Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima

The International Convention for the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism will take effect on July 7. This is the 13th international anti-terrorism convention within the United Nations’ framework.
With this convention in place, the agreements reached by the international community have basically covered all aspects in fighting terrorism.
What is most important is that the convention defines nuclear terrorism as a crime against humanity. It follows, therefore, that the domestic laws of the signatory countries and international laws must be oriented to suppressing dissemination of nuclear terrorism and its implementation.
International cooperation, in this regard, is naturally called for within the framework of the convention. The convention has filled a gap in international laws, in terms of fighting nuclear terrorism.
International terrorism takes multiple forms. And terrorist acts are increasingly taking on a cross-border nature as the flow of personnel, materials and information quickens in our era of globalization.
The September 11 terror attacks six years ago was by far the most shocking. The event also spurred the government of the victim country to take disproportionate revenge, which has, in turn, served to intensify tumult and chaos in the Middle East.
So, it is safe to state that terrorism and the anti-terror fight are two primary factors that combine to power the transformation of the 21st-century’s international framework.
The murderous attacks by hijacked planes ramming into the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center simply pale into insignificance when compared to the devastation wrought by possible nuclear or radioactive weapons set off by terrorists.
In August 1945, the United States dropped two atom bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, leveling the two cites and killing thousands of people. The bomb that hit Nagasaki, for instance, killed 120,000 people, much more than those who perished in the September 11 attacks.
It should be noted that each nuclear bomb’s TNT equivalent was merely 20,000 tons. Today, the average TNT equivalent of a nuclear bomb is several more times than the ones dropped in 1945.
In view of all this, the devastation wrought on humanity by the combination of terrorism and nuclear weapons could defy our worst imagination. Worse still, the technology of processing fissile materials, which is at the core of building a nuclear bomb, has become widely proliferated.
So far, several countries have mastered the technology of extracting fissile materials. Over the last decade, India, Pakistan and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea have claimed they have acquired nuclear weapons.
In addition, lawful and illegal transfer of nuclear materials happens time and again, which means that the distance between non-governmental bodies bent on obtaining nuclear weapons and their accessing fissile materials is being dramatically shortened. It is more than likely today that radioactive materials could be used in terror attacks.
Taking all this into account, it might be purely a stroke of good luck that humanity has so far remained safe from the harms wrought by nuclear terrorism.
Confronted by the grave situation, the international community must be galvanized into action. The formulation of the International Convention for the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism is the embodiment of the international community’s determination to stave off nuclear terrorism.
It states clearly that all acts doing harm to a country or an international organization by obtaining radioactive materials, nuclear materials, nuclear devices and facilities fall under the category of nuclear terrorism.
It was agreed that the convention would go into force when a total of 22 countries sanctioned it. On June 7, Bangladesh approved the convention, making up the required number.
CHINADAILY.COM

