Peace and Justice Post

Consortiumnews.com, February 5, 2008

By Robert, Sam and Nat Parry

Editor’s Note: Five years ago, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the United Nations Security Council – and the world – to make a case for war that wasn’t true. He falsely claimed that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction.

The importance of Powell’s speech cannot be overstated. It effectively sealed the deal for the U.S. invasion of Iraq, at least as far as the American news media and opinion leaders were concerned.

After Powell’s speech, Consortiumnews.com was one of the few news outlets that wasn’t onboard. We reprised an earlier series about Powell’s real history as a rank opportunist, under the title “Trust Colin Powell?” However, many people did trust Colin Powell and the results have been catastrophic.

On this fifth anniversary of Powell’s speech, we are publishing an excerpt about his testimony from the book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush. The book also contains a chapter on the real history of Colin Powell, but this excerpt concentrates on his fateful speech:

To make his case before the U.N., Bush dispatched the most credible official in his administration, Secretary of State Colin Powell.

By the time Powell was assigned to make the case for war, he counted himself among the growing list of officials nervous about the quality of the WMD intelligence. Indeed, Powell may have been one of the best positioned officials to know that the threat from Iraq was being exaggerated.

Continued . . .

Saad Tawfiq told his handlers that Saddam had shut down wmd program
By Agence France Presse (AFP)

The Daily Star, February 05, 2008

AMMAN: When Saad Tawfiq watched then-US Secretary of state Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations on February 5, 2003, he shed bitter tears as he realized he had risked his life and those of his loved ones for nothing. As one of Saddam Hussein’s most gifted engineers, Tawfiq knew that the Iraqi dictator had shut down his nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs in 1995 – and he had told his handlers in US intelligence just that.

And yet here was Powell – Tawfiq’s television was able to receive international news through a link pirated from Saddam’s spies next door – waving a vial of white powder and telling the UN Security Council a story about Iraqi germ labs.

“When I saw Colin Powell, I started crying – immediately. I knew I had tried and lost,” Tawfiq told AFP five years later in the Jordanian capital, Amman.

Now in his 50s, a round-faced man with a small moustache and lively eyes behind delicate spectacles, Tawfiq described how the CIA set up an elaborate operation to recruit Iraqi weapons scientists and then ignored the results.

From the end of 2002 the US spy agency had sources inside Iraq’s weapons plants telling them clearly what the whole world now knows – that Saddam had ended efforts to produce weapons of mass destruction.

Continued . . .

In These Times, Feb 4, 2008

Neve Gordon 

The experiment in famine began on January 18, 2008. Israel hermetically closed all of Gaza’s borders, preventing food, medicine and fuel from entering the Strip. Power cuts, which had been frequent for many months, were extended to 12 hours per day. Because of the electricity shortage, at least 40 percent of Gazans have not had access to running water (which is channeled through electric pumps) for days and the sewage system has broken down. The raw sewage that has not spilled onto the streets is being poured into the sea at a daily rate of 30 million liters. Hospitals have been forced to rely on emergency generators, leading them to cut back, yet again, on the already limited services offered to the Palestinian population. The World Food Programme has reported critical shortages of food and declared that it is unable to provide 10,000 of the poorest Gazans with three out of the five foodstuffs they normally receive.

Keep reading . . . 

The Independent,  4 February 2008

Gaza’s 1.5 million Palestinians were trapped behind their closed borders again after tasting freedom for 12 days, when Egyptian forces sealed the last of the breaks in the Gaza-Egypt barrier broken down by Hamas militants.

After the metal spikes and barbed wire were in place yesterday, attention turned to how the border crossing would be run, and it appeared unlikely that the Islamic Hamas rulers of Gaza would get what they want — a role for them but none for Israel.

Egypt warned Hamas against trying to open the border by force again, as it did on Jan. 23.

“Egypt is a respected state. Its border cannot be breached and its soldiers should not be lobbed with stones,” said Suleiman Awwad, spokesman for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

The border breach temporarily relieved a seven-month blockade, imposed by Israel and Egypt after Hamas seized Gaza by force in June.

Continued  . . .

“For the oppressors, what is worthwhile is to have more–always more–even at the cost of the oppressed having less or having nothing. For them, to be is to have and to be the class of the ‘haves.’”
Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Finally, the truth is seeping out. Contrary to how President George W. Bush has tried to justify the Iraq war in the past, he has now clumsily-if inadvertently-admitted that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was aimed primarily at seizing predominant influence over its oil by establishing permanent (the administration favors “enduring”) military bases.

