Peace and Justice Post

Spiegel online International, September 10, 2007

In an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, American military historian Gabriel Kolko argues that the situation in Iraq is worse than ever and that the artificial nation, created after World War I, is breaking up. The “surge,” he says, is also failing.

REUTERS

US soldiers in Iraq: “Some of the most acute criticisms made of the gross simplisms which have guided interventionist policies were produced within the American military.”

SPIEGEL: The long awaited results of the “surge” are now in. Has the surge succeeded? Is there reason for optimism in Iraq? KOLKO: Both United States General David H. Petraeus and US Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker will deliver “progress” reports to Congress on Monday, but the skeptics far outnumber those who believe Bush’s strategy in Iraq is succeeding. They will say that Shiite attacks on Sunnis in Baghdad have fallen but they will not add that Baghdad has been largely purged in many areas of Sunni inhabitants and their flight much earlier — and not the increase in Americans — is the reason “success” can be reported to Congress. Indeed, most of the administration’s statistics have been met with a wave a skepticism.

Continued …

by Dave Lindorff | Sep 10 2007
Nobody should fall for a story that those six (yeah, it was first reported as five, but now the original military whistleblowers have told Army Times it was six) nuclear-tipped cruise missiles that were flown in launch position on a B-52 from Minot, ND to Barksdale, LA, were put on there inadvertently.

I had some experience with the way nuclear weapons get handled, as compared to conventional weapons, and I can assure you that there is no way anyone would just “accidentally” pick up the wrong weapons.

article continues…

Information Clearing House

By Jim Kirwan

09/08/07 “ICH ” — – The United States has had a standing presence in the skies around the world since the Cold War began. The division of the Air Force that has that responsibility was Strategic Air Command – that was the case until the Berlin Wall went down. Since that time it is unclear who is in charge of this vast nuclear fleet of global bombers that always kept a full third of their forces in the air, around the world, at all times prior to the end of the Cold War. (1)

Those B-52’s were armed with nuclear weapons, because they were part of our forward defense shield to deter the communist regime of the USSR from a pre-emptive attack upon the USA or on any of our military bases scattered all over the planet. We also had Trident submarines that also encircled the seas – and they too carried nuclear weapons, theirs were in the form of ICBM’s. What remains unclear today is who now controls our nuclear bomber fleet – and what will happen to them on September 14, when the US Air Force grounds all its planes because of this “incident.’ (2)

Today there are 190 nations in the world and we have 130 military bases on this planet in other nations: If we do not have a WAR department, why do we need so many bases? We call the military—the Department of Defense—yet how can this be considered a Defensive department – when so many of our bases are still located in 130 other countries?

Continued . . .

War In Iraq

By: AKI on: 11.09.2007

Turkish author Orhan Pamuk says prestige of Western civilisation ruined by ‘horrors and injustice’ of war.

TURIN, Italy – The Iraqi war was a disaster for the US and its allies and had undermined support for democracy and secularism in the Islamic world, Nobel Prize-winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk told Adnkronos International (AKI).

On a visit to Italy, Pamuk said the prestige of Western civilisation had been ruined by the ‘horrors and injustice’ of the war and it had poisoned relations between the Arab world and the US and its European allies.

“I think it is one of the major disasters in the last three or four decades, this war in Iraq. It’s destroyed a peaceful approach in the Middle East towards democracy, towards human rights, western values and women’s liberation,” Pamuk told AKI.

He was visiting the northern city of Turin for a lecture organised by the Premio Grinzane Cavour, a prestigious Italian literary prize that he won in 2002.

Pamuk said Muslim countries were also suffering from simplistic perceptions in the West that associated Islam with terrorism, suicide killings and bombings.

Continued . . .

Published on Monday, September 10, 2007 by CommonDreams.org

By Norman Solomon

It evokes a tragedy that marks an epoch. From the outset, the warfare state has exploited “9/11,” a label at once too facile and too laden with historic weight — giving further power to the tacit political axiom that perception is reality.

Often it seems that media coverage is all about perception, especially when the underlying agendas are wired into huge profits and geopolitical leverage. If you associate a Big Mac or a Whopper with a happy meal or some other kind of great time, you’re more likely to buy it. If you connect 9/11 with a need for taking military action and curtailing civil liberties, you’re more likely to buy what the purveyors of war and authoritarian government have been selling for the past half-dozen years.

“Sept. 11 changed everything” became a sudden cliche in news media. Words are supposed to mean something, and those words were — and are — preposterous. They speak of a USA enthralled with itself while reducing the rest of the world (its oceans and valleys and mountains and peoples) to little more than an extensive mirror to help us reflect on our centrality to the world. In an individual, we call that narcissism. In the nexus of media and politics, all too often, it’s called “patriotism.”

Continued . . .

