Source: Counterpunch, June 5, 2007

By Robert Fantina

“I have real doubts about the value of engagement with a regime that is anti-democratic, and that appears to me to be trying to arrange a transition from one anti-democratic regime to another anti-democratic regime.” So said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during her first official visit to Spain. She and Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos discussed Cuba, among other topics, and apparently ‘agreed to disagree’ about that Caribbean island nation.

Ms. Rice also had doubts about the value of any engagement with Iran, but the U.S. eventually saw some potential there, and has begun low-level discussions. One wonders what makes so-called ‘anti-democratic’ Cuba a bigger bugaboo that anti-democratic Iran. A skeptic might say that perhaps the difference is the Cuban-American voting block in Florida.

But regardless of the reasons, Ms. Rice seemed miffed that Mr. Moratinos had not met with Cuban dissidents when he visited Cuba in April. She felt that this might have sent them the wrong message, when she wants them to know ” that the free world stands with them and is not prepared to tolerate an anti-democratic transition in Cuba.” She must have borrowed President Bush’s saber in order to rattle it in Madrid.

The response of Mr. Moratinos was telling, and should certainly have left Ms. Rice speechless; said he: the “government (of Spain) has no problem in talking to the dissidents. I would ask you, ‘Who has seen more of the dissidents?'” Spain, unlike the U.S., has diplomatic relations with Cuba.

The United States has maintained its bizarre non-relationship with Cuba for nearly fifty years. The apparent intent of this unusual estrangement is to force that nation to accept democratic principles. One might think that after nearly five decades, someone would decide that it wasn’t working.

It is interesting that Ms. Rice said that the world “is not prepared to tolerate an anti-democratic transition in Cuba.” When referring to the ‘world,’ did she actually mean the United States? Is the United States then prepared to intervene in Cuba as it has in Iraq when it determined the necessity for ‘regime change’ there? If Cuba, with the eventual death of the seemingly immortal Fidel Castro, does indeed transition to another ‘anti-democratic’ (as deemed by the U.S.) government, should the citizens of that nation prepare to experience the same brand of horrific terrorism that America unleashed on Iraq four years ago? Can the world look for the same degree of success in democratic nation-building in Cuba that the U.S. has had in Iraq?

The U.S. State Department’s official website describes Cuba in great detail. A few of the statements contained therein seem to accuse Cuba of offenses of which the U.S. itself is guilty. In describing that nation as a police state, it says that the Cuban government engages in “intense physical and electronic surveillance of Cubans.” Is not the U.S. government engaging in intense electronic surveillance of Americans through Mr. Bush’s illegal wiretapping program? Any telephone calls between the United States and any other country are subject to this scrutiny. Perhaps, as with so many other things, ‘intense electronic surveillance’ of the citizens is not wrong when the U.S. does it.

The website goes on to state that “Castro pursued close relations with the Soviet Union and worked in concert with the geopolitical goals of Soviet communism, funding and fomenting violent subversive and insurrectional activities, as well as military adventurism.” This does not seem dissimilar to the record of the United States, which has used covert and overt means to destabilize and destroy governments throughout the world with which it disagrees. Chile, Indonesia and El Salvador quickly come to mind. And can America’s latest imperial misadventure in Iraq be termed anything if not ‘military adventurism?’ Perhaps again, murder, government overthrow and civilian repression is not wrong when done in the name of America’s lofty ideals of peace and freedom.

“The government (of Cuba) incarcerates people for their peaceful political beliefs or activities.”

Again, we need not look far for U.S. parallels. As recently as November 2006, activist Cindy Sheehan was arrested in Washington, D.C. and charged with “interfering with a government function.” Ms. Sheehan and about fifty others wanted to deliver to the president a petition with 80,000 signatures opposing an invasion of Iran. She and the others tossed the petition over the White House fence and were arrested.

During the Republican National Convention in New York City in 2004, hundreds of protesters were arrested on a wide variety of charges. Four who were arrested for climbing the front of a hotel and hanging a banner were also charged with assaulting a police officer, because during their arrest the officer stepped on a skylight, broke it and hurt himself. Others who were arrested atop a trailer were charged with endangering a police officer, because he had to climb on the trailer to arrest them. Other protesters were kept blocks away from the convention, being denied their right of peaceful protest.

Ms. Rice’s comments about Cuba may be nothing more than the continued American rhetoric that many people have not tired of hearing, although it has played like a broken record for nearly fifty years. But with Mr. Castro now ill, and his brother Raul having been in command for nearly a year, perhaps that country will soon see a change in leadership. That potentiality necessitates the need to take Mr. Rice’s comments a little more seriously than the political posturing of past Secretaries of State and presidents. Mr. Bush may relish the possibility of forcing a government to his liking in Cuba, if for no other reason than to deflect attention from his continuing disaster in Iraq, and thus give some credence to his discredited attempts to force his brand of democracy down the throats of unwilling Iraqis. While the world focuses on Iraq and Mr. Bush’s increasing harsh words towards Iran, Cuba must not be ignored during this critical time. However, based on fifty years of spineless rhetoric on the topic, and Congress’s recent demonstration of cowardice in the face of one presidential veto, one must not expect that Mr. Bush will be thwarted in whatever plan he may have for Cuba. The result, if history tells us anything, will be simply more innocent victims of U.S. imperialism, and all the blood, death and sorrow that that always brings.

