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by Sherwood Ross
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Global Research, January 19, 2008
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“In the last six years, Washington has stepped up its sales and transfers of high-technology weapons, military training, and other military assistance to governments regardless of their respect for human rights, democratic principles, or nonproliferation,” according to a report in the current(Jan.-Feb.) “Arms Control Today,” published online by the Arms Control Association (ACA). “All that matters is that they have pledged their assistance in the global war on terrorism.” You read it right. The Bush regime has been using 9/11 as an excuse for the reckless sale of weapons around the globe, working $16.9 billion in new arms deals in 2006, 41.9 percent of the world’s total. This compares to runners-up Russia, $8.7 billion, and Great Britain, $3.1 billion, writes Rachel Stohl, a senior analyst at the Center for Defense Information(CDI), which tracks such data. Despots once banned from getting U.S. weapons and training are being showered with both. “By providing military assistance with a disregard for human rights(HR) conditions, the U.S. is not only giving up the opportunity to use military assistance as leverage to improve (HR conditions), but is also rewarding abusive governments for their unconscionable actions,” Stohl writes. Noting that U.S. aid is growing “at the same time as human rights conditions are worsening,” Stohl cites the example of Ethiopia, “which is carrying out a brutal counterinsurgency campaign within its own borders” and Nepal, whose security forces “opened fire on peaceful strikers and anti-government demonstrations.” Bush is also funneling millions into Uzbekistan, where thousands of Muslims have been imprisoned without due process and many tortured to death. |
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Archive for January, 2008
US Weapons Sales: President Bush Arming Fellow Tyrants Globally
January 22, 2008
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Print this articleEuropean collusion in Israel’s slow genocide
January 22, 2008Never against!
Counterpunch, January 21, 2008
By Omar Barghouti
The European Union, Israel’s largest trade partner in the world, is watching by as Israel tightens its barbaric siege around Gaza, collectively punishing 1.5 million Palestinian civilians, condemning them to devastation, and visiting imminent death upon hundreds of kidney dialysis and heart patients, prematurely born babies, and all others dependent on electric power for their very survival.
By freezing fuel and electric power supplies to Gaza, Israel, the occupying power, is essentially guaranteeing that “clean” water — only by name, as Gaza’s water is perhaps the most polluted in the whole region, after decades of Israeli theft and abuse — will not be pumped out and properly distributed to homes and institutions; hospitals will not be able to function adequately, leading to the eventual death of many, particularly the most vulnerable; whatever factories that are still working despite the siege will now be forced to close, pushing the already extremely high unemployment rate even higher; sewage treatment will come to a halt, further polluting Gaza’s precious little water supply; academic institutions and schools will not be able to provide their usual services; and lives of all civilians will be severely disrupted, if not irreversibly damaged. And Europe is apathetically watching.
No light, no heat, no bread: stark reality for the powerless in Gaza
January 22, 2008Besieged civilians pay the price for Israel’s hardline response to rocket attacks
Rory McCarthy in Khan Yunis, Gaza
Tuesday January 22, 2008
The Guardian
A Palestinian boy waits to pump air by hand into his bedbound brother’s lungs in case his respirator cuts out during blackouts. Photograph: Suhaib Salem/Reuters
When it opened its doors seven years ago, the European Gaza hospital was one of the biggest foreign investments in the long-troubled Gaza Strip and one of the leading medical centres in the Palestinian territories. Yesterday, the 250-bed hospital was sliding rapidly into crisis, turning away patients for routine operations and struggling to manage emergency cases, as the sole power plant in Gaza halted electricity production after Israel stopped all fuel supplies.
Israel said its closure of the Gaza strip was intended to halt the firing of makeshift rockets by Palestinian militants into southern Israel.
Yet Israel’s stark new policy has meant no fuel or food aid has come into Gaza since last Thursday. Large parts of the overcrowded strip had no power, leaving it without lights and heating, closing bakeries and forcing hospitals to rely on generators and their own limited fuel reserves. As night fell nearly all Gaza City was in darkness. Simply put, it was “collective punishment,” said the European commissioner for external relations, Benita Ferrero-Waldner.
Surge to Nowhere
January 21, 2008The Washington Post.
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Don’t buy the hawks’ hype. The war may be off the front pages, but Iraq is broken beyond repair, and we still own it.
By Andrew J. Bacevich
As the fifth anniversary of Operation Iraqi Freedom nears, the fabulists are again trying to weave their own version of the war. The latest myth is that the “surge” is working.
