Peace and Justice Post

Source: The Australian

 

 

Mark Dodd | September 05, 2007

 

GEORGE W. Bush should be tried as a war criminal for his role in launching the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the Howard Government is culpable for supporting him, a US anti-war activist claims.

The US President and John Howard were committed to a failing war that was being waged for oil and economic motives, former US marine and two-time combat tour veteran Matt Howard said in Sydney yesterday.

The anti-war movement was growing in the US, and veterans had a responsibility to tell the truth about what was happening in Iraq, Mr Howard, 26, told a news conference at the Alternative APEC Centre in Sydney’s Trades Hall.

The Prime Minister’s support for the war provided “political cover” to Mr Bush’s “dangerous political agenda”, said Matt Howard.

His message on behalf of the Iraq Veterans Against the War was timed to coincide with the arrival in Sydney of Mr Bush for the APEC summit.

Tactically, Australia’s 900-strong military contribution in Iraq was so small it made no difference compared with the 160,000 US troops there, but politically it was indispensable for the Bush White House, Matt Howard said.

“We’ve destroyed Iraq and it’s been done in our name, and the Australian Government is involved,” he said.

“In 2003, I illegally invaded Iraq. We left a swath of destruction all the way from Basra to Baghdad.”

Mr Bush should be tried for crimes against humanity over the killing of the tens of thousands of Iraqi men, women and children who were victims of the war, Mr Howard said.

Meanwhile, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said the Government was “entirely comfortable” with Britain’s decision to withdraw its troops from their base in the southern city of Basra and redeploy them in the nearby airport.

Prison Planet,

By: Paul Joseph Watson on: 04.09.2007

Dick Cheney has ordered top Neo-Con media outlets, including Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, to unleash a PR blitz to sell a war with Iran from today, according to Barnett Rubin, the highly respected Afghanistan expert at New York University.

The New Yorker magazine reports that Rubin had a conversation with a member of a top neoconservative institution in Washington, who told him that “instructions” had been passed on from the Office of the Vice-President to roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day.

“It will be coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual suspects, writes Rubin, “It will be heavy sustained assault on the airwaves, designed to knock public sentiment into a position from which a war can be maintained. Evidently they don’t think they’ll ever get majority support for this—they want something like 35-40 percent support, which in their book is “plenty.”

Continued . . .

Sonja Karkar, The Electronic Intifada, Sep 3, 2007

Palestinians harvest olives in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, November 2006. (Hatem Omar/MaanImages)

Universally regarded as the symbol of peace, the olive tree has become the object of violence. For more than forty years, Israel has uprooted over one million olive trees and hundreds of thousands of fruit trees in Palestine with terrible economic and ecological consequences for the Palestinian people. Their willful destruction has so threatened Palestinian culture, heritage and identity that the olive tree has now become the symbol of Palestinian steadfastness because of its own rootedness and ability to survive in a land where water is perennially scarce.

Throughout the centuries, Palestinians farmers have made their living from olive cultivation and olive oil production; 80 percent of cultivated land in the West Bank and Gaza is planted with olive trees. [1] In the West Bank alone, some 100,000 families are dependent on olive sales. [2] Today, the olive harvest provides Palestinian farmers with anywhere between 25 to 50 percent of their annual income, and as the economic crisis deepens, the harvest provides for many their basic means of survival. [3] But despite the hardships, it is the festivities and traditions that accompany the weeks of harvesting that have held Palestinian communities together and are, in fact, a demonstration of their ownership of the land that no occupation can extinguish except by the annihilation of Palestinian society itself.

Continued . . .