Robert Fantina is author of ‘Desertion and the American Soldier: 1776–2006.‘

“I lost my son in a war I oppose. We were both doing our duty.” By Andrew J. Bacevich

Washington Post, June 03, 2007

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Parents who lose children, whether through accident or illness, inevitably wonder what they could have done to prevent their loss. When my son was killed in Iraq earlier this month at age 27, I found myself pondering my responsibility for his death.

Among the hundreds of messages that my wife and I have received, two bore directly on this question. Both held me personally culpable, insisting that my public opposition to the war had provided aid and comfort to the enemy. Each said that my son’s death came as a direct result of my antiwar writings.

This may seem a vile accusation to lay against a grieving father. But in fact, it has become a staple of American political discourse, repeated endlessly by those keen to allow President Bush a free hand in waging his war. By encouraging “the terrorists,” opponents of the Iraq conflict increase the risk to U.S. troops. Although the First Amendment protects antiwar critics from being tried for treason, it provides no protection for the hardly less serious charge of failing to support the troops — today’s civic equivalent of dereliction of duty.

What exactly is a father’s duty when his son is sent into harm’s way?

Among the many ways to answer that question, mine was this one: As my son was doing his utmost to be a good soldier, I strove to be a good citizen.

As a citizen, I have tried since Sept. 11, 2001, to promote a critical understanding of U.S. foreign policy. I know that even now, people of good will find much to admire in Bush’s response to that awful day. They applaud his doctrine of preventive war. They endorse his crusade to spread democracy across the Muslim world and to eliminate tyranny from the face of the Earth. They insist not only that his decision to invade Iraq in 2003 was correct but that the war there can still be won. Some — the members of the “the-surge-is-already-working” school of thought — even profess to see victory just over the horizon.

I believe that such notions are dead wrong and doomed to fail. In books, articles and op-ed pieces, in talks to audiences large and small, I have said as much. “The long war is an unwinnable one,” I wrote in this section of The Washington Post in August 2005. “The United States needs to liquidate its presence in Iraq, placing the onus on Iraqis to decide their fate and creating the space for other regional powers to assist in brokering a political settlement. We’ve done all that we can do.”

Not for a second did I expect my own efforts to make a difference. But I did nurse the hope that my voice might combine with those of others — teachers, writers, activists and ordinary folks — to educate the public about the folly of the course on which the nation has embarked. I hoped that those efforts might produce a political climate conducive to change. I genuinely believed that if the people spoke, our leaders in Washington would listen and respond.

This, I can now see, was an illusion.

The people have spoken, and nothing of substance has changed. The November 2006 midterm elections signified an unambiguous repudiation of the policies that landed us in our present predicament. But half a year later, the war continues, with no end in sight. Indeed, by sending more troops to Iraq (and by extending the tours of those, like my son, who were already there), Bush has signaled his complete disregard for what was once quaintly referred to as “the will of the people.”

To be fair, responsibility for the war’s continuation now rests no less with the Democrats who control Congress than with the president and his party. After my son’s death, my state’s senators, Edward M. Kennedy and John F. Kerry, telephoned to express their condolences. Stephen F. Lynch, our congressman, attended my son’s wake. Kerry was present for the funeral Mass. My family and I greatly appreciated such gestures. But when I suggested to each of them the necessity of ending the war, I got the brushoff. More accurately, after ever so briefly pretending to listen, each treated me to a convoluted explanation that said in essence: Don’t blame me.

To whom do Kennedy, Kerry and Lynch listen? We know the answer: to the same people who have the ear of George W. Bush and Karl Rove — namely, wealthy individuals and institutions.

Money buys access and influence. Money greases the process that will yield us a new president in 2008. When it comes to Iraq, money ensures that the concerns of big business, big oil, bellicose evangelicals and Middle East allies gain a hearing. By comparison, the lives of U.S. soldiers figure as an afterthought.

Memorial Day orators will say that a G.I.’s life is priceless. Don’t believe it. I know what value the U.S. government assigns to a soldier’s life: I’ve been handed the check. It’s roughly what the Yankees will pay Roger Clemens per inning once he starts pitching next month.

Money maintains the Republican/Democratic duopoly of trivialized politics. It confines the debate over U.S. policy to well-hewn channels. It preserves intact the cliches of 1933-45 about isolationism, appeasement and the nation’s call to “global leadership.” It inhibits any serious accounting of exactly how much our misadventure in Iraq is costing. It ignores completely the question of who actually pays. It negates democracy, rendering free speech little more than a means of recording dissent.

This is not some great conspiracy. It’s the way our system works.

In joining the Army, my son was following in his father’s footsteps: Before he was born, I had served in Vietnam. As military officers, we shared an ironic kinship of sorts, each of us demonstrating a peculiar knack for picking the wrong war at the wrong time. Yet he was the better soldier — brave and steadfast and irrepressible.

