11-26-2008, 01:46 PM
http://vivekajyoti.blogspot.com/2008_11_01_archive.html
This is very important IMO:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>The Hidden Hand Of Human Rights -- Let Us Keep Our Police Out Of All This</b>
From: Radha Rajan
date: Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 1:50 PM
subject: NSA and the Police
Chris Patten, former Governor of Hong Kong, currently EU Commissioner for External Affairs, was in town a couple of months ago. He was invited to speak at the Madras University by the Center for Security Analysis, a Ford Foundation think tank, and the Department of Defence and Strategic Studies, Madras University, in his capacity as Chancellor of the Oxford University. In his introductory speech, M.K.Narayanan, former Director, Intelligence Bureau and currently Vice-President of the Center, extolled Chris Patten's genius which had authored the Independent Policing for Northern Ireland report. Because he was a policeman, Mr.Narayanan said, he was able to better appreciate the genius which had produced this report. Later, answering a pointed question on the US led invasion of Iraq, Chris Patten declared we were making too much of national sovereignty. "Sovereignty is like virginity", he said with great originality, his genius rising up to Narayanan's fulsome praise. "It is there one day, gone the next".
Soon thereafter, the Center for Security Analysis invited Prof. Laurence Lustgarten to speak to high-ranking serving police officers and a few specially invited intellectuals of Chennai on the merits of constituting an 'institutional and hierarchical mechanism' for looking into complaints against the police force. Prof. Lustgarten, one of the 17 Commissioners of the IPCC, spoke about the newly constituted Independent Police Complaints Commission for England and Wales. Mr.M.K.Narayanan introduced the speaker to the audience. The thematic connection between Prof.Lustgarten's visit and that of Chris Patten could hardly be missed. What deserves our attention is Patten's toffee-nosed dismissal of the sovereignty of nations not covered by the protectionism racket called NATO, his call for military and other interventions into the domestic affairs of countries which western nations think are not abiding by international norms on human rights, (humanitarian intervention, I think it is called, like the invasion of Iraq) and the real intentions, as stated by Prof.Lustgarten, behind setting up parallel mechanisms within a country to monitor the country's police force. Chris Patten delightfully genius-like and once again with great originality termed this kind of intrusive monitoring and intervention, 'sharing sovereignty'. "Countries must get used to sharing sovereignty", was how he put it. Needless to say, this 'sharing' seems to be one-way and selective about which areas of sovereignty are being 'shared'.
Expanding upon his claim that national sovereignty was no big deal, Chris Patten told his audience in the university that the world was moving rapidly towards the post nation-state era. Now, I will buy me a ticket to this Fool's Paradise the day the US dismantles its national military structures, destroys all its weapons â conventional and unconventional, and de-commissions its uniformed men and women. As long as the US and all the former colonial powers of Europe continue to exist as nation-states, with all the attendant paraphernalia of State power, I do not see the world-without frontiers era approaching even distantly. Be that as it may; but what is even more disquieting is the growing international trend to de-sanctify national borders - in theory by American think-tanks and in practice by the US led western world; and our own people providing persons like Patten and Lustgarten with opportunities to peddle their theories and intentions to audiences which one can only classify as being 'sensitive'. <span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'>The Ford Foundation is in partnership with a sensitive department like Defence and Strategic Studies in the Madras University. How this alliance came to be and how this partnership was countenanced by the Chancellor of the university is incomprehensible. This provides the Foundation with easy access to impressionable student minds and an opportunity to co-opt our university and our academics into their agenda, to take up their pet causes. The Ford Foundation has not opened shop in India to further India's national interests. It is working with a well-planned agenda. Advancing India's interests is definitely not one of them.
Chris Patten is not the first important western politician calling for an intrusive foreign policy which unabashedly declares military intervention to be a legitimate instrument. Several American think-tank specialists and even a senator have stated that gross violation of human rights, gross abuse of political power and genocide will henceforth call for military intervention into other countries. This American senator went so far as to say that poverty, illiteracy and failure to provide basic health care will also now merit American scrutiny. 'We intend to make all this our business', this man declared in the recently concluded World Economic Forum in Davos. "We intend to link aid with corruption, good governance, health-care, human rights, democracy and education".</span> This sanctimonious humbug was notwithstanding the slow genocide of the people of Iraq through the most cruel and inhuman economic sanctions that the US and the UK imposed on Iraq for 12 years and the studious indifference of the western world to the genocide in Rwanda. While the slow killing of Iraqi children, women and the aged served the West's political and strategic interests in Iraq in particular and in the Middle-East in general, the genocide in Rwanda, a poor African nation was beyond the frontiers of their interests and imagination and gave them no reason to intervene. Besides, Rwanda had no oil.
