Peace and Justice Post

Martin Hodgson and agencies
Thursday February 7, 2008
The Guardian

The UN’s chief torture investigator criticised the US government yesterday for defending the use of “waterboarding”, an interrogation method often described as a form of torture.

Manfred Nowak, the special rapporteur on torture, said: “This is absolutely unacceptable under international human rights law. [The] time has come that the government will actually acknowledge that they did something wrong and not continue trying to justify what is unjustifiable.”

On Tuesday, the CIA admitted for the first time that it had used the technique, in which interrogators strap a suspect to a board and pour water through a cloth over the face, creating a sensation of drowning. Testifying before Congress, the CIA director, Michael Hayden, said the method had been used on the suspected September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and senior al-Qaida leaders Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.

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World Socialist Web Site, 6 February 2008

By Naomi Spencer

The US military confirmed Tuesday that soldiers shot dead at least three Iraqi civilians in their beds Monday night north of Baghdad. The admission comes just a day after military officials acknowledged that nine civilians were killed in an Army air raid south of the capital on February 2.

The incidents, which were only acknowledged by the military after inquiries from the media, highlight the ongoing brutality of the US occupation and its reliance on indiscriminate firepower.

On Saturday, witnesses in Iskandariya said the air raid came after a mortar attack on a US convoy at a checkpoint manned by US-backed Sunni fighters, members of the so-called Awakening Councils. Calling the air raid “the deadliest case of mistaken identity since November,” the Associated Press reported that the Army retaliated to the hostile fire by calling in strikes on a nearby home where Awakening Council fighters had sought cover. Helicopters bombarded the house, killing eight adults and a child, and wounding three others, including two children.

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Did They Reveal the Absence of Confessions?

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS | Counterpunch, February 4, 2008

Many Americans are content with the 9/11 Commission Report, but the two chairmen of the commission, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton are not. Neither was commission member Max Cleland, a US Senator who resigned from the 9/11 Commission, telling the Boston Globe (November 13, 2003): “This investigation is now compromised.” Even former FBI director Louis Freeh wrote in the Wall Street Journal (Nov. 17, 2005) that there are inaccuracies in the commission’s report and “questions that need answers.”

Both Kean and Hamilton have twice stated publicly, once in their 2006 book, Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission, and again in the January 2, 2008, New York Times, that there are inaccuracies in their report and unanswered–or mis-answered–questions.

On the second day of this new year, Kean and Hamilton accused the CIA of obstructing their investigation: “What we do know is that government officials decided not to inform a lawfully constituted body, created by Congress and the President, to investigate one of the greatest tragedies to confront this country. We call that obstruction.”

Keep reading . . .

There is no way out of this nightmare until negotiations begin between all sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

Lynne Segal | The Guardian: Comment is free, Feb 5, 2008

Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) celebrates its first year with its eyes on Gaza, demanding an end to the Israeli blockade and, on the uneven playing field of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, an end to human rights abuses on both sides.

IJV was formed a year ago to raise issues of human rights generally, but especially in that part of the world where we feel our voices might have most resonance, urging a fair and peaceful end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Happily, despite inevitable opposition, we quickly gained significant support and media coverage for our stance, especially in Jewish publications around the world.

Such exposure enabled us to further our goal in launching IJV, which was to change the parameters of the debate in this conflict: prioritising the issue of human rights, paying attention to the situation of both Palestinians and Israelis in the search for peace, opposing all forms of racism. Tragically, over this same year, we have seen no serious move coming from the vastly stronger party in the conflict, the Israeli state, towards ending the multiple human rights abuses in the Palestinian territories it controls.

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The Palestinian Center for Detainees’ Studies issued a press release on Monday revealing that Israel is currently holding more than 365 Palestinian children captive in its prisons, including 100 children who are 13-15 years old.

The Center reported that the underage detainees are subjected to harsh treatment and torture and that their continued arrest comes in violation to the International Law and the basic principles of human rights.

The Center also stated that all of the child detainees, currently imprisoned by Israel, were kidnapped by the army since during the Al Aqsa Intifada which started in 2000.

Ahmad Shawahna, head of the center stated, that the Israeli Prison Administration is subjecting the detainees to physical and psychological pressures in addition to threatening them to attack their families if they do not confess to charges filed against them.

Shawahna appealed the International Community to practice pressure on Israel in order to stop its violations against the detainees, especially child detainees, and added that these violations should be labeled as War Crimes.

LewRockwell:com, Feb 5, 2008

by Karen Kwiatkowski

Cheney lives, and he wants more war. According to former CIA officer Phil Giraldi, Cheney remains hard at work fomenting some kind of attack or even war with Iran – and beyond that, he and George W. Bush don’t believe their own CIA’s latest intelligence assessment on Iran, indicating, in short that when it comes to Iran, we have little to fear but fear itself.

