Sunday Round-Up - May 12, 2013

This is the weekly selection of news and opinion from sources outside the US mainstream media. Today we look at the still-open Guantanamo Bay prison, Secretary of State Kerry's Moscow visit and Syria, Italy's failure to form a progressive government after the February elections, and the Bangladesh factory collapse. Excerpts are from TomDispatch.com, The Guardian, The Asia Times, Pravda, and The Nation.

Guantanamo Bay Prison

One of the first things Barack Obama did when taking office in 2009 was to pledge the shutdown of the Guantanamo Bay prison. Guantanamo was being used as a facility for the indefinite detention of prisoners in the "war on terror". Well, four years later, prisoners are still being held in indefinite detention and a hunger strike is underway.   Hopefully Obama will make good on his latest pledge to finally close this, as Peter Van Buren calls it, "crown jewel of the offshore Bermuda Triangle of injustice that the Bush administration set up in January 2002." Van Buren continues in his May 9 post on TomDispatch.com: "The fact that relatively few Americans seem fazed by this should be startling. No charges, no trials, but never getting out of prison: that would once have been associated with the practices of a totalitarian state....Guantanamo now holds 86 prisoners (out of the 166 caged there) who have been carefully vetted by the U.S. military, the FBI, the CIA, and so on, and found to have done nothing for which they could be charged or should be imprisoned." Most of these vetted prisoners are Yemeni and Obama has imposed a moratorium on transferring prisoners there.

 

 

Syria and Kerry's Visit to Moscow

Secretary of State John Kerry was in Moscow Tuesday, May 7, on a "working visit" trying to enlist Russian assistance in ending the Syrian civil war. The civil war has resulted in more than 70,000 deaths. The recent Israeli airstrikes in Syria and the Hezbollah and Syrian reaction to it have brought to the forefront the potential for the situation to spill over and destabilize the entire Middle East.  Stephen Lendman notes in a May 9 post in Pravda: "Russian condemnation of Israeli air strikes preceded Kerry's arrival. Moscow's Foreign Ministry called them 'a threat to regional stability.' ... Moscow wants Syrians to decide who'll lead them. Foreign intervention is rejected. It doesn't want another allied regional government toppled. Doing so leaves others more vulnerable. It gives Washington greater control. It harms Russia's strategic interests." The Asia Times continued the theme of the strange run-up to Kerry's Moscow visit. Besides noting Moscow's angry reaction to the Israeli airstrikes, M K Bhadrakumar writes "the US senate's foreign relations committee took up a draft bill proposing American military help for the Syrian rebel fighters. It was no doubt a barely-disguised pressure tactic threatening Moscow that unless it compromised on Syria, Obama would arm the anti-regime fighters." In the end, Kerry and Sergei Lavrov, Russia's foreign minister, "pledged [their countries] to convene an international conference aimed at ending the civil war in Syria, hoping to give the situation a new diplomatic push following two years of bloodshed...Kerry said at the midnight press conference that the conference would be held 'as soon as practical, possibly, hopefully as soon as the end of the month'. " [The Guardian]  Then in a Friday editorial, The Guardian endorses the persuasive arguments of the European Council on Foreign Relations for de-escalation and a diplomatic solution. "It means pressuring the Gulf states to starve rival militias of arms. Without that happening, there is no political solution....For Russia and Iran to cut their military support, Assad's fate has to be a product of the transition, not a precondition of it." As events of the past couple of weeks show, a "war that has already killed 70,000 Syrians, displaced 4 million and forced 1 million to flee could get a lot worse. That is why it is right for Barack Obama to resist pressure from Britain and France to arm the rebels, and to instead make another attempt at an internationally brokered settlement with the Russians."

 

 

Italy's New Not-So-Progressive Government

 

Italy's new government of center-left and center-right coalitions was formed two months after the elections after Beppe Grillo refused to take his Five Star Movement party into any coalition.   Frederika Randall writing in The Nation examines Italy's failure to form a progressive government. She writes: "There was one sunny week this spring when it looked like change might finally come to Italy. A week when an ossified and gerontocratic political class looked like it might give way to new faces and new ideas. When the combined forces of youth and progress looked strong enough to defy European austerity." Unfortunately, "hopes for a progressive government failed, thanks to suicidal divisions among the center-left and Beppe Grillo’s demagogic posturing."

 

Bangladesh Garment Factory Tragedy

Finally on May 8, The Guardian carried a sad update on the factory collapse in Bangladesh. The death toll had risen above 800.   "The disaster is the worst ever in the garment sector, far surpassing fires last year that killed about 260 people in Pakistan and 112 in Bangladesh, as well as the 1911 garment disaster in New York's Triangle Shirtwaist factory that killed 146 workers." As to the possible cause of the collapse, officials "say the building's owner illegally added three floors and allowed the garment factories to install heavy machines and generators, even though the structure was not designed to support such equipment." (By Friday, the death toll had soared over 1,000.  That day, there was a miraculous rescue of a seamstress who had been trapped in the rubble for 17 days. [Washington Post/AP])