Military censorship of the war in Iraq

By Naomi Spencer | WSWS, 31 July 2008

Five years of bloody US occupation have seen numerous crimes against humanity unfold in Iraq. Millions of Iraqi civilians have been killed and wounded, with millions more made into refugees. Ancient, once-vibrant cities have been destroyed by air raids and chemical weapons. Thousands of Iraqis have imprisoned by the US military in barbaric conditions, and in many cases tortured. In carrying out the occupation, more than 4,400 military personnel—most of them American—have died and tens of thousands have been wounded.

Little reflection of these realities is to be found, however, in the US media, particularly in visual form. Censorship by the military—and self-censorship by media outlets—is part of an effort by the ruling elite to sanitize the war and keep the American public in the dark about its real nature.

As highlighted in a July 26 piece in the New York Times, titled “4,000 U.S. Deaths, and a Handful of Images,” very few photographs of the occupation have trickled out from the military-embedded journalists and been released by the American media. The military and Bush administration have imposed rules barring photos of flag-draped caskets, as well as documentation of battlefield casualties in which faces, ranks, or other identifiers are visible.

The Times notes, “Even memorial services for killed soldiers, once routinely open, are increasingly off limits. Detainees were widely photographed in the early years of the war, but the Department of Defense, citing prisoners’ rights, has recently stopped that practice as well.” Journalists have also been forbidden from releasing images showing what the military deems to be sensitive information—anything from an image of American weaponry to the aftermath of an insurgent strike.

Journalists interviewed by the Times said that even tighter rules imposed last year, requiring written permission from wounded soldiers before their images could be used, were nearly impossible to satisfy in the case of seriously wounded and dying soldiers.

“While embed restrictions do permit photographs of dead soldiers to be published once family members have been notified,” the Times commented, “in practice, the military has exacted retribution on the rare occasions that such images have appeared.”

Clearly, none of these restrictions have anything to do with “prisoners’ rights” or respect for the families of fallen soldiers. To the contrary, the military’s intent is to obscure from the American people the hellish reality in which prisoners and US soldiers alike have found themselves. Indeed, while employing typical military jargon and doublespeak, Defense Department officials make no secret of the subject: free and easy access to photographs, print journalism, and first-hand accounts of the war are a “vulnerability” for US imperialism because it fuels antiwar sentiment in the population and within the military.

Continued . . .

Let’s Speak the Truth About Afghanistan

The Huffington Post, Posted July 30, 2008 | 12:55 PM (EST)

By Eric Margolis

---

NEW YORK — During his triumphant European tour, Senator Barack Obama again urged NATO’s members to send more troops to Afghanistan and called the conflict there, “the central front in the war on terror.” Europe’s response ranged from polite evasion to downright frosty.

It is unfortunate that Obama has adopted President George Bush’s misleading terminology, “war on terror,” to describe the conflict between the United States and anti-American groups in the Muslim world. Like many Americans, he and his foreign policy advisors are sorely misinformed about the reality of Afghanistan.

One understands Obama’s need to respond with martial élan to rival John McCain’s chest-thumping about “I know how to win wars.” Polls put McCain far ahead of Obama when it comes to being a war leader. But Obama’s recent proposal to send at least 7,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, and his threats to attack Pakistan’s territory, and warnings about Islamabad’s nuclear forces, show poor judgment and lack of knowledge.

The United States is no longer “fighting terrorism” in Afghanistan, as Bush, Obama and McCain insist. The 2001 U.S. invasion was a legitimate operation against al-Qaeda, a group that properly fit the role of a “terrorist organization.” But, contrary to the White House’s wildly inflated claims that Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda was a worldwide conspiracy, it never numbered more than 300 hard core members. Bin Laden and his jihadis long ago scattered into all corners of Pakistan and elsewhere. Only a handful remain in Afghanistan.

Continued . . .

The Impeachment Hearing: A Victory and a Challenge

By DAVE LINDORFF | Counterpunch, July 30, 2008

The dramatic hearing on presidential crimes and abuses of power held on Friday by the House Judiciary Committee was both a staged farce, and at the same time, a powerful demonstration of the power of a grassroots movement in defense of the Constitution. It was at once both testimony to the cowardice and self-inflicted impotence of Congress and of the Democratic Party that technically controls that body, and to the enormity of the damage that has been wrought to the nation’s democracy by two aspiring tyrants in the White House.

As Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), chairman of the committee, made clear more than once during the six-hour session, this was “not an impeachment hearing, however much many in the audience might wish it to be” He might well have added that he himself was not the fierce defender of the Constitution and of the authority of Congress that he once was before gaining control of the Judiciary Committee, however much his constituents, his wife, and Americans across the country might wish him to be.

At the same time, while the hearing was strictly limited to the most superficial airing of Bush administration crimes and misdemeanors, the fact that the session—technically an argument in defense of 26 articles of impeachment filed in the House over the past several months by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH)--was nonetheless a major victory for the impeachment movement. It happened because earlier in the month, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who has sworn since taking control of the House in November 2006, that impeachment would be “off the table” during the 110th Congress, called a hasty meeting with Majority Leader Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD), Rep. Conyers, and Rep. Kucinich, and called for such a limited hearing.

It was no coincidence that shortly before Pelosi’s backdown, peace activist and Gold Star mother Cindy Sheehan announced that her campaign had collected well over the 10,000 signatures necessary to qualify for listing on the ballot as an independent candidate for Congress against Pelosi in the Speaker’s home district in San Francisco. Sheehan has been an outspoken advocate of impeaching both Bush and Cheney. “Pelosi is trying to throw a bone to her constituents by allowing a hearing on impeachment,” said Sheehan, who came to Washington, DC to attend. “It’s just like her finally stating publicly that Bush’s presidency is a failure—something it has taken her two years to come to, but which we’ve been saying for years.”

So determined were Pelosi and Conyers to limit the scope and intensity of the hearing that they acceded to a call for Republicans on the Judiciary Committee to adhere to Thomas Jefferson’s Rules of the House, which prohibit any derogatory comments about the President, which was interpreted by Chairman Conyers as meaning no one, including witnesses or members of the committee, could suggest that Bush had lied or deceived anyone. Since a number of Rep. Kucinich’s proposed articles of impeachment specifically charge the president with lying to Congress and the American People, this made for some comic moments, with witness Bruce Fein, a former assistant attorney general under former President Ronald Reagan, to say he would reference his listing of crimes to the “resident” of the White House.

Continued . . .

Bush’s Legacy of Torture

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Truthdig, posted July 28, 2008

By Eugene Robinson

I still find it hard to believe that George W. Bush, to his eternal shame and our nation’s great discredit, made torture a matter of hair-splitting, legalistic debate at the highest levels of the United States government. But that’s precisely what he did.

Three previously classified administration memos obtained last week by the American Civil Liberties Union add to our understanding of this disgraceful episode. The documents are attempts to justify the unjustifiable—the use of brutal interrogation methods that international agreements define as torture—and keep those who ordered and carried out this dirty business from being prosecuted and jailed.

The memos don’t call it torture, of course. Heavily redacted before being surrendered to the ACLU under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the documents refer euphemistically to “enhanced techniques” of interrogation. Changing the name doesn’t change the act, however. One memo, written in 2004, specifically makes clear the administration’s view that “the waterboard” is an acceptable way to extract information.

Waterboarding, a technique of simulated drowning, is considered torture virtually everywhere on earth except in the Bush administration’s archive of self-exculpatory memos, directives and opinions.

The most stunning of the memos—written in August 2002 by Jay Bybee, who was head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel—makes the incredible claim that unless a torturer has the “specific intent to inflict severe pain or suffering,” no violation of U.S. laws against torture has occurred. Bybee, since appointed to the federal bench, wrote that the torturer needed only the “honest belief” that he was not actually committing torture in order to avoid legal jeopardy. Oh, and Bybee added that it wasn’t even necessary for that belief to be “reasonable.”

The memo notes that U.S. torture statutes outlaw the infliction of severe mental pain, as well as physical pain. It acknowledges that “the threat of imminent death” is one of the specific acts that can constitute torture. Somehow, though, the administration pretends not to understand that strapping a prisoner down and pouring water into his nose until he can’t breathe constitutes a death threat—regardless of whether the interrogator intended to stop before the prisoner actually drowned.

Perhaps that question was dealt with in the nine-tenths of the memo that was redacted before the administration handed it over to the ACLU. The memo never would have been released at all if the government hadn’t been ordered to do so by a federal judge.

The whole thing would be laughable if it were not such a rank abomination. No government obeying the law needs a paper trail to absolve its interrogators of committing torture. Conversely, a government that produces such a paper trail has something monstrous to hide.

It is not difficult to avoid violating federal laws and international agreements that prohibit torture. Just don’t torture people, period. The idea that there exists some acceptable middle ground—a kind of “torture lite”—is a hideous affront to this nation’s honor and values. This, perhaps above all, is how George Bush should be remembered: as the president who embraced torture.

I wouldn’t be surprised if, as he left office, Bush issued some sort of pardon clearing those who authorized or carried out “enhanced techniques” of interrogations from any jeopardy under U.S. law. International law is something else entirely, however, and I imagine that some of those involved in this sordid interlude might want to be careful in choosing their vacation spots. I’d avoid The Hague, for example.

Barack Obama has stood consistently against torture. John McCain, who was tortured himself as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, has denounced torture as well—and, although he voted against restraining the CIA with the same no-exceptions policy that now applies to military interrogators, he has been forthright in saying that waterboarding is torture, and thus illegal. On Inauguration Day, whoever wins, this awful interlude will end.

The clear and urgent duty of the next president will be to investigate the Bush administration’s torture policy and give Americans a full accounting of what was done in our name. It’s astounding that we need some kind of truth commission in the United States of America, but we do. Only when we learn the full story of what happened will we be able to confidently promise, to ourselves and to a world that looks to this country for moral leadership: Never again.

Eugene Robinson’s e-mail address is eugenerobinson(at)washpost.com.

© 2008, Washington Post Writers Group

Forget the Surge -- Violence Is Down in Iraq Because Ethnic Cleansing Was Brutally Effective

By Juan Cole, JuanCole.com. Alternet, July 29, 2008.

The bloodbath in Baghdad has resulted in fewer ethnically mixed neighborhoods, leading to the recent drop in violence.

Editor's note: John McCain's latest stumble in discussing Iraq -- in which he muddled the timeline of the so-called "surge" -- was treated by most of the press as an unfortunate gaffe, rather than further proof that the aspiring commander in chief does not know what he's talking about when it comes to the war and occupation. (One CNN report actually ran the headline: "McCain Broadens Definition of the Surge.") Meanwhile, the Republican nominee's recent attacks on Barack Obama for failing to admit the success of the "surge" was widely reported by the same members of the media, whose dominant and uncritical narrative has long been that, as McCain and Bush contend, the "surge" has been an unqualified success. "Why can't Obama bring himself to acknowledge the surge worked better than he and other skeptics thought that it would?" a USA Today editorial asked last week.

In the article below, Juan Cole takes a closer look at the "surge," weighing the troop increase alongside the numerous other contributing factors to the decline in violence. At the same time, he reminds us that, regardless of the relative decrease in bloodshed -- and what may be behind it -- the country is still a frightfully unstable place for Iraqis. "Most American commentators are so focused on the relative fall in casualties that they do not stop to consider how high the rates of violence remain," he writes. Few people would consider Afghanistan, where last year an average of 550 people were killed per month, a safe place. Yet, "that is about the rate recently (in Iraq), according to official statistics." -- AlterNet War on Iraq editor Liliana Segura

***

I want to weigh in as a social historian of Iraq on the controversy over whether the "surge" "worked." The New York Times reports:

Mr. McCain bristled in an interview with the CBS Evening News on (July 22) when asked about Mr. Obama's contention that while the added troops had helped reduce violence in Iraq, other factors had helped, including the Sunni Awakening movement, in which thousands of Sunnis were enlisted to patrol neighborhoods and fight the insurgency, and the Iraqi government's crackdown on Shiite militias.

"I don't know how you respond to something that is such a false depiction of what actually happened," Mr. McCain told Katie Couric, noting that the Awakening movement began in Anbar Province when a Sunni sheik teamed up with Sean MacFarland, a colonel who commanded an Army brigade there.

"Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others," Mr. McCain said. "And it began the Anbar Awakening. I mean, that's just a matter of history."

The Obama campaign was quick to note that the Anbar Awakening began in the fall of 2006, several months before President Bush even announced the troop escalation strategy, which became known as the surge.

And Democrats noted that the sheik who helped form the Awakening, Abdul Sattar Buzaigh al-Rishawi, was assassinated in September 2007, after the troop escalation began.

But several foreign policy analysts said that if Mr. McCain got the chronology wrong, his broader point -- that the troop escalation was crucial for the Awakening movement to succeed and spread -- was right. "I would say McCain is three-quarters right in this debate," said Michael E. O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

The problem with this debate is that it has few Iraqis in it.

It is also open to charges of logical fallacy. The only evidence presented for the thesis that the "surge" "worked" is that Iraqi deaths from political violence have declined in recent months from all-time highs in the second half of 2006 and the first half of 2007. (That apocalyptic violence was set off by the bombing of the Askariya shrine in Samarra in February 2006, which helped provoke a Sunni-Shiite civil war.) What few political achievements are attributed to the troop escalation are too laughable to command real respect.

Proponents are awfully hard to pin down on what the "surge" consisted of or when it began. It seems to me to refer to the troop escalation that began in February 2007. But now the technique of bribing Sunni Arab former insurgents to fight radical Sunni vigilantes is being rolled into the "surge" by politicians such as McCain. But attempts to pay off the Sunnis to quiet down began months before the troop escalation and had a dramatic effect in al-Anbar Province long before any extra U.S. troops were sent to al-Anbar (nor were very many extra troops ever sent there). I will disallow it. The "surge" is the troop escalation that began in the winter of 2007. The bribing of insurgents to come into the cold could have been pursued without a significant troop escalation, and was.

Continued . . .

End the Occupation of Iraq — and Afghanistan

Published on Tuesday, July 29, 2008 by CommonDreams.org

by Marjorie Cohn

So far, Bush’s plan to maintain a permanent U.S. military presence in Iraq has been stymied by resistance from the Iraqi government. Barack Obama’s timetable for withdrawal of American troops has evidently been joined by Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, Bush has mentioned a “time horizon,” and John McCain has waffled. Yet Obama favors leaving between 35,000 and 80,000 U.S. occupation troops there indefinitely to train Iraqi security forces and carry out “counter-insurgency operations.” That would not end the occupation. We must call for bringing home — not redeploying — all U.S. troops and mercenaries, closing all U.S. military bases, and relinquishing all efforts to control Iraqi oil.

In light of stepped up violence in Afghanistan, and for political reasons — following Obama’s lead — Bush will be moving troops from Iraq to Afghanistan. Although the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was as illegal as the invasion of Iraq, many Americans see it as a justifiable response to the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the casualties in that war have been lower than those in Iraq — so far. Practically no one in the United States is currently questioning the legality or propriety of U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan. The cover of Time magazine calls it “The Right War.”

The U.N. Charter provides that all member states must settle their international disputes by peaceful means, and no nation can use military force except in self-defense or when authorized by the Security Council. After the 9/11 attacks, the Council passed two resolutions, neither of which authorized the use of military force in Afghanistan. Resolutions 1368 and 1373 condemned the September 11 attacks, and ordered the freezing of assets; the criminalizing of terrorist activity; the prevention of the commission of and support for terrorist attacks; the taking of necessary steps to prevent the commission of terrorist activity, including the sharing of information; and urged ratification and enforcement of the international conventions against terrorism.

The invasion of Afghanistan was not legitimate self-defense under article 51 of the Charter because the attacks on September 11 were criminal attacks, not “armed attacks” by another country. Afghanistan did not attack the United States. In fact, 15 of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia. Furthermore, there was not an imminent threat of an armed attack on the United States after September 11, or Bush would not have waited three weeks before initiating his October 2001 bombing campaign. The necessity for self-defense must be “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.” This classic principle of self-defense in international law has been affirmed by the Nuremberg Tribunal and the U.N. General Assembly.

Bush’s justification for attacking Afghanistan was that it was harboring Osama bin Laden and training terrorists. Iranians could have made the same argument to attack the United States after they overthrew the vicious Shah Reza Pahlavi in 1979 and he was given safe haven in the United States. The people in Latin American countries whose dictators were trained in torture techniques at the School of the Americas could likewise have attacked the torture training facility in Ft. Benning, Georgia under that specious rationale.

Those who conspired to hijack airplanes and kill thousands of people on 9/11 are guilty of crimes against humanity. They must be identified and brought to justice in accordance with the law. But retaliation by invading Afghanistan is not the answer and will only lead to the deaths of more of our troops and Afghanis.

The hatred that fueled 19 people to blow themselves up and take 3,000 innocents with them has its genesis in a history of the U.S. government’s exploitation of people in oil-rich nations around the world. Bush accused the terrorists of targeting our freedom and democracy. But it was not the Statue of Liberty that was destroyed. It was the World Trade Center — symbol of the U.S.-led global economic system, and the Pentagon — heart of the U.S. military, that took the hits. Those who committed these heinous crimes were attacking American foreign policy. That policy has resulted in the deaths of two million Iraqis — from both Bill Clinton’s punishing sanctions and George W. Bush’s war. It has led to uncritical support of Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestinian lands; and it has stationed more than 700 U.S. military bases in foreign countries.

Conspicuously absent from the national discourse is a political analysis of why the tragedy of 9/11 occurred and a comprehensive strategy to overhaul U.S. foreign policy to inoculate us from the wrath of those who despise American imperialism. The “Global War on Terror” has been uncritically accepted by most in this country. But terrorism is a tactic, not an enemy. You cannot declare war on a tactic. The way to combat terrorism is by identifying and targeting its root causes, including poverty, lack of education, and foreign occupation.

There are already 60,000 foreign troops, including 36,000 Americans, in Afghanistan. Large increases in U.S. troops during the past year have failed to stabilize the situation there. Most American forces operate in the eastern part of the country; yet by July 2008, attacks there were up by 40 percent. Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor for Jimmy Carter, is skeptical that the answer for Afghanistan is more troops. He warns that the United States will, like the Soviet Union, be seen as the invader, especially as we conduct military operations “with little regard for civilian casualties.” Brzezinski advocates Europeans bribing Afghan farmers not to cultivate poppies for heroin, as well as the bribery of tribal warlords to isolate al-Qaeda from a Taliban that is “not a united force, not a world-oriented terrorist movement, but a real Afghan phenomenon.”

We might heed Canada’s warning that a broader mission, under the auspices of the United Nations instead of NATO, would be more effective. Our policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan should emphasize economic assistance for reconstruction, development and education, not for more weapons. The United States must refrain from further Predator missile strikes in Pakistan, and pursue diplomacy, not occupation.

Nor should we be threatening war against Iran, which would also be illegal and result in an unmitigated disaster. The U.N. Charter forbids any country to use, or threaten to use, military force against another country except in self-defense or when the Security Council has given its blessing. In spite of the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency’s conclusion that there is no evidence Iran is developing nuclear weapons, the White House, Congress, and Israel have continued to rattle the sabers in Iran’s direction. Nevertheless, the antiwar movement has so far fended off passage of HR 362 in the House of Representatives, a bill which is tantamount to a call for a naval blockade against Iran — considered an act of war under international law. Credit goes to United for Peace and Justice, Code Pink, Peace Action, and dozens of other organizations that pressured Congress to think twice before taking that dangerous step.

We should pursue diplomacy, not war, with Iran; end the U.S. occupation of Iraq; and withdraw our troops from Afghanistan.

Marjorie Cohn is president of the National Lawyers Guild and a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law. She is the author of Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law and her new book, Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent (co-authored with Kathleen Gilberd), will be published this winter. Her articles are archived at www.marjoriecohn.com.

Acts of War

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Truthdig, July 29, 2008

AP photo / Brennan Linsley

Members of the Iranian resistance group Mujahadeen-e Khalk, or MEK, guard a road leading to the group’s main training camp, watched over by a U.S. Army Abrams tank in background, near Baqubah in north-central Iraq.

By Scott Ritter

The war between the United States and Iran is on. American taxpayer dollars are being used, with the permission of Congress, to fund activities that result in Iranians being killed and wounded, and Iranian property destroyed. This wanton violation of a nation’s sovereignty would not be tolerated if the tables were turned and Americans were being subjected to Iranian-funded covert actions that took the lives of Americans, on American soil, and destroyed American property and livelihood. Many Americans remain unaware of what is transpiring abroad in their name. Many of those who are cognizant of these activities are supportive of them, an outgrowth of misguided sentiment which holds Iran accountable for a list of grievances used by the U.S. government to justify the ongoing global war on terror. Iran, we are told, is not just a nation pursuing nuclear weapons, but is the largest state sponsor of terror in the world today.

Much of the information behind this is being promulgated by Israel, which has a vested interest in seeing Iran neutralized as a potential threat. But Israel is joined by another source, even more puzzling in terms of its broad-based acceptance in the world of American journalism: the Mujahadeen-e Khalk, or MEK, an Iranian opposition group sworn to overthrow the theocracy in Tehran. The CIA today provides material support to the actions of the MEK inside Iran. The recent spate of explosions in Iran, including a particularly devastating “accident” involving a military convoy transporting ammunition in downtown Tehran, appears to be linked to an MEK operation; its agents working inside munitions manufacturing plants deliberately are committing acts of sabotage which lead to such explosions. If CIA money and planning support are behind these actions, the agency’s backing constitutes nothing less than an act of war on the part of the United States against Iran.

The MEK traces its roots back to the CIA-orchestrated overthrow of the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeg. Formed among students and intellectuals, the MEK emerged in the 1960s as a serious threat to the reign of Reza Shah Pahlevi. Facing brutal repression from the Shah’s secret police, the SAVAK, the MEK became expert at blending into Iranian society, forming a cellular organizational structure which made it virtually impossible to eradicate. The MEK membership also became adept at gaining access to positions of sensitivity and authority. When the Shah was overthrown in 1978, the MEK played a major role and for a while worked hand in glove with the Islamic Revolution in crafting a post-Shah Iran. In 1979 the MEK had a central role in orchestrating the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, and holding 55 Americans hostage for 444 days.

However, relations between the MEK and the Islamic regime in Tehran soured, and after the MEK staged a bloody coup attempt in 1981, all ties were severed and the two sides engaged in a violent civil war. Revolutionary Guard members who were active at that time have acknowledged how difficult it was to fight the MEK. In the end, massive acts of arbitrary arrest, torture and executions were required to break the back of mainstream MEK activity in Iran, although even the Revolutionary Guard today admits the MEK remains active and is virtually impossible to completely eradicate.

It is this stubborn ability to survive and operate inside Iran, at a time when no other intelligence service can establish and maintain a meaningful agent network there, which makes the MEK such an asset to nations such as the United States and Israel. The MEK is able to provide some useful intelligence; however, its overall value as an intelligence resource is negatively impacted by the fact that it is the sole source of human intelligence in Iran. As such, the group has taken to exaggerating and fabricating reports to serve its own political agenda. In this way, there is little to differentiate the MEK from another Middle Eastern expatriate opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress, or INC, which infamously supplied inaccurate intelligence to the United States and other governments and helped influence the U.S. decision to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein. Today, the MEK sees itself in a similar role, providing sole-sourced intelligence to the United States and Israel in an effort to facilitate American military operations against Iran and, eventually, to overthrow the Islamic regime in Tehran.