It may not matter what George W. Bush believes, or thinks. He defers to Dick on national security matters. But Dick Cheney is apparently determined to make his mark before the election of the next American president, who, if Ron Paul, will immediately work to end our foreign policy fiascos, and if it is one of the remaining Democratic contenders, will slowly and more slowly, hesitantly and more hesitantly, try to begin to withdraw from the Bush wars.

Any new president is bad news for Cheney, who operates without legal, political or moral constraints, and wishes to continue to fight everyone he can in the Middle East and beyond. But the world community and hometown America won’t stomach the selling of yet another unnecessary war in the Middle East so soon. War by accident, to quote a phrase used by Phil Giraldi in his Antiwar.com interview on January 24th, seems to be Cheney’s preferred pathway towards destruction in Iran.

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RINF.com, February 2, 2008

A study of the black box data provided by the government to Pilots for 9/11 Truth has confirmed the previous findings of Scholars for 9/11 Truth that no Boeing 757 hit the Pentagon on 9/11. We have had four lines of proof that no Boeing 757 hit the building, said James Fetzer, founder of Scholars for 9/11 Truth. This new study by Pilots drives another nail into a coffin of lies told the American people by The 9/11 Commission:The new society, an international organization of pilots and aviation professionals, petitioned the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) under the Freedom of Information Act and obtained its 2002 report on American Airlines Flight 77, a Boeing 757 that, according to the official account, hit the ground floor of the Pentagon after it skimmed over the lawn at 500 mph plus, taking out a series of lamp posts in the process. The pilots not only obtained the flight data but created a computer animation to demonstrate what it told them.

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War In Iraq, Feb 5, 2008
By: Mark Glenn on: 05.02.2008

A single undersea fiber-optic cable carrying internet traffic accidentally being cut once in a year’s time is believable. 5 of them however within the span of only a few days resulting in most of the Middle East being left in the informational dark ages cannot be mere happenstance. The odds are too extreme to even contemplate it being anything but a deliberate act of sabotage, and particularly when Israel and US-occupied Iraq happen to be unaffected by it.

As of the moment of this writing, 5 internet cables–buried deep beneath the ocean floor to prevent them being accidentally dredged up by a ships’ anchor–have been cut, preventing most of the Middle East from internet access. The cables provide 90% of the region’s internet service and the countries affected most by this are Egypt, Bahrain, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Iran. They have since re-routed to older, slower lines and satellites, but overall internet service is slow and in some cases–particularly Iran, there is no internet service whatsoever.

The lines–originating in southern Europe and then snaking their way southward to north Africa and then eastward through the Suez Canal and then on to India are the communication, commerce and technology lifelines for these nations. In a world where everything is dependent upon the internet, from government operations to financial markets the devastating effect this disruption could have on these nations is easy to see.

In all the media coverage of this event, it was hinted that possibly an anchor from a ship was the guilty culprit. However, shortly thereafter Egypt released a statement to the effect that video footage of the area where the cuts took place showed no surface ship activity for the previous 12 hours and added that these particular lanes are closed to maritime traffic for the express reason of avoiding damage to the cables. Interestingly, none of the stories covering this event mentioned (or even hinted, for that matter) the words ‘foul play’, and this in an age where everything from global warming to bad breath is blamed on Osama Bin Laden and his merry band of Islamic militants.

Besides the everyday issues of news and information services, telephone communications have been severely disrupted and financial markets have suffered as much as a 70% loss in trading activity. It is estimated that the earliest the problem will be fixed is the beginning of the 2nd week in February, as it takes several days for repair ships to reach the areas where the cuts took place.

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AFP – Wednesday, February 6, 2008

WASHINGTON (AFP) – – CIA director Michael Hayden for the first time admitted publicly Tuesday that the agency had used “waterboarding,” or simulated drowning, in interrogations of three top Al-Qaeda detainees nearly five years ago.

The technique, which critics say is tantamount to torture, was used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Abd Al-Rahim al-Nashiri at a time when further catastrophic attacks on the United States were believed to be imminent, Hayden said.

“Let me make it very clear and to state so officially in front of this committee that waterboarding has been used on only three detainees,” he told members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

“It was used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. It was used on Abu Zubaydah. And it was used on Nashiri.”

Mohammed has claimed to be the operational mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks. Abu Zubaydah is alleged to have been an aide to Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. And al-Nashiri is alleged to have been the operational commander of the suicide attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000.

All three were initially held and interrogated at secret CIA-run detention centers overseas before being transferred in 2006 to a military-run facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

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