Eastern CPEC route unfeasible -report

Eastern CPEC route unfeasible -report

By Shahbaz Rana    July 26, 2015

By preferring a route that passes through Punjab and Sindh rather than Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan, the federal government is artificially inflating the cost of the China-Pakistan economic corridor, to the point where it may become economically unviable, claims a report studying the matter issued by the Balochistan government.

The report, titled “China Pakistan Economic Corridor: The Route Controversy”, addresses what Quetta feels is Islamabad’s lack of consistency on the matter, and its failure to take into account the needs and desires of all federating units of the country. The matter could get politically inconvenient for the federal government, since Balochistan Chief Minister Abdul Malik Baloch’s National Party is an ally of the ruling Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz.

However, Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal claims that the report is one-sided and did not take into account the views of what he feels is the main stakeholder in CPEC: the federal government.

The report was prepared by the chief minister’s Policy Reform Unit, headed by economist Kaiser Bengali. It analyses the viability of the three CPEC routes based on three parameters: population density, total area under cultivation along the routes and total production of four major crops. These parameters become the base for determining the cost of land acquisition and displacement of population, the socio economic benefits and the environmental impact.

Read: Game changer: Army chief vows to turn economic corridor into reality

Pakistan has identified three routes for Chinese cargo: the eastern alignment (passing mainly through central Punjab and Sindh), the central route (passing partly through Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, and hitherto unconnected parts of Punjab and Sindh) and the western alignment (passing through the relatively underdeveloped areas of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan).

The provincial government claimed that “despite denials the route has been changed to pass through central Punjab”, Islamabad is primarily focusing on the eastern corridor.

The districts along the preferred eastern route are the most densely populated, having large swathes of land under cultivation and is the main source of production of four major crops, according to the report. All these factors will increase the construction cost. By comparison, the western route is thinly populated and the land is mainly barren.

The comparison between the three routes implies that the eastern route is economically unviable, claims the report.

By selecting the eastern route, the government is trading off today’s security risks with provincial discord and political instability in the future, the report stated.

However, Iqbal said that the central route was the shortest one. “The eastern alignment part of Peshawar-Karachi motorway serves the major markets, industrial areas and most populated centres of the country,” said Iqbal. He said the CPEC concept is not to create a “container-in, container-out” economy but rather help make the country a regional manufacturing hub.

Read: China-Pakistan Economic Corridor: Lines of development – not lines of divide

The report argues that the pre-existing sections are likely to save time and cost are not tenable, as most sections will have to be widened and re-laid to cater to the volume and load of the traffic.

CPEC trail

The report finds the traces of the CPEC in the mid-2000s when the Planning Commission made a presentation to the then-president Pervez Musharraf and prime minister Shaukat Aziz. It was then called the “Trade, Energy, Transport and Industrial Corridor”. The Musharraf Administration had identified the central route for creating surface transport connectivity between Gwadar and Kashgar in China.

The report also challenged the government’s claim that it will build all the three alignments. “The resources to build all three routes are not available and China would certainly not allocate resources to pander to political disagreements in Pakistan,” it added.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 26^th, 2015.

http://tribune.com.pk/story/926582/economic-corridor-eastern-cpec-route-unfeasible/

Roof of the World rebels against Pakistan, Aljazeera

Roof of the World rebels against Pakistan, Aljazeera

Gilgit, Pakistan - Escalating protests in villages perched on the "Roof of the World" - a mountainous territory disputed between Pakistan and India - have exposed deep animosity towards Islamabad.

After 67 years of control by the Pakistani government, many local people want the country to either accept them as a new province - or grant them independence.

Pakistan's authorities have responded to the unrest - sparked by poor public services and anger at corruption - with a brutal crackdown.

"The problem is in the system - it's a colonial system. The laws come from Islamabad and we have to live under them," Nazir Ahmed, a local lawyer who helped organise the protests, told Al Jazeera.

'Massive corruption'

The two hundred thousand residents of Ghizer district now have an ambulance, a crucial service in a region where the nearest hospital is a precarious five hour drive along narrow roads hugging cliff faces thousands of feet above fast-moving rivers.

