings in private homes without permits and reading religious materials in husseiniyas (prayer halls). Saudi Arabia also restricts the establishment of Shia Muslim cemeteries. In 2019, government authorities conducted a mass execution of 37 Shia Muslim protesters, including some who were minors at the time of their alleged crimes."
Even genuine reforms are encircled with repression. MbS, as the crown prince is known, lifted some of the disabilities traditionally inflicted upon women. At the same time, however, he ordered the detention, torture, and imprisonment of activists who campaigned for just such a reform. Why this seeming contradiction, asked the International Service for Human Rights?
Simple: "Because of their activism. The women’s rights activists are being used to amplify the Saudi’s government message to its citizens: ‘Keep quiet and obey us. If you demand your rights, you will get punished.’ Several of the women’s rights activists were tortured and sexually assaulted. They told the Prosecution about their torture but it has so far failed to hold those responsible accountable."
Of course, Saudi Arabia is not the only brutal dictatorship seeking to win election to the Human Rights Council. As noted earlier, China is running for a seat in the same region. Cuba, Russia, and Uzbekistan are effectively unopposed in other regions. None of them should sit on a body that is supposed to help protect their citizens from the same regimes.
Yet Riyadh is a special case since so many Western nations shamelessly line up for Saudi oil and money. Even the US When Pompeo visits Riyadh he genuflects in spirit if not fact the moment he exits the plane.
The Kingdom apparently is buying its way back onto the HRC. That makes a powerful statement of injustice. Complained Saudi defense attorney Taha al-Hajji, who lives in Germany: "If Saudi Arabia succeeds, it will show the world that as long as a state has powerful friends and a limitless public relations budget, it can torture and execute its people, including children, with impunity."
There is still time for the UN to reject Saudi Arabia’s candidacy. After all, not only does it brutally mistreat its people. It also recklessly endangers the peace and routinely subsidizes tyranny. Which undermines the UN’s foundational values.
But set aside moral concerns for a moment. The Kingdom, especially under MbS, is a security threat. At least Washington should stop making excuses for the Saudi regime’s reckless criminality.
Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. A former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is the author ofForeign Follies: America’s New Global Empire.
https://original.antiwar.com/doug-bando ... s-council/
Re: Saudi Arabia Should Be Punished By, Not Elected To, The UN Human Rights CouncilDoug Bandow
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Re: Saudi Arabia Should Be Punished By, Not Elected To, The UN Human Rights CouncilDoug Bandow
This "banda" is corrupted to the core like you, you rodent.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doug_BandowDouglas "Doug" Bandow (born April 15, 1957) is an American political writer, currently working as a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. In 2005, Bandow was forced to resign from the Cato Institute after it was revealed that for over ten years, he accepted payments in exchange for publishing articles favorable to various clients. Bandow referred to the activities as "a lapse of judgment" and said that he accepted payments for "between 12 and 24 articles," each article costing approximately $2,000.
Awash wrote: ↑12 Oct 2020, 03:28October 11, 2020 •
Whatever the theoretical value of the United Nations system, its agencies are a source of frequent farce. Among the worst performers is the Human Rights Council. Nominally devoted to promoting people’s basic rights, the body often protects the world’s worst human rights abusers instead. Indeed, authoritarian governments routinely sit on the 47-member body.
Over the years 117 countries have served on the Council. Among the more vicious oppressors: Bahrain, China, Burundi, Vietnam, Sudan, United Arab Emirates, Russia, Algeria, Kazakhstan, Eritrea, Cuba, Egypt, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia.
The selection of states that kill and imprison their people is no accident. Countries are elected by region. Many governments care nothing about how neighboring states treat their own people. Moreover, like any legislative body the UN is prone to log-rolling. Tyrants often band together to create a cordon sanitaire against anyone who would hold criminal regimes accountable. The Mideast is noteworthy for the high concentration of despotic regimes.
Amazingly, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, a bloody, aggressive, absolute monarchy, treats the HRC as almost a second home. The KSA joined the Council in 2006, dropped off after hitting the six-term limit, returned from 2014 to 2019, left this year for the same reason, and is now running again.