I know that my son did his best to serve our country. Through my own opposition to a profoundly misguided war, I thought I was doing the same. In fact, while he was giving his all, I was doing nothing. In this way, I failed him.

Andrew J. Bacevich teaches history and international relations at Boston University. His son died May 13 after a suicide bomb explosion in Salah al-Din province (Iraq).

Source: salon.com , June 4, 2007

Little-noticed details in declassified U.S. documents indicate that Israel’s Six-Day War may not have been a war of necessity.

By Sandy Tolan

At a little after 7 on the morning of June 5, 1967, as Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s commanders were finishing their breakfasts and driving to work, French-built Israeli fighter jets roared out of their bases and flew low, below radar, into Egyptian airspace. Within three hours, 500 Israeli sorties had destroyed Nasser’s entire air force. Just after midday, the air forces of Jordan and Syria also lay in smoking ruins, and Israel had essentially won the Six-Day War — in six hours.

Israeli and U.S. historians and commentators describe the surprise attack as necessary, and the war as inevitable, the result of Nasser’s fearsome war machine that had closed the Strait of Tiran, evicted United Nations peacekeeping troops, taunted the traumatized Israeli public, and churned toward the Jewish state’s border with 100,000 troops. “The morning of 5 June 1967,” wrote Israel’s warrior-turned-historian, Chaim Herzog, “found Israel’s armed forces facing the massed Arab armies around her frontiers.” Attack or be annihilated: The choice was clear.

Or was it? Little-noticed details in declassified documents from the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, indicate that top officials in the Johnson administration — including Johnson’s most pro-Israeli Cabinet members — did not believe war between Israel and its neighbors was necessary or inevitable, at least until the final hour. In these documents, Israel emerges as a vastly superior military power, its opponents far weaker than the menacing threat Israel portrayed, and war itself something that Nasser, for all his saber-rattling, tried to avoid until the moment his air force went up in smoke. In particular, the diplomatic role of Nasser’s vice president, who was poised to travel to Washington in an effort to resolve the crisis, has received little attention from historians. The documents sharpen a recurring theme in the history of the Israeli-Arab wars, and especially of their telling in the West: From the war of 1948 to the 2007 conflict in Gaza, Israel is often miscast as the vulnerable David in a hostile sea of Arab Goliaths.

“You will whip the hell out of them,” Lyndon Johnson told Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban during a visit to the White House on May 26, 1967. The president’s conclusions were based on multiple intelligence reports, including a CIA assessment that Israel “can maintain internal security, defend successfully against simultaneous Arab attacks on all fronts, launch limited attacks simultaneously on all fronts, or hold any of three fronts while mounting successfully a major offensive on the fourth.” As Nicholas Katzenbach, U.S. undersecretary of state at the time, recalled: “The intelligence was absolutely flat on the fact that the Israelis … could wipe out the Arabs in no time at all.”

A key discrepancy lay between U.S. and British intelligence reports and those conveyed to the administration by the Israelis. On May 26, the same day Eban met with Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, the secretary of state, relayed a message from Israel indicating “that an Egyptian and Syrian attack is imminent.” In a memo to the president, Rusk wrote: “Our intelligence does not confirm this Israeli estimate.” Indeed, this contradicted all U.S. intelligence, which had characterized Nasser’s troops in the Sinai as “defensive in nature” and only half (50,000) of the Israeli estimates. Walt Rostow, the national security advisor, called Israeli estimates of 100,000 Egyptian troops “highly disturbing,” and the CIA labeled them “a political gambit” for the United States to stand firm with Israelis, sell them more military hardware, and “put more pressure on Nasser.”

As for the Egyptian president, there was a huge difference between his public and private signals. He had threatened Israelis with “annihilation,” causing fear bordering on paralysis for a population devastated by the Holocaust. He had closed the Strait of Tiran, a source of less than 10 percent of Israel’s shipping, but nevertheless a casus belli as far as Israel was concerned. He had expelled the U.N. peacekeepers from Sinai, further raising fears of war. (Israel, however, refused to accept those same peacekeepers — a move that would have diminished the chance of war.) And, as the leader of the “Arab nation,” Nasser was under great pressure from other Arabs to cut short Israel’s nuclear ambitions and deliver the Palestinians back to the homes they had fled and been driven out of in the war of 1948.

But privately Nasser was sending strong signals he would not go to war. On May 31, he met with an American emissary, former Treasury Secretary Robert Anderson, assuring him that Egypt would not “begin any fight.” Two days later, Nasser told a British M.P., Christopher Mayhew, that Egypt had “no intention of attacking Israel.” The same day he met again with Anderson, agreeing to dispatch his vice president, Zakariya Mohieddin, to Washington, in an apparent last-ditch attempt to avoid war. (Anderson and Johnson had also spoken of a visit to Cairo by Vice President Hubert Humphrey.)

Rostow decided that Israel should know about the secret visit. In a June 2 note to the president, the national security advisor urged that the United States inform Israel of Mohieddin’s impending trip to the White House: “My guess is that their intelligence will pick it up.” The same day, Nasser sent a telegram to the American president indicating that Egypt would not attack Israel, but that “we shall resist any aggression launched against us or against any Arab state.”