Given the nightmarish scenario now being played out in Iraq and Afghanistan, even the megalomaniac American State is less and less likely to wage conventional wars against other nations in the future. Instead it is more likely to seek to install puppet regimes which are 'pro-US' in those parts of the world where it has political and strategic interests. And this the US will do after having reduced the concerned country to total political, economic and administrative chaos. This will only be in line with the Carter doctrine or the Zbignew Brzinski document which envisaged a world order in which the United States would be the only super power and all other countries of the world would either be vassal States of the United States or tributary States. And human rights groups in the concerned country would be the 'consenting weapons' in this war-by-another-name which will effectively arrange the world order to match Brzinski's script.
One can therefore be prepared to see the West-inspired and funded human rights industry getting into an over-drive whenever nationalist governments assume power at the Center. The idea will be to dis-credit the government, the State instruments and generally erode all authority vested in State power. And this, the human rights industry will attempt to do by playing upon people's vulnerabilities, by instigating one group against another, making people lose confidence and trust in the ability of their government, their police and armed forces to protect them and also by calling into question their very integrity. The human rights industry works on the basic and uncompromising assumption that the State is evil and that all State apparatus is guilty by association. It is this antagonistic assumption that lies behind the bitter hostility of human rights activists and organizations towards our police and our armed forces.
Sovereignty is the essence of nation-States. State sovereignty implies territorial frontiers and needless to say State instruments are created to defend and safeguard these frontiers and the territorial integrity of nations. This is as old as the earliest, organized human settlement in history when it was confronted by a rival settlement. Which is why every nation raises its own army to defend its national borders and raises its police force to maintain internal law and order. Our armed forces and our police are the most visible symbols of State power and it is the quality and morale of our people in uniform, which determines the effectiveness of all security and law enforcing mechanisms. In short, national security depends ultimately on our uniformed forces and morale is the most important factor which maintains in them a very high level of effectiveness.
The IPCC for England and Wales, by Prof. Lustgarten's own admission was constituted on the twin premises that, one, the police force is congenitally inclined to violence and abuse and two, the police force cannot be trusted to correct itself. Contrary to the report that appeared in The Hindu on the 24th of January http://www.hindu.com/2004/01/24/stories/...650500.htm on Prof. Lustgarten's meeting, where the reporter incorrectly states that the IPCC has no ambitions or intentions of becoming an investigating agency, Prof.Lustgarten had stated categorically at the meeting that while currently the IPCC is undertaking investigation of cases sometimes independently and sometimes in partnership with the police, they intend to relieve the police force of all its investigating role, and also that very soon the IPCC would evolve into a full-fledged investigating agency. The idea behind wanting to relieve the police force of its investigating role is all too clear. The IPCC has no faith in the integrity of the police to conduct free and fair investigation into cases. Prof.Lustgarten also said that the IPCC was under tremendous pressure to prove itself and to provide results.
If we looked at what lies beneath the Professor's ambitions for the IPCC, it reveals that the IPCC is seeking to legitimise its dangerous ambitions by laying it on the 'people'. He said the people expected the IPCC to substantiate allegations of mis-conduct and abuse against the police. They expected the IPCC to expose police highhandedness and violations of human rights. In short, what Prof.Lustgarten meant was, the IPCC would police the police force. Constituting a parallel investigating mechanism is a zero sum exercise. The more the IPCC gains in credibility, the more the people's faith in the police force would erode. To a pointed question on whether eroding the credibility of the State and State instruments did not bode ill for democracy and if this kind of public expose of the police force were not a sure prescription for anarchy, Prof.Lustgarten declared smugly that if the police force was found to be corrupt and prone to violate human rights, then it deserved to be eroded.
This is the danger. That the concept of human rights becomes more important than the nation, the State, the instruments of State power. That groups, organizations and powerful countries will declare unchallenged that human rights violations and genocide will invite military intervention, that nations will be thrown into anarchy by emasculating our police and armed forces by questioning their functioning, their decisions, their actions, their motives, their integrity. Our own NHRC not to be out-done, is now seeking amendments to the Protection of Human Rights Act. The NHRC was constituted as a result of this Act and now the NHRC is seeking amendments to it whereby the NHRC would be given the right to investigate allegations of human rights violations against our armed forces who are called upon to fight insurgency and organized terrorism in states like J&K and the North-East. Currently, the NHRC will have to refer these complaints to the army itself and suggest investigation and enquiry into the alleged crime or it may approach the courts for justice. But it cannot don the role of an independent and parallel investigating agency. If an over-ambitious Chairman of the NHRC were to take it upon himself to enquire into every incident ending in the killing of terrorists or in the death of so-called 'innocent civilians', the accompanying media publicity would inevitably demoralise our police and our armed forces and if the NHRC's activism continues, over time, it could dissuade them from acting decisively against anti-social and anti-national forces. The loser would be the nation and the law-abiding people of this country. And that is the danger of constituting parallel non-governmental mechanisms to police our uniformed forces.