In President Bush‘s pithy formulation, the United States is now “kicking ass” in Iraq. The gallant Gen. David Petraeus, having been given the right tools, has performed miracles, redeeming a situation that once appeared hopeless. Sen. John McCain has gone so far as to declare that “we are winning in Iraq.” While few others express themselves quite so categorically, McCain’s remark captures the essence of the emerging story line: Events have (yet again) reached a turning point. There, at the far end of the tunnel, light flickers. Despite the hand-wringing of the defeatists and naysayers, victory beckons.
From the hallowed halls of the American Enterprise Institute waft facile assurances that all will come out well. AEI’s Reuel Marc Gerecht assures us that the moment to acknowledge “democracy’s success in Iraq” has arrived. To his colleague Michael Ledeen, the explanation for the turnaround couldn’t be clearer: “We were the stronger horse, and the Iraqis recognized it.” In an essay entitled “Mission Accomplished” that is being touted by the AEI crowd, Bartle Bull, the foreign editor of the British magazine Prospect, instructs us that “Iraq’s biggest questions have been resolved.” Violence there “has ceased being political.” As a result, whatever mayhem still lingers is “no longer nearly as important as it was.” Meanwhile, Frederick W. Kagan, an AEI resident scholar and the arch-advocate of the surge, announces that the “credibility of the prophets of doom” has reached “a low ebb.”
Just one more year! Good riddance to George W Bush
January 21, 2008But what kind of mess will the next president inherit, exactly 12 months from today? By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
The Independent, January 20, 2008
Arabia is the land of illusion and desert mirages. And as he jetted last week from kingdom to sheikdom, to be regaled with feasts and falcons, jewels and ornamental swords, George Bush might have imagined that all was well with his presidency. But this, his longest and most ambitious trip to the Middle East, will surely be remembered – if it is remembered at all – as a gaudy, irrelevant footnote to a presidency that has long since failed.
Today is a sombre milestone, marking the start of the last of Mr Bush’s eight years in the White House. This being a leap year, exactly 366 days remain until 20 January 2009, when his successor will be sworn into office. It is a time when incumbents look to their legacies. And for this President the view could scarcely be bleaker.
Is he the worst President in US history? Mr Bush faces stiff competition from the likes of James Buchanan, who watched as America slipped towards civil war, or Warren Harding with his corrupt administration, or Herbert Hoover, who failed to halt the slide into the Great Depression, or, more recently, Richard Nixon, the only President to be forced to resign. But in terms of dogmatism, incompetence, ignorance and divisiveness, Mr Bush surely compares with any of the above.
Bush’s Middle East “peace” charade
January 21, 2008Socialistworker.com
Editorial, January 18, 2008
THE NEW York Times scolded George Bush last week for waiting seven years into his presidency to tackle the thorny problem of brokering peace in the Israel-Palestine conflict. But in the end, its editorial page struck a hopeful note.
“Mr. Bush said he would pressure the two sides when necessary, and he also promised to return to the region in May for Israel’s 60th anniversary–and maybe more often if needed,” read the Times editorial. “We hope that means that the president is finally and truly engaged.”
But this image of Bush as a peacemaker has little to do with the real purpose of the trip–pledging U.S. support for Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s policy of starving Palestinians in Hamas-controlled Gaza into submission, propping up Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in a powerless mini-state on the West Bank, and rounding up support among Arab regimes for the U.S. campaign against Iran.
Bush reiterated his promise to provide Israel with $30 billion in new military and economic aid–a more than 25 percent increase–over the next 10 years.
People are dying in Gaza, Help us!
January 21, 2008Death and Darkness in Gaza
Information Clearing House, January 20, 2008
By Maan
Five patients dead due to electricity cutoffs in Gaza hospitals: Hamas claimed Sunday night that five patients died because of the cutoff of electricity in Gaza hospitals resulting from the Israeli blockade.
Hamas Leader Pleads Help For Gaza From Arab Nations : : The Hamas leadership pleaded with Arab leaders and the rival Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, on Sunday, asking them to forget their differences and help the beleaguered Gazans.
20/01/08 “ICH” — — A humanitarian crisis is underway as the Gaza Strip’s only power plant began to shut down on Sunday, and the tiny coastal territory entered its third full day without shipments of vital food and fuel supplies due to Israel’s punitive sanctions.
The Gaza Strip’s power plant has completely shut down on Sunday because it no longer has the fuel needed to keep running. One of the plant’s two electricity-generating turbines had already shut down by noon.
This will drastically reduce output to 25 or 30 megawatts, down from the 65 megawatts the plant produces under normal conditions. By Sunday evening the plant will shut down completely, leaving large swaths of the Gaza Strip in darkness.