Two weeks ago, hundreds of residents converged to besiege government offices, demanding that officials provide an ambulance and basic medical facilities.

Ghizer has no surgeon or gynaecologist, and just one female health worker.

Similar unrest has erupted in villages across Gilgit-Baltistan in protests that began with calls for an end to government corruption.

"There is massive corruption, and no one here is answerable," said Ahmed, who adds that the struggle for better medical facilities is just the beginning.

The protests have been met with a brutal crackdown by authorities, who are using special courts to prosecute 'terrorists' and who have jailed hundreds on charges of sedition and 'terrorism'.

In April, hundreds of thousands of protesters held an 11-day sit-in in Gilgit's legislative assembly after Islamabad threatened to end a wheat subsidy established in 1972 to match a similar package in India-administered Kashmir.

The protesters won back the subsidy but their other demands, including self-rule for Gilgit-Baltistan, have yet to be met.

"Pakistan is seeking that the United Nations solve the Kashmir dispute, and is unwilling to officially integrate Gilgit-Baltistan into its political system," said Ahsan Ali, the head of the Gilgit-Baltistan High Court Bar Association, and an expert on constitutional law in the region.

Disputed territory

The Roof of the World is part of a pre-1947 Kashmir, claimed by Pakistan and India and home to the only land route to the Indian Ocean for Pakistan's closest ally in the region, China.

The territory is home to 12 of the 30 highest peaks on Earth, and its massive glaciers are the source of water for most of the Indian subcontinent.

Since independence from Britain in 1947, Pakistan and India have fought several wars over the status of Gilgit-Baltistan - part of the Pakistan-administered Kashmir - and the rest of disputed Kashmir to its east.

According to binding resolutions from the UN, a plebiscite is to be held to determine whether the region is to join India or Pakistan, or become an independent state, but this has yet to happen, leaving millions in legal limbo.

Pakistan has not constitutionally integrated Gilgit-Baltistan into its political system because it believes the area could one day prejudice the plebiscite vote to settle the Kashmir dispute with India.

This legislative assembly...we feel is powerless. All the power is in Islamabad. Until this [Advisory] Council in Islamabad, which has all the power... until their power is transferred to the [Legislative] Assembly here, we feel the problems here cannot be solved. Afrasiab Khan Khattak, Senator and head of Senatorial committee on Human Rights

No taxation without representation

Ghizer district is an unlikely place to find such animosity towards Islamabad as it is the home to 12,000 soldiers in an elite division that specialises in high-altitude warfare.

Nearly 500 have died fighting India since 1999, manning border posts in the highest battlefield on earth.

Islamabad has also spent billions of dollars building infrastructure in the area like the Karakoram highway, which links remote mountain communities and provides a reliable land route to China.

Yet locals receive no revenue from customs duties with China, or the sales tax collected by Pakistan, which generates up to $550m in annual revenue and is destined entirely for Islamabad.

The Awami Action Committee (AAC), a coalition of 23 religious and political groups behind the current protests, is demanding that there be "no taxation without representation".

Stretching 28,000 square miles, and home to 2 million people, the region is not even mentioned in Pakistan's constitution, a fact that irks young activists like Sajjid Rana, 19, who says textbooks only refer to it as "the land of glaciers".

If Gilgit-Baltistan gained self-rule, Rana would like to see it become a crossroads for trade between India and Central Asia, as it was for thousands of years before its western and eastern borders were closed under Islamabad's foreign policy priorities.

"A lot of people care about the region, but no one cares about the people," Shabbir Hakimi, a Shia-cleric who helped mobilise thousands for the April sit-ins, told Al Jazeera.

"As Muslims, we care about Kashmir, but give us our rights, make us like Kashmir, or let us go altogether."

Unlike the rest of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, which has its own constitution, democratically-elected legislature, and independent judiciary, Gilgit-Baltistan was long governed by a federally-appointed civil servant who could impose collective punishment on local tribes.

In 2009, Islamabad granted the territory largely symbolic autonomy under a Legislative Assembly whose members are elected, and an Advisory Council, most of whose members are selected by the federal government.

