Peace and Justice Post

The Guardian, UK, April 25, 2008

Stephen Kinzer

By naming his favourite military officer, General David Petraeus, to head the US Central Command, President Bush evidently hopes to terrify Iran. Americans and people in the rest of the world, however, have at least as much reason to be terrified as anyone in Tehran.

For several years, President Bush and those around him sought to justify the idea of attacking Iran on the grounds that Iranian leaders were on the brink of producing nuclear weapons. “Iran’s pursuit of technology that could lead to nuclear weapons threatens to put a region already known for instability and violence under the shadow of a nuclear holocaust,” Bush said in August last year.

That argument was deflated by the end of last year, when US intelligence agencies announced their conclusion that Iran was not, in fact, building nuclear weapons. Almost immediately, the administration found a new argument: Iran is an outlaw state because it is responsible for killing Americans in Iraq. General Petraeus has vigorously promoted this view.

“Is it fair to say that the Iranian-backed special groups in Iraq are responsible for the murder of hundreds of American soldiers and thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians?” Senator Joseph Lieberman asked General Petraeus at a recent hearing in Washington. “It certainly is,” Petraeus replied. “That is correct.”

General Petraeus and President Bush may well be right that groups in Iran are supporting and arming factions in Iraq. Their suggestion that some Iranian leaders dream of building nuclear weapons may also be true. What makes their charges so frightening, though, is their evident belief that these transgressions may justify an American attack on Iran. Such an attack would strengthen militant factions in Iran rather than weakening them; make Iran more dangerous rather than less; and undermine US national security rather than strengthening it.

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A Libyan envoy to the UN, whose colleague compared the situation in Gaza to the Holocaust, said on Thursday it was even worse than in Nazi concentration camps because of regular Israeli bomb attacks.

“It is more than what happened in the concentration camps,” Libya’s deputy permanent UN representative, Ibrahim Dabbashi, told reporters. “There is the bombing, daily bombing [by Israel] … in Gaza. It was not in the concentration camps.”

“It is worse than that,” said Dabbashi, who holds the rank of ambassador.

U.S. envoy Alejandro Wolff rejected the Libyan statement. He was one of several Western envoys who walked out of a UN Security Council discussion on Gaza on Wednesday after Dabbashi compared the situation in the Gaza Strip to the Holocaust, in which six million Jews were systematically murdered by Nazi Germany.

Wolff told reporters the remarks “reflect a degree of historical ignorance and moral insensitivity that is one of the large reasons this council has been unable to act on Middle East issues and why peace in the Middle East is so difficult.”

The French, British, Belgian and Costa Rican envoys also left the council on Wednesday after Dabbashi made his remarks. Such protests against fellow Security Council members are rare, diplomats said.

On Wednesday, Western envoys to the United Nations walked out of a Security Council discussion after Libya’s ambassador likened the plight of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to Nazi concentration camps.

“The Libyan ambassador [Giadalla Ettalhi] compared the situation in Gaza to the Nazi Holocaust,” said a Western diplomat who was present at a council discussion on the Middle East. “Afterwards, the Western envoys stood up and left the room in protest.”

Among the chief diplomats who left the council chamber were the U.S., French, British, Belgian and Costa Rican envoys, diplomats said. Some others remained.

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Americans Insist No Deal Made on Settlement Growth

By Glenn Kessler,Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 24, 2008

A letter that President Bush personally delivered to then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon four years ago has emerged as a significant obstacle to the president’s efforts to forge a peace deal between the Israelis and Palestinians during his last year in office.

Ehud Olmert, the current Israeli prime minister, said this week that Bush’s letter gave the Jewish state permission to expand the West Bank settlements that it hopes to retain in a final peace deal, even though Bush’s peace plan officially calls for a freeze of Israeli settlements across Palestinian territories on the West Bank. In an interview this week, Sharon’s chief of staff, Dov Weissglas, said Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice reaffirmed this understanding in a secret agreement reached between Israel and the United States in the spring of 2005, just before Israel withdrew from Gaza.