The archives for the 1967 war, as with the documentary evidence from other Arab-Israeli wars, thus reveal a history far more complex, and far more interesting, than the inflated portrayal of Arabs poised to crush Israel. “One against 40,” declared David Ben-Gurion in describing the odds facing Israel in the war of 1948, ignoring the fact that comparisons of total populations meant little. The records show that the key Arab and Jewish forces — a much more crucial benchmark — were about the same, and that after a June 1948 cease-fire, a rearmed Israel had a decided advantage, which it parlayed into victory. Fifty-nine years later, in today’s conflict in Gaza, the tragic, well-publicized deaths of Israelis in Sderot from crudely built Qassam missiles — nine in the last six years — are dwarfed by the deaths of 650 Palestinians last year (more than half unarmed civilians, according to Amnesty International) from attacks by Israel, one of the most potent and sophisticated military powers in the world, armed with nuclear weapons.

Yet the David vs. Goliath narrative persists, obscuring a more nuanced view of the balance of power in the region. Much of this has to do with Americans’ familiarity with the story of Israel as a safe haven for Jews ravaged by the Holocaust. By contrast, Arabs, especially Palestinians, have long been seen as a vaguely menacing Other, as depicted in Leon Uris’ hugely influential best-seller, “Exodus.” The “Exodus” history, in which Arabs are alternately pathetic or malicious, holds no room for a more layered narrative of the struggle between Arabs in Jews, in which someone like Gamal Abdel Nasser, blustering for the Arab street, may have been privately seeking a way out of war.

Did Nasser truly want peace? We may never know. On June 3, 1967, after Secretary of State Rusk had informed Israel of the pending visit from Egyptian Vice President Mohieddin, Rusk relayed a message from the president to Nasser. “In view of the urgency of the situation,” Rusk wrote, “we hope it will be possible for him to come without delay.” That same day, however, at a Pentagon meeting between Mossad director Meir Amit and McNamara, the prospects for war seemed closer than ever. Amit told McNamara bluntly that he was “going to recommend that our government strike.” This time, the Americans did not object; indeed, the CIA had grown sympathetic to Israel’s war aims, in which Nasser, seen as too close to the Soviets, would be defanged. When McNamara asked Amit how long a war would last, the Mossad director replied: “Seven days.” And so the meeting between the White House and Mohieddin, scheduled for June 7, never took place. By that time, it was already Day 3 of the Six-Day War, and Israel was already in control of Sinai, the West Bank, Gaza and the skies over much of the Middle East.

The Jerusalem Post, May 30, 2007

Israeli Chief Rabbi Advocates Carpet Bombing Gaza

“If they don’t stop after we kill 100, then we must kill a thousand,” said Shmuel Eliyahu. “And if they do not stop after 1,000 then we must kill 10,000. If they still don’t stop we must kill 100,000, even a million. Whatever it takes to make them stop.”

By Matthew Wagner

All civilians living in Gaza are collectively guilty for Kassam attacks on Sderot, former Sephardi chief rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu has written in a letter to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

Eliyahu ruled that there was absolutely no moral prohibition against the indiscriminate killing of civilians during a potential massive military offensive on Gaza aimed at stopping the rocket launchings.

The letter, published in Olam Katan [Small World], a weekly pamphlet to be distributed in synagogues nationwide this Friday, cited the biblical story of the Shechem massacre (Genesis 34) and Maimonides’ commentary (Laws of Kings 9, 14) on the story as proof texts for his legal decision.

According to Jewish war ethics, wrote Eliyahu, an entire city holds collective responsibility for the immoral behavior of individuals. In Gaza, the entire populace is responsible because they do nothing to stop the firing of Kassam rockets.

The former chief rabbi also said it was forbidden to risk the lives of Jews in Sderot or the lives of IDF soldiers for fear of injuring or killing Palestinian noncombatants living in Gaza.

Eliyahu could not be reached for an interview. However, Eliyahu’s son, Shmuel Eliyahu, who is chief rabbi of Safed, said his father opposed a ground troop incursion into Gaza that would endanger IDF soldiers. Rather, he advocated carpet bombing the general area from which the Kassams were launched, regardless of the price in Palestinian life.

“If they don’t stop after we kill 100, then we must kill a thousand,” said Shmuel Eliyahu. “And if they do not stop after 1,000 then we must kill 10,000. If they still don’t stop we must kill 100,000, even a million. Whatever it takes to make them stop.”

In the letter, Eliyahu quoted from Psalms. “I will pursue my enemies and apprehend them and I will not desist until I have eradicated them.”

Eliyahu wrote that “This is a message to all leaders of the Jewish people not to be compassionate with those who shoot [rockets] at civilians in their houses.”

