Daily Telegraph, London, on the necessary evil of detaining terror suspects indefinitely: If you were a law professor looking for a tricky legal problem, you couldn’t get much trickier than the position of the Guantanamo four, who will in all
Daily Telegraph, London, on the necessary evil of detaining terror suspects indefinitely:
If you were a law professor looking for a tricky legal problem, you couldn’t get much trickier than the position of the Guantanamo four, who will in all likelihood be released from police custody soon after they return here within a couple of weeks. …
The detention of the men for up to three years despite the lack of evidence would offend the basic laws of justice in peacetime. But, at a time of war — when these men were detained — it is the right of even the most impeccable of democracies to suspend those basic laws in the defense of its people.
Who would deny the right of the American government to have detained the Sept. 11 bombers if they had been caught on Sept. 10 on the merest hint that they were up to no good?
The question then becomes: how long do you detain suspects when your nation is involved in an asymmetrical war on terrorism that, as President Bush has said, may well last for decades rather than years? Momentary suspension of the basic laws of justice is a necessary evil; permanent suspension is just straightforwardly evil. …
The Star, Johannesburg, South Africa, on Palestinian president-elect Mahmoud Abbas:
The landslide victory in the Palestinian Authority presidential election was a good result for the resumption of the long-stalled Middle East peace process.
Abbas is clearly more committed to the peace process than his late predecessor, Yasser Arafat. But it is already clear that neither peace nor even the resumption of the peace process are assured. Abbas will have to walk a precarious tightrope between the demands for peace talks and the concerns of some Palestinians that he might sell them out.
Already the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon has demanded that Abbas rein in the terrorists as a condition for resuming talks. Politically Sharon probably has to say that. But he must not make the demand too literal. Abbas is physically incapable of ending all terror, and politically, if he tries too hard to do so, he might provoke an internal backlash.
And Sharon will have to make some concessions too, by offering substantially more than his present commitment to withdraw from Gaza and only tiny bits of the West Bank.
Both men will have to tread very carefully, each dealing with his own extremists while helping the other to deal with his. It is called building the center. It was the way it was done here and it is the way it will have to be done there.
The Irish Times, Dublin, Ireland, on the question of God’s role in the Dec. 26 tsunami:
The deepest ethical, philosophical and theological questions are raised by the tsunami disaster in south Asia and the wonderful outpouring of global solidarity in response to it. How, ask many Christian and other religious believers and those who are skeptical of such faith, can a good and omniscient God have allowed it to happen?
Can the question of God’s existence be resolved simply by this assumed responsibility for natural or human events? Does humanity’s freedom of will to respond compassionately and with love to such disasters not provide the real test of this question? How does the flow of material aid and human empathy to the Indian Ocean countries and peoples affected measure up to that demanding task?
Rarely have questions like these been posed in as direct and challenging a way as over the weeks since the tsunami struck. It is one way of gauging how deeply people have been affected in a much more interdependent global setting. In Ireland and throughout the Christian world the fact that the disaster coincided with the Christmas holiday greatly amplified the religious response and questioning to which it has given rise, as well as the human solidarity shown.
The New Zealand Herald, Auckland, on military’s failure to adequately deliver aid:
Twice last week this country’s contribution to international tsunami relief was affected by the Royal New Zealand Air Force’s failure to maintain its aircraft in sound operational condition. The first Air Force Hercules dispatched to northern Sumatra was grounded in Indonesia when a crack was discovered in the manifold. A few days later the second Hercules on the tsunami mission struck mechanical problems, preventing Foreign Minister Phil Goff from making an intended excursion to the disaster zone after the Jakarta aid meeting. …
It is automatic to blame parsimonious Governments for the state of the armed forces. It is true that defense budgets were slashed in the early 1990s, from 2.3 per cent of gross domestic product to 1.2 per cent. But most countries were cutting defense expenditure at that time, just after the collapse of the Soviet bloc. It was called the “peace dividend.” The savings contributed to fiscal improvement in Western economies which helped to produce a decade of remarkable prosperity. …
The RNZAF’s five Hercules are nearly 40 years old but two years ago the Government announced an upgrade that was expected to extend their use by 15 years. If the aircraft are not obsolete, not peripheral to modern military requirements and not forgotten in defense spending, why are they continually breaking down? … They should be constantly ready for an emergency, and reliable. They are plainly neither. Their breakdowns are now well beyond a joke. They are becoming a national embarrassment.
La Nation, Buenos Aires, Argentina, on the necessary tasks of Palestinian president-elect Mahmoud Abbas:
The crisis in the Middle East that Israelis and Palestinians have faced for decades has, in the end, projected instability beyond its own geographic dimension. The recent election of Mahmoud Abbas, a moderate and experienced Palestinian leader, as president of the Palestinian Authority and successor of Yasser Arafat, creates a new opportunity that must not be wasted. Particularly because he received the solid support of two-thirds of all Palestinian voters. …
Abbas now has ahead of him two kinds of tasks, both urgent. The first, on the internal front, he must immediately begin to reorganize the chaotic Palestinian Authority and drive out the corruption that infects it; he must centralize and control adequately the different Palestinian security forces, which today number no less than nine, a situation that has filled them all with operative anarchy, and restructure the Palestinian justice administration, deeply disreputable to the rest of the world. …
Secondly, he must take part in an extremely complex task with Israel: the revival of the derailed peace process. To this end, he must prepare his people to accept necessary compromises, leaving behind the absolutism that seeks all or nothing. …
This opportunity must be supported by the international community, with the leadership of the United States and the European Union, but with the determined participation of all, including Argentina.
On the Net: http://www.lanacion.com.ar/
On the Net: http://www.corriere.it
Jan. 11
Daily Star, Beirut, Lebanon, on Arab media in the information age:
This is the age of information, the age of communication, is it not? Unless one has been asleep in a cave for the last 10 years, this fact is self-evident. For some, however, it has been a struggle to keep up with developments in this new age. … In the Arab world, there is a long way to go before indigenous media find their true place and their true voice in the region.
This is where the conference “Arab Media in the Information Age,” hosted in Abu Dhabi by the Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research … has a role to play. … United Arab Emirates Information Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahyan (proposed the following) three major points: state-dominated Arab media should develop partnerships with the private sector; regional media should fulfill a sociopolitical role by applying pressure on Arab governments to make them more accountable to the public; and all press laws in the Arab world are long overdue for review and should, in fact, be completely overhauled.
If implemented, these three courses of action would amount to a revolution in the nature and role of the media in Arab societies. There is no time like the present for such a revolution to begin. It is needed. …
At the end of the day, perhaps the Western media, for so long the envy of other regions of the world, could these days also benefit from the good sheik’s message.
Daily Star, Beirut, Lebanon, on Arab media in the information age:
On the Net:
http://www.dailystar.com.lb
