Amnesty International reports today that there were a minimum of 3,797 people who were executed last year in 25 countries; 97 percent of those executions occurred in China, Iran, Vietnam, and America.

In 2004, Bhutan, Greece, Samoa, Senegal, and Turkey joined the list of 115 other nations that have abolished the death penalty.  

Mimi Hanaoka

If you’re fluent in Arabic, have a penchant for psychological warfare, like getting your paycheck from the U.S. government, and have a knack for drawing, then there might be a job for you; the US Army is attempting to create a comic book that will, it hopes, have the youth of the Middle East and Islamic world embracing Americanism with open arms. The rationale is that “in order to achieve long-term peace and stability in the Middle East, the youth need to be reached.” Thus, the American government’s Federal Business Opportunities website now posts an ad looking for a collaborator for “a series of comic books,” since the medium would provide “the opportunity for youth to learn lessons, develop role models and improve their education.” The comic book will be produced by a new player in the business: the U.S. Special Operations Command based in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, home to the Fourth Psychological Operations Group.

Applicants should note, however, that they need not be overly creative — the American Army has already concocted the basics of character and plot, which will be centered around “security forces, military and police,” and will take place “in the near future in the Middle East.” The ideal author and artist should not highly value artistic integrity, either, but he or she should be open to working in (or perhaps being trampled on) in a highly collaborative process, since the U.S. government hopes to tempt some Middle Eastern nations to participate in this comic book venture through their ministries of the interior.  

This new pawn in the escalating war of media propaganda between the U.S. and the Muslim and Middle Eastern world will be facing stiff competition. The tentacular reach and popularity of the graphic novel now extends to the Middle East with AK Comics’ Middle East Heroes line of comic books, which is the first comic book specifically targeted for the audience in the region. The graphic novel, which is published in both Arabic and English, pits forces of good and evil for control of the City of All Faiths. Al-Ahram Weekly recently ran an article about Middle East Heroes with the cheerful title “My Favorite Superhero,” which quoted a 27-year-old business analyst explaining the appeal of the comic: “The setting is familiar and most characters’ names are Arabic…it’s just easier to connect.”

Middle East Heroes comic books seem set to enjoy even wider distribution, if not popularity; the AK Comics website gleefully notes that EgyptAir has agreed to a first-of-its-kind deal to dole out 20,000 AK Comics magazines on their flights. In contrast, its naked propagandism and American authorship will likely make the American government’s nascent comic book a very tough sell.  

Mimi Hanaoka

“I do not know whether I am an adult or a child…All I do is eat and sleep, eat and sleep.”

— Majok, a Sudanese youth who was brutalized and castrated as a child, and who is now a freed slave. Majok does not know how old he is or what his name is.

In January of 2005, an agreement was signed to end the civil war in Sudan that raged for 21 years between the largely Muslim north of the country — where the Arabic speaking Sudanese identify themselves as Arabs — and the Christian and Animist southern region. In the months after the agreement to end the war, the Committee for the Eradication of Abduction of Women and Children (CEAWC), a six-year-old Sudanese organization, founded by the government, has been repatriating southern Sudanese who were enslaved by their northern compatriots. It is unclear how many southerners were enslaved; the London- and Kenya-based Rift Valley Institute has identified 12,000 abductions, 11,000 missing, and 5,000 murdered. In contrast, the controversial Swiss group, Christian Solidarity International, refers to 200,000 people who were abducted, a number generated by local southern Sudanese leaders.

The CEAWC’s repatriation of slaves is problematized and complicated; while many former slaves are relieved and delighted to return to their southern homeland, there are others, particularly of the younger generation, who feel displaced and wish to return to the northern region, which they have come to identify as home. Additionally, agencies including UNICEF and Save the Children UK have criticized or questioned CEAWC’s methodology for repatriating individuals, suggesting that some people were not clearly identified as slaves, or if they were, they were not consulted about whether they wanted to return to the south or if they even had families to return to.

Mimi Hanaoka

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 sent shivers of horror, disbelief, and indignation throughout America, and the American intelligence community was forced to face the tears and recrimination of the nation. Now America has the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program, a thee-year pilot program with a four million dollar budget that, by September of 2006, will send a maximum of 150 current or aspiring analysts — most are graduate students — to university programs, generally for two years, to resuscitate what critics have labeled America’s feeble and systemically crippled intelligence community. The question, then, is whether this program is a boon for the nation or a sinister and secret plan. The jury is still out.

The program is clearly designed to meet a near-desperate need of intelligence, as the terrorist attacks in 2001 demonstrated. In 2004 the CIA stated that it aims to increase the number of its analysts by 50 percent, and the organization has undergone numerous personnel reshuffles recently, in addition to the broader changes occurring in the American intelligence community-at-large.

