Month: March 2009

China Shuts Down Phone, Internet in Tibet

The Times of London’s Jane Macartney reports:

About a quarter of China’s territory, an area the size of Western Europe, has been closed off to foreigners. Thousands of troops and paramilitary police have been deployed in Tibetan-populated regions amid fears of a renewed outburst of the anti-Chinese violence that rocked the region a year ago. Winding mountain roads have been clogged for days with convoys of armoured military trucks and coaches bringing in reinforcements.

Two counties of western Sichuan province, where some of the biggest demonstrations erupted last year, have been virtually cut off already from the outside world. Their internet and mobile phone systems have been blocked. From tomorrow, mobile phone users in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, will find that they are virtually unable to communicate.

A message sent out by the mobile telephone company in the city late last week notified subscribers that the system would be undergoing maintenance from March 10 to April 1. “Please forgive any inconvenience caused,” it said.

The authorities are fearful of a repeat of the unrest last year when Tibetans used text messages to communicate details of new demonstrations against Chinese rule in the vast and sparsely populated Himalayan region. Protests spread swiftly among distant Tibetan communities on a scale unseen since the 1959 uprising.

A Chinese-language website catering for Tibetans closed for repairs on Friday. The popular website featured news from China’s state-run media and Government, as well as cultural and Buddhist content.

This massive censorship and silencing of Tibetans is the lastest extreme measure in China’s crackdown on Tibet.

Oh and the title of Macartney’s article? “MONKS TAKEN FOR ‘RE-EDUCATION’ BEFORE TIBET UPRISING ANNIVERSARY”.

The rounding up of 109 monks from Lutsang monastery in Qinghai province, western China, is one of a series of extraordinary security measures being implemented to prevent restive Tibetans from commemorating the anniversary with protests against Chinese rule.

The other extreme measures being the shut down of the cell networks and internet, along with shutting off all of Tibet from tourists and the media, and putting tens of thousands of more troops inside Tibet.

“Our 50 years of agony”

The Sydney Morning Herald has an amazing profile of three Tibetans who fought during the 1959 national uprising against Chinese occupiers and as a result spent a combined 53 years in jail. With all the focus on what’s going on inside Tibet today, it’s a good reminder of what happened during the first ten years of China’s occupation of Tibet that lead to the massive and violent resistance that escalated in 1959, as well as the brutality of the Chinese military’s response.

Wrong About Everything

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http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:cms:item:comedycentral.com:220252

Via AmericaBlog, Jon Stewart just rips apart CNBC, the network that has been wrong about everything.

Hopefully this video encourages the administration and Dems on the Hill from not listening to these people when it comes to their thoughts on economic recovery packages, the budget, and bailouts of Wall Street, automakers, and insurance companies.

Shrill

Timothy Egan, in the midst of a brilliant riposte of Rush Limbaugh, tears apart Republican economic hypocrites:

There is a war, all right. We are witnessing the worst debacle of unfettered capitalism in our lifetime brought on by — you got it, capitalism at its worst. It cannibalized itself. Government, sad to say, had nothing to do with it — except for criminal neglect of oversight.

Now that government has been forced to the rescue, just who is insisting on taxpayer bailouts? Who is in line for handouts? Who is saying that only government can save capitalism? The very leaders of unregulated markets who injected this poison into the economy, the very plutocrats that Limbaugh celebrates.

And, of course, let us never forget that the bailouts of banks and insurance companies were initiated by the Republican president Limbaugh defended for eight years.

Cue sad antics from Rush.

NYT on 50 Year Anniversary of Tibetan Uprising

The New York Times Edward Wong again has a long, featured front page article on Tibet. It seems Wong was detained by Chinese paramilitary for trying to get into Tibet, albeit in areas outside the T.A.R. and in areas that do not have bans on foreign visitors. Along his way, Wong was able to find strong evidence of the impact of China’s harsh crackdown on Tibetans and vast militarization of Tibet:

There are no signs of protests now, residents say, because the town is completely locked down. Recent photographs taken in Xiahe show riot police officers marching in the streets.