The current situation concerning the MEK would be laughable if it were not for the violent reality of that organization’s activities. Upon its arrival in Iraq in 1986, the group was placed under the control of Saddam Hussein’s Mukhabarat, or intelligence service. The MEK was a heavily militarized organization and in 1988 participated in division-size military operations against Iran. The organization represents no state and can be found on the U.S. State Department’s list of terrorist organizations, yet since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, the MEK has been under the protection of the U.S. military. Its fighters are even given “protected status” under the Geneva Conventions. The MEK says its members in Iraq are refugees, not terrorists. And yet one would be hard-pressed to find why the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees should confer refugee status on an active paramilitary organization that uses “refugee camps” inside Iraq as its bases.

Continued . . .

RIGHTS: Iran Condemned for Ongoing Juvenile Executions

By Omid Memarian

Iran has executed 191 people in 2008, including four juveniles. Credit:ISNA

UNITED NATIONS, Jul 29 (IPS) - A week after the execution of two juvenile offenders in Iran, who were under 18 at the time of their crime, a coalition of human rights organisations is urging the Iranian parliament to move swiftly to ban such executions.

The groups include Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, along with six other international and regional human rights organisations -- Iran Human Rights; the Iranian League for the Defence of Human Rights (LDDHI); Penal Reform International; Stop Child Executions; and Viviere -- strongly condemned Iran's continuing execution of juvenile offenders in a joint statement Tuesday.

"Iran is executing several children every year, despite the fact that it is banned under international law," the organisations said. "It is cruel and inhumane to apply the death penalty even to adults, let alone to those convicted for crimes committed before the age of 18."

"The execution of juvenile offenders is subject to an absolute prohibition in international law. This is testimony to the world's repugnance towards this practice," Drewery Dyke, a researcher with Amnesty International in London, told IPS. "It is high time that Iranian judicial officials and other leaders heed the concerns of the many jurists, lawyers and human rights activists in Iran who repeatedly call on the authorities to end the practice of executing juveniles and find a way to having Iran uphold its international legal commitments."

Iranian authorities executed Hassan Mozafari and Rahman Shahidi on Jul. 22, along with an adult offender, Hussein Rahnama, in the southern city of Bushehr. The Bushehr Criminal Court had convicted them of rape, together with another juvenile offender, Mohammad Pezhman, and two other adults, Behrouz Zangeneh and Ali Khorramnejad. Iranian authorities executed Pezhman in May 2007 and the two other adults in October 2007.

"Mozafari and Shahidi's executions are extremely disturbing," Clarisa Bencomo, Middle East and North Africa researcher in the Children's Rights Division of Human Rights Watch, told IPS.

"The fact that the families of murder victims pardoned two other juvenile offenders just days before these latest executions only underlines how arbitrary the Iranian justice system is," she added. "Iranian authorities should stop making excuses and change their laws to ensure that no one is ever executed for a crime committed when under 18."

In 2007, Iran carried out at least eight such executions. The recent hangings of Mozafari and Shahidi bring the number of juvenile executions to four so far in 2008. No other country is known to have executed a juvenile offender in 2008.

"Iran's continued execution of child offenders is very worrisome as it shows a determined will to ignore international law and Iran's obligations," Hadi Ghaemi, coordinator of the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, told IPS in a telephone interview. "At the same time, large-scale hangings, such as those of 29 men inside Evin prison on Jul. 27, sends the message of a bloodthirsty judiciary that wants to intimidate the general public with its propensity to rely on extreme violence."

Human rights advocates say that the situation of juvenile offenders facing execution in Iran has reached crisis levels, making Tehran's violation of international standards much greater than any other country. There are at least 132 juvenile offenders known to be on death row in Iran, although the true number could be much higher.

Continued . . .

End of the two-state solution

A multicultural state can offer Jewish Israelis and Muslim and Christian Palestinians a future free of discrimination, occupation, fear and violence

• 
• • Saree Makdisi
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday July 28 2008

In order to try to create an exclusively Jewish state in what had been the culturally diverse land of Palestine, Israel's founders expelled or drove into flight half of Palestine's Muslim and Christian population and seized their land, their houses, and their property (furniture, clothing, books, personal effects, family heirlooms), in what Palestinians call the nakba, or catastrophe, of 1948.

Even while demanding – rightly – that no one should forget the Jewish people's history of suffering, and above all the Holocaust, Israel has insisted ever since 1948 not merely that the Palestinians must forget their own history, but that what it calls peace must be premised on that forgetting, and hence on the Palestinians' renunciation of their rights. As Israel's foreign minister has said, if the Palestinians want peace, they must learn to strike the word "nakba" from their lexicon.

Some must never forget, while others, clearly, must not be allowed to remember. Far from mere hypocrisy, this attitude perfectly expresses the Israeli people's mistaken belief that they can find the security they need at the expense of the Palestinians, or that one people's right can be secured at the cost of another's.

Little wonder such an approach has not delivered peace. The only way to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to end the denial of rights that fuels it, and to ensure that both peoples' rights are equally protected.

For some years it was thought that peace could be obtained by sidestepping the central fact of the nakba, and creating a Palestinian statelet in what remained of Palestine after 1948, namely, the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, which Israel occupied in 1967.

But such a two-state solution is no longer possible. The inescapable fact is that one state controls all of the land, and it has done so for over 40 years, affirming one people's right to live, marry, work and settle by negating another people's right to do the same, on land that two peoples – not just one – call home.

The only question now is how much longer this negation can go on, and how long it will be before a state premised on it is superseded by its opposite, an affirmative, genuinely democratic, secular and multi-cultural state, the only kind that can offer Jewish Israelis and Muslim and Christian Palestinians alike a future free of discrimination, occupation, fear and violence.

The question, in other words, is not whether there will be a one-state solution, but when; and how much needless suffering there will be in the meantime, until those who are committed to the project of creating and maintaining a religiously exclusivist state in what was historically a culturally and religiously heterogeneous land finally relent and accept the inevitable: that they have failed.

This last point is especially important, because the conflict between Zionism and the Palestinians is – and has always been --– driven by the notion that hundreds of years of cultural heterogeneity and plurality could be negated overnight by the creation of a state with a single cultural and religious identity.

It hardly matters that that identity was never as homogeneous as Zionists like to claim: witness Israel's methodical de-Arabisation of its Mizrahi (Arab-Jewish) population in the 1950s and 1960s, or the perennial debate over "who is a Jew" – an unseemly question that in Israel is not merely a matter of arcane theological exegesis but tied directly to matters of citizenship, nationality, and law.

Israel's claim to an exclusive Jewish identity – as symbolised by its flag – has been sustained ever since 1948 by denying the moral and legal right of return of those Palestinians expelled during the nakba, by forms of legalised discrimination inside the state, and by the maintenance of a much more violent system of apartheid in the territories Israel has militarily occupied since 1967.

Palestinian citizens of Israel – officially referred to by the state as deracinated "Arabs" because it cannot bring itself to acknowledge the fact that they are Palestinian – face institutionalised forms of discrimination far worse than those once encountered by African Americans. For example, while Jewish Israelis who marry non-citizens (or residents of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories) are entitled to have their spouses come live with them, Israeli law explicitly denies that right to Palestinian citizens who marry Palestinians from the occupied territories. Palestinian citizens are also denied various other privileges, including access to state lands, reserved exclusively for Jews.

Meanwhile, Israel maintains two separate infrastructures in the occupied territories, and it subjects the two populations there to two distinct legal and administrative systems. Indigenous Palestinians are subject to a harsh form of military rule, whereas Jewish settlers enjoy the protections of Israeli civil law, even though they have been transplanted -– in violation of international law – beyond the borders of their state.

Indeed, Israel's intensive settlement of the occupied territories is the primary reason for the demise of the two-state solution. Not only is the settler population increasing at a rate three times greater than that of Israel itself, but, according to a UN report published last summer, almost 40% of the West Bank is now taken up with Israeli infrastructure to which Palestinians are denied access. The remainder of the territory has been broken up into an archipelago, each little "island" of territory in effect a small-scale Gaza, cut off from the outside and completely vulnerable to Israel's whims. Under such circumstances, an independent Palestinian state is inconceivable.

Even if it were conceivable, the creation of a Palestinian statelet in the occupied territories would do nothing to safeguard the rights of the 20% of Israel's citizens who are Palestinian; on the contrary, its existence would further empower the likes of former deputy prime minister Avigdor Lieberman, who wants all Palestinians removed to make room for Jewish immigrants (like himself). Nor would it address the right of return of the Palestinians who were deliberately expelled to make room for a Jewish state in 1948, who have been kept out and living in limbo – or in the prison that is Gaza – solely in order to preserve Israel's tenuous claim to Jewishness.

Negation, denial and imprisonment have run their course. The future should be built on affirmation, cooperation, and the constitution of a democratic and secular state that guarantees the rights of Israelis and Palestinians, of Jews, Muslims, and Christians alike.

• Saree Makdisi is Professor of English Literature at the University of California, and the author of Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, published by WW Norton.

US warned against missile strikes

The Peninsula, July 29, 2008

Source ::: AFP

Islamabad • Repeated US missile strikes in Pakistan could harm relations between the two countries, a top Pakistani military officer told a visiting US commander yesterday, a statement said.

The warning by General Tariq Majid, chairman of Pakistan’s joint chiefs of staff, to Lieutenant General Martin Dempsey, head of US Central Command, came hours after a suspected US missile strike in Pakistan’s tribal belt.

“Expressing concern over repeated cross-border missile attacks/firing by coalition and Afghan forces, General Tariq said that our sovereignty and territorial integrity must be respected,” a Pakistani military statement said.

“Any violation in this regard could be detrimental to bilateral relations,” it said.

Majid “also reemphasised that Pakistan armed forces are capable of handling any challenges to our security.”

Pakistani officials said a suspected missile strike by US-led coalition forces in Afghanistan early yesterday had killed three foreign militants and three boys in the South Waziristan tribal region.

The United States has stepped up missile attacks in Pakistan in recent months in response to a surge in violence in parts of Afghanistan bordering Pakistan. Fears have also grown in Pakistan of a possible US offensive in the tribal areas.

Rising violence in Afghanistan has meanwhile, prompted harsh words from Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who accused Pakistani intelligence of orchestrating an attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul earlier this month.

Pakistan’s Majid said the “baseless allegations against Pakistan could affect mutual trust and would definitely influence our efforts in the war against terror.”

What's Driving the Jerusalem Attacks

"If I Forget Thee, Umm Touba…"

By URI AVNERY | Counterpunch, 26 / 27 July, 2008

In one of the most beautiful songs in the Bible, the poet vows: "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, / Let my right hand forget her cunning. / If I do not remember thee, / Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; / If I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy!" (Psalms 137:5)

For some reason, the poet did not write: "If I forget thee, O Umm Touba!" nor "If I forget thee, O Sur Baher!" nor "If I forget thee, O Jabal Mukaber!" nor even "If I forget thee, O Ein Karem!"

A fact that should be remembered in any discussion about Jerusalem: there is no resemblance between the Jerusalem of the Bible and the "Jerusalem" of the current Israeli map. The object of the yearning of the exiles who wept by the rivers of Babylon was the real Jerusalem - more or less within the boundaries of the Old City, whose center is the Temple Mount. One square kilometer, that's all.

The redefined municipality of Jerusalem after the 1967 annexation comprises a vast area, some 126 square kilometers, from Bethlehem in the south to Ramallah in the north. This area has been clothed with the name of "Jerusalem" in order to bestow a religious-national-historic aura to what was nothing but an act of land-grabbing and settlement.

The planners of this map, including the late General Rehavam Ze'evi, nicknamed "Gandhi", the most far-right officer in the Israeli army, had a simple purpose: to annex to Jerusalem as many areas as possible that were free of Arabs, in order to set up Jewish settlements there. They were haunted by the demographic phantom that is still terrorizing us today: they aimed to expand the Jewish and to reduce the Arab population - in Jerusalem and throughout the country.

In order to achieve this, the planners were compelled to add some nearby Arab villages. Not only the Arab neighborhoods near the Old City, like the Mount of Olives, Silwan and Ras-al-Amud, but also villages located at some distance - such as Umm Touba, Sur Baher and Jabal Mukaber in the east, Beit Hanina and Kafr Aka in the north, Sharafat and Beit Safafa in the south.

The demographic phantom that haunted "Gandhi" then is now pursuing us through the streets of Jerusalem, riding a deadly bulldozer.

* * *

UNTIL THE 1949 war, Jerusalem was indeed a mixed city. Jewish and Arab neighborhoods were interwoven.

The demographic map of Jerusalem became engraved in my memory during a personal experience. A year or so before the war, some of us, young men and women of the Bama'avak group in Tel-Aviv, decided to make a trip to Hebron. At the time, only very few Jews went to the southern town, which was known as a nationalist and religious Muslim stronghold.

We took the Arab bus from Jerusalem and went to the town, walked around its alleyways, bought the blue glass for which Hebron is famous, visited the Gush Etzion kibbutzim on the way and returned to Jerusalem. But in the meantime something had happened: one of the "dissident" underground organizations had carried out an especially serious attack (I think it was the bombing of the officers' club in Jerusalem) and the British had imposed a general curfew on all Jewish neighborhoods throughout the country.

At the entrance of Jerusalem we alighted from the bus and crossed the city on foot from one end to the other, taking care to move only in the Arab neighborhoods. From there we took an Arab bus to Ramle, and another one to Jaffa, and then found our way to our homes in Tel Aviv through backyards and side streets. Not one of us was caught.

Thus I became acquainted with the Arab neighborhoods, among them elegant quarters like Talbieh and Bakaa, which became the centers of Jewish Jerusalem after the 1948 war. In that war, the inhabitants fled/were driven to East Jerusalem and settled there - until these neighborhoods, too, were conquered by the Israeli army and annexed to Israel.

THE ANNEXATION of East Jerusalem created a dilemma. What to do with the Arab population? They could not be expelled. The destruction of the Mugrabi quarter opposite the Western Wall and the brutal expulsion of the Arab inhabitants of the Jewish Quarter in the Old City had already caused much negative comment throughout the world.

If the government had indeed intended to "unite" the city, they would have accompanied the annexation with some immediate measures, such as conferring automatic citizenship on all the Arab inhabitants and returning their "abandoned" properties in West Jerusalem (or, at least, paying compensation.)

But the government did not dream of doing so. The inhabitants were not awarded citizenship, which would have given them the same rights as the Arab citizens of Israel in Galilee and the Triangle. They were only recognized as "residents" in the city in which their forefathers had lived for over a thousand years. That is a fragile status, which accords Israeli identity cards, but not the right to vote for parliament. It can easily be withdrawn.

True, in theory an Arab Jerusalemite can apply for Israeli citizenship, but such an application is subject to the arbitrary decision of hostile bureaucrats. And the government, of course, relies on the Arabs not to do so, since that would mean recognizing the legitimacy of the Israeli occupation.

Continued . . .

Amnesty claims its website is being blocked

RINF.COM, July 28, 2008

JOURNALISTS working from the Olympics press centre in Beijing are unable to access amnesty.org, the Amnesty International website, the organisation claimed today.

A number of other websites are also reported to have been blocked, they claimed.

It comes as Amnesty International prepares to launch a new report evaluating the Chinese authorities’ human rights performance in the run-up to the Olympics.

It is embarrassing to the International Olympic Committee, who had highlighted the loosening of restrictions on foreign media in China as an example of an improvement in human rights brought about by the hosting of the Olympics.

Earlier this month Jaques Rogge, the IOC President, had claimed that “there will be no censorship on the internet.”

“The Olympics Countdown: Broken Promises” is due to be published online today at 21:00 GMT, Tuesday 29 July at 05:00am Hong Kong time.

It is the follow-up to “China: The Olympics Countdown: Crackdown on Activists Threatens Olympic Legacy” which was released in April this year, the new report claims to show that there has still been little progress towards fulfilling the Chinese authorities’ promise to improve human rights, but rather continued deterioration in key areas.

Report: Torture widespread in Palestinian jails

AP, July 28, 2008

By KARIN LAUB and DALIA NAMMARI
Associated Press Writers

RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) -- One detainee told of being beaten with pipes and having a screwdriver rammed into his back. Another said interrogators tied his hands behind his back then lifted him into the air by his bound wrists.

Two human rights groups on Monday decried widespread torture of political opponents by bitter Palestinian rivals Hamas and Fatah, and Associated Press interviews with three victims and a doctor backed the reports of abuse.

The findings emerged as the two sides carried out fresh arrest sweeps in the West Bank and Gaza - highlighting deep tensions in the Palestinian territories after a flare-up in violence over the weekend.

In the West Bank on Monday, the security forces of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas rounded up more than 50 suspected Hamas supporters, including mosque preachers and intellectuals, in retaliation for a similar sweep of Fatah loyalists in Gaza, set off by a bombing that killed five Hamas members Friday.

Hamas violently seized power in Gaza in June 2007, leaving the Islamic militant group in charge of the coastal territory and Abbas' forces controlling the West Bank.

The Palestinian human rights group Al Haq said Monday that arbitrary arrests of political opponents have been common since Hamas' takeover of Gaza, with each side trying to defend its turf.

Continued . . .

The Military-Industrial Complex

It's Much Later Than You Think

By Chalmers Johnson | TomDispatch.com, July 27, 2008

Most Americans have a rough idea what the term "military-industrial complex" means when they come across it in a newspaper or hear a politician mention it. President Dwight D. Eisenhower introduced the idea to the public in his farewell address of January 17, 1961. "Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime," he said, "or indeed by the fighting men of World War II and Korea… We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions… We must not fail to comprehend its grave implications… We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex."

Although Eisenhower's reference to the military-industrial complex is, by now, well-known, his warning against its "unwarranted influence" has, I believe, largely been ignored. Since 1961, there has been too little serious study of, or discussion of, the origins of the military-industrial complex, how it has changed over time, how governmental secrecy has hidden it from oversight by members of Congress or attentive citizens, and how it degrades our Constitutional structure of checks and balances.

From its origins in the early 1940s, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was building up his "arsenal of democracy," down to the present moment, public opinion has usually assumed that it involved more or less equitable relations -- often termed a "partnership" -- between the high command and civilian overlords of the United States military and privately-owned, for-profit manufacturing and service enterprises. Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is that, from the time they first emerged, these relations were never equitable.

In the formative years of the military-industrial complex, the public still deeply distrusted privately owned industrial firms because of the way they had contributed to the Great Depression. Thus, the leading role in the newly emerging relationship was played by the official governmental sector. A deeply popular, charismatic president, FDR sponsored these public-private relationships. They gained further legitimacy because their purpose was to rearm the country, as well as allied nations around the world, against the gathering forces of fascism. The private sector was eager to go along with this largely as a way to regain public trust and disguise its wartime profit-making.

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Roosevelt's use of public-private "partnerships" to build up the munitions industry, and thereby finally overcome the Great Depression, did not go entirely unchallenged. Although he was himself an implacable enemy of fascism, a few people thought that the president nonetheless was coming close to copying some of its key institutions. The leading Italian philosopher of fascism, the neo-Hegelian Giovanni Gentile, once argued that it should more appropriately be called "corporatism" because it was a merger of state and corporate power. (See Eugene Jarecki's The American Way of War, p. 69.)

Some critics were alarmed early on by the growing symbiotic relationship between government and corporate officials because each simultaneously sheltered and empowered the other, while greatly confusing the separation of powers. Since the activities of a corporation are less amenable to public or congressional scrutiny than those of a public institution, public-private collaborative relationships afford the private sector an added measure of security from such scrutiny. These concerns were ultimately swamped by enthusiasm for the war effort and the postwar era of prosperity that the war produced.

Continued . . .

US faces record budget deficit

Al Jazeera, July 29, 2008

Costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have sapped the US budget [AFP] The US government's budget deficit is expected to soar to a record $482 billion in the next fiscal year, the White House budget office has said. The Office of Management and Budget said on Monday it blamed the "recent economic slowdown" for the record figure. The budget deficit measures the gap between how much the government spends and what it raises through taxes. Analysts say the news means the next US president may be urged to work on slashing the deficit instead of adding to it with expensive spending programmes such as those promised by both candidates. Democrat anger The White House had initially projected a deficit of $410 billion in the 2009 fiscal year, which begins October 1. However the office also predicted that the US economy would grow at a rate of 1.6 per cent this year and rebound further at 2.9 per cent rate next year. The White House said its projections showed a resilient economy with controlled inflation, and said that if food and energy prices stabilise "as expected" the inflation rate should fall. However Democrats have criticised the Bush administration for squandering budget surpluses and nearly doubling the national debt, from $5.6 trillion when Bush took office in 2001, to more than $9.5 trillion at present. Toll of war Gerald Friedman, a professor of economics at the University of Massachussetts Amherst told Al Jazeera the government had underestimated the size of the deficit. "The problem is that the Bush administration spends money like a drunken sailor rather than investing wisely in schools and infrastructure." Gerald Friedman, professor of economics. "They are not indicating all the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan despite a mandate from congress to do that. They are only including the first nine months of the fiscal year. "They are also projecting that the economy will recover faster than most economists think. We'll probably be looking at a deficit of around $600 billion by now. "The problem is that the Bush administration spends money like a drunken sailor rather than investing wisely in schools and infrastructure." The budget has been sapped by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that came as Bush's tax cuts went into effect. Analysts have also said that health care and pensions spending will rise as the US's so-called "baby boom" generation, born after World War II, ages. US economic growth has been hit hard by the current slump in the housing market, a global credit crunch and record world oil prices. Dana Perino said earlier on Monday that a higher was "the price that we pay in order to help improve the economy". She said the administration still stood by its goal of achieving a balanced budget by 2012. "We hope to pull out of this economic downturn over the next few months because of the stimulus package," she said.

A new consensus on Iraq

Eric Ruder looks at the factors driving the seeming convergence of Barack Obama, the Bush administration and other players when it comes to Iraq--and what policy they are actually converging around.

Socialist Worker, July 25, 2008

IS THE end of the U.S. occupation of Iraq within sight?

In late July, newspaper headlines announced that the Bush administration and Iraqi officials had agreed on a "general time horizon for meeting aspirational goals" for the withdrawal of U.S. troops. The fuzzy phraseology allows the Bush administration to deny that it had agreed to a "timetable" for withdrawal--something it has repeatedly denounced as "irresponsible" when advocated by Democrats.

Meanwhile, Barack Obama, who has promised to withdraw U.S. combat troops from Iraq by late 2010 if he becomes president, captured the world's attention with a whirlwind tour that took him to Baghdad for meetings with Iraqi politicians and U.S. military leaders.

Shortly before he arrived, an interview with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in Germany's Der Spiegel made headlines because Maliki basically endorsed Obama's 2010 timeline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops--and made the pointed remark that "he who wants to exit in a quicker way has a better assessment of the situation in Iraq."

The sudden convergence of Obama, Maliki and the Bush administration on Iraq left Republican presidential candidate John McCain out in the cold. For months, he has attacked Obama for failing to understand what's at stake in Iraq with his 16-month withdrawal proposal. But suddenly, McCain looks like the one who's out of step--with the heads of state in both the U.S. and Iraq.

As news of Maliki's praise of Obama sunk in, McCain stuck to his script. "The fact is, if we had done what Senator Obama wanted to do, we would have lost," McCain said. "And we would have faced a wider war. And we would have had greater problems in Afghanistan and the entire region. And Iran would have increased their influence."

That perfectly describes the situation that already exists--as a direct product of the U.S. war on Iraq.