Global Research, September 4, 2007

By Prof. Mohssen Massarrat

Email this article to a friend Print this article

The U.S. government is not marking any progress in Iraq, and the number of Americans who reject their president’s Iraq policy is growing day to day. The White House surprises us with the terrible news that it wants to provide Saudi-Arabia, the Gulf states and Egypt – all Sunni Arab countries – with weapons worth $34 billion. It is no arms dealer but the Bush administration that uninhibitedly announces the new armament plan as if it the purchaser were in fact its own federal states. To prevent misgivings from its adversaries’ build-up, Israel shall receive a similar amount of military aid. The political justification for this business is obvious. It’s about Iran; more precisely, it’s about the demonization of the Islamic Republic as the core state of Shi’ite Islam – a view of Iran which the CIA’s PR agencies have built up and pushed in recent years. One thing is becoming increasingly clear: the United States military−industrial complex has a completely consistent long-term plan for the Near and Middle East region: arms race, arms race, and once again arms race. The origins of this plan go back to the first “oil price shock” in 1974 when Henry Kissinger and his aides were looking for ways to recycle the oil states’ skyrocketing petro-dollars into the U.S.-dominated financial system. The solution was quickly found. The monarchical government of Iran – now the United States’ outstanding archenemy – was chosen as the key player for an enormous arms transfer. Shah Reza Pahlavi’s ambition to take the lead in the Middle East as the military hegemonic power came at just the right time for both the State Department and the Pentagon. Iran’s ruler – formerly Israel’s most important regional ally – had all his wishes fulfilled. He received – in a great number – the U.S. Air Force’s newest super weapons, such as the F-16 jet which at that point had not been sent to any other country – not even Israel. This manoeuver was justified with the argument that a counterweight was needed vis-à-vis Soviet allies – Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and Hafez al-Assad’s Syria, which at the time were also the most extreme representatives of Arab nationalism. Saudia-Arabia felt pressured into similarly substantial acquisitions of U.S. weapons, so that she could – according to the Realist school of thought – install a ‘balance of power.’ This was how the first externally coordinated arms race in the history of the Middle East was set up. Continued . . .

by Prof. Marjorie Cohn

Global Research, September 2, 2007

The Sunday Times of London is reporting that the Pentagon has plans for three days of massive air strikes against 1,200 targets in Iran . Last week, Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center , told a meeting of The National Interest, a conservative foreign policy journal, that the military did not intend to carry out “pinprick strikes” against Iranian nuclear facilities. He said, “They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military.” Bush has already set the wheels in motion. With Rovian timing, Alberto Gonzales’ resignation was sandwiched between two Bush screeds – one aimed at ensuring Congress scares up $50 billion more for the occupation of Iraq , the other designed to scare us into supporting war on Iran . As Gonzales rides off into the sunset, the significant questions are who will take his place and how that choice will facilitate Bush’s occupation of Iraq and attack on Iran . One name that’s been floated for Bush’s third attorney general is Joe Lieberman, the “independent” senator from Connecticut . Lieberman, who advocates the use of military force against Iran , was the only person Bush quoted in his August 28 speech to the American Legion. Bush called Iran “the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism” and pledged to “confront Tehran ‘s murderous activities.” Gonzales greased the Bush/Cheney wheels for torturing in violation of the Geneva Conventions, illegally spying on Americans, and purging disloyal Bushies. Similarly, Lieberman would ensure the Justice Department mounts a vigorous defense of a war of aggression against Iran . And Bush would get a two-fer: Connecticut ‘s Republican governor would appoint a Republican to fill Lieberman’s seat, returning control of the Senate to the GOP. A Republican-controlled Senate would direct the agenda, thereby furthering the Bush/Cheney plan. Continued . . .

Inter Press Service, September 1, 2007

By David Cronin

BRUSSELS, Aug 31 (IPS) – Poverty in the Palestinian territories has reached “unprecedented levels” because they have been held under an “economic siege” for almost seven years, a United Nations body has found.

During 2006 the number of Palestinians living in ‘deep poverty’ almost doubled to more than 1 million. Some 46 percent of public sector employees do not have enough food to meet their basic needs, with 53 percent of households in the Gaza reporting that their incomes declined in the last year by more than half.

This data is contained in a report, released Aug. 30, by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

It stated that an ostensible Israeli policy of ‘separating’ the Palestinian authorities from Arab and world markets by restricting the movement of people and goods has “squeezed the economy to a size smaller than a decade ago.”