“The security forces are everywhere, on every corner, day and night,” said a Tibetan woman reached by telephone. “Don’t come here.”

She paused when asked her opinion about the current situation. “We Tibetans who do business, we’re under a lot of pressure,” she said. “We have to keep quiet. I can’t say I disagree with the policies of the Chinese. It’s their country, and we’re only a minority.”

Like others interviewed for this article, she declined to give her name for fear of government reprisal.

It’s good to see the Times continuing to focus on Tibet and Wong’s reporting has been some of the best in recent weeks. Clearly, though, this article and others like it are about March 10th and what may happen inside Tibet on the 50th anniversary of the Tibetan national uprising.

China’s ban on foreigners to Tibet (the T.A.R. and Tibetan regions annexed to Chinese provinces), as well as the long standing media ban into Tibet, means it will be very difficult for the world to know what happens next week. Last year, the national uprising came as a surprise. There were journalists and many tourists inside Tibet to document the peaceful Tibetan protests which lead to violent Chinese response and subsequent rioting and greater protests. If such events happen this year, news of them will only come out by Tibetans risking their lives to tell the world. This is a deeply troubling fact and one that the Chinese government has worked hard to create through their draconian lock down of Tibet.

Releasing Secret Documents

As I’ve been intermittently critical of the Obama administration’s course of action on rule of law questions, I think it’s important to note that the release of secret legal documents yesterday is a huge step in the right direction and a meaningful signifier of the sort of change that is possible with Obama in the White House. Glenn Greenwald’s look at “Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the U.S.” is particularly instructive of where we are today, less than two months after the conclusion of the Bush administration.

The essence of this document was to declare that George Bush had the authority (a) to deploy the U.S. military inside the U.S., (b) directed at foreign nationals and U.S. citizens alike; (c) unconstrained by any Constitutional limits, including those of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments.  It was nothing less than an explicit decree that, when it comes to Presidential power, the Bill of Rights was suspended, even on U.S. soil and as applied to U.S. citizens.  And it wasn’t only a decree that existed in theory; this secret proclamation that the Fourth Amendment was inapplicable to what the document calls “domestic military operations” was, among other things, the basis on which Bush ordered the NSA, an arm of the U.S. military, to turn inwards and begin spying — in secret and with no oversight — on the electronic communications (telephone calls and emails) of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil.

Clearly the task in front of the Obama administration to unwind and rollback extreme, anti-constitutional executive branch legal positions like this is great. It is up to Obama and his legal counsel to take all that was wrong and cut it out, swiftly and with no hesitation. If Obama’s team proves slow or even unwilling to do this, the onus must fall out congressional leaders to do what they failed to do over the last eight years: be an assertive check on the executive branch.

Greenwald points out the the military operations authorized were not abstract, but were actualized by NSA warrantless wiretapping of Americans on U.S. soil. Understanding the sort of legal doctrines the Bush administration used to justify these actions is a necessary, but not sufficient, step for restoring the rule of law in America. We also must know what specifically was done following the establishment of these legal positions. We must know who was spied upon, who tortured our prisoners, and who was sent abroad to be tortured. We must know how wide a net the federal government cast in their suspicions of innocent Americans. Knowing what secret laws were and are in place is a step in the right direction, but it is by no means a meaningful accounting of the assault on the Constitution under the Bush administration.

Via Greenwald, Scott Horton writes:

 We may not have realized it at the time, but in the period from late 2001-January 19, 2009, this country was a dictatorship. The constitutional rights we learned about in high school civics were suspended. That was thanks to secret memos crafted deep inside the Justice Department that effectively trashed the Constitution. What we know now is likely the least of it. [Greenwald’s emphasis]

This is the imperative the Obama administration faces: how do we have such an accounting of the Bush “dictatorship” so as to restore the Constitution, while simultaneously instilling in the American public a degree of outrage and skepticism that will ensure that such actions are never again deemed acceptable by anyone serving in the federal government? Looking at our past is precisely what will ensure that our nation’s future is bright and defined by our freedoms and not their absence.