"Islamabad is basically running the show," said Nawaz Khan Naji, an elected member of the 33-seat Legislative Assembly. "We have stacks of resolutions we have passed that have not been acted upon."

In 2012, the Legislative Assembly passed a resolution asking for Gilgit-Baltistan to be turned into a province, but the Advisory Council, headed by the Pakistani prime minister, ignored it.

Likewise key powers over trade, tourism and natural resources remain effectively under Islamabad's control and judges in Gilgit-Baltistan are appointed and dismissed at the discretion of a federal minister.

"We call it a 21st-century colony," said Israr-ud-Din Israr of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan.

"All powers are with Pakistan, and we cannot make laws ourselves, for our own interests."

"This legislative assembly...we feel is powerless," Senator Afrasiab Khan Khattak, who heads a Senatorial committee on Human Rights, told reporters after a fact-finding trip to Gilgit-Baltistan in April.  

"All the power is in Islamabad.  Until this [Advisory] Council in Islamabad, which has all the power... until their power is transferred to the [Legislative] Assembly here, we feel the problems here cannot be solved."

Pakistani Taliban claim attack on foreigners in Gilgit-Baltistan

Harsh crackdown

The narrow roads throughout Gilgit-Baltistan are littered with checkpoints, manned by paramilitary soldiers and police who question all travellers.

In April, police climbed the cliffs overlooking the narrow highway near the village of Sikandarabad to drop giant boulders on to the roadway in an unsuccessful attempt to keep protesters from reaching the Gilgit sit in.

But blocked roads are not the only obstacle protesters face, with special courts set up to prosecute 'terrorism' suspects now being used against political activists.

Picturesque Ghizer river, from which the valley and district take their names. [Umar Farooq / Al Jazeera]

More than 250 people have been tried in the anti-terrorism courts, alongside the 300 or so political cases that have been held in conventional criminal courts.

Iftikhar Hussain, 34, has been in a Gilgit city prison awaiting trial in an anti-terrorism court for nearly three years, even though the special courts are required to sentence convicts within 90 days of an arrest.

He is one of 36 men charged with 'terrorism' and 'sedition' stemming from a 2011 protest by locals demanding compensation promised to them by Pakistan after a massive landslide had destroyed their villages.

When police trying to clear the protest killed two men, riots erupted across the entire region and locals destroyed more than 17 government buildings including police stations.

Hussain, who says he was not involved in the riots, was one of more than 100 people arrested. Most of the other suspects arrested with Hussain have been released.

He says that for nearly a month he was tortured by investigators who included officers from Pakistan's intelligence agencies.

"We always raised our voices over local problems in our areas, simple things," says Hussain, who is a member of the Karakoram National Movement, a party advocating for self-rule.

"They don't like this, so they call it sedition."

As always authorities deny having tortured Hussain.

"[Hussain] is accused of serious violent crimes, " a senior Gilgit District police officer, who declined to be named, told Al Jazeera when asked about the allegations. "He was not tortured," he stated.

Source: Aljazeera

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2014/06/gilgit-baltistan-rebels-against-pakistan-201462984334940614.html

In Pakistan Detainees Are Vanishing in Covert Jails

In Pakistan Detainees Are Vanishing in Covert Jails

By TAHA SIDDIQUI and DECLAN WALSH JULY 25, 2015

KOHAT, Pakistan — Niaz Bibi’s son disappeared into the night, whisked away by Pakistani soldiers who accused him of being a Taliban fighter. For 18 anguishing months, she could find no word of his fate. Then she got a phone call. 

“Come to Kohat prison,” said the man on the other end. “Tell nobody.”

At the prison, in northwestern Pakistan, she was directed to a separate, military-run internment center where her son, Asghar Muhammad, was brought to her. They touched hands through a metal grill, and she wept as he reassured her that he would be home soon.  

But when the phone rang again, one month later, an official delivered crushing news. “Your son is dead,” he said. “Come collect his body.”

·         Pakistani Taliban Blame Electric Company for Heat Wave Deaths JUNE 26, 2015

Mr. Muhammad was one of dozens of detainees who have died in military detention in Pakistan in the past year and a half, amid accounts of torture, starvation and extrajudicial execution from former detainees, relatives and human rights monitors. The accusations come at a time when the country’s generals, armed with extensive new legal and judicial powers, have escalated their war against the Pakistani Taliban by sweeping into their strongholds and detaining hundreds of people.