The vote occurs on Tuesday and Riyadh is a heavy favorite along with China, since only five countries are vying for four seats in the Asia-Pacific. Nepal, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan, none of them liberal democracies, follow. At least there is a contest there. Everywhere else the elections are Soviet style, with no competition.
No doubt, the Kingdom hopes to use membership to defend its reputation. Last year Australia and Iceland led multiple nations in publicly rebuking Riyadh for its many abuses. That likely came as shock to a country used to buying protection from friends, including the Trump administration, which even sought to cover up the infamous 2018 murder of U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi. Returning to the Council would allow the Saudi royals to better dampen future criticism. Warned Human Rights Watch: "Saudi Arabia and China have a history of using their seats on the Human Rights Council to prevent scrutiny of their abuses and those by their allies. Saudi Arabia has threatened to withdraw millions of dollars in UN funding to stay off the secretary-general’s annual ‘list of shame’ for violations against children."
It is impossible to overstate the ludicrous nature of its HRC candidacy. Despite Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s attempt to play social reformer, the group Freedom House rates the Kingdom as Not Free. It scores just seven on a 100-point scale. Out of almost 200 countries only North Korea, Turkmenistan, South Sudan, Eritrea, Equatorial Guinea, and Syria rank lower. (Somalia tied the KSA.)
Explained Freedom House: "Saudi Arabia’s absolute monarchy restricts almost all political rights and civil liberties. No officials at the national level are elected. The regime relies on pervasive surveillance, the criminalization of dissent, appeals to sectarianism and ethnicity, and public spending supported by oil revenues to maintain power. Women and religious minorities face extensive discrimination in law and in practice. Working conditions for the large expatriate labor force are often exploitative."
Amnesty International also detailed how the regime’s treatment of its people remained barbaric, stuck in an earlier time. Explained AI: "The authorities escalated repression of the rights to freedom of expression, association and assembly. They harassed, arbitrarily detained and prosecuted dozens of government critics, human rights defenders, including women’s rights activists, members of the Shia minority and family members of activists. Shia activists and religious clerics remained on trial before a counter-terror court for expressing dissent. The authorities used the death penalty extensively, carrying out scores of executions for a range of crimes, including drug offences. Some people, most of them members of the country’s Shia minority, were executed following grossly unfair trials."
Discrimination against women was pervasive and humiliating. Despite some reforms, "women continued to face systematic discrimination in law and practice in other areas and remained inadequately protected against sexual and other violence. The authorities granted hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals the right to work and access to education and health care, but arrested and deported hundreds of thousands of irregular migrant workers, who were exposed to labor abuses and exploitation by employers and torture when in state custody. Discrimination against the Shia minority remained entrenched."
Even the US State Department, headquarters of Saudi sycophant Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, was forced to admit the obvious—though the agency’s human rights report was shaped to minimize the royal family’s many crimes. It began with a description of the KSA’s organization of government, lauded long-overdue social reforms, and suggested that Riyadh was the victim when the Yemenis that Saudi Arabia had been bombing and killing for years retaliated with drone and missile strikes.
However, even clever phrasing could not shield the regime from blame for its totalitarian political system. Explained State: "Significant human rights issues included: unlawful killings; executions for nonviolent offenses; forced disappearances; torture of prisoners and detainees by government agents; arbitrary arrest and detention; political prisoners; arbitrary interference with privacy; criminalization of libel, censorship, and site blocking; restrictions on freedoms of peaceful assembly, association, and movement; severe restrictions of religious freedom; citizens’ lack of ability and legal means to choose their government through free and fair elections; trafficking in persons; violence and official discrimination against women, although new women’s rights initiatives were implemented; criminalization of consensual same-sex sexual activity; and prohibition of trade unions. In several cases the government did not punish officials accused of committing human rights abuses, contributing to an environment of impunity."
Human Rights Watch also covered the Kingdom’s crimes in detail, including violations of "freedom of expression, association, and belief," criminal justice abuses, discrimination against women, and mistreatment of migrant workers. Unlike the State Department, HRW also cited Riyadh’s murderous war while privately worrying about liability for war crimes, the horrific aggressive war being waged by the KSA against Yemen.