We know that there is corruption in the judiciary and that several of our judges are men and women of questionable and even unsavoury character. Oftentimes there has been wanton mis-carriage of justice, not the least because of pecuniary benefits. There is corruption and pervasive immorality in the polity of our country. But no one in his right senses would suggest that the country must set up 'hierarchical and institutional' parallel judiciary or government. I see no reason why we must make an exception of the police force. Nor do I see the need to give the National Human Rights Commission any new or greater powers that would in effect make it a parallel and quasi-judicial and investigating agency. That there are instances of human rights violations is true and also that there is corruption and insensitivity towards specific categories of people. It is best to insulate our uniformed forces from public scrutiny without however condoning or ignoring allegations of mis-conduct and human rights violations. The police force and our armed forces, because of the dignity and the high value that is attached to the uniform that they wear with pride, are more concerned about maintaining the highest integrity and standards of behavior among their cadre and their officers. There is no dearth of thinkers and intellectuals in their midst. We must trust them to work out ways and means to deal with complaints and allegations without jumping on the bandwagon of the anarchists to drag our uniformed forces into public gaze and infamy.
There is a good practice in force of not inviting serving policemen, army men and judges to meetings and seminars organized by civil society. There is no need to make an exception just because such meetings are organized by retired or former policemen. The meeting of the kind organized by the Center for Security Analysis with Prof.Lustgarten and Chris Patten, are not meant for 'sensitive' audiences. Let such seminars and discussions remain the business of civil society. Meetings of a similar nature to be productive, where the police force could participate actively may be organized by the government or by the police itself with outsiders strictly not invited to be present. Our police and our armed forces have enough to do without having to sit through seminars and discussions which abuse them and do not go beyond. As indeed they cannot go beyond.
http://www.vigilonline.com/index.php?optio...=751&Itemid=112
17, February, 2004.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->AmeriKKKa - the land of global terrorism.
This is very important IMO:
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin--><b>The Hidden Hand Of Human Rights -- Let Us Keep Our Police Out Of All This</b>
From: Radha Rajan
date: Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 1:50 PM
subject: NSA and the Police
Chris Patten, former Governor of Hong Kong, currently EU Commissioner for External Affairs, was in town a couple of months ago. He was invited to speak at the Madras University by the Center for Security Analysis, a Ford Foundation think tank, and the Department of Defence and Strategic Studies, Madras University, in his capacity as Chancellor of the Oxford University. In his introductory speech, M.K.Narayanan, former Director, Intelligence Bureau and currently Vice-President of the Center, extolled Chris Patten's genius which had authored the Independent Policing for Northern Ireland report. Because he was a policeman, Mr.Narayanan said, he was able to better appreciate the genius which had produced this report. Later, answering a pointed question on the US led invasion of Iraq, Chris Patten declared we were making too much of national sovereignty. "Sovereignty is like virginity", he said with great originality, his genius rising up to Narayanan's fulsome praise. "It is there one day, gone the next".
Soon thereafter, the Center for Security Analysis invited Prof. Laurence Lustgarten to speak to high-ranking serving police officers and a few specially invited intellectuals of Chennai on the merits of constituting an 'institutional and hierarchical mechanism' for looking into complaints against the police force. Prof. Lustgarten, one of the 17 Commissioners of the IPCC, spoke about the newly constituted Independent Police Complaints Commission for England and Wales. Mr.M.K.Narayanan introduced the speaker to the audience. The thematic connection between Prof.Lustgarten's visit and that of Chris Patten could hardly be missed. What deserves our attention is Patten's toffee-nosed dismissal of the sovereignty of nations not covered by the protectionism racket called NATO, his call for military and other interventions into the domestic affairs of countries which western nations think are not abiding by international norms on human rights, (humanitarian intervention, I think it is called, like the invasion of Iraq) and the real intentions, as stated by Prof.Lustgarten, behind setting up parallel mechanisms within a country to monitor the country's police force. Chris Patten delightfully genius-like and once again with great originality termed this kind of intrusive monitoring and intervention, 'sharing sovereignty'. "Countries must get used to sharing sovereignty", was how he put it. Needless to say, this 'sharing' seems to be one-way and selective about which areas of sovereignty are being 'shared'.
