Sunday Roundup - December 21, 2014

This is the weekly selection of news and opinion from sources outside the US mainstream media. Today we look at Cuba, the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Pakistan, nuclear weapons, US-Russia relations, and in brief, the US federal judiciary, the death penalty, Venezuela and Colombia.   

Cuba
President Obama took a major step towards normalizing relations with Cuba on Wednesday.  The shift will see the reopening of a U.S. embassy in Havana and an easing of the decades-long trade embargo of the island.  Obama detailed the changes in a White House address that coincided with a prisoner swap with Cuban authorities. U.S. citizen Alan Gross, a USAID contract worker whom Havana accused of spying, was released in exchange for three Cuban nationals jailed in Florida.  “We will end an outdated approach that for decades has failed to advance our interests, and instead we will begin to normalize relations between our two countries," Obama said...The policy shift amends existing regulations of the executive branch governing U.S. Cuba policy...These changes will allow an expansion of authorized travel categories by Americans to Cuba, increased caps for legal remittances from the U.S. to Cubans, greater commercial ties to the Cuban private sector and additional allowances between mutual exports and imports and authorizations for additional financial and banking transactions.  The reset in relations also includes a review of the U.S. designation of Cuba as a state sponsor of terrorism. Pope Francis and Uruguayan President José Mujica each played a role in the recent events which followed after more than a year of back-channel communications.  [Al Jazeera, Dec. 17]  The embargo has been opposed by the vast majority of nations - 188 of 193 nations voted to strike it down at this year's UN General Assembly vote on the embargo.  Latin American nations, which have long been especially critical of the embargo, welcomed the move.
Related

Pope John Paul II with President Fidel Castro in Cuba, 1998
Photo Credit: AP/Jose Goitia

"The US – not Cuba – comes in from the cold: Obama shifted US policy on Havana towards that of the rest of world, saying that decades-long embargo had failed" [Al Jazeera, Dec. 17]
"The spirit is willing: Papal role in Cuba thaw started with John Paul II" [Al Jazeera, Dec. 17]
John Paul II had raised eyebrows in 1996 when he granted a Vatican audience to the former seminarian-turned-revolutionary Fidel Castro. Even more remarkable, back then, was the apparent meeting of minds the two men had at the U.N. World Food conference in Rome that year on the question of hunger — and embargoes.

Occupied Palestinian Territory
With the US warning of a possible veto, Palestinian leaders and negotiators are pressing ahead with a Palestinian statehood resolution.  Palestinian foreign minister Riyad al-Malki said the draft would be submitted to the Security Council after the Palestinians agreed with France on a merged text...The new text would set a two-year deadline for wrapping up negotiations on a final agreement paving the way to a new Palestinian state with Jerusalem as the shared capital...The Palestinians pushed for action at the United Nations as the European parliament overwhelmingly backed recognition of a Palestinian state..."The draft that will be presented...is the French draft based on Palestinian observations and decisions," Malki told AFP...UN diplomats however cautioned that action may not be imminent. Jordan was due to meet with Britain, France and the United States later before deciding on whether to submit the Palestinian text.  Secretary Kerry is meeting with Israel's Netanyahu, Palestinian negotiators, and European ministers in an attempt to head off a Security Council confrontation.  The Palestinian envoy to the United Nations, Riyad Mansour, warned this week that the international community could not simply ignore the Palestinian question.  "The Palestinian question is not going to evaporate," he said.  Mansour warned of more confrontation on the ground and said the Palestinians were ready to take action at the General Assembly and at the International Criminal Court. [AFP/Yahoo News, Dec. 18] 

To hold out hope that the Israeli government will negotiate in good faith on Palestinian statehood without serious international pressure is a cruel hoax.  It's been 21 years since the Oslo 2 Accord, which provided for a two-state solution.  Progress on Oslo has been virtually non-existent since the assassination of Nobel-Peace-Prize-winner Yitzhak Rabin by an Israeli right-wing extremist.  Kerry's failed peace talks are just the latest indication of the long-standing Israeli intransigence.  

After 47 years of military occupation, with the Gaza Strip devastated by a blockade and military assaults, with a government defying international law by illegal settlements and collective punishment, with an Israeli President who has built a political career on preventing a two-state solution, it is time for Palestinian statehood to be imposed by the world community.  Palestinians are only asking for what every other people have - a homeland (193 at last count).  As it is, the land sought by Palestinians has been reduced to just 40 percent of that proposed for their state by UN Resolution 181.  