Prisonplanet.com

Sunday September 9, 2007

Adam Pearlman, the Jewish Mossad agent who once wrote stinging essays condemning Muslims as “bloodthirsty terrorists”, has been singled out as the creator of the suspicious “new” Osama Bin Laden video.

From the London Telegraph:

A Californian heavy metal fan, who converted to Islam and became the first American to be charged with treason in half a century, has been fingered as the author of Osama bin Laden’s latest video lecture – which left the terror chief sounding like an anti-globalisation protester.

The al-Qaeda leader’s first video message for three years featured a bizarre rant against America, with references to global warming, “insane taxes”, the US mortgage market meltdown and rising interest rates.

American spy chiefs were quick to name Adam Gadahn, the head of al-Qaeda’s English language media operations, as the author of large sections of bin Laden’s broadcast.

Continued . . .

By Bill Van Auken

Global Research, September 9, 2007

wsws.org – 2007-09-07

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Wednesday’s revelation that a US Air Force B-52 bomber flew over the length of the United States armed with six cruise missiles carrying nuclear warheads has attracted amazingly little media attention.

The story, first broken by the Military Times web site based on tips from military officers, was relegated to the bottom of page 16 in Thursday’s New York Times and to page 10 of the Washington Post.

Featured prominently in both newspapers and generally in media coverage were reassurances from a spokesman for the Air Force that it represented “an isolated mistake” and that “at no time was there a threat to public safety.”

This incident, however, has immense and ominous significance. Describing it as an “isolated mistake” begs the obvious questions of how a nuclear-armed B-52 was allowed to become airborne—ostensibly without the approval of senior officials—and who ordered this extraordinary flight, and why.

The B-52 took off from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota and flew to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana on August 30 after six nuclear-tipped Advanced Cruise Missiles were mounted on the pylons under its wings. Each of the warheads carried a yield of up to 150 kilotons, more than ten times as powerful as the US bomb that leveled Hiroshima at the close of the Second World War.

Continued . . .

Green Left, September 8, 2007

Pip Hinman

The following speech was delivered by Pip Hinman, a member of Sydney’s Stop the War Coalition and the Socialist Alliance, to the September 8 “Stop Bush” protest in Sydney.

The other night on Lateline on the ABC, US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice was trying to justify her government’s war of occupation in Iraq.

The people in Iraq, she said, just want they same things that we want. They want peace, security and freedom. Just like we do.

That was her argument for the US occupation of Iraq.

But it has been the US government and the governments of other rich robber nations that have been denying the people of Iraq, and others in the Middle East, peace, security and freedom for more than a century.

Continued . . .

Haaretz.com, September 6. 2006
By The Associated Press

Norway’s embassy in Tel Aviv has urged the government to criticize Israel for the alleged use of torture in prisons, the state radio network NRK reported Thursday.

The network said it had obtained a secret diplomatic document from the embassy urging action by expressing our concern that torture is still practiced in Israel.

According to Norway’s NRK, the concern stemmed from a report by the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, an Israeli human rights group, claiming that prisoners were sometimes beaten during interrogation, held in painfully tight handcuffs and suffered isolation, threats, humiliation and sleep deprivation.

Norway’s Deputy Foreign Minister Raymond Johansen said he was aware of the document, but had not decided whether to act upon the recommendation.

“We have a number of difficult cases to raise with the Israeli authorities, not in the least in relation to the Israel-Palestinian conflict,” Johansen said on NRK. “Every government must exercise good judgment in which matters to raise at any given time.”
He said Norway does consider torture and abuse to be serious issues, but you always have to make a choice.

The Israeli Embassy in Oslo said it could not immediately comment on the report because the ambassador was in a meeting.

Norway has sought to be a peacemaker in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, having secretly brokered the now-tattered 1993 Oslo Agreement Peace accords between the sides.

According to NRK, the secret diplomatic document says the interrogation methods are seen as legal by Israeli authorities.

NRK said the human rights group report was based on interviews with 82 former prisoners.

Source: Information Clearing House

By Dr. Crockett Grabbe and Lenny Charles

09/08/07 “ICH” — — The majority of us accept as fact that the current administration manipulates science for political ends. Few were surprised to hear experts from industry challenge overwhelming evidence of man-made climate change. Frustration within the scientific community had grown so much that by Dec. 2006 more than 10,000 scientists, including 52 Nobel laureates and 63 recipients of the National Medal of Science, had signed a statement accusing the Bush administration of “distortion of scientific knowledge for partisan political ends”.

Scientific integrity within the administration has often not been rewarded. Recently fired US surgeon general Richard Carmona said after leaving, “In public health, as in a democracy, there is nothing worse than ignoring science, or marginalizing the voice of science for reasons driven by changing political winds.”

Truth, even when grounded in strong scientific evidence, is the first casualty of war, and the US is at war.

The pattern is clear, and it affects us all.

Continued . . .