Source: GlobalResearch  Was Iraq Invaded to boost Oil Prices  Value of Exxon Reserves rose by 666 Billion  by Sherwood Ross

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Saddam Hussein may have been deposed in order to limit Iraq’s oil production and thus keep world oil prices artificially high. This could be the real reason behind the invasion of Iraq by the Anglo-American forces and their allies. According to Greg Palast’s new book, “Armed Madhouse”(Plume), “When OPEC raises the price of crude, Big Oil makes out big time.” Palast makes the point Iraq’s output in the 2003-05 period following the invasion saw a decline in oil production. In fact, it dropped to below the level of the 1995-2003 Oil-for-Food arrangement that allowed Iraq to sell two million barrels per day to raise cash for humanitarian purposes. “Whether by design or happenstance, this decline in (Iraqi) output has resulted in tripling the profits of the five U.S. oil majors to $89 billion for a single year, 2005, compared to pre-invasion 2002,” Palast writes. He points out the oil majors are not simply passive resellers of OPEC production but have reserves of their own which rise in tandem with oil prices. “The rise in the price of oil after the first three years of the (Iraq) war boosted the value of the reserves of ExxonMobil Oil alone by just over $666-billion,” Palast wrote. What’s more, Chevron Oil, “where (Secretary of State) Condoleezza Rice had served as a director, gained a quarter trillion dollars in value.” Another big winner in the Iraq war is Saudi Arabia. The war-stoked jump in oil prices, Palast writes, put $120 billion in Saudi Arabia’s treasury in 2004, triple its normal take. Among the big losers have been American motorists, now paying about $3.30 for a gallon of gas. What’s more, the oil price spike has punished U.S. industry, costing America an estimated 1.2-million jobs. “Higher borrowing costs for business since the beginning of the Iraq war are bleeding manufacturing investment,” Palast adds. Rising oil prices are an anomaly. The world’s petroleum reserves have doubled from 648 billion to !.2 trillion barrels in the past 25 years, Palast reports. According to free market laws of supply and demand, discovery of these immense new pools should cause prices to drop. Big Oil’s interest is in “suppressing production,” Palast writes, stating “An international industry policy of suppressing Iraqi oil production has been in place since 1927.” Iraq has 74 known oil fields but only 15 are in production and 526 known pools of oil of which only 125 have been drilled. In 2005, Iraq exported only 1.4 million barrels of oil daily, less than under Hussein, less than half its old OPEC quota, and less than a fourth of its ultimate capacity, Palast reports. “Though technically owned by the Iraqis through their state oil company, we can expect the (Iraqi) crude to be gathered and controlled downstream by the same old hands, British Petroleum, Chevron and other IOC’s (international oil companies) that first drew that nation’s borders, politely fulfilling Iraq’s quota assigned by the Saudis, no more, maybe less,” Palast writes. In addition to clapping a lid on Iraqi production, Palast charges the U.S. “promoted sabotage of oil piping, loading and refining systems in Venezuela” to limit that country’s production. Palast reminds that Venezuela, once the top exporter to the U.S., broke the back of the 1973 Arab oil embargo by replacing the oil withdrawn by Saudi Arabia. “(Hugo) Chavez, despised by Bush, was not likely to save Bush’s bacon by busting another embargo. Therefore, Chavez had to go immediately,” Palast writes. Palast says that OPEC is a front for the IOC’s. “If oil companies had created this cartel to fix prices, that would have made it a criminal conspiracy—cartels are illegal. But when governments conspire for the same purpose, the illegal conspiracy turns into a legitimate ‘alliance’ of sovereign states. OPEC’s government cover makes the price fixing perfectly legal, and Big Oil reaps the rewards.” What’s more, Saudi Arabia and other OPEC nations take Americans’ money at the pump, and in their heating and electric bills, and use it to buy up U.S. government notes. In 2005, Palast said, $243 billion in petro-dollars was collected from Americans by OPEC. Foreigners then bought up $311 billion in U.S. government debts. “All the goodies, from nuclear subs to tax cuts to war in Mesopotamia appear to be ‘free’ to the taxpayer,” Palast writes. “It’s all just put on the tab, the national debt, including the interest on it. The actual cash needed to pay for these budget busters is first collected from U.S. consumers via the hidden oil tax for which Mr. Bush takes no blame.” Sherwood Ross is an American reporter who covers political and military subjects.

Source: Kuwait Times, June 03, 2007

TAXILA: Hundreds of supporters turned out to hail Pakistan’s suspended chief justice as he travelled to a northwestern town yesterday to muster support for his legal battle against President Pervez Musharraf’s attempt to sack him. Chants of “Go Musharraf Go”, that have become a signature of the three-month-old judicial crisis, were raised as Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry passed through towns and villages on his way to Abbottabad, to address lawyers in the garrison town some 60 km (38 miles) north east of Islamabad.

“The constitution gives the people of Pakistan the right to rule the country. We will no longer allow any army general to rule the country,” Ali Ahmed Kurd, a lawyer on Chaudhry’s legal team, told opposition party workers in Taxila, a town on the way.

Lawyers and the opposition see the March 9 suspension of Chaudhry as an attack on the independence of judiciary and their protest has turned into a broad campaign for the restoration of full democracy in the country. Chaudhry has denied levelled charges of misconduct levelled by General Musharraf, who came to power in a bloodless coup almost eight years ago.

