Peace and Justice Post

The Nation, August 6, 2007

By John Nichols

Things got a little testy at the Camp David Summit between Afghan President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and American President George Bush.

Karzai, who when he is in the U.S. is expected to act as a puppet of the Bush administration, made the mistake of actually speaking his mind. In a CNN interview broadcast Sunday, the Afghan president said terrorism in Afghanistan is getting worse, that the hunt for al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is at a standstill and, then, he described Iran as a positive player — “a helper and a solution” — in the region.

All of these statements are objectively true.

But George Bush does not deal in the realm of truth. And he certainly does not like his puppet presidents getting off their strings.

On the eve of the summit, Karzai told CNN that:

1. “The security situation in Afghanistan over the past two years has definitely deteriorated. The Afghan people have suffered. Terrorists have killed our schoolchildren. They have burned our schools. They have killed international helpers.”

2. “We are not closer (to catching bin Laden), we are not further away from it. We are where we were a few years ago.”

3. “So far, Iran has been a helper (in the fight against terrorism).”

All of those statements, made by Karzai in an interview with Wolf Blitzer on the eve of his trip to Camp David, were corrected by Bush upon the Afghan president’s arrival.

On the security situation, Bush told Karzai not to believe what he was seeing on the ground in Afghanistan. “There is still work to be done, don’t get me wrong,” Bush said. “But progress is being made.”

On the bin Laden search, Bush spoke of how the hunt is progressing and declared that, “With real actionable intelligence, we will get the job done.”

On Iran’s positive role in the region, Bush again told Karzai not to believe his own experience but instead to accept the neoconservative version of events. “I would be very cautious about whether or not the Iranian influence there in Afghanistan is a positive force,” the American president pointedly told the Afghan president.

So there you have it, a meeting of the minds Bush-style.

A foreign leader from a region of supreme interest to the United States comes to Camp David to brief the American president on what is going on. The foreign leader speaks his mind, offering his best assessment of the experience he is living. Then the president tells the visitor from abroad that he is wrong.

As Bush famously declared at a policy session in 2005, “See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.”

And it is just so damned inconvenient when a puppet who is supposed to help spread the propaganda instead messes everything up by talking about what is really happening.

John Nichols’ new book is The Genius of Impeachment: The Founders’ Cure for Royalism. Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson hails it as a “nervy, acerbic, passionately argued history-cum-polemic [that] combines a rich examination of the parliamentary roots and past use of the ‘heroic medicine’ that is impeachment with a call for Democratic leaders to ‘reclaim and reuse the most vital tool handed to us by the founders for the defense of our most basic liberties.’”

Granma Internacional, August 2, 2007

WASHINGTON, Aug. 3. — Interrogation techniques used by the CIA on alleged terrorists can cause serious mental damage and are illegal in the United States, according to a report released Thursday by two non-governmental organizations, Physicians for Human Rights and Human Rights First.

The report, titled “Leave No Marks, ‘Enhanced’ Interrogation Techniques and the Risk of Criminality,” was drafted by medical and legal investigators from both groups and based its conclusions on extensive medical documentation and various cases of torture survivors.

Researchers analyzed CIA techniques, which include sensory and sleep deprivation, exposing prisoners to excessive heat and/or cold for long periods, placing prisoners in “stress” (extremely uncomfortable) positions, sexual humiliation and simulated drowning of prisoners via a technique known as “water-boarding.”

The report found that these practices can cause long-term consequences such as post-traumatic stress disorder, psychosis, substance abuse, and suicide, and for that reason are illegal, the AP reported.

SFGate: World News, August 7, 2007

George W. Bush, Jr. and his sidekick, Afghan President Hamid Karzai, Team Bush’s hand-picked head of its puppet government in Kabul, got together at Camp David earlier this week to catch up, ride a golf cart and offer some contradictory policy pronouncements to reporters.

Larry Downing/Reuters

Golf-cart diplomacy: Bush and Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, at Camp David earlier in the week

Afghanistan was, of course, the real breeding ground of the kind of international terrorism Bush had vowed to eradicate when he launched his ill-fated Iraq boondoggle back in early 2003. For Team Bush, though, Afghanistan has always been an after-thought.

Nevertheless, as Bush told reporters at a press conference with Karzai, who sometimes appeared alongside his host during his visit wrapped in an swath of green cloth, like an Afghan taco: “Our enemy is still there, defeated but still hiding in the mountains. And our duty is to complete the job, to get them out of their hide-outs in the mountains….” Bush was referring to Afghanistan-based terrorists like those who have been associated with Osama bin Laden‘s al-Qaeda organization. Reuters notes: “Bush, who has been on the defensive about the failure to find…bin Laden, said he was confident [that] U.S. and Pakistani forces would track down the militant group’s leaders. But he stopped short of saying whether the United States would seek Pakistan‘s permission before going after those militants. The subject is a sensitive issue in Islamabad.”

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Global Research, August 3, 2007

By Felicity Arbuthnot

Britain’s new Prime Minister, Gordon Brown announced a ‘war on poverty’ at the United Nations on 31st July, aiming to: ‘..eradicate the great evils of our time – illiteracy, disease, poverty, environmental degradation and underdevelopment’. This from the man who failed to mention exactly that, which he had been responsible for, in Iraq and Afghanistan’s invasions – for which, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he had written the cheques for the UK’s involvement, in the total decimation of all which can be called normality. Those elephants in the Bush-Brown meeting at Camp David and at Brown’s UN., foray, were seemingly un-noticed; the horrors air-brushed out.

