Dr. Farooq Hassan, Bar at Law,
Professor of International Law, Harvard University

The military run administration in Islamabad stuck back at the top Pakistani Judge of its apex court. Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry has been suspended by President Pervez Musharraf for “misuse of authority”. The president has asked the Supreme Judicial Council, which oversees the judiciary, to investigate the charges.

The military regime in Pakistan has seldom given any hope to the country’s well wishers abroad and within the country to return to barracks as mandated by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Zafar Ali Shah’s case by 2002. Now well beyond that time frame, its clear that this demolition of the judicial independence of the nation is to ensure that the judges will personally pay who dare to affirm their integrity in this year when the general is evidently hell bent upon staying in power for the third time, irrespective of what the Constitution or the electorate says.

By: Professor Dr. Farooq Hassan∗
President Pakistan Ecology Council

(Presidential Address to the Pakistan Ecology Council at the Karachi Hall, Lahore High Court Bar Association, 6 October, 2006, Lahore)

I am grateful to be invited to give this year’s main Annual address on the highly important subject of Islam and protection of the environment. As Chairman of the Bar’s Environmental Committee as well, I am pleased to be here at this historical Karachi Hall, the venue for many events dealing with this country’s constitutional history. To days talk is even more significant since it deals with the survival of the human race. My interest in this subject is not new. Let me at the outset take a brief moment of your time to submit to you that as far back as 1975, that is thirty years ago, I was elected amongst a handful of Third World delegates to the First International Ecology Congress in Vienna, in which I presented my views on a subject which was in some ways similar to the one today but without reference to the available Islamic conceptions about it. [1]

The current debates on environment and its much needed protection seems to be at the center of many controversial aspects of US foreign and domestic policy. Conservationists feel that exploitation of earth’s resources for commercial goals is leading the entirety of human race into an uncertain future. On the other hand, many Western governments, led by Washington, maintain that this threat is over exaggerated and that putting an end to useful acquisition of such resources by latest scientific methodology would be tantamount to impeding human progress.

It is the purpose of this presentation to examine this debate from an Islamic perspective. My research indicates that although some aspects of this topic have been handled by a few scholars mostly in the Arabic language, this appears to be a pioneer effort to do so in an exhaustive manner. I request therefore, that you give the message of this address, the needed significance for an adequate dissemination to the people of this country. Not only third of world countries are comprised of Muslims, a number of them are pivotal in enunciating policies with respect to oil exploration.

In this context, we may keep in mind the peculiar environmental controversy intertwined with fossil oil which Muslim states have in abundance. Their rapid utilization at the urging of mostly Western states, and by the US in particular, causes serious pollution hazards and also emission of gases that are a cause of acute danger to the ozone protection of the world’s atmosphere. This has resulted in clearly the single most dangerous pollution hazard, namely, global warming to which I shall revert to later in this presentation.

The ensuing analysis examines the Islamic injunctions, if any, on this subject. This is with a view to see the philosophy of the Muslim faith towards this most crucial of current topics of human concern. Islam is considered a comprehensive way of life whose teachings, directly or indirectly, cover every possible human relationship including what today is described as “environment”.

By: Dr. Farooq Hassan

(Synopsis of address presented at World Islamic International Awards ceremony

16th September, South hall, London, 2006)

It is my great honor to be invited here to receive the World Islamic International Award for Family from the London based World Islamic Family Coalition. As a networking coalition of Muslim NGOs our host today is involved in diverse matters including the family. This NGO is designed to provide resource services and to act as a caucus for Muslim institutions internationally. Although barely set up less than a year ago, it has begun its work with some degree of earnestness with institutions in the Islamic world. I thank the Secretary General Dr. Malik for his pioneer efforts in this regard.

But I must add that much work needs to be done by them if they have to make a mark in this field as an Islamic international NGO in Family matters. All the reputable institutions that are operating presently in the field of the family are invariably Western in origin. They are primarily organized for alleviating the misfortunes and woes faced by this basic human institution in their societies. I am not aware of a single non Western NGO in the field of the family to have embarked upon a venture such as our hosts have done with any significant impact.

This is a cross posting of an original post by: Marty Kaplan

09.14.2006
How to Hack a Diebold (Ivy League Edition)

Watch this video

Princeton computer scientists have figured out how to hack into a Diebold AccuVote [sic] TouchScreen voting machine. The subversion of democracy takes a coupla minutes, a screwdriver or paperclip, plus a floppy with the malware they’ve written.

This is no comedy video; it’s a bone-chilling, blood-pressure-raising, citizen-outraging rebuttal to all the calming unctuous bromides you’ve heard about the safety of our voting technology.

The authors of this paper may be geeks, but they don’t wear tinfoil hats. The P doesn’t stand for Paranoia; it stands for Princeton.

I’d upload the Princeton video so you could watch it right here, but the Creative Commons non-commercial license it’s copyrighted under precludes wrapping it in an ad. As long as you attribute it and don’t profit from it, you can post the video on any site you’d like. If the hotlink to the video doesn’t work for you, here’s the URL:

http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/videos.html

The complete paper can be found here.

Had enough?

By: Dr. Farooq Hassan

Harvard University

A major puzzling question agitating many is how to evaluate the end game behind this huge military onslaught that is destroying Lebanon? On 3rd August the Senate Armed Services Committee gave the Defense Secretary a difficult time when he appeared in a public debate to explain the Administration’s stance on the war situation in Iraq and Lebanon.

