MANDELA: Obama Would Have Killed Him

US President Barack Obama

By Ekow Mensah

Nelson Mandela ought to count himself very lucky that the United States of America was not led by its first Black President when he was declared a terrorist by Western countries.

Indeed, there would have been very few options for dealing with the anti-apartheid passion of Mandela and he could have ended up dead.

Under Barack Obama, imperialism does not take prisoners and those who threaten the global system of exploitation and domination face assassination.

They have no chance to defund themselves in court and they are so quickly silence to prevent them from becoming symbols of resistance.

Obama just despatches drones to kill them in regard for the lives of those around them.

Under the guise of fighting terrorism, tens of thousands of militants and innocent people in Asia and Africa been assassinated by forces under the command of Barack Obama without the slightest reference to law.

All you have to do to qualify for assassination is to earn the accolade of terrorist from the Obama white House.

And those who have been declared as terrorist include such liberation movement as Hernas in Palestine and Hizbolla in Lebanon.

The hypocrisy of international politics is laid bare by the slowing tributes pouring out of Washington Paris, Bonn, London and elsewhere to a man they declared as a terrorist.

Interestingly, the same western countries which declared Mandela as a terrorist are the same countries now urging African leaders to emulate Nelson Mandela.

What an irony?

They are deliberately tuning Mandela into Saint because it serves their interest to do so now.

 After all Mandela failed to dismantle the economic structures of apartheid and protected those who committed crimes against humanity under apartheid.

Mandela also played a key role in sideling radical leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) including his own wife Winnie Mandela.

 Today, it has become useful to praise Mandela but we cannot forget that Obama would have assassinated him in cold blood as his predecessors did to the Congolese nationalist leader, Patrice Lumumba.

Editorial

Corruption

Sometime this week, former President Jerry John Rawlings alleged that his colleague former President Kufour has been the most corrupt in our history.

He claimed that the former President monopolised corruption to the extent that only members of his family and those he permitted were engaged in corruption.

It is important that Mr Rawlings failed to provide a shred of evidence to back his claims.

It would appear that Mr Rawlings was only engaged in a game of valueless equalisation which in the end bastardises the fight against corruption.

The Insight believes that corruption is a major drain on the national economy and needs to be fought vigorously.

However when it is reduced to a mere political blame game it does more than harm to the nation.

Let us fight corruption not just as a means to retain or win political power. 

Snowden truths help against terror

Edward Snowden

By Harry J. Bentham

On November 7, while being questioned on their spying excesses against the public, the heads of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ claimed Edward Snowden’s exposure of their crimes against democracy is helping terrorism, especially the al-Qaeda group.

What this means is that these agencies have now reached a tipping point where they claim terror and intolerance cannot be stopped unless democracy is supplanted by terror and intolerance of their own.

It is worth mentioning that WikiLeaks has been accused of this very same irresponsibility that Edward Snowden has been accused of. Namely, indirectly helping terrorists by supplying more information to the public than the state would prefer to be visible. For example, claims have been made that WikiLeaks documents were found in Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Julian Assange has dismissed the existence of WikiLeaks material there as irrelevant, noting that a lot of other literature was found in the compound and is similarly irrelevant.

WikiLeaks supporters justify leaking government documents into the public domain on the basis that WikiLeaks, like Wikipedia, is simply an information source. Who uses it, or for what ends, is simply irrelevant and incriminates no-one. If governments begin saying that dignified sources of information or clarity for the public should be destroyed because terrorists can look at them, it can be said that these governments are sending civilization towards a Dark Age.

Even if information can enable people to commit atrocities, this has never been a justification to ban information in the past. Jet airplanes and human beings were not banned after the attacks of September 11, so information should not be banned even if terrorists could use it to cause terror. On the whole, transparency is like transport in that it does far more good than bad for civilization, even if both could conceivably be used for evil ends.

Even if, for the sake of argument, we believe the UK and US governments when they claim that Snowden is helping terrorists coordinate their actions, it still provides scant reasons to end the disclosures or present any kind of case that Snowden has done more harm than good. There is still no justification to hide the information about surveillance excesses from the public.

Consider that spy agencies using sensory deprivation on the entire public, or detaining and torturing every member of the public at Guantanamo Bay, would similarly reduce the possibility of terrorist plots in society. However, it would also be a very grave offense against society and a violation of the rights of every member of that society. It is not a valid form of security for the public, because it is a form of immoral assault that governments promise to protect their populations from.

The form of spying practiced against the public by Western intelligence agencies is an immoral assault against every individual and a hostile act against democracy. Far from helping against terrorism, it renders the entire “war on terror” as a pointless farce with the people realizing that the state is likely to assault them and their democracy in its supposed mandate to protect these things. If spying excesses are an assault against democracy and the public, then these excesses cannot be said to protect anything other than a fraudulent regime that dreads the human yearning for freedom.

If any life is lost as a consequence of Edward Snowden’s revelations, we must know that this man is not to blame, because a person who told the truth should never be blamed for the consequences. The responsibility for any loss of life will rest solely with the ones who built this house of cards. Responsibility for any consequences of a lie being made or unmade will always rest with the liar, and not the whistleblower.

If our lives may be put at risk of terrorism because an immoral crime was exposed, we should consider ourselves privileged in comparison with the people who died fighting to defend the lies of Bush and Blair and their successors. The cause of truth deserves more to be risked in its name than the cause of deception and ignorance. When the choice is to support the lies of a state or the truth of one man, the latter is a more honorable thing to take risks for. If soldiers and operatives must become sacrifices for truth, transparency and freedom, their fate is more honorable than becoming sacrifices for lies like the US and UK troops and operatives whose lives were lost in Iraq.

For governments who claim to condemn irresponsibility and immoral risks, it seems the US and UK both forget to mention how their own actions boosted al-Qaeda in the ongoing Syrian Conflict and in the Iraq War before it. Given their own current priorities, saying Snowden is potentially empowering al-Qaeda is beyond hypocritical for the UK ad US governments. The idea of Snowden empowering al-Qaeda is nothing but a fantasy argument with no evidence, while the fact of the UK and US governments resorting to help al-Qaeda terrorists is an unquestionable reality faced by the Syrian population.

The revelations of Edward Snowden are not supporting terrorism, but are part of a long path to freedom that will help against terror and intolerance in the world by starting at its source.

Terrorism thrives in a world of secrecy, distrust, lies and internecine covert warfare. In such a space, it is able to gain recruits. It does not thrive in the world of transparency and accountability that whistleblowers have been striving to achieve.

The sooner the lies are dead and walls of fear against the truth have been torn down, the sooner society in Western countries will manage to restore a form of openness and trust between the government and population. Therefore, with the continuance of whistleblowing and the free flow of information from dignified sources to the people who most need it, we may hope that someday the US and UK governments will stop assaulting their own people by spying on them and accosting them.