At the same time, McCain might be trying to change direction. "If there is any fixed position in John McCain's policy agenda, it's that we must never, ever, set a timetable for leaving Iraq," observed the Chicago Tribune's Steve Chapman. "So it was a surprise to hear him say Monday [July 21], when asked if our troops might depart in the next two years, 'Oh, I think they could be largely withdrawn, as I've said.'"

Continued . . .

Brzezinski: Surge In Afghanistan Risky, Some McCain Backers Want World War IV

Seth Colter Walls | Huffington Post, July 25, 2008

All of a sudden, everyone seems to be in favor of sending more troops to Afghanistan. As Barack Obama encourages Europeans to dispatch more NATO forces and John McCain says that U.S. troops could be sent in greater numbers, the idea that a bigger military footprint is needed has become something of a consensus in the political mainstream.

But Dr. Zbigniew Brzezinski is not on board -- though it's not the first time President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser has cast a skeptic's eye on the usefulness of dispatching great numbers of troops to the country. In an famous 1998 interview with France's Le Nouvel Observateur, Brzezinski admitted his own role in funding Afghanistan's Mujahadeen in 1979, thereby "increasing the probability" that the Soviets would invade a tough, demoralizing, mountainous theater for combat.

And it's with a similar perspective that Brzezinski now doubts the that the answer to what ails Afghanistan is more troops. "I think we're literally running the risk of unintentionally doing what the Russians did. And that, if it happens, would be a tragedy," Brzezinski told the Huffington Post on Friday. "When we first went into Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban, we were actually welcomed by an overwhelming majority of Afghans. They did not see us as invaders, as they saw the Soviets."

However, Brzezinski noted that just as the Soviets were able to delude themselves that they had a loyal army of communist-sympathizers who would transform the country, the U.S.-led forces may now be making similar mistakes. He said that the conduct of military operations "with little regard for civilian casualties" may accelerate the negative trend in local public opinion regarding the West's role. "It's just beginning, but it's significant," Brzezinski said.

Continued . . .

Suspected US missiles kill six in Pakistan

AFP, 28/07/2008 09h25

The Pakistani tribal village of Azam Warsak

PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AFP) - Suspected US missiles killed six people including three Arab militants in Pakistan's tribal belt on Monday, as the country's premier prepared for talks with US President George W. Bush.

Three missiles struck a house attached to a mosque in the tribal district of South Waziristan, an area bordering Afghanistan that is regarded by Washington as a haven for Al-Qaeda and Taliban extremists, officials said.

"Six people are dead and three others injured after three missiles hit a house in Azam Warsak (village)," a senior security official told AFP. He said those killed were three "suspected Arab militants and three young boys."

Map locating the district of South Waziristan in Pakistan's tribal district
©AFP/Graphic

Residents said that they heard US aircraft and pilotless Predator drones flying above the area before and after the strike, adding that there had been alarm over similar flights throughout the weekend.

Pakistani officials said the missiles were not fired by their forces but apparently came from US coalition troops deployed over the border, which lies some 20 kilometres (12 miles) west of Azam Warsak.

"This has been done by coalition forces, we did not do it," another Pakistani security official said.

The identities of those killed were not known. A group of Arabs, believed to be Egyptians, had rented a compound containing the house and the madrassa from a local tribesman, Malik Salat, residents said.

A number of Arab Al-Qaeda operatives are believed to be hiding in the tribal belt, including Osama bin Laden, blamed for the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

A tribesman in a village near Azam Warsak near the Pakistan-Afghan border
©AFP/File - Tariq Mahmood

Military officials in Islamabad and the US-led coalition in Afghanistan were not immediately available to comment.

Pakistan has protested over a wave of missile strikes attributed to US-led forces in Afghanistan in recent months which have killed dozens of local people.

Officials including the governor of North West Frontier Province, which adjoins the tribal belt, have warned that the missile strikes are damaging support for Pakistan's new government.

The latest killings took place hours before the scheduled talks between Bush and Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani at the White House.

Continued . . .

Israel steps up anti-Iran lobby in US

Press TV, Sun, 27 Jul 2008

Dick Cheney (L), Ehud Barak (R)

Senior Israeli officials are slated to hold strategic talks with the United States on tactics likely to resolve Iran's nuclear standoff.

According to the Israeli public radio, during his three-day visit, Defense Minister Ehud Barak is expected to hold talks with US officials on Iran's nuclear program and enhancing the capabilities of Israeli armed forces.

Barak is to meet with Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, senior military officials, members of Congress, and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

Former Israeli defense minister Shaul Mofaz, believed to be campaigning to succeed Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, is also scheduled to visit the US on Wednesday.

His spokesperson told AFP that Mofaz would hold meetings with Cheney and Rice, adding that, "The main subject under discussion will be the threat posed by the Iranian nuclear program to the entire region."

While Israel and the US claim to be committed to a diplomatic solution to Iran's nuclear standoff with the West, they have repeatedly threatened to launch a military strike against Iran should the country continue uranium enrichment.

Earlier in July, in response to growing threats from Israel and the US, Iran test-fired nine long and medium-range ballistic missiles to demonstrate the country's defensive military capabilities.

Tehran insists that its nuclear program is aimed at generating electricity for a growing population and is in line with the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Islamophobia in the British media

By Barry Mason | WSWS, July 28, 2008

A recent Channel 4 Television “Dispatches” documentary, “Muslims under Siege,” showed how the demonisation of Muslims and the propagation of Islamophobia have become widespread in British media and politics.

Presented by journalist Peter Oborne, the programme was based on research for a pamphlet, also entitled, “Muslims under Siege”[1] written by Oborne and James Jones, a television journalist.

The “Dispatches” programme commissioned a survey of newspaper reportage by the Cardiff School of Journalism. It involved nearly 1,000 articles written since the year 2000, noting the content and context of articles pertaining to Muslims and Islam.

The findings showed that 69 percent of the articles presented Muslims as a source of problems not just in terms of terrorism but also on cultural issues, and that 26 percent of the articles portrayed Islam as dangerous, backward or irrational.

Professor Justin Lewis said the survey of the articles showed a “series of ideas repeated over time... that links Muslims with terrorism... with extremism... with incompatibility with British values. Those ideas are repeated over and over again and inevitably they are going to play a part in shaping public consciousness.”

A significant finding was that the emphasis of the articles switched this year from terrorism (27 percent) to religious and cultural issues (32 percent). Professor Lewis explained that the focus on Muslims having different cultural values is “in some ways more damaging, it portrays all British Muslims with this notion of being extreme and incompatible with British values.”

Many of the articles in tabloid newspapers were either outright lies or gross distortions. A Sun newspaper report of October 7, 2006 stated that a “Muslim hate mob” had attacked a house in an exclusive suburb of Windsor that was being refurbished to be used by British soldiers returning from Afghanistan. Whilst the house had been vandalised, no evidence could be produced to show it had been carried out by Muslims. Oborne spoke to the senior policeman who had investigated the case. He explained the attack had taken place overnight and there was no evidence to show who had done it.

Continued . . .

UK torture coverup unravels

uruknet.info, July 27, 2008

smintheus, Daily kos

Torture by British soldiers, Iraq 2004 The British governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have been shockingly complicit with the Bush administration both in using, encouraging, and facilitating torture, as well as in helping to cover up the traces. Some CIA torture flights passed through the UK, and British-controlled Diego Garcia has served as one of the primary staging grounds for those flights and itself is one of the network of 'black sites'. Indeed MI5 agents have arranged the arrest of men who ended up at Guantanamo, and taken part in interviews there - as for example in the case of Bisher al Rawi. In other words, Tony Blair fully integrated the UK into Bush's torture regime. That's made even clearer in a new parliamentary report just published in Britain. The Joint Committee on Human Rights has been investigating the torture and murder of Baha Musa in Iraq in 2003. Musa was beaten and suffocated. The Committee found that top military officials misled it when they claimed that Bush-style "conditioning techniques" used by the British military had not been approved for interrogations in Iraq. Such techniques (e.g. hooding, sleep deprivation, and stress positions) were prohibited by law more than 30 years ago. Since 2004 UK military officials have pled the few bad apples defense, both in their own internal review and in testimony to Parliament. [In 2004] Adam Ingram, the armed forces minister, and Lieutenant General Robin Brims, Commander Field Army in 2006, had told the Joint Committee on Human Rights that hooding and sleep deprivation were forbidden. But the committee said the assurances appeared to be false, and not all troops had known these and other "conditioning techniques" were banned. Neither man has explained to Parliament why they lied. The Independent adds: A scathing report from the Joint Human Rights Committee (JHRC) warns that the use of "coercive interrogation techniques" may have been officially sanctioned, despite assurances that troops knew they were outlawed... The JHRC report also found that the use of hooding and stress positioning by 1 Queen's Lancashire Regiment in 2003 was based on legal advice received from brigade headquarters. It claims that, at least until the Baha Mousa case came to light, the prohibition on the use of conditioning techniques "was not as clearly articulated to troops in Iraq as it might, and indeed should, have been". Legal advice from the military chain of command authorizing torture. How familiar. Phil Shiner, of Public Interest Lawyers, said: "We are meant to believe that it is just a few bad apples, but the evidence from courts martial and other cases shows that nothing could be further from the truth." The report also finds that... ...even at the start of 2008 an official army investigation had found that the prohibition on [the techniques'] use was still not 'clearly being articulated' to ordinary soldiers... [Phil Shiner said] "There is evidence that British forces in Iraq routinely used coercive interrogation techniques - including sexual humiliation - and that interrogators were made to use them." In the face of this damning evidence, and very much on the model of the Bush administration, the British Defense Minister Des Browne has the temerity to say: "Since 2003 we have made considerable improvements to the training and information given to soldiers deploying on operations about the correct and humane treatment of detainees. We have always been clear that we expect our forces to comply fully with international law. We will not tolerate anything less." Even so, Browne has announced that a judge's inquiry will investigate the "discrepancies" between what military officials told legislators and, presumably, the truth. Such a judicial investigation into official government lies would be welcome in the US as well. Photo: Autopsy of Baha Musa, Sept. 2003

U.S. concedes Iraq victims were law-abiding, not insurgents

By Leila Fadel | McClatchy Newspapers, July 27, 2008

BAGHDAD -- The U.S. military said Sunday that the three people killed last month after U.S. soldiers shot at their car in one of the most secured areas of Iraq were civilians, not criminals as the military initially reported.

The correction came more than a month after a bank manager at a branch inside the airport, Hafeth Aboud Mahdi, and two female bank employees were shot at by U.S. soldiers as they sped to work on a road within the secured airport compound. The road is used only by people with high-level security clearance badges. The car veered off the road, hit a concrete blast wall and burst into flames.

The original statement said that Mahdi and the two women were "criminals" and that an American convoy on the side of the secured road came under small-arms fire from the vehicle. Soldiers said they shot back. A weapon was found in the debris and two U.S. military vehicles were struck by bullets from the attack, the statement on June 25 said.

"When we are attacked, we will defend ourselves and will use deadly force if necessary," Maj. Joey Sullinger, a spokesman for 4th Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division, said in a statement at the time. "Such attacks endanger not only U.S. soldiers but also innocent civilians, including women and children, traveling the roadways of Baghdad."

On Sunday the story changed and the tone was apologetic. A military statement said that neither the civilians who were killed nor the soldiers were at fault for the deaths. An investigation found that "the driver and passengers were law-abiding citizens of Iraq."

Soldiers had pulled off the road because one of the vehicles in the convoy was having maintenance problems. As they worked on the vehicle they saw Mahdi's car and thought it was moving too quickly toward them, the statement said. Believing they might be in danger, the soldiers warned the car. When the driver ignored the signals they shot at the vehicle, the statement said.

The alleged attack and the weapon that was said to have been recovered from the burned vehicle were misunderstandings, the statement said.

"This was an extremely unfortunate and tragic incident," said Col. Allen Batschelet, chief of staff, MND-B and 4th Infantry Division, in a statement. "Our deepest regrets of sympathy and condolences go out to the family. We are taking several corrective measures to amend and eliminate the possibility of such situations happening in the future."

Mahdi's son, Mohammed Hafeth, said the statement was insufficient.

He said the image of his father's burning vehicle haunts him. He'd waited in his father's office that morning surprised that he wasn't there yet. They'd left at nearly the same time that morning.

Hafeth drives bank employees to work. That morning his father offered to take one of Hafeth's passengers and picked up another female bank employee who lived nearby their central Baghdad home.

As he sat in the office a colleague walked in and told Hafeth his father's car was broken down on the airport road. Hafeth reached for his car keys.

"I'll drive," he recalled his colleague saying.

As they approached his father's car he saw the flames. He jumped from the car and started to run toward the burning vehicle, but U.S. soldiers blocked his way.

"Go," he recalled them ordering. But he said he couldn't move. He dropped to the ground and wept as his father burned inside the vehicle.

"Why did they kill him like this?" Mohammed Hafeth said Sunday in a phone interview. "We demand that they send those soldiers to an Iraqi and American court."

Mahdi was the father of six, including Hafeth. Hafeth said he now shoulders the financial responsibility for his family on his approximately $100-a-month salary.

"I was shocked that my father was killed by the Americans," he said. "Supposedly we move in a secured area ... we used to wave at them and they waved at us."

Hafeth said he didn't accept the compensation offered by the U.S. military. They offered $10,000, he said, and that wasn't enough for his father's car let alone his father's life.

"My father was a peaceful man," he said. "He never did anything wrong. Everybody knew his good reputation and everybody liked him."

McClatchy Special Correspondent Laith Hammoudi contributed to this report.

McClatchy Newspapers 2008

Time To Exit The Empire Game

By Patrick J. Buchanan | WorldNetDaily, July 25, 2008

As any military historian will testify, among the most difficult of maneuvers is the strategic retreat. Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, Lee's retreat to Appomattox and MacArthur's retreat from the Yalu come to mind. The British Empire abandoned India in 1947 – and a Muslim-Hindu bloodbath ensued.

France's departure from Indochina was ignominious, and her abandonment of hundreds of thousands of faithful Algerians to the FALN disgraceful. Few American can forget the humiliation of Saigon '75, or the boat people, or the Cambodian holocaust.

Strategic retreats that turn into routs are often the result of what Lord Salisbury called "the commonest error in politics ... sticking to the carcass of dead policies."

From 1989 to 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Empire and breakup of the USSR, America had an opportunity to lay down its global burden and become again what Jeane Kirkpatrick called "a normal country in a normal time."

We let the opportunity pass by, opting instead to use our wealth and power to convert the world to democratic capitalism. And we have reaped the reward of all the other empires that went before: a sinking currency, relative decline, universal enmity, a series of what Rudyard Kipling called "the savage wars of peace."

Yet, opportunity has come anew for America to shed its imperial burden and become again the republic of our fathers.

The chairman of Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang Party has just been hosted for six days by Beijing. Commercial flights have begun between Taipei and the mainland. Is not the time ripe for America to declare our job done, that the relationship between China and Taiwan is no longer a vital interest of the United States?

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government wants a status of forces agreement with a timetable for full withdrawal of U.S. troops. Is it not time to say yes, to declare that full withdrawal is our goal as well, that the United States seeks no permanent bases in Iraq?

On July 4, Reuters, in a story headlined "Poland rejects U.S. missile offer," reported from Warsaw: "Poland spurned as insufficient on Friday a U.S. offer to boost its air defenses in return for basing anti-missile interceptors on its soil. ...

"'We have not reached a satisfactory result on the issue of increasing the level of Polish security,' Prime Minister Donald Tusk told a news conference after studying the latest U.S. proposal."

Tusk is demanding that America "provide billions of dollars worth of U.S. investment to upgrade Polish air defenses in return for hosting 10 two-stage missile interceptors," said Reuters.

Reflect if you will on what is going on here.

By bringing Poland into NATO, we agreed to defend her against the world's largest nation, Russia, with thousands of nuclear weapons. Now, the Polish regime is refusing us permission to site 10 anti-missile missiles on Polish soil, unless we pay Poland billions for the privilege.

Has Uncle Sam gone senile?

No. Tusk has Sam figured out. The old boy is so desperate to continue in his Cold War role as world's Defender of Democracy he will even pay the Europeans – to defend Europe.

Why not tell Tusk that if he wants an air defense system, he can buy it; that we Americans are no longer willing to pay Poland for the privilege of defending Poland; that the anti-missile missile deal is off. And use cancellation of the missile shield to repair relations with a far larger and more important power, Vladimir Putin's Russia.

Consider, too, the opening South Korea is giving us to end our 60-year commitment to defend her against the North. For weeks, Seoul hosted anti-American protests against a trade deal that allows U.S. beef into South Korea. Koreans say they fear mad-cow disease.

Yet, when a new deal was cut to limit imports to U.S. beef from cattle less than 30 months old, that too was rejected by the protesters. Behind the demonstrations lies a sentiment of anti-Americanism.

In 2002, a Pew Research Center survey of 42 nations found 44 percent of South Koreans, second highest number of any country, holding an unfavorable view of the United States. A Korean survey put the figure at 53 percent, with 80 percent of youth holding a negative view. By 39 percent to 35 percent, South Koreans saw the United States as a greater threat than North Korea.

Can someone explain why we keep 30,000 troops on the DMZ of a nation whose people do not even like us?

The raison d'etre for NATO was the Red Army on the Elbe. It disappeared two decades ago. The Chinese army left North Korea 50 years ago. Yet NATO endures and the U.S. Army stands on the DMZ. Why?

Because, if all U.S. troops were brought home from Europe and Korea, 10,000 rice bowls would be broken. They are the rice bowls of politicians, diplomats, generals, journalists and think tanks who would all have to find another line of work.

And that is why the Empire will endure until disaster befalls it, as it did all the others.

Pat Buchanan was twice a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and the Reform Party's candidate in 2000. He is also a founder and editor of The American Conservative. Now a political analyst for MSNBC and a syndicated columnist, he served three presidents in the White House, was a founding panelist of three national TV shows, and is the author of seven books.

Europe's Hypocrisy

Why Bush Must be Put in the Dock

By BRENDAN COONEY | Counterpunch, 26 / 27 July, 2008

It seems strange for European leaders to be celebrating the capture of a war criminal, Radovan Karadzic, so soon after they were shaking hands with another, who so far has not had to go through the trouble of growing out his hair and selling new-age medicine.

"This is a historic moment," German Chancellor Andrea Merkel said of the arrest of the Serbian, whose body count is thought to be upwards of 10,000. "The victims must know: massive human rights violations will not go unpunished."

Two weeks earlier she had "a very interesting exchange of view" with George Bush, whose body count is thought to be upwards of half a million and counting. There was no mention of reassurances for his victims.

The Karadzic seizure "underscored Serbia's European calling," Merkel said, just a fortnight after she had a greater criminal by the right hand and let him get away.

But wait a minute, you say. Karadzic killed systematically. He targeted innocent people. He killed people because of their ethnicity. Shouldn't this be factored into our judgment of him? Maybe. Or maybe killing civilians is killing civilians. Maybe the fact that you don't do body counts, that you slaughtered so many people so indiscriminately that there is no way to precisely tabulate the number, should be weighed as well.

Whether having people lined up before shooting them should carry a different moral valence from dropping bombs on them is a consideration that might be brought up at the International Criminal Court of the United Nations.

There is no reason the International Criminal Court should not adjudicate prima facie cases of aggressive wars. It was wars of aggression, after all, that Nuremberg's International Military Tribunal found "evil." A war of aggression, it said, is "not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." It was Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg, who coined the phrase supreme international crime.

The first four of the seven Nuremberg Principles, adopted in 1950, are a seminal attempt to hold individuals accountable for their actions within the larger system of the nation-state: Principle 1 holds that the individual is responsible for his war crimes; Principle 2 says you're not off the hook just because what you did was okay by the laws of your country; Principle 3 posits that acting as head of state is no defense, and Principle 4 says that following orders is not a defense either.

So what's an international crime? The Principles lay out three kinds: crimes against peace (such as "planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression"), war crimes ("murder," "ill-treatment of prisoners of war," "plunder of public or private property," "wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages"), and crimes against humanity ("murder...and other inhumane acts done against any civilian population.")

If we are to mean anything at all as a nation, we must hold the Iraq War up to the light of these principles. We must let an international court decide which of these crimes were committed by whom, and we must hold accountable the individuals responsible for this war.

The Nuremberg trials were open to two main critiques from contemporary observers: they smacked of victor's justice, because the Allies were not tried for their war crimes, and they were based on ex post facto laws (devised after the crimes were committed). Both points have their validity. And yet putting Bush and company on trial is immune from both charges, because the Principles have been in place for 60 years now, and it is not a question of hauling the vanquished before the victorious. This is the perfect opportunity to establish that no nation is above international law.

Here at home, people are finally starting to talk about impeachment, now that the Administration is in its gloaming. But impeaching Bush is like discharging Timothy McVeigh from the military or kicking Jeffrey Dahmer out of the Boy Scouts. It's something we should probably do while we're waiting for the guy to be arrested.

Writing in The New York Times Book Review of March 28, 1971, Times reporter Neil Sheehan argued that the U.S. presidents, generals and advisers who had launched the war of aggression in Southeast Asia should be put on trial. "The cleansing of the nation's conscience and the future conduct of the most powerful country in the world towards the weaker peoples of the globe demand a national inquiry into the war crimes question," he wrote. "History shows that men who decide for war, as the Japanese militarists did, cannot demand mercy for themselves. The resort to force is the ultimate act."

What defense would we hear from lawyers for the Bush Administration and his henchmen (or puppeteers, let the evidence determine)? That the Iraq War was self-defense? One argument for putting Bush and Cheney in the dock of an international court is that judges there might not swallow that line as easily as did the U.S. press and public.

Brendan Cooney is an anthropologist living in New York City. He can be reached at: itmighthavehappened@yahoo.com

The war, the war criminals and the law

Dr George Barnsby, July 26, 2008

The scenario that Gordon Brown and his New Labour cabinet paint for themselves is pure bunkum and it revolves around the fact that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are now at an end. This moment occurred when five British hostages were taken. Brown now has only two alternatives. He can try to continue the war when he will find that every British life is a virtual hostage or he can bring the troops home and accept reality.

The other aspect of reality is that Brown and all who have waged war illegally are war criminals stained with the blood of the innocent. And once a war criminal always a war criminal. George Monbiot was the first to test this truth when he attempted to make a citizen’s arrest of John Bolton at the Hay Festival. In many countries now their constitutions do not permit of war criminals remaining at large and this is the significance of another attempted citizen’s arrest this week in New Zealand where students offer support for anyone making a citizen’s arrest of Condoleezza Rice the US Secretary of State. George W. Bush himself came close to a citizen’s arrest on his recent visit to Britain and had to be protected by British police from anyone getting near to him. It is now quite clear that there is a large body of opinion in America in favour of Bush being arraigned before the Court of Human Rights at the Hague charged with Crimes against Humanity and it becomes more evident every day that this wiill be where he lands up.

Returning to Blair, Gordon Brown and the diminishing tribe of New Labourites, it is clear that as Britain disintegrates there will be an urgent need for an English constitution which will raise the question of what to do with war criminals. In this regard Britain’s record is a poor one. In 1945 it allowed to enter Britain Nazi collaborators, war criminals and concentration camp guards from Poland, Estonia, Lithuania and elsewhere. Not a single collaborator was ever tried. The idea of Brown being free for another two years is ludicrous and I hope a citizen’s arrest will be made in public by one of my favourite MPs, George Galloway or Ken Purchase. And locally perhaps me arresting my friend Rob Marris who continues to support the war in Iraq when most rational people know that it is all over.