While the program demonstrates an attempt to rectify recent intelligence failures with a larger pool of more focused analysts, there are concerns about the ethics of the program. Importantly, the students enrolled in the Pat Roberts program will be working behind desks and are not actual spies in the field; they seem, however, suspiciously close to spies in the classroom. The students are not obligated to disclose their intelligence affiliations to the academic community or to their professors, and some critics of the program have raised ethical concerns, especially regarding the students’ anthropological fieldwork and work in the social sciences, particularly given previous relationships between social scientists, the CIA, and totalitarian regimes. Associate Professor of Anthropology at St. Martin’s College David H. Price argues that the program may confuse and taint the ethical obligations of the academic with his or her allegiance to the intelligence community. Additionally, he argues that the unannounced presence of an intelligence community member will be tantamount to spying on professors.    

The success and efficacy of the program is still open to debate, and the its four million dollar budget is certainly small; this year’s budget for Title VI fellowships for area studies, which are funded by the federal government, channeled through participating universities, and which carry no government service obligations, is 28.2 million dollars. The issues the Pat Roberts program raises, however, are pertinent and valid; does this program threaten the intellectual and personal freedom of American professors, does it reintroduce an inappropriate dose of secret intimacy between academia and the intelligence community, and would making such a program more transparent compromise its very purpose?

Mimi Hanaoka

“My children don’t see role models in their lives: mayors, factory managers, postal workers, business owners. So we’re setting up a place to show our unique culture, our unique society.”

— Marvin T. Miller, who is deaf, speaking through an interpreter about the town for the deaf he intends to build on a sparsely populated stretch of land in South Dakota (Salem, the neighboring town, has 1,300 residents).  The proposed town, Laurent — named in honor of Laurent Clerc, a 19th-century teacher of the deaf — has already attracted 92 families who intend to move to the village, where all services, including stores, the fire station, restaurants, and businesses would be deaf-friendly. American Sign Language would be the dominant language in the village.

Mimi Hanaoka

“As we approach the season of the Nobel Peace Prize, I would like to nominate the spiritual leader of Iraq’s Shiites, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, for this year’s medal. I’m serious,” claims The New York Times’ columnist  Thomas L. Friedman, writing about the accomplishments of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most prominent Shiite cleric in Iraq.

Friedman cites three main reasons that al-Sistani has contributed to the democratization of Iraq and, more broadly, the Middle East: al-Sistani has advocated a political strategy and vision of Iraq that has centered on positively and proactively focusing on the lives of Iraqis without resorting to defaming other movements or individuals; he has encouraged Iraqi voters, and not elite or self-appointed clerics, to have the commanding voice in post-occupation in Iraq; most importantly, in Friedman’s view, al-Sistani supports an understanding of Islam that is amenable to democracy. As Friedman characterizes it, in al-Sistani’s view, politics may be infused with Islamic values, but clerics will not be the dominant political force.

Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani’s most recent and most visible political role in reforming Iraq from beneath the rubble was to encourage his Shia followers to vote in the January 30th elections, whereas some Sunni organizations demanded that potential voters boycott the elections. Voter turnout was a staggeringly low 2 percent in some predominantly Sunni areas, as voters boycotted the elections or were intimated away from the voting booths by rampant violence.

Mimi Hanaoka

“Same-sex marriage cannot be prohibited solely because California has always done so before.”

— San Francisco Superior Court Judge Richard Kramer, writing today to explain his ruling, in which he declared that California’s current state ban on same-sex marriages violates citizens’ constitutional right to equal treatment. Kramer previously ruled in support of the same-sex couples when they, along with the city of San Francisco, sought legal recourse in March of 2004 after the Supreme Court annulled approximately 4,000 same-sex marriages that had taken place in San Francisco on the basis that the city had illegitimately allowed the marriages to take place despite the state’s ban on the practice.  

Mimi Hanaoka

Behind every great man stands a woman, and behind every militant jihadist stands an equally devoted jihadist woman. Or so says al-Qaeda.  

The Search for International Terrorist Entities Institute, or SITE Institute — an American non-profit terrorist-monitoring group that scours, among other things, militant Islamist websites — reports on a rising target demographic for militant Islamist websites: women.

In a passage purportedly written by the former and late al-Qaeda leader Yusuf al-Ayiri, the site proclaims:

“The reason we address women in these pages is our observation that when a woman is convinced of something, no one will spur a man to fulfill it like she will… The saying ‘Behind every great man stands a woman’ was true for Muslim women at these times, for behind every great Mujahid stood a woman.”