Observed HRW: "As the leader of the coalition that began military operations against Houthi forces in Yemen on March 26, 2015, Saudi Arabia has committed numerous violations of international humanitarian law. As of June [2019], at least 7,292 civilians had been killed and 11,630 wounded, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), although the actual civilian casualty count is likely much higher. The majority of these casualties were a result of coalition airstrikes.
Since March 2015, Human Rights Watch has documented numerous unlawful attacks by the coalition that have hit homes, markets, hospitals, schools, and mosques. Some of these attacks may amount to war crimes. Saudi commanders face possible criminal liability for war crimes as a matter of command responsibility. Human Rights Watch documented five deadly attacks carried out by coalition naval forces on Yemeni fishing boats since 2018 that killed at least 47 Yemeni fishermen, including seven children, as well as the coalition’s detention of more than 100 others, some of whom say they were tortured in custody in Saudi Arabia."
The Saudis also are among the world’s most religiously intolerant and repressive states. At least North Korea has a handful of official churches. Riyadh makes no pretense of allowing any non-Muslims to worship. (The right of Shiites to practice their faith is restricted and any effort at activism is brutally repressed.)
The State Department made no attempt to hide the ugly reality: "Freedom of religion is not provided under the law. The government does not allow the public practice of any non-Muslim religion. The law criminalizes ‘anyone who challenges, either directly or indirectly, the religion or justice of the King or Crown Prince.’ The law criminalizes ‘the promotion of atheistic ideologies in any form,’ ‘any attempt to cast doubt on the fundamentals of Islam,’ publications that ‘contradict the provisions of Islamic law,’ and other acts including non-Islamic public worship, public display of non-Islamic religious symbols, conversion by a Muslim to another religion, and proselytizing by a non-Muslim."
The US Commission on International Religious Freedom was even tougher in its assessment: the KSA "continued to engage in other systematic, ongoing, and egregious violations of religious freedom. The government prohibits public practice of any religion other than Islam, and no houses of worship other than mosques are allowed in the kingdom. Non-Muslims who gather in private houses are subject to surveillance and Saudi security services may break up their private worship services. … the government’s tolerance remained low for those who chose not to accept its state-endorsed version of Hanbali Sunni Islam."
Shiite Muslims fared only marginally better than non-Muslims. Wrote USCIRF: "Shia Muslims in Saudi Arabia continue to face discrimination in education, employment, and the judiciary, and lack access to senior government and military positions. The building of Shia mosques is restricted outside majority-Shia Muslim areas in the Eastern Province, and Saudi authorities often prohibit use of the Shia Muslim call to prayer in these areas. Authorities arrest and imprison Shia Muslims for holding religious gatherings in private homes without permits and reading religious materials in husseiniyas (prayer halls). Saudi Arabia also restricts the establishment of Shia Muslim cemeteries. In 2019, government authorities conducted a mass execution of 37 Shia Muslim protesters, including some who were minors at the time of their alleged crimes."
Even genuine reforms are encircled with repression. MbS, as the crown prince is known, lifted some of the disabilities traditionally inflicted upon women. At the same time, however, he ordered the detention, torture, and imprisonment of activists who campaigned for just such a reform. Why this seeming contradiction, asked the International Service for Human Rights?
Simple: "Because of their activism. The women’s rights activists are being used to amplify the Saudi’s government message to its citizens: ‘Keep quiet and obey us. If you demand your rights, you will get punished.’ Several of the women’s rights activists were tortured and sexually assaulted. They told the Prosecution about their torture but it has so far failed to hold those responsible accountable."
Of course, Saudi Arabia is not the only brutal dictatorship seeking to win election to the Human Rights Council. As noted earlier, China is running for a seat in the same region. Cuba, Russia, and Uzbekistan are effectively unopposed in other regions. None of them should sit on a body that is supposed to help protect their citizens from the same regimes.