NATO states agree to send more forces to Afghanistan

The Peninsula, July 27, 2008

Source ::: Reuters

KABUL • NATO countries have agreed to send more troops to the volatile south of Afghanistan, Canada’s foreign minister said yesterday, and another 200 Canadian troops could also be deployed.

Canada has some 2,500 soldiers in Afghanistan, most of them stationed in the southern province of Kandahar where they have suffered one of the worst casualty rates fighting a resilient Taliban insurgency.

“We’ve been talking with our NATO allies and in fact we do now have commitments to increase the number of troops particularly in the Kandahar region,” Canadian Foreign Minister David Emerson told a news conference in Kabul.

“We’re really more comforted that the troop support is being increased in an appropriate way,” he said.

Canadian soldiers first came to Afghanistan in late 2001 as part of a US-led Afghan mission to overthrow the hardline Taliban. In 2006, Canadian troops took over operations in Kandahar, the Taliban’s former de-facto capital. Faced with some of the fiercest fighting in Afghanistan, Canada has criticised other countries for refusing to send troops to the south, where the insurgency is strongest.

Asked if Canada was going to increase its own contingent in Afghanistan, Emerson said it could send some 200 soldiers.

“Canada does have 2,500 troops here in Afghanistan and that number could expand to 2,700 as more equipment arrives,” he said.

“We are really talking about a significant increase in the contribution from other countries and that contribution has been forthcoming,” he said.

Emerson, on his first trip to Afghanistan since taking office in May, said he had visited “his team” in Kandahar and Kabul to ensure they were well organised.

Asked if more troops were the only solution in Afghanistan, Emerson said there needed to be a more “complete reconciliation”.

“But it is going to take some military capacity and military activity to get Afghanistan to the point where a more comprehensive, a more permanent solution can take effect,” he said.

The Scourge of the IMF

Published on Friday, July 25, 2008 by CommonDreams.org

by Robert Weissman

Tuberculosis, a treatable disease, kills 1.7 million people a year worldwide.

TB incidence, according to the World Health Organization seems to be correlated to broad social factors, like access to clean water and sanitation, HIV incidence and national health expenditures.

A just published study in the journal PLoS (Public Library of Science) Medicine investigates the role of different possible explanatory factor: the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The researchers’ study focuses on the period 1991 to 2003 for the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, a region for which there is robust data.

The results: The researchers concluded “that IMF economic reform programs are strongly associated with rises in tuberculosis mortality rates in post-communist Eastern European and FSU [former Soviet Union] countries, even after correcting for potential selection bias, tuberculosis surveillance infrastructure, levels of economic development, urbanization, and HIV/AIDS.”

“We estimated an increase in tuberculosis mortality rates when countries participate in an IMF program, which was much greater than the reduction that would have been expected had the countries not participated in an IMF program. On the other hand, we estimated a decrease in tuberculosis mortality rates associated with exiting an IMF program.”

In other words: When countries entered IMF programs, TB rates went up. When the programs ended and countries escaped from IMF influence, TB rates went down.

OK, but the region was in chaos after the fall of the Soviet Union. Economies crashed and per capita income plummeted. Crime rose, incarceration rates jumped, HIV spread. Aren’t these the real factors behind rising TB rates?

Explains Sanjay Basu of Yale University, one of the study authors: “First of all, not all of these countries in this region were dependent on the former Soviet Union. Many of them actually had an increase in GDP after the fall of the former Soviet Union. Several were not part of the trading bloc. And in some of the key countries where TB rates rose, we actually saw an increase in economic growth. So economic downturns could not explain, as the WHO itself has stated, the trends of tuberculosis in that regions. Something else was going on.”

“The reason we use such heavy statistics is precisely to factor in these other issues — incarceration, HIV, changes to the economy, changes to the healthcare infrastructure. We found a statistically independent effect of the IMF. That’s not to say that the IMF was the only cause of TB in this region. The economy, incarceration, HIV — these are all very important, but those factors could not fully explain TB in the region.”

(An interview with Basu can be found here.)

The PLoS study found that participating in an IMF program correlated with increases in tuberculosis incidence of 13.9 percent and an increase in TB mortality rates of 16.6 percent. Basu says that, if the study results are valid, they suggest “we would have averted tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of new cases” if countries in the region had never entered IMF programs.

The theory of the study authors is that IMF programs drive down healthcare spending, and this reduced investment in healthcare explains the rise in TB incidence and death. Basu emphasizes, correctly, that the issue is not so much the IMF directing countries to spend less on health. Rather, it imposes a set of policy constraints — including overall limits on government spending, and needlessly low inflation targets — that inevitably result in countries spending less on health.

There are always variations between regions, but there is nothing about the PLoS researchers’ story that suggests things are any different in Africa, the region where the IMF now exerts the most influence.

Not surprisingly, the IMF has rejected the PLoS findings. “Severe methodological shortcomings limit the scope of these results and prevent any causal interpretation,” asserts an IMF response that is much more subdued than comments from spokespeople. “The fundamental problem is that this study does not take properly into account that countries implement IMF-supported reforms in times of economic distress.”

Says the IMF response: “The authors do not take into account that the economic and social instability following the collapse of Soviet Union may have had a direct impact on TB incidence in the 21 transition economies considered in the study.”

The problem with this line of argument is that it is not true. The authors did take the economic and social instability into account.

Can anything be done about IMF policies with such harmful impacts?

Yes. The IMF is a human creation, not a force of nature.

The United States Congress will next year have a unique opportunity to influence IMF policy. The IMF needs approval from the Congress to go ahead with plans to sell some of the gold it controls. This gold would be used to fund the IMF’s administrative costs — a new income stream the IMF desperately needs. Interest payments from middle-income countries previously paid for administrative costs, but these countries have paid back their loans in order to escape from IMF influence.

As the U.S. Congress looks to approve gold sales to finance the IMF, it must insist that the IMF first end the mandates that effectively restrict countries’ health spending, and force borrowing countries to implement a discredited market fundamentalist policy agenda.

Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor, and director of Essential Action.

(c) Robert Weissman

Are You Ready to Face the Facts About Israel?

By Paul Craig Roberts | Information Clearing House, July 25, 2008

"On October 21 (1948) the Government of Israel took a decision that was to have a lasting and divisive effect on the rights and status of those Arabs who lived within its borders: the official establishment of military government in the areas where most of the inhabitants were Arabs." - Martin Gilbert, Israel: A History

I had given up on finding an American with a moral conscience and the courage to go with it and was on the verge of retiring my keyboard when I met the Rev. Thomas L. Are.

Rev. Are is a Presbyterian pastor who used to tell his Atlanta, Georgia, congregation: "I am a Zionist." Like most Americans, Rev. Are had been seduced by Israeli propaganda and helped to spread the propaganda among his congregation.

Around 1990 Rev. Are had an awakening for which he credits the Christian Canon of St. George's Cathedral in Jerusalem and author Marc Ellis, co-editor of the book, Beyond Occupation.

Realizing that his ignorance of the situation on the ground had made him complicit in great crimes, Rev. Are wrote a book hoping to save others from his mistake and perhaps in part to make amends, Israeli Peace/Palestinian Justice, published in Canada in 1994.

Rev. Are researched his subject and wrote a brave book. Keep in mind that 1994 was long prior to Walt and Mearsheimer's recent book, which exposed the power of the Israel Lobby and its ability to control the explanation Americans receive about the "Israeli-Palestinian conflict."

Rev. Are begins with an account of Israel's opening attack on the Palestinians, an event which took place before most Americans alive today were born. He quotes the distinguished British historian, Arnold J. Toynbee: "The treatment of the Palestinian Arabs in 1947 (and 1948) was as morally indefensible as the slaughter of six million Jews by the Nazis. Though nor comparable in quantity to the crimes of the Nazis, it was comparable in quality."

Golda Meir, considered by Israelis as a great leader and by others as one of history's great killers, disputed the facts: "It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist."

Golda Meir's apology for Israel's great crimes is so counter-factual that it blows the mind. Palestinian refugee camps still exist outside Palestine filled with Palestinians and their descendants whose towns, villages, homes and lands were seized by the Israelis in 1948. Rev. Are provides the reader with Na'im Ateek's description of what happened to him, an 11-year old, when the Jews came to take Beisan on May 12, 1948. Entire Palestinian communities simply disappeared.

In 1949 the United Nations counted 711,000 Palestinian refugees.

In 2005 the United Nations Relief and Works Agency estimated 4.25 million Palestinians and their descendants were refugees from their homeland.

The Israeli policy of evicting non-Jews has continued for six decades. On June 19, 2008, the Laity Committee in the Holy Land reported in Window Into Palestine that the Israeli Ministry of Interior is taking away the residency rights of Jerusalem Christians who have been reclassified as "visitors in their own city."

Continued . . .

Somalia: Famine Looms as Aid Workers Flee

By Najum Mushtaq | Inter Press service

NAIROBI, Jul 25 - By December this year, aid agencies estimate that the number of displaced and hungry people in need of life-saving aid in Somalia will swell to 3.5 million—nearly half the country’s population. Yet, as drought and conflict conspire to worsen the crisis, the humanitarian space to deliver food and other essential assistance in this conflict zone has all but vanished.

“At sea, ships carrying aid face the threat of piracy, on land (aid workers face) armed robbery and kidnapping,” says Abdullahi Musse, a Somali worker for an international humanitarian organisation. “Then, in the process of reaching our warehouses as well as on their way to the beneficiaries, the trucks cannot move without security escorts and have to pass through countless checkpoints which cannot be crossed without paying a ‘fee’ to a variety of armed groups.

“It is a high-risk activity with minimal guarantees of security,” says Musse.

Over the past few months, even this has become almost impossible to do. This year alone 20 aid workers, including foreigners, have been killed. Seventeen aid workers were freed after being kidnapped for ransom while 13 more are still in captivity.

All international aid workers and UN staff have been forced out by continuous fighting between Islamic insurgent groups and forces of the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) backed by Ethiopian troops. Both sides accuse each other of attacks on aid workers and vow to protect them. Added to this are professional kidnapping rings, which have been encouraged by the large ransoms paid by foreigners to release ships taken by pirates.

The UN agencies and nine international organisations still maintain a presence in Mogadishu, but they rely exclusively on local staff. Musse told IPS over the phone from Mogadishu that Somali workers, too, are now being targeted and aid delivery has completely stalled.

There are 250 informal settlements of displaced people in Mogadishu and over 200 more along the road in Afogye. The UN says that as of June, 857,000 people had been displaced from Mogadishu and are reliant on international aid. Other agricultural regions in south-central Somalia, the main theatre of conflict, have been without rain this season and food shortage is acute.

“One of the reasons why many people had fled Mogadishu and set up camps in Afgoye (45 kilometres from the capital) was that it was more accessible for aid workers than the city itself,” he says. “Many families split to get the aid they couldn’t in Mogadishu. For the last two weeks people in the Afgoye corridor settlements have also been protesting in frustration over lack of aid delivery.”

If sufficient food and other humanitarian assistance cannot be scaled up in the coming months, Oxfam International sees a severe famine in the making: “Should these conditions continue and aid agencies are not able to deliver adequate assistance, then the situation could tip over into famine in several regions of Somalia later in the year.”

In his speech at the Security Council on July 23, the secretary-general’s special representative for Somalia, Ahmed Ould-Abdalla, urged international naval escorts for WFP’s aid-carrying ships and more security for aid workers.

“I sympathise with Somali nationals who constitute more than 95 percent of aid workers in south and central Somalia. They risk their lives daily and all too often have been the innocent victims of targeted killings,” Abdalla told the Security Council Wednesday.

Continued . . .

Arabs under siege as Israel tightens grip on Holy City

The battle for Jerusalem is entering a new phase as Israel continues to build new settlements in the east of the city and a series of violent attacks by lone Arab attackers ratchets up the tension

• Peter Beaumont in Jerusalem
• The Observer, Sunday July 27 2008

Palestinian Fawzia al-Kurd walks past a house displaying Israeli flags in the neighbourhood of occupied east Jerusalem where she lives with her family Photograph: Ahmad Gharabli/AFP/Getty

Fawzia al-Kurd’s home is nothing special. She has lived within its walls for the past quarter of a century, in the heart of East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah district. The house is tidy. But at first glance, it would not appear to be worth $10m.

That is the sum that the al-Kurd family claim they were offered by Israeli buyers as an incentive to move on, a figure confirmed by their lawyer. Fawzia refused to make a deal, whatever the price. It would have hurt her ‘integrity’ to take it and leave, she said. So last week she received an eviction notice, based on an arcane legal claim to the site that her husband first called home in 1956.

If she and her family are forced to leave as a result, ultra-Orthodox Israeli settlers from a company called Nahlat Shemoun - linked to a nearby Jewish shrine - will take over half of the house. Settlers have already occupied her illegally built extension. The Kurd house may soon be draped with Israeli flags - as is another a handful of metres distant - and Arab East Jerusalem will have shrunk perceptibly once more.

‘Their objective [in trying to evict me] is political’, said Fawzia. ‘They are claiming as theirs something that is not.’

The story of Fawzia’s house reflects the larger battle for the future of Jerusalem, a city contested with an intensity and urgency unmatched anywhere else in the world. In the interminable saga of the Middle East peace process, agreement on the ‘final status’ of the Holy City remains as elusive as ever.

As Fawzia pondered her eviction notice, Gordon Brown arrived in town to tell the Knesset that he favoured Jerusalem as a shared capital of two separate states: Israeli and Palestinian. US presidential hopeful Barack Obama followed, and adroitly back-tracked on a recent assertion that the city, as the capital of Israel, ‘must remain undivided’. ‘Final status,’ he said, would be for the ‘two sides to negotiate’.

What is at issue now is what has been at stake since Israel’s foundation and before: how can two peoples’ claim on a city as the centre of their national ambitions ever be reconciled? Since the ‘uniting’ of Jerusalem in the Six Day War of 1967, when Israeli troops overran Jordanian positions on the east side of the city, Palestinians have largely watched, furious but impotent, as Israeli construction in Arab East Jerusalem has proceeded apace. Israeli flags dotted around Palestinian quarters bear defiant testimony to Jewish insistence on a unified city and capital.

Continued . . .

Bush, US Military Pressure Iraqis on Withdrawal

Inter Press Service, July 25, 2008

by Gareth Porter

WASHINGTON - Instead of moving toward accommodating the demand of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for a timetable for U.S. military withdrawal, the George W. Bush administration and the U.S. military leadership are continuing to pressure their erstwhile client regime to bow to the U.S. demand for a long-term military presence in the country.

The emergence of this defiant U.S. posture toward the Iraqi withdrawal demand underlines just how important long-term access to military bases in Iraq has become to the U.S. military and national security bureaucracy in general.

From the beginning, the Bush administration’s response to the al-Maliki withdrawal demand has been to treat it as a mere aspiration that the United States need not accept.

The counter-message that has been conveyed to Iraq from a multiplicity of U.S. sources, including former CENTCOM commander William Fallon, is that the security objectives of Iraq must include continued dependence on U.S. troops for an indefinite period. The larger, implicit message, however, is that the United States is still in control, and that it — not the Iraqi government — will make the final decision.

That point was made initially by State Department spokesman Gonzalo Gallegos, who stated flatly on Jul. 9 that any U.S. decision on withdrawal ‘will be conditions-based’.

In a sign that the U.S. military is also mounting pressure on the Iraqi government to abandon its withdrawal demand, Fallon wrote an op-ed piece published in the New York Times Jul. 20 that called on Iraqi leaders to accept the U.S. demand for long-term access to military bases.

Fallon, who became something of a folk hero among foes of the Bush administration’s policy in the Middle East for having been forced out of his CENTCOM position for his anti-aggression stance, takes an extremely aggressive line against the Iraqi withdrawal demand in the op-ed. In fact the piece is remarkable not only for its condescending attitude toward the Iraqi government, but for its peremptory tone toward it.

Fallon is dismissive of the idea that Iraq can take care of itself without U.S. troops to maintain ultimate control. ‘The government of Iraq is eager to exert its sovereignty,’ Fallon writes, ‘but its leaders also recognise that it will be some time before Iraq can take full control of security.’

Fallon goes on to insist that ‘the government of Iraq must recognise its continued, if diminishing reliance on the American military’. And in the penultimate paragraph, he demands ‘political posturing in pursuit of short-term gains must cease’.

Fallon, now retired from the military, is obviously serving as a stand-in for U.S. military chiefs for whom the public expression of such a hard-line stance against the Iraqi withdrawal demand would have been considered inappropriate.

But the former U.S. military proconsul in the Middle East, like his active-duty colleagues, appears to actually believe that the United States can intimidate the al-Maliki regime. The assumption implicit in his op-ed is that the United States has both the right and power to preempt Iraq’s national interests in order to continue to build its military empire in the Middle East.

As CENTCOM chief, Fallon had been planning on the assumption that the U.S. military would continue to have access to military bases in both Iraq and Afghanistan for many years to come. A Jul. 14 story by Washington Post national security and intelligence reporter Walter Pincus said that the Army had requested 184 million dollars to build power plants at its five main bases in Iraq.

The five bases, Pincus reported, are among the ‘final bases and support locations where troops, aircraft and equipment will be consolidated as the U.S. military presence is reduced’.

Funding for the power plants, which would be necessary to support a large U.S. force in Iraq within the five remaining bases, for a longer-term stay, was eliminated from the military construction bill for fiscal year 2008. Pincus quoted a Congressional source as noting that the power plants would have taken up to two years to complete.

The plan to keep several major bases in Iraq is just part of a larger plan, on which Fallon himself was working, for permanent U.S. land bases in the Middle East and Central Asia.

Fallon revealed in Congressional testimony last year that Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan is regarded as ‘the centrepiece for the CENTCOM Master Plan for future access to and operations in Central Asia’.

As Fallon was writing his op-ed, the Bush administration was planning for a videoconference between Bush and al-Maliki Jul. 17, evidently hoping to move the obstreperous al-Maliki away from his position on withdrawal.

Afterward, however, the White House found it necessary to cover up the fact that al-Maliki had refused to back down in the face of Bush’s pressure.

It issued a statement claiming that the two leaders had agreed to ‘a general time horizon for meeting aspirational goals’ but that the goals would include turning over more control to Iraqi security forces and the ‘further reduction of U.S. combat forces from Iraq’ — but not a complete withdrawal.

But that was quickly revealed to be a blatant misrepresentation of al-Maliki’s position. As al-Maliki’s spokesman Ali Dabbagh confirmed, the ‘time horizon’ on which Bush and al-Maliki had agreed not only covered the ‘full handover of security responsibility to the Iraqi forces in order to decrease American forces’ but was to ‘allow for its [sic] withdrawal from Iraq.’

An adviser to al-Maliki, Sadiq Rikabi, also told the Washington Post that al-Maliki was insisting on specific timelines for each stage of the U.S. withdrawal, including the complete withdrawal of troops.

The Iraqi prime minister’s Jul. 19 interview with the German magazine Der Speigel, in which he said that Barack Obama’s 16-month timetable ‘would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes’, was the Iraqi government’s bombshell in response to the Bush administration’s efforts to pressure it on the bases issue.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack emphasised at his briefing Tuesday that the issue would be determined by ‘a conclusion that’s mutually acceptable to sovereign nations’.

That strongly implied that the Bush administration regards itself as having a veto power over any demand for withdrawal and signals an intention to try to intimidate al-Maliki.

Both the Bush administration and the U.S. military appear to harbour the illusion that the U.S. troop presence in Iraq still confers effective political control over its clients in Baghdad.

However, the change in the al-Maliki regime’s behaviour over the past six months, starting with the prime minister’s abrupt refusal to go along with Gen. David Petraeus’s plan for a joint operation in Basra in mid-March, strongly suggests that the era of Iraqi dependence on the United States has ended.

Given the strong consensus on the issue among Shiite political forces of all stripes as well as Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the Shiite spiritual leader, the al-Maliki regime could not back down to U.S. pressure without igniting a political crisis.

Gareth Porter is an historian and national security policy analyst. His latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam“, was published in June 2005.

© 2008 Inter Press Service

What Obama missed in the Middle East

Khaleej Times, July 25, 2008

BY ALI ABUNIMAH (World View)

WHEN I and other Palestinian- Americans first knew Barack Obama in Chicago in the 1990s, he grasped the oppression faced by Palestinians under Israeli occupation. He understood that an honest broker cannot simultaneously be the main cheerleader, financier and arms supplier for one side in a conflict.

He often attended Palestinian-American community events and heard about the Palestinian experience from perspectives stifled in mainstream discussion.

In recent months, Obama has sought to allay persistent concerns from pro-Israel groups by recasting himself as a stalwart backer of Israel and tacking ever closer to positions espoused by the powerful, hard-line pro-Israel lobby Aipac. He distanced himself from mainstream advisers because pro-Israel groups objected to their calls for even-handedness.

Like his Republican rival, senator John McCain, Obama gave staunch backing to Israel's 2006 bombing of Lebanon, which killed over 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and the blockade and bombardment of the Gaza Strip, calling them "self defence".

Every aspect of Obama's visit to Palestine-Israel this week has seemed designed to further appease pro-Israel groups. Typically for an American aspirant to high office, he visited the Israeli Holocaust memorial and the Western Wall. He met the full spectrum of Israeli Jewish (though not Israeli Arab) political leaders. He travelled to the Israeli Jewish town of Sderot, which until last month's ceasefire, frequently experienced rockets from the Gaza Strip. At every step, Obama warmly professed his support for Israel and condemned Palestinian violence. Other than a cursory 45-minute visit to occupied Ramallah to meet with Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinians got little. According to an Abbas aide, Obama provided assurances that he would be "a constructive partner in the peace process." Some observers took comfort in his promise that he would get engaged "starting from the minute I'm sworn into office". Obama remained silent on the issue of Jerusalem, after boldly promising the "undivided" city to Israel as its capital in a speech to Aipac last month, and then appearing to backtrack amid a wave of outrage across the Arab world.

But Obama missed the opportunity to visit Palestinian refugee camps, schools and even shopping malls to witness first-hand the devastation caused by the Israeli army and settlers, or to see how Palestinians cope under what many call "apartheid". This year alone, almost 500 Palestinians, including over 70 children, have been killed by the Israeli army - exceeding the total for 2007 and dwarfing the two-dozen Israelis killed in conflict-related violence.

Obama said nothing about Israel's relentless expansion of colonies on occupied land. Nor did he follow the courageous lead of former President Jimmy Carter and meet with the democratically elected Hamas leaders, even though Israel negotiated a ceasefire with them. That such steps are inconceivable shows how off-balance is the US debate on Palestine.

Many people I talk to are resigned to the conventional wisdom that aspiring national politicians cannot afford to be seen as sympathetic to the concerns of Palestinians, Arabs or Muslims. They still hope that, if elected, Obama would display an even-handedness absent in the campaign.

Without entirely foreclosing the possibility of change in US policy, the reality is that the political pressures evident in a campaign do not magically disappear once the campaign is over. Nor is all change necessarily for the better.

One risk is that a President Obama or President McCain would just bring back the Clinton-era approach where the United States effectively acted as "Israel's lawyer", as Aaron David Miller, a 25-year veteran of the US state department's Middle East peace efforts, memorably put it. This led to a doubling of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, an upsurge in violence and the failed 2000 Camp David summit where Clinton tried to pressure Arafat into accepting a bantustan. A depressing feature of Obama's visit was the prominent advisory role for Dennis Ross, the official in charge of the peace process under Clinton, and the founder of an Aipac-sponsored pro-Israel think-tank.