Omar Kittaneh, the head of the Palestine Energy Authority in Ramallah, confirmed that by tonight, the one remaining operating turbine will be powered down, and the Gaza power plant will no longer be generating any electricity at all.
“We have asked the Israeli government to reverse its decision and to supply fuel to operate the power plant”, Dr. Kittaneh said. “We have talked to the Israeli humanitarian coordination in their Ministry of Energy [National Infrastructure]. We say this is totally Israel’s responsibility, and that reducing the fuel supplies until the plant had to shut down will affect not only the electrical system but the water supply, and the entire infrastructure in Gaza – everything.”
After months of increasingly harsh sanctions, Israel imposed a total closure on the Strip’s border crossings, even preventing the delivery of humanitarian aid. The Israeli government says the closure is punishment for an ongoing barrage of Palestinian homemade projectiles fired from the Gaza Strip.
The Ordeal of Dr. Safdar Sarki
January 21, 2008Counterpunch, Weekend Edition, January 19 / 20, 2008
Letter from a Secret Jail
By PATRICK IRELANIn a strange way, the “war on terror” may have claimed another victim, at least for now and perhaps forever.
Safdar Sarki, who earned his medical degree in Pakistan, is a member of the World Sindhi Congress. The congress seeks greater influence for the Sindhi ethnic minority in Pakistan’s Sindh Province.
In February 2006, police and intelligence officers arrested Dr. Sarki at his sister’s apartment in Karachi, Pakistan, and he joined the world’s army of the disappeared.
Dr. Sarki remained with the disappeared until last fall, when a letter from him somehow made its way to Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, Chief Justice of Pakistan’s Supreme Court. In the letter, Dr. Sarki described “complete isolation with a strip of black cloth on my eyes when outside, otherwise in a dark, stuffy and small gravelike cell in severe heat and severe cold. For 24 hours I am handcuffed except 15 minutes during a toilet break.”
Dr. Sarki had found himself among an estimated 4000 prisoners in President Pervez Musharraf’s secret detention network. An article by Jane Perlez in the January 18, 2008, New York Times provided few details about this network. Some prisoners are suspected terrorists. Some are not. Officials announced no charges against Dr. Sarki after his arrest. That’s how secret jails remain secrets.
Israeli ministers call to assassinate Hizbullah leader
January 21, 2008
Albawaba.com, January 20, 2008
A number of Israeli ministers on Sunday called for the assassination of Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah. “Nasrallah is a cruel and crazy man,” said Minister Yitzhak Cohen (Shas), during the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem. “I don’t understand why he is still breathing. We should have liquidated him a long time ago. I recommend the cabinet assassinate the man.
On his part, Interior Minister Meir Shitrit echoed the sentiment, saying, “Nasrallah is a person who has crossed all inhuman lines. We don’t need to negotiate with him, we need to destroy him.” Israel’s Absorption Minister Ze’ev Boim called Nasrallah a “sewer rat,” adding, “we must make sure he does not see the light of day.”
Gaza plunged into darkness after Israel lockdown
January 21, 2008AFP – Monday, January 21
GAZA CITY (AFP) – – Gaza was in darkness early Monday after its only power plant shut down for lack of fuel as Israel kept up a blockade of the Hamas-run territory in retaliation for rocket fire,
The closure of the plant, which accounts for 30 percent of the population’s needs, plunged entire city blocks in Gaza City into darkness, and was set to sharply worsen power cuts already hitting the impoverished coastal strip.
“We have had to close the power plant for want of fuel,” its director Rafiq Mliha told reporters, warning of “very serious consequences for residents, but also for the operation of hospitals and water treatment plants.”
Mliha said he had no word on when Israel might allow in the fuel to enable the power station to resume generating electricity.
The Gaza Strip, where most of the 1.5 million residents depend on aid, remained sealed off for a third consecutive day Sunday as the Israeli cabinet decided to maintain the closure of crossing points amid escalating violence.
The Gaza director of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine refugees called on Israel to reopen the crossings and appealed to the international community to help the civilian population.
The power station’s shutdown has “plummeted Gaza City, which has 600,000 people, into darkness,” John Ging told a news conference, adding that the loss of electricity “affects every aspect of the civilian population’s lives here in Gaza”.
“If you visit any of the hospitals you will find that its generators are only producing enough electricity to keep essential equipment going. They are very cold, all of the wards, adding to the misery of the patients,” Ging said.
Peace and Justice Post 