Yet Riyadh is a special case since so many Western nations shamelessly line up for Saudi oil and money. Even the US When Pompeo visits Riyadh he genuflects in spirit if not fact the moment he exits the plane.
The Kingdom apparently is buying its way back onto the HRC. That makes a powerful statement of injustice. Complained Saudi defense attorney Taha al-Hajji, who lives in Germany: "If Saudi Arabia succeeds, it will show the world that as long as a state has powerful friends and a limitless public relations budget, it can torture and execute its people, including children, with impunity."
There is still time for the UN to reject Saudi Arabia’s candidacy. After all, not only does it brutally mistreat its people. It also recklessly endangers the peace and routinely subsidizes tyranny. Which undermines the UN’s foundational values.
But set aside moral concerns for a moment. The Kingdom, especially under MbS, is a security threat. At least Washington should stop making excuses for the Saudi regime’s reckless criminality.
Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute. A former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is the author ofForeign Follies: America’s New Global Empire.
https://original.antiwar.com/doug-bando ... s-council/
Re: Saudi Arabia Should Be Punished By, Not Elected To, The UN Human Rights CouncilDoug Bandow
THE RIGHT
Independent and Principled? Behind the Cato Myth
The battle between the Cato Institute and the Koch brothers for control over the conservative think tank has further entrenched the risible notion that the group regularly defies the Republican party line.
By Mark Ames
https://www.thenation.com/article/archi ... cato-myth/
APRIL 20, 2012
It began as a fairly straightforward story about a shareholder lawsuit: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0312/73494.html The Koch brothers, Charles and David, who together own 50 percent of the libertarian Cato Institute, filed suit to recover a 25 percent stake held by longtime chairman William Niskanen, who died last autumn and whose widow has yet to relinquish those shares.
Cato’s shareholder’s agreement is “pretty clear,” according to legal writer Alison Frankel http://newsandinsight.thomsonreuters.co ... INS+%27ANV shareholders cannot sell or transfer their shares without first offering them back to the Institute and then to the remaining Cato shareholders. But there’s one legal ambiguity: Cato’s shareholder agreement
What started as a rather arcane legal dispute between the Koch brothers and their longtime lieutenant, Cato president Ed Crane, quickly transformed into a PR-manufactured Washington melodrama: the famed and revered (in some quarters) Cato Institute has turned against its Dr. Frankenstein, Charles Koch, attacking its maker with the full range of PR-weaponry that has served Cato effectively over these past four decades. The same pundits who only yesterday fell over themselves defending the billionaire Koch brothers as principled libertarians now denounce their benefactors as venal Republican Party warmongers out to crush the Cato Institute’s “nonpartisan” “independent” “scholarship” for the crime of being, yes, principled libertarians.doesn’t specifically address what happens when a shareholder dies.
It would all be good for a laugh, if the spin hadn’t succeeded in conning the media and confusing the public, even roping in some well-meaning progressives like Common Cause, http://www.commonblog.com/2012/03/14/ca ... mon-cause/ who defended Cato’s “independence.”
But in order for progressives and others to make an honest and practical assessment about the Cato Institute and its battle with the Kochs, we need to first set the record straight about some of the claims being spun.
Cato Claim #1: The Cato Institute was one of the earliest and most principled critics of the Bush Administration’s wars abroad and attacks on civil liberties at home (here and here http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ ... k_anchor_2).
Fact: The Cato Institute’s actual record during the Bush administration years was anything but principled and far from heroic.
John Yoo, author of the notorious “torture memo,” http://www.salon.com/2008/04/02/yoo_2/singleton/ served on the Cato editorial board http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=109714178 for Cato Supreme Court Review during the Bush presidency. At the same time, Yoo was writing the Bush administration’s legal justifications for waterboarding, Guantánamo, warrantless wiretapping and more. Yoo also contributed articles http://www.thenation.com/wp-content/upl ... 3/yoo1.pdf to Cato Supreme Court Review and a chapter to a Cato book titled The Rule of Law in the Wake of Clinton http://www.cato.org/store/books/rule-la ... -paperback criticizing President Clinton’s “imperial presidency.” http://delong.typepad.com/the_torture_m ... -john.html
The “Cato Policy Report” attacked progressive critics of Bush’s “War on Terror” as “Terrorism’s Fellow Travelers“ http://www.thenation.com/wp-content/upl ... orism1.pdf in its November/December 2001 issue. Former Vice President of Research Brink Lindsey wrote,
Another Cato executive, Ted Galen Carpenter, http://www.cato.org/people/ted-galen-carpenter former VP for defense and foreign policy studies, enthusiastically supported Bush’s “war on terror” and called on Bush to invade Pakistan. http://web.archive.org/web/200206012337 ... 28-02.htmlMost of the America haters flushed out by September 11 are huddled on the left wing of the conventional political spectrum.