Analysts suspect Musharraf’s motive for seeking to oust the judge stems from fears of an adverse ruling should the opposition raise constitutional challenges against the president’s plans to seek a second five-year term. There were no live broadcasts of Chaudhry’s journey to Abbottabad, as the authorities have clamped down, partly out nervousness that people were becoming bolder in voicing criticism of the powerful military.

“We cannot do it after authorities conveyed to us that we need a prior permission for any live coverage of an event,” said Syed Talat Hussain, a news director at the private Aaj television. Earlier, television channels had followed Chaudhry on his travels to address the legal community in various cities, and broadcast live pictures of rousing receptions given to the judge.

There is a standing regulation banning the gathering of more than five people, without prior permission in Islamabad, though it has yet to be enforced by the city authorities. Officials said there have been no cases registered against people who have organised rallies in the capital in support of the chief justice. Musharraf has accused lawyers and opposition parties of politicising a judicial matter.

The controversy has already led to the most serious political violence in Pakistan for decades. About 40 people were killed in Karachi when supporters from a party in the ruling coalition clashed with opposition activists during a visit by Chaudhry on May 12. An inquiry into the misconduct allegations against Chaudhry has been halted, pending a decision by the Supreme Court over which legal body should have jurisdiction over the case. – Reuters

 

Nasir Khan In the following article Charley Reese shows that the deaths of American soldiers in Iraq is for nothing. However, the number of such dead soldiers is under four thousand. I should remind our readers that the number of Iraqis killed by Bush’s army is not five thousand, ten thousand or even fifty thousand. It is much more than that. Even before the Iraqis started their resistance against the American occupation, the Americans had killed more than 100,000 Iraqis. And now the Iraqi deaths as a result of Mr Bush’s policies in Iraq is more than 650,000 people. ———————————————— Source: Antiwar.com Dying for Nothing

by Charley Reese

I didn’t watch any of the Memorial Day events on television. Memorial Day, it seems to me, should be only for the families of the dead. It’s really impossible to remember someone we never knew. Of course, these days Memorial Day gets larded with politics and pseudo-patriotism. It’s nauseating to watch a bunch of actors, entertainers and politicians who never heard a gun fired in anger put on a maudlin performance as if they really gave a rat’s toenail for the dead. The fact is, war is started by old men who never go near the war, and wars are always fought by the young. The king of Belgium once noted that it takes 20 years of peace to produce a man and 20 seconds of war to destroy him. Think about that. All that a young human being is – intelligence, health, youth, education, knowledge, potential accomplishments – reduced to a bloody pile of broken bones and guts in an instant. They are strangers killing and being killed by strangers. War is mass murder, and no doubt part of the degradation of the human species is the fact that starting with the War Between the States, the human toll of war has increased exponentially. It’s ironic that wars take the healthiest and bravest, while the unhealthy and the cowardly manage to evade them. Look at all the draft dodgers of the Vietnam Era who suddenly became war hawks as soon as they were too old to go. I’ve said it before: If I had children of war age, I would do everything in my power to dissuade them from joining the military. The present war is a bad war. It is not being fought to protect freedom, let alone the American people. Poor Cindy Sheehan, who bravely protested the war, finally gave up. She felt betrayed by the Democrats, by the antiwar movement, but the saddest thing of all, she said, was that she finally faced the fact her son died for nothing. And sad as it is to say, it’s true. The politicians and some of the media chicken hawks like to fork the fertilizer talking about sacrifices for freedom (sacrifices most of them studiously avoid ever making), but it’s just fertilizer. Why did we go to war in Iraq? Because the president hated Saddam Hussein; because the Israeli lobby wanted us to; because the crazy neoconservatives had the insane idea that the Middle East could be democratized at the point of a gun; because oil companies and other corporations lusted for profit. Missing is any threat to the safety and freedom of the United States, a threat no Iraqi ever made or ever had the capability of carrying out. So, if you don’t want to say the kids are dying for nothing, you can say they are dying for Halliburton, for ExxonMobil, for the president’s ego, for a cockamamie theory of a bunch of academics, for Israel, for money or for oil. What you cannot truthfully say is that they are dying for freedom. The “global war on terror” is just a bad metaphor that doesn’t have any connection to reality. How long are the American people going to allow liars to lull them into sacrificing the most precious treasure the country has – its youth – in a futile, lie-ridden, corruption-pocked war? In my dreams, I see the American people rising like a roaring lion and ripping the guilty politicians out of their offices, but that is only a dream. The kind of people with the courage to do that lie moldering in millions of graves around the world.

Source: WSWS

The US media “discovers” Pakistan’s Musharraf is a dictator—why now?

By Keith Jones
2 June 2007

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The New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angles Times have all published editorials in recent days taking the Bush administration to task for its unabashed and unequivocal support for Pakistan’s military dictator, General Pervez Musharraf.

In an editorial titled “Musharraf’s follies: When will the US hold the Pakistani president accountable for his abuse of power?” the Los Angeles Times compared the Bush administration’s support for Musharraf to the “terrible mistake” the US made in propping up three Cold War dictators who were ultimately swept from power by popular upheavals—the Shah of Iran, Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza, and the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos.