Whoever is elected will face a rapidly changing situation in Palestine-Israel. A number of shifts are taking place simultaneously. First, the consensus supporting the two-state solution is disintegrating as Israeli colonies have rendered it unachievable. Second, the traditional Palestinian national leadership is being eclipsed by new movements including Hamas. And, as western and Arab governments become more craven in the face of Israeli human rights violations, a Palestinian-led campaign modelled on the anti-apartheid strategy of boycott, divestment and sanctions is building global civil society support. Finally, the demographic shift in Palestine-Israel toward an absolute Palestinian majority in all of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip will be complete in the next three to five years.

Making peace in this new reality will take leaders ready to listen and talk to all sides in the conflict and to consider alternatives to the moribund two-state solution, such as power-sharing, confederation or a single democratic state. It will require, above all, the courage, imagination and political will to challenge the status quo of Israeli domination and Palestinian dispossession that has led to ever more violence with each passing year.

Ali Abunimah is a Palestinian activist

If Iran is Attacking It Might Really be Israel

The American Conservative, July 24, 2008

by Philip Giraldi

The Benny Morris op-ed in the NYT last Friday should provide convincing evidence that Israel really really really wants an attack against Iran sooner rather than later. Morris is close to the Israeli government and his case that Iran must be bombed soon and with maximum conventional weaponry to avoid using nukes later was clearly intended to push the United States to do the attacking. The likelihood that Dick Cheney is almost certainly supportive of a US pre-emptive strike and might well be pulling strings behind the scenes, possibly without the knowledge of the Great Decider, makes the next several months particularly significant if a war is to be avoided.

Some intel types are beginning to express concerns that the Israelis might do something completely crazy to get the US involved. There are a number of possible “false flag” scenarios in which the Israelis could insert a commando team in the Persian Gulf or use some of their people inside Iraq to stage an incident that they will make to look Iranian, either by employing Iranian weapons or by leaving a communications footprint that points to Tehran’s involvement.

Those who argue that Israel would never do such a thing should think again. Israel is willing to behave with complete ruthlessness towards the US if they feel that the stakes are high enough, witness the attack on the USS Liberty and the bombing of the US Consulate in Alexandria in the 1950s. If they now believe that Iran is a threat that must be eliminated it is not implausible to assume that they will stop at nothing to get the the United States to do it for them, particularly as their air force is only able to damage the Iranian nuclear program, not destroy it.

Truth and other casualties of war

The US military’s censorship of a photographer in Iraq raises stark questions about how graphic we want war reporting to be

• 
• • Robert Fox
  • guardian.co.uk,
  • Friday July 25 2008

A fellowship of death: the artillery memorial in London

The row over the American photojournalist Zoriah Miller should put the media’s narcissistic warbling about the right to know about Max Mosley’s kinky affair in the shade. I doubt if it will, however.

Miller, a freelance photographer, was embedded with a US marine unit at Fallujah two years ago. On July 26 2006, he was due to go with the marines to a town council meeting at Garma. He decided instead to accompany a marine troop on a routine patrol. As they were out on the streets they heard an explosion. A suicide bomber had struck the council meeting.

Arriving on the scene, Miller was left to photograph the devastation. More than 20 people had been dismembered by the blast and a number were severely injured.

“As I ran I saw human pieces … a skullcap with hair, bone shards,” he told a blog news wire in San Francisco. “Of the marines I jogged in with, someone started to vomit. Others were standing around, not knowing what to do. It was completely surreal.”

Some of the bodies he photographed wore the shredded uniforms of the marines. He edited the pictures back at the camp, checking that none of the other marines objected, and later put them on his own website, including the images of the American corpses.

For this, his embed was terminated. He was told by letter that he had violated paragraphs 14 (h) and 14 (o) of his signed agreement with the American authorities. By these he had agreed, apparently, not to divulge “any tactics, techniques, and procedures witnessed during operations”, and not to provide “information on the effectiveness of enemy techniques”.

The US marine commander in Iraq, Major General John Kelly has insisted that Miller is banned from access to all US military units in Iraq.

The case has brought into sharp focus the whole business of accrediting war correspondents and embedding journalists with operational units. His transgression – for no one could be daft enough to call this a crime – was that he showed images of dead Americans killed in the service of their country. Though more than 4,000 American service personnel have been killed in Iraq, there have been surprisingly few photos of the dead, and the flag-draped coffins have often been kept away from the public gaze in hangars on air bases.

Despite the pervasive nature of images of war and the ease with which they can be transmitted, our authorities are squeamish about showing that war kills. Dead foreigners are one thing, but showing the images of dead British, American or French allied soldiers are off limits on the grounds that they are an unwarranted intrusion on grief for the relatives, dismay the community at home, and encourage the enemy.

Continued . . .

The Ordeal of Mohammed Omer

By Dr Kenneth Ring | Axis of Logic, July 24, 2008, 19:41

We are used to hearing about the hazards, often fatal, of being a journalist these days. Everyone is familiar with accounts of courageous Russian journalists who have been assassinated and, of course, with stories of war correspondents who have been killed or gravely wounded in the course of reporting from Iraq and Afghanistan. But what about the dangers of just being a Palestinian journalist who is simply trying to return to his own hometown in Gaza after being abroad?

Consider the case of a twenty-four-year-old reporter named Mohammed Omer.

Some background first: For the past six years Mohammed has been covering and reporting on the situation in Gaza and has published his articles in various periodicals in Europe, for the InterPress Service News Agency and The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. His articles have received much recognition and several awards, including, most recently, the prestigious Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, which was presented to Mohammed in a special ceremony in London in June, 2008 – about which more in a moment.

Mohammed and his family, like many Palestinians, have suffered greatly because of the circumstances under which they live in Gaza. He himself was nearly killed by a bulldozer in the course of photographing the demolition of a neighbor’s house and one of his brothers did lose his life as a teenager as a result of being shot by Israel Defense Forces on his way home from school. Another brother was shot in the leg, which had to be amputated. Mohammed’s father has spent eleven years in Israeli prisons where torture, as is well known, is common. And in March, 2003, Mohammed returned to his home after school to find that it had been demolished by an Israeli bulldozer. All his family’s possessions – books, photographs, his own notebooks, everything – were obliterated, and he and his family suddenly found themselves homeless.

This is not an unusual family story for people living in Gaza; on the contrary, one hears accounts like this all the time from the lips of Palestinians.

Fast-forward to June 2008. Mohammed has recently received word that he is to be a co-recipient of the Martha Gellhorn Prize. For this, he must get to London. But it is not easy for any Gazan to leave the prison that Gaza has become under the unrelenting Israeli siege. Only after strenuous diplomatic efforts by Dutch officials and a prize-winning Australian journalist living in England over several weeks was it possible for Mohammed to leave Gaza to receive his award. While in Europe, Mohammed spoke in Sweden, the Netherlands and Greece about his work, in addition to giving a very moving acceptance speech in London during the ceremonies for the Gellhorn Prize.

The return to Gaza was, however, fraught with difficulties. According to various reports in the press, as soon as Mohammed arrived in Amman, the Dutch diplomats who had facilitated his trip informed him that the Israelis did not want him to return. But he was finally allowed to enter Israel via the Allenby Bridge on the morning of June 26^th, after further negotiations by his Dutch sponsors.

That’s when the trouble began.

According to all the accounts I have read in the press, including several interviews with Mohammed himself, he was interrogated there, strip-searched, and brutalized by agents of the Shin Bet for several hours. Mohammed says that his interrogators made fun of him saying, “Oh, so it’s you who won the journalism award,” and repeatedly asked him where he had hidden his prize money. After that, he was continually threatened at gunpoint, forced to remove all his clothes, and then beaten and kicked for more than ten minutes until he lost consciousness. He awoke to find himself being dragged around the room by his feet, his head banging on the floor. Then a Shin Bet officer pressed his boot upon Mohammed’s neck while another painfully jabbed fingers into his face. At this point, Mr. Omer says, “I thought I was dying. I remained in a state of unconsciousness for up to 90 minutes until a medical doctor who was carrying an M-16 performed an electrocardiogram on me.”

This bare summary of Mohammed’s ordeal hardly gives more than an overall impression of his treatment, and the rank and wanton humiliation inflicted on him, seemingly motivated only by malice. Reading Mohammed’s own testimony, one can’t help being reminded of the unchecked and unmonitored torture that was visited upon Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. To illustrate this, I will present some excerpts from a recent interview between Mohammed and Amy Goodman on her Democracy Now! program.

Continued . . .

EU Parliament: Fingerprinting of Gypsies In Italy is racial discrimination

PR-inside.com

© AP, 2008-07-10 19:30:19 -

STRASBOURG, France (AP) - The European Parliament on Thursday called the fingerprinting of Gypsies in Italy a clear act of racial discrimination and urged the authorities to stop it.

In a resolution, the EU assembly said the measure is not supported by EU human rights treaties and that EU citizens of Roma, or Gypsy, origin

must not be treated differently from others in Italy, who are not required to submit their fingerprints.

In Austria, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which monitors and reports on the human rights situation in its 56 participating states, including Italy, also expressed serious reservations about Italy’s handling of Gypsies.

The Italian government has begun the Roma fingerprinting as part of a wider crackdown on street crime. Italian newspapers have published photographs of gloved officials taking fingerprints from the ink-stained hands of Gypsies living in around Naples, and authorities are expected to move in on camps in other cities in the coming days.

Early examples of the papers filed in Naples showed local authorities also were identifying those fingerprinted according to their religion, ethnicity and education level.

Italian Interior Minister Roberto Maroni said last week the measure was needed to fight crime and identify illegal immigrants for expulsion.

EU lawmakers called on the European Union executive to thoroughly check whether the steps taken by the Italian government violate European law.

They said Italian claims that the presence of Gypsy camps around large cities justifies the government to declare a state of emergency and implement extraordinary measures are disproportionate and inappropriate.

The parliamentary resolution, which is not binding but puts political pressure on Italy to refrain from the fingerprinting, was approved by 336 to 220 votes, with 77 abstentions. Center-left deputies voted «yes,» despite protests from conservatives.

Franco Frattini, the Italian foreign minister and former EU justice commissioner, criticized the motion as politically motivated.

The fingerprinting measure «does not target ethnic groups and is not inspired by racism but by the elementary need to identify anyone who does not have a valid document,» he told the online Repubblica TV.

More than 700 encampments have been built in Italy, mainly around Rome, Milan and Naples, housing tens of thousands of Gypsies in squalid conditions.

Exposing Bush's historic abuse of power

Salon has uncovered new evidence of post-9/11 spying on Americans. Obtained documents point to a potential investigation of the White House that could rival Watergate.

By Tim Shorrock | Salon.com, July 23, 2008

The last several years have brought a parade of dark revelations about the George W. Bush administration, from the manipulation of intelligence to torture to extrajudicial spying inside the United States. But there are growing indications that these known abuses of power may only be the tip of the iceberg. Now, in the twilight of the Bush presidency, a movement is stirring in Washington for a sweeping new inquiry into White House malfeasance that would be modeled after the famous Church Committee congressional investigation of the 1970s.

While reporting on domestic surveillance under Bush, Salon obtained a detailed memo proposing such an inquiry, and spoke with several sources involved in recent discussions around it on Capitol Hill. The memo was written by a former senior member of the original Church Committee; the discussions have included aides to top House Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers, and until now have not been disclosed publicly.

Salon has also uncovered further indications of far-reaching and possibly illegal surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency inside the United States under President Bush. That includes the alleged use of a top-secret, sophisticated database system for monitoring people considered to be a threat to national security. It also includes signs of the NSA's working closely with other U.S. government agencies to track financial transactions domestically as well as globally.

The proposal for a Church Committee-style investigation emerged from talks between civil liberties advocates and aides to Democratic leaders in Congress, according to sources involved. (Pelosi's and Conyers' offices both declined to comment.) Looking forward to 2009, when both Congress and the White House may well be controlled by Democrats, the idea is to have Congress appoint an investigative body to discover the full extent of what the Bush White House did in the war on terror to undermine the Constitution and U.S. and international laws. The goal would be to implement government reforms aimed at preventing future abuses -- and perhaps to bring accountability for wrongdoing by Bush officials.

Continued . . .

Karzai 'protecting drug lords'

Al Jazeera, July 25, 2008

Afghanistan produced 93 per cent of the world's opium last year [AFP] A former senior US anti-drug official has accused Afghanistan's president of playing the US "like a fiddle" and protecting drug lords in his country for political reasons. Thomas Schweich, who until June served as US state department co-ordinator for counter-narcotics and justice reform for Afghanistan, said Hamid Karzai was impeding the so-called war on drugs. But the US government underscored its continued support for Karzai on Thursday despite the allegations. Schweich wrote in an article on the New York Times website on Wednesday that "narco-corruption went to the top of the Afghan government". He said the Taliban fighting Karzai's government profited from drugs, but Karzai was reluctant to move against big drug lords in his political power base in the south, where most of the country's opium and heroin is produced. "Karzai was playing us like a fiddle," Schweich wrote. "The US would spend billions of dollars on infrastructure development; the US and its allies would fight the Taliban; Karzai's friends could get richer off the drug trade," he wrote. "Karzai had Taliban enemies who profited from drugs but he had even more supporters who did." Schweich also accused the Pentagon and some US generals of obstructing attempts to get military forces to assist and protect opium crop eradication drives. Nato and US military commanders have been reluctant to get involved in the drug fight, arguing that destroying farmers' crops would alienate tribesmen and increase support for the Taliban. Warlord government Hillary Mann Leverett, a former US National Security Council official for Afghanistan, told Al Jazeera that the US knew that government ministers in Afghanistan, including the minister of defence in 2002, were involved in drug trafficking. Afghan ministers at that time had little expertise but were appointed because "they were warlords, they were thugs, they represented various ethnic and sectarian constituencies", Mann Leverett said. She added that the US government chose to work with them in an attempt to stop Afghanistan becoming a haven for al-Qaeda. "Instead of funding the warlords we could have funded the UN to have a security peacekeeping force throughout the country. "Instead we left Karzai without any troops, without any weapons, without any money, without any backing, to the warlords." US defends Karzai Gonzalo Gallegos, a state department spokesman, did not directly address Schweich's allegations but defended US policy and backing for Karzai. "Karzai was playing us like a fiddle. The US would spend billions of dollars on infrastructure development; the US and its allies would fight the Taliban; Karzai's friends could get richer off the drug trade" Thomas Schweich, ex-US state department co-ordinator for counter-narcotics and justice reform for Afghanistan "We know and understand that there is a corruption issue in Afghanistan but we're working with the sovereign government," Gallegos said on Thursday. "President Karzai has shown us through word and deed that he is working with us to help improve the plight of that country." Gallegos added that corruption was a deeply rooted problem and solving it would take time. Drug production has skyrocketed since the US-led invasion that ousted the Taliban. In 2007, nearly 200,000 hectares of land in Afghanistan was used to cultivate poppy - more than double the area in 2003 – and the country produced 93 per cent of the world's supply of opium, the raw material of heroin. Karzai says his government is succeeding in the war on drugs and has repeatedly promised his US backers that he is committed to rooting out endemic corruption and fighting the drug trade. His counter-narcotics ministry says 20 of Afghanistan's 34 provinces will be poppy-free this year, compared to 13 provinces in 2007. But in the south, cultivation remains rampant.

Pakistan warns that US-India nuclear deal could lead to new arms race

Jeremy Page, South Asia Correspondent | The Times, July 25, 2008

(Manish Swarup/AP)

Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh, who successfully pushed the deal with the US through parliament earlier this week

Pakistan warned the international community yesterday that a deal allowing India to import US atomic fuel and technology could accelerate a nuclear arms race between Delhi and Islamabad.

The warning was made in a letter addressed to more than 60 nations as the Indian Government, having survived a no-confidence vote on Tuesday, dispatched diplomats to clear the deal with international regulators.

Later, in a concession to Islamabad, the United States said that it planned to shift $230 million (£116 million) in aid to Pakistan away from counter-terrorism to upgrading its F16 fighter jets seen as crucial for maintaining military parity with India. That announcement came four days before Yousuf Raza Gilani, Pakistan’s new Prime Minister, is due to meet President Bush at the White House for talks on co-operation in combating Islamic extremists.

Pakistan is a key US ally in the War on Terror and has long complained that India’s nuclear deal, agreed in 2005, will upset the strategic balance of South Asia by endorsing it as a nuclear weapons state.

Related Links

• India Government wins vote to save nuclear deal

• Harm done by nuclear pact eclipses benefits

• India saves nuclear agreement with US

India and Pakistan both tested nuclear weapons in 1999, but cannot buy nuclear supplies from most countries because they refuse to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The nuclear deal bypasses that by lifting a US ban on nuclear sales to India imposed after Delhi tested its first nuclear device in 1974.

India must still win approval from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), whose board meets on August 1, and the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group (NSG). Pakistan warned IAEA and NSG members in its letter that the deal would impair non-proliferation efforts and “threatens to increase the chances of a nuclear arms race in the sub-continent”.

India and Pakistan have fought three wars since independence from Britain in 1947, and though a peace process has stabilised relations since 2004, they remain deeply distrustful of each other.

Mohammad Sadiq, a spokesman for the Pakistani Foreign Ministry, confirmed the contents of the letter, which he said was distributed to IAEA members. He said: “There should be a model agreement that could be signed with any country that meets the criteria. It should not be country-specific.” The US Congress must also approve the deal and American officials have repeatedly said they could struggle to do that before President Bush steps down. Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, said yesterday that the White House would push to get it approved in time.

Congress must also approve the White House’s proposal to shift two thirds of annual US military training and equipment aid to Pakistan towards upgrading the F16s.

Congress demanded last year that military aid to Pakistan — $1 billion annually since 2002 — be spent on law enforcement or fighting terrorism.

Dana Perino, a White House spokeswoman, said that the F16s were used for counter-terrorism. Military experts said that they were rarely used against militants and designed more for a potential war with India.

India has sent its top diplomats to Germany, which holds the rotating chair of the NSG, and to Ireland, an NSG and IAEA board member and a strong proponent of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

The NSG — founded in 1974 — is an informal group of 45 nuclear-exporting countries committed to preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

India has submitted a draft agreement to the IAEA, under which it would separate civilian and military nuclear facilities and allow agency inspections of the former.

Europe's Obama cheers ring hollow in the Middle East

Here the US leader has much less power. Israel calls the shots, and the reality on the ground is gloomy and anti-peace

• 
• • Jonathan Steele
  • The Guardian, Friday July 25 2008

What a contrast. In western Europe Obama-mania is in full flood, epitomised by raving crowds in Berlin last night as well as the polls which show the Democratic candidate to be far more popular than John McCain in almost every country. In Israel he is met with apprehension, and in the Palestinian territories there is only the faintest hope that the deadlocked conflict will ever end.

The difference is that Europeans know the American president holds the keys to war or peace. He has enormous influence in dragging European governments after him, as the disastrous Iraq adventure showed. So it is not surprising that many Europeans are crying out for a man in the White House who will be less aggressive, less unilateral, less imperial, and more attuned to the complexities of international policy. Obama seems to be the one.

In the Middle East the US leader has much less power. Israel calls the shots, and what's happening on the ground is deeply gloomy and anti-peace. The chances of creating a viable Palestinian state have almost vanished as Israeli settlements on the West Bank go on increasing and yet more checkpoints appear.

No wonder that, while they like Obama more than McCain, Palestinians feel little optimism. "Obama might create a different atmosphere," says Yasser Abed Rabo, the secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, stressing the "might". "Bush polarised things between him and Osama bin Laden. The moderates were the big losers. People in the middle felt crushed," he argues.

Others expect Obama will take time to focus on the Middle East in spite of his promise this week to be engaged in peace from day one. "He'll concentrate first on Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and the economy, which all matter more for Americans," an adviser to the Palestinian negotiating team told me.

His visit to the Israeli border town of Sderot was one-sided, not just because he did not balance it with visits to places where Palestinians are oppressed. Sderot is more than a place under threat of terror. It is a model for how ceasefires are negotiable, and why they are the vital first step towards any serious peace agreement. Yet Obama ignored the point.

Continued . . .

$5000 reward offered for Rice's citizen's arrest

stuff.com.nz, July 24, 2008

A $5000 dollar reward is being offered to any Auckland University student who can make a successful citizen's arrest of United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during her visit to the country this weekend.

Auckland University Student Association (AUSA) president David Do said the arrest would be for her role in "overseeing the illegal invasion and continued occupation" of Iraq.

"It is hard enough living as a student in Auckland these days without having a war criminal coming to town, so we thought we'd give our students a chance to make a dent in their student loans and work for global justice at the same time."

Dr Rice will be in Auckland on July 26, where she will meet with Prime Minister Helen Clark, Foreign Minister Winston Peters and Opposition leader John Key.

She will make her first trip to New Zealand after attending a meeting of the Asean Regional Forum this week in Singapore.

- NZPA

SOME MATTER MORE - WHEN 47 VICTIMS ARE WORTH 43 WORDS

Media Lense, July 22, 2008 Bad Form In his classic work, Obedience to Authority, psychologist Stanley Milgram observed: "There is always some element of bad form in objecting to the destructive course of events, or indeed, in making it a topic of conversation. Thus, in Nazi Germany, even among those most closely identified with the 'final solution', it was considered an act of discourtesy to talk about the killings." (Milgram, Obedience to Authority, Pinter & Martin, 1974, p.204) The same "bad form" is very much discouraged in our own society. One would hardly guess from media reporting that Britain and America are responsible for killing anyone in Iraq and Afghanistan, where violence is typically blamed on "insurgents" and "sectarian conflict". International "coalition" forces are depicted as peacekeepers using minimum violence as a last resort. In reporting the November 2005 Haditha massacre, in which 24 Iraqi civilians were murdered by US troops, Newsweek suggested that the scale of the tragedy "should not be exaggerated". Why? "America still fields what is arguably the most disciplined, humane military force in history, a model of restraint compared with ancient armies that wallowed in the spoils of war or even more-modern armies that heedlessly killed civilians and prisoners." (Evan Thomas and Scott Johnson, 'Probing Bloodbath,' Newsweek, June 12, 2006; http://www.newsweek.com/id/52312/page/1) The truth was revealed in a single moment of unthinking honesty by a senior US Army commander involved in planning the November 2004 Falluja offensive and convinced of its necessity. He visited the city afterward and declared: "My God, what are the folks who live here going to say when they see this?" (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/04/ weekinreview/04burns.html?fta=y&pagewanted=all) The answer was provided by physician Mahammad J. Haded, director of an Iraqi refugee centre, who was in Falluja during the US onslaught: "The city is today totally ruined. Falluja is our Dresden in Iraq... The population is full of rage." (http://www.countercurrents.org/iraq-awad100305.htm) In July 2005, the Independent commented on US actions in Iraq: "The American army's use of its massive fire-power is so unrestrained that all US military operations are in reality the collective punishment of whole districts, towns and cities." (Patrick Cockburn, 'We must avoid the terrorist trap,' The Independent, July 11, 2005) In April 2004, the Daily Telegraph reported the disgust of senior British army commanders in Iraq with the "heavy-handed and disproportionate" military tactics used by US forces, who view Iraqis "as untermenschen. They are not concerned about the Iraqi loss of life... their attitude toward the Iraqis is tragic, it is awful." (Sean Rayment, 'US tactics condemned by British officers', Defence Correspondent, Daily Telegraph, April 11, 2004) READ FULL ALERT >> What is Media Lens? Media Lens is our response to the unwillingness, or inability, of the mainstream media to tell the truth about the real causes and extent of many of the problems facing us, such as human rights abuses, poverty, pollution and climate change. CONTINUE

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Report Says Pentagon Pressured, Intimidated Auditors

Dana Hedgpeth, The Washington Post, July 23, 2008

A GAO report found that the Defense Contract Audit Agency, which oversees contractors for the Defense Department, made an upfront agreement with"a major aerospace company" to limit the scope of an audit. (Photo: EML Associates)

Auditors at an oversight agency of the Pentagon were pressured by supervisors to skew their reports on a major defense contractor's work, hiding wrongdoing and charges of overbilling, according to an 80-page report from the Government Accountability Office.