If the world has learned anything after Israel's sabotage of the "Kerry":peace talks and after its brutal assault against Gaza this summer, it's that a two-state solution will never happen as long as the United States enables Israeli oppression by its arms sales and Security Council vetoes.  To continue this policy is morally reprehensible and makes a mockery of the United States's view of itself as a defender of human rights.  

Related
"Hamas taken off EU terror blacklist: Move comes as European parliament adopts resolution supporting principle of Palestinian statehood" [The Guardian, Dec. 17]

Pakistan
Seven heavily-armed Taliban gunmen carried out an attack on a school in Pakistan that left at least 141 people, mostly teenagers and younger children, dead.  Whatever these lunatics were thinking, unmitigated outrage spread quickly across the world  - even other terrorists denounced the attack.  It takes something unusually vile for the world to pay much attention to a terrorist outrage in Pakistan. Since 2007 the annual toll of murders by jihadists has never dropped below 2,000 and in 2012 and 2013 it was not far off 4,000....But the horror of the attack by the Pakistani Taliban, an umbrella organisation of militant groups officially known as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), on an army-run school in Peshawar stands out for the scale and nature of its brutality....The army, and previous governments, must take much of the responsibility for the violence the country has suffered in recent years. The growth of the TTP is a direct consequence of neurotic fear of encirclement by India which is widespread in Pakistan’s ruling class and has led to the disastrous policy of exploiting and encouraging jihadist groups...After Nawaz Sharif became prime minister in June 2013 and Raheel Sharif (they are not related) took over as chief of army staff a year ago this disastrous policy began to change. Both men came to the conclusion that jihadist terrorism poses a greater threat to their country than India does....Reining in other terrorist groups that the state has cultivated will ultimately require moves towards a rapprochement with India over Kashmir. For that to happen India’s government will also have to show vision. [The Economist, Dec. 20]
Related
"3 Problems Pakistani Politics has to Resolve after Grisly School Attack" [Informed Comment, Dec. 17]

Nuclear Weapons
James Carroll at TomDispatch plots the long, sad course from Obama's 2009 Prague speech on banishing nuclear weapons ("As the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a moral responsibility to act... So today, I state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.") to his role as an enabler of their renewal, Obama’s timing in 2009 was critical. The weapons and delivery systems of the nuclear arsenal were aging fast....massive reductions in the arsenal had to begin before pressures to launch a program for the wholesale replacement of those weapons systems grew too strong to resist...Obama, in other words, was presiding over a golden moment, but an apocalyptic deadline was bearing down. And sure enough, that deadline came crashing through.  Thanks to Pentagon pressure, Russia's ambition to return to world power status, and extremist Republicans taking Congress hostage,  Obama has become the "Ahab of Nuclear Weapons".  In order to get the votes of Senate Republicans to ratify the START treaty, Obama made what turned out to be a devil’s bargain.  He agreed to lay the groundwork for a vast “modernization” of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, which, in the name of updating an aged system, is already morphing into a full-blown reinvention of the arms cache at an estimated future cost of more than a trillion dollars. Carroll wonders what might happen if the President went directly to the people and passionately made the case today that he made in Prague five years.  Although there is no sign that the president intends to do such a thing any longer,... if a commander-in-chief were to order nuclear reductions into the hundreds, the result might actually be a transformation of the American political conscience. In the process, the global dream of a nuclear-free world could be resuscitated and the commitment of non-nuclear states (including Iran) to refrain from nuclear-weapons development could be rescued. Ending on a pessimistic note, Carroll writes: Because of decisions likely to be taken this year and next, no American president will ever again be able to embrace this purpose as Obama once did. Nuclear weapons will instead become a normalized and permanent part of the twenty-first century American arsenal, and therefore of the arsenals of many other nations. [TomDispatch, Dec. 11]