These exchanges quintessentially centered on Rumsfeld’s earlier upbeat assessments and what has actually occurred. It was an ex post facto analysis of the recent past: the aim being to demonstrate the short sightedness of the US polices. Senator Hillary Clinton categorized the Administration’s policies in Iraq as faltering failures and their execution incompetent. Embarrassing for the Administration, its two top generals, who had been frequently describing American fortunes in Iraq’s war in reserved yet clearly platitudinous semantics, frankly admitted that Iraq was near enough a civil war. Manifestly the army’s think tanks have now come to adopt the same perception of events in Baghdad that the public has known for many months! For many months, with nearly a hundred deaths a day, there is little that any sophisticated spin of concepts could possibly otherwise accomplish.

What is, however, the ultimate goal of the current state of continued bombardment of Lebanon that clearly has Washington’s support? To realize this end game scenario a number of fundamental questions need to be raised.
In pursing Hezbollah, why was the high degree of damage to Lebanon’s infrastructure and people acceptable to the US? Did Secretary of State’s repeated assertions that “sustainable peace” was the US goal, implicitly permit the devastating civil toll? If, for a moment, we accept the underlying rationale of this perspective on account of its possible strategic implications, we still are not told why this was a necessary element in this process. Hasn’t such a policy politically strengthened Hizbollah? If the aim was to destroy their military might this objective has failed. Indeed, this war, now in its fourth week, put an end to the myth of invincibility of Israel’s armed forces.

My wife and I saw “An Inconvenient Truth” recently. Good audience, even if not quite sold out. Great film. As I told my friend Dewayne, if Al doesn’t run for president, I’ll be extremely disappointed.

Clearly, the implosion of the environment is THE defining challenge facing us. It trumps terrorism and all of the issues that Bush and Rove have used to define their agenda. It actually makes a mockery of them. The collapse of the environment as we have come to utterly depend on it is THE national security issue of the 21st century. It will be the organizing principal of the next effective political party with an agenda that ignites passions in its members.

Who lost the Environment? Who lost 8 precious years that could have made a real difference?

The Bush party of me, myself, and my money ignored Global Warming — worse, they denied it.

Where is the party of we and I? The party of environmental stewardship? The party of cooperative gain?

Speaking of the “the corruption of democracy, itself”, as Tom Atlee does below, consider tnis:

Friend Bob Weber forwarded this note to me. It is very much worth reading. How will we counter election fraud, apparently a fundamental and essential tactic of the Bush administration, in 2006 and 2008? Election fraud is both necessary and sufficient for Bush to assure “victory”.

If you read one thing this year, let it be the compelling article by RFK Jr. on the theft of the 2004 election.

And look at the accompanying chart:

This one is going to be hard to ignore.

The Open Source Intelligence site has posted this news item:

News Flash: Depleted Uranium Reaches England?

Depleted uranium from the Iraqi campaign has evidently reached England.

A repeat of Gulf War syndrome, which put over a quarter million US veterans on disability, appears to be joining the massive number of amputees.

Some of the coverage of this new finding is quasi-hysterical, but what we find very interesting is the combination of policy acceptance of depleted uranium impacts on both our own troops as well as our downwind allies, and the larger discussion of deliberate depopulation strategies including genetically modified corn.

The post includes an interesting list of links.

That is the question.

I recently stumbled on an essay by Thomas Keane in the The Boston Globe Magazine of March 19th: Strings Attached .

Keane does a marvelous job of articulating a particular and very conventional point of view on municipal wireless projects: They are a bad idea as they represent government competing with the private sector. He even makes the tired, old joke about “Hi! I’m from the government, and I am here to help you.

This is, of course, only one possible point of view. There are more innovative points of view that I would have expected a venture capitalist, as a taker of risks in the name of innovation, to articulate and embrace.

My essay on Wireless Civic and Economic Development is an example of such another point of view. It supports the new joke going around: Hi! I’m from the private sector, and I am here to help you.

By: Dr. Farooq Hassan
Published in The Nation

Barely seven months ago a number of leading American TV evangelists had some highly derogatory comments about the Prophet of Islam (pbuh). A leading Republican Party supporter of this category, referred to the Prophet as a ‘terrorist’. The Muslims, the world over, were deeply offended. The Islamic populations protested as did their governments but as expected in a most respectful manner. In the wake of 9/11 it was considered to let this perfidy pass. Even the Government of Pakistan, conceivably the most important Islamic country, did not seriously protest to any one. Emboldened by the muted reaction of the Islamic world to such heinous moral invasions of the Muslim Faith this new found technique of hurting the Muslims has now emanated from Europe. This time a Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten has done so again. It came out with posters depicting the Prophet of Islam in a light that is unspeakable in a shocking affront to any civilised decent person in the international civil society so called.

It is reported that both the OIC and the Arab League are holding some kind of Executive Session to chalk out some strategy to lodge protest with the Danish authorities. What that means I cannot foretell. But if all that is designed to accomplish is to merely apprise the Danish Authorities that such publications are deeply offensive to the Muslims feelings, I am afraid it misses the point. Such routine diplomatic rumblings are taken in stride and really accomplish nothing. Already worldwide demonstrations by the people at large in the Islamic world have made this point abundantly clear.

Read the full essay here.