The Defense Contract Audit Agency, which is charged with overseeing contractors for the Defense Department, made an upfront agreement with "a major aerospace company" to limit the scope of work and basis for an audit, the report said.

When the contractor, who is not named in the report, objected to the draft findings of the DCAA audit, managers at the audit agency assigned a new supervisor to the case and threatened the senior auditor with personnel action if "he did not delete findings from the report and change the draft audit opinion to adequate," according to the GAO report.

Supervisors at DCAA attempted to intimidate auditors, prevented them from speaking with GAO investigators and created a "generally abusive work environment," the report said.

GAO said it launched the investigation on its own after receiving complaints on a hotline about 14 DCAA audits. It conducted more than 100 interviews of more than 50 people involved in the audits at two DCAA locations in California. The report details three of the audits the GAO looked into but does not name any of the contractors.

Chris Isleib, a spokesman at the Pentagon, said he did not have a comment at this time.

Former Gitmo Prosecutor Says Trials Rigged

RINF.COM, Thursday, July 24th, 2008

By Jeff Stein

Air Force Col. Morris D. Davis, who resigned last year after two years as chief prosecutor at Guantanamo, today described the military commissions system as fatally “tainted” by politics and designed to produce guilty verdicts, no matter what the costs.

The possibility of the system delivering “credible verdicts is doubtful,” Davis said Tuesday in a remarkable interview on NPR’s Diane Rehm Show.

“The process has been so tainted, such a black eye to the country, that we have to make every effort possible to have an open trial…

“I’m afraid that what has happened, though, is that we’ve had a rush, in order to get things done before the election, rather than taking the time — and getting evidence declassified in order to have an open trial is a frustrating, time consuming process, but in my view a necessary step if these things are going to have credibility.

Morris said the politicization of the system began at the top, with the appointment of Susan Crawford, a “political appointee” with no time in uniform, to run the military commissions.

Morris also said that Brig. Gen. Thomas W. Hartman, senior legal advisor to the convening authority, “broke the law” by exercizing command influence on the proceedings.

“Most people were watching to see what DoD was going to do about it, to see if he’d be fired. But instead they charged six more detainees and pressed ahead.”

Morris also said that on Jan. 2, 2007, two hours after President Bush withdrew the nomination of DoD General Counsel Jim Haynes, implicated in torture policy memos, to be a federal judge, Haynes called him up to demand the quick prosecution of Australian David Hicks, a Guantanamo inmate who has since been freed.

”How quickly can you charge David Hicks?” Haynes said, according to Morris.

“At that time we had no statute in place, no convening authority for military commisions, no regulations for military commissions. The major pieces were not in place, and I’m having to deal with the general cousel who’s asking how soon we can charge David Hicks.”

Haynes compared the Guantanamo proceedings to the Nurenburg trials of Nazi officials at the end of World War Two. But when Morris noted that those trials had also rendered aquittals, Haynes expoloded.

“Acquittals? We’re not going to have any acquittals,” Haynes said, according to Morris. “We’ve been holding these guys for years. How could you explain that if we had acquittals? We’ve gotta have convictions.”

Morris said there was no doubt in his mind that Salim Hamdan, on trial now, was far more than a cluless chaffeur for Osama bin Laden. But the “black eye” the proceedings have earned will taint his conviction. (Listen to the audio tape here.)

The Israeli army released the soldier who shot a bound Palestinian in Ni'lin two weeks ago

uruknet.info, July 22, 2008

The Israeli National Radio reported on Monday evening that the Israeli Army District Attorney has released the Israeli soldier who shot a bound Palestinian civilian in Ni'lin village near Ramallah in the northern part of the West Bank two weeks ago. A video showing an Israeli soldier shooting a bound Palestinian in the village of Ni'lin near Ramallah raised uproar among human rights organizations. The tape, which was released on Sunday by the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem, shows an Israeli soldier shooting Ashraf Abu Rahme with a rubber coated-steel bullet at short range while his arms were bound almost two weeks ago. B'Tselem said that other soldiers witnessed the shooting but moved no limb to stop it, and demanded an investigation to be opened into the incident. The shooting took place July 7, during an anti-wall demonstration in the village. The video shows Abu Rahme being taken to the military jeep by one soldier, while the other points his gun form a very short range at Abu Rahme and shoots him in his left foot. The video was filmed by a Palestinian girl, 14, from a window in her home in the village. B'Tselem has distributed about 100 cameras to Palestinians throughout the West Bank over the last year, as part of their "Shooting Back" project. B'Tselem released a video last month showing the beginning of an apparent assault by stick-wielding Israeli settlers on Palestinian farmers. The footage shows four people holding sticks approaching the farmers near the settlement of Susya outside Hebron. Dozens of similar violations go undocumented especially in nonviolent protests in remote villages that most media outlets do not reach. The Israeli soldier told the investigators that he opened fire at the Palestinian civilian after he had received orders by his commander. The Israeli Defense Minister, Ehud Barak, said that this incident is against the morals of the Israeli army and an investigation will be conducted. The Israeli Army District Attorney announced that the charges against the soldier will be dropped but the officer who gave the order will be questioned and may face charges.

UK MPs urge the Quartet to bring Hamas into peace talks

Allegra Stratton, political correspondent

The Guardian, Thursday July 24, 2008

A cross party group of MPs has called on the Quartet mediating in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process to open a dialogue with Hamas, saying “until now there has been no engagement between the Quartet and Hamas, but now we think it is time”.

Publishing a report on the humanitarian and development situation in the occupied territories, the international development select committee said the international community should “seize the opportunity” of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas to bring the Palestinian group into the peace process.

The chair of the committee, Liberal Democrat Malcolm Bruce told the Guardian that the MPs believed it was time for the Quartet - made up of the US, the EU, Russia and the United Nations - to “sound out Hamas”.

The committee heard evidence from former prime minister Tony Blair - the representative of the Quartet - whose session in front of the committee was a rare return to the House of Commons. The MPs found that Blair had made a “welcome first step” to reduce strategic checkpoints.

Although the MPs reported that the Hamas armed takeover of Gaza was “neither justified nor acceptable”, they also said that it was important to include Hamas in peace talks. They also urged the Quartet to use the opportunity provided by the truce to begin a reconciliation between rival Palestinian parties Hamas and Fatah.

The Quartet’s insistence that Hamas must first agree to three principles - to recognise Israel, renounce violence, and abide by previous agreements - before being involved in peace talks had “achieved very little” in the last two years, the committee said.

Bruce said that food, fuel and water were in short supply in Gaza, and the public health system was under severe pressure following the closure of borders. Though a six-month ceasefire was agreed between Hamas and Israel last month allowing food and aid through Gaza’s borders, the committee found that the effect of Israel’s blockades were still felt and the situation on the ground was far worse.

Bruce said: “Israel has obligations to ensure the health and welfare of the Palestinian population, which it has not met.

“We believe the situation was allowed to continue for too long, and that the Quartet did not exert sufficient pressure on Israel to open the crossings.”

US-led forces kill more Afghan civilians

By Jerry White | World Socialist Web Site, 22 July 2008

US and NATO forces killed at least 13 Afghans over the weekend, adding to the toll of civilian deaths as the military intensifies efforts to crush opposition to the nearly seven-year-old US occupation.

The two latest incidents occurred as Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama visited Afghanistan and called for more US troops to be sent to the war-ravaged country.

On Sunday, US-led coalition forces killed four Afghan police officers and five civilians in the Anar Dara district in the western province of Farah, near the Iranian border. Coalition forces, which entered the area around midnight, waged a four-hour firefight and called in air strikes after reportedly receiving small arms fire from a group of local policemen.

Provincial Deputy Governor Younus Rasuli said the US-led convoy of troops never informed local police or officials of their plans to be in the area, and the policemen mistook them for Taliban fighters.

The US military issued a perfunctory statement justifying the action against what it described as a “non-uniformed hostile force.” Coalition forces, the statement said, had “engaged the enemy with precision close air support.”

In a separate incident Saturday night, NATO forces killed at least four civilians in eastern Paktika province when International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF) fired two mortar rounds that landed nearly half a mile short of their target. The Associated Press reported that NATO was investigating whether three other civilians were also killed in the attack, which occurred in the Barmal district, an area made up mostly of Sunni Pashtun people.

The ISAF issued a statement saying it “deeply regrets this accident” and would investigate the incident. The alliance acknowledged it was providing medical aid to four others who were wounded in the attack.

As has been the case in previous such incidents in which, all told, thousands of Afghan civilians have been killed by US-led forces, military commanders insisted they were taking every precaution to prevent civilian deaths, which they said, were ultimately the fault of the insurgency.

The slaughter of innocent men, women and children, however, is inevitable given the neo-colonial character of the war and the counter-insurgency methods the US and NATO forces are using against growing popular resistance.

The number of attacks launched against the occupation forces has jumped by over 40 percent this summer. For the first time last month, US and allied casualties in Afghanistan surpassed those in Iraq.

In response to the deteriorating military situation, 646 bombs were dropped in June—the second highest total for any month of the war. In the first half of 2008, 1,853 bombs and missiles were used, 40 percent more than the same period last year.

The escalating violence took place as Obama visited Kabul on Sunday. In the morning he met with US troops at Camp Eggers, a heavily fortified military base in the city, praising them for their “excellent work.”

Later, in a meeting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, he pledged additional military support to the puppet regime. Karzai’s spokesman said Obama was “committed to supporting Afghanistan and to continue the war against terrorism with vigor.” He said Democrats and Republicans “are friends of Afghanistan and no matter who wins the US elections, Afghanistan will have a very strong partner in the United States.”

In an interview from Kabul broadcast by CBS News on Sunday, Obama said the situation in the country was “precarious and urgent” and reiterated his position that Afghanistan had to become the focus of US military action, as opposed to the “strategic mistake” in Iraq that had diverted the US from the so-called “war on terror.”

Obama said as US troops left Iraq, at least 7,000 should be sent to the Central Asian country and that plans to increase US presence should not wait until the next administration takes office.

The massacre of Afghan civilians exposes the brutal, neo-colonial reality of US imperialist policy that is supported by both parties and both presidential candidates.

Madness and Shame

Truthout, Tuesday 22 July 2008

by: Bob Herbert, The New York Times

David Addington is described by Jane Mayer as Dick Cheney without a sense of humor. (Photo: Getty Images)

You want a scary thought? Imagine a fanatic in the mold of Dick Cheney, but without the vice president's sense of humor.

In her important new book, "The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals," Jane Mayer of The New Yorker devotes a great deal of space to David Addington, Dick Cheney's main man and the lead architect of the Bush administration's legal strategy for the so-called war on terror.

She quotes a colleague as saying of Mr. Addington: "No one stood to his right." Colin Powell, a veteran of many bruising battles with Mr. Cheney, was reported to have summed up Mr. Addington as follows: "He doesn't believe in the Constitution."

Very few voters are aware of Mr. Addington's existence, much less what he stands for. But he was the legal linchpin of the administration's Marquis de Sade approach to battling terrorism. In the view of Mr. Addington and his acolytes, anything and everything that the president authorized in the fight against terror - regardless of what the Constitution or Congress or the Geneva Conventions might say - was all right. That included torture, rendition, warrantless wiretapping, the suspension of habeas corpus, you name it.

This is the mind-set that gave us Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and the C.I.A.'s secret prisons, known as "black sites."

Ms. Mayer wrote: "The legal doctrine that Addington espoused - that the president, as commander in chief, had the authority to disregard virtually all previously known legal boundaries if national security demanded it - rested on a reading of the Constitution that few legal scholars shared."

When the constraints of the law are unlocked by the men and women in suits at the pinnacle of power, terrible things happen in the real world. You end up with detainees being physically and psychologically tormented day after day, month after month, until they beg to be allowed to commit suicide. You have prisoners beaten until they are on the verge of death, or hooked to overhead manacles like something out of the Inquisition, or forced to defecate on themselves, or sexually humiliated, or driven crazy by days on end of sleep deprivation and blinding lights and blaring noises, or water-boarded.

Continued . . .

The Speech Brown Should Have Made to the Knesset

The Palestine Chronicle, July 22, 2008

'Britain has an uncanny knack of producing one silly leader after another'

By Stuart Littlewood - London I and my dog Mortimer apologise most sincerely to the world, and especially to Arab friends, for our prime minister's crass speech to the Knesset. Britain, like the US, has an uncanny knack of producing one silly leader after another from a limitless supply that thrust themselves on an unsuspecting public in order to perpetuate the Great Betrayal and the Nakba. Brown is the latest high-flier from our political swamp. Judging by his performance so far, we Brits are destined to live our lives in a state of perpetual and excruciating embarrassment. Let it be known that this prime minister doesn't speak for me or anyone I know when he says: "Britain will always stand firmly by Israel's side." And nobody of my acquaintance, or their dog, would ever sign up to "an unbreakable partnership based on shared values of liberty, democracy and justice" with Israel. It is quite obvious that none of our values of liberty, democracy and justice is practised by that regime. However, it was faintly amusing to hear Brown say that "we will do more than oppose what is wrong. We will show those who would give licence to terror the way home to what is right too - showing them that the path to a better future runs not through violence, not by murder, and never with the killing of civilians but by liberty's torch, through justice's mighty stream, and across tolerance's foundation of equality." That should have had Knesset members squirming in their seats, but the irony was obviously lost on them, and on Brown himself. "I think of David Ben Gurion," he blurted, "who from humble beginnings in Poland built up the Jewish National Institutions and in 1948 said it was not enough for the Jewish state simply to be Jewish, it had to be fully democratic offering equal citizenship to all residents: a democracy not just of one people but of all your peoples..." Mentioning Ben Gurion in the same breath as democracy and equality is not a good idea. This is the same guy who said: "I support compulsory transfer [i.e. ethnic cleansing]. I don't see anything immoral in it." On another occasion he admitted: “If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel… We have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it is true, but 2,000 years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country.” Brown even praised Menachem Begin but was careful not to mention the Irgun. It was Begin's terror gang, the Irgun, that declared war on the British mandate government while Britain was still fighting Nazi Germany. And our prime minister must have forgotten that in 1946 the Irgun under Begin's leadership blew up British headquarters in Jerusalem's King David Hotel, killing 91. Continued . . .

US/IRAN: Scowcroft, Brzezinski Urge Bush to Drop Precondition

By Jim Lobe*

WASHINGTON, Jul 22 (IPS) - Two of Washington's most prominent foreign policy greybeards praised Saturday's direct participation in multinational talks with Iran by a senior U.S. diplomat but called on the administration of President George W. Bush to drop his demands that Tehran freeze its uranium enrichment programme as a precondition for broader negotiations.

Ret. Gen. Brent Scowcroft, who served as national security adviser under Republican presidents Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, who held the same post under Democratic President Jimmy Carter, urged Bush to go further by offering immediate rewards to Tehran in exchange for such a freeze.

And both men warned that repeated U.S. threats to use military force against Iran were counter-productive and strengthened hard-line forces in the regime led by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. They said an actual military attack -- whether by the U.S. or by Israel -- would likely be disastrous for U.S. interests in the region.

"A war with Iran will produce calamities for sure," said Brzezinski, who pointed, among other things, to its likely impact on the price of oil and the likelihood that it would create yet another front to add to the two wars -- Iraq and Afghanstan -- in which U.S. military forces are already engaged.

"(Brzezinski's assessment) may be a little more dire (than mine) but not much," Scowcroft told IPS in a brief interview after the two men spoke at a briefing sponsored by the Centre for Security and International Studies (CSIS) here. "It would turn the region into a cauldron of conflict, bitterness, and hatred. It would turn Islam against us."

Both men have been strongly critical of U.S. policy in the Middle East, particularly the decision to invade Iraq -- although Brzezinski has been considerably more vocal than Scowcroft, who remains a close friend of Bush's father. Both leading lights of the so-called "realist" foreign-policy establishment, they are currently collaborating on a book to be published in September.

Their joint appearance at CSIS, which was announced late last week after the administration had confirmed that undersecretary of state for policy, Amb. William Burns, would attend Saturday's meeting between the so-called P5+1 (the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and Germany) and Iran, seemed timed to demonstrate strong bipartisan support for continued and enhanced U.S. engagement.

Continued . . .

Rights group hails video as new weapon against Israeli army

• Rory McCarthy in Jerusalem
• The Guardian, Tuesday July 22, 2008

Israel's defence minister, Ehud Barak, yesterday promised an inquiry after video footage showed an Israeli soldier shooting baton rounds at a Palestinian detainee who was blindfolded and cuffed.

"The Israeli military will investigate the incident, learn its lessons and hold those responsible to account," he told MPs from his Labour party. "Warriors do not behave like this."

The advocate general, Brigadier General Avichai Mendelblit, is said to have ordered a military police inquiry after he saw the footage released on Sunday by the Israeli human rights group, B'Tselem. The incident happened on July 7 in Nil'in village. Several other soldiers were present, including a lieutenant colonel who was holding the arm of the Palestinian man.

The man shot, Ashraf Abu Rahma, 27, was treated for an injury to his toe and was then released.

It was the latest incident in which video footage has been used to highlight violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. B'Tselem has been running a project since January last year in which it has given out around 100 video cameras to Palestinians to allow them to film human rights abuses in the West Bank. The Nil'in footage was filmed on a private camera by a 17-year-old girl who lives in the village. B'Tselem has now given her one of its cameras as part of its Shooting Back project.

Sarit Michaeli, spokeswoman for B'Tselem, said the footage was intended as much for an Israeli audience as for an international one. She said spoken or written testimony from Palestinians involved in such cases was often given little weight in official police or military investigations into apparent abuses, but video footage was much more powerful.

"I see no better way of encouraging accountability among members of the security forces," said Michaeli.

Serbia captures fugitive Karadzic

BBC News, July 22, 2008

Radovan Karadzic is one of the world's most wanted men

Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect Radovan Karadzic, one of the world's most wanted men, has been arrested in Serbia after more than a decade on the run.

The Bosnian Serb wartime political leader disappeared in 1996.

He has been indicted by the UN tribunal for war crimes and genocide over the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica.

The appointment of a new, pro-European government in Belgrade last month appears to have cleared the way for his arrest, says a BBC correspondent.

The European Union, which the new government hopes to join, has put Serbia under considerable pressure to hand over indicted war criminals to the UN tribunal in The Hague.

But Mr Karadzic's wartime military leader, Ratko Mladic, remains at large.

'Located and arrested'

The arrest of Radovan Karadzic was welcomed by war crimes prosecutors in The Hague as a "milestone".

He has been brought before Belgrade's war crimes court, a legal procedure that indicates he may soon be extradited.

But it is not clear how soon he might be transferred to stand trial at the war crimes tribunal in The Hague, says the BBC's Bridget Kendall.

Serbian officials have suggested he will stay put for at least three days while his lawyer appeals against his extradition.

Continued . . .

WHILE NABLUS IS RAIDED: GORDON BROWN, ANOTHER FALSE PROPHET PRAISES ISRAEL

By Khalid Amayreh | Desert Peace, July 21, 2008

As British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was having an audience with Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas in Bethlehem, the Israeli occupation army was raping anew the Palestinian town of Nablus, rounding up and humiliating innocent people, violating homes and vandalizing businesses.

On Sunday and early Monday, the so-called Israeli Defense Forces raided the northern city, for the fourth time in less than three weeks, as thousands of CIA-trained Palestinian security personnel were watching from their comfortable headquarters nearby.

The invading forces arrested dozens of innocent people, including a lawmaker named Muna Mansur, the wife of an Islamic political leader who was murdered by a Jewish death squad while sitting in his office in downtown Nablus several years ago.

The detainees, who are likely to be dumped in an Israeli concentration camp for lengthy periods of time, have committed no felony or even misdemeanor. Their only “guilt” seems to be their conscientious opposition to the Nazi-like Israeli occupation of their country.

Two weeks ago, the same Jewish forces, acting like the German Gestapo, ransacked the main commercial center of Nablus, raiding commercial malls, beauty salons, a major medical center and numerous other institutions, crushing furniture, smashing equipments and vandalizing public and private property.

These acts of rape passed quietly as the governments of Europe and North America, thoroughly absorbed in their pornographic hypocrisy toward the Palestinian plight, kept silent. After all, the victims are Palestinian, they are Arabs, they are Muslims.

These are the same governments that have been demanding rather shamelessly the prompt and unconditional release of an Israeli combat soldier who was taken prisoner by Palestinian fighters near the Gaza Strip more than two years ago, while utterly ignoring the fate of more than 10,000 Palestinian detainees languishing in Israeli dungeons and detention camps.

This pattern of moral whoredom on the part of European and North American leaders is echoed ad nauseam every time a European or American or Canadian official sets foot on the soil of occupied Palestine, a holy land made unholy by the overwhelming obscenity of Israel’s oppression of a people whose only guilt is its enduring determination to survive and be free.

There, these officials and statesmen utter a few empty words about the “glory of Israeli democracy” before returning home, hoping to have succeeded in impressing the international Zionist cartel which effectively controls the policies, politics and governments of most western countries.

Gordon is no exception. He is just another carbon copy of the typical hypocritical, double-faced, and morally bankrupt western leader who tries to blur his dishonest discourse with diplomatic niceties and nice-sounding statements.

In fact, not only did Gordon keep his mouth shut regarding Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, apparently fearing upsetting his arrogant Zionist hosts, but he also reiterated the same mantra western leaders like to utter whenever they visit Europe’s ugly brat in the Middle East.

Brown, whose country gave birth to ugly Zionist entity, vowed that Britain would “back Israel’s right to exist,” a euphemism for backing Israel’s settlement expansion and territorial aggrandizement at the expense of the Palestinian people.

Indeed, this is how Israel understands such statements from western leaders because if a given western country doesn’t fully support Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians, then the government of that country must be advocating the destruction of Israel and the extermination of the Jewish people!!

In short, from the Israeli perspective, Europe and America have two choices vis-à-vis Israel, either they support the liquidation of Palestine and its native people, the Palestinians, or get themselves ready for vociferous Jewish accusations of being Nazis, anti-Semites and “Hamas lovers”!!!

I don’t know why western leaders, such as Gordon, keep talking about Israel’s right to exist while rarely alluding to the Palestinian people’s right to exist. Do they think that Palestinians are unimportant? Do they consider the rights of the “Chosenites” to be superior to and override the rights and lives of the non-Chosenites?

Continued . . .

Dictatorial Powers Upheld

The Meaning of the Al-Marri Decision

By ANDY WORTHINGTON | Counterpunch, July 21, 2008

Wake up, America! On July 15, the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled by 5 votes to 4 in the case of Al-Marri v. Pucciarelli that the President can arrest US citizens and legal residents inside the United States and imprison them indefinitely, without charge or trial, based solely on his assertion that they are “enemy combatants.” Have a little think about it, and you’ll see that the Fourth Circuit judges have just endorsed dictatorial powers.