Russia
On Thursday, President Obama signed a bill that will allow the White House to levy further sanctions on Russia over Ukraine, though the Administration has said it has no immediate plans to introduce them....US entities would be forbidden from investing in gas giant Gazprom, and the company would face additional sanctions if it broke off supplies to key eastern European countries.... Other sanctions would involve Russia’s arms exporter Rosoboronexport. Perhaps most crucially, organizations in [Russia’s] embattled financial sector would be barred from dealing with any US banks...In a related move, the bill authorizes Obama to supply anti-tank weapons, surveillance drones and other sophisticated equipment for Petro Poroshenko's government in Kiev, though White House officials said the President had no immediate plans to allow US weapons to be used to put down the uprising in the east of the country...Two factors appear to have put a brake on the plan. Obama is loathe to impose new measures without backing from Brussels, where there is no unity on the need for future sanctions...and the Russia rouble has collapsed over the past week - partly due to oil prices. [Russia Times, Dec. 18]
Dmitri Trenin at The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace believes that the West and Russia may now be entering a state of permanent crisis.  Conflict resolution is not on the agenda. It is time for permanent crisis management. ...Crisis management must ensure, at minimum, that there is no resumption of hostilities in eastern Ukraine. Should Kiev, with Washington's blessing or its acquiescence, attempt to retake Donetsk and Lugansk, the Kremlin may not confine itself to restoring the status quo...The best one can do now is to engage in practical steps to make life less miserable for the people directly affected. The trilateral Russia-Ukraine-EU agreement on gas supplies to Ukraine finally concluded at the end of October is a useful first step...Ukraine and Europe...should not overreact to the November 2 elections in Donbass. They would be wise to engage with newly elected leaders of the region. Talking with people, including adversaries, and dealing with them does not imply recognition of an entity, but can be useful in managing important practical issues.  Europeans need to find a way to relate to Russians, even if, in Germany Chancellor Angela Merkel's memorable phrase, Putin may "live in another world." If Europe and Germany want to be a serious player..., they have to build a relationship with Russia on a new foundation of realism and pragmatism.  [CEIP, Nov. 4]

In Brief - Links
US Federal Judiciary
"The Senate Just Cemented Obama's Judicial Legacy" [Huffington Post, Dec. 18]
The number of vacancies in the Federal courts is now 41 out of 874 judgeships.  This is down from 86 vacancies in March.

Colombia
"Colombia rebuffs FARC ceasefire offer: Government says peace deal must be reached before it will accept rebels’ demand that truce be verified by other countries" [The Guardian, Dec. 18]

Venezuela
"Venezuela sanctions highlight US hypocrisy on human rights: Obama should follow his example on Cuba and engage with, not punish, Venezuela" [Al Jazeera, Dec. 18]

Death Penalty
In 2014, 35 people were executed, the fewest in 20 years. Death sentences dropped to their lowest level in the modern era of the death penalty, with 72 people sentenced to death, the smallest number in 40 years. Just seven states carried out executions, and three states (Texas, Missouri, and Florida) accounted for 80% of the executions.  [Death Penalty Information Center, Dec. 18]

The machinery of death

"From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death."

- Justice Harry Blackmun

Twenty years ago, Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun wrote an emotional dissent from the Court's decision not to hear the appeal of a mentally impaired Texas inmate on death row.  Blackmun had become convinced that the death penalty could no longer be carried out in a constitutional manner in our country. Several recent news items brought Justice Blackmun's dissent to mind. There may yet be some hope that the United States will join the rest of the civilized world in abolishing the death penalty.

On July 16, a federal judge ruled California's death penalty unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishment".  From CNN and KFOR: "Judge Cormac J. Carney vacated the 1995 death sentence of Ernest D. Jones...Carney wrote: 'Allowing this system to continue to threaten Mr. Jones with the slight possibility of death, almost a generation after he was first sentenced, violates the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment...In California, the execution of a death sentence is so infrequent, and the delays preceding it so extraordinary, that the death penalty is deprived of any deterrent or retributive effect it might once have had...Such an outcome is antithetical to any civilized notion of just punishment.' "  

Through year-end 2013, there had been 317 post-conviction DNA exonerations in the United States. Earlier this month, we witnessed yet another case in which DNA evidence was used to exonerate two innocent men.  The New York Times reported on September 2, "Thirty years after their convictions in the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl in rural North Carolina, based on confessions that they quickly repudiated and said were coerced, two mentally disabled half brothers were declared innocent and ordered released Tuesday by a judge here. The case against the men, always weak, fell apart after DNA evidence implicated another man whose possible involvement had been somehow overlooked by the authorities even though he lived only a block from where the victim’s body was found, and he had admitted to committing a similar rape and murder around the same time." One brother was on death row and the other had served 30 years of a life imprisonment.