“Replace,” said the LA Times, “the words ‘reliably anti-communist’ with ‘reliable US ally in the war on terror,’ and despair at the Bush administration’s willingness to excuse heinous repression from Egypt to Saudi Arabia to Azerbaijan. Worst of all is its policy toward Pakistan, where the administration refuses to distance the US from the increasingly errant autocrat Pervez Musharraf.”

Bill Clinton’s Democratic administration made no fuss in the fall of 1999 when Musharraf, then as now the chief of Pakistan’s armed services, seized power. After all, the Pentagon has enjoyed an intimate partnership with Pakistan’s military since the early 1950s and Washington’s political establishment, for almost as long, has held the military to be the chief bulwark of a “stable Pakistan.”

But the Bush administration has not just acquiesced to military rule in Pakistan. It has lavished praise and gobs of money on the Musharraf regime, declared Pakistan a “major non-NATO ally” of the US, repeatedly hailed the general as a pivotal leader in the war on terror, and proclaimed the various maneuvers he has taken to perpetuate military rule and run roughshod over the country’s constitution as steps on the road to “full democracy.”

Till now the US media has essentially peddled the administration’s line. Certainly there has been no chorus of media voices pointing out the incongruity and downright absurdity of the Bush administration’s claims to have restored democracy in Afghanistan by entrenching military rule in Pakistan.

The New York Times inadvertently admitted its only complicity when in its May 23 editorial, “Propping up the General,” it counseled the Bush administration to “use the leverage it gets from [providing Islamabad] roughly $2 billion a year in aid to encourage an early return to democratic rule.” An early return—after seven years and seven months of military dictatorship!

If sections of the press have now “discovered” that Musharraf is a despot, it is because they fear that the general is losing his grip and are anxious about the consequences for US interests and influence in Pakistan, as well as for the US’s larger strategic ambitions in South Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East.

Since March, Pakistan has been convulsed by a mounting political crisis—a crisis that has precipitated the largest anti-government protests since Musharraf seized power and that has split the legal establishment.

The trigger for this crisis was Musharraf’s sacking of the chief justice of the Supreme Court, whom the general feared could not be relied upon to rubber stamp his phony “re-election” as president. But the opposition to the trumped-up corruption case against the chief justice is fueled by the absence of democracy, neo-liberal economic policies that have resulted in deepening social inequality and economic insecurity, and Musharraf’s support for US imperialism in its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq .

Desperate to stamp out the mounting challenge to his authority, Musharraf unleashed murderous violence on the streets of Karachi, Pakistan’s principal city, on May 12-13. More than 40 people were killed in two days of violence orchestrated by the thugs of the pro-Musharraf MQM in connivance with the authorities of Karachi and Sind province.

This bloodbath has only served to underscore the popular feeling that the Musharraf regime has become intolerable. As for Musharraf’s political cronies, they are publicly fighting amongst themselves as they seek to escape public opprobrium.

The Bush administration, meanwhile, has remained steadfast in its support for the general-president, issuing not a word of criticism of the Pakistani government in the wake of the violence in Karachi. (See “Following bloodbath in Karachi: US reaffirms support for Musharraf”)

The editors of the New York Times, LA Times and Post are alarmed by what they perceive to be the Bush administration’s myopic policy of tying the fortunes of US imperialism to the hated and increasingly isolated Musharraf. Yet none of the three editorials calls for the US to repudiate Musharraf, let alone cut off relations with his government. They merely counsel Washington to broker a deal between the military and the principal bourgeois opposition parties, warning that otherwise a regime hostile to the US may ultimately come to power in Pakistan.

In fact, the Bush administration has signaled that it would like Musharraf to reach a deal with Benazir Bhutto and her Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). But such a deal has floundered over the division of the prerogatives and spoils of office, and the Bush administration fears that without the iron fist of military rule Pakistan could become embroiled in class and ethnic conflicts menacing to US interests.

There is also, undoubtedly, concern in the Bush administration that a change of regime in Islamabad could endanger various sordid, secret operations that US military and security forces are currently carrying out in Pakistan, including the warehousing and torture of alleged terrorists and training exercises for an attack on Iran.

Whilst fear that Musharraf is stoking a popular rebellion that could threaten US interests is the principal reason sections of the press are now calling for the Bush administration to distance itself from the general and begin planning for a “post-Musharraf Pakistan,” it is not the only reason.

Put bluntly, many sections of the US establishment don’t think they are getting their money’s worth from Musharraf. That is to say, they do not think he has been sufficiently pliant in acting on US demands that his government root out Taliban operatives who have found refuge in Pakistan’s border areas with Afghanistan and violently suppress a growing indigenous tribal/Taliban insurgency in north and western Pakistan.

All three editorials combine complaints about Musharraf’s authoritarian rule with sniping that the general has proven a poor bargain for US imperialism. “Congress,” declared the New York Times, “must insist that future payments [to Pakistan] be linked to actual counterterrorist activity and results, as some American military officials now recommend.”