In the words of Judge William B. Traxler, whose swing vote confirmed the court’s otherwise divided ruling, “the Constitution generally affords all persons detained by the government the right to be charged and tried in a criminal proceeding for suspected wrongdoing, and it prohibits the government from subjecting individuals arrested inside the United States to military detention unless they fall within certain narrow exceptions … The detention of enemy combatants during military hostilities, however, is such an exception. If properly designated an enemy combatant pursuant to legal authority of the President, such persons may be detained without charge or criminal proceedings for the duration of the relevant hostilities.”

As was pointed out by Judge Diana Gribbon Motz, who was steadfastly opposed to the majority verdict (and whose opinion was endorsed by Judges M. Blane Michael, Robert B. King and Roger L. Gregory), “the duration of the relevant hostilities” is a disturbingly open-ended prospect. After citing the 2007 State of the Union Address, in which the President claimed that ‘[t]he war on terror we fight today is a generational struggle that will continue long after you and I have turned our duties over to others,’” Judge Motz noted, “Unlike detention for the duration of a traditional armed conflict between nations, detention for the length of a ‘war on terror’ has no bounds.”

The Court of Appeals made its extraordinary ruling in relation to a habeas corpus claim in the case of Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, whose story I reported at length here. To recap briefly, al-Marri, a Qatari national who had studied in Peoria, Illinois in 1991, returned to the United States in September 2001, with his US residency in order, to pursue post-graduate studies, bringing his family -- his wife and five children -- with him. Three months later he was arrested and charged with fraud and making false statements to the FBI, but in June 2003, a month before he was due to stand trial for these charges in a federal court, the prosecution dropped the charges and informed the court that he was to be held as an “enemy combatant” instead.

Continued . . .

RIGHTS-US: Hamdan Case to Test Military Tribunals

By William Fisher

NEW YORK, Jul 21 (IPS) - As the long-awaited trial of Guantanamo detainee Salim Ahmed Hamdan opened this week at the U.S. naval base in Cuba, human rights groups filed suit demanding that the Department of Justice (DOJ) produce documents related to the U.S. government's ghost detention, torture, and extraordinary rendition programme.

Attorney-General Michael Mukasey also called on Congress to quickly pass new legislation to guard against judges imposing a patchwork of conflicting rules that could produce confusion, more court challenges and even lengthier delays for prisoners who have been held at Guantanamo for as long as seven years.

Hamdan, Osama bin Laden's alleged former driver, is the first terror suspect to face trial at Guantanamo in seven years and the first test of whether that system can dispense fair and impartial justice. The charges against the Yemeni father of two will proceed before a military commission -- the first since the end of World War II -- with a jury of uniformed officers and rules that many constitutional authorities believe give great deference to the prosecution.

Evidence obtained from "cruel" and "inhuman" interrogation methods as well as hearsay evidence will be admissible under certain circumstances. Hamdan faces a maximum of life in prison if convicted.

"This was supposed to be the premier system for bringing to justice the masterminds of the worst crime ever committed on U.S. soil," said Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch. "The only result in seven years was the conviction of an Australian kangaroo trapper, who is now free."

Continued . . .

FIVE BRITISH HOSTAGES HELD IN IRAQ

Dr George Barnsby | The Barnsby Blog, July 20, 2008

Those of us who believe that Britain has no right be in someone else’s country will have the dismal privilege of having proved right. Last week were we saying that it was useless to shed crocodile tears over the death of a female in Afghanistan because she was a murderer in a foreign land.

Now no doubt we shall be asked to pray for our brave hostages in Iraq when we have said all along that British and US imperialist troops have only two alternatives - leave now or find yourself pushed out.

What has been the reaction to this perfectly logical event. Our Foreign Secretary Miliband has nothing he can threaten the hostage takers with, so in fact all he can do is call them naughty people. Our hopeless and helpless Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has apparently said tonight that there will be staged withdrawal from Iraq, which is the reverse of what he was saying yesterday when it was we’re staying till the job is done. But the man with most to lose in my view is David Cameron. He had a chance to become the next Prime Minister if the coming election whenever it comes produces a hung Parliament. But his problem is that it can only be in a coalition of Tories and Lib Dems who have opposed the war in Iraq from the beginning. So when this was mooted about two years ago, Cameron was opposed to the war and was even prepared to contact me to tell me so. Now the Lib Dems will not join a coalition with him because the situation is now so advanced that we are already being thrown out of Iraq. The only solution at this stage is a coalition of Lib Dems, Tories who oppose the war and Labour MPs who oppose the war. Of these there were over 100 in 2003 at the start of the war. Certainly the position is unprecedented and the war mongers and war criminals have now surely shot their bolt.

U.S. Perpetuates Mass Killings In Iraq

by Peter Phillips | Dissident Voice, July 19th, 2008

The United States is directly responsible for over one million Iraqi deaths since the invasion five and half years ago. In a January 2008 report, a British polling group Opinion Research Business (ORB) reports that, “survey work confirms our earlier estimate that over 1,000,000 Iraqi citizens have died as a result of the conflict which started in 2003…. We now estimate that the death toll between March 2003 and August 2007 is likely to have been of the order of 1,033,000. If one takes into account the margin of error associated with survey data of this nature then the estimated range is between 946,000 and 1,120,000”.

The ORB report comes on the heels of two earlier studies conducted by Johns Hopkins University published in the Lancet medical journal that confirmed the continuing numbers of mass deaths in Iraq. A study done by Dr. Les Roberts from January 1, 2002 to March 18 2003 put the civilian deaths at that time at over 100,000. A second study published in the Lancet in October 2006 documented over 650,000 civilian deaths in Iraq since the start of the US invasion. The 2006 study confirms that US aerial bombing in civilian neighborhoods caused over a third of these deaths and that over half the deaths are directly attributable to US forces.

The now estimated 1.2 million dead, as of July 2008, includes children, parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, cab drivers, clerics, schoolteachers, factory workers, policemen, poets, healthcare workers, day care providers, construction workers, babysitters, musicians, bakers, restaurant workers and many more. All manner of ordinary people in Iraq have died because the United States decided to invade their country. These are deaths in excess of the normal civilian death rate under the prior government.

The magnitude of these deaths is undeniable. The continuing occupation by US forces guarantees a mass death rate in excess of 10,000 people per month with half that number dying at the hands of US forces — a carnage so severe and so concentrated at to equate it with the most heinous mass killings in world history. This act has not gone unnoticed.

Recently, Dennis Kucinich introduced a single impeachment article against George W. Bush for lying to Congress and the American people about the reasons for invading Iraq. On July 15, the House forwarded the resolution to the Judiciary Committee with a 238 to 180 vote. That Bush lied about weapons of mass destruction and Iraq’s threat to the US is now beyond doubt. Former US federal prosecutor Elizabeth De La Vega documents the lies most thoroughly in her book U.S. v. Bush, and numerous other researchers have verified Bush’s untrue statements.

The American people are faced with a serious moral dilemma. Murder and war crimes have been conducted in our name. We have allowed the war/occupation to continue in Iraq and offered ourselves little choice within the top two presidential candidates for immediate cessation of the mass killings. McCain would undoubtedly accept the deaths of another million Iraqi civilians in order to save face for America, and Obama’s 18-month timetable for withdrawal would likely result in another 250,000 civilian deaths or more.

We owe our children and ourselves a future without the shame of mass murder on our collective conscience. The only resolution of this dilemma is the immediate withdrawal of all US troops in Iraq and the prosecution and imprisonment of those responsible. Anything less creates a permanent original sin on the soul of the nation for that we will forever suffer.

Peter Phillips is a Professor of Sociology at Sonoma State University, and Director of Project Censored, a media research organization. Read other articles by Peter, or visit Peter's website.

Israeli Soldier Shoots Handcuffed And Blindfolded Palestinian Prisoner

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Nearly Fifty Percent of Americans Think U.S. Should Help Israel Attack Iran

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
July 20, 2008

	It does not matter who ends up in the Oval Office, be it McCain or Obama, because the policy toward Iran will be similar, if not identical.

If we are to believe the results of a Rasmussen poll released on July 20, an astounding number of Americans have no problem helping Israel attack Iran. “Forty-two percent (42%) of Americans say that if Israel launches an attack against Iran, the United States should help Israel. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey found that 46% believe the United States should do nothing while just 1% believe the U.S. should help Iran.”

Moreover, once again demonstrating a complete ignorance of history and an absence of rational thinking — predictable, considering most Americans receive their historical and political education from the corporate media — 47% “believe it is at least somewhat likely Iran will try to provoke some form of attack before November in an attempt to influence the U.S. elections.”

In other words, so important is the American election to the Iranians, they will court the sort of chaos and social disintegration currently underway in Iraq to determine the outcome of the American election, an absurdity at best. But then Americans excel at buying into absurdities, the more ludicrous the better.

It does not matter who ends up in the Oval Office, be it McCain or Obama, because the policy toward Iran will be similar, if not identical. If this poll demonstrates anything, it is that the average voter of the sort polled by Rasmussen is effectively brainwashed and believes there is actually some sort of difference between Democrats and Republicans. Apparently, the Rasmussen voter also thinks the United States is at the center of the universe and all other nations pay close attention to our every political move before putting on their shoes in the morning. In fact, this sort of mindless “American exceptionalism” is resented and held in contempt by millions of people around the world.

In a normal, objective, historically accurate, and non-Bushzarro world, the Rasmussen voter would take into consideration the fact the British and the CIA worked directly with royalist Iranian military officers to overthrow the democratically elected government of Mohammad Mosaddeq and installed the brutal dictator Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi and his SAVAK torturers.

Continued . . .

U.S. Position Complicates Global Effort to Curb Illicit Arms

By C. J. CHIVERS | New York Times, July 19, 2008

UNITED NATIONS — Diplomats from the world’s governments met throughout this week on agreements to cut the global illicit trade in small arms, but their work was curtailed in part by the near-boycott of the meetings by the United States.

The tone of the meetings underscored the political complexities of gaining full support for international small-arms agreements from the United States. The American view has balanced recognition of the dangers of illegal proliferation with the government’s own arms-distribution practices and with the American gun lobby’s resistance to the United Nations’ proposals.

Since 2001, United Nations members have endorsed a broad but loosely defined initiative, called the program of action, for a collective effort against illegal arms circulation. The agreement in part encourages governments to tighten controls on manufacturing, marking, tracing, brokering, exporting and stockpiling small arms and to cooperate to restrict illicit flows, particularly to regions perennially in armed conflict. It addresses hundreds of millions of weapons, ranging from pistols to shoulder-fired rockets, that the United Nations says are in circulation worldwide.

The initiative has spotlighted the dire effects of the flood of small arms and led to expanded research into its often chilling consequences.

Continued . . .

The US will not prosecute Bush

Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld will never be tried for war crimes in the US because the country lacks a consensus on torture

• 
• • John McQuaid | guardian.co.uk, Friday July 18, 2008

The evidence is mounting that top US officials - including President George Bush, vice-president Dick Cheney and former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld - committed war crimes by authorising the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" - ie torture. The war crimes drumbeat has accelerated with the recent release of two books: New Yorker writer Jane Mayer's The Dark Side and Philippe Sands's Torture Team, which document the executive decision-making that led the US to set aside not just the Geneva Conventions, but a tradition of respect for the human rights of enemy prisoners that dates to back to George Washington's prohibition on harming POWs.

Current and former Bush officials are now scrambling to avoid the opprobrium - not to mention the risk of prison time - that would result from criminal prosecution. This week, Capitol Hill was treated to the spectacle of Sands and Douglas Feith, a former Rumsfeld protege who was an architect of the Iraq invasion, testifying side by side before a House subcommittee. In an earlier interview with Sands, Feith claimed to be "really a player" in the engineering of legal workarounds to the Geneva Conventions at Guantánamo. Before the committee, Feith declared his unerring support for Geneva.

The stream of commentary on this topic is waxing as we near the end of the Bush presidency. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof went his fellow pundits one better, suggesting that what the US needs is a South Africa-style Truth and Reconciliation Commission to sort through not just the legal transgressions of the past eight years, but the political manipulations as well.

Hang on a moment. There is no way that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld or the second- and third-tier enablers of torture - the Feiths and John Yoos - will be prosecuted for war crimes in the United States.

The obstacle to prosecutions is the absence of a national consensus on the specific issue of torture, or, more generally, the Bush administration's actions on terror. Certainly there is a consensus that the Bush administration has been a disaster and that the Iraq war was a mistake. But this doesn't apply to specific terrorism policies, on which the White House still has more or less a political blank check to do as it pleases. (Whether a majority of the public supports those policies is debatable, but Republicans still back Bush, and Democrats are still cowed by the risk of appearing soft on the issue.) See Kevin Drum on why this is not Watergate: a well of political support remains for Bush's terror policies, "enhanced interrogation" among them.

The matter of criminal culpability lies several steps further on. Even if they concede that torture is a war crime and buy the practical arguments against it - that it generates false information, endangers US soldiers should they be taken prisoner and is disastrous for America's image and diplomatic efforts - many Americans would still resist prosecuting officials whose motive was averting terror attacks.

This also goes deeper than politics. I hate to sound cynical, but Americans don't have much interest in accountability, truth or reconciliation. Our national motto is "move on". The buzzword of the decade is Stephen Colbert's "truthiness". Trials or commissions on war crimes would force a reckoning that many Americans don't think is necessary and/or would simply rather not have.

However, those still hoping to see Bush and his associates in the dock might see promise in another feature of American culture: its disposability. What seems set in stone today, an immutable law of politics, almost certainly won't be tomorrow. What once seemed an issue of high principle to many conservatives - embracing torture and defending Bush & Co - may quickly become passé once Bush leaves office and other issues come to dominate. The ideal condition for a successful prosecution is not a rising tide of outrage at Bush that would stoke the divisions in US society, but indifference.

Still, the most likely scenario for a torture prosecution is something like what happened to ex-Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. His own country wouldn't touch him, but an industrious Spanish prosecutor - aided by the work of human rights activists and backed by international opinion - indicted him for torture and war crimes and nearly snared him. If Bush, Cheney or Rumsfeld faced a similar indictment from abroad, Americans would be outraged - but not really. The US government would try to head it off, but wouldn't be able to do much. No one would actually go on trial, but the indictees would see their travel options humiliatingly curtailed and go to their graves knowing the phrase "charged with war crimes" will be next to their names in the history books.

Looters Destroying Ancient Treasures

Archaeologists say unprotected remains of country’s historic civilisations are subject to widespread plundering.

By Daud Salman in Baghdad and Berlin (ICR No. 265, 18-Jul-20008)

Experts are calling for Iraq’s archaeological sites to be protected, saying that many have been severely damaged as a result of theft, illegal excavations and trespassing.

According to the Iraqi government, the country – which was once home to Assyrian, Babylonian, Sumerian and other ancient empires – has around 10,000 archaeological sites.

Most are located in central Iraq, an area badly hit by the chaos and lawlessness that has gripped the country over the past several years. While some of the country’s best known Mesopotamian sites, including Ur near modern-day Nasiriyah, are well-protected, many have no security.

The Iraqi government has just 1,200 guards to keep an eye on all of its sites, said Qais Rashid Hussein, director-general of excavations and inspection at the ministry of archaeology and tourism. Hussein said the lack of protection is “a huge problem” that has left antiquities vulnerable to gangs and smugglers.

Treasure-hunters illegally excavate the sites for valuable items which can be traded on the black market and are often smuggled out of Iraq.

Margarete van Ess, director of Oriental Science at the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin, estimated that illegal excavation in Iraq has caused ten billion dollars worth of damage.

“Many of the sites are far from town centres and cities and are under the control of tribes,” she said, which made them vulnerable to theft.

While Saddam Hussein’s regime secured most of the country’s sites and cracked down heavily on theft. Those caught steeling antiquities faced 15 years in prison, and, in some cases, the death penalty. These sentences, though still on the statute books, are rarely enforced today.

On Iraq’s black market, ancient coins, seals and other gold, silver and bronze pieces can be purchased for as little as ten dollars, but the same items can fetch a far greater sum outside the country. Thousands of artefacts from Iraqi sites have ended up in neighbouring Syria and Jordan.

Continued . . .

Afghanistan hit by record number of bombs

Air Force Times, July 18, 2008

By Bruce Rolfsen - Staff writer

Air Force and allied warplanes are dropping a record number of bombs on Afghanistan targets.

For the first half of 2008, aircraft dropped 1,853 bombs — more than they released during all of 2006 and more than half of 2007’s total — 3,572 bombs.

Driving the increasing use of air power are fights in southern Afghanistan, where the Marine Corps arrived last winter, and battles in eastern Afghanistan, where Taliban and other insurgents use the border region with Pakistan as a safe haven.

Army Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Schloesser, who oversees ground operations in eastern Afghanistan as commander of Joint-Combined Joint Task Force-101, told reporters insurgent attacks were up 40 percent this year compared with 2007.

Information from the Air Force shows that in June warplanes released 646 bombs — the second-highest monthly total for Afghanistan or Iraq. The record was set in August 2007, when 670 bombs fell on Afghanistan.

As high as those numbers are, they may understate the intensity of the combat. The statistics do not include cannon rounds shot by fighters or AC-130 gunships, Hellfire and other small rockets launched by warplanes, and assaults by helicopters. In close-quarter firefights where friendly soldiers could be wounded if bombs are used, cannon fire and missiles are often the preferred alternative.

Inside Afghanistan at Bagram Airfield, the Air Force keeps a squadron each of A-10 Thunderbolts and F-15E Strike Eagles. From outside of Afghanistan, the Air Force launches B-1B Lancers.

Also flying over Afghanistan are remote-controlled MQ-1 Predators and MQ-9 Reapers, both able to attack targets, and AC-130 gunships. Foreign warplanes dropping bombs include French Mirage 2000 fighters and British Royal Air Force Harriers, typically flying out of Kandahar Airfield.

For Air Force jets, the preferred bombs are laser-guided bombs and satellite-controlled Joint Direct Attack Munitions.

The most frequently used bombs are the 500- and 2,000-pound satellite-guided Joint Direct Attack Munitions and 500-pound laser-guided Paveway bombs. Unguided bombs sometimes are used, typically when the target is a safe distance from coalition troops and civilians.

US torture claims are unreliable: British lawmakers

Khaleej Times, July 19, 2008

(AFP)

LONDON - The British government should no longer accept US assurances that it does not use torture, a parliamentary oversight committee said on Sunday in a wide-ranging report looking at London’s human rights policy.

Ministers have previously taken at face value statements from their US counterparts, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and President George W. Bush, that Washington does not resort to such practices.

But the cross-party foreign affairs committee said that stance should be abandoned given admissions from the US director of national intelligence, Michael McConnell, that “water-boarding” had been used on terror suspects.

Foreign Secretary David Miliband has told parliament on two occasions this year that the practice, which simulates drowning during interrogation, amounts to torture.

Miliband’s position has “serious implications” for government policy, the committee said in its 214-page Human Rights Annual Report 2007-8.

“We conclude that, given the clear differences in definition, the UK can no longer rely on US assurances that it does not use torture, and we recommend that the government does not rely on such assurances in the future,” it added.

Britain is a signatory to a United Nations convention that prevents the extradition of suspects to countries where torture is used. If adopted, a change in approach could affect such transfers.

The committee also called for Britain to carry out an “exhaustive analysis” of US government interrogation techniques and seek guarantees about whether US flights carrying terror suspects used British airspace or airports.

Earlier this year, the United States admitted that two “rendition” flights landed on Diego Garcia, a British overseas territory in the Indian Ocean where there is a US air base.

Britain, whose policy is not to allow such transfers where there is a risk of torture, had earlier accepted assurances that its territory had not been used for the extra-judicial transfer of suspected extremists.

Such flights should not use British territory or airspace, even if no detainees were on board, the committee said.

Elsewhere, the committee urged an investigation into claims that six British nationals were detained and tortured by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency and interrogated by British security agents.

NATO air strikes kill nine Afghan police in ‘friendly fire’ clash: officials

AFP, July 20, 2008

HERAT, Afghanistan (AFP) - Nine Afghan policemen were killed in international military air strikes called in after troops clashed with police in southwestern Afghanistan, provincial authorities said on Sunday.

The fighting erupted in the western province of Farah in the early hours of the morning when police and soldiers mistook each other for Taliban militants, deputy provincial governor Mohammad Younus Rasouli said.

Police engaged soldiers with the Afghan National Army (ANA) and NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), kicking off the fighting, he said.

“The ANA requested air support, and ISAF bombed the police post that killed nine police and injured five police,” he said.

The police chief of Farah’s Anar Dara district was among the wounded and was in a serious condition, he said.

The police commander for western Afghanistan, Ikramuddin Yawar, confirmed the incident and said he had sent a team to the area to investigate.

“Last night at around 1:30, a clash took place between ANA, ANP (Afghan National Police) and ISAF, each mistaking the other side as Taliban,” Yawar said. “Nine police were killed and five wounded.”

The Afghan defence ministry and international forces said they were checking on the report but did not immediately have details.

There have been several deadly incidents of “friendly fire” in Afghanistan where there are several Afghan and international security forces involved in the fight against Taliban insurgents.

The forces have been accused of not coordinating their operations properly, resulting in cases of mistaken identity.

Netroots Nation or Nation of Sheep: Nancy Pelosi and Al Gore Address the Netroots Nation Conference

Published on Saturday, July 19, 2008 by CommonDreams.org

by Ronnie Cummins

Saturday morning, July 19. Sitting here at the Netroots Nation conference in Austin, Texas with several thousand other online activists. Nancy Pelosi, Democratic Party Speaker of the House, the third most powerful politician in the United States, is up on the podium, doing her best to damp down the mounting criticism of the Democratic Party’s shameful collaboration in funding the war and aiding and abetting the Bush administration’s shredding of the Constitution. Before Pelosi speaks, an announcement is made from the podium that disruptions will not be tolerated–if any of us express our frustrations too passionately with Pelosi and the sell-out Democratic Party leadership we will be arrested.

The first question the Netroots moderator poses to Pelosi is about impeachment. This generates considerable applause and cheers from the crowd. Pelosi, notorious for proclaiming that “impeachment is off the table,” artfully dodges the question and evasively talks about censuring the Bush administration and getting tough on Karl Rove. This generates polite clapping from the front of the room, where all the tables have apparently been “reserved” for Pelosi fans. In contrast I can see groans, grimaces, and shaking of heads from many of us, the netroots rabble, sitting at the back of the hall.

I resist a strong urge to get up and leave. How long will the centrist bureaucrats of Netroots Nation and groups like MoveOn roll-over for lowest common denominator Democrats and Barack Obama? After an hour of rather boring rhetoric by Pelosi, Al Gore makes a surprise appearance on the stage, letting Nancy off the hook.

After a standing ovation, Gore reminds us that the polar icecaps are melting even faster than scientists had expected. The global climate crisis, he goes on, is about to turn into a climate catastrophe. Gore then points out that global warming is of course connected to the energy crisis, reliance on foreign oil, and the economic crisis, as well as the lack of political leadership in the country. Finally, to cheers from the crowd, Gore calls on the assembled netroots to educate the public and get behind his campaign to generate 100% of the nation’s electricity from renewable sources of energy within 10 years.

Pelosi once again joins Gore on the stage and rather unconvincingly tries to present herself and the Democratic majority in the Congress as “revolutionary” on energy matters. This is too much for a number of us in the audience, and finally a man yells out at the top of his lungs, “What about the goddamn impeachment resolution?” The security guards at side of the hall look nervously around, but no one makes a move to arrest the man.