This North Carolina case was actually cited in 1994 by Justice Antonin Scalia justifying the use of the death penalty even in the case of mentally impaired defendants.  Heather Digby Parton writing at Salon.com excoriates Scalia and his views on the death penalty, which include his contention that the state is not doing anything immoral if it executes an innocent man as long as he has been given a fair trial. "Worst of all, Justice Scalia and other death penalty proponents who find nothing immoral in the state’s conscious, coldblooded taking of a life are equally unconcerned that they might be taking the life of an innocent person....This man claims that he could not be a judge if he thought his participation in the death penalty was immoral and yet he does not believe it matters under the Constitution if the state executes innocent people. How on earth can such a depraved person be on the Supreme Court of the United States? On what basis can our country lay claim to a superior system of justice and a civilized moral order when such people hold power?"

The problem goes well beyond Justice Scalia.  Although polls are showing a continuing downward trend towards the death penalty, 55% of the country still approve of the "state's conscious, coldblooded taking of a life." As a nation, we have a very long way to go before we brag about our moral superiority. Our executions in 2013 were exceeded only by China, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea. In fact, the United States is one of just 22 nations that executed prisoners last year. The death penalty has been abolished outright or is under a moratorium in 155 countries. Just 40 countries still maintain a death penalty. With the sole exception of the United States, all of these 40 nations are in Asia, Africa or the Caribbean.   

There was a brief period, from 1972 until 1977, when the death penalty was suspended in the United States. By a 5 to 4 vote, the Supreme Court in its Furman vs. Georgia decision voided the death penalty statutes of the 40 states that had them. While we won't ever have again those enlightened justices (Douglas, Brennan, Stewart, White and Marshall), it should be noted that one of the dissenting justices in Furman vs. Georgia was Blackmun. Twenty-two years after that dissenting vote, Blackmun decided that the death penalty could not be imposed in a manner consistent with the Constitution. If some of the justices currently in favor of the death penalty change their opinions, that may be enough to declare it unconstitutional once and for all.

Demographically, younger people tend to oppose the death penalty more than older people. For example, a Barna Group poll found that just 23% of practicing Christian millenials supported the death penalty. They see it as a human rights as well as a moral issue.

Many religious leaders have spoken against the death penalty and that same Barna Group poll found that there was a significant difference in opposition to the death penalty between practicing Christians and the overall population. Perhaps no church has been more clear in its opposition to the death penalty in recent decades than the Catholic Church.   In 1999, Pope John Paul II speaking at a Papal Mass in St. Louis, Missouri, said,"The new evangelization calls for followers of Christ who are unconditionally pro-life: who will proclaim, celebrate and serve the Gospel of life in every situation. A sign of hope is the increasing recognition that the dignity of human life must never be taken away, even in the case of someone who has done great evil. . . . I renew the appeal I made . . . for a consensus to end the death penalty, which is both cruel and unnecessary." In 2005, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops wrote in A Culture of Life and the Penalty of Death, "Twenty-five years ago, our Conference of bishops first called for an end to the death penalty. We renew this call to seize a new moment and new momentum. This is a time to teach clearly, encourage reflection, and call for common action in the Catholic community to bring about an end to the use of the death penalty in our land." 

(Just a thought - six of the justices on the Supreme Court (including all five conservatives) are Roman Catholics. Okay, I get the need for separation of Church and State but surely one's conscience should play some role in deciding the justice and fairness of a law or statute.) 

Finally, there are the justice, fairness and practicality arguments against the death penalty.

• It has never been shown to be a deterrent.
• It is seldom applied to individuals who can afford a strong defense team and is disproportionately applied to persons of color. (The total death row population as of April 2014 was 43% white, 42% black, 13% Latino, and 2% other races.)
• Innocent people have been executed.
• The cost of capital cases are prohibitively high.

Although a SCOTUS ruling against the death penalty does not appear imminent, the states are taking action. The death penalty has now been abolished in 18 states and the District of Columbia. Moratoriums are currently in effect in another 7 states, and 2 states have not executed a prisoner in more than 15 years. (Source: The Death Penalty Information Center) 

Our Constitution, human rights' considerations, the teachings of religious leaders, the example of the world's other democracies, and justice, fairness, and practicality concerns all argue for an end to the death penalty. This barbaric and unnecessary practice, this cruel and unusual punishment, this "conscious, coldblooded taking of a life" by the state is a blot on our national character. We should rejoin the democracies of the world in barring it as soon as possible. If not now, then we'll need to wait until our wiser, more humane, less vengeful sons and daughters bring it about.

Links

Death Penalty Information Center

Amnesty International USA - US Death Penalty Facts

The Innocence Project