Brown of course stayed silent, both in opposition and since becoming Chancellor in 1997, at one of ‘the great evils of our time’, the silent holocaust which was the thirteen year embargo on Iraq – and there has not been a squeak from him over what one could be forgiven for thinking has become a genocide since the 2003 illegal invasion. What else can describe a possible million dead and four million displaced and one third of the country in absolute poverty? There has not been a glimmer of compassion from a man who suffered the agony of watching a baby of his own lose her fight for life, not a spark of empathy of the searing grief of others, from a man whose small son suffers a serious health condition – for whom he can demand the best treatment, whilst in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine, parents watch in helpless heartbreak and trauma, because little or none is available.

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Global Research, July 30, 2007

By Jerry White

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Over the last two weeks the Bush administration has orchestrated yet another campaign to sow fear and anxiety among the American people with unsubstantiated claims that signs are mounting of a looming Al Qaeda terrorist attack.

Not a day goes by without suggestions by Bush or top Homeland Security officials that an attack perhaps on the scale of 9/11, or worse, is being prepared. As always, the mass media dutifully report such claims as authoritative, without questioning the lack of evidence beyond the bald assertions of intelligence and other government officials.

The deliberate cultivation of a climate of fear is a basic modus operandi of the Bush White House. Can it be an accident that Bush is once again resorting to scare tactics at a time when his poll numbers are dropping to record lows, popular opposition to the war in Iraq is rising, and the administration is openly declaring that its war policy will not be bound by elections or debates in Congress? The sudden reemergence of Al Qaeda as a supposed threat to the safety and security of every American coincides with a political counteroffensive in which critics of Bush’s military escalation are branded as either dupes or aiders and abettors of the terrorists.

The terror scare serves three basic political functions: to divert public attention from the disaster in Iraq and the social crisis within the US, to justify a foreign policy based on militarism and war, and to provide a pretext for police state measures at home.

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Source: War In Iraq

John Diaz
Sunday, August 5, 2007

THE FIFTH AMENDMENT WAS WRITTEN FOR GOOD REASON: It’s dangerous to give the government unchecked authority to seize private property without judicial review.
The founding fathers knew that people in power were not always going to be reasonable or ethical – or competent.

It doesn’t require a subpoena of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales or a brave whistle-blower to find President Bush’s latest affront to the U.S. Constitution. It’s in plain view on the White House Web site: “Executive Order: Blocking Property of Certain Persons Who Threaten Stabilization Efforts in Iraq.”

This far-reaching order of July 17 may be Bush’s most brazen defiance of the Constitution, which is no small feat for an administration that thinks it can set its own rules on electronic surveillance, torture, kidnapping, rendition, and the designation of “enemy combatants” who can be arrested on U.S. soil and held indefinitely without judicial review.

This one is a frontal assault on the Fifth Amendment, which decrees that the government cannot seize an individual’s property without due process.

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Alternet
Posted on August 5, 2007

President Bush signed into law on Sunday legislation that broadly expanded the government’s authority to eavesdrop on the international telephone calls and e-mail messages of American citizens without warrants.

Congressional aides and others familiar with the details of the law said that its impact went far beyond the small fixes that administration officials had said were needed to gather information about foreign terrorists. They said seemingly subtle changes in legislative language would sharply alter the legal limits on the government’s ability to monitor millions of phone calls and e-mail messages going in and out of the United States.

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Amnesty International announced today that it has written to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, urging him to ensure that independent observers are permitted access to the trial of 40 members of the Muslim Brotherhood, scheduled to resume before the Supreme Military Court in Cairo on Sunday.

The organization made this call following two earlier trial hearings when legal observers sent by Amnesty International and other human rights organizations were barred from entering the court.

“We look to President Mubarak, as Egypt’s highest authority, to open the doors to this important trial,” said Amnesty International’s Secretary General Irene Khan. “He should clear the way for it to receive the scrutiny it deserves.”

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Z Net

Teach Them Not to Think

Teach Them to Buy and be Sold

By Badri Raina, August 1, 2007

Counterpunch

Weekend Edition, August 4 / 5, 2007

How the U.S. is Reshaping the Middle East

Bribe, Divide and Conquer

By RANNIE AMIRI

Sometimes a foreign policy gambit is anticipated to be so successful there is no need to keep it secret. In fact, it can be made public. Such was the case when the United States announced multi-billion dollar military assistance packages to Saudi Arabia, Israel and Egypt this week. Lest anyone think the United States plan for the greater Middle East has failed, this arms deal makes it clear just how much of the region is firmly under their control. And thanks to venal Arab regimes, it has been a task made easy.

The proposal would provide Saudi Arabia and the five other nations comprising the Gulf Cooperation Council (Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman and United Arab Emirates) with $20 billion worth of arms over the next ten years while upgrading their existing military equipment. Not to be outdone (and to make sure it gets through Congress), Israel will be guaranteed $30 billion over the next decade, a full 25% increase in the amount they normally receive. Egypt will also garner $13 billion. According to Secretaries Rice and Gates, one reason for the aid packages will be to bolster Sunni Arab governments to counter Iran’s perceived expanding influence. Before embarking on a tour to the area, they claimed mobilizing support for the current Iraqi leadership among these countries will be an additional priority.

Except these two objectives are in complete contradiction to one another.

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