The Cato Institute advised the 2002–04 Republican-dominated Congress to commence military strikes in Pakistan in its Cato Handbook for Congress http://www.thenation.com/wp-content/upl ... 108-51.pdf arguing,
Another Cato Institute executive, Roger Pilon, http://www.cato.org/people/roger-pilon vigorously supported Bush’s attacks on civil liberties. Pilon, Cato’s VP for legal affairs and founding director of the Cato Institute’s “Center for Constitutional Studies,” supported expanded FBI wiretapping in 2002 http://www.cato.org/new/05-02/05-30-02r-2.html and called on Congress http://www.cato.org/publications/commen ... ning-enemy to reauthorize the Patriot Act as late as 2008.Ultimately, Afghanistan becomes less important as a place to conduct military operations in the war on terrorism and more important as a place from which to launch military operations. And those operations should be directed across the border into neighboring Pakistan.
While it’s true that compared to other pro-Republican think-tanks, Cato did have periods when it was critical of Bush’s wars and attacks on civil liberties, those attacks weren’t consistent and showed every sign of being subordinated to the Cato Institute’s political demands. The most obvious example of this came in 2005, when Cato suddenly called a halt to its growing criticisms of Bush’s “war on terror” and fired one of its most ardent anti-interventionists (another resigned), sparking a backlash from some prominent non-Cato libertarians like antiwar.com’s Justin Raimondo, who wrote: http://www.antiwar.com/blog/2005/09/23/ ... uers-cato/
In 2006, with Bush’s presidency in tatters, Cato restarted its criticism in earnest.Now that the majority of Americans have turned against this war, the Cato bigwigs are lining up with the neoconservatives who want to ‘stay the course.’
Cato Claim #2: The Cato Institute is independent of the Republican Party http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-0 ... klein.html establishment and often as much in opposition to the GOP as to the Democrats.
Fact: In reality, the Cato Institute has been one of the leading Republican Party policy and propaganda factories since at least the early 1990s.
In 1995, the LA Times http://articles.latimes.com/print/1995- ... 1_ed-crane described the Cato Institute as the Republican revolution’s favorite hangout,
In 2005, a Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dy ... ge=printer article observed,the hottest think tank in town. On any given day, House Majority Whip Tom DeLay of Texas might be visiting for lunch. Or Cato staffers might be plotting strategy with House Majority Leader [deleted] Armey, another Texan, and his staff. Cato’s constitutional law briefs cross the desks of conservative Supreme Court justices and their clerks.
Among Cato figures in the Bush administration named in the article: Andrew Biggs, Derrick Max, Charles Blahous, Leanne Abdnor and Carolyn Weaver, who helped launch Cato’s war on Social Security back in 1979.Nowadays, Cato alumni are everywhere in the Bush administration.
President Bush’s high-priority Social Security privatization plan was all thanks to lobbying by Cato president Ed Crane and Cato executive José Piñera, a former Pinochet official who heads Cato’s Social Security privatization project.
Cato Claim #3: The Kochs are staging an unprecedented GOP takeover of the Cato Institute by staffing it with Republican Party operatives and backers (here http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ ... ingle.html and here http://volokh.com/2012/03/03/koch-v-cat ... from-cato/).
Fact: The Cato Institute’s board of directors and staff have always been stacked with Republican Party supporters, donors and operatives.
