Mission & Justice

Ray Bonner; 12/9/08 - London-based writes about international security for The New York Times.

The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on America’s Ideals; Jane Mayer; Scribe

 America’s reputation and image in the world, as a paradigm of justice and the rule of law, has been seriously tarnished by rendition and torture, indefinite detentions, Guantanamo and domestic spying: in short, by an erosion of civil liberties that has no precedent in US history. During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus; during World War II, president Franklin Roosevelt interned 100,000 Japanese-Americans. But the Bush administration has taken those aberrations and turned them into policy, going much further. From the legion of books so far about the so-called war on terror, we know what has happened. What we haven’t known is how it came about.

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Alex Sehmer; 11/9/08

More than 50 per cent of people reject the official belief that the attacks on the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001, were carried out by al-Qaeda, a new survey has revealed. The findings, released late on Wednesday, suggest that the official version of events - that the attacks, which killed more than 2,900 people and sparked the US so-called “war on terror”, were carried out by al-Qaeda - is still a long way from being generally accepted. Only 46 per cent of respondents named al-Qaeda, while 25 per cent said they did not know and 15 per cent said the US government was behind the attacks. Steven Kull, the director of WorldPublicOpinion.org, which carried out the survey, told Al Jazeera: “Broadly what this says is that there is a lack of confidence with the United States and so people mistrust the narrative the US puts forward.”

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9/9/08

The Church of Scientology is to be tried for fraud, and seven of its members for illegally prescribing drugs, legal sources said yesterday, in the latest clash between French officials and the controversial religion. The charges stem from a case taken by a woman who said she paid the church more than €20,000 ($34,600) for lessons, books, drugs and an “electrometre,” a device which the church says can measure a person’s mental state. She allegedly made the payments after being approached in a Paris street in 1998. The case is also being taken by another plaintiff and by France’s professional pharmaceutical association.

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9/9/08

Al Jazeera speaks to Howard Zinn, the author, American historian, social critic and activist, about how the Iraq war damaged attitudes towards the US and why the US “empire” is close to collapse.
Question: Where is the United States heading in terms of world power and influence?
HZ: America has been heading - for some time, and is heading right now - toward less and less world power, less and less influence Obviously, since the war in Iraq, the rest of the world has fallen away from the United States, and if American foreign policy continues in the way it has been - that is aggressive and violent and uncaring about the feelings and thoughts of other people - then the influence of the United States is going to decline more and more.

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William Birnbauer; 7/8/08

Tobacco companies have covered up for 40 years the fact that cigarette smoke contains a dangerous radioactive substance that exposes heavy smokers to the radiation equivalent of having 300 chest X-rays a year. Internal company records reveal that cigarette manufacturers knew that tobacco contained polonium-210 but avoided drawing public attention to the fact for fear of “waking a sleeping giant”. Polonium-210 emits alpha radiation estimated to cause about 11,700 lung cancer deaths each year worldwide. Russian dissident and writer Alexander Litvinenko died after being poisoned with polonium-210 in 2006. The polonium-210 in tobacco plants comes from high-phosphate fertilisers used on crops. The fertiliser is manufactured from rocks that contain radioisotopes such as polonium-210 (PO-210).

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Elisabeth Wynhausen; 6/9/08
The suit was a beautiful dove-grey. The cropped jacket had a rounded collar and three-quarter sleeves. Once the trousers were taken up, the whole thing would fit like a glove. It cost a fraction less than $600. If it wasn’t the most expensive outfit I’d bought, it was close. But I wanted something special to wear to the launch of my book, Dirt Cheap: Life at the Wrong End of the Job Market, in 2005. I started wondering only the other month if the dove-grey Perri Cutten suit I had worn to launch a book about exploited low-paid workers had been made in Australia by an even lower-paid one. By then I’d decided to find out about recent additions to my wardrobe. Perhaps knowing more about the garments would help defuse the minefield of ethical dilemmas shopping has become. Now the most desultory shopping expedition can involve a debate with oneself about the ecological footprint of a cotton T-shirt, the dyes used in the treatment of leather or the working conditions in garment factories in the Pearl River Delta in China.

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6/9/08

The problem of counterfeit drugs being sold or distributed in developing countries has been around for some time. Some disreputable manufacturers specialise in the dangerous practice of producing spurious drugs which more often than not cause serious harm to those patients who take them. Some of the counterfeit drugs contain a small amount, but not enough, of the required medication, thereby building up a resistance to the genuine drug and its efficacy. It then becomes very difficult for doctors to treat such patients, especially if the drug is of specialist nature and no similar type is made. Other types of counterfeit drugs contain no medicines at all and may contain any substance that gives the appearance of the correct medicine, but will not perform any function towards benefiting the patient. Although Asian countries are often accused of these malpractices, it is not confined to the East, as there are drug manufacturers in the West that also produce counterfeit drugs, or have been known to ship expired drugs, once re-dated, or drugs that are banned in their own countries.

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Brendan Nicholson & Belinda Tasker; 5/9/08

Australia is the world’s 13th biggest spender on defence, according to a survey of international spending on wars and weapons. The survey carried out for Jane’s Industry Quarterly said Australia’s defence spending had jumped by about 56% in the past seven years to about $24 billion, putting it ahead of some European Union countries. Secretary for Defence Procurement Greg Combet said yesterday the Government decided how much to spend depending on what the Australian Defence Force needed to protect the country.

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Duncan Green; 3/9/08

“Massive poverty and obscene inequality are such terrible scourges of our times — times in which the world boasts breathtaking advances in science, technology, industry and, wealth accumulation — that they have to rank alongside slavery and apartheid as social evils.” Nelson Mandela, London, 2005 From cradle to grave, a person’s life chances are dominated by the extraordinary inequality that characterises the modern world. A girl born in Australia will almost certainly live to old age (provided she is not indigenous). If she is born in Sierra Leone, however, she has a one in four chance of dying before her fifth birthday. An Australian girl can expect to go to school and university and to be healthy and cared for through to old age. In Sierra Leone only two in three girls start school and of those many drop out, deterred by the “user fees” or by the low standards of education, or forced to stay home to care for brothers and sisters or to find work to feed the family. Only one in four women are able to read and write. University is an impossible dream.

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Phillip Adams, 30/8/08

In Africa, it has been a death sentence to millions. Consider, for the next 800 words, the condom, still condemned by the Vatican as a tool of the devil. My attempts to persuade the visiting Pope to change his mind clearly failed - though the thousands of trouser-less men who marched on St Mary’s wearing luminous condoms must stand as one of this country’s most memorable demos. It was such a pretty sight! All those fluorescent frangers! Accompanied by womenfolk brandishing the glowing gadgets on erect forefingers, my hastily organised effort resembled a procession of pilgrims carrying candles. But the Pope and Cardinal Pell refused to see the light.

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