Critics warn that those gains may be coming at the cost of human rights, potentially weakening Pakistan’s fragile democracy and, ultimately, undermining its counterterrorism effort.

“People live in abject fear of speaking out about what the military is doing,” said Mustafa Qadri of Amnesty International, which received reports of more than 100 deaths in military custody in 2014.

At issue is a network of 43 secretive internment centers dotting Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province and the tribal belt. Little is known about the centers, formally established in 2011 and given greater powers by a tough antiterrorism law passed last year. Most are based in existing jails and military bases and operate far from public view. The total number of detainees has not been made public.

Relatives of missing people have filed 2,100 cases with the Peshawar High Court, seeking news of their fates.

In many instances, the first news comes when a body is sent home.

Last year, for instance, a man from the Kurram tribal district told the court that three of his six sons who were detained in Kohat had died in custody. The man’s lawyer said he had not brought a criminal complaint against the military out of fear that his remaining sons would meet a similar fate.

The chief military spokesman, Maj. Gen. Asim Bajwa, did not respond to a detailed list of questions about conditions at the internment centers.

Classified documents leaked last year by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden made clear that American officials were aware of widespread human rights violations by the Pakistani military, even as billions of dollars in American military aid kept flowing to Pakistan.

Pakistani military officials tortured and killed people suspected of being militants “with the knowledge, if not consent, of senior officers,” said one American assessment in 2011.

 “The military took care to make the deaths seem to occur in the course of counterinsurgency operations, from natural causes, or as the result of personal vendettas,” said the document, first cited by The Washington Post.

The Obama administration, which has gradually improved its relationship with Pakistan this year, has been muted in its public criticism of the violations and has not invoked a provision of American law that limits assistance to foreign militaries guilty of human rights abuses.

Instead, the administration approved more weapons for the Pakistani military: In April, it approved almost $1 billion worth of helicopters and laser-guided Hellfire missiles for use in counterterrorism operations.

State Department officials say they have warned the Pakistani military that the accounts of rights violations could lead to future restrictions on military assistance.

Until recently, accusations of such abuses by Pakistani soldiers and intelligence officers have been sharpest in western Baluchistan Province, where the army has faced accusations of abducting, torturing and killing people suspected of being Baluch nationalists as part of a decade-old effort to quell a separatist rebellion there.

The deaths at internment centers have come in conjunction with the military’s battlefield gains — in the past year, it has seized control of much of North Waziristan — and a general hardening of public opinion against the Pakistani Taliban.

Tough new antiterrorism laws have given the army greater legal powers, and the number of deaths in military custody has declined in recent months since a military court system, authorized by Parliament in January, became active. Fayaz Zafar, a journalist in the Swat Valley, counted 48 bodies being returned to that area in 2014 and five so far this year, the latest on June 2.

Experts say the military-run courts fall far short of international standards, and their authority is being challenged in Pakistan’s Supreme Court. But public opposition to the courts has been muted, particularly since a Taliban massacre that killed 150 people, most of them children, in December. The authorities have taken harder action against militants on other fronts, too,lifting a moratorium on executions that has led to 178 convicts being hanged.

The executions have drawn repeated protest from the United Nations and the European Union but barely a whimper of public complaint.

By several accounts, conditions at the internment camps can be brutal. One former detainee from Swat said he had been thrashed with barbed wire, reduced to eating soap because he was fed so little and forced to give false testimony against other detainees in court.

“I felt guilty, but I knew I would be beaten if I refused,” said the man who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid further trouble.

Relatives of detainees who die in custody say they have been pressured into conducting hurried funerals, often at night, and sometimes coerced into declining an autopsy, even if the corpse bears signs of ill treatment. In other instances, they say, local mullahs are forbidden from offering prayers for the dead.

Asma Jahangir, a leading human rights lawyer, has brought a Supreme Court case challenging the detention of 33 men. When brought to court two years ago, two of the men said they had been tortured. They have since died in custody. “They supposedly had heart attacks,” Ms. Jahangir said.