U.S. officials say no such agreement exists, and in recent months Rice has publicly criticized even settlement expansion on the outskirts of Jerusalem, which Israel does not officially count as settlements. But as peace negotiations have stepped up in recent months, so has the pace of settlement construction, infuriating Palestinian officials, and Washington has taken no punitive action against Israel for its settlement efforts.

Israeli officials say they have clear guidance from Bush administration officials to continue building settlements, as long as it meets carefully negotiated criteria, even though those understandings appear to contradict U.S. policy.

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Santa Monica Mirror online, April 25. 2008

Dan Hamburg, Mirror Contributing Writer

George W. Bush is poised to order a massive aerial bombardment – possibly including tactical nuclear weapons – of up to 10,000 targets in Iran. The attack would be justified on grounds that Iran is interfering with U.S. efforts in Iraq and that Iran is developing a nuclear weapon, a charge that was debunked last fall in the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE).According to international experts, the U.S. declared economic war against Iran on March 20. On that day, the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) called on the world’s financial institutions to stop doing business with Iran, making it much more difficult for Iran to engage in global commerce.

Now the Bush administration is preparing to drop the other shoe. Below are some of the indications that a U.S. military attack on Iran is imminent:

The March 11 resignation of CENTCOM Commander Admiral William Fallon who, according to a well-publicized Esquire magazine article, “openly opposed Bush’s Iran policy and was a lone voice against taking military action to stop the Iranian nuclear program.”

The recent removal of Vice Admiral John Stufflebeem, Commander of the 6th Fleet (Mediterranean Sea), also known to be a critic of the administration’s war plans.

Two U.S. warships took up positions off Lebanon last month. According to US News & World Report, “The United States would want its warships in the eastern Mediterranean in the event of a military action against Iran.”

The United States has two aircraft carrier strike groups (the USS John C. Stennis and the USS Eisenhower) stationed in the Persian Gulf with at least one additional group reportedly on the way.

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The Huffington Post

Shahid Buttar | Posted April 22, 2008

Government handouts to corporations might seem untenable at a time when more and more Americans suffer every day from the impacts of a mounting economic crisis. Yet efforts to bolster the economy have largely taken the form of corporate welfare — much like an appalling effort, in the closing days of the Bush administration, to subsidize corporate violations of the rule of law and individual liberties.

After the Federal Reserve’s $30 billion bailout for investment bank Bear Stearns last month came the Senate’s recent decision to set aside $25 billion in tax breaks for corporate homebuilders, and then last week’s revelation of “a historic collapse in audits” of major corporations by the IRS. All three stories prompted outrage from observers noting the implications for American workers.

But even these insults pale next to another round of corporate welfare currently considered by Congress for the telecom industry — a handout that, despite a smaller price tag, even more thoroughly degrades the public interest by both undermining national security and offending our nation’s fundamental interests in transparency and the rule of law.

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ATLANTA – With media attention focused almost exclusively on the dramatic contest between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, millions of U.S. voters probably have no inkling that there is a ballot option beyond the Democratic and Republican Parties.

“There needs to be room for a lot of policy threads in American discourse. But the corporate media is not informing the people,” Cynthia McKinney, the front-runner for the Green Party presidential nomination, told IPS during a rare 90-minute interview.

Founded in 2001 as the successor of the Association of State Green Parties, the party’s platform revolves around environmentalism, non-violence, social justice and grassroots organising. It has slightly more than 300,000 registered voters nationwide, and a standing ballot line in 20 states plus Washington, DC. In other states, the party must circulate petitions to get its candidates on the ballot.

McKinney, a former congressional representative from Georgia, abandoned the Democratic Party last year in disgust at its failure to end the U.S. troop presence in Iraq, and is now poised for a presidential run on the Green Party ticket.

She has won Green Party primaries in Arkansas, Illinois, and Washington, DC. Ralph Nader, who gave the party national stature as its candidate in 2000, won in California and Massachusetts, prior to announcing he is running as an Independent instead.

