United States

First printed in MRZine.org on 13 November 2009

On 3 November 2009, the United States House of Representatives voted 344-36 in favor of House Resolution 867, making it Congress' official response to the 575-page Report submitted by Justice Richard J. Goldstone to the United Nations Human Rights Council at the conclusion of a “fact-finding” mission on the Gaza conflict. The Resolution does little more than recycle traditional rhetoric about an anti-Israel bias, Qassam rocket attacks, Hamas' use of human shields, and Israel's right of self-defense, all in an effort to ignore the reality of the Israeli Occupation of the Palestinian Territories and the devastating effects it has had on the region. By passing HR 867, Congress has opted to join the Israeli government in rejecting international efforts to defend the civilians in Palestine and to hold Israeli and Palestinian forces accountable to international law.

The United States government is frequently criticized for abusing its veto power in the United Nations Security Council to block resolutions that call on Israel to deescalate military violence. A Security Council resolution is vetoed when any one of the five permanent member states casts a negative vote. In addition to the United States, the five permanent member states are the United Kingdom, France, China, and the Russian Federation. The Security Council also has ten rotating member states, but only a vote of "nay" from a permanent member state can veto a resolution. In addition to vetoing a resolution, a member state can abstain from voting, which allows a state to express its disapproval of a resolution without issuing an outright veto. Professor Noam Chomsky has referred to an abstention by the United States as a "double veto," because it effectively eliminates any coverage of the resolution in the media and it erases it from the historical record.1 In its defense, the United States government does not hold the record for the most vetoes cast by a single member state. That dubious honor belongs to the USSR, which cast 118 vetoes in its lifetime. The US follows in second place with 76 vetoes (which means it is the nation with the highest number of vetoes that still exists in the Security Council). The nation in third place--the United Kingdom--cast only 31 vetoes.2 The record of resolutions vetoed by the US government is troubling as it demonstrates, in addition to a commitment to continued violence by the Israeli government, a pattern of violence openly opposed by the international community and excluded from the mainstream domestic press.

1. 1. Chomsky, N. 2003. Dominance and its Dilemmas. Boston Review http://www.chomsky.info/articles/200310--.htm
2. 2. I tallied these vetoes manually, so they may be off by a couple vetoes

As of Monday 29 December 2008, the death toll of Israeli military assaults in the Gaza region has passed 335 deaths since Israel began its bombing campaign on Saturday 27 December 2008. In this same time, rocket attacks by Hamas forces have caused two Israeli deaths. 1 As usual, spokespeople for the U.S. government have helped to escalate the violence by offering unconditional military support to the Israeli government. In an effort to help the government understand that the people of the U.S. do not condone U.S. backing for further violence in the region, I drafted and transmitted a brief letter to the President and to my two U.S. Senators and one Representative. While I expect my individual request to have little bearing on on this matter, it is my hope that many others are also doing something similar. Anyone who is looking for information to include in a letter of h(er|is) own is welcome to use what I have to offer below.

1. . a. b.

Politicians, human rights activists, citizens and soldiers around the globe are debating whether the treatment of prisoners by U.S. forces is consistent with international and national laws. Although the U.S. government refuses to extend Constitutional protections or treat them as 'prisoners of war' or 'civilians under enemy control', officials repeatedly claim that they are treating prisoners in a manner 'consistent with international law'. Conversely, repeated reports of abuses and illegal practices from soldiers, FBI agents, prisoners and foreign governments have created serious doubts about whether the U.S. government is being entirely truthful in these claims. Given the current administration's history of misrepresentation, the fact that many reject claims that the government is in compliance with international human rights laws as outright lies is not at all surprising.

Originally posted on A contrario on 16 April 2008

In the letter quoted below, I request that Steve Buyer, the U.S. Representative for Indiana's 4th district, take the necessary steps to stop the U.S. government's use of torture and to identify and reprimand the officials responsible for this obscene policy. This letter is in response to Bush's latest statement that he personally approved the use of torture (see the Washington Post's summary of the interview), and the structure of this letter is based loosely on the form letter that ACLU is hosting over here. If you wish, you are welcome to use any part or all of the below text (except my signature!) in your own letter. According to the House web site, all physical mail is currently being screened for biological agents, so the fastest way to contact your Representative is probably through the House's Write Your Representative form.

Originally posted on A contrario on 22 March, 2008

This is the extended and original version of a letter I submitted to the editor of the local paper. It is the first of a growing series of documents to come out of my research into the human rights violations that are being committed by or in the United States. While I am disgusted by my government's behavior, I am even more incensed by the general public apathy (at least in my area) toward the issue . I wrote this letter in an attempt to dissolve that apathy and implore people to start attending to what the U.S. government is doing in our name. Democracy will not survive in this nation if we do not monitor our own government at least as vigilantly as it seems to be monitoring us.

Recently, WIRED magazine printed an article that listed several environmentally destructive activities that do not directly affect the Earth's climate and may therefore be continued without consequencehttp://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/16-06/ff_heresies_intro. Thankfully, this rather foolish article also ran with a counterpoint by Alex Steffan of Worldchanging.com that pointed out that the single-problem, mechanistic thinking that spawned WIRED's article is the same sort of thinking that got us into this climate mess in the first placehttp://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/magazine/16-06/sb_carbon. The real 'inconvenient truth' is that as long as environmental issues (and most other political issues, for that matter) are treated as discrete problems to be addressed by mechanistic, independent solutions, society will merely continue to move closer to an ecological collapse. A myopic focus on cutting carbon emissions may help to reduce the severity of the inevitable climate shift, but it won't help supply the world's growing population with clean freshwater, slow the catastrophic rate of bio-homogenization, or address any of the other major ecological issues that our society faces. Carbon is only one of six different elements that make up 95% of the Earth's biomass, and we are severely altering the natural cycles of all six of them. Instead of trying to 'fix' our environmental situation with piecemeal technical innovations, each specific to a single issue, we need to stop for a moment and consider all our actions in the context of what we've learned about the Earth's biosphere thus far. In short, we need to restructure ourselves into a sustainable society.