In Swat, several women have formed a protest group to seek news of their missing relatives through street demonstrations and court actions. Their leader, Jan Saba, said in an interview that she had “knocked on every door” in search of news of her missing husband, but that she still had heard nothing.

Few dispute that many of the military detainees are linked to the Taliban. Mr. Muhammad, the detainee who died in Kohat last year, admitted to his family that he had spent eight months in the company of Taliban fighters before being arrested, relatives said.

One of his brothers, Abid, said that when the family asked Mr. Muhammad what he was doing during that time, he replied, “The less you know, the better.”

Such tales have led civilian officials to turn a blind eye to conditions at the internment centers. Jamaluddin Shah, the top civilian official in Kohat, said in an interview that he did not believe the military practiced torture or conducted executions at the center. But, he added, “even if such cases were true, why would that be an issue?”

“Have you seen them slaughtering people and distributing those videos?” Mr. Shah asked, referring to Taliban execution videos. “Do you think they deserve any human rights?”

But although the army has clearly weakened the Taliban in recent months, experts warn that reports of abuse could ultimately hurt its counterterrorism effort, in much the same way that harsh American tactics after 2001 led to global condemnation and bolstered militant recruitment.

Ms. Jahangir, the lawyer, calls the network of internment centers “Pakistan’s little Guantánamo Bay.”

“These laws risk turning Pakistan into a security state,” Ms. Jahangir said. “We cannot afford torture and killings on a mass scale, even in a time of war.”

Taha Siddiqui reported from Kohat, and Declan Walsh from London. Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, and an employee of The New York Times contributed from Pakistan.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/26/world/asia/detainees-vanish-in-secretive-facilities-as-pakistan-fights-taliban.html?_r=1

Hiroshima 70 Years Of Lies And Propaganda By Mickey Z.

Hiroshima 70 Years Of Lies And Propaganda By Mickey Z.

25 July, 2015
World News Trust

“It is an atomic bomb. It is the greatest thing in history.”

- President Harry S. Truman (August 6, 1945)

One of the seemingly endless Good (sic) War myths goes a little something like this:

The U.S. had no choice but to drop atomic bombs on Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Had they not done so, the fanatical Japanese never would have surrendered and millions of brave American soldiers would have perished in the ensuing invasion of the Japanese islands.

As we approach the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, I’ll try (yet again) to answer the question: Why was the bomb used?

The enemy was never fascism

Before confronting the unleashing of the bomb, there is lesser-known myth that must be dealt with: the life-and-death race with German scientists. “Working at Los Alamos, New Mexico,” writes historian Kenneth C. Davis, “atomic scientists, many of them refugees from Hitler’s Europe, thought they were racing against Germans developing a ‘Nazi bomb.’”

Surely, if it were possible for the epitome of evil to produce such a weapon, it would be the responsibility of the good guys to beat der Führer to the plutonium punch. While such a desperate race makes for excellent melodrama, the German bomb effort, it appears, fell far short of success.

Thanks to the declassification of key documents, we now have access to “unassailable proof that the race with the Nazis was a fiction,” says Stewart Udall, who cites the work of McGeorge Bundy and Thomas Powers before adding: “According to the official history of the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), those agents maintained ‘contacts with scientists in neutral countries.’”

These contacts, by mid-1943, provided enough evidence to convince the SIS that the German bomb program simply did not exist.

Despite such findings, U.S. General Leslie Groves, military commander of the Manhattan Project, got permission in the fall of 1943 to begin a secret espionage mission known as Alsos (Greek for “grove,” get it?). The mission saw Groves’ men following the Allies’ armies throughout Europe with the goal of capturing German scientists involved in the manufacture of atomic weapons.

While the data uncovered by Alsos only served to reinforce the prior reports that the Third Reich was not pursuing a nuclear program, Groves was able to maintain enough of a cover-up to keep his pet project alive. In the no-holds-barred religion of anti-communism, the “Good War” enemy was never fascism. Truman’s daughter, Margaret, remarked about her dad’s early presidential efforts after the death of FDR in April 1945, “My father’s overriding concern in these first weeks was our policy towards Russia.”

