Peace and Justice Post

The Raw Story, Feb 8, 2008
Muriel Kane

A new article by veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh offers a detailed examination of the claims that Israel bombed a nuclear facility under construction in Syria last September and finds that none of the evidence stands up to scrutiny.

According to Hersh, “A former senior U.S. intelligence official, who has access to current intelligence, said, ‘We don’t have any proof of a reactor — no signals intelligence, no human intelligence, no satellite intelligence.'” However, Hersh found that the Israelis were continuing to stand adamantly by their claims:

“When I went to Israel in late December, the government was still maintaining secrecy about the raid, but some current and former officials and military officers were willing to speak without attribution. Most were adamant that Israel’s intelligence had been accurate. ‘Don’t you write that there was nothing there!’ a senior Israeli official, who is in a position to know the details of the raid on Syria, said, shaking a finger at me. ‘The thing in Syria was real.'”

Just one Israeli official expressed doubts, but also brushed them away:

“Retired Brigadier General Shlomo Brom, who served as deputy national-security adviser under Prime Minister Ehud Barak, told me that Israel wouldn’t have acted if it hadn’t been convinced that there was a threat. ‘It may have been a perception of a conviction, but there was something there,’ Brom said. ‘It was the beginning of a nuclear project.’ However, by the date of our talk, Brom told me, ‘The question of whether it was there or not is not that relevant anymore.'”

One Syrian official suggested to Hersh that the Israelis may have picked up the presence of North Korean laborers at the site and drawn their own conclusions. “‘The Israelis may have their own spies and watched the laborers being driven to the area,’ the senior officer said. ‘The Koreans were not there at night, but slept in their quarters and were driven to the site in the morning. The building was in an isolated area, and the Israelis may have concluded that even if there was a slight chance’ — of it being a nuclear facility — ‘we’ll take that risk.'”

RAW STORY‘s Larisa Alexandrovna reported last fall that current and former intelligence privately agreed the Syrian facility was not nuclear in nature. Hersh’s article is the first major mainstream confirmation of that reporting.

MOSCOW – Vladimir Putin has used one of the last major speeches of his presidency to deliver a defiant message to the West, accusing it of unleashing a new arms race that left Moscow no choice but to retaliate in kind. Less than a month before presidential elections that his hand-picked successor is almost certain to win, the speech removed any lingering doubts that Russian foreign policy might become less aggressive after Mr Putin steps down.

“It’s clear that a new arms race is unfolding in the world,” said Mr Putin, one that Russia did not start. And he vowed that Russia would respond to the threats by developing newer and more modern weapons that were as good as if not better than those possessed by Western countries. “We are being forced into retaliating … Russia has and always will have the answers to these challenges,” he said.

The speech in which he also condemned Nato expansion came as defence chiefs of the 26-nation alliance, increasingly alarmed by Russia’s flexing of its military muscles, met in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, and urged Moscow to tone down its rhetoric.

Russian bomber patrols have recently been made over the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic oceans and approached close to the borders of Nato airspace. Two Russian Tupolev-95 aircraft strayed south from their routine patrol pattern off the Norwegian coast and headed towards Scotland last September.

Continued . . .

REUTERS

Reuters North American News Service

Feb 09, 2008 10:57 EST

Feb 9 (Reuters) – Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, spiritual leader of the world’s 77 million Anglicans, is facing calls to resign for suggesting that the introduction in Britain of some aspects of sharia — or Islamic law — was unavoidable.
WHAT IS SHARIA?

Sharia is the body of Islamic religious law based primarily on the Islamic holy book, the Koran, as well as the words and actions of the Prophet Mohammad.

It is a legal framework that regulates both public and private life. Sharia covers a broad range of issues including worship, commercial dealings, marriage, inheritance and penal laws.

Sharia has been demonised by some in the West, primarily for its criminal legal aspects, which can include punishments like amputation of a hand for theft or the stoning of adulterers.

Women’s dress is another much-debated aspect of sharia. Some believers interpret it as requiring a woman to wear a full-length robe that also covers her face, and others insist it simply refers to modest dress.

Continued . . .

Voters on the progressive wing of the Democratic Party are rightly disappointed by the similarity of the foreign policy positions of the two remaining Democratic Party presidential candidates, Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama. However, there are still some real discernable differences to be taken into account. Indeed, given the power the United States has in the world, even minimal differences in policies can have a major difference in the lives of millions of people.

As a result, the kind of people the next president appoints to top positions in national defense, intelligence, and foreign affairs is critical. Such officials usually emerge from among a presidential candidate’s team of foreign policy advisors. So, analyzing who these two finalists for the Democratic presidential nomination have brought in to advise them on international affairs can be an important barometer for determining what kind for foreign policies they would pursue as president. For instance, in the case of the Bush administration, officials like Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle played a major role in the fateful decision to invade Iraq by convincing the president that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat and that American forces would be treated as liberators.

Continued . . .

By Onnesha Roychoudhuri, AlterNet. Posted February 8, 2008.