The Palestinians’ reliance on imports as a proportion of their gross domestic product rose to 86 percent last year — up from 75 percent in 2005, equating to the loss of 500 million dollars to the economy.

Continued . . .

The Sunday Times

September 2, 2007

Pentagon ‘three-day blitz’ plan for Iran

Sarah Baxter, Washington

THE Pentagon has drawn up plans for massive airstrikes against 1,200 targets in Iran, designed to annihilate the Iranians’ military capability in three days, according to a national security expert.

Alexis Debat, director of terrorism and national security at the Nixon Center, said last week that US military planners were not preparing for “pinprick strikes” against Iran’s nuclear facilities. “They’re about taking out the entire Iranian military,” he said.

Debat was speaking at a meeting organised by The National Interest, a conservative foreign policy journal. He told The Sunday Times that the US military had concluded: “Whether you go for pinprick strikes or all-out military action, the reaction from the Iranians will be the same.” It was, he added, a “very legitimate strategic calculus”.

President George Bush intensified the rhetoric against Iran last week, accusing Tehran of putting the Middle East “under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust”. He warned that the US and its allies would confront Iran “before it is too late”.

Continued . . .

Al-Ahram Weekly online, August 30, 2007

Mixing religion and politics was a colonial scheme that is now haunting the West
By Ayman El-Amir

---

Since the attacks of 11 September, terrorism has come to be identified with Islam. Whenever there is a plane crash, a train accident, a gas pipeline explosion or a university campus shooting, investigators first ask if it is an act of terrorism and secondly whether it is the work of Muslim fundamentalists. The definition is all- inclusive and it makes no distinction between attacks on school children in Moscow, hotels in Amman, a suicidal attack on a coalition force patrol in Afghanistan, a roadside bomb blast against US occupation forces in Baghdad, or a shootout with Israeli troops in occupied Palestine. It even goes to the extreme of ostracising a majority government in occupied Palestine that has been elected according to the best tradition of Western liberal democracy. Differences have been completely blurred since the former Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon tutored US President George W Bush that Palestinian resistance against the Israeli occupation was an integral part of the global attack on democracy and deserved to be included in Bush’s global war on terrorism. Islamic extremists were painted as being behind it all. Continued . . .

Source: Rootless Cosmopolitan

Imagine, for a moment, that U.S. troops invading Iraq had, as they neared Baghdad, been fired on by an artillery unit using shells filled VX nerve gas — an attack that would have lasted minutes before a U.S. aircrew had taken out the battery, and may have brought a horrible death to a handful of American soldiers. Imagine, further, that the conquering troops had later discovered two warehouses full of VX and mustard gas shells. And later, that inspectors in a science lab had discovered a refrigerator full of Botulinum toxin or even anthrax.

The Administration and its allies in the punditocracy would have “proved” their case for war, and the media would have hailed President Bush as the kind of Churchillian visionary that he imagines himself to be. And goodness knows what new adventures the Pentagon ideologues would have immediately begun planning.

Continued . . .

AlterNet. Posted by Liliana Segura at 12:15 PM on August 31, 2007.

Liliana Segura: Bush has more blood on his hands than anyone could possibly imagine.

 

 

Paul Craig Roberts

 

Back in his pre-coronation days, when George W. was still known as “Governor Bush,” the Campaign to End the Death Penalty had a bestselling item in its fundraising kit: a t-shirt with a mugshot of the future president splashed across the front, reading “WANTED FOR MURDER.” Bush’s crowning legacy at the time was having racked up a record-breaking 152 executions in the state of Texas–and doing so with a clear-eyed callousness that was at once startling and sickening.

Little did we know that less than ten years later, Bush would have more blood on his hands than we could possibly imagine.

He’s drenched in it. Between the massive death toll in Iraq–655,000 as of last fall–to those anguished masses who would become bloated bodies in New Orleans, Bush has shown a boundless capacity for cruel and unusual punishment for those whose lives are expendable in the racist La La land that his administration calls home.

Continued . . .