Targeting women for jihad is certainly not a new thing; eager to capitalize on an expanding Internet audience, Al-Khansa, a new jihadist online magazine directed exclusively at women, incites women to participate in jihad. What this recent jihadist message does demonstrate, though, is the ferocity of the media wars being waged for the hearts and minds of Muslims. While the al-Qaeda recruiting video tapes have tended to target men, this attests to an increasingly visible move to envelop women within the fold of militant jihad, even be it, in this case, as some sort of a support mechanism (woman are, according to this website, not supposed participate in physical combat). This, apparently, is gender equality’s new and militant face.  

Mimi Hanaoka

The tentacular reach and popularity of the graphic novel now extends to the Middle East with the first comic book specifically targeted for the audience in the region — AK Comics’ Middle East Heroes line of comic books, which is published in both Arabic and English, pits forces of good and evil for control of the City of All Faiths.

“We need to believe in a higher being that will be there for help, and can affect change on his own. There is a global and human need for that,” explained Marwan Nashar, managing editor at AK Comics.

The main characters — two men and two women — include Jalila, The Defender of City of All the Faiths; Aya, the Princess of Darkness; Rakan, the Lone Warrior; and Zein, the Last Pharaoh, who was spirited out of his pharonic age by a time capsule. The generous gender balance and the very literal strength of the female characters — the female Jalila has the most powerful abilities — is proving stunningly popular with women, and the comic book appears to be enjoying widespread general appeal. Al-Ahram Weekly recently ran an article about the comic with the cheerful title “My Favorite Superhero,” which quoted a 27-year-old business analyst explaining the appeal of the comic: “The setting is familiar and most characters’ names are Arabic … it’s just easier to connect.”  

The comic book seems set to enjoy even wider distribution, if not popularity; the AK Comics website gleefully notes that EgyptAir has agreed to a first-of-its-kind deal to dole out 20,000 AK Comics magazines on their flights.  

Mimi Hanaoka

“I am concerned that the public may start to wonder: ‘Well what is a journalist and isn’t it all kind of a scam somewhere on the payroll, some seem to work for partisan organizations’ … I fear they may question all of journalism, it’s kind of a con game and a sham and that would be unfortunate.”

— Matthew Cooper, Time White House correspondent, speaking about the perception of journalists in the aftermath of the Jeff Gannon scandal.  

Bloggers recently unmasked Jeff Gannon, who had been installed in the White House as a correspondent for a media outlet, as a journalistic fraud; his real name is James Guckert, the ostensibly responsible media outlet for which he reported, Talon News, has been exposed as a Republican mouthpiece and has now been taken offline, and lurid accounts that link Guckert to pornographic websites have now surfaced.  

Bloggers began to research and subsequently expose Guckert after he asked President Bush the leading question that was too transparently partisan to evade scrutiny: “Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of the US economy … How are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?”

Mimi Hanaoka

Forced to stand trial without his lawyer and behind closed doors, Arash Cigarchi was recently sentenced to 14 years in jail in Iran for the commentary he published in his blog; he was officially charged, among other crimes, with “aiding and abating hostile governments and opposition groups.” Bizarrely, Cigarchi himself may not even have been present at his trial, which Human Rights Watch has condemned as a “sham” that “violated international standards for fair trials.”

Widney Brown, deputy program director of Human Rights Watch, stated that the “Iranian government is sending a message to its critics: keep silent or face years in prison.”

Other bloggers in Iran, including Mojtaba Lotfi and Mojtaba Saminezhad, have been thrown into jail as a result of the political commentary they published in their blogs.

Mimi Hanaoka

Five years ago, no one would have thought that Stonewall, a lobbying group for gays, lesbians, and bisexuals, would be acting as a consultant to the Royal Navy of Britain. Nor would anyone have thought that the Royal Navy would consider placing advertisements in gay magazines. If times have changed, so have the Royal Navy’s strategies.  

Britain terminated its ban on gays in the military five years ago, and the British parliament approved the Civil Partnership Act last year, granting registered same sex couples rights similar to those given to heterosexual married couples. From the fall of 2005, gay servicemen and women in partnerships may apply for housing that was previously restricted to married couples.

The Royal Navy isn’t merely paying lip service to this new legislation — through its partnership with Stonewall, it’s seeking to retain and recruit more gays and lesbians, in addition to improving their quality of life in the military. Director of Naval Life Management Commodore Paul Docherty states that the current efforts are intended to “make more steps toward improving the culture and attitude within the service as a whole, so gays who are still in the closet feel that much more comfortable about coming out.”
  

Mimi Hanaoka