A new book takes a close look at the triumphs, challenges and regrets of reporters working to cover the first three years of the Iraq war.

The late British journalist James Cameron, known for his coverage of the Vietnam War, said of his journalism, “I may not have always been satisfactorily balanced; I always tended to argue that objectivity was of less importance than truth.” Perhaps in times of peace, objectivity naturally hews closer to truth. But when leadership misleads (or, euphemisms be damned, lies to) the public, journalists bear a greater responsibility. “Reporting” can all too easily translate into providing a megaphone for intentionally misleading information.

It is these issues that are at the forefront of Reporting Iraq: An Oral History of the War by the Journalists Who Covered It. Comprised mainly of interviews with over 40 journalists who covered the war, Reporting Iraq offers a candid view of the difficulties and complexities of working in an environment so hostile to reporters.

In one episode Rajiv Chandrasekaran of the Washington Post recalls the difficulty of getting any relevant information from the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA): “Well, off the record,” CPA advisor Dan Senor told him, “Paris is burning, but on the record, security and stability are returning to Iraq.” Such double-speak motivated reporters to take great risks to find the facts — and spurred a wartime environment where journalists have now come to rely heavily on Iraqi stringers who, unlike western reporters, are able move more freely around the country. Reporting Iraq takes a close look at the triumphs, challenges and regrets of reporters working to cover the first three years of the occupation of Iraq.

Continued . . .

MRZINE, February 8, 2008

by Mahmoud El-Yousseph

Let’s pretend for a moment that Israel and not Gaza is under siege by its Arab neighbors.  The Arabs are preventing all food supplies, medicine, and fuel from reaching starving Israelis.  The reason given: Israel’s refusal to accept the Arab peace initiative (land for peace).

What would America and the rest of the world do?  You can bet the sky would fall down and America would raise holy hell.

First, President Bush would put our armed forces on worldwide alert, dispatch aircraft carriers to the region, and issue a 24-hour ultimatum to lift the siege or else.  U.S. lawmakers would be tripping over each other to the microphone to condemn the act as war crime against humanity.  It would headline front pages in all mainstream media, with editorials denouncing the Arabs as bloodthirsty savages who do not value human life and appeal to save Israel before it is too late.  TV stations would preempt regularly scheduled programs for constant updates and analyses.  The topic would be on every radio talk show with calls to “Send the Marines” and to start the “Tel Aviv Airlift.”  The crisis would dominate the presidential debate, and every candidate would try to outdo the others as to who cares more about Israel.  And yes, Arab/Muslim communities would be asked if they condone or condemn the siege.

That is a hypothetical scenario — the truth is, the siege has indeed taken place since June 2007, and the victims are not Israelis, but rather 1.5 million Palestinians living in Gaza (more than half of whose population are under 18).  The reasons given by Israel for the siege: the Hamas government does not recognize the Israeli occupation as legitimate and it has fired home-made rockets across the border.

Continued . . . 

The Providence Journal (Rhode Island), February 8, 2008

DAVID M. GITLITZ

WHY has the Bush administration been dancing around the question of whether waterboarding is torture?

Waterboarding was one of the most common tortures employed by the Spanish Inquisition for the first half of its 450-year-long history (circa 1480-1834). This has never been a secret. It is attested to by reams of documents — letters, debates, manuals of instruction and copious records of trials that include verbatim accounts of the torture sessions themselves — in the Historical Archives of Spain and Mexico, in which I have worked for the last 30 years. The information about inquisitorial waterboarding has also been available to the English-reading general public since publication of H.C. Lea’s A History of the Inquisition, the last volume of which appeared a hundred years ago this year.

Here is Lea’s description of the inquisitorial waterboarding:

“The patient was placed on an escalera or potro — a kind of trestle, with sharp-edged rungs across it like a ladder. It slanted so that the head was lower than the feet and, at the lower end was a depression in which the head sank, while an iron band around the forehead or throat kept it immovable. A bostezo, or iron prong, distended the mouth, a toca, or strip of linen, was thrust down the throat to conduct water trickling slowly from a jarra or jar, holding usually a little more than a quart. The patient gasped and felt he was suffocating, and at intervals, the toca was withdrawn and he was adjured to tell the truth. The severity of the infliction was measured by the number of jars consumed, sometimes reaching to six or eight.”

Keep reading . . .

RINF.com, Feb 9, 2008

By Joseph A. Lopisi

It is hard to pick a place to start in terms of talking about the most outrageous lies that the Bush administration and the 9/11 Commission have presented to the people in this country as a reason to attack Afghanistan and Iraq and to launch a “fake war on terror”.

The reason I say this is that I have been reading articles and watching videos about the lies and deceptions surrounding 9/11 for the past three years. If anything, there are so many obvious unanswered questions about 9/11. However, not only has no one answered any of these questions but in fact no one in the mainstream media nor anyone in the United States Congress except for Representative Kucinich and Cynthia McKinney have even asked these questions.

Some of these questions are:

Keep reading . . .

REUTERS

Reuters North American News Service

Feb 08, 2008 23:57 EST