After claiming that she is trying to be “bi-partisan” today, and dodging a question about whether or not she will get behind Gore’s campaign for 100% renewable electricity by 2018, Pelosi rather anti-climatically reminds us that nothing will change unless we “get out there and elect Obama and a Democratic majority in November…”

Whether or not you decide to vote for Democrat Barack Obama, Green Party candidate Cynthia McKinney, or Independent Ralph Nader in November, please go to http://www.GrassrootsNetroots.org and join a growing radical populist army who believe we need an alternative to MoveOn and Democratic Party centrists. The doomsday clock is ticking. Let’s fight like hell to make sure that 2008 is not the year where we tried to change drivers, but still went over the cliff.

Ronnie Cummins is National Director of the Grassroots Netroots Alliance.

Friends of Israel blind to the truth

By Stuart Littlewood | Redress, 19 July 2008 Stuart Littlewood considers the blatant disregard for justice, human rights and basic norms of civilized behaviour shown by Israel’s stooges in the British Parliament, some of whom recently visited Israel and showed far more concern for Israeli terrorists than the Christian and Muslim civilians they terrorize. The real Zionist vision does not recognise any maps. It is a vision of a state without borders – a state that expands at all times according to its demographic, military and political power. This warning by the respected Israeli journalist and peace activist Uri Avnery should be impressed on every friend of Israel in the West. They are so gullible. The Jewish Chronicle last week reported how a group of intrepid Conservative MPs on a “Friends of Israel” junket experienced a “gunfire exchange" in Sderot. One of them said: ”We couldn’t see the gunfire, but could hear that it was close by." The exchange illustrated the “effects on quality of life that people in the south of Israel suffer on a daily basis. It shows that it is not a sustainable position for these areas to be constantly subject to rocket attacks and that Israel has the right to take appropriate actions to defend its citizens.” Urging Britons to visit Israel, he argued: “It’s very important to show their support for the only democracy in the area. I feel we have a duty and obligation to support Israel." Israel's stooges in the UK Parliament choose to sympathize with Israeli terrorists rather than the Christian and Muslim civilians they terrorize Another commented: "The gunfire was pretty close and it very much brought home how the violence in the area is ongoing and what people go through every day. Until I was there, I didn’t appreciate how serious the problem was and how much normal civilians, including children, are on the front-line." These brave souls from the British Parliament didn't trouble to visit the Gaza side and experience the Palestinians’ quality of life under the far more lethal barrage from Israel or partake of starvation rations under the cruel siege. If they hadn’t the good manners to go talk with Hamas they could at least have met the Christian community and listened to their story. Instead they were happy to be brainwashed by Tel Aviv propagandists, who no doubt told them how many home-made rockets had fallen on southern Israel but not, of course, the number of high-tech munitions fired by Israel's F16s, helicopter gunships, tanks, drones and naval gunboats into the densely-packed population of the Gaza Strip, or the limb-shattering high-velocity rounds used by the Israeli occupation forces. I'll bet they can quote the Israeli casualties but have no idea of the massive Palestinian death toll. It is very strange indeed how these Friends of Israel – mostly Christians, it seems – show far more concern for Israeli terrorists than the Christian and Muslim civilians they terrorize. Maybe basic facts haven’t quite sunk in... like Israel has been ethnically cleansing the Palestinian people for 60 years like Israel continues to occupy, rob, humiliate and murder its neighbours like Israel is no Western-style democracy but an apartheid-loving ethnocracy like Israel has ignored nearly 40 UN resolutions, flouts international law and is oblivious to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights like eight Palestinians are killed for every Israeli, and the lives of Palestinian children are so cheap they are slaughtered at the rate of 11 to 1 like Israel lies when it claims to have "withdrawn completely" from Gaza like Israel has nuclear weapons numbering hundreds and is the only state in the region not to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. With a record like this, how does the Israel lobby manage to browbeat supposedly intelligent MPs, MEPs and ministers into supporting the regime’s crimes and the ruthless Zionist expansion? Continued . . .

Report: U.S. Africa Aid Is Increasingly Military

Advocacy Group Cites Development Needs

By Stephanie McCrummen
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, July 18, 2008; A10

NAIROBI, July 17 -- U.S. aid to Africa is becoming increasingly militarized, resulting in skewed priorities and less attention to longer-term development projects that could lead to greater stability across the continent, according to a report released Thursday by the advocacy group Refugees International.

The report warns that the planned U.S. Africa Command, designed to boost America's image and prevent terrorism, is allowing the Defense Department to usurp funds traditionally directed by the State Department and U.S. aid agencies.

A Pentagon spokesman did not return a call requesting comment. But Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates warned this week against the risk of a "creeping militarization" of U.S. foreign policy and said the State Department should lead U.S. engagement with other countries.

The Pentagon, which controlled about 3 percent of official aid money a decade ago, now controls 22 percent, while the U.S. Agency for International Development's share has declined from 65 percent to 40 percent, according to the 56-page report.

"The danger is this strategy will not achieve the security objectives of addressing the root causes of terrorism," said Mark Malan, author of the report. "And it certainly won't address the developmental objectives of U.S. foreign policy."

Refugees International, based in Washington, provides aid to refugees and advocates for solutions to end conditions that create displacement.

Malan said the militarization has been driven by the U.S. focus on counterterrorism, though the trend dates to the Cold War era. The more fundamental problem, he said, is a lack of consistent, coherent U.S. foreign policy attention to Africa.

For example, the United States has dedicated nearly $50 million to hire contractors to train 2,000 soldiers in post-civil war Liberia, a West African country of 4 million people. Meanwhile, $5.5 million has been dedicated to boosting a weak and unprofessional army of 164,000 soldiers in Congo, a country of 65 million where a decade-long conflict and humanitarian crisis have left an estimated 5 million people dead.

The headquarters of the new African command post, known as Africom, has not been determined, and many African leaders have rejected hosting it. A temporary headquarters is being set up in Stuttgart, Germany, and is expected to begin consolidating responsibility for the continent in October.

Africom in part aims to better integrate U.S. efforts in Africa by coordinating military activities with the State Department and other agencies, but "the State Department is being overwhelmed by the Pentagon," Malan said.

Continued . . .

Ashcroft Defends Waterboarding In Front of House Judiciary Committee

Published on Thursday, July 17, 2008 by Associated Press

by Lara Jakes Jordan

WASHINGTON - Former Attorney General John Ashcroft said Thursday “it was not a hard decision” to withdraw Justice Department legal opinions that approved the use of harsh interrogation methods which critics say amount to torture.

Ashcroft, testifying in front of the House Judiciary Committee, said he did not necessarily disagree with the conclusions of the two memos that were written in 2002 and 2003 but later rescinded. But he said the legal reasoning behind both memos was flawed and needed to be corrected.

At the heart of both opinions was a controversial definition of torture. It said “only extreme acts” that cause pain similar in intensity to that caused by death or organ failure should be prohibited in the interrogations of terrorist suspects. Ashcroft, who served as attorney general from 2001 to 2005, had initially approved both memos. They were written in part at least by former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo.

“It became apparent in the further examination of those opinions, when made in another timeframe, that there were matters of concerns that were brought to my opinion,” Ashcroft told lawmakers. “It was not a hard decision for me.”

He added that he relied on his staff attorneys - and Yoo in particular - to give him sound legal advice.

Though the memos were later replaced with a new, narrower policy about what methods would be allowed, that did not “call into question any of the actual interrogation practices that the OLC had previously approved as legal,” Ashcroft said. OLC stands for the Office of Legal Counsel, which writes the Justice Department’s legal opinions for the president.

“When I was informed about concerns regarding overly broad advice, the limits of which were never tested, I directed the OLC to correct it,” Ashcroft said.

Democrats peppered Ashcroft with questions about how often waterboarding was used by interrogators who were following the now-defunct legal opinions.

Waterboarding involves strapping a person down and pouring water over his or her cloth-covered face to create the sensation of drowning. It has been traced back hundreds of years, to the Spanish Inquisition, and is condemned by nations around the world. Critics call it a form of torture.

Ashcroft said he was aware of three times that interrogators waterboarded terror suspects. He said he does not believe waterboarding, as it was then described by the CIA, amounted to torture.

The Bush administration maintains waterboarding was legal when it was used by CIA interrogators in 2002 and 2003 on top al-Qaida detainees Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. CIA Director Michael Hayden has said waterboarding was used, in part, because of widespread belief among U.S. intelligence officials that more catastrophic attacks were imminent.

Hayden banned waterboarding in CIA interrogations in 2006. Attorney General Michael Mukasey has refused to publicly discuss whether waterboarding is currently legal since it is no longer used by CIA interrogators.

© 2008 The Associated Press

Who Can And Who Can't Have Nuclear Weapons?

By Real News

Americans should question the assumption that the US has to be the most powerful nation on earth

The Nuclear Non Proliferation treaty was signed by non nuclear countries on the assumption that there would be a swift move towards disarmament by those that already had them would begin to disarm and even destroy their nuclear stockpiles.

Posted 18/07/08

Is the US 'encircling' China? Aijaz Ahmad: What would a rational American foreign policy look like? Pt 3 July 9, 2008

Why does US need military bases around the world? Aijaz Ahmad: What would a rational American foreign policy look like? Pt 2 July 8, 2008

What's a rational American foreign policy? Aijaz Ahmad: Start with the question, why does the US have to be the most powerful country on earth? Pt1 July 7, 2008

Based in New Delhi, Aijaz Ahmad is The Real News Network's Senior News Analyst; Senior Editorial Consultant, and political commentator for the Indian newsmagazine, Frontline. He has taught Political Science, and has written widely on South Asia and the Middle East.

More Evidence Madrid Bombing was a False Flag Op

Kurt Nimmo | Infowars, July 17, 2008

	It now appears obvious the Madrid bombing was a Gladio-like operation designed to frighten and stampede the Spanish public into supporting the bogus war against terror.

Agence-France Presse reports:

Spain’s supreme court Thursday overturned the guilty verdicts on four of the 21 people convicted over the Madrid train bombings that killed 191 people in 2004.

It also upheld a lower court’s decision to acquit one of the alleged masterminds of the Al Qaeda-inspired attacks, Rabei Ousmane Sayed Ahmed, known as “Mohammed the Egyptian”.

And it handed down a four-year prison term to a Spaniard, Antonio Toro, who had been acquitted on charges of transporting explosives.

Note: the attack is no longer considered the direct handiwork of al-Qaeda but is rather an “al-Qaeda inspired attack.” Back in March, 2004, the corporate media resoundingly declared al-Qaeda to be responsible.

The supreme court Thursday overturned the convictions of Basel Ghalyoun and Mohamed Almallah Dabas, both condemned to 12 years in prison for belonging to a terrorist group.

It also cleared Abdelilah El Fadual El Akil, condemned to nine years for collaborating with a terrorist group, as well as Raul Gonzalez Pena, who had received five years for supplying explosives.

In other words, according to Spain’s Supreme Court, these people did not belong to a terrorist group, at least not an Islamic terrorist group. Apparently, there was not enough evidence to stay the conviction of “Mohammed the Egyptian,” said to be the ringleader, and his conviction was thrown out as well.

The court in October had handed down the heaviest sentences to two Moroccans — Jamal Zougam and Othman el-Gnaoui — and a Spaniard, Jose Emilio Suarez Trashorras.

As it turns out, Trashorras and a compatriot, Antonio Toro, were government informants, a fact reported by the New York Times and the Times Online. Toro was recently handed a four-year prison for transporting explosives.

Continued . . .

Kristen doktrin støtende på muslimer, sier Erkebiskop av Canterbury

Viktige elementer i kristen doktrin er støtende for muslimer, Erkebiskop av Canterbury har sagt i et brev til islamske lærde.

Ben Farmer | Telegraph.co.uk, July 16, 2008 Ben Farmer | Telegraph.co.uk, 16 juli 2008

Dr Rowan Williams også snakk kritisk av voldelig fortid både religioner og kristendommen er avskaffelse av sin fredelige opprinnelse.

Hans kommentarer kom i et offentliggjort brev til islamske ledere, som er ment å fremme tettere dialog og forståelse mellom de to trosretninger.

Men de kommer bare måneder etter Dr Williams ble tvunget til å avklare kommentarer der han sa at enkelte deler av islamsk lov vil "uunngåelig" tas i bruk i Storbritannia.

Kommentarene er også gjort som en gang et tiår Lambeth Conference begynner i Canterbury. Opptil en fjerdedel av løperne er boikotte arrangementet, som den anglikanske kirken står overfor fortsetter divisjonen over utgaver av kvinner løpere og homofile prestene.

Den omfattende brev som dekker vanskeligste spørsmålene inkludert religiøs frihet og religiøst-inspirert vold som svar på et dokument skrevet i fjor av muslimske vitenskapsmenn fra 43 land.

Diskusjon om forskjeller mellom religioner, Dr Williams erkjenner at kristen tro i treenigheten er "vanskelig, noen ganger støtende, for muslimer".

Treenigheten er kristen doktrin angivelse Gud eksisterer som Faderen, Sønnen og Den Hellige Ånd og konflikter med islamske undervisning at det er en all-mektig Gud.

Uttaler seg om historien til de to religioner, Dr Williams sa de hadde vært altfor ofte forveksles med Empire og kontroll.

Han sa: "Til tross for Jesu ord i Johannesevangeliet, kristendommen har blitt forfremmet at poenget med sverd og lovlig støttes av ekstreme sanksjoner, til tross for Qur'anic axiom, Islam har blitt støttet på samme måte, med ekstreme straffer for å forlate det, og sivil handikap for dem utenfor troen.

"Det er ingen religiøs tradisjon som er unntatt fra slike fristelser, og slike feil."

Han fortsetter: "Hva vi trenger som en visjon for vår dialog er å bryte gjeldende sykluser av vold, for å vise verden at tro og tro alene kan virkelig bakken en forpliktelse til fred som definitivt abandons det fristende men dødelige syklus av gjengjeldelse i som vi bare imitere hverandres vold. "

Den 17-siders brev, kalles et vanlig ord for Common Good, er svar på et brev fra muslimske ledere skrevet i september i fjor.

Det bokstav, et vanlig ord mellom oss og deg, ble undertegnet av 138 muslimske lærde å erklære felles interesser mellom de to religioner.

Dr Williams beskrevet den muslimske dokument som gjestfri og vennlig, og la til: "Ditt brev kunne neppe vært mer betimelig, gitt den voksende bevissthet på at fred i hele verden er dypt Entwined med mulighet for alle mennesker av tro overalt å leve i fred, rettferdighet, gjensidig respekt og kjærlighet. "

Hans egen tett og grundig brevet ikke nevne sharia islamsk lov i det hele tatt. Han har mottatt omfattende kritikk fra politikere og andre prestene for hans kommentarer i februar og senere fortalte General Synode han tok ansvar for sin "unclarity" og "villedende" valg av ord.

Coalition troops mass at Pakistan border

The Australian, July 17, 2008

Bruce Loudon, South Asia correspondent

NATO said last night it had abandoned an Afghan outpost only two days after it was stormed by militants who killed nine US soldiers in one of the deadliest attacks since the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001.

News of the pull-out from the position in Wanat village in northeastern Kunar province came as hundreds of US and coalition troops massed along the nearby border with Pakistan yesterday, amid reports of an imminent attack against al-Qa'ida and Taliban bases in the area.

Afghan officials said the US troops withdrew from the Wanat outpost on Tuesday, two days after Taliban militants breached the position in one of the deadliest attack involving international forces since 2001.

NATO spokesman Mark Laity said the International Security Assistance Force would maintain patrols in the area, which Afghan officials said was now under the control of the Taliban.

On the border, thousands of tribal families, fearful that the arrival of the coalition forces could be the start of a full-scale assault on militants based inside Pakistani territory, were said by officials to be fleeing their homes.

Rounds of mortar fire from the Afghan side of the Durand Line frontier were reported to be hitting the Pakistani town of Angoor Adda, but they were not believed to be from the coalition force mobilising near the border.

While officials in Islamabad insisted they knew of no unusual coalition troop movements on the Afghan side of the border, other well-placed sources said a red alert had been issued to Pakistan army commanders in the area to repel cross-border incursions.

At the same time, published reports said the Pakistan air force had been ordered to attack any aircraft violating the country's airspace.

A senior military official was quoted as saying: "Responsible departments of national security have made it clear to the ISAF (the US-led coalition force in Afghanistan) that they will give a befitting response to any border and air violation."

The official added: "Pakistan will never allow foreign interference in our territory, or for our sovereignty to be violated. Such incidents are infuriating not only to the security forces but also the Pakistani people." However, a spokesman for coalition forces in Afghanistan insisted yesterday there was no question of troops violating the border and entering Pakistan. "Our mandate stops at the border," said Captain Mike Finney.

Reports of the troop build-up has caused fury among local tribal leaders.

Malik Mohammad Afzal Khan Darpakhel, a local leader in the militant-infested tribal area of North Waziristan, was quoted as saying: "We want to warn them that three million tribesmen will rise against them if they try to move in."

The deployment followed a fierce denunciation of Pakistan on Monday by Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai who accused Islamabad and its top spy agency the ISI of being "the world's biggest producers of terrorism and extremism".

The Pakistani Foreign Ministry retaliated by accusing Kabul of creating "an artificial crisis to satisfy short-term political expediencies".

India, too, has rounded on Islamabad, accusing the ISI of responsibility for the suicide-bombing of its embassy in Kabul last week in which 58 people died and hundreds were wounded.

Western commanders say there has been a marked increase in cross-border infiltration in the past few months, fuelling the insurgency in Afghanistan. NATO troops have clashed with Pakistani units along the South Waziristan border.

Intelligence sources, backed by accounts from tribesmen, said yesterday that hundreds of heavily armed coalition troops had deployed just across the border from the Pakistani village of Lwara Mundi in North Waziristan. The village is reported to be a hotbed of jihadi militant activity.

Haji Yaqub, a resident of the nearby border town of Ghulam Khan, told reporters: "They have started setting up bunkers very close to the border while helicopter gunships are continuously hovering over the border."

U.S.-led forces confirm killing Afghan civilians

REUTERS
Reuters North American News Service

Jul 17, 2008 08:13 EST

KABUL, July 17 (Reuters) - U.S.-led coalition troops killed eight Afghan civilians in an air strike in the western province of Farah during a Tuesday raid against suspected militants, the U.S. military said.

The acknowledgement came as reports of more civilian deaths caused by a fresh air raid by foreign forces emerged on Thursday from the neighbouring province of Herat.

Tuesday's air strike was summoned after a coalition convoy came under sustained attack from machine gun and indirect fire from a number of houses adjacent to a road in the Bakwa district of Farah, the U.S. military said.

"The coalition convoy returned fire and called for close air support on the enemy positions. A house was hit; eight civilians were killed, two others injured," it said in a statement late on Wednesday.

"Coalition forces never intentionally target non-combatants, and deeply regret any occurrence such as this where civilians are killed and injured as a result of insurgent activity and actions," it said.

Afghan officials said nine people, all members of the same family were killed in Tuesday's bombing.

In Thursday's raid, at least four men were killed, a spokesman for the regional police command said. Witnesses said 17 people were also wounded and taken to hospital.

The U.S. military said the raid was against "high priority Taliban targets" in Herat, adding two "Taliban leaders" and "significant number of other insurgents were also killed".

In a statement, it said, there was no evidence of civilian casualties.

The issue of civilian casualties is highly sensitive one for the Western-backed government and undermines Afghan support for the presence of foreign forces who are fighting the Taliban-led insurgents in Afghanistan.

There has been a sharp rise in violence in Afghanistan this year, the bloodiest since U.S.-led and Afghan forces overthrew the hard-line Taliban in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

The U.S. military says it is investigating reports by Afghan officials that around 60 civilians were killed in two separate air strikes by U.S.-led coalition forces this month in eastern Afghanistan.

More than 800 civilians have been killed since the start of 2007 in Afghanistan by foreign and Afghan forces, according to Afghan officials and the U.N. (Writing by Sayed Salahuddin; Editing by Valerie Lee)

Source: Reuters North American News Service

Opposing war in "the belly of the beast"

The latest in a series of articles elaborating on the ISO's "Where We Stand" statement.

Socialist Worker, July 18, 2008

We oppose U.S. intervention in Cuba, the Middle East and elsewhere. We are for self-determination for Puerto Rico.
--From the ISO "Where We Stand"

Series: Where We Stand

You can read previous installments of Paul D'Amato's articles on the ISO's "Where We Stand" statement.

"'FREEDOM' IS a grand word," Lenin once wrote, "but under the banner of freedom for industry, the most predatory wars were waged."

Nowhere is this statement truer than the United States. Washington has always cloaked its predatory ambitions in the language of the American Revolution--freedom, liberty, democracy and freedom of trade. It has always been the "reluctant empire," invading other countries for their own good, and always with kind and benevolent intentions.

Parallel to this has come the idea that the United States is destined to dominate the world. "The history of territorial expansion," exclaimed O.H. Platt, a Connecticut senator in the late 1890s, "is the history of our nation's progress and glory...We should rejoice that Providence has given us the opportunity to extend our influence, our institutions and our civilization into regions hitherto closed to us."

The United States, from its inception, has been a society built upon violent conquest, beginning with the dispossession of Native Americans. "America the benevolent," writes historian Sidney Lens, "does not exist and never has existed."

From its war with Mexico in 1846--which resulted in the annexing of half of that country to the United States--to the occupation of Iraq, the United States has never been shy about using its military might to conquer territory, annex colonies or intimidate rivals and weaker nations. Its interventions in the Philippines, Korea and Vietnam alone are responsible for the deaths of more than 6 million people.

Columnist: Paul D'Amato

Paul D'Amato is managing editor of the International Socialist Review and author of The Meaning of Marxism, a lively and accessible introduction to the ideas of Karl Marx and the tradition he founded.

Between 1870 and 1922, the U.S. emerged as the world's biggest industrial power, and its total wealth increased tenfold, from $30 billion to $320 billion. By the end of this period, the U.S. became Europe's and the world's creditor; after the Second World War, it added to its economic power its military supremacy--a position it has fought to maintain by any means necessary ever since.

Continued . . .

Israeli Claims over Journalist Challenged

By Sanjay Suri and Mel Frykberg

Mohammed Omer

LONDON, Jul 17 (IPS) - Medical reports seen by IPS appear to confirm the testimony of IPS Gaza correspondent Mohammed Omer of physical abuse at the hands of Israelis last month.

Omer said he was physically and mentally abused at the Allenby crossing into Gaza while on his way back from a European tour. In London, he was awarded the Martha Gellhorn prize for investigative reporting.

Omer left for Europe through an agreement secured by Dutch diplomats to escort him in and out of Gaza. The abuse was reported Jun. 26 as Omer was searched at the crossing in Israeli custody while a Dutch diplomat waited outside.

According to Omer's testimony, he was forced to strip by an Israeli officer wearing a police uniform. He was pinned down on the floor with a boot on the neck. He says he collapsed during interrogation, and when he came round his eyelids were being forcibly opened. He was then dragged along the floor by his feet by officials of the Israeli security agency Shin Bet.

Omer was taken by ambulance from the Allenby crossing to the Jericho hospital in Palestinian territory in the West Bank. From there he was transferred to Gaza after a few hours.

A note from the Israeli Government Press Office (GPO) denies Omer's account of physical abuse in Israeli custody. "In contradiction to his claims, at no time was the complainant subjected to either physical or mental violence."

But an ambulance report of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society says: "We note finger signs on the neck and chest." A report from the European Gaza Hospital of the Palestinian National Authority's Ministry of Health includes the following notation after examination of Omer: "Ecchymosis (discolouration caused by bleeding underneath, typically caused by bruising) at upper part of chest wall was found."

Continued . . .