Expanding upon his claim that national sovereignty was no big deal, Chris Patten told his audience in the university that the world was moving rapidly towards the post nation-state era. Now, I will buy me a ticket to this Fool's Paradise the day the US dismantles its national military structures, destroys all its weapons â conventional and unconventional, and de-commissions its uniformed men and women. As long as the US and all the former colonial powers of Europe continue to exist as nation-states, with all the attendant paraphernalia of State power, I do not see the world-without frontiers era approaching even distantly. Be that as it may; but what is even more disquieting is the growing international trend to de-sanctify national borders - in theory by American think-tanks and in practice by the US led western world; and our own people providing persons like Patten and Lustgarten with opportunities to peddle their theories and intentions to audiences which one can only classify as being 'sensitive'. <span style='font-size:14pt;line-height:100%'>The Ford Foundation is in partnership with a sensitive department like Defence and Strategic Studies in the Madras University. How this alliance came to be and how this partnership was countenanced by the Chancellor of the university is incomprehensible. This provides the Foundation with easy access to impressionable student minds and an opportunity to co-opt our university and our academics into their agenda, to take up their pet causes. The Ford Foundation has not opened shop in India to further India's national interests. It is working with a well-planned agenda. Advancing India's interests is definitely not one of them.
Chris Patten is not the first important western politician calling for an intrusive foreign policy which unabashedly declares military intervention to be a legitimate instrument. Several American think-tank specialists and even a senator have stated that gross violation of human rights, gross abuse of political power and genocide will henceforth call for military intervention into other countries. This American senator went so far as to say that poverty, illiteracy and failure to provide basic health care will also now merit American scrutiny. 'We intend to make all this our business', this man declared in the recently concluded World Economic Forum in Davos. "We intend to link aid with corruption, good governance, health-care, human rights, democracy and education".</span> This sanctimonious humbug was notwithstanding the slow genocide of the people of Iraq through the most cruel and inhuman economic sanctions that the US and the UK imposed on Iraq for 12 years and the studious indifference of the western world to the genocide in Rwanda. While the slow killing of Iraqi children, women and the aged served the West's political and strategic interests in Iraq in particular and in the Middle-East in general, the genocide in Rwanda, a poor African nation was beyond the frontiers of their interests and imagination and gave them no reason to intervene. Besides, Rwanda had no oil.
Given the nightmarish scenario now being played out in Iraq and Afghanistan, even the megalomaniac American State is less and less likely to wage conventional wars against other nations in the future. Instead it is more likely to seek to install puppet regimes which are 'pro-US' in those parts of the world where it has political and strategic interests. And this the US will do after having reduced the concerned country to total political, economic and administrative chaos. This will only be in line with the Carter doctrine or the Zbignew Brzinski document which envisaged a world order in which the United States would be the only super power and all other countries of the world would either be vassal States of the United States or tributary States. And human rights groups in the concerned country would be the 'consenting weapons' in this war-by-another-name which will effectively arrange the world order to match Brzinski's script.
One can therefore be prepared to see the West-inspired and funded human rights industry getting into an over-drive whenever nationalist governments assume power at the Center. The idea will be to dis-credit the government, the State instruments and generally erode all authority vested in State power. And this, the human rights industry will attempt to do by playing upon people's vulnerabilities, by instigating one group against another, making people lose confidence and trust in the ability of their government, their police and armed forces to protect them and also by calling into question their very integrity. The human rights industry works on the basic and uncompromising assumption that the State is evil and that all State apparatus is guilty by association. It is this antagonistic assumption that lies behind the bitter hostility of human rights activists and organizations towards our police and our armed forces.
Sovereignty is the essence of nation-States. State sovereignty implies territorial frontiers and needless to say State instruments are created to defend and safeguard these frontiers and the territorial integrity of nations. This is as old as the earliest, organized human settlement in history when it was confronted by a rival settlement. Which is why every nation raises its own army to defend its national borders and raises its police force to maintain internal law and order. Our armed forces and our police are the most visible symbols of State power and it is the quality and morale of our people in uniform, which determines the effectiveness of all security and law enforcing mechanisms. In short, national security depends ultimately on our uniformed forces and morale is the most important factor which maintains in them a very high level of effectiveness.