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New Statesman, April 24, 2008

John Pilger

John Pilger argues that an unreported war is being waged by the US to restore power to the privileged classes at the expense of the poor

Beyond the sound and fury of its conquest of Iraq and campaign against Iran, the world’s dominant power is waging a largely unreported war on another continent – Latin America. Using proxies, Washington aims to restore and reinforce the political control of a privileged group calling itself middle-class, to shift the responsibility for massacres and drug trafficking away from the psychotic regime in Colombia and its mafiosi, and to extinguish hopes raised among Latin America’s impoverished majority by the reform governments of Venezuela, Ecuador and Bolivia.

In Colombia, the main battleground, the class nature of the war is distorted by the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as the Farc, whose own resort to kidnapping and the drugs trade has provided an instrument with which to smear those who have distinguished Latin America’s epic history of rebellion by opposing the proto-fascism of George W Bush’s regime. “You don’t fight terror with terror,” said President Hugo Chávez as US warplanes bombed to death thousands of civilians in Afghanistan following the 11 September 2001 attacks. Thereafter, he was a marked man. Yet, as every poll has shown, he spoke for the great majority of human beings who have grasped that the “war on terror” is a crusade of domination. Almost alone among national leaders standing up to Bush, Chávez was declared an enemy and his plans for a functioning social democracy independent of the United States a threat to Washington’s grip on Latin America. “Even worse,” wrote the Latin America specialist James Petras, “Chávez’s nationalist policies represented an alternative in Latin America at a time (2000-2003) when mass insurrections, popular uprisings and the collapse of pro-US client rulers (Argentina, Ecuador and Bolivia) were constant front-page news.”

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• Mark Tran
• guardian.co.uk, Wednesday April 23 2008

The US “war on terror” has backfired, strengthening extremists in Afghanistan and Somalia and turning them into legitimate political actors in the eyes of their local populations, a thinktank said today.

The Senlis Council, which has strongly criticised US policy in Afghanistan in the past, is particularly scathing of the Bush administration’s “abject policy failures” in Somalia.

It said air strikes, support for Ethiopian troops that attacked Somalia last year and the ill-timed designation of a radical Islamist group, al-Shabab, as a terrorist group had been successfully exploited by the insurgency to boost recruitment.

“The lack of strategic acumen present in the ‘war on terror’ in Somalia and Afghanistan is in fact enabling the spread of the insurgencies present throughout both countries,” said Norine MacDonald QC, the council president.

“The US is the common denominator in both countries – instead of containing the extremist elements in Somalia and Afghanistan, US policies have facilitated the expansion of territory that al-Shabab and the Taliban have psychological control over.”

Aid groups say Somalia, wracked by anarchy and violence for decades, is suffering its worst humanitarian crisis since 1993.

Militias linked to the former Islamic Courts authority, which controlled Mogadishu in the latter half of 2006, are waging a guerrilla war against the occupying Ethiopian troops and the weak central government. With a small African Union peacekeeping force reduced to the role of bystander, several thousand civilians have been killed in the crossfire since early 2007.

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The Raw Story, April 23, 2008

Documents suggest CIA stonewalled Congress

The Central Intelligence Agency has acknowledged having 7,000 pages of documents pertaining to President George W. Bush’s secret rendition and detention programs, according to three international human rights groups.

Amnesty International USA, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the International Human Rights Clinic at NYU School of Law made the claim following a summary judgment motion by the agency this week to avoid a lawsuit that seeks to force the nation’s top spy outfit to make the documents public under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

“Among other assertions, the CIA claimed that it did not have to release the documents because many consist of correspondence with the White House or top Bush administration officials, or because they are between parties seeking legal advice on the programs, including guidance on the legality of certain interrogation procedures,” the groups wrote in a release. “The CIA confirmed that it requested—and received—legal advice from attorneys at the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel concerning these procedures.”

“For the first time, the CIA has acknowledged that extensive records exist relating to its use of enforced disappearances and secret prisons,” Curt Goering, AIUSA senior deputy executive director, said in a statement. “Given what we already know about documents written by Bush administration officials trying to justify torture and other human rights crimes, one does not need a fertile imagination to conclude that the real reason for refusing to disclose these documents has more to do with avoiding disclosure of criminal activity than national security.”

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