“Saved millions of lives”

The most commonly evoked justification for the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan was to save lives, but was it true? Would such an invasion even have been necessary? Finally, were the actions of the United States motivated by an escalating Cold War with the Soviet Union? Here are the facts that don’t mesh with the long-accepted storyline:

Although hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives were lost in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the bombings are often explained away as a “life-saving” measure -- American lives. Exactly how many lives saved is, however, up for grabs. (We do know of a few U.S. soldiers who fell between the cracks About a dozen or more American POWs were killed in Hiroshima, a truth that remained hidden for some 30 years.)

In defense of the U.S. action, it is usually claimed that the bombs saved lives. The hypothetical body count ranges from 20,000 to “millions.” In an August 9, 1945 statement to “the men and women of the Manhattan Project,” President Truman declared the hope that “this new weapon will result in saving thousands of American lives.”

“The president’s initial formulation of ‘thousands,” however, was clearly not his final statement on the matter to say the least,” remarks historian Gar Alperovitz. In his book, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth, Alperovitz documents but a few of Truman’s public estimates throughout the years:

>> Dec. 15, 1945: “It occurred to me that a quarter of a million of the flower of our young manhood was worth a couple of Japanese cities ...”

>> Late 1946: “A year less of war will mean life for three hundred thousand -- maybe half a million -- of America’s finest youth.”

>> October 1948: “In the long run we could save a quarter of a million young Americans from being killed, and would save an equal number of Japanese young men from being killed.”

>> April 6, 1949: “I thought 200,000 of our young men would be saved.”

>> November 1949: Truman quotes Army Chief of Staff George S. Marshall as estimating the cost of an Allied invasion of Japan to be “half a million casualties.”

>> Jan. 12, 1953: Still quoting Marshall, Truman raises the estimate to “a minimum one quarter of a million” and maybe “as much as a million, on the American side alone, with an equal number of the enemy.”

>> Finally, on April 28, 1959, Truman concluded: “the dropping of the bombs ... saved millions of lives.” 
Fortunately, we are not operating without the benefit of official estimates.

In June 1945, Truman ordered the U.S. military to calculate the cost in American lives for a planned assault on Japan. Consequently, the Joint War Plans Committee prepared a report for the Chiefs of Staff, dated June 15, 1945, thus providing the closest thing anyone has to “accurate”: 40,000 U.S. soldiers killed, 150,000 wounded, and 3,500 missing.

While the actual casualty count remains unknowable, it was widely known at the time that Japan had been trying to surrender for months prior to the atomic bombing. A May 5, 1945 cable, intercepted and decoded by the United States, “dispelled any possible doubt that the Japanese were eager to sue for peace.” In fact, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey reported shortly after the war, that Japan “in all probability” would have surrendered before the much-discussed November 1, 1945 Allied invasion of the homeland.

Truman himself eloquently noted in his diary that Stalin would “be in the Jap War on August 15th. Fini (sic) Japs when that comes about.”

The cold logic of capitalism

Some post-Hiroshima/Nagasaki sentiments questioned the use of the bombs.

“I thought our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives,” said General Dwight D. Eisenhower while, not long after the Japanese surrender, New York Times military analyst Hanson Baldwin wrote, “The enemy, in a military sense, was in a hopeless strategic position ... Such then, was the situation when we wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Need we have done it? No one can, of course, be positive, but the answer is almost certainly negative.”

So, was it the cold logic of capitalism that motivated the nuking of civilians?

As far back as May 1945, a Venezuelan diplomat was reporting how Assistant Secretary of State Nelson Rockefeller “communicated to us the anxiety of the United States government about the Russian attitude.”

U.S. Secretary of State James F. Byrnes seemed to agree when he turned the anxiety up a notch by explaining how “our possessing and demonstrating the bomb would make Russia more manageable in the East ... The demonstration of the bomb might impress Russia with America’s military might.”

General Leslie Groves was less cryptic: “There was never, from about two weeks from the time I took charge of this Project, any illusion on my part but that Russia was our enemy, and the Project was conducted on that basis.”