Why would the US president, in the midst of substantial and growing cooperation with the Iranians, suddenly decree Iran in 2002 to be part of an axis of evil, and all but declare Iran an enemy on whom war must inevitably be waged?
Numerous and disparate factions surrounding the president each desired, albeit for different reasons and with different motives, hostility and conflict with Iran.
Those factions perceive that belligerence toward Iran, rather than a negotiated peace, would promote their respective agendas. And each was able to depict Iran in the Manichean terms that would ensure that the president would see Iran as an implacable foe he was duty-bound to defeat.
Numerous ideologies and belief systems have played prominent roles in shaping the president’s Manichean militarism toward Iran. Initially, the president surrounded himself with traditional, garden-variety hawks--those who are driven by a central belief in the virtue and justification of America’s use of its superior military force to impose its will on other nations.
Such hawkishness is embodied by both Vice President Cheney and former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and exists independent of any specific geopolitical reasons for seeking Middle East hegemony. Hawks of this sort have cheered on every warmongering step taken by the president. A highly influential strain in the Bush administration seeks war because it believes in the use of war as a principal tool for securing America’s interests and dealing with other nations that refuse to submit to America’s will.
And then there is the related set of concerns: the emerging prospect that the world’s demand for oil will outstrip supply, and that with Saudi oil production potentially peaking, the largest strategic reserves will be in Iran, where US access can be ensured only with a pro-American government in place.
Oil is a critical resource for a nation’s strength, prosperity, and security. It is also finite and becoming scarce. Those who insist that such considerations are irrelevant to foreign policy decisions regarding the most oil-rich region on the planet, and the most oil-rich nations in that region, are advancing claims too frivolous to merit serious consideration. Access to and control over the Middle East’s oil supply pervades, to one degree or another, virtually all power struggles within that region.
Regarding the most important issues of the Bush presidency--the invasion of Iraq, the treatment of Iran, and enhanced and unprecedented domestic police powers--traditional hawkishness and concern over the Middle Eastern oil supply have worked in perfect tandem with one another. And that agenda has also converged with two other critically influential factions of the Bush presidencyÐ-namely, the president’s base of Christian evangelicals who view political power as a means for promoting their theological objectives, and independently, the Israel-centric strain of neoconservatives. The agendas of all of those factions have been promoted by the same policies--the invasion of Iraq, expanded police powers at home, and the treatment of anti-American regimes in the Middle East as mortal enemies to be shunned, demonized, and attacked.
An influential faction of Christian evangelicals has loyally supported the Bush foreign policy in the Middle East. That faction is driven by the general theological belief that God’s will is for Jews to occupy all of “Greater Israel,“ which will occur only once the enemies of Israel are defeated.
There is no question--because many of their key leaders have said so themselves that evangelicals, who compose a substantial part of President Bush’s most loyal following, have become fanatically “pro-Israel“ in their foreign policy views because they believe that strengthening Israel is a necessary prerequisite for Rapture to occur--for the world to be ruled by Christianity upon Jesus’ apocalyptic return to Earth--and they believe that can occur only once “Greater Israel“ is unified under Jewish control.
It is certainly true that this extremist, theological commitment to Israel as a means of facilitating Jesus’ return is not shared by a majority of Christians. But these are hardly fringe views either.
Christian evangelicals have played an important role in both of President Bush’s election victories and in the general preservation of Republican power. Many of the evangelical leaders who spout these extremist “pro-Israeli“ theological views exert substantial influence at high levels of the Bush administration and with the president himself.
Their doctrinal convictions have played a substantial role in generating support for the president’s militarism in the Middle East and his Manichean approach to Israel’s enemies.
ANTIWAR.COM

Hillary ClintonÕs campaign advertisement parodies "The Sopranos."

Everybody seems to love the Hillary Clinton campaign advertisement that parodies “The Sopranos.“ While it’s clever, it’s completely wrong for drawing attention to a curious marriage and injecting her husband prematurely into the campaign. You can understand the temptation to play off the finale of the HBO series everyone was talking about. The ad opens with the senator flipping through jukebox titles at a diner. Her husband--that would be Bill, dressed in an untucked shirt--walks in and asks, “So what’s the winning song?“--a reference to the contest to see what her presidential campaign theme song should be.
True to Tony Soprano’s preferences and his own, Bill wants onion rings. She says she’s ordered carrots for the table. (Message: She’s in charge and still worried about health care).
Like Meadow Soprano, Chelsea is late because she can’t “parallel park.“ A menacing figure- an actor from the real show--gets off his stool and walks toward the bathroom. The screen goes black.
We never find out what happens to the fictional Sopranos. We do find out what happens to the real candidate’s theme song. It will be “You and I“ by Celine Dion, a star in Las Vegas. The song used to be an Air Canada jingle. It’s one play away from elevator music. It will offend no one.
If attention is what Clinton wanted, she got it. The campaign didn’t need to spend a cent to get a week of exposure. It showed that Hillary could be playful (since she calls herself “Hillary“ in all her campaign materials).
Yet the Clintons have too much in common with the Sopranos to risk parodying them. Through eight seasons of mob life in New Jersey and eight years in the Clinton White House, America has been gripped by these two couples. Much of the fascination is with the wives: How much does she know? Why does she stay?
In the last two seasons, Sopranos writer David Chase made sure that Carmela was held to account. She’d become the person she denied she was to her therapist and priest--a co-conspirator who turned a blind eye to her husband’s sins to enjoy the fruits of his crime.
We don’t have a writer to give us the answer for Hillary, who is by no means in her last season. And the Clintons might not know. Did they muddle into the middle of the most treacherous question about them, or do it with eyes wide open? They might be in as much denial about themselves as Tony. He thought his nephew Christopher’s movie was great until someone told him the homicidal maniac at the center of it was him.
The ad touches close to the mother lode of Hillary’s vulnerability among some women. When you ask them why they don’t like her, they say it’s because they don’t understand why she makes goo-goo eyes at a guy who broke her heart multiple times and humiliated her daughter. After that, pretending to be a teenager in love makes them wonder what else she might be faking.
The Carmela-Hillary juxtaposition has been made before by others, and not in Hillary’s favor. For staying with a repeat philanderer, Carmela got to live in a McMansion, wear expensive jewelry and wield derivative power as Queen Bee of the mob families. Hillary got to be first lady with a good shot at the White House.
If Hillary’s hoping we’ll be kinder to her than Chase was to Carmela, it’s hard to see why she would tempt the comparison herself. The only possible rationale is that every time voters are reminded how bad Bill is, her numbers go up.
She might not be the senator from New York were it not for Monica Lewinsky.
BLOOMBERG.COM

