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Commentary Week In Review

Guy Taylor | Bio | 25 May 2007

The Commentary Week in Review is posted on the blog every Friday. Drawing from more than two dozen English-language news outlets worldwide, the column highlights a handful of the week's notable op-eds.

Africa's secret prisons

Writing in the New Statesman on May 21, Christopher Thompson claimed that the United States has "quietly opened" a War on Terror front in East Africa, specifically through the use of undocumented Ethiopian jails for "'rendition' and interrogation of terror suspects" rounded up in the region.

"Unfortunately, there is no way of knowing the exact number of prisoners. They are kept in secret detention that bears all the hallmarks of a Guantanamo-type policy: cross-border transfers without judicial proceedings, military tribunals, abusive conditions and the prospect of indefinite imprisonment," wrote Thompson, whose piece cited Human Rights Watch as its main source.

"There are reports that western intelligence agencies are taking advantage of these conditions -- and, by extension, Ethiopia's poor human-rights record -- to conduct clandestine interrogations," he wrote.

Iran's Pursuit of WMD

Bronwen Maddox reminded us in the May 24 Times of London that Iran has "smashed through yet another deadline without a flicker of a response to demands that it halt its nuclear program."

"The test of whether the world really wants to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons comes now," wrote Maddox, who homed in on influence France and its newly elected President could have over the situation in the weeks to come.

"Efforts in the coming days by the U.S. and Britain to rally support in the United Nations Security Council for a third, harsher set of sanctions against Iran will be helped by the tough talk from President Sarkozy of France," he claimed. "In his first detailed comments on the stand-off since taking office, Sarkozy said that the notion of a nuclear-armed Iran was unacceptable. He added that "one should not hesitate to toughen the sanctions."

With the nuclear issue in the backdrop, Shaul Bakhash offered an intense personal account in the May 25 Los Angeles Times of his wife's incarceration in Tehran. Haleh Esfandiari, a duel Iran-U.S. citizen and the director of the Middle East Program of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, has been in custody since May 8 in Tehran.

Bakhash's op-ed offered this description and theory about Iran's motives:

Thailand's Constitutional Crisis

With Thailand's a new draft constitution -- drawn up by the junta of military generals in power since last September's coup -- set to be put to a national referendum at summer's end, Thitinan Pongsudhirak asserted in the May 24 Wall Street Journal that a "happy ending looks less likely as the document's contents are scrutinized and opposition from the Thai public mounts."

"The central premise of the new constitution is unmistakable: It is designed to prevent the monopolization of Thai politics that the country experienced under former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra's five-year rule and to shift political power from the parties, politicians and the electorate to the military, the bureaucracy and the monarchy," Pongsudhirak wrote. "The Thai people are already voicing their objections. Street protests have grown in the face of increasing military clampdown. Pro- and anti-Thaksin forces both oppose the new charter, lining up against the coup, the military and the interim government and giving rise to persistent rumors of an incumbency coup and Prime Minister General Surayud Culanont's resignation or termination by Council for National Security (the main organ of the junta)."

The "Red Ghosts" of Poland

Timothy Garton Ash claimed in the May 24 Guardian that Poland has made a "complete mess" of dealing with its communist past. "Poland's latest episode," according to Ash, "its so-called lustration law, introduced by the country's rightwing, nationalist prime minister and president, the near-identical twins Jaroslaw and Lech Kaczynski, who came to power on a promise of finally cleansing the country's public life of the red poison."

"The new Polish law was very broadly and very badly drawn," asserted Ash. "Among the categories of people to be lustrated were all journalists and academics. A procedure was introduced by which everyone affected had to submit a declaration saying whether they had consciously and secretly collaborated with the communist security services."

Noting, however, that large parts of the law were recently struck down by Poland's constitutional court, Ash added that "Poland today, a member of Nato and the EU, with independent media, a booming economy and a constitutional court strong enough to strike down a bad law, is better placed to weather the storm than it would have been in the autumn of 1989."

Venezuelan Media Fight

Democratic U.S. Rep. Tom Lantos argued in the May 25 Miami Herald that "Hugo Chávez is nearing the end of his campaign to stifle independent media -- not due to a change of heart, but because through the years he has been singularly successful at cutting off dissenting voices in Venezuela."

"If he succeeds in his latest ploy, another will fall silent in the coming days," wrote Lantos, referring to Chávez's recent refusal to renew the license of "the country's oldest and most popular station, Radio Caracas TV, a source of radio programming for 76 years and television for 53."

Noting the roster of critics of this impending move already includes the secretary general of the OAS, the Inter-American Press Association, the National Association of Newspapers of Brazil, Reporters without Borders, The Committee to Protect Journalists, the Inter-American Human Rights Commission, and the Congress of Chile, Lantos urged "regional leaders such as Brazil, Mexico, Argentina and others to galvanize a single voice to echo the sentiments already issued by Chile's Senate, which expressed its 'strong rejection' of the plan to squash RCTV."

The Commentary Week In Review draws from links aggregated every weekday morning in WPR's Media Roundup, which you can receive by email for free by registering now.