The IPCC for England and Wales, by Prof. Lustgarten's own admission was constituted on the twin premises that, one, the police force is congenitally inclined to violence and abuse and two, the police force cannot be trusted to correct itself. Contrary to the report that appeared in The Hindu on the 24th of January http://www.hindu.com/2004/01/24/stories/...650500.htm on Prof. Lustgarten's meeting, where the reporter incorrectly states that the IPCC has no ambitions or intentions of becoming an investigating agency, Prof.Lustgarten had stated categorically at the meeting that while currently the IPCC is undertaking investigation of cases sometimes independently and sometimes in partnership with the police, they intend to relieve the police force of all its investigating role, and also that very soon the IPCC would evolve into a full-fledged investigating agency. The idea behind wanting to relieve the police force of its investigating role is all too clear. The IPCC has no faith in the integrity of the police to conduct free and fair investigation into cases. Prof.Lustgarten also said that the IPCC was under tremendous pressure to prove itself and to provide results.
If we looked at what lies beneath the Professor's ambitions for the IPCC, it reveals that the IPCC is seeking to legitimise its dangerous ambitions by laying it on the 'people'. He said the people expected the IPCC to substantiate allegations of mis-conduct and abuse against the police. They expected the IPCC to expose police highhandedness and violations of human rights. In short, what Prof.Lustgarten meant was, the IPCC would police the police force. Constituting a parallel investigating mechanism is a zero sum exercise. The more the IPCC gains in credibility, the more the people's faith in the police force would erode. To a pointed question on whether eroding the credibility of the State and State instruments did not bode ill for democracy and if this kind of public expose of the police force were not a sure prescription for anarchy, Prof.Lustgarten declared smugly that if the police force was found to be corrupt and prone to violate human rights, then it deserved to be eroded.
This is the danger. That the concept of human rights becomes more important than the nation, the State, the instruments of State power. That groups, organizations and powerful countries will declare unchallenged that human rights violations and genocide will invite military intervention, that nations will be thrown into anarchy by emasculating our police and armed forces by questioning their functioning, their decisions, their actions, their motives, their integrity. Our own NHRC not to be out-done, is now seeking amendments to the Protection of Human Rights Act. The NHRC was constituted as a result of this Act and now the NHRC is seeking amendments to it whereby the NHRC would be given the right to investigate allegations of human rights violations against our armed forces who are called upon to fight insurgency and organized terrorism in states like J&K and the North-East. Currently, the NHRC will have to refer these complaints to the army itself and suggest investigation and enquiry into the alleged crime or it may approach the courts for justice. But it cannot don the role of an independent and parallel investigating agency. If an over-ambitious Chairman of the NHRC were to take it upon himself to enquire into every incident ending in the killing of terrorists or in the death of so-called 'innocent civilians', the accompanying media publicity would inevitably demoralise our police and our armed forces and if the NHRC's activism continues, over time, it could dissuade them from acting decisively against anti-social and anti-national forces. The loser would be the nation and the law-abiding people of this country. And that is the danger of constituting parallel non-governmental mechanisms to police our uniformed forces.
We know that there is corruption in the judiciary and that several of our judges are men and women of questionable and even unsavoury character. Oftentimes there has been wanton mis-carriage of justice, not the least because of pecuniary benefits. There is corruption and pervasive immorality in the polity of our country. But no one in his right senses would suggest that the country must set up 'hierarchical and institutional' parallel judiciary or government. I see no reason why we must make an exception of the police force. Nor do I see the need to give the National Human Rights Commission any new or greater powers that would in effect make it a parallel and quasi-judicial and investigating agency. That there are instances of human rights violations is true and also that there is corruption and insensitivity towards specific categories of people. It is best to insulate our uniformed forces from public scrutiny without however condoning or ignoring allegations of mis-conduct and human rights violations. The police force and our armed forces, because of the dignity and the high value that is attached to the uniform that they wear with pride, are more concerned about maintaining the highest integrity and standards of behavior among their cadre and their officers. There is no dearth of thinkers and intellectuals in their midst. We must trust them to work out ways and means to deal with complaints and allegations without jumping on the bandwagon of the anarchists to drag our uniformed forces into public gaze and infamy.
There is a good practice in force of not inviting serving policemen, army men and judges to meetings and seminars organized by civil society. There is no need to make an exception just because such meetings are organized by retired or former policemen. The meeting of the kind organized by the Center for Security Analysis with Prof.Lustgarten and Chris Patten, are not meant for 'sensitive' audiences. Let such seminars and discussions remain the business of civil society. Meetings of a similar nature to be productive, where the police force could participate actively may be organized by the government or by the police itself with outsiders strictly not invited to be present. Our police and our armed forces have enough to do without having to sit through seminars and discussions which abuse them and do not go beyond. As indeed they cannot go beyond.
http://www.vigilonline.com/index.php?optio...=751&Itemid=112
17, February, 2004.<!--QuoteEnd--><!--QuoteEEnd-->AmeriKKKa - the land of global terrorism.