He made this transparently clear by adding a signing statement to the defense appropriation bill, indicating that he would not be bound by the law’s prohibition against expending funds:

“(1) To establish any military installation or base for the purpose of providing for the permanent stationing of United States Armed Forces in Iraq,” or

“(2) To exercise United States control of the oil resources of Iraq.”

But, if you have been asleep for the past five years, you may ask, what about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and its ties to al-Qaeda? A recent study by the Center for Public Integrity found that Bush made 260 false claims about these in the two years following 9/11. He was followed closely by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell with 254. Nor can they any longer pretend they were deceived by faulty intelligence, since hard evidence that continues to accumulate shows they knew exactly what they were doing.

Continued . . .

Axis of Logic, Feb 4, 2008

In 1923, the Ukrainian-born Zionist and founder of Irgun terror network in Palestine, Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote that Zionist colonization in the Middle East can only succeed if it is “protected by an Iron Wall”, designed to incarcerate and keeps the native Palestinian population out of their land. Today, more than ever, the Palestinian people are refusing to surrender and give up their history.

For decades, Western leaders – led by the Americans –, and pro-Israel Western media have promoted the idea of a ‘Palestinian State’ for Palestinians to claim it as their homeland. It has become a euphemism for never-to-be a Palestinian state. What is misleading about this idea of a ‘Palestinian State’ is it provides people in the West – including those who pretend to support the Palestinians – with an illusionary hope, while at the same time it covers Israel’s war crimes and Israel’s illegal annexation and colonization of Palestinian land and water resources.

Continued . . .

Richard A. Clarke | The Philadelphia Inquirer, January 1, 2008

Richard A. Clarke is former head of counterterrorism at the National Security Council

When I left the Bush administration in 2003, it was clear to me that its strategy for defeating terrorism was leaving our nation more vulnerable and our people in a perilous place. Not only did its policies misappropriate resources, weaken the moral standing of America, and threaten long-standing legal and constitutional provisions, but the president also employed misleading and reckless rhetoric to perpetuate his agenda.

This week’s State of the Union proved nothing has changed.

Besides overstating successes in Afghanistan, painting a rosy future for Iraq, and touting unfinished domestic objectives, he again used his favorite tactic – fear – as a tool to scare Congress and the American people. On one issue in particular – FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) – the president misconstrued the truth and manipulated the facts.

Let me be clear: Our ability to track and monitor terrorists overseas would not cease should the Protect America Act expire. If this were true, the president would not threaten to terminate any temporary extension with his veto pen. All surveillance currently occurring would continue even after legislative provisions lapsed because authorizations issued under the act are in effect up to a full year.

Simply put, it was wrong for the president to suggest that warrants issued in compliance with FISA would suddenly evaporate with congressional inaction. Instead – even though Congress extended the Protect America Act by two weeks – he is using the existence of the sunset provision to cast his political opponents in a negative light.

For this president, fear is an easier political tactic than compromise. With FISA, he is attempting to rattle Congress into hastily expanding his own executive powers at the expense of civil liberties and constitutional protections.

Continued . . .

The Americans are just apeing their predecessors in the Inquisition

The Independent | Saturday, 2 February 2008

“Torture works,” an American special forces major – now, needless to say, a colonel – boasted to a colleague of mine a couple of years ago. It seems that the CIA and its hired thugs in Afghanistan and Iraq still believe this. There is no evidence that rendition and beatings and waterboarding and the insertion of metal pipes into men’s anuses – and, of course, the occasional torturing to death of detainees – has ended. Why else would the CIA admit in January that it had destroyed videotapes of prisoners being almost drowned – the “waterboarding” technique – before they could be seen by US investigators?

Yet only a few days ago, I came across a medieval print in which a prisoner has been strapped to a wooden chair, a leather hosepipe pushed down his throat and a primitive pump fitted at the top of the hose where an ill-clad torturer is hard at work squirting water down the hose. The prisoner’s eyes bulge with terror as he feels himself drowning, all the while watched by Spanish inquisitors who betray not the slightest feelings of sympathy with the prisoner. Who said “waterboarding” was new? The Americans are just apeing their predecessors in the inquisition.

Continued . . .