September/October 2005

One can only marvel.

Prominently featured in the New York Times this morning, August 9 (anniversary of the Nagasaki bombing that put the United States of America so deep into the civilian-killing business that we’ve never yet been able to climb out of the moral pit we dug for ourselves), was an article entitled “Nepal’s Human Rights Record Threatens Military Aid,” filed by Somini Sengupta from Katmandu. It is yet another story on yet another dictator in yet another culturally distant country doing things of which we cannot approve. Nor should we; nor should anybody, really. But the ethical disconnect is becoming surreal. I mean, who are we to talk?

“When a firebrand student leader went to visit his friends in jail here last week, he, too, found himself arrested by the police and locked up on a charge of sedition,” Sengupta begins. This Nepali student obviously picked the wrong friends. Meanwhile, back in the US, firebrand lawyer Lynne Stewart picked the wrong client to represent, and now may be facing thirty years (see Opps, p. 35.) Does anybody recall that, or is the image obliterated by now?

“When a political prisoner was freed by a court order in the town of Nepalganj in June,” Sengupta continues, “plainclothes police officers immediately plucked him from the courthouse steps.” Pretty bad. And when sixteen-year-old Tashnuba Hayder, brought up in New York since infancy, was released from an obscure Pennsylvania detention facility in July because she really bore not the slightest resemblance to a suicide bomber, Im-migration immediately picked her up and booted her to Bangladesh, where she has no friends or cultural experience and cannot speak the language. As of this writing, she’s still there. That’s pretty bad too. Do we give her a second thought?

“And after two Nepalese newspaper journalists wrote last month about the army’s deploying children as informers against suspected Maoist guerrillas, they were summoned to the army barracks for questioning,” Sengupta’s third example runs. You seen Dan Rather (or American journalism) lately?

Further into Sengupta’s story, we discover that “The American law threatening the loss of military aid, passed by the United States Congress last year, was prompted by Nepal’s unenviable human rights distinction: during the past two years, the largest number of new cases of disappeared persons reported to the United Nations came from here… those who are sus-pected of being Maoists or their sympathizers can be locked away without charges for up to a year under Nepal’s antiterror laws.”

This watchdog of liberty is the same Congress, mind you, that just extended the PATRIOT Act. As for America’s own disap-peared, have a look at p. 21 for the domestic, and p. 16 for the off-shore variety. Nepal is to be reproved because the Maoists are yes-terday’s enemy: permissible targets can only be Muslim these days.

“The conditions for restoring full American military aid range from whether law enforcement authorities obey court orders on prisoner releases, to whether steps are taken to end torture by security forces, to whether the government allows the National Human Rights Commission to function freely.”

Think Guant‡namo. Think Abu Ghraib. Think of the pillorying of Amnesty International (p. 19) for naming the unnamable: the provenance of “the gulag of our times.”

Is your mind boggled? Then maybe your patriotism is suspect.

Don’t worry about the plight of the King of Nepal, by the way: I’m betting he’ll get his military aid. Deep in the story we read that the Bushies are hoping he’ll send troops to Afghanistan. If he does, he’s off the hook. Congress may get confused about what its priorities are, but kings always basically understand each other.

If you get depressed, though, think FOIA. The Freedom of Information Act still champions the public’s right to know what the maestros of the cover-up desperately wish we didn’t. One can learn from the past (McCarthy- and Vietnam-era surveillance, see pp. 5-10) what to expect in the present. So another Times headline—“Large Volume of F.B.I. Files Alarms U.S. Activist Groups”—didn’t exactly surprise us in July. Yeah, they’re at it again. Whoever has a forbidden skeleton in their closet will be certain that you must have ten in yours. The dirty secret that they’re after is really the realization of their own. Torture. Disappearance. Political mass murder. We can’t…quite…remember. No, those things couldn’t possibly happen here.

If you want them to blow a gasket, don’t have anything to hide.

With this issue I am passing the oratorical torch to Fellowship’s new editor, the accomplished Ethan Vesely-Flad. You’ll get a preview of him on the following page. It’s been a grand pleasure haranguing you. I hope to keep dropping in to these pages from time to time.

 —Rabia Terri Harris, Interim Editor, newseditor@forusa.org