Rupert Murdoch was a Cato board member, serving at least through the early 2000s. http://web.archive.org/web/200112142159 ... ctors.html When Murdoch first joined Cato’s board, Ed Crane hailed http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/cpr-19n6-10.html the News Corp chief as
So was Murdoch’s longtime US partner, John C. Malone of Liberty Media, whom Al Gore once reportedly called http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/ ... /index.htm the Darth Vader of cable. Malone is a major GOP donor http://littlesis.org/person/4684/John_C ... recipients and the largest private landowner http://www.forbes.com/sites/monteburke/ ... -s-speaks/ in the United States.a strong advocate of the free market and a committed civil libertarian.
Stephen Moore, longtime [deleted] Armey sidekick and author of the 2004 hagiography Bullish on Bush: How George W. Bush’s Ownership Society Will Make America Stronger, http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml was director of Cato’s Fiscal Policy Studies and remains a senior fellow.
Other major GOP sponsors on the Cato board before the Kochs’ recent “coup” include K. Tucker Andersen, http://littlesis.org/person/34904/K_Tucker_Andersen Howard Rich http://www.goupstate.com/article/200809 ... l&tc=pgall (funder of the term-limits movement) and Ethelmae C. Humphreys, http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/09/koc ... donor-club who along with her son has
Republican operatives in Cato are numerous and include former Phil Gramm staffer and Bush HUD deputy assistant secretary Mark Calabria, http://www.cato.org/people/mark-calabria director of Cato’s Financial Regulation Studies; and former Senate Republican Policy Committee http://www.legistorm.com/person/Michael ... 53617.html analyst Michael Cannon, director of Cato’s health policy studies and adviser to Florida Republican Governor Rick Scott. Cannon’s “independent scholarship” includes his famous November 2008 Cato blog post: Blocking Obama’s Health Plan Is Key to the GOP’s Survival. http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/blocking ... -survival/ That’s before Obama took office.doled out hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican candidates.
Cato Claim #4: Cato’s employees are “independent” http://www.commonblog.com/2012/03/09/ko ... institute/ scholars free from the corrupting influence of “special interests.” http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/06/us/ca ... wanted=all
Fact: The Cato Institute is one of the leading manufacturers of toxic corporate propaganda, cynically undermining science and scholarship to serve the interests of tobacco companies, oil and gas, chemicals, health insurance, financial industry and other Cato donors.
Cato chairman Robert Levy, who today accuses the Kochs of turning Cato into “a mouthpiece of special interests,” once faithfully served the tobacco industry as a leading tobacco-death denialist. In his article, “Lies, Damn Lies & 400,000 Smoking-Related Deaths”, http://www.thenation.com/wp-content/upl ... _lies1.pdf Levy claimed,
andchildren do not die of tobacco-related diseases
(In fact, tobacco use kills more than 5 million people a year worldwide.)there is no credible evidence that 400,000 deaths per year—or any number remotely close to 400,000—are caused by tobacco.
Greenpeace labeled http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/campai ... institute/ Cato a “Koch Industries climate denial front group” that is
Among Cato’s anti-science propagandists: Patrick J. Michaels, http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2012/01/1 ... ient-data/ called “a serial deleter of inconvenient facts” by ThinkProgress and Steven Milloy, http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?ti ... _J._Milloy a onetime Cato adjunct scholar on the payroll of Philip Morris, oil companies and others.focused on disputing the science behind global warming and questioning the rationale for taking action.
Philip Morris listed Cato VP David Boaz as one of its “National Allies" http://legacy.library.ucsf.edu/tid/iqg76c00/pdf in a 2000 memo.
In 2001, a British-American Tobacco executive sent a thank-you letter to Levy and the Cato Institute, noting:
So there you have it: a brief look at the Cato Institute’s factual record, which reads nothing at all like the heroic fairytales spun by Cato and its allies about its principled opposition to the Bush Administration’s imperial presidency, or its opposition to the Republican Party, or whatever else Cato’s minions tell us to win our hearts rather than our minds.I was also pleased to learn after our meeting that our subsidiary company, Brown & Williamson, provided the Cato Institute with funding in 2000.