During the same time period, President Truman noted that Secretary of War Henry Stimson was “at least as much concerned with the role of the atomic bomb in the shaping of history as in its capacity to shorten the war.” What sort of shaping Stimson had in mind might be discerned from his Sept. 11, 1945 comment to the president: “I consider the problem of our satisfactory relations with Russia as not merely connected but as virtually dominated by the problem of the atomic bomb.”

Stimson called the bomb a “diplomatic weapon,” and duly explained that “American statesmen were eager for their country to browbeat the Russians with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip.”

“The psychological effect [of Hiroshima and Nagasaki] on Stalin was twofold,” proposes historian Charles L. Mee, Jr. “The Americans had not only used a doomsday machine; they had used it when, as Stalin knew, it was not militarily necessary. It was this last chilling fact that doubtless made the greatest impression on the Russians.”

It also made an impression on J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientific director at Los Alamos. After learning of the carnage wrought upon Japan, he began to harbor second thoughts and he resigned in October 1945. In March of the following year, Oppenheimer told Truman:

“Mr. President, I have blood on my hands.”

Truman’s reply?

“It’ll come out in the wash.”

Later, the president told an aide, “Don’t bring that fellow around again.”

“They’ll spit in your eye”

“Why did we drop (the bomb)?” pondered Studs Terkel, two decades ago. “So little Harry could show Molotov and Stalin we’ve got the cards,” he explained. “That was the phrase Truman used. We showed the goddamned Russians we’ve got something and they’d better behave themselves in Europe. That’s why it was dropped. The evidence is overwhelming. And yet you tell that to 99 percent of Americans and they’ll spit in your eye.”

Let the spitting begin.

Mickey Z. is the author of 12 books, most recently Occupy this Book: Mickey Z. on Activism. Until the laws are changed or the power runs out, he can be found on the Web here and here. Anyone wishing to support his activist efforts can do so by making a donation here.

End Abuses by the Indian Military, New York Times

End Abuses by the Indian Military, New York Times

Since 1958, India’s Armed Forces Special Powers Act, or Afspa, has fostered a culture of impunity among India’s armed forces that has led to repeated, documented human rights abuses against Indian civilians in designated “disturbed areas.” In the wake of fresh calls to repeal the law, it’s time for the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi to do what prior governments have not: stand up to India’s military, which has long resisted any modification of the act — and move to have Afspa repealed.

The law was enacted to fight a separatist insurgency in Nagaland and was later applied to restive areas in several states in the northeast. In 1990, a version of the act was applied to the state of Jammu and Kashmir. Rather than help quell revolt, Afspa has hardened resentments against a military that has too often abused the extraordinary powers conferred by the act.

The act, which can be activated by the federal government or the states, gives soldiers wide powers to kill, arrest, search and detain. It also grants them civil immunity from prosecution and punishment. India’s army, which is empowered to try soldiers in military courts for crimes against civilians, has rarely done so. The result is a shocking incidence of rapes, murders, torture, summary detention and disappearances of civilians in areas where the law applies.

This month, Amnesty International published a damning report on abuses in Jammu and Kashmir, and called again for an end to the law. Indian legal authorities and human rights groups, as well as international groups and the United Nations, have urged repeal. In 2005, following the rape and murder of a woman in Manipur, a government-appointed committee said the law should be amended or replaced “in consonance with the obligations of the government towards protection of Human Rights.” In 2008, Human Rights Watch published a major report on Afspa calling for repeal. In 2012, the United Nations said the act “clearly violates international law.” The year after, a former chief justice of India, J.S. Verma, chairman of a committee charged with reviewing Indian law after the brutal rape of a student in New Delhi, said there was an “imminent need” to assess continued use of the law.

The government of Prime Minister Modi should not wait to act. In May, the state of Tripura, with the federal government’s approval, repealed Afspa, saying it was no longer necessary. The Peoples Democratic Party, which governs Jammu and Kashmir in alliance with the national governing Bharatiya Janata Party, is calling for repeal there. India’s home minister, Rajnath Singh, said this month he hoped a time would come when Afspa “should not be needed anywhere in the country.” That time is now.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/25/opinion/end-abuses-by-the-indian-military.html?_r=0