Wendy Kristianasen
Le Monde Diplomatique

Indonesia’s disasters – October’s tsunami and eruption, the killing of suspected terrorists in Sumatra – get more media attention than its democratic elections. Yet these marked the direct re-election of the president last year and a cautious step away from Islamising agendas, re-affirming the country’s historic balance of secularism with Islam.

The compromise almost didn’t happen. Just seven words in the preamble to the Indonesian constitution would have made Indonesia an Islamic state: “Muslims are bound to follow Islamic law”. They were withdrawn at the very last moment, on 18 August 1945. And Indonesia became the Pancasila state, based on five principles – belief in one God, humanitarianism, national unity, representative democracy, social justice – a historic compromise between secularism and Islam.

“Indonesia is the seat of a moderate, smiling Islam,” said Shafi Anwar, director of the International Centre for Islam and Pluralism. “But with 9/11, the spread of radicalisation and conservatism, and the 2002 Bali bombings, suddenly we were frowned upon. My purpose is to convey the message that democracy is compatible with Islam.”

The country’s democratic opening began in 1998 after two long periods of authoritarian rule, first under Sukarno, the founding president (1945-1967) who juggled the three great forces: nationalism, Islam and communism (Indonesia then had the world’s third biggest communist party). Then under Suharto (1967-1998) who seized power on the pretext of a communist threat. Half a million or more died (1) and the country remains traumatised by these events.

Indonesia is now the world’s third biggest democracy. “That’s something the West always overlooks,” said Anies Baswedan, rector of Jakarta’s Paramadina University. “They always refer to us as the world’s biggest Muslim population. We say we are a democracy full stop. We have a free press, a dynamic political process, a vibrant civil society. Yes, there is corruption, there always was, but now there’s transparency and it gets reported. The economy is resilient in this current world crisis, compared with that of our neighbours and with what is was 10 years ago.” The Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s hit Indonesia hard. “And yes, we have our Islamists and fundamentalists, but they have mostly been absorbed into the political process.”

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Sherwood Ross
Gloabal Research

Police refuse to search known CIA rendition plane
at Shannon.

[RE: Photo: The arrival of CIA torture rendition plane N475LC at Shannon at about 1.20 am this morning was witnessed by Edward Horgan, Conor Cregan, and Garda Pat Harte and Garda Karen Fitzgerald, who were watching Cregan and Horgan at the time. Immediate requests for this plane to be searched were immediatly refused. (IM)]

If the CIA routinely lies to the American people, maybe that's because its got so much to lie about, like killing millions of innocent human beings around the world. As far back as December, 1968, the CIA's own Covert Operations Study Group gave a secret report to president-elect Richard Nixon that conceded, “The impression of many Americans, especially in the intellectual community and among the youth, that the United States is engaging in 'dirty tricks' tends to alienate them from their government.” According to Time Weiner's book “Legacy of Ashes” (Anchor), the report went on to say,

“Our credibility and our effectiveness in this role is necessarily damaged to the extent that it becomes known that we are secretly intervening in what may be (or appear to be) the internal affairs of others.”

President Bill Clinton, who first gave the CIA the green light to launch its illegal “renditions” (kidnappings,) told the nation on the occasion of the Agency's 50th birthday (1997), “By necessity, the American people will never know the full story of your courage.” (Courage? For 22 agents to grab one Muslim cleric off the streets of Milan, Italy, and ship him abroad to be tortured?) Anyway, presidents who authorize criminal acts by the CIA, as virtually all have done since its founding in 1947, don't want the truth out, either, lest knowledge of those “dirty tricks” sicken and revolt the American people when they find out what crimes the Agency is perpetrating with their tax dollars. As former CIA agent Philip Agee once put it,

“The CIA is the President's secret army.” This point was underscored at a luncheon by President Gerald Ford himself, which he hosted for New York Times top editors on Jan. 16, 1975. According to Weiner, Ford told them the reputation of every President since Truman could be ruined if the secrets became public. Asked by an editor, like what? Ford replied “like assassinations.”

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Stephen Lendman

More than ever today, Muslims are public enemy number one. Post-9/11, they've been ruthlessly vilified and persecuted for their faith, ethnicity, prominence and activism. As a result, innocent men and women have been spuriously called terrorists, or charged with conspiracy to provide them material support.

No wonder as an earlier article explained. They've been unfairly portrayed as culturally inferior, dirty, lecherous, untrustworthy, religiously fanatical, violent, gun-toting terrorists. As a result, hundreds have been wrongfully arrested, charged, convicted and imprisoned, guilty only of being Muslims in America at the wrong time. Their treatment represents a clear indictment of US injustice, targeting innocent victims for political advantage.

A September 20 Congressional Research Service (CRS) report [.pdf] titled, "American Jihadist Terrorism: Combating a Complex Threat" explains more about America's scheme, naming names, "plots," and dates to highlight the "threat." It begins saying:

"Between May 2009 and August 2010 (alone), arrests were made for 19 'homegrown,' jihadist-inspired terrorist plots by American citizens or legal permanent residents of the United States." They were Muslims "susceptible to ideologies supporting a violent form of jihad, a term willfully misused. CRS suggests that jihad = violence, "jihadists,"....illegally supporting, plotting, or directly engaging in violent terrorist activity."

Post-9/11, CRS cited 40 homegrown "jihadist" plots, including attacks on America, likely reflecting Al Qaeda directed schemes, it said.

During America's "war on terror," terms like Al Qaeda, outside enemies, jihadists, and Islamic terrorists are interchangeably used to incite fear. Recruited by the CIA and Pakistan's ISI, Al Qaeda or Mujahideen were defenders of Muslim lands against the 1980s Soviet Afghan occupation. At the time, Reagan officials called them a "necessary response" against imperial communism.

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Bill Van Auken
WSWS

24 is an American television series starring Kiefer
Sutherland as federal agent Jack Bauer. Bauer a
highly proficient agent, but one taking an "ends
justify the means" approach regardless of the per-
ceived morality of some of his actions. WikiPedia

'Enhanced interrogation techniques.' -This phrase represented virtually a literal translation of the term used by the German Gestapo 60 years earlier, Verschärfte Vernehmung, also as a bureaucratic euphemism for torture. The US media fell dutifully into line with this attempt to deny torture with a terminological sleight of hand. This complicity in and indifference towards the crime of torture pervades all sections of the US ruling elite, its government, its political parties and its media.

In a memoir to be released next week, former US President George W. Bush boasts of having personally given the order to the CIA to employ the torture method of waterboarding.

The book, titled Decision Points, includes Bush’s recounting that when asked by the CIA whether it could subject Khalid Sheik Mohammed, an alleged leader in the September 11, 2001, terror plot, he gave the reply, “Damn right.” The former president added that he would do the same thing again to “save lives.”

The passage constitutes an even more explicit admission than Bush’s flip statement in a speech to an audience of businessmen in Grand Rapids, Michigan, last June. The ex-president then declared: “Yeah, we waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. I’d do it again to save lives.”

The claim that suspects were being tortured in order to “save lives” is entirely self-serving. In reality, Mohammed and others were subjected to waterboarding and other torture methods by interrogators who were told to come up with evidence linking the 9/11 attacks to Iraq in order to provide a pretext for the war that the administration was determined to launch in pursuit of US strategic interests.

In a country governed by laws, international treaties and democratic principles, such admissions would provoke a public outcry, an intense political debate and the arrest and prosecution of George W. Bush.

In the United States of America of 2010, however, the former president’s bragging that he ordered his subordinates to carry out torture has been greeted within the political establishment and the corporate media with an audible yawn of indifference.

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