In fact, it’s hard to know what, if anything, to believe about Cato—PR and spin are so ingrained in their thinking and their breathing, one wonders if Cato’s own flaks can tell the difference themselves between reality and spin. Lately, they seem to have a hard time keeping track of their numerous and rather careless flip-flops, particularly when it comes to how they characterize their longtime benefactors, the brothers Koch. Most of the same libertarians who attacked the Kochs as unprincipled GOP usurpers of the Cato Institute only yesterday defended the same Kochs as principled patrons of purist libertarian scholarship.
Last October, David Boaz, Ed Crane’s number two in Cato, defended the Koch brothers as principled libertarians http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/snidely- ... -carolina/ under attack for
Five months later, Boaz darkly warned http://www.politico.com/arena/perm/Davi ... 1CFA4.html that the very same Koch brothers posedopposing a president who supports fiscal irresponsibility, the Patriot Act, the war on drugs, and secret wars.
Slate’s David Weigel—a libertarian graduate of the Kochs’ Reason magazine and the Kochs’ Institute for Humane Studies—defended the Kochs last year during the Wisconsin protests against Scott Walker:direct threat to the independence, nonpartisanship and libertarianism of the Cato Institute.
Weigel asked.How did the Kochs become the villains of Madison?
And last May, during the uproar over a donation by the Charles G. Koch Foundation—with strings attached—to Florida State University’s economics department, Weigel defended the billionaires by way of sneering: http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2011/ ... rsity.htmlThey have, for decades, bankrolled libertarian think tanks and programs, and they help put on conferences where conservative ideas are spread. Among the ideas they end up spreading are drug legalization and opposition to the Patriot Act.
Skip a few months, and the Koch brothers circa 2012 http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ ... ingle.html are suddenly, implausibly, the very antithesis of the Koch brothers circa-2011:The Koch pushback continues, as non-controversial donation after non-controversial donation is blown up into a controversy—a byproduct of the brothers’ new fame.
Now, non-controversial donations are suddenly controversial—without explanation. Weigel never explains to his readers why owning 75 percent instead of 50 percent of Cato will turn the Koch brothers from last summer’s principled libertarians into this spring’s evil GOP neocons. His substitution of one unsupported message with its antithesis is confusing—to put it as kindly as possible.If the Kochs win control of his shares, and the Koch-skeptics bolt, a much-less-credible Cato Institute will never be so rude to the Republican Party.
Julian Sanchez is another Cato flip-flopper. Shortly after Jane Mayer’s article on the Kochs appeared in The New Yorker, Sanchez rushed to their defense: http://www.juliansanchez.com/2010/09/02/koch-habits/
That was autumn 2010, when the Kochs were still dreamy libertarians. A year and a half later, Sanchez is full of righteous indignation http://www.juliansanchez.com/2012/03/05 ... on-letter/ against those same, but now-unprincipled, Koch brothers:as someone who’s directly or indirectly benefited from Koch largess for most of my adult life—the Koch Fellowship as a student; gigs at Koch-funded Reason and Cato—I’d expect folks to be justly skeptical of anything favorable I might write about them. …The idea that they’ve poured a hundred million and change into funding libertarian think tanks, advocacy groups, and educational programs over the years in order to line their own pockets or boost the corporate bottom line seems kind of bizarre.
Without explaining his flip-flop, it’s hard to take Sanchez’s “presignation” announcement as little more than a PR stunt.I hereby tender my pre-resignation from Cato, effective if and when the Kochs take command. I’ll be sad to go, if it comes to that, but sadder to see a proud institution lose its autonomy.
The more you get to know the real Cato Institute, the more you see a rank, powerful right-wing corporate front group deeply woven into the Republican Party machinery, as unprincipled and cynical in its relentless service of the 1 percent’s interests as it is hostile to the progressive cause.