When the Special Court of Sierra Leone handed down historic war-crimes judgments last week, Tamba Finnoh was one of the first to hear the news.
He is one of the victims of the vicious cruelty used by all sides in his country’s 11-year civil war: amputation. Finnoh lost his right hand and barely escaped with his left in 1997 when rebel forces caught him in the bush.
Today, he is one of the few amputees in the country fortunate enough to have a job; he serves tea to witnesses who testify before the court. It is ironic that when defendants are called to testify during trial, they are treated as witnesses--and Tamba Finnoh finds himself serving tea to the very men who masterminded the violence that cost him his hand.
Last week’s convictions of five top commanders from the Civil Defense Forces and the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council, two of the war’s three fighting forces on trial, include the world’s first-ever convictions for solicitation of child soldiers.
The judgments have been rightly hailed as groundbreaking by the international community. But the fact remains that the rulings will have little bearing on those most in need of justice Ð the victims of the war, particularly those who were brutally amputated. As Finnoh says, “Whether or not these people are caught or are unpunished, it cannot bring back the hands.“
Unlike Finnoh, thousands of amputees face the ongoing challenge of trying to find work to provide food for their families and pay school fees for their children. Tamba Ngaujah was the first amputee of the war; both of his hands were cut off by rebel soldiers from the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in 1991.
Today he lives in a four-room zinc shack on the side of a steep hill outside Freetown, with his wife, six children, and two other relatives. He is the sole provider for his household.
The RUF trials are still ongoing and judgments are expected in 2008. But even then, Ngaujah will still be searching for justice. “Those who have caused these problems, to jail them or do whatever to them, why can’t [the government] think about the people who suffered from the war and come to their aid?“ he said last week.
In fact, the final report of Sierra Leone’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) issued in 2004 recommended that the government make reparations to amputee victims, including free medical treatment and free schooling for their children. Unfortunately, the government has yet to follow through with the commission’s recommendations--a source of growing disillusionment here. Sadly, people like Finnoh and Ngaujah struggle not only with the injustice of the lack of government benefits, but they also face a daily struggle against social stigmas: Increasingly, the word “amputee“ has become synonymous with “beggar.“
The government is not bound by the TRC recommendations, and it argues that it doesn’t have the resources to enact them. Sierra Leone ranks high on the failed-states index and is notoriously corrupt. But the government must quell the growing discontent among the war’s victims. For victims to find peace and a sense of justice, the democratically elected government must find a way to care for those whose lives were shattered by the war.
But despite the lack of attention given to war victims, many Sierra Leoneans believe the current ruling party will emerge victorious in this August’s elections as the lesser of two evils.
International nongovernmental organizations line the streets of Freetown, but responsibility ultimately lies with the government. The international community is not likely to pressure Sierra Leone through sanctions or other measures. But the issue of reparations is nonetheless a crucial question that the international community must consider as it seeks to support stable conditions here and in so many other troubled areas throughout the African continent.
CSMONITOR.COM