The Pakistani people have suffered horrendously under the yoke of a string of US armed and sponsored military regimes. The regime of General Ayub Khan (1958-69) ruthlessly suppressed the working class and toilers, while pursuing an industrialization policy that enriched a tiny elite, the so-called 20 families. US President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger encouraged his successor, Yaya Khan, in mounting a campaign of bloody repression against the Bangla-speaking people of East Pakistan (Bangladesh), who had been denied their basis rights within the Pakistan federation. This campaign resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands and caused millions more to seek refuge in India.

But in many ways it was the dictatorship of General Zia-ul Haq (1977-88) that has proven the most destructive to the social fabric of Pakistan. The US made Zia’s regime the pivot of its strategy of fanning, in alliance with the Saudi regime, an Islamic fundamentalist rebellion against Afghanistan’s pro-Soviet government and ensnaring the Soviet Red Army in a counterinsurgency war. Pakistan’s role in arming and organizing the Islamicist insurgency in Afghanistan dove-tailed with Zia’s own efforts to use Islam to legitimize his regime and to promote the religious right as a bulwark against the working class and all progressive thought.

Two decades on, Pakistan continues to lives with the consequences of the US-backed dictator Zia’s Afghan adventure and promotion of Islamicist politics—everything from deep and oftentimes violent cleavages between different Muslim sects and a widespread drug and Kalashnikov culture, to the existence of a well-organized and financed network of Islamicist institutions, political parties and militias.

“One reason” General Musharraf “is unpopular, conceded the Washington Post, “is his alliance with the United States.”

Yet the PPP, Nawaz Sharif’s PML (N) and the rest of the bourgeois opposition clutch to the coattails of the US, hoping—seven-and-a-half-years of rebuffs notwithstanding—that they can convince the Bush administration they can better serve the US’s predatory interests than Musharraf.

The venal Pakistani bourgeoisie has always sought to gain money and geopolitical influence by serving imperialist interests. Before Washington, it looked to London.

But the opposition’s appeals to Washington are above all grounded in its fears that any popular mobilization against the Musharraf regime could escape its control, undermine the military, and become a threat to the bourgeois order. Second only to the Pakistani military itself do the Benzair Bhuttos and Nawaz Sharifs look to the imperialist powers, and above all the US, as the bulwark of their own privileges, of a socioeconomic order that condemns the vast majority of Pakistanis to a life of poverty, ignorance and squalor.

 

 

Ideas cannot be killed – Castro
By: UK Indymedia on: 29.05.2007

Fidel Castro Ruz Background: More than 600,000 people have lost their lives in Iraq and more than 2 million have been forced to emigrate since the American invasion began…

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A few days ago, while analyzing the expenses involved in the construction of three submarines of the Astute series, I said that with this money:

“75,000 doctors could be trained to look after 150 million people, assuming that the cost of training a doctor would be one-third of what it costs in the United States.”

Now, along the lines of the same calculations, I wonder: how many doctors could be graduated with the one hundred billion dollars that Bush gets his hands on in just one year to keep on sowing grief in Iraqi and American homes. Answer: 999,990 doctors who could look after 2 billion people that today do not receive any medical care.

More than 600,000 people have lost their lives in Iraq and more than 2 million have been forced to emigrate since the American invasion began.

In the United States, around 50 million people do not have medical insurance. The blind market laws govern how this vital service is provided, and prices make it inaccessible for many, even in the developed countries. Medical services feed into the Gross Domestic Product of the United States, but they do not generate conscience for those providing them nor peace of mind for those who receive it.

The countries with less development and more diseases have the least number of medical doctors: one for every 5,000, 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 or more people. When new sexually transmitted diseases appear such as AIDS, which in merely 20 years has killed millions of persons, — while tens of millions are afflicted, among them many mothers and children, although palliative measures now exist — the price of medications per patient could add up to 5,000, 10,000 or up to 15,000 dollars each year. These are fantasy figures for the great majority of Third World countries where the few public hospitals are overflowing with the ill who die piled up like animals under the scourge of a sudden epidemic.

To reflect on these realities could help us to better understand the tragedy. It is not a matter of commercial advertising that costs so much money and technology. Add up the starvation afflicting hundreds of millions of human beings; add to that the idea of transforming food into fuels; look for a symbol and the answer will be George W. Bush.

When he was recently asked by an important personality about his Cuba policy, his answer was this:

“I am a hard-line President and I am just waiting for Castro’s demise.”

The wishes of such a powerful gentleman are no privilege. I am not the first nor will I be the last that Bush has ordered to be killed; nor one of those people who he intends to go on killing individually or en masse.

“Ideas cannot be killed”, Sarría emphatically said.

Sarría was the black lieutenant, a patrol leader in Batista’s army who arrested us, after the attempt to seize the Moncada Garrison, while three of us slept in a small mountain hut, exhausted by the effort of breaking through the siege. The soldiers, fuelled by hatred and adrenalin, were aiming their weapons at me even before they had identified who I was. “Ideas cannot be killed”, the black lieutenant kept on repeating, practically automatically and in a hushed voice.

I dedicate those excellent words to you, Mr. W. Bush.

Fidel Castro Ruz

May 28, 2007