Ask Naomi Klein. In 2008, the Cato Institute unleashed a full-frontal PR attack on Klein in the form of a twenty-page brochure denouncing and belittling The Shock Doctrine, which offended Cato because it took on two of the think tank’s golden calves: Milton Friedman and Augusto Pinochet, whose onetime labor minister, José Piñera, has been working for Cato since 1995 trying to strip Americans of their Social Security. The Cato attack against The Shock Doctrine was petty, bizarre and remarkably shallow even by PR hack standards—at one point, the Cato brochure attacked Klein for hosting blurbs by fiction writers on the jacket of The Shock Doctrine and implied that those blurbs were evidence that the book was itself fiction.
Klein was left understandably bewildered: http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2008 ... se-attacks
The greatest challenge in responding to the Cato paper is the scope of its dishonesty,
she wrote.
More recently, since the killing of Trayvon Martin, the Cato Institute has been one of the staunchest defenders http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/stand-yo ... -evidence/ of the “Stand Your Ground” http://www.cato.org/search_results.php? ... ds=summary laws.
Remember that when you see Cato flaks squaring off against their onetime sugar daddies, the Koch brothers. Until we better understand what they do, and what sort of people they are, and how they’ve actually operated according to the record, rather than responding to what they’re telling us without questioning it, the only sure thing about this Cato-Koch struggle is that whoever comes out on top, Ed Crane or Charles Koch, the rest of us are guaranteed to be the big losers.
Late note: Charles Murray, whose “racial eugenics” http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/i ... m?page=0,1 book The Bell Curve argued that blacks and Latinos are genetically inferior to whites, has announced his support http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/29 ... les-murray for the Cato Institute. Murray, whose racist views influenced John Derbyshire, http://old.nationalreview.com/derbyshir ... 150836.asp disclosed,
Murray has alsoEd Crane is a close personal friend.
enjoyed a friendly acquaintance
with both Koch brothers
_______________for more than twenty years.
Mark Ames is the founding editor of the eXile and author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion: From Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine. He is an editor at The eXiled Online and a regular guest on MSNBC’s The Dylan Ratigan Show.
Re: Saudi Arabia Should Be Punished By, Not Elected To, The UN Human Rights CouncilDoug Bandow
While the Agame defends the Saudi savages, the people languish in ugum's gulags.
Re: Saudi Arabia Should Be Punished By, Not Elected To, The UN Human Rights CouncilDoug Bandow
While the Agame fess@m zombie defends the savages, the Real Eritreans languish in Agame gulags
Re: Saudi Arabia Should Be Punished By, Not Elected To, The UN Human Rights CouncilDoug Bandow
Wait. The Agames released some prisoners after decades of incarceration
https://missionsbox.org/press-releases/ ... n-eritrea/Christian Prisoners Released in Eritrea
OCTOBER 11, 2020
LONDON, ENGLAND — There are believed to be around 500 Christian prisoners of faith in Eritrea, many imprisoned indefinitely under appalling conditions. However recent reports indicate a growing number of them have been released.
A trusted contact of Release International says the government has set free 27 prisoners, most of whom have been behind bars for more than ten years. They have yet to be named.
There are indications that other Christian prisoners at the jail have been informed they could soon be set free.
This follows the release of 22 Methodist prisoners in July from another prison, mainly women and children.
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There are reports from Eritrea that the government has released 27 Christian prisoners of faith, and hopes are rising that more could follow, according to Release International.
Another source has reported that a total of 69 Christians have now been released from prison.
Release International’s Andrew Boyd says while they welcome this development help will be need to rehabilitate those who have become institutionalized after so many years of captivity in terrible conditions.
Many of them have been jailed for ten years or more. They’re jailed indefinitely for nothing other than doing what we take for granted – meeting to pray or have fellowship or read their Bibles. For those reasons they’ve been jailed. They’ve been institutionalized, they will need help and they will need support.
Boyd concluded by highlighting the importance of campaign for the release of the remaining Christians still being held.
This is an encouraging sign. We want to see them all set free and more than that there is no reason why faith should be banned on any nation on earth. There’s now reason why faith and the act of Christian faith should be banned in Eritrea so we want to see full religious freedom restored in that nation and we would call on the Eritrean government to trust its citizens to give them the freedom that is there’s by